Baldur's Gate 3 is an ocean of "content" that stretches as far as the eye can see with the depth of a puddle. The game does storytelling in this really infuriating way where its an immersive sim where the world is supposed to feel real, which means theres all these tiny little side plots that all go nowhere while also not having any interesting dialogue.

It iss all these railroaded quest storylines where it really does feel like dnd because you either do what the DM wants and get the lore dumps with a million names you're supposed to remember or you say something someone doesnt like and they give you lore dumps with a million names or you attack them and the game crosses its arms and says "well i guess you arent interested in the world"

There is never any sense of stakes, there is this worm in your head thats supposed to kill you and it never does. karlach has this burning engine in her thats supposed to kill her and it never does. gale is going to explode if you dont feed him magic items and he never does. any stakes the game has are either an outright lie, a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ writing plot macguffin, or both

The dialogue leaves a lot to be desired, I want to be invested in the story of the origin characters in my party but it is just completely railroaded in such a boring way. basically all of the characters tell you they have some big quest they have to do, and each act they're like "go here and i can finally do the thing" and then you go there and the thing doesnt work and they go "darn i guess we have to go to baldurs gate and then we can do the thing" its just all these ♥♥♥♥♥♥ writing pitfalls where things are supposed to seem deep and epic but if you ever ask the question "what was the point of that" the answer is almost always "there wasn't one".

ah but don't worry the devs made sure there were sex scenes for every origin character instead of actually writing their stories. good thing priorities are in order.

What about the combat?

I love turn based combat, I think its a really easy mechanism for the player to understand, optimize and engage with. My favorite turn based rpgs are paper mario the thousand year door, mother 3, pokemon platinum, Chrono Trigger, like half of the final fantasies, LISA the painful, theres millions of good turn based rpgs that do at least 1 of engaging, optimizing, or understanding well.

Baldurs Gate 3 fails on all 3 of these. Every time I enter a combat in bg3 with like 5 or more enemies I just groan, the turns take ungodly long, the controls you have to work with are ungodly cumbersome, the tools you have as options vary from mindnumbingly simple like playing a barbarian or ungodly confusing if you are playing a spellcaster. Not to mention the ai is bafflingly stupid. There are a million super powerful builds in bg3 but the stupidest ones are where you cast Fire wall in a room and then watch as the ai walks in and out of it 3 times and it wipes the room.

There are also bugs once you get out of act 1. They are bad. There are visual bugs in cutscenes that make it hard to take the world seriously, and there are bugs such as you're in a fight and someone falls through the floor and then your game crashes bad. before I uninstalled bg3 the game size was like 120gb, and the game took me 15 minutes to reboot because i had to "verify integrity of my files"

idk, maybe im just not the kind of person who is supposed to enjoy bg3, maybe i wasnt roleplaying as my character hard enough, maybe i wasnt reading or listening to the hours upon hours of dialogue closely enough, maybe i removed the fun by optimizing my character, who knows. but people were insisting that bg3 was "game of the year" and I'd like to believe i gave it a fair shot.

I did all of act 1 solo and then played through all of acts 1 and 2 with 2 friends and didn't enjoy it. I had more fun in the multiplayer run, but most of the time it was because my friends made me laugh instead of the game being fun.

half of this review feels like screaming into the void, but my main point is that if you go into bg3 expecting the best immersive sim ever with great turn based combat and great writing, you may be sorely disappointed on any or all of those fronts.