Baldur's Gate III

[Ond]

While Baldur's Gate sleeps, Bhaalists tear up the streets

 

[Goatson]

fuck it rating the companions and their questlines

karlach: pure and good and giddy and great, lacks personal growth but also she doesnt need it because shes great
astarion: i dunno i didnt even bother further than keeping him around
shadowheart: fucking amazing story and character growth but honestly i found the end of her arch (at least the one i went with which is supposed to be the "good" one) a little disappointing
gale: charismatic fucker and very likeable, but i eventually grew a bit tired of his archetype, also his intro scene for dark urge is hilarious
lae'zel: annoying at first, grows on you depending on how you make your choices, amazingly satisfying end of arch (if you bother pursuing it)
wyll: probably most bland and boring companion imo, but also has a satisfying end if you pursue his and karlachs personal quests together

Spoiler: spoiler companions?

halsin: aesthetically the best companion, but really fucking boring, he got kidnapped for me at the end and i didnt even bother saving him
minthara: killed her the first time through, going with her now, evil drow that is very much in tune for DnD
jaheira and minsc: dont really have much of questlines since they're returning characters, but it was nice to see them considering ive dabbled a bit in old baldurs gate
scratch: dog

 

[Ond]

fuck it rating the companions and their questlines

karlach: pure and good and giddy and great, lacks personal growth but also she doesnt need it because shes great
astarion: i dunno i didnt even bother further than keeping him around
shadowheart: fucking amazing story and character growth but honestly i found the end of her arch (at least the one i went with which is supposed to be the "good" one) a little disappointing
gale: charismatic fucker and very likeable, but i eventually grew a bit tired of his archetype, also his intro scene for dark urge is hilarious
lae'zel: annoying at first, grows on you depending on how you make your choices, amazingly satisfying end of arch (if you bother pursuing it)
wyll: probably most bland and boring companion imo, but also has a satisfying end if you pursue his and karlachs personal quests together

Spoiler: spoiler companions?

halsin: aesthetically the best companion, but really fucking boring, he got kidnapped for me at the end and i didnt even bother saving him
minthara: killed her the first time through, going with her now, evil drow that is very much in tune for DnD
jaheira and minsc: dont really have much of questlines since they're returning characters, but it was nice to see them considering ive dabbled a bit in old baldurs gate
scratch: dog

>he doesn't have "Us" as a companion

also yeah

Spoiler

halsin and jaheira aren't that fun to have around as companions, and I too found Wyll boring and non-inventive to have around gameplay wise

 

[Goatson]

also was it just me who though about how the companion roster is very lacking in short characters?

i would have loved having a scheming gnome sorceror/wizard/rogue or a stocky dwarf barbarian/bard for the journey

and no hirelings dont count

 

[dallahan]

also was it just me who though about how the companion roster is very lacking in short characters?

i would have loved having a scheming gnome sorceror/wizard/rogue or a stocky dwarf barbarian/bard for the journey

and no hirelings dont count

gnomelight

 

[Señor Jaggles]

>he doesn't have "Us" as a companion

Holy shit I absolutely forgot where it went lol, Us is just gone for me

 

[Andrew]

also was it just me who though about how the companion roster is very lacking in short characters?

i would have loved having a scheming gnome sorceror/wizard/rogue or a stocky dwarf barbarian/bard for the journey

and no hirelings dont count

this was such a downer in my second game w/ friends i made a gnome paladin
genuine displeasure to read about the game and see that there weren't any voiced gnome companions, but a bunch of elves instead
ball dropped in that regard

 

[Ond]

Holy shit I absolutely forgot where it went lol, Us is just gone for me

You have to activate the summon from your inventory the first time, then it becomes a part of your hotbar like scratch

 

[Mic15000]

You'll need the healing buffs and shielding once you get into the later acts/dungeons

being able to dual stack healing and shields for frontline mages is overpowered as fuck

That’s a nice argument, unfortunatelly Great weapon mastery and sneak attack rogue sharpshooter +10 damage and crit

 

[Mic15000]

Also found out Bard college of sword is an insane archer????? You can use slashing ranged to fire 4 arrows on a single target in one turn if you have sharpshooter you can do over 100 damage in a turn if you get lucky

 

[Nathant18]

Haven't really played much with the other companions outside of Lae'zel, Shadowheart and Karlach aside from replacing Karlach with Astarion solely for going through Cazador's palace, but I thought the development between Lae'zel and Shadowheart to be fun given they start off as distrusting as possible towards each other and eventually become quite strong allies by the end of their questlines despite their differences. Karlach obviously is just fun all around.

I do find Wyll as a standalone character quite boring, but he's made more interesting with the story surrounding Mizora and Ravengard but I've literally never had him in my party so I've likely missed a few plot points with his story, Halsin I thought was cool as fuck but then all of a sudden he wanted to fuck me which came out of nowhere after finishing moonrise towers and idk just put me off him as a character. I reckon I could listen to Gale talk for hours though that guy has got some good dialogue. Jaheria is cool, like Wyll hardly played her, meeting her family was fun.

Outside of characters n shit the game has been an absolute blast to play, though I've got a fucking killer game-breaking bug atm on act 3 that only affects Karlach and she refuses to follow my group unless I ungroup then regroup, then once she reaches me she'll stand still and not follow anymore, and if I ungroup and regroup again she'll teleport back to where she was when the bug happened unless I specifically control her. The bug turns itself on and off at its leisure I have no idea how to fix it and it's fucking infuriating but still good game

also was it just me who though about how the companion roster is very lacking in short characters?

i would have loved having a scheming gnome sorceror/wizard/rogue or a stocky dwarf barbarian/bard for the journey

and no hirelings dont count

I would kill to have Barcus as a companion man he's so fucking funny

 

[Numbers]

If you go wanting to basically left click everything then yeah she'll be cool as fuck with it

the trick was to make as many people left click each other as possible before you go in left clicking them yourself

was a really fun playstyle in the end

 

[Goopy]

i just started and i love lae'zel

i only keep shadowheart around for guidance, she's a whiny bitch otherwise

lae'zel > shadowheart

shadowheart is just kinda mid, give her blonde hair and remove her eye-shadow mascara combo and witness as 80% of her fanbase disappears

 

[Señor Jaggles]

lae'zel > shadowheart

shadowheart is just kinda mid, give her blonde hair and remove her eye-shadow mascara combo and witness as 80% of her fanbase disappears

Woke up this morning and decided to make the single worst take in 2023 videogame topic

I'll just say I pet the dog and only Shadowheart and Karlach approved of it so that automatically invalidates all of your arguments defending any character that isn't them

YOU MUST APPROVE OF GOOD BOY PATS, THIS IS A THREAT

 

[dallahan]

karlach > your opinion

 

[Mic15000]

Found the Plot a Terrorist Attack Questline

Do it for him

 

[Goatson]

Found the Plot a Terrorist Attack Questline

Do it for him

barcus > wulfred

 

[Goatson]

After over 100 hours playtime, finishing the game once with most sidequests complete, and mulling it over for a while, while I can say with 100% certainty this is my GOTY and a fucking amazing feat.

MAN did act 3 drop the ball. Act 1 and most of Act 2 were great, engaging, polished (mostly) and just pure fun. Act 3 really wasn't.
I can't be the only one who finds act 3 worse, right? First, almost all of my gamebreaking bugs I encountered (where I had to reload saves and lose progress) were in Act 3 due to bad pathing, weird level design, or bad scripting. I also felt like the level design was a lot more confusing and it was much easier to miss stuff even when you were looking for it. A lot of quests also felt strangely scripted unlike the rest of the game where for some quests you had to do random arbitrary things to unlock the ability to talk about stuff to progress the quest.

My worst points were probably my save getting randomly corrupted in one major lore location underground causing me to lose about 2 hours of progress, and getting stuck in combat in a big tower because an enemy flew through a very obvious open space but my party apparently couldn't and therefore couldn't reach them and the enemy refused to come back up, and that time I was trying to do a side-quest the "morally good" route but an NPC refused to give me the item I needed despite me doing everything necessary so I was forced to kill them for it.

Not to mention:

Spoiler: big act 3 spoilers

The fact that you can't even access the Upper City, which was teased and is semi-implemented in the ending (it was confirmed to be cut late in development with A LOT of story content).
The rushed end of the Dead Three arc (seriously, Gortash was lacking A LOT of stuff to flesh out his character and motives, I bet a lot of it was in the Upper City originally).
The fact that Karlach's "good end" was blatantly cut with the Upper City (Larian confirmed this and that all the possible endings she has currently was the "fail-state endings".
And perhaps most importantly, the "17000 different endings" were cut, they had most of the voice acting done for ending epilogue slides that would change based on your actions and a camp party scene similar to the end of Act 1.

TL:DR if youre playing the game now and haven't gotten to act 3 yet, take your time with act 1-2 while we wait for Larian to fix the mess.

 

[Mic15000]

After over 100 hours playtime, finishing the game once with most sidequests complete, and mulling it over for a while, while I can say with 100% certainty this is my GOTY and a fucking amazing feat.

MAN did act 3 drop the ball. Act 1 and most of Act 2 were great, engaging, polished (mostly) and just pure fun. Act 3 really wasn't.
I can't be the only one who finds act 3 worse, right? First, almost all of my gamebreaking bugs I encountered (where I had to reload saves and lose progress) were in Act 3 due to bad pathing, weird level design, or bad scripting. I also felt like the level design was a lot more confusing and it was much easier to miss stuff even when you were looking for it. A lot of quests also felt strangely scripted unlike the rest of the game where for some quests you had to do random arbitrary things to unlock the ability to talk about stuff to progress the quest.

My worst points were probably my save getting randomly corrupted in one major lore location underground causing me to lose about 2 hours of progress, and getting stuck in combat in a big tower because an enemy flew through a very obvious open space but my party apparently couldn't and therefore couldn't reach them and the enemy refused to come back up, and that time I was trying to do a side-quest the "morally good" route but an NPC refused to give me the item I needed despite me doing everything necessary so I was forced to kill them for it.

Not to mention:

Spoiler: big act 3 spoilers

The fact that you can't even access the Upper City, which was teased and is semi-implemented in the ending (it was confirmed to be cut late in development with A LOT of story content).
The rushed end of the Dead Three arc (seriously, Gortash was lacking A LOT of stuff to flesh out his character and motives, I bet a lot of it was in the Upper City originally).
The fact that Karlach's "good end" was blatantly cut with the Upper City (Larian confirmed this and that all the possible endings she has currently was the "fail-state endings".
And perhaps most importantly, the "17000 different endings" were cut, they had most of the voice acting done for ending epilogue slides that would change based on your actions and a camp party scene similar to the end of Act 1.

TL:DR if youre playing the game now and haven't gotten to act 3 yet, take your time with act 1-2 while we wait for Larian to fix the mess.

Frankly I Enjoyed Act 3, but that's mostly because my first run I was dark urge, and everything connects with Dark Urge once you reach Act 3 in such a way that I was enthralled at all times!

Spoiler: Act 3

However, I agree a lot that I feel like they could have expanded a lot more with the upper city, furthermore the fact that the endings just... END with no real epilogue kinda sucks, it was fine my first run since my ending was blood and death but to know that there are straight up no epilogue for all ending kinda sucks, even DoS2 had some.

I will likely say this, Knowing Larian I fully expect them to release a Baldurs Gate 3: GOTY edition or Definitive edition in a few years from now (or even as DLC who knows) and implement a lot of cut and new content in it. They have done this in the past with Divinity Original Sin 2 where they fully re-did a whole Act (old Arx sucked ass lol).

Still I found it very enjoyable and I just reached Act 3 again now with my second playthrough, and I'm still finding new stuff. There were some bugs in Act 3 more than the other acts but thankfully nothing game-breaking for me.

I'll say, is Act 3 worse than Act 1 and 2, debatebly yes. But I don't think it's bad, just undercooked and depending on your choices on the previous acts your experience will vary! Still, holding out hope for future expansion or editions!

 

[Straven]

MAN did act 3 drop the ball. Act 1 and most of Act 2 were great

Having played DoS: 2 I think this is just something Larian Studios does. It seems they put all their effort and time into the first two acts and then they don't really know how to wrap it all up, or just don't have enough time to conclude it all in the way they intended and so kinda fumble.