This is going to be a long blog post about a video game I just finished. Lots of spoilers and opinions below.
A really good game studio once made a "Divinity: Original Sin" series of games that was very good. I played them and enjoyed them a lot. They did such a great job, that they were able to win a chance to make a much bigger budget game to continue the esteemed Baldur's Gate series.
And boy did they fail...
It is the same game engine, but the long textual dialogues were replaced with voice acting. And that killed the game. Voice acting is expensive and hard to change, so it killed all the creativity that the team had and created just another one "RPG on the rails" experience for a gamer. Because no matter what you do, no matter what you choose in the game - none of it matters. The number of voicelines is very limited and the game's story will push you into the single pre-defined story no matter what.
I played the game as somehwat xenophobic elf druid character. He really did not like any Illithids. To be fair, Illithids are tentacled monsters that consume human brains, so perhaps it is not that much of xenophobia to dislike them. But the game was written such that you MUST ally with one or even become one.
The first time a "voice in my head" reveals himselves as an Illithid I as a player have a choice to distrust him. If I do, it is a Game Over screen though. I am not kidding, it is just an instant loss if I choose a dialogue option that game developers did not had the voicelines for.
Choosing temporary ally with one is not much better. The monster keeps coming at my characters as if we are friends somehow. At one point even suggesting a intimate encounter. Despite my characters telling them how much he hates Illithids.
At some point I finally get a chance to stop being temporary allies with that monster and he just walks away. In that dialogue there is just not an option for my character to kill the monster. Because later on it will be revealed that the monster is actually a monster and I'd have to fight him in a scripted battle. Major revelation!
Before the final battle my Illithid-hating characters frees another even more Illithing-hating NPC and the most cringe dialogue of all time happens. NPC says "In order to defeat the big floating brain one of us has to become an Illithid. Will you do this?" and my character goes "Hell no!", to which the NPC just says "Ok, I'll do it then" and just becomes and Illithid right there and stands by me as an ally. Oh, and if my character kills that newly hatched monster it is another game over.
After the battle the NPC gets really upset that he is an Illithid now and commits a suicide. And I am just... dude... how about not becoming a monster you had spent centuries fighting against 10 minutes ago? That option never occurred to you?
The game's writers also really liked backstabbing for some reason. Throughout the whole game the player is expected to infiltrate some bad guys pretending to be one of them and then stab the poor souls in the back. It starts from the Goblins, then slavers, then weird fighting club people, then it is cultists, then a power hungry tyrant-to-be, then another cultists... The problem is: I am not really into backstabbing. So when my character gets a quest "Go pretend to really enjoy watching people in forced labour beaten to death", I go and try to free the poor guys. Without ever pretending to be on their slavers's side.
And boy the game fails to account for anyone ever doing that. After killing the slavers, the poor Gnomes continue to work through the rock with their pickaxes. And if I talk to them they say "Shh... Don't talk to me, or the big bad slaver guy is going to beat me" - despite the fact that they are literally standing next to the dead body of that "big bad slaver guy". I guess there was no budget left to record extra voice lines for "Now that they are dead I can be free".
This happens ALL THE TIME. After fighting a battle against some baddies my in game companions would randomly say a voice line of something like "Now that we killed this bad guy, we can go to that other bad guy and pretend being friends with him". Out of nowhere - I never picked any option in any dialogue to be pretend friends with any of the bad guys.
After fighting through the hordes of cultists and finally facing one of its leader, the opening line that leader would say is "I see you want to join my cult". Right... that's how people normally join religious cults. Sure...
I am mostly infuriated by how bad Baldur's Gate 3 is because I know that there are talented people in the studio. They have made great games before! If it was just yet another game from a studio I never heard about I would've just shrugged and moved on. But I am really upset about this one.
How could the people who already made a great game on the very same game engine fail so hard?
Back to the problem of choices. The game ignores any and all meaningful choices the player can ever makes, but for some reason it has a few choices that should not matter at all but it is up to a player to decide. For example, one of the most powerful mages of the realm asks the player on what should he do with a crown - one of the most powerful artefacts in the realm. And for some reason he actually does to the artifact exactly what the player tells them to. And there is no option to answer "I do not know dude, you are the well educated sage, I am a glorified hippie and you are not asking an advice on the flower arrangement here". I can tell the wizard to throw it out in the ocean and he will do that. Or I can tell him to give it away to a God and he will do that as well. It does not matter anyway what he does to the artifact, but why he is even asking a random elf druid?
Speaking of Gods and Devils. They are really weird in the game. At one point a literal Goddess tells my character to do something - to enter a prism. There is an option to say "Nah, I do not want to", but it results in an instant Game Over screen. Remember the lack of budget for the voicelines? The reasoning is that the Goddess gets mad I disobey her and kills me. Kind of makes sense for a moment. Until I select a dialogue option "OK, I'll do it" and just walk the hell out of the room without ever doing what she asked me to do. Somehow, this does not make the Goddess mad at all. She is totally fine with that, does not kill anyone and does not ever come into the game at all. She is supposedly so powerful that she can instakill my entire party, but is also completely irrelevant and I can just ignore her quest in my ledger and move on with the game.
Same with the Devil. The whole game I am being told by scores of NPCs how powerful the Devil is. In the many encounters with the Devil I never have a chance to attack him. When I finally get to fight the Devil later in the game he is a total joke. The fight starts in a small room with some pillars that give him extra power. But I can just open the door and walk out of the room and the Devil will follow, get out of range of those pillars and quickly loose all of his magical abilities. The fight with that supposedly insanely powerful Devil was one of the easiest fights in the game.
It happens to all the "big and powerful" entities in the game. They are all a total joke when you finally get to confront any of them.
I am no stranger to the Visual Novel genre of video games. But I did not expect Baldur's Gate 3 to be one of them. There is a set story in the game and no matter what the player does, it plays out exactly the single way it could have played out. Any attempt to stray away from the predetermined line leads to the instant Game Over screen at best. And to some really weird bugs at worst.
Baldur's Gate 3 was a terrible disappointment. The only positive thought I had after finishing the game was "Now I can finally delete it from my hard drive with no regrets".