Thanks, But I Couldn't... Oh, Go On Then...

Want to know what I think of Baldur's Gate 3? I mean, I haven't actually finished it yet but Steam tells me I've played for nearly ninety hours so I guess I'm entitled to an opinion. And I have one.

It's too long!

Geez! Is it ever! I got to the end of Act II yesterday and immediately I was in two minds about whether I wanted to carry on. That's not the reaction a game ought to engender as you arrive at what should be the climax of the central narrative. There should be a thrilling sense of everything coming together at last. All will be revealed. One last, epic battle and roll the credits!

Instead I figured, given that Acts I and II had taken well over eighty hours, unless the whole thing was going to be ridiculously bottom-heavy, I probably had at least another thirty of forty hours of content still to go. Did I want it? Not really.

I took a break and had a bit of a think about it; whether to just quit, at least for now, but in the end curiosity won out. Before I took the road to the city of Baldur's Gate itself, though, and turned my back forever on Act II, I thought I'd go to the store to replace some supplies I needed. 

Except there was no store to go to, not in Act II. Not any that I could think of. All the vendors I'd seen since leaving the Underdark had been killed. Not that I could remember that there'd been more than one or two of them, anyway.

In fact, the last vendors I could remember were back in the mushroom area of the Underdark in Act I, which did seem to have far more vendors than the rest of the game. I considered whether there would be places to shop in Baldur's Gate itself. You'd think so but who knows? Best not take the chance.

Instead, I thought I'd just nip back and hit up the ones I was sure of before moving on. I knew there was no going back to the previous Act as far as questing went but shopping? That'd be okay, surely...

I knew where the elevator was to take me back down but when I got on that irritating "Dream Presence" appeared and started handing out Dire Warnings about what would happen if I broke my promise/shirked my duty.

Obviously, I ignored her. It was easy. Who ever listens to gnomes, anyway?

Back at character creation one of the things you're asked to do is pick an appearance for your "Guardian".  There is absolutely no explanation about who or what this "Guardian" is but I figured it was probably going to be one of those fairies or cartoon animals that flap around and give you unwanted advice in so many games. 

On that basis, I gave it the silliest appearance available and made it a gnome. Unfortunately, the Guardian aka Dream Presence turns out to be an extremely serious character with absolutely no sense of humor at all, just a whole load of portentous and mysterious promises and threats, none of which carry well when being delivered by a three-foot tall gnome in a ball gown.

That's an example of an uninformed choice. BG3 specializes in them. It's almost a feature. 

When I say BG3 is too long, that does depend to an extent on which choices you make. It can be a lot shorter if you decide to do something the developers didn't want you to do. For those they do try to steer you away but infinite saves make it hard to take the warnings seriously. 

My come-uppance just for trying to nip back and buy a few potions before getting on with the job was dramatic. I was immediately discovered by the Big Bad, who took control of my character and unleashed of an apocalyptic swarm of mindflayers the length of the Sword Coast. Up came a big, black "Game Over" screen. It didn't have "Told You So" on it but it might as well have done.

That was my third Game Over event. There was one where I reused to do something the developers clearly wanted me to do and all the True Souls ceramorphed into mindflayers and ate the whole of the Sword Coast or something. I forget the exact details but it wasn't a happy outcome. 

Then there was the time I backed up Gale, when he wanted to blow himself up to kill the Elder Brain. It seemed like a good idea at the time. He was standing right next to the rest of the party at the time and the castle fell down and everyone died including us. We did get the Brain though and I don't believe there was a mindlfayer apocalypse that time, so I'd call it a win, albeit a Pyrrhic one..

So I guess you can have a shorter game if you want. Just not a very satisfying one. Assuming you want anything that feels like a "good" ending, you have to keep on slogging through and trying not to piss off the people who made the game, who are all clearly some variant of Lawful Alignment. Chaotic behavior really riles them up.

Here's the thing. BG3 very much wants to have cake, eat cake and keep plenty more cake for later. It wants you to have freedom to choose but to choose make the choice it intended you to make all along. 

For a game that prides itself on flexibility and verisimilitude, it also does not place a great deal of stock in logic or consistency. There's a good deal of talk about urgency and time running out and once in a while, if you don't get a move on, something will happen without you. Mostly, though, everything waits until you have the time and inclination to deal with it.

Four can keep a secret if two of them are dead.

Some of the more jarringly game-like moments come with the many times NPCs stand around and completely ignore what's happening because they don't have a script to tell them how to react. As I discovered in Act I, if you manage to set something up so as to kill a bunch of baddies without them knowing you've done it, the rest of them just stand around next to the dead bodies as if nothing happened. And they'll keep doing it forever unless you initiate something.

More mildly, lots of dialogs don't really address or recognize events that have happened if they weren't quite what the game expected. Some of this is probably unavoidable but sometimes it just looks lazy. 

After an absolutely titanic battle at the end of Act II, one that would have worked perfectly well as the climax to the whole game in my opinion, my character enjoyed a very lengthy post-battle dialog with someone, while the other three members of her party stood behind her and listened. 

Except two of them had been killed in the fight and were really lying dead at her feet. As soon as the dialog ended I had to figure out how to get back to camp and have Withers resurrect them, at which point they all magically seemed to know what had happened while they were dead. I guess the explanation is in the word "magically" but it's not a good explanation, is it?

There's nothing wrong with any of this per se. Video games aren't perfect reflections of some alternate reality, just clever mock-ups. Larian have likely taken things about as far as the technology allows. The problem is that they've tried to go wide as well. 

The story in BG3 is very much not a linear narrative. There's a through-line, sure, but it has a bewildering number of branches. That would have been more than enough but there are also any number of smaller stories that appear to have no direct significance to the core storyline. Sometimes it turns out they do, after all, but not always.

This makes sense in Act I, where everything is new and unfamiliar and who knows what might turn out to be relevant. It's less convincing in Act II, when the stakes are higher and the urgency more obvious. By the final act, surely, everything should come to a head with no time for seemingly irrelevant distractions.

Hah! Good luck with that!

Once I'd reloaded and pretended I'd never tried to go back into the Underdark after all, and after a somewhat unexpected event in camp that I won't attempt to recount, the party finally arrived in Act III proper only to find themselves in a sprawling suburb, packed with refugees, all yelling about their myriad problems. It was like stepping into a completely different game.  

It's a long walk to the shops...

I looked at the sheer scale of the place, which wasn't even the city itself, just a village outside the walls, and decided I had a whole lot of "content" still ahead of me, even before I got inside. Too much. 

Rather than engage with any of it, I just started wandering around, opening up the map, which inevitably led to meetings with a bunch of people asking me to do things for them or trying to kill me. Before I'd even thought about it, I had a whole new set of quests, some of which looked like they might be related to the main plot and others which seemed like obvious side-stories.

To be fair to the designers, there's almost always an option somewhere in the dialog along the lines of "I'm far too busy saving the world to bother with your trivial little problem" but you'd need to be a sociopath to feel comfortable taking it. It's like the "You can do this if you insist but it means the end of the world if you do" options I was complaining about earlier. They're mostly there to say "well, you had a choice" but it's really no choice at all.

So here I am now in Act III, with the whole of Faerun supposedly teetering on the edge of extinction and only me and my team standing ready to pull it back and what am I doing? Solving the murder of a priest, exposing a blackmail ring and investigating an extremely dubious circus. Oh, and watching an ox turn into an apple. I ought to sell that ox to the circus...

With Act III the whole thing suddenly turns into some kind of point&click adventure game only without the pointing and clicking. It's a very odd pivot. One minute we're in the planes arguing with god-queens, the next we're looking for evidence to present a murder case to the investigating officer (Who just happens to be a flying elephant but we don't talk about that.)

I'm aware that some of this is going to tie in to the main plot. That's already apparent. I'm fairly sure that some of it won't, though, and even if it all did, it'd still be a bizarre way to carry on after what felt like a genuinely climactic ending to Act II. It's as if the whole game is starting over again.

And that's really what I mean about BG3 being too long. They could quite reasonably have released each of the three acts as separate games. There has to be at least fifty hours of solid content in each of them, easily enough for a full-price release, even without the high replayability factor. 

Would I rather have had a trilogy of more compact RPGs? Yes, I think I would. I think that would have left me wanting more, which is supposed to be the entertainer's mantra. Instead I find myself wanting less. 

It would also have meant a new game to look forward to every two or three years rather than a long wait and then a huge splurge. Expectation and excitement would have built to a glorious climax instead of exhaustion setting in well before the end.

I should make it clear, before someone points it out in the comments that, yes, obviously I could just pace myself. I could take a break between acts or more as I go along. I could even play Act I now, Act II next year and Act II the year after that, if I really would have preferred a trilogy.

I could but naturally I won't. Who does that? Like most people, I'll either binge 'til I finish or rage-quit and never go back when it gets to be too much. 

For all the praise the game has received, I'm guessing mine might not be as much of an outlying reaction as all that, either. Looking at the Steam Achievements, of which there's handily one for reaching each Act after the first, I see that only barely over half of all players even make it as far as Act II. 50.7% to be precise. By the time they get to Act III, that falls to a sliver under 40%. 

Nearly two-thirds of all the people who played the game didn't even stay for the final act. I wonder how many got to the very end? And will I be one of them?

I guess I'll find out soon enough. If you call another forty or fifty hours. soon, that is.