Fight! Fight! Fight!

Just a short update today (Well, I hope...) on how Baldur's Gate 3 is going. It remains both the only thing I'm playing and the thing I'm playing more than anything I've played for a long time but that isn't necessarily a recommendation. Also, why did I keep using "thing" there instead of "game"? I mean, it's not like if I wasn't playing BG3 I'd be playing the zither...

Steam now has me at 121 hours played. I have become a little more lax about leaving the game running when I'm AFK but I'm pretty sure that wouldn't account for more than a couple of hours altogether, so around a hundred and twenty hours seems fair. 

How Long To Beat has just the main story at a weirdly specific seventy-two and a half hours and "Main + Extra" at a hundred and fifteen, so I'm already past that. They have "Completionist" at a hundred and seventy-eight hours, which is still a long way off but my run so far is very, very far from being complete. Every time I change Acts a whole slew of quests get marked as "Completed", by which I think the game means "Unfinishable" and I have by no means found all the possible quests or even all the explorable areas.

What this tells me is that I'm playing the game wrong. Well, I knew that!

It is, in fact, increasingly obvious to me that Act 3 is a totally different game from Acts 1 and 2, not because of anything the developers have done but because the sheer attrition of having already played the equivalent of two, full-length RPGs even by the time I got there means I am no longer treating the experience even as something from the same genre, let alone as a continuation of the same game.

In Act I, I was pretty much invested in the characters and the storyline. I tried to roleplay most choices and avoid fudging the results as much as possible without actually having to restart the entire game. In Act II, I began to feel a lot more like I was playing a video game, where getting the best result was more important than staying true to the character I was playing, but I was still quite strongly involved in the storyline and the plot and I still wanted to keep things moving in a direction that felt honorable or appropriate.

Act III not only doesn't feel like the same game any more, it often doesn't even feel like a game at all. It feels more like a toy. It's full of big, set-piece battles that I find myself doing over and over to see if I can get a better result. And then I don't always even use the save from the good one when I get it! It's more like Kerbal Space Program than an RPG now, where you just keep fiddling with the controls so you can watch stuff blow up. 

The plot is still there, of course, but it's been a while now since I really cared about it. For a start, it's insanely complicated and I can't remember who is supposed to be doing what to or for whom anymore. It's like one of those Batman stories where someone blows a hole in the wall of Arkham Asylum and the entire Rogues Gallery comes boiling out, every one of them with a plot and agenda of their own. 

As far as I can remember, there are three Champions of Bad Gods, one of whom I killed at the end of Act II, plus at least two Devils, a Mindflayer going by the name of The Emperor, a Vampire Lord and a Hag. Then there are at least two Cults with countless members doing murders, a Thieves Guild and a Necromancer cluttering up the storyline and all of the above interact with each other in various ways.

It's ridiculous overkill and it's had the very negative effect of making it almost impossible for me to take any of it remotely seriously. The whole thing has devolved into a series of largely meaningless fights. I wander around the city looking for them and when I find one, it usually takes me all day. 

For a while I was still attempting to play the game properly, by which I mean coherently and in the manner of a table-top campaign, but that all came to an end after I spent literally a whole day - at least eight hours of gameplay - fighting through the very challenging series of encounters in the sub-plot where the PC tries to break into an Archdevil's storage vault in Hell to steal back the contract they foolishly signed.

It was a good day's play. I enjoyed it a lot. My party won a whole series of fights they really should have lost. I came up with some clever tactics and we had some lucky rolls and it all felt pretty good. Only, after every titanic clash, there was always another and there was never any real opportunity to rest and recover. In the end it just got to be too much.

When the final conflict between my team and the Archdevil himself started I knew there was no chance whatsoever we would win, even after Floradelle, who has a frankly insane Persuasion bonus, convinced one of the Devil's lieutenants to switch sides. We did indeed duly lose and the Game Over card came up and at that point it was plain no amount of retries would make the slightest difference.

I thought about it afterwards. In a way you could say it was a whole day wasted because I did end up going back to a save from before we even went to the Hells in the first place. On the other hand, as I said, it was a thoroughly enjoyable, exciting experience as a sequence of tactical battles in its own right. 

I came to the conclusion that it had been worth the time but only once. No way was I going to try it again, so that timeline was effectively null. It also brought down the final curtain on any lingering ideas I might have had about this being a roleplaying game. From then on it's all been about whether the fights are fun and pretty much nothing else. 

If they are, I keep doing them until I either get the result I want or I've had enough. I did the Hag fight about a dozen times yesterday, saving at every decision point in combat and reloading if I didn't like the way it went. 

As well as all the false starts and aborted attempts, I completed the entire thing three times with different outcomes. I killed the Hag but Vanra, who I was trying to rescue, died. That's actually very easy to do. The Hag barely got a spell off. Then I knocked the Hag out and cut Vanra out of her belly, which was harder but still not too difficult. Vanra ran off to safety and I thought I was done but unfortunately the Hag came back to life because I hadn't destroyed all her mushrooms and kept doing it even after I killed her a second time. 

After a reload, I spent ages trying to destroy all the mushrooms first, so the Hag would stay down, then knock her out and cut Vanra loose, and finally kill her while she was unconscious. I spent about four or five hours trying to do it but I could either get all the mushrooms or the Hag down but never both in the same run.

So I gave up. I'd saved after I freed Vanra so I reloaded and just had all my characters run away as soon as the Hag stood up. I got them all out into the city so instant-travel worked again and took them straight to Camp. As far as I'm concerned that's the Hag finished with for good. I hope never to see her again. 

Whether that will be how things turn out, I can't predict, even though I'm now using walkthroughs and guides all the time. I read several versions of how the Vanra quest can turn out but none of them cover my specific way of dealing with the situation so I have no idea if the Hag will come after us or not. I suspect that hasn't been scripted and she'll just hang about in her cellar until the heat death of the universe but I could be wrong. 

The issue isn't whether Larien has foreseen that particular tactical trick and accounted for it. It's that I really don't care. Further back in the game, I would have been concerned about leaving a threat like Auntie Ethel out there to make someone else's life a misery. To roleplay the character I'd created, I'd have felt obligated to Do Something About It.

Now I don't. It's not a real story any more, just a bunch of fights strung together. The whole thing has effectively collapsed under its own weight. Gravity has done it for gravitas.

None of which makes it a bad game. I'm still playing it. I'm still having fun. It's just that now it's the kind of fun you have when you line up all your toy soldiers and make them fight, not fun like watching a movie or reading a book.

Going back to how long it's taking me, obviously re-doing a lot of the fights multiple times is adding to the count but even without that it does seem to me that I must be taking a lot longer than expected to get through this thing. I'm not aware of taking it slowly but I do open just about every crate and that takes a while. I also find it very hard to follow the maps so I am frequently lost. I wish you could click on the map and just go there, like you could in the first two Baldur's Gates. I bet there's a mod for that but it's a bit late to go looking for one now.

It's almost certain I won't finish BG3. The fights are starting to become too difficult for me; too much going on and too many extremely tough opponents in quick succession. I can only assume the game will build up to a climactic battle at the end and I cannot imagine that fight being one I could win. 

I vaguely remember the first two games having a similar difficulty arc. By the end of BG1, which I did finish, I had a tactic that consisted almost entirely of summoning huge numbers of Monsters using the Monster Summoning line of spells and just swarming the bosses. Those spells don't seem to exist in BG3 so that's no longer an option, sadly. I can't remember how, or even if, I finished BG2. 

I could turn the difficulty down, of course. I'm playing on whatever the Default is but there's a Story Mode below that. And again I imagine there are mods that would make things easier. 

But I don't care enough to do any of that. Mike of The Works of Egan has a long post up about not finishing games and I have to say I think it's a healthy way to look at it. If it stops being fun, stop doing it. I probably wouldn't be so blase about giving up on a movie or a novel but the time investment involved there is literally orders of magnitude less, or it is with this game. 

I am also quite looking forward to stopping just so I can play something else. There's an annoyingly addictive element to the tactical combat that losing interest in the reason the fights are happening doesn't seem to quell. I imagine I'll eventually hit the point where even the fights aren't fun any more but annoyingly I don't seem to be quite there yet. 

Whether this will be the last time I write about Baldur's Gate 3 is another question. I imagine I'll at least want to give some kind of summing-up when I finally log out for the last time. Or maybe this post will be my final word on the subject.

I guess we'll find out.