At Last!

 Baldur's Gate 3 is back in the box. Or it would be, if there was a box.

I'm very happy to have finished it. Firstly, because I'd had enough some time ago and secondly because it makes a nice change to finish a game at all, these days. Also I think it means I've played all three Baldur's Gates through to the credits, although I can't be absolutely sure I got right to the end of the second one. Pretty sure I did, though...

Two questions remain, I guess:

1. Was it any good?
2. How satisfying was the ending?

As to the first, yes, obviously it was good. It would be ridiculous to pretend otherwise. Clearly, this was a massive technical achievement on Larian's part and a very worthy addition to the celebrated series. It was also fun, enjoyable, entertaining and addictive in the best "just one more try" way. Not much more you could ask of a video game, really.

That said, I didn't exactly love it. As previously discussed, it went on far too long. Having finished it, I'm even more of the opinion it would have been better split into at least two separate games or even a trilogy. So much happens that it's very hard to remember it all, far less appreciate it. As a studio, Larian always seems to want to take the maximalist approach and it's not my preference at all.

Leaving aside the whole "too much of a good thing" problem, though, I don't have anything other than praise for the quality of the writing or the voice acting. One of the reasons it took me as long as it did was that I had to hear every word spoken out loud and I had to find and read every book on every shelf. It wasn't until the epilogue that I finally decided I could just glance at the subtitles and skip ahead rather than listen to Wyll droning on - but then he was by a wide margin the least interesting character. I never skipped on anyone else.

Visually, the game looks amazing. The level of detail is overwhelming. I spent a lot of time just wandering about, looking at stuff. I wasn't entirely happy with the way the camera worked but it wasn't terrible. Most of the time, anyway.

The tactical gameplay was everything I could have asked for. I found the fights perhaps the most addictive part of the whole game although it was the ones I managed to avoid by dint of persuasion that felt, ironically, like the most satisfying of victories. I played the entire campaign on the default setting and it seemed just about right. I can only remember giving up altogether on one fight but several came right down to the last person standing, which felt pretty good, at least when that person was one of my party.

The story was OK. I find it hard to get emotionally involved in narratives that include gods and archdevils as active participants. The whole thing began to feel a bit above my pay-grade by about halfway through and by the end it was so far removed from anything I could associate with it ceased to feel like any choices I made had any relevance at all.

But that's the generic problem with D&D. You start out worrying whether two goblins might be one too many for the party and end up riding on an Ancient Red Dragon as you head into a battle with a demi-god. 

Or something. I gave up my AD&D campaign back in the '80s when the party reached 7th level because it got too hard to take any of it seriously any more. BG3 is, I think, the highest I've ever taken a character in any version of the rules and even then Larian had to pull the plug on XP at Level 12 because anything beyond would have been impossible to balance.

So, I'd say Baldur's Gate 3 is a good game despite the IP, not because of it. I'd honestly have preferred to stay in Act I in terms of both the narrative and the gameplay. The problems there seemed a lot more approachable and the tactics more comprehensible. Then again, the higher level spells are certainly a lot more spectacular, so there's that.

Speaking of spells and abilities, there are far, far too many of them and the mechanics of preparing them are far too abstruse. I found it verging on impossible to know what to pick on Level-Up and in the entire 155 hours I never figured out how to change prepared spells efficiently. I either forgot about it altogether or when I remembered and tried to swap spells out it didn't work for some reason I couldn't grasp. 

By the final battle my bags were bursting with those potions that add or restore spell slots but I never did manage to get one to work, which was how I ended up with so many unused ones in the first place. I don't enjoy fiddling about with builds or specs or anything of the kind so for the entire game I had the exact same party - my character, Shadowheart, Lae`zel and Gale and they all used pretty much the same set of spells and abilities for the whole run.

Frequently, that meant I didn't have what I needed to get a fight done efficiently but I almost always just muddled through as best I could. I did make extensive use of scrolls, because those I could understand and I always had stacks of them, but it seemed very odd that my magic-users were so limited by what they could remember, while anyone at all could cast any spell, providing they had a bit of paper in their hand.

The worst example of these self-inflicted limitations  in the whole game came right at the end, when Tipa tipped me to the fact that you can skip the entire penultimate set-piece battle simply by making all your characters invisible. It was a great tip but by then I had precisely no characters who could cast any form of invisibility and exactly two invisibility potions between five of them (Orpheus, the tag-along, being the one who needed invisibility most of all.)

The mechanics of the game at that point precluded a trip back to a vendor or my camp stash to restock. I would have had to go back to a very much older save for that. Instead I ended up spending several hours working on a strategy to get Orpheus and my character to the Crown unseen, so my character could read from a scroll of Globe of Invulnerability and keep them both safe while Orpheus cast Karsus' Compulsion and maintained it for long enough to trigger the cut scene.

And now we're sliding into that second question: how satisfying was the ending? Hmm. There's no easy answer to that one.

For a start, it depends what you mean by "ending". The final fight is a huge anti-climax, especially if you've just taken three days and about eight or nine hours getting through the one before, not to mention almost as long on the one before that. 

In the event, I went into the last fight with just Orpheus and my character. I'd ungrouped for tactical reasons in the penultimate battle and at least one of those characters was dead anyway so I saved at the zone-in, then went in with just the two of us, intending to see how it went and then try again, with the full group if necessary. 

It was not. Two of us were more than enough to subdue the Netherbrain. I absolutely am not complaining about it being too easy. As I said, I'd been itching to get the game over with for a long time by then so the easier the better. It still seemed like a weird design choice, all the same. 

Speaking of difficulty, in typical fashion, I neglected to use two of the biggest boosts available. After all that work in Act III, gathering a bunch of allies to call on for help in the final battle, I never even saw them. I managed to kill the entire horde of enemies in the stages leading up to the final confrontation with the Netherbrain without any help from outside the party and when I wanted to bring in my allies for the difficult second-to-last fight, the button to call them had disappeared! Apparently I'd missed my chance and they'd all gone off to do something else.

Similarly, I saved Shadowheart's Divine Intervention (Only One Use Per Game.) for a Very Dire Situation but never found one that was quite dire enough. I did use it on one attempt to get Orpheus to the Crown but that attempt failed so I reloaded an earlier save and I never called on Selune again.

I think it's fair to say that if I'd had to rely on my wits and skill, I would never have finished the game at all, or not yet, anyway. A significant proportion of the big fights can be rendered almost trivial by certain strategies or tactics and once I started looking those up whenever I ran into trouble, things got a great deal easier. That and save-scumming, of course.

That said, I never felt like I was actually cheating - just not coming up with all the ideas on my own. But then, there were three other people in the party so I really shouldn't have needed to, should I?

So much for the final fights. What about the narrative conclusion?

Bleh! This is where I think Larian really dropped the ball. There's a long epilogue, all cut scenes and talking, which is clearly supposed to tie up all the loose ends and give all the characters a nice, tidy ending. Unfortunately, it just makes things worse.

For one thing, several hanging swords never fall. My plan was always to give the Crown to the devil I'd contracted with to do so but that option simply never appeared. Instead, I got a cut-scene late on, when he complained about my not having fulfilled the contract but declined to do anything much to punish me. Apparently he was content to just watch, as everything would inevitably go wrong for me from then on without any further intervention on his part.  

That made no sense at all but it was in good company. There were many examples of things not making any sense, not least all the supposedly deep and meaningful conversations with "companions" about the amazing times we'd had together, when about the only thing we'd ever done together was hang around in camp. Since I'd avoided any kind of romance and we had never fought alongside each other, the supposed bonds we'd formed seemed delusional.

The single, worst example, though, was Jaheira. I got her killed in a fight in Act II. I know for certain she was dead because if Jaheira is dead, it's impossible to calm Minsc down when you fight him later and you have no option but to kill him. Which I did. I read the strats and the only dialog option that works is not present if Jaheira is dead. That dialog option was not present for me plus I saw her die. Ergo, Jaheira is dead.

Except she turns up in the Epilogue, chatty as anything, apparently remembering nothing about her demise. Yes, it's D&D so maybe somehow she got resurrected but if so you'd think she might have mentioned it. The game just doesn't keep tabs accurately on what you've done, something I found a problem right from the start.

More annoying than that, though, were two things that happened - or didn't happen - at the reunion party six months after the destruction of the Netherbrain. Everyone comes back for a catch-up and I talked to them all - except for the very two I most wanted to see. One of those couldn't talk to me and the other wasn't even there.

The mute companion was Scratch, the dog. I always talked to him by using a Potion of Animal Speaking, several of which I had on me at all times. Except when I opened my inventory to drink one, I found it completely empty. Apparently, having spent moths carrying the contents of a medium-sized store around with me, I'd suddenly decided to throw it all away and go around with nothing but the clothes on my back.

That was very annoying but Scratch could still bark and I could rub his ears. That gave me some closure, at least. What I really wanted to know - and still do - is what happened to the girl, Yenna, who I rescued twice, once from a life on the streets and once from a psychopathic killer, and who was last seen relatively happily employed as camp cook.

Apparently no-one at Larian thought to write a farewell script from her so she just vanishes. Meanwhile, all those layabouts she spent her time feeding get to stuff themselves while button-holing me to yak on about the great times we never had.

As I said, bleh! Not impressed at all with the wrap-up. Also, I have one final complaint. The ending comes with several obvious set-ups for a sequel, some just hinted at in a line or two of dialog, a couple with their own full cut-scenes. That would be fine if there was going to be a sequel but Larian has made it abundantly clear they aren't going within a thousand miles of one. They're done with the franchise for good.

Whether it gets handed on to another studio remains to be seen but even if it does, I very much doubt that studio will want to start from where Larian left off, so all those teasers are more like taunts, now. Still, if someone does ever make a Baldur's Gate 4, I guess I'll play it. And it'll have to go some to beat this one, for all its many flaws.

As for a replay of BG3, I wouldn't say never but I'm really not feeling it right now. Time for something new. Past time, truly. 

And So We Came To The End - Almost

Time for a little update on how Baldur's Gate 3 is going, I think. There's a very good chance this might be the penultimate post on the subject because I have reached the final battle. Well, probably. You never can be sure with this game.

And I am not looking forward to it. Not one little bit. I'm imagining it's going to be some ridiculously overwrought epic with vast numbers of troops on the battlefield. Far too many enemies with insanely over-powered abilities and vast heaps of hit points. The chaotic kind of fight where I can't even see half the units, let alone get to them.

I really enjoyed the D&D-based tactical combat earlier in the game but only so long as the scale remained manageable. In the latter stages, there have been a few fights where the biggest challenge was working out where everyone was. That's not fun.

It doesn't help that the camera in BG3 really isn't great. Is that something people complain about? I haven't seen anything. Maybe it's just me. I don't think I'm imagining it, though.

For example, there's a huge problem with the z-axis. Since the game uses click-to-move, if you want to go upstairs, you have to click on a point that is literally up the stairs. Unfortunately, the camera doesn't understand that's where you're going until one of the characters gets there, meaning if you sweep ahead to see what's coming, as I do all the time, your POV goes through the staircase as if it wasn't there, leaving you on the lower floor.

In some locations, that makes it extremely awkward to get any impression of where you're going. One especially bad example is the artist's house, which is on several floors and has mezzanines as well. 

The house is haunted, filled with possessed items that blast you as soon as you come into range and/or sight (Never did figure out which.) Working my way up the floors, I had to re-load numerous times because I just couldn't get the camera to give me any useful information before my party arrived at the danger spots, where they'd be killed before I could see what they were supposed to be fighting. 

You might think that's just the game preventing the player from having information the characters wouldn't have but it was plain my characters ought to be able to see the relevant locations from where they were. It was just me that couldn't. 

There are lots of other things wrong with the camera but I'll leave it at that. Suffice to say I feel like I've spent nearly as much time fighting the controls as I have the baddies.

And speaking of baddies, are we them now? It's starting to feel like it.

I'm watching the second season of Marvel's Runaways at the moment. I'll get to reviewing it soon enough so I won't say any more other than it's excellent. The reason I mentioned it is that it's very strong on how good intentions can be corrupted by necessity, compromise, pragmatism or self-delusion, often without you even realizing it's happened until it's too late. You can start out with the noblest of ideals and end up doing  the very thing you thought you were against.

Let's just steal a boat and make a break for it!

There's a lot of that in BG3. It's one of those "Decisions Matter" games in both the positive and the negative meaning of the phrase. The good part is that, when you make a choice, the narrative and even world changes as a result. That is almost certainly something you want if you choose to play an RPG.

The bad part is that the writers have deliberately set out to create situations in which there is no good choice. They mean to back you into a corner, where you have to make a decision you're almost bound to be unhappy with. Presumably this is supposed to suggest emotional depth. I just find it irritating.

There is, of course, always the option of walking away. I've done that several times but it's rarely satisfying. Or there's the ever-popular save-scumming, whereby you try all the available choices for size before picking the one you're going to walk out of the store wearing. Done that a few times, too. It's more satisfying than just skipping the entire thing but it still feels cheesy.

The cumulative effect of all of this is the reverse of what's presumably intended. Instead of choices that matter all that's left is choices I don't really care about. I just want to get on with things and see what happens next. Moral consequences be damned.

And what does happen next seems to get more perfunctory the closer to the climax we come. In my last session there were at least two decision points that felt like they were bound to lead to big fights but instead the person I was thwarting just shrugged their shoulders, mumbled something along the lines of  "Well, if you're going to be like that about it..." and left. 

Which was fine, in a way. I really didn't want another big fight and it's not like I hadn't done the same a few times. 

The main reason I didn't want those incidents to turn into fire-fights is that I'm all too aware the really big fight is just around the corner. And I'm not there for it. If I could skip it without actually giving up, I would. Sadly, I don't see any way to avoid it other than to stop playing altogether. 

Is that the state of mind the developers were hoping to encourage in the endgame? A kind of weary, grudging acceptance of the inevitable? One last heave and it'll all be over. Then I can uninstall and forget this ever happened. Shouldn't I be excited, thrilled by the prospect of one, titanic, final battle, followed by absolute victory? Maybe want to start over again because I had so much fun?

This wasn't what I meant...

Yes, well, I expect it's me. I was already very annoyed by the way all progress stops when you hit Level 12. That really put a damper on my enthusiasm.

Larian decided, quite reasonably, that since D&D basically goes insane at high levels, it would be impossible to balance the game after that. They'd have to allow for characters throwing around Wishes, Earthquakes and Meteor Storms and bringing dead party members back to life with full health at the wave of a hand. To avoid the inconvenience, they capped levels for the player and their companions at 12, giving them access to 6th level spells and nothing higher.

It's a choice I have no problem with. Or it would be if they'd also switched off the xp spigot. But they didn't.

I had to go look up why my xp was frozen even though I kept seeing yellow numbers every time I killed an enemy or completed a quest. It seems you get the xp but it just dissipates into the ether, leaving you forever stuck on whatever you were when you dinged 12.

It's far more frustrating to carry on gaining xp but not be able to use it than it would have been had it stopped altogether. Every time I do anything of any significance now it feels like I'm being cheated out of my rightful progression. It's very disheartening and it makes me want to avoid doing anything more than what's absolutely necessary.

None of which entirely stops me from enjoying myself altogether but it certainly hasn't been as much fun for a long time now as it was at the beginning and it gets to be less fun the larger the ending looms ahead of me. I'm at the point where I can feel the finish so close by, it seems more trouble to stop than it does to go on. One more push and it'll all be over and thank god for that.

I can't wait to be done with Baldur's Gate 3. It's been an experience, that's for sure. Whether it's an experience I'd recommend is another question. It feels masochistic occasionally and enervating much of the time.

I hope I'm right and I really am almost at the end. I'd hate to think there might be some kind of coda to drag it out even longer. I suppose I'd better wrap this up and go make my final assault on the Netherbrain. 

If I said I was looking forward to it I'd be lying. 

I just want it to be over.

Coming Soon To A Screen Near You...

This wasn't going to be a post about Baldur's Gate 3. It was going to be a more general grab-bag of media stuff. That's not quite how it turned out.

I'm still playing BG3, although I haven't actually played any video games at all for nearly three days, which is something of a peace-time record for me. I won't bother with the details of why I haven't been playing, most of which relate to work, illness and responsibilities, but the plain fact is, I haven't had the time, the energy or the inclination to log in these last few days.

Before that, though, and since the last time I posted about BG3, I was playing a lot. The main plot progresses even though I'm not particularly trying to push through it. It turns out in Act III just about everything circles back to the central narrative, even when it looks like it won't.

There have been some very significant battles, some of which turned out to be a whole lot easier than I was expecting, something for which much of the credit goes to two years of accrued experience as recorded on the internet. I haven't specifically been following walkthroughs but I have been skimming guides and wikis to see if there are things I should know or ought to avoid. It makes a big difference.

So does running through the opening couple of turns of a big fight to see exactly who the enemies are and what they can do, saving as I go, then going back to the beginning and altering my tactics accordingly. It absolutely is cheating but it's a lot more fun than taking two hours to do a huge fight properly and then losing. If I do it that way, I have to redo it anyway so how is that any purer?

The fight that most surprised me was the one with Orin. I really, really hate Orin. She's utterly obnoxious, with no charm or wit or any kind of mitigating factor to dilute her sheer unpleasantness. I'd been very keen to kill her for a while so when I finally found her lair I was looking forward to getting into it with her...

...and then she turned into some bat-winged monstrosity with what looked like complete invulnerability to everything I could throw at her. I had a few experimental tries, stopping as soon as it was obvious my team was going to be obliterated, then I decided it was completely hopeless and gave up. 

I went to do something else instead because even at this late stage there's always something else to do. Only I was still wondering how the heck anyone was supposed to beat an opponent who has seven layers of invulnerability that refresh every turn. It seemed very unfair. 

So I went and looked it up and it turns out it's not because she doesn't. 

What she has is invulnerability to seven attacks per turn and every strike of a multiple-part attack strips one of the layers. I'm still not sure if that's clear from the in-game description but it makes one hell of a difference. All you really need to do is have someone blast her with a low-level spell like Magic Missile that comes in six or seven bursts for one cast and then she's vulnerable to everything else that hits her.

Which in my case was Lae'zel, hasted, standing next to her and battering her with a Silver Sword. Orin literally didn't get a single action before she was dead. It was extremely satisfying. 

It would have been nice if all her little minions dropped dead of shock but of course they didn't. It took a good long time to clear the rest of them up but none of my party died so I count that as a clean win. 

Unfortunately, I chose both to loot Orin's corpse and release the captive prisoner the moment she died, then save in case something bad happened. Then the fight went on for a while and after it was all over I couldn't figure out what had happened to the hostage so that meant more googling.

I found her eventually and spoke to her.  I've rescued so many people now, I forget where she was. Most of the people I save aren't where they're supposed to be by the time I want to talk to them. I'm used to it now.

I hadn't even been sure who the victim was. Every one of the accounts of the fight I've read talk about the hostage being one of your Companions, someone who could have joined your party, had you not left them languishing back at camp. 

All my companions were still twiddling their thumbs by the fire. The only one that was missing was the little girl with the cat, another waif I rescued at some point and offered sanctuary. 

She'd been hanging out with Withers, the leather-faced not-a-mummy who does all the resurrections. They seemed like an unlikely couple but they looked like they were getting on pretty well so I left them to it until one day the kid just vanished. I asked Withers where she'd gone and he said something about how she'd found out I knew her parents were dead and lied about it so she didn't want anything more to do with me, which seemed fair enough. I mean, I was going to tell her but the time never seemed right.

Well, it turns out he was wrong and in fact Orin had crept into the camp, killed the cat and kidnapped the girl. If I didn't already have good reason to hate her... (Also, Orin did at one point impersonate the girl and tell me a horrific tale about Orin making her eat her cat before I saw through her little ruse but then Orin does that sort of thing a lot and I never take much notice.)

Anyway, it seems all is good between my character and the girl... what is her name? Yenna! That's it. She's back at the camp now, cooking soup for all of us. She seems pretty untraumatized, considering. In my head-cannon she's going to adopt the dog, Scratch, who I picked up right at the start and who lives in the camp and they'll be best buddies now the cat's gone.

So that was one fight. There have been a whole bunch of others. One very satisfying one was the top floor of the fireworks factory, which I did almost completely from the outside, lobbing fireballs through the open window and watching the entire stock of fireworks explode and kill half the people inside before the rest made it out the door, where we picked them off from the tower opposite.

I've worked out that in many cases the best tactic is to start the fight from outside a choke point like a doorway and force all the enemies to come to you. The AI and the pathing in BG3 is good but it's far from infallible. Often the enemies can't figure out how to get to you and they never know where their own traps are so they frequently arrive half-dead from their own ordnance. Which is nice.

These are the kinds of games within the game that keep me going now the basic plot has collapsed under its own weight. I think the shark-jumping moment for me was when I found that now I'm supposed to go down below the city to recruit a Brass Dragon to join me in the final battle. That just felt like someone wasn't taking the whole thing seriously any more so why should I?

That's where I am now, anyway. I feel as though it's not impossible I might get to the end although how the last battle is going to work with all the allies I've acquired I can't even imagine. Every turn is going to take about an hour.

Or of course I could just shelve the whole thing and wait for the TV show. HBO has greenlit a series set in Baldur's Gate after the game finishes so presumably there'll be a recap of what happened.

The showrunner is Craig Mazin, the guy behind The Last Of Us, which I haven't seen but which seems to get good notices. No information on when it will be out but I would imagine 2027 at the very earliest.

Luckily for me, long before then I will finally be able to watch HBO legally. Only today I saw the announcement that HBOMax is launching in the UK next month. About bloody time!

There are a bunch of subscription options, starting with the ad-supported cheapie at £4.99 and going all the way up to Premium at £14.99. I'll probably take the £9.99 Standard package with no ads. I've just dropped my Apple+ sub because neither Mrs Bhagpuss or I was using it so the timing is good. There's plenty on HBO I'd like to see. Or there used to be, anyway. I can't say I've checked for a while.

I'll get on that right now. 

 

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. 

When They Talk About The Meta, I Don't Think This Is What They Mean...

I'm finding it increasingly awkward to come up with ideas for game-related posts when I'm really playing just the one game. Yes, still that one, Played Time now just nudging into three figures according to Steam and still very obviously nowhere even close the end. 

One odd thing I notice as a blogger is that if this was a new MMORPG I was playing, it would feel completely legitimate, not to say expected, for me to post a dozen or more times in excruciating detail about the gameplay. I've done it countless times with any number of MMOs, the great majority of which I've ended up playing for considerably less than a hundred hours and I've rarely thought to ask myself if anyone really cares, let alone whether it's a reasonable use of my time.

With single-player games, though, it feels like the way to go is maybe one or two posts at the start, just to announce what game it is I'm playing and what sort of a first impression it's giving, then nothing more until I've finished and it's time for a full review. It's an approach that works well for most of the single-player games I actually finish, nearly all of which are likely to be point&click adventures or narrative-driven games of some kind and which, crucially, are unlikely to take more than ten or fifteen hours, tops.

Survival games and the currently vogueish action-rpgs like Wuthering Waves, even if they're not multiplayer or I'm not playing them as such, slew much more to the MMORPG end of the spectrum. They frequently feel like MMOs even when they aren't, which makes it very easy to write about them as though they were.

Really, ridiculously big single-player RPGs like Baldur's Gate 3, though, (And I'm not sure there are all that many others...) don't fit into any box. It would be very easy for me to do whole posts on what the characters look like, on the dress-up options (Not least that there are some.) on inventory management, on the combat, the stats, the skill trees... all the standard topics I'd fall into talking about out of habit if I was obsessed by a new MMORPG.

Only, doing the same for Baldur's Gate 3 feels at best self-indulgent but mostly just pointless. Who even cares? The game's two years old and developers, Larian, have made it extremely plain they're done with it, want no more to do with it, won't be making any more content for it and are more than happy to move on from it. Sometimes I get the impression they wish they'd never gotten involved with it in the first place. 

With an MMORPG or any live service game that's still getting updates, commenting on how the game looks and plays feels like a conversation. With an RPG that's final and complete, talking about it feels more like hearing an old recording playing in an empty room.

But what's the alternative?  Hah! I'm so glad you asked! I can tell you that!

 

Since BG3 is still literally the only game I'm playing, as far as gaming goes I could post about:

• Games I'm Not Playing But Might If/When I Ever Get To The End Of This Bloody Monster
• Games I Used To Play Long, Long Ago
• Games I'm Looking Forward To Playing If/When Someone Gets Off Their Backside And Finishes Them
• Things Going On In Gaming In General

Or I could post about non-gaming topics. I always do plenty of that. Except, just now, I'm really only playing this one game, reading the usual random selection of books and slowly working my forward through the Dr. Who Archive on the BBC iPlayer. I'm not listening to enough new music to put a solid playlist together or watching enough new TV shows for a full post about anything. (I did watch the second episode of Haunted Hotel last night. That was good...)

Does anyone really care what I think now about the Dr. Who seasons I last watched when I was in my teens, though? That's how far I've got so far. There's really a shit-ton of Dr. Who, isn't there? I never really appreciated the sheer voloume of the franchise before. 

I do have things to say about the show but again it seems like the world has probably had to put up with more than enough old men droning on about the things they thought were so great when they were young already, especially if the only conclusions they come to is that those things were pretty great after all.

Most of this is happening because I have so much annoying, difficult real-life stuff going on at the moment, not helped in the slightest by Mrs Bhagpuss and I both suffering form a nasty and persistent cold-like bug that makes getting any of it done a real challenge. It means all I really want to do with my free time is as little as possible. 

BG3 is a drug, basically, and so is old, familiar television and, for that matter, the kind of books I've been reading lately. (I might argue all reading is a drug-like experience but that would require me to put a coherent argument together which, as must be obvious from this post, is not something I'm up to doing just at the moment.)

It's not that there aren't things to talk about. Actual, gaming -related topics I may or may not find the will to discuss this week include:

• The Official Launch of Project:Gorgon
• Daybreak Games' decision to abandon Roadmaps
• The Return of Jack Emmert to Cryptic
• The Unexpected Signs of Life in Rift

I'm listing those out in the hopes it might induce me to write something about them later. I don't suppose it will but you have to try, don't you?

I could also just stop posting for a while but as you can see I'd rather bang out a few hundred words of waffle and blether rather than let the post count fall to danger levels. I can get one of these done in an hour, provided I don't attempt to say anything of import.

This is the exact time AI would come in very handy, isn't it? I could just feed those bullet points into Gemini or ChatGPT and have the glorified predictive text apps knock out the first draft. Then I could edit that to make it look less plasticky and who would be any the wiser? 

Did I do that already? Aha! Wouldn't you like to know?

Alright, I didn't. The AIs just aren't that good yet. It'd be even more work than writing one of the damn posts myself. 

I will throw in a couple of AI illustrations though because I have fecking hundreds of them stored up and I might as well use them for something. I have them because I do the daily challenge at NightCafe every day, so as not to break my streak, which is over a hundred days now, and I've gotten so blase about it I just click on whatever they suggest and let the AI play with itself.

Now, that is a post I do want to write: what the hell do the people behind NightCafe think they're playing at? How does it benefit them to give away orders of magnitude more credits for free than I find it possible to imagine anyone ever needing? Aren't they supposed to making money selling them? And why are all the prompts virtually identical? Robots, airships, decaying jungle ruins, explorers...

And now, since I seem to have wandered entirely off-topic, not that it was ever all that clear just what topic I was on, I think I'll call this post done.

Hope you enjoyed it. I enjoyed writing it but then I love free-styling. It's always fascinating, finding out what I'm going to say next.

Sure! I'll Just Add It To My List...

Since I have a ludicrous number of real-life issues going on that mitigate against me writing anything that requires effort or commitment right now, I'm going to grab onto a comment of Tipa's, spin five hundred words out of it and call it a post. I know. We all expected more but sometimes life disappoints

Here's what Tipa said, talking about my complaints about just how damn big Baldur's Gate 3 is:

"I really think this is not a game for completionists. You're not supposed to see everything and do every quest. It encourages quick but meandering playthroughs; two or three times and each time lots of new things."

I think that's good advice for a gamer but it doesn't really address the issues for anyone who's chosen to roleplay their character, even very lightly. And BG3 is, after all, a D&D game. Roleplaying is kind of the point, isn't it?

Like a lot of people, I generally try to avoid playing Evil characters. I also steer clear of playing jerks, blowhards, pompous asses and selfish gits. Mostly what I play are either trippy cartoonish characters for whom everything is one big gosh-wow life experience or pollyannish do-gooders who trek around the map like the Littlest Hobo on steroids.

Either approach means that if someone asks me to do something that doesn't sound positively sociopathic, the chances are that I'll do it. Or agree to, at least. It's a particular issue in BG3 because so many of the requests are so plausible.

Because I'm also anything but a completionist, not all the promises I blithely make get kept. I don't intentionally break them, I just get distracted and forget I made them. In every RPG I've ever played, on or offline, my quest journal is usually stuffed so full I have to delete unfinished quests just so I can keep adding new ones. Which I do.

That never bothers me as a player. I don't have any issues with not finishing quests or leaving them hanging. I don't often care how things turn out. Very few stories in RPGs are sufficiently interesting for not knowing the ending to feel like it's going to be a problem.

As a character, though, I do sometimes feel a degree of commitment. It's often when I come to make space in the Journal that I'm reminded of promises I made and that's when I feel like maybe I should go do something about them. 

The upshot is that in a game like BG3, where there are what seems like literally hundreds of NPCs asking me to do things for them, many of whom, for a change, could make a fairly convincing argument that they couldn't do those things for themselves, it's more than averagely likely that at some point I'm going to start feeling the pressure.

 

I mentioned in another post that almost all dialogs do have some kind of "Get lost, pal. I have better things to do than fix your dumb problems" option. I'm sure that works beautifully for people who love roleplaying bastards but it clearly isn't going to do much for me. Later in the game there may also be a few "I'd really love to help but I'm kind of busy saving the world right now" answers, which is obviously an improvement but, honestly, still feels much too rude (And self-aggrandizing.) for me to be comfortable saying it.

The inevitable result is that I agree to everything anyone asks me, then start trying to do it until I meet another NPC who asks me to do something else and I switch tracks to do that instead. This happens over and over again and pretty much describes my progress through all RPGs.

BG3 does have the advantage that many apparently unrelated questlines end up being connected after all, so dotting about between them doesn't always mean nothing's getting done. On the other hand, some of the interactions are so abstruse and unforeseeable that, when you run into one of those, it feels like a real bait&switch.

The prime example of that in my playthrough so far has been Korlach's clockwork heart. She's one of the numerous companions I have never invited to come adventuring with me but who hangs around in my camp anyway. All of them seem to think being a camp-follower means I have to fix their entire lives and of course I'm far too polite to tell them to sod off so I always promise to do my best. 

As an aside, all my three regular party-members love me. Well, two of them absolutely worship me and the third is only lukewarm because I refused to sleep with her, twice. Apparently the one thing every character I play has no issues saying a firm "No" to is any kind of sexual relationship.  

Other than that, though, she loves me too, and the reason they all think I'm so goddamn wonderful is because I agree with everything they say and promise to do everything they want. And since they're always with me, unlike the NPCs who watch me walk away, never to return, those are the promises I actually keep.

I fully intended to keep my promise to Korlach and find her a mechanic to fix her malfunctioning pump but before I even got going on that, there was a scripted incident that I'm fairly sure I couldn't do anything about and after the smoke cleared, the one person who could do the repairs was dead. I spent a while googling to see if there was any alternative but apparently this guy is literally the only smith in the whole of sodding Faerun capable of doing the job.

Which is obviously bollocks and bad writing. I imagine any competent Dwarven forge could have done the work for a very reasonable fee, not to mention about a gazillion other crafts-persons or magic-users, not to mention the infinity of clerics that could have brought the guy I needed back from the dead. But no. Get that sequence in the wrong order and you've had it.

Again, fine. Actions have consequences and all that. Win some, lose some. All the cliches. The thing is, if you have no real idea which quests are simple, which are complex and which have critical decision points, it's hard-to-impossible to triage them for efficiency or even sanity.

That's not a problem for me, either, generally. As I've said, what I mostly do is quite similar to what Tipa's suggesting. I meander through the plot, wandering back and forth across the landscape, picking up quests and dropping them again, only finishing any of them by chance. And for fifty or sixty hours, that's a lot fun.

Unfortunately, fifty or sixty hours barely scratches the surface. The one thing in Tipa's suggestion that really doesn't seem viable is the idea that anyone could have a "quick" playthrough. What would "quick" even mean in this context? Forty or fifty hours? 

I guess you could set some rules on what sort of quests you were willing to take. No helping refugees. No helping devils. No helping rude people. 

Or on how many - only speak to a couple of NPCs in each new area, for example, and completely snub the rest. Then, on your next playthrough, you could swap those rules around. You'd probably always have to hit certain nodal points in the main plot but I'm sure they can all be approached in various ways.

Even if that did indeed give you several playthroughs that felt quite different, though, it does nothing to address that awkward roleplaying problem. You'd either be roleplaying some kind of opinionated bigot, only willing to help those who "deserved" it or some spell-slinging time-and-motion inspector, willing to help but only according to a quota system.

If I'm finding this problematic, how must genuine completionists be feeling? Hard to imagine, since it's an alien mindset for me. It seems like they'd find it as abrasive as sand in a bathing costume but who knows? Maybe they love it. Maybe having a hundred and fifty hours of gameplay before they get every "i" dotted is the dream. Certainly, the game seems to be almost universally adored so I guess it must be.

BG3 is just an extreme example of the problem, anyway. I think AgingGamer is onto something when he comments that "80+ hours often seems too big". That's where I've felt the ennui set in before and it's happening again here, although I'd say things generally begin to feel stale after 60 hours.

There always comes a time when I just want to be done with the damn thing. That's when I realize I'm not even thinking about the quests any more, just slogging through them without taking in much of the detail. 

I hit that point in BG3 at start of the weekend. I haven't played for a couple of days, mostly for unrelated reasons. The longer I'm away, the less I feel like going back, although I'm not yet so fed up with it I'm going to quit altogether. I'll keep picking away at it but, as often happens with MMORPGs, it's starting to feel more like a habit than a pleasure. (It's worth pointing out that MMOs seem to manage to delay this sort of reaction for orders of magnitude longer than other genres, which presumably is why developers keep insisting on making more of them...)

As for playing Baldur's Gate 3 more than once. Well, maybe in a few years. 

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 refused 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 but he was standing right next to the rest of the party so when he exploded 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 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 III 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.

If In Doubt, Run Like Hell or How To Say No And Get Away With It

Who's up for another round of "Yesterday In Baldur's Gate"? No-one? Tough! It's all I've got.

My played time now stands at a terrifying fifty-five hours, of which I very much doubt even as much as an hour was idle time. It also appears that I'm still in "Act 1" which, if true, and if the acts were all to be of roughly equal length, would suggest a final running length of somewhere around a hundred and fifty hours.  

I'm guessing what it means is either that I'm spending a huge proportion of my time doing things I probably don't need to be doing, or that the three acts are not of equal length. Possibly both. 

How Long To Beat has a "Completionist" run coming in at 179 hours, with a brisk trot through just the main storyline taking a little less than half that long. They also show something called "Main + Extra" at 115 hours although what that means, exactly, is anyone's guess.

Is this a good thing? Should a single video game take up that much of anyone's time? It certainly isn't necessary to take that long for a game to feel like something special. I completed Disco Elysium in forty hours and that felt like a major event. Broken Sword 5 lasted sixteen hours and Cloudpunk, which I found very absorbing, took me just eleven hours. Quality over quantity, I guess, although I suppose it's a bit rich to balk at both together.

Games eat each other, though. Since I started playing BG3, I've put in far more hours than I'd been used to doing for months, if not years, but I've also played nothing else. Regular readers may remember I was quite happily trundling along in EverQuest II, with vague plans of taking several characters through the new expansion over the rest of the winter. Well, that's not happening.

Of course, EQII will still be there when I finish Baldur's Gate 3. Probably. We hope. If anything's going on there now that I ought to know about, though, I'm missing it. 

I'm not completely wrapped up in Faerun. I got an email from Artix about a giveaway in AdventureQuest 3D that was tempting enough to get me to log in, even though I really don't play that game much at the best of times. When someone offers to give you a bunch of cash shop money just for logging in, though, it's rude to ignore them. 

But that only took five minutes. Other than that, it's been BG3, all day, every day. It's compelling but also confusing, which is quite a strong combo for me. I do like not really knowing what's going on in a game.

Take that three-act structure for a start. I'm not sure it exists, formally, inside the game but it's referenced everywhere outside it and I have clearly misunderstood how it works until very recently. I was sure there was a hard transition between the "Mountain" zone and the "Wilderness" and I think there probably is but the transition evidently isn't where I thought it was.

I've spent a very great deal of time in the area in and around the Githyanki Creche and the semi-ruined temple where it's hidden. I thought that was in Act 2 but it's not. I thought it was on the other side of the mountain pass, too, but it's not that, either. And I thought it was going to be the end of my game but it turned out I was mistaken. Bloody close call, though!

As I almost always do in RPGs that let you form a party as you go along, I'm sticking with the first characters I  met. I know you're supposed to swap them in and out but I almost never do that. I stay loyal to the ones I've got, even if they're useless. I only really drop someone if I find them too offensive in some way to put up with.

My team has been Gale the Wizard, Lae'zel the Fighter and Shadowheart the Cleric from the start. I have a bunch of would-be companions in camp but they never get to come adventuring with me. I'm comfortable with the team I've got.

It's almost mutual. I like all three of my team and two of them like me. Shadowheart isn't so sure, mostly because I friend-zoned her. Twice.

That bit at the start of the game, where you can toggle off Sex and Violence, doesn't go far enough in my opinion. I was hoping it would mean no shenanigans in camp but my character has been propositioned several times, which is not my idea of an adventure.And I'm not having any of it. So to speak.

A refusal often offends, as the oh-so-witty sign in too many gift shops likes to warn us, but luckily a firm "No" doesn't seem to have offended Shadowheart enough to make her pack her hammer and leave. In a way it wouldn't be so bad if she did because she's certainly the weak link in the squad. I though clerics were supposed to be good at healing but she seems more like a trained first-aider than a battlefield medic. She also can't hit the side of a barn door with that hammer...

I like her, though. And I like Gale. But I like Lae'zel best of all, which is why, when we found ourselves unexpectedly embroiled in a long sub-plot involving her opportunity to Do The Right Thing by her Queen-Goddess, I backed her all the way. Another reason for Shadowheart to take against me, now I come to think of it.

Anyway, I cheered Lae'zel on while the crazy doctor tried to get the tadpole out with her organic crab machine and we broke it, which led to a fight that did not go well for the doctor. Then I backed Lae'zel in her obviously doomed but very proper attempt to tell the Creche Boss the doctor had been a wrong 'un and that's why we killed her. He didn't buy it so we had to kill him, too. 

Well, we were in it up to our necks by then. The others would have made a run for it but no, I stuck by Lae'zel, when she thought the Inquisitor was bound to understand. Clue is in the name, I'd have thought, but I agreed to give it a try and to give Lea'zel credit, he did listen. 

He wanted the Artefact that was keeping us all alive and which is something super-important to Shadowheart for... reasons... so I gave it to him. 

Hmm. I'm beginning to see why Shadowheart's going off me now...

He called the Queen, who made us an offer we couldn't refuse. Well, we could have but she'd have killed us. 

Of course, she was always going to kill us anyway, that was obvious, but you try to spin it out, don't you? I kept backing every play Lae'zel made, right up to the very end, when we got sent into the Planes to kill the Mysterious Presence who's been saving us every so often and instead of fighting back, she bared her neck and said we could kill her if that's what we wanted and that finally turned out to be the line I wouldn't cross, even for Lae'zel (Who also wanted to sleep with me, by the way, but who took my refusal a lot better than Shadowheart.).

We went back to the Creche and told the Queen. She was Not Happy. She told the Inquisitor and his gang to kill us and then vanished. At this point none of us had many spells left and we were all quite badly injured so, obviously, I thought that was it. 

Except it wasn't. By the simple expedient of using every speed-increasing option available and running like hell, I managed to get far enough back into the main part of the Creche for Instant Travel to start working again, then I ported back to camp. 

Just me. Everyone else was dead.

I was considering whether to load an earlier save or just recruit a whole new team, when I remembered that leather-faced ghoul who hangs around at the back of the camp. Didn't he say something about bringing my people back from the dead, for a fee?

Yes he did and it wasn't even a lot. 600 gold and he rezzed all three of them in the camp and it was like the whole thing had never happened. The script made a vague attempt at dealing with the anomaly but it wasn't convincing. It wasn't until we all went back the next day, at full health, and killed the Inquisitor like the script assumed we'd already done that the dialog started making sense again.

Then, since we were there anyway, we cleared out the entire Creche and looted everything. That took a while. Lae'zel, who seems to be an absolute mistress of self-deception, somehow squared all of that with her upbringing and religion and now she loves me more than ever. Even Shadowheart is willing to give me the benefit of the doubt, since we still have the Artefact and no-one stayed dead.

And now, as far as I can tell, we really have done everything there is to do in Act I, or at least everything any of us cares much about, so after I post this we'll be going through the Real Mountain Pass and into the Real Act 2. Probably. 

I imagine things will only get more confusing from there.