Hello, my name is ColdBeer and last week I was playing Baldur’s Gate 3 almost non-stop.
I finished the game’s Early Access and loaded the game again to play even more and explore
the map, because the game is good.
Really good.
Not as good as your dog, but it gave me lots of fun and I do believe, when it is finished,
it will become one of the greatest adventure RPG games ever created.
But it is not like that for now, it has a lot of flaws and I do not have in mind bugs
and glitches.
Although I have quite a few of those for you to see in the end of this video.
So, let’s talk from the very beginning - character creation screen.
Although I created half wood elf with blue beard and green eye makeup, because I tried
to make a fun character and I have no doubts about my manliness, but, even that doesn’t
satisfy my hunger for something really different.
And I have in mind that every character is just a slight variation of a human.
Longer ears, thinner face... shorter body - that is almost human and it is boring.
Tieflings have tail and horns, but if you take those away - it’s just the same human
again.
So, here you can’t play as undead, like a skeleton, as a lizardman, as a minotaur,
or a cat person, something like khajiit from Elder Scrolls - every choice you make is humanlike
and that limits your imagination.
In fact, in game, occasionally I couldn’t tell the race of the characters, because if
they had some lush hair that hid the ears, there was no way for me to tell if this is
a human, elf or a half elf.
Sometimes I had doubts, if this person is an elf or just gay.
Because some of those characters were looking good and they had feminine manners, and for
me it was hard to tell if this is a feature of a race or of this particular person.
Although in one place, called the Underdark, I stumbled on a village of myconids - a humanoid
mushrooms and that was awesome.
I have no idea why developers didn’t implemented those as a race in Early Access - they have
different models of them, all the animations and so on - I hope they will introduce the
myconid in the full version, because they look epic.
And it would be amazing just to try to persuade a Shadowheart or Lae’zel to have a sex with
you when you look like this.
You know, many women say that this is all about your personality and your myconid sharlatan
beast tamer would be the most charming mushroom they have ever met.
So, obviously I will not spoil you the story, but will talk about the game in general.
For now, in Early Access you can play on one difficulty level.
And that level is ridiculously hard.
Most of the time you win your battles because you get lucky and not because of your amazing
knowledge in tactics or strategy.
I played the game for almost 30 hours and I’m just level 4 now.
And this level is a maximum level on Early Access, you probably can’t progress further.
I say probably, because it still shows you the experience left until the next level,
but oh well, Early Access is teeming with bugs, so I’m not entirely sure about anything.
So that difficulty level is one of the most annoying things of the game right now.
I can show you the last moments of my playthrough - after this battle I uninstalled the game,
because I understood that there is nothing I can or want to do with battling much stronger
opponents anymore.
As you can see this was the first turn of the enemy and my main hero is already dead
and two others are critically injured.
Like literally, I never had even a chance to do anything and that's how the battle began.
Also those githyanki warriors are all level 5 and I’m capped at level 4, I had no chance
against them even if I tried to sneak up upon them.
Although I could probably avoid the battle with just a bit of luck in rolling while speaking
with them to be fair, but my save game was like 15 minutes away and I just snapped.
And this is the reason why I wouldn’t recommend you to buy Early Access of this game.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a great game otherwise, but constant loading for your life is not
a thing you will enjoy.
There are many battles that will require your ingenuity, but also there are too many of
those where you just die without any chance of survival and have to load a game to try
again.
Well, to be fair, you can probably win every battle, even that one I just showed you.
After a 123rd loading screen.
That’s not what I want from the game.
I can load once, twice, three times, because the learning process is a thing, I have nothing
against dying a few times.
But this is just too much.
For example while I was battling a few minotaurs I had to reload 13 times.
How many of you have the time or the will to do that if you don’t have to create a
review of the game?
After the battle I just made a guide video and uploaded it to my other channel about
how to defeat those minotaurs and it accumulated thousand views in a matter of several hours.
So, that’s not just me who is struggling.
So, my advice is - wait for the full release, probably next year in winter, and play then
when you can choose normal difficulty or hard - I can guarantee that hard will be easier
than this version of a game.
That is no doubt.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is also great with it’s storytelling - you can be a good guy or you
can become evil and kill the good guys.
And those good guys are not entirely good, so I liked the fact that all the game is built
in some grey area between good and evil.
Several times I was balancing on that grey area as well, because the game forces you
to make difficult decisions.
At least the game thinks that it is a difficult decisions.
For example I killed paladins of light just to save some devilish looking tiefling from
death, but I had no moral doubt - these paladins were just NPC’s and they had loot.
And once I let owlbear that killed many innocent people live, because I like animals more than
people anyway.
Well, at least in this game.
What I liked the most, apart from the story, which is great and really interesting, is
the open world.
Yeah, Baldur’s Gate 3 is an open world game, you can go wherever you want, in any direction
not blocked by the mountains.
And while you wander around you can stumble on amazing or creepy things.
Like a remote cabin in the woods where a creepy old woman lives.
You instantly know that this woman is not what she appears to be and then you will try
to provoke her with dialog options to change into her true form.
I will not spoil you these moments, so you could have fun when the full game is released.
And speaking about dialogue options - these are great and they really matter.
In example, if you fail to roll a dice on some option - it is gone forever.
So, one choice can prevent you from doing a great quest or to avoid deadly battle.
It’s all about luck.
It is very pleasant when you roll the difficult dice and things are going your way, but it
is very annoying when you fail and... you load the game.
And this is a big flaw of Baldur’s Gate 3, because you start saving the game every
5 minutes or so and if you forget to do that and fail - you have to load the game and play
the same portion of the game again, then save the game before dice rolling and load again
if you fail.
And then load again.
And again.
I think once I spent 2 hours just loading the game in one place because I wanted to
see the outcome of success in a very difficult situation.
I had to roll 20 out of 20 and eventually I did.
Is that cheating?
No, you are allowed to do that and it takes your time away.
Of course you can play it honestly like it’s intended, but you will miss so many options
and there is no guarantee that you will get those differently when you play the game again
with a different character, because if you must roll, let’s say, 15 or more out of
20 it’s only 1 out of 4 chances that you will succeed.
So usually you are not lucky.
You have to be a masochist of some kind to not load the game to see different outcomes.
In example I wanted a dog, but I failed to speak with it the first time I tried.
Yeah, you can speak with the animals if you have a spell, all the lines are voiced.
So I loaded the game and now I have a dog in my camp.
Who doesn’t want that?
How can you just not have a dog when you can have one?
Right?
So, anyway, many life changing choices, open world, great story and spirit of adventure
makes this game a wonderful thing we are all waiting for.
That greatness is not there yet, but I have no doubt that the full version will be beyond
any expectations.
My verdict is 8 vodkas out of 10 even for Early Access and I do believe the full version
will be worth the whole 10.
And now is the time for bugs
and glitches.
Thank you for watching.
Now you can like, subscribe or even help me create more by becoming a Patreon supporter
- even 1 dollar a month is a huge help for me.
Have a nice day and I’ll see you next time, bye.