I burned out playing Baldur’s Gate 3. Can an RPG be too long?

It started perfectly, I couldn’t have dreamed of it better. An extensive character editor, an interesting introduction, modern graphics while maintaining a fantasy atmosphere. I described all this, presenting you my first impression of Baldur’s Gate 3. If I were to rate this game divided into acts, I would give the first one 11/10.

Apart from one bug that made me unable to complete a minor task, I liked everything about it. Even if some aspects were not very intuitive and I struggled with the quest due to the mechanics and not the lack of ideas, the game seemed perfect.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is unfortunately a very uneven game

The problems started in the second act. Already there, I began to feel at times that I was traveling through places that were a bit too similar, and the game world simply seemed empty to me. Of course, there was a plot justification for this, which I won’t write about so as not to reveal anything to those who haven’t played the game yet.

Despite everything, I started playing as if by force. Just make it to the third act. Just to get to the famous Baldur’s Gate to see this iconic place again. Although the end of the second act was interesting again and nicely introduced the player to the final phase, I had to strain myself a bit. Here the partial score would be 8/10.

I entered the third act full of hope. Ready to rush into the big city and start solving hundreds of smaller and larger problems of its inhabitants. Meanwhile, I again encountered unnecessary debts. It took me a few hours to leave the camp, to which the game itself took me back every now and then, making me relive some uninteresting issues.

Once I got through it, I didn’t end up in Baldur’s Gate itself, but in its outskirts. Another delay in my goal. It was also the first time I encountered characters who couldn’t be talked to. A logical solution from the creators’ point of view – the game cannot be expanded indefinitely. However, it slightly spoils the immersion and looks rather sloppy.

Bugs and performance issues in Baldur’s Gate 3

Even worse, however, were the characters with whom you could talk, but they uttered one sentence and interrupted the “dialogue”. This is probably one of the things that irritated me the most in the latest part of the Baldur’s Gate series. As long as the conversations consisted of exchanging opinions and choosing options, changing the camera and turning on a kind of “cutscene” did not bother me. Doing it just to hear one sentence – that didn’t suit me at all. Especially since it didn’t happen smoothly and before each such “conversation” the game stopped for half a second.

Problems with flow in the third act are a topic for a separate text. About a week after the premiere, the creators released a patch for the game that completely reset my graphic settings. I couldn’t get back to that perfect state from the first act. The game just looked worse and there was nothing I could do about it. I also lost my saves one day and had to replay about two hours of gameplay.

In addition to a very unpleasant bug with empty books that were not translated into Polish on time, I also had a problem with game stability. In one place, whenever I approached the cave, everything crashed to the desktop with an error message. Baldur also turned off twice for no particular reason. So much has been written about the fluidity in the last and largest location of this title that I won’t repeat my complaints. It was bad.

I got bored in Baldur’s Gate

However, it was not because of the errors that I had to stop my adventure with Baldur’s Gate 3. At some point, I simply stopped playing. My team became too strong for the opponents, so the fights were not a challenge. There were a lot of characters in the city, but the conversation only made sense with a dozen or so of them. There were a lot of buildings, but in many there was nothing to look for, because the boxes and wardrobes were empty, and the notes did not add much to the plot.

In contrast, the sewers under Baldur’s Gate were overloaded with content, which was a bit absurd. The creators seem to have forced various elements next to each other, not necessarily paying attention to whether such massing of enemies makes sense at all. However, I won’t nitpick too much here. It’s better than another empty location pretending to be a big city.

I have some trouble rating this game because I wonder if there is something wrong with it, or maybe my approach was wrong. The nature of a collector and a person who has to look everywhere and see everything didn’t work very well in the second and third acts. While the first act, available in the “early access” formula, was perfect in every respect, in the next two acts looking under every stone in search of treasures simply did not make sense.

Baldur’s Gate 3, however, is similar to Divinity: Original Sin 2

I had similar feelings with Larian’s previous game. In Divinity: Original Sin 2, I also had enough at some point during the game. The creators first drew me into their world, delighting me with mechanics and details, only to then discourage me with overly developed locations, multi-layered tasks and the vision of an endless adventure, which I was not in the mood for. Does every basement have to turn into a 20-room dungeon with fifteen mandatory fights? Perhaps this approach suits some people. I would prefer a more compact and refined production than deceiving me with a huge world filled with extras without a story.

I will definitely come back to Baldur’s Gate 3. But now I have to wait a bit. I need to get back into the mood for an RPG session and throwing twenty-sided dice. For a moment I feel full and I switch to something else so as not to yawn at the monitor. I’m a bit sad to write such a negative text about a game that I fell in love with at first sight at the beginning of the month. However, love sometimes blinds us, and the object of our sighs can hide its weaknesses until the very end.