D&D General Baldur's Gate 3 will now be releasing August 3rd on PC and September 6th on PS5, increased level cap, race & class details and more

[Demetrios1453]

Where you start? Found a cleric and rogue. Guess I’ll go back there.

Yep, keep wandering around the ship and you'll find Gale pretty quickly, and not far from him is Lae'zel, who will be a big help since you need a front-liner.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Gale, the most boring character via Intro stuff is the most popular... what a world...

I guess it's because people have been told that wizard is the most powerful class? Or maybe as a geeky white male he is most similar to a typical player?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Finally put some time in. Got my ass handed to me in the crypt. Finally beat it after a few tries.

Really wish I had a warrior type with me (I made a Sorcerer).

Funny how much difference a bit of EA practice makes. Playing as a monk I picked the lock in the door on the beach and went directly to the crypt. Won first attempt at level 2 with only Shadowheart.

 

[Ondath]

Soooo, Act 3, it is definitely not as polished as Act 1/2.

Specifically the quests. In Act 1, virtually every quest stages correctly in the journal, and the journal will give you some idea of where you are with it, and where to go next, either by describing what's happening, or having a map marker, or both. Act 2 is mostly the same, but there are a handful of questlines (particularly Halsin's main one) that simply do not work well, and have a lot of issues.

Act 3 that suddenly becomes the norm, and it's very problematic, particularly as Act 3 allows you to sequence-break more than other acts, in the design of the maps basically encourages sequence-breaking. Quite a few times I've had a character say we need to do something, and it's obviously a quest goal, but it's not in the journal at all, just hope you remembered what they said.

It's not anywhere near act 3/4 of DOS2 bad. Everything works, generally speaking, and the city doesn't seem in any way unfinished or incomplete. But it's getting to the point where it's actually frustrating, given the dozens of quests you're potentially tracking, that many of them aren't tracking particularly well. One major quest, where multiple characters in multiple scenes decided to do a specific thing, just isn't tracked in the quest log at all. I'm sure something will trigger eventually, but it's pretty annoying.

Do you think it's the kind of thing that'd be improved by an upcoming patch, or would it get better only when a Definitive Edition gets released, if at all?

I'm rather close to finishing Act 2, but I would honestly prefer putting my playthrough on hold if it'll get patched in a few weeks. It'd be good for my academic life as well, anyway.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I guess it's because people have been told that wizard is the most powerful class? Or maybe as a geeky white male he is most similar to a typical player?

I think it's because he comes across as educated and refined, while looking relatively rugged. Because, let's face it, he looks like every stock fantasy white-boy main character from the 20th century, just with more chin hair. Folks who aren't interested in making a custom character likely feel he will give a close approximation of what they're looking for. Stereotypical Main Character syndrome.

Astarion sounds a bit whiny, a pompous aristocrat high on his own perfume. Lae'zel is a gith, the nose thing is gonna turn off a lot of people. Shadowheart is most players' girlfriend, not the person they play (though plenty also chose her).

The one that gets me is that Wyll is rarely played. I can only assume it's because of his bad eye and scarring, or because folks are shy about taking on a story-centric Warlock Pact with all the issues that might entail. (Or maybe he falls into the "male equivalent of Shadowheart" zone?) Karlach likely falls into the same camp--too much connection to powerful dark forces and possible "that's who I want to romance" rather than "that's who I want to be."

 

[deganawida]

Over 93% rolled custom characters? Well, may that will put to bed the belief that origin characters are better (but, given that this is Larian’s second game with them, probably not).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Do you think it's the kind of thing that'd be improved by an upcoming patch, or would it get better only when a Definitive Edition gets released, if at all?

I think it's the sort of thing that will take steady patching over months to fully straighten out, but it's not so extreme it'd normally need a Definitive Edition.

To be clear it doesn't make it unplayable - the quests seem to stage correctly in the underlying game. It's just that the journal becomes increasingly less useful.

I should note we haven't seen any serious patches yet, just an assortment of hotfixes, all of which have contained a lot of fixes but not actual improvements (nor balance changes, though that's probably for the best for now), and this would probably largely fall under "improvements" rather than just fixes.

Karlach likely falls into the same camp--too much connection to powerful dark forces and possible "that's who I want to romance" rather than "that's who I want to be."

Karlach is the second-most-popular origin on the chart, so I think it's only "that's who I want to romance" holding her back at all if anything.

Wyll it is going to be a combo of three factors I think - first off, in EA, he was more boringly written than all the other characters. His dark secret was seemingly just that he was a Warlock, which is not much of a fun dark secret compared to everyone else. And yes, he's kind of naughty word-up looking. I think they were going for rakish but the stone eye consistently comes across as creepy, but he doesn't have a personality that leans in to creepy.

Stereotypical Main Character syndrome.

Beyond being a white man, he doesn't fit that at all though.

He speaks like Richard Ayoade's character Moss from the IT Crowd, rather than in a commanding way. He has mucho hair, and it's fancy. He's not physical/strong/pushy (despite his character model being hilariously ripped, because they all are). He has no military background, even in the past. He's a Nice Guy (TM) of the worst kind personality-wise, rather than a Bad Boy or just attractive/charismatic.

So I think we have to rule out Stereotypical Main Character in his case - if anything he's slightly closer to Type 2 Main Character, the Spider-Man/Jedi Survivor-type. But he is a white male human, and that's the real thing pushing him into the lead origin-character-wise, I would personally suggest.

Astarion I think you're right on - he's even further from the stereotype and is that kind of fancy foppish Brit who Americans are confused by and think has to be gay (the vast majority of people who talk like that are straight though). But he's still extremely close to Karlach in popularity because he's a vampire and funny as naughty word.

Over 93% rolled custom characters? Well, may that will put to bed the belief that origin characters are better (but, given that this is Larian’s second game with them, probably not).

I mean, popularity has never reflected whether something is "better". And we had Swen himself saying "Play a custom character first before the origin characters".

 

[fluffybunbunkittens]

FWIW, the only thing I have seen people say is broken is apparently a lot of the romance flags (might be tied to the extremely fast approval gain leading to skipped scenes?). So this is definitely one of the most finished major releases of the year (and I was totally expecting to hear of game-stopping quest line issues in the later acts, but I haven't).

There's just a LOT of adjustments/fixes to make, and the end of the game might be getting some polish/revisions when they eventually do an Enhanced Edition (in time for the Xbox release?). I'm not really expecting any kind of balance changes, because there's so much busted stuff. Which, whatever, it's a single-player game, pick what is fun for you, it's not as problematic as it would be in tabletop.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Probaly worth pointing out that the chart shows characters created, not hours spent playing each character. I created a whole bunch of characters before settling on Karlach for my first full playthrough. I mean, I even started a game as Lae'zel, just to see if she could meet herself on the nautaloid (she doesn't).

And where is Durge? He doesn't have a bar on the origin character chart, so is he included in the 93% custom?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

FWIW, the only thing I have seen people say is broken is apparently a lot of the romance flags (might be tied to the extremely fast approval gain leading to skipped scenes?). So this is definitely one of the most polished major releases of the year (and I was totally expecting to hear of game-stopping quest line issues in the later acts, but I haven't).

Re: romance flags I think there's a lot that they need to double-check there, like an absolute ton. In EA it had a ton of issues, and it seems to here too. They also need to consider re-wording at least one of the prompts, because it replaces "Yo I'm breaking up with you" with "I'd like to talk about 'us'" which basically has the same meaning at one point in a romance, yet if you carefully save and try the latter, it leads to a bunch of other, positive options.

I think there are other issues too - as I may have mentioned Karlach just gains opinion ridiculously slower than everyone else for me, it's like she's got some % modifier significantly lowering it. I've seen more "Karlach approves" over the last 20 hours than literally any other character (albeit I think it starts hiding "approves" once they hit 100, which is kind of crap), because we're on the same wavelength about most stuff (approximately Chaotic Good), and she's still on like 70-something. Literally Shadowheart is way higher and I've had her in the party far less (like, what, 15% as much?), and been less nice to her.