What videogames are you playing in 2026?

This is probably going to get me jumped on, but, I'm finally playing Baldur's Gate 3 and absolutely hating it. It is everything I loathe in an RPG - endless pixel bitching trying to find pointless crap. I've gotten maybe halfway through the first chapter and I've honestly given up. That UI is absolute dog water. The camera is crap. Everything is just washed together and the pathing for movement is a joke.

This is the game that everyone loves? Really?

I am, though, really looking forward to Menace. Tried out the demo and loved it. Just my speed.
 

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This is probably going to get me jumped on, but, I'm finally playing Baldur's Gate 3 and absolutely hating it. It is everything I loathe in an RPG - endless pixel bitching trying to find pointless crap. I've gotten maybe halfway through the first chapter and I've honestly given up. That UI is absolute dog water. The camera is crap. Everything is just washed together and the pathing for movement is a joke.

This is the game that everyone loves? Really?

I am, though, really looking forward to Menace. Tried out the demo and loved it. Just my speed.
Are you using Alt to highlight interactable items in the environment (and Shift to highlight enemy line of sight for stealth)? That should eliminate pretty much any pixel hunting you need to do.
 

I’m well into Act 3 now of Clair Obscur and I can see where the story is going but there’s one thing that nags at me:

What is all this nonsense about a war between painters and writers? It feels wholly unnecessary to the story and in a way, it reduces it to yet another fight. The tragedy is enough. It doesn’t need some extraneous war to explain why things happened. Bad things happen. I think that would’ve been a more powerful message.
A spoiler to your spoiler:
It's not really a hugely relevant to the actual plot, it is still treated mostly as a tragic accident, and a bit of an excuse what the other sister is doing, but she could really have thrown herself into any other kind of work to avoid dealing with her loss.
It could be a bit of world-building to describe the world outside the painting. Maybe it also exists for Expetion 33: Volume II, if they ever want to do that?
 

This is probably going to get me jumped on, but, I'm finally playing Baldur's Gate 3 and absolutely hating it. It is everything I loathe in an RPG - endless pixel bitching trying to find pointless crap. I've gotten maybe halfway through the first chapter and I've honestly given up. That UI is absolute dog water. The camera is crap. Everything is just washed together and the pathing for movement is a joke.
I don't think you deserved to be jumped on for disliking a popular game, but I am somewhat surprised that these are you specific critiques. I don't think you're even wrong per se, it's just that these aren't things that stood out as major issues to me or most people (except the path goddamn that pathing lol).

Like, for example, the "pixel bitching", you can hold down Alt (ninja'd by @MarkB :) ) to highlight pretty much all the interactable objects worth interacting with (bodies, containers, levers, etc.) so long as they're in LOS of your party (which can be an issue - sometimes you can see something the characters can't, so you have to move them to get the game to highlight it). It's absolutely true though that there are loads of other technically-interactable objects that are well, yes, as you say "pointless crap" for the most part (and that don't necessarily show up unless mouse over them). If it doesn't come up on Alt though you can probably ignore it. Probably. And that probably itself is a problem, albeit a minor one imho.

I guess it might not be obvious that there's this divide between worth interacting with and not. I think I didn't realize it until part-way through Early Access.

There is some of what is real "pixel bitching" that isn't mostly junk too but not until Act 2 (mostly in one specific place). And it can be really painful to do things like get your characters in exactly the right position to throw an object to a specific place, sometimes, or to pile objects up. But most of those situations have other ways you can handle them.

Re: the UI being crap - it is, and funnily enough it's much improved from what it was at launch. But a lot of why it's crap is because they're trying to do so much, because this is a very "do anything" kind of game (for a certain value of anything). Doesn't make it not crap though, it's more something you gradually learn to work with. Oddly enough the console/gamepad UI (which was designed much later), whilst clunky, is kind of better.

The camera is pretty bad yeah. Though I would say the same is true of almost every non-fixed perspective isometric game. I can't think of one where it is good. Different kinds of bad, but all bad. Fixed perspective (like Diablo 4) helps a lot because they you can level-build around it.

And yes, agree on pathing too - it's dreadful, and annoying. If you're not careful, characters will absolutely hare off in bizarre directions, and sometimes the need to manually jump can be pretty tedious.

So in short, I don't think you're wrong to be irritated by these elements - they are all real weaknesses. It's just that, for I guess most players, they're the sort of weaknesses that people expect and work around, and the superior writing, fallback design and insane array of ways to solve problems (it's a lot harder to get unaccounted-for situations in BG3 than, well, any other game), charming characters (admittedly, it takes a while for some of them to warm up), and sheer breadth (and in some cases depth) of content all make up for these. Also whilst the main story could be overall more compelling, the sub-stories that make it up tend to be pretty strong, as are the character arcs (which can vary depending on how you treat them).

My personal biggest beef along similar lines to the ones you describe, after the pathing, yeah, which is terrible and inconsistent (sometimes characters will jump down a ledge or w/e and damage themselves even if you don't use jump, for example, other times they just won't) is probably that the game relies heavily on your characters spotting objects, but doesn't highlight them well and only highlights them for a few seconds, and they're inconsistent as to whether they show up when you hold down the key. Frankly, there should be an option to make any "spotted" object glow indefinitely and brightly (at least until clicked on).
 
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This is probably going to get me jumped on, but, I'm finally playing Baldur's Gate 3 and absolutely hating it. It is everything I loathe in an RPG - endless pixel bitching trying to find pointless crap. I've gotten maybe halfway through the first chapter and I've honestly given up. That UI is absolute dog water. The camera is crap. Everything is just washed together and the pathing for movement is a joke.

This is the game that everyone loves? Really?

I am, though, really looking forward to Menace. Tried out the demo and loved it. Just my speed.
If you don’t like a game, you don’t like a game. I’ve been in that spot before. 🤷‍♂️

I also get why people would bounce off of BG3 for the reasons you mentioned. I tend to think most games have some idiosyncrasies that I usually can work my way around or just get used to. I enjoyed BG3 but I think it bogs down story wise in Act 3 and the pathing issues become a lot more pronounced possibly because there’s just a lot more going on in that section of the game. Navigating the sewers was annoying in particular. My biggest issue was the finale. Timed battles against bosses that I can’t even get worked up about amidst a kind of weird storyline just left me flat. I was much, much happier with some of the personal quests though like Astarion’s and Shadowheart’s, and those had some epic endings.

So yeah, by no means perfect, and probably not my game of the year.
 

Oddly enough the console/gamepad UI (which was designed much later), whilst clunky, is kind of better.
Not that unusual: with a modern standardized controller, a game has access to some 14 buttons and two analog sticks. Enough to provide robust inputs, but not enough to allow for "mission creep" like a keyboard.
 

Not that unusual: with a modern standardized controller, a game has access to some 14 buttons and two analog sticks. Enough to provide robust inputs, but not enough to allow for "mission creep" like a keyboard.
I will say it took me forever to figure out how to split up the party on the PS5. It’s a more intuitive action on a keyboard but sometimes on consoles they have to get creative.
 

Like real life, there are a lot of objects that can be picked up and interacted with. That doesn’t mean you need to interact with everything. Most of it is just scenery.
 

Wow. I did not expect that.

Basically, I'm just really frustrated with the game. I've spent WAY too much time trying to find stuff. A door in the goblin/ruined town that leads down into the necromancer's lair took me quitting the game and looking it up on Reddit. Followed by a talking door that you basically have to edge your characters forward without mousing over the door to get past it once you've unlocked it. Other stuff too - the high mountain road that I could not figure out how to walk down for the life of me. Basically three really frustating things right in a row has sucked all the joy of the game out of me.

Plus, FFS, let me zoom the freaking camera out some more so I can actually SEE the game. I could not give two craps about roofs and leaves.
 

Wow. I did not expect that.

Basically, I'm just really frustrated with the game. I've spent WAY too much time trying to find stuff. A door in the goblin/ruined town that leads down into the necromancer's lair took me quitting the game and looking it up on Reddit. Followed by a talking door that you basically have to edge your characters forward without mousing over the door to get past it once you've unlocked it. Other stuff too - the high mountain road that I could not figure out how to walk down for the life of me. Basically three really frustating things right in a row has sucked all the joy of the game out of me.

Plus, FFS, let me zoom the freaking camera out some more so I can actually SEE the game. I could not give two craps about roofs and leaves.
Haha, yeah, I had more than a few “What? You can’t see the hidden ladder we placed there for you?” moments in that game. There was a secret door in the Druid’s grove that had a reward for finishing a quest and it took me for-ev-er to find it, even though an NPC told me to go in and claim my prize. Why make that so difficult?!

I’ll say it does not get better. If that really bugs you, you’re better off not being frustrated for 100+ hours of game play.
 

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