I'm just a little bit late to the Baldurs Gate 3 party, but I searched on here and didn't see much follow up discussion about it after the review thread. I'm also trying to submit more to Lemmy so the communities can grow, so I thought I'd bring it back up now that it has been out for a few weeks.
I only just bought Baldurs Gate 3 this week and finally got time to sit down and play it tonight for the first time really and I am so impressed. The character creator allows so much character expression. I made a generic red Tiefling and when I saw there was an option to add vitiligo, I immediately built out a head canon where my character is a Tiefling that is slowly being transformed into a human by a curse from his past. I never would have thought of a character like this, but the character creator just provided some pretty unique designs and options.
Everything just feels so polished. I've played Pathfinder Kingmaker before this and parts of Wasteland 2, but I've never been much of a CRPG fan. I feel like the user interface in this game is a lot easier to follow and read. It's especially nice because I played in co-op with a friend that doesn't play much in the way of RPGs and has only ever played tabletop D&D once and he was able to easily slot in and start figuring out how things work together and where everything in the UI was. It was very entry-level friendly for our experience and it made the entire experience a lot better.
Also it's kind of a weird thing but I'm really impressed with the facial animations so far. I was expecting Bioware or Bethesda style faces where their lips move, but their faces are otherwise lifeless. I've been loving seeing the character seemingly actually move their eyebrows and their jaws when they're speaking.
I'm not super far into the game since I've only had time today to play it, but I'm super excited to play more when I get the chance.
What have your experiences been like? Any fun stories or characters you've made?
It can be enjoyed casually solo or with close family like a girlfriend or teenage kids. But with friends you need to schedule long sessions because it's a huge game. It has 3 difficulties: explorer, balanced and tactician. So a solo explorer play through could be done casually in 30 minute chunks. You might have to pause mid combat during longer fights but it has quick save so you can finish it later.
One thing to be aware of is that it's not designed for drop-in multiplayer. I offered to be player 2 for my girlfriend's playthrough and now any time she wants to play by herself my character is stuck in her party, not following her around and taking up a slot that can't be allocated to one of the origin characters.
(UPDATE: This last bit may have been a transient bug; I was able to get the character to follow again after some troubleshooting. Still can't swap the character for an NPC though.)
So unless you know your other multiplayer buddies can always play with you, think twice about MP or you may be at a disadvantage.
It's not the best, but you can group the other player characters with your character so they just follow you around the same way the origin characters do. You still lose the slot, but it's otherwise the same as using an origin character.
My wife left early last night while we were playing and her character ended up coming in clutch in many combats. Figuring out I could get her to follow me was a game changer
Yeah, it's weird. Last night group and split were having no effect on the character, but after a bunch of restarts and updating to the preview build of SteamOS I'm able to group again. So at least there's that. (No idea which if any of those things resolved the bug, unfortunately.)