I am giving it a serious look. Have been attempting Pillars of Eternity again, after a long time away from it and that has given me nostalgia for the isometric goodness of BG and ID.

Sheesh, I still haven't even barely finished the original BG!

Is the game isometric view like the originals?

I want to say that Buffy would be a Ranger, but I’m not sure how close BG3 follows D&D 5E rules. In D&D 5E, Rangers are basically fighters that can cast a reduced number of spells from the Druid spell list. They start with a proficiency in martial weapons which includes longbows. The other option in D&D 5E would be Fighter and taking Arcane Archer as the Martial Archetype when reaching level 3, but that doesn’t seem to be an option in BG3… yet. In the table top, you don’t really have to do anything to memorize spells every night, it just gives you the chance to swap out spells after taking a long rest. I did read on an IGN article that multiclassing is a thing in BG3.


Mostly, though I’ve heard you can zoom the camera in to an over the shoulder view, if you want though.

This post has been edited by TheCheshireKhajiit: Aug 4 2023, 07:04 PM

BG3 was made by Larian, who also did the Divinity Original Sin games. I played D:OS 1, and it looks very similar to BG3. It is a 3d isometric game. But it is turn-based, rather than real time with pause, unlike previous Neverwinter, Baldur's, and Icewind Dale games. That has its pluses and minuses.

I personally find it more minus, as turn based games in general are slower, and drag combat out. They also add in micro-managing things, like how far you can move and still attack in a turn, change weapons, stand or kneel, etc... Plus your party cannot move in formation and act as a unit, which makes teamwork harder, and battles more chaotic, as you quickly get all spread out. The real time with pause in games like Pillars makes combat flow a lot more smoothly.

Also, because it is Larian making it, there is no command console to tweak the game with, either to cheat or just fix bugs (I cannot imagine playing an Elder Scrolls game without the command line to fix bugs, especially for quests).

It does have mod support. But I am not sure how mod creation works. I did not see any developer supplied modding tools. So my guess it is something like Pillars of Eternity 2, where you can use an advanced text editor like Notepad++ or Visual Studio Code and write it all out in code.

Well, given that the reviews seem to indicate that it is good, and the fact that people in my D&D group are enjoying it, I decided to take the plunge and get Baldur’s Gate 3 for my PC. I will post my impressions once I have spent enough time with the game.

Fabulous! Looking forward to hearing your impressions.

I am eager to hear more about it too. In spite of what I said about turn based games, I am still thinking of getting it myself.

Should I do a new thread for it or do you folks think it’s fine to discuss it in this one?

This is probably a good one to keep it in. We are already talking about it here, and it is in the series.

Very good. I’ve still not made it out of the character creator yet, so it may be a bit before I can talk about it. And I promise, no spoilers.

Well, just put the spoilers in

Ok, I broke down and tried out BG3.

It is an addictive game. I have been playing it non-stop since I got it.

I also have not played any of the recent editions of D&D. I stopped at 3.5. So it might be that this is similar to 5th edition rules. I don't know. I have seen a mod that adds more 5E spells, so I am guessing it might not be.

It does feel a lot like the Divinity Original Sin games. But the ability to mod helps alleviate that. And it does have more of a D&D feel than that ever did. The old stats are there. The skills are different from what I am used to, and they have profiencies, which give you a bonus to your skills. There are also Feats, but it feels like you get them a lot less than you did in D&D 3.5.

There is no command console.

There are a lot things the game does not tell you. So buckle in.

You will find mounds of dirt by passing perception tests. But you cannot do anything with them without a shovel. You can buy one in the Druid Grove, which is the first settlement that you come across, relatively soon into the game. You can also get them randomly. You only need one, just leave it in your inventory the entire game.

There is a new system of Resting. There are two types: Short Rest and Long Rest. A short rest heals half you damage, and I think refreshes your spells. A long rest takes you back to your camp. It is its own worldspace, where all of your companions will be waiting. You can talk to each there, change out who is in your party, that sort of thing. Kind of typical in most RPGs these days, like the Normandy in Mass Effect. You can sleep there, and it heals all your damage, refreshes all your magic, etc... However, to sleep you need camping supplies, aka food. You will find it throughout the game. You need 40 points of food to sleep. So don't sell any of it. Hoard your vittles.

There are about 8 or 9 companions in the game. They are called Origin Characters. Each has their own quest, like companions usually do. You will find a Fighter, Cleric, Rogue, and Wizard pretty quickly. There is a Warlock in the Druid Grove, and his quest leads you to the Barbarian (Karlach, whom he thinks is a baddie, but she's not). What is unusual about the Origin characters is that you can play one as your main character if you want. And I think the companion version is still out there, and you can recruit them. Or so I gather.

There is also a special Origin character called the Dark Urge. He starts as a Dragonborn (Fus Roh Dah!) Sorcerer. But if you play him, you can change him to any race, class, sex, appearance you want. The only thing that you cannot change is his background, which is the Dark Urge. Basically you have an evil past, and through the game you will be continually prompted to commit evil acts by a voice in your head. Or so I understand it. You don't have to give in to the voice, you can still play a good character. But those urges are always there. I might try this out when playing Blood Raven.

I think there are some other non-Origin character companions too, like Minsc and Jaheria. I have not gotten far enough to find them however. Apparently you can find Jaheria in Act 2, and Minsc in Act 3.

It has all the standard D&D classes. You can multiclass. Though how is not obvious. When you level up, there will be a little button in the window telling you your new class updates that you can press to multiclass instead. I do not think there is an XP penalty for multiclassing. And I do not know if there is any limit to the number of classes you can take.

You can edit your character's appearance. It was not as intuitive as I would like. I spent about a day constantly going back and restarting to tweak January's appearance. The main thing to start with is that there are four body types. You pick them at the bottom of the screen from a row of little buttons. They are average woman, average man, big woman, big man. In addition you have a choice of sex at the top of the screen, giving you options for female, male, and non-binary. I went with NB for January to see what that is like. It has no bearing on your appearance at all. So far someone called me "They" once in the game, I think it might be just that pronoun use that is different.

There are no sliders for face or body. You have about half a dozen preset faces to choose from for each race. They are well done though. So no complaints. You can pick your hairstyle from a bunch of options. Plus colors for hair, eyes, makeup, scars, facepaint, and the like. You can also select from several voices. The acting is good. But my only complaint is that they are all English, so in the end they all feel really similar. It would have been nice to have more variety. Even if it was just choosing between Posh, Chav, Irish, and Scottish. I still can't tell when my character is talking, because I can't distinguish her voice from most everyone else's.

Speaking of which every voice in the game for every character is English. Even goblins.

You can move things in this game. I mean like crates and barrels. In fact, you can even pick up chests and put them in your inventory. So if you cannot pick a lock on one, just carry it with you for later. The game never tells you can do this, and it is not very intuitive. It won't tell you what you can or cannot move. Just mouseover what you want to try to move, click and hold, and try to drag it aside. If it is moveable, it will show you a gray outline of where it will go.

This matters, because there are several places with levers hidden behind crates, and you have to move them to find the lever, to open a secret door, to reach the rest of the dungeon. There is also a very early dungeon with a bunch of oil traps on the floor, that will flood the room with oil, and then firebolts will fly from the walls and ignite it. But if you move crates over the traps, that will block the oil, and you might survive.

Magic use is still something I am getting used to. You have cantrips, which you can use with no limits, so that is good. I think that is from 5E. You will have some basic damage spells, that do an ok amount of damage, like 1d8. I created January as a High Half Elf, and she started with a Firebolt cantrip that does 1d8 damage. It is nice. Not awesome, but nice.

You still have to prepare your spells from a list, at least with cleric, paladin, and wizard. But you cannot take a spell multiple times. I think the game lets you cast the same spell as many times as you want, until you get to your casting limit for the day. You can change out your prepared spells, but then you have to rest for them to take effect (not sure if it is a short or long rest). I have not tried a sorcerer, so I am not sure how they differ from wizards in this. Though I might try multiclassing January as one later.

There are weapon and armor presidencies. But it seems like you can use anything you are not proficient in. If you do have one, it unlocks extra actions you do with them. And there are a lot of those. Everyone has a bunch of basic actions like jump, crouch, dip (as in dip an arrow into a flame to turn it into a flaming arrow), shove, etc... There is even a non-lethal attack mode which is nice to have for a change. Then on top of that you get bonus actions granted by weapon feats, like special attacks. Then you get bonus actions due to your class. Then you get spells. Then you get feats. When you are playing a spellcaster you can get a ton of stuff in your action bar really fast. Thankfully there is a Custom view where you can put the things you use on a regular basis.

This is a very vertical game. By that I mean there is a lot of stuff you can climb on top, like roofs, hills, cliffs, etc... Height matters in combat, as you get penalties to attack enemies higher up, and bonuses to attack ones lower down. You can also jump across chasms.

It is Turn based. And you cannot hold your action. You have to act, or end your turn, in order. If you have multiple characters going continuously, you can pick their order however. There are also regular actions, and bonus actions. Some spells and abilities are bonus ones, which you can take in addition to a regular one. For example, the Barbarian's rage is a bonus action. So take that first, then you can make your attack as a regular action. There are a lot of bonus actions like that, which you want to do first, because they usually are minor buffs.

Fighting is intense. Like the Divinity games, pretty much every fight is a boss fight. There are no trash mobs, no walkovers. Even goblins are a real threat. Once you are out of the tutorial, you will be taking a lot of damage, every fight. I cannot imagine playing this game without a cleric in the party. They will spending a lot of time healing. I rolled January as a Paladin, and took the sublcass with the most healing options, and I am glad of it. Both she and the cleric spend a lot of time healing the party during battles.

The map is that from the Divinity games, and it is... confusing. There is so much stuff on it, but most of it makes no sense when you look at it. There is no compass heading, so you can lose your bearings really fast. I found that keeping the mini-map unlocked works the best for me, because that does have compass headings on it. So I can look at that to see where I am going.

There is fast travel. But it is only to waypoints that you discover as you go. You can fast travel from any point on the map. But you can only to to the specific waypoints.

Oh, when you rest and go to your camp, after you wake up the next day it takes you right back to where you were on the world map. Also time does not seem to pass. It is always daytime.

There is an option to respec your character, changing class, appearance, etc... Once you are out of the tutorial the first dungeon you come across will probably be the Dank Crypt. You have to explore down into it. There is a secret button you need to discover in an area behind a statue of a deity. Pushing it opens a secret room. Within is a room with a giant sarcophagus. Activate it, and an undead guy named Withers pops out and talks to you. He will leave, and will then be in your camp. Go to him, and he will respec your character for a small fee. But you cannot change your appearance or race.

The camera is very limited. I cannot find a first person option. You can zoom in and out a certain amount. But you cannot change the angle from which you view the game. So you cannot ever look up, which can be annoying when you are trying to fight someone above you. You can press the O key to go to a top down view however. You can also rotate the camera a full 360 degrees, which is nice.

Ok, mods. There is mod support. But it is not robust. I have no idea how the mods are made. They are binary files however, and there are no modding tools. So I don't know people make them. But there are a lot of them. So maybe it is not too hard.

Mods come in .pak files. Unzip them from whatever zip or rar file you download them from and copy them to this folder: Username\AppData\Local\Larian Studios\Baldur's Gate 3\Mods

Then you have to use a mod manger to active them, otherwise the game will still ignore them. The BG3ModManager seems to be the most popular one, and I am using it. There is no real installation. Just copy it to your drive and run the .exe. You will want to set up your game path file in its preferences once you start it.

It had some bugs when the game was released, but those were fixed already.

You will need the Full Release Mod Fixer, otherwise your game will CTD on startup. This comes with an additional option file that removes an annoying error message, which I recommend using as well. Otherwise it terrifies you by telling you it cannot create a working story. Even though it is fine and you can just click that to make the message go away. The optional mod just removes that message. You will not need this anymore, as it fixed in an update to the game. However, the same fix causes the game to lock up whenever you need to make a dice roll if you still have a Mod Fixer. So delete your old Mod Fixers.

These did not originally appear in the BG3 Mod Manger. But now they do show up at the bottom under Overrides. You cannot turn them off or on, they always work so long as they are in the mods folder.

Action Resources replenish AFTER combat - this is an absolute necessity. Otherwise you will need to be doing a full rest after every battle. It replenishes all your spells and abilities after every fight. I would not play the game without it, given that nearly every fight is a boss fight. It won't replenish your health however.

Short Rest Tweaks - this mod increases the number of short rests you can take. I am using the 99 rests option. The downside is that once this is used, it is always active. Even if you remove the mod, you cannot change to a different version without starting a New Game.

These two mods do not work together! Well, yes they do, here is how. Start with only Short Rest Tweaks active. Start you game, make a new save, exit. Now deactivate short rest tweaks. Then turn on Action Resources Replenish. Go back to your new save, and you will still have your higher number of short rests.

Choose Your Stats - This is your basic character trainer. It gives your player and all companions a potion at the start of the game. You drink it, and it will put a bunch of options down in your action bar. You can change your stats by adding or subtracting from them, gain feats, proficiencies, increase movement rate, armor class, etc... You can use each option multiple times, to get the end stat you want. When you are done, there is an option to click on to finish. The potion remains in your inventory, and be used again as many times as you want.

Carry Weight Extra - increases your carry weight to some insane amount. Basically you won't have to worry about how much you can carry, and just play the game and have fun instead.

Unlock Level Curve - is one I am trying out that raises the level cap to 20. It is normally at 20. Since I am still only level 4, I am not sure if this is good, bad, or whatever.

Level 20 Multiclass - is another one I am not using right now. It also raises the level cap, but in a different way. You can still only reach level 12 in any one class. But if you multiclass you can reach a total of 20 in both combined.

In addition there are some race specific mods I am using, but they are probably superfluous with Choose Your Stats. They are Elf Unleashed, Half-Elf Unleashed, Human Unleashed, etc... They basically add a few extra starting feats to each race in question.

Wow, thanks for the detailed info!

Yes, the game is 100% a “tweaked” version of D&D 5E. It’s probably as close as you can get to the tabletop experience without actually participating in an actual tabletop game. It’s very, very close.

I’m having a good time with BG3, but I do have some… observations about the game.

1.) The listing for nudity and strong sexual content on the rating is no joke! Heed it. Indeed, your party’s character models come equipped with removable underwear that, upon removal, provides you with a good view of all of your characters’ bits and bobs. There is an option that supposedly allows for you to “turn off” the nudity, but it doesn’t seem to do much beyond maybe obscuring some of the more explicit details of the body (like female breasts have their nipples obscured). I’m currently playing a Dragonborn, a race of lizard like humanoids that are descended from dragons, and instead of a cloaca like you might expect for a lizard being, for whatever reason the males have human like genitalia, only covered in scales. With the nudity turned “off” you can still see all of this on him, so I’m not sure what is going on with that. I guess the best practice here if you don’t want to see your characters naked is just to never ever click on the underwear that they are currently equipped with. I should probably play around with this more but honestly, I don’t want to, lol. Whatever, I can deal with it, just not really sure what it adds to the game.

2.) After you’ve spent 6 hours creating your character in the character creator, the game forces you to do it all over again on a separate character! Yay! The game tells you absolutely nothing about who or what this character is besides referring to them as a “Guardian”. Since it allows you almost full control over what this character looks like (they apparently can’t be of the Dragonborn race for some reason), it seems that this character is going to be important to the story somehow. It annoys me a bit that we get to customize this character while knowing nothing about them and their relevance to the story, but not really a big deal.

3.) You can not max out a stat at the beginning of the game even if you have enough points to do so. It is possible I’m just not understanding why but it seems like an arbitrary limitation. In the D&D 5E campaigns I’ve played, we either roll dice for our stats or the DM will give us a spread of set numbers we can use wherever we want, so this part is a bit unfamiliar to me in the game.

4.) Goblins, despite being evil little brats, are frickin’ adorable in this game and I just want to cuddle them.

This post has been edited by TheCheshireKhajiit: Aug 10 2023, 04:20 PM

I have the nudity turned off too, and I only took a character's underwear off once to see what they did with a non-binary character. That was enough for me.

It does not surprise me though. Cyberpunk was exactly the same. It seems to be the current trend in video games that there are options to pick for genitals. If you have the nudity turned on you will get options to choose your character's genitals, the same as other body parts.

The Guardian character is a mystery to me too. I just skimmed over creating them. I did see a character in the cinematic right before the crash who looked like the Guardian. I think it was when the nautiloid was flying over the city of Baldur's Gate. There was another guy beside him with a telescope.

I think this character shows up later in the game. Not as a companion, but rather in cutscenes, maybe as some sort of mentor/narrator? I have only read some mentions of it in reviews, I have not gotten to them actually being in the game.

Given the English accents and small statures, Goblins are basically homicidal versions of Oliver Twist. But instead of sweepin' ya' chimmnay fur ya guv, they want to gut you and eat your innards.

I read something similar, that they are a guide or mentor of some sort.


Like I said, adorable!
I felt a small pang of remorse when Skorge and crew slaughtered their little war party at the gate to that settlement with the druids. They were so cute, with their little bows and scimitars!

This post has been edited by TheCheshireKhajiit: Aug 10 2023, 11:24 PM

Some other observations.

You do not need a Rogue to pick locks and deal with traps. First you need Thieves Tools for locks, and Disarm Trap Kits for traps. Sometimes picking locks/disabling traps uses one up, sometimes it does not. If you fail it uses one up, but sometimes when I succeed it also uses one. So stock up on these.

Doing either is a Dexterity check. It is modified by the Sleight of Hand skill, which gives you a bonus. There is also a pair of gloves you get early on that gives you another bonus to it. I think there are other things that can also boost it, but don't remember what they are right now.

Detecting traps is a Wisdom check, and uses the Perception skill. So having a proficiency in Perception will give you a bonus at that. There is no trap detection mode. It just happens passively as you go through the world, and all your party members will roll for it. So there is a pretty good chance someone will see a trap if it is there. However, the game does not automatically stop movement upon finding a trap. So it is not unusual to see it, and then step on it before you can stop (turns out right clicking with that mouse will halt all actions. Too bad I never remember that).

They have a sort of Karma system that allows you to reroll failures in most tests. You build up these points by doing inspirational things. Each background from character generation has certain actions that accrue inspirations. This is in both the PC and the Origin companions. You can bank a total of 4 of them. Each time you want to do a reroll, it uses one of these points. It is a nice system that can help prevent your game from being ruined by one bad roll.

The environment is something you can often alter. By which I mean throwing an acid or fire bomb will set the area around the target on fire or bathed in acid. But there is a 2nd Level Cleric spell called Create/Destroy Water that you can cast on the such areas. If you go the create route, it causes a rainstorm, and that puts out the fire and acid. But if you then cast a lightning spell in the pool of water it forms, it will cause damage to everyone in the pool.

The same is with things like pools of oil. You can shoot fire into them and cause a big explosion. There are also barrels of oil in some places that you can shoot with fire spells to blow them up. I have seen barrels of water too.

So keep in mind that you can probably manipulate the environment to your advantage. Usually I only notice these things after the battle is over.


Edit to add:

Oh, and there is no Alignment in this game. Though Paladins still have to follow a code of ethics based on their order.

You can also throw things. There is a button for it in the Common actions list. Those things you can move like crates, you can also pick up and toss around. You can do this in combat, and literally use them as throwing weapons. I just tried it with a crate, and killed a guy with it. Hilarious!

There are generic Hirelings you can recruit as well. You get them from the same NPC who respecs your characters. I have not tried them, but my impression is that they are the same as the generic Adventurer's you can hire in the Pillars of Eternity games. You basically create them from scratch and they join your party. But they have no quest or anything unique about them.

Unless you want to become…

OATHBREAKER!!!