I agree completely. I’m even very forgiving when it comes to bugs and performance - especially when it’s a studio I trust will address them - but the huge swaths of obviously cut content combined with the way the story wraps up really gets to me and left me massively disappointed. I too still love the game for the gameplay and Act 1 and 2, but it really didn’t stick the landing in my opinion.
Even just things like the reactivity of your companions stands out; in Act 1 you could barely sneeze without everyone at camp chiming in with a comment about what just happened while in Act 3 you’ll do massively impactful things in both main story and companion quests and be greeted by the standard “Well met” or “hello soldier” at camp.
And that’s not getting into whatever scraps of the stated 17k different endings actually ended up not getting cut or the sorry state or the epilogues. Not even all companions get one!
verysoft@kbin.social 1 year ago
You get "Larianed" a lot in BG3 just like you did in DOS2, plenty of inconsistencies, annoying pathing and quirks that make you wonder if they even played their own game before releasing it. But to put it in the same vein as cyberpunk 2077 is kind of disgusting. CDPR completely lied about the product, it barely ran on most PCs and didn't even function on consoles.
BG3 while far from perfect, is much more of a game cp2077 will probably ever be and Larian are firing out patches left and right at the moment while CDPR are still forbidding reviewers to even use their own game footage.
ayaya@lemdro.id 1 year ago
I am talking strictly on the basis of bugs/incompleteness not the overall quality/scope of the games. But also “it barely ran on PCs” neither did Act 3. I have a 7950X and I still drop down to 40fps in some places even after the patches. People with say a 3600X were barely scraping 30. If we’re talking about the trend of games being unfinished or buggy on launch then BG3 deserves to be called out for the same.
all-knight-party@kbin.run 1 year ago
I'm surprised I don't hear more people talk about this, maybe because they seemed to strategically handle bugs and content more thoroughly in the early game so that a lot of players would gush about that and be more forgiving by the time they got to act 3, along with everyone who didn't even make it that far and only praised it online instead.
Starfield gets dragged through the mud for both deserved and undeserved reasons, almost universally without nuance, and BG3 gets blanket praise and acclaim, almost universally without nuance, and then I see this comment thread where there are apparently some serious issues grouped within a specific portion of the game and I'm not sure if that's better or not.
ayaya@lemdro.id 1 year ago
Part of it is the game just being so huge. Most people aren’t even going to hit Act 3 until 50-60 hours in which is already much longer than most other games. So you’ve already formed your opinion of the game by the time you hit the less polished part.
And to be fair, those first 50-60 hours are pretty great. (Minus some gripes with things like pathing and inventory management) If the game just straight up ended with Act 2 I would be completely satisfied. I didn’t even mention this because I wanted to focus on the bugs but even narrative, pacing, and quest design in Act 3 is just so rough compared to the other two. It almost feels like a different game or a different developer. The quality drop is that drastic IMO.
I am worried that other studios might look at this and realize they can just front-load the best content and all the polish in the first section and neglect the rest to fix later. It sets a bad precedent.
verysoft@kbin.social 1 year ago
On just bugs I still disagree, but performance in act 3 still has a long way to go yeah, luckily it's not a fast paced game or a... shooter, so it's not the end of the world.