[jshaqaw]

I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate 3. I remember being very proud of winning BG1 without looking up hints. Now I find myself on the wiki. Why? I’m almost 50. I’ve got kids, businesses, life, etc… I can’t play a game for hours on end of immersion every night. I get to game in an hour here hour there slices through the week. If I spent 8 of those slices looking for some random nugget instead of moving the story forward there is no way I’d keep playing. I have no illusions that I’m “beating” the game organically but I’m having fun immersed in a fantasy world and having fun is the only point here.

PS - if you aren’t playing BG3 - this game is fantastic and a worthy heir to the BG 1/2 standard

[WillAdams]

The thing is, I'd be glad of this sort of thing in-game which could be sought out at need (go to Elminster) or turned on/off (map guide arrow).

I'm about 3 personal projects and 2 side jobs and 1 computer generation too far behind to play BG3 --- positive reports such as yours make me regret that, but I also worry about disturbing my pleasant memories of resolving a crisis and ensuring the best endings for my various companions....

[cyrnel]

I've been playing BG3 for over a year now and it breaks pretty much all the rules in the accepted answer. There are puzzles that are only skippable with non-obvious cheesing. In-game knowledge is heavily relied upon. The quest journal is overly vague (and buggy sometimes). Item and spell descriptions are good at least, but many of those come from D&D anyway.

The absolute worst offender is "Don't give choices with unexpected or unclear outcomes". Almost every decision has unclear outcomes, some with devastating consequences on later phases of the game.

It's an impressive game with a great story and great combat, but only the most hardcore players are exempt from the mandatory save-scumming and wiki-reading IMO.

[BugsJustFindMe]

> Almost every decision has unclear outcomes

And to make matters worse, many of the outcomes are identical. It's disheartening to save scum through an exchange only to find that the exact same thing happens no matter which option you choose.

And then you'll see that you get some bonus effect for one choice for a d20 roll, which makes it seem more likely to succeed than the others, but then the number to beat is also higher, making it actually a worse option.

> Item and spell descriptions are good at least

I don't agree with this. Most item descriptions make no distinction between items you should definitely hold onto and ones that are just garbage to sell for gold, which you don't even need because there just isn't that much to buy relative to the amount of incense flooding the world. And finding out what it means for something to add e.g. "momentum" can be non-obvious. And dyes don't describe their use. And a potion/elixir might say that you can get the same effect from throw/splash vs drinking but not say that if you do then the effect goes from "until next long rest" to "for three turns".

But the absolute worst here is the character selection and leveling. You have zero guidance whatsoever on what it means to pick a bard vs a druid etc, both short term and long term. It just assumes that have a D&D character guide. Turns out that bards are actually really good at combat magic after a few levels. Who knew.

[jshaqaw]

The choices thing is interesting. I go both ways on this. Some of the story choices lead to places you don't want and didn't foresee. Part of me wants the story to go where I want it to go and thus I will wiki the conversational choices. Part of me loves that this is a story and stories can take your characters where the story takes them. In life we make all sorts of "conversational choices" where the ramifications long in the future are hard/impossible to foresee but profound.

Overall though I love the game. Nothing is perfect but this game is a blast and kudos to the developers more making something so deep, interesting, and fun.