Baldur's Gate 3 - Ishvii Reviews

I'm not sure I can add a whole lot to this that anyone hasn't ready already if they're interested, but I think it's simple enough to say this is the best RPG I've ever played. It's true to the DND 5E ruleset, extremely well voice and motion captured, combat is engaging, the game is beautiful, and it's memorable enough that I can actually remember the character's names. If you're even remotely interested in RPGs, turn based combat and dialogue, get this.

Pros

Unlike most top-down RPGs, you can adjust the camera angle so you can see far into the distance
I LOVE the combat. It's very challenging on the normal setting and there's so much going on. Visibility levels, elevation and your abilities affect chance to hit. There's a ton of utility spells and class abilities. Positioning matters.
Huge attention to detail in companion dialogue. For example, I took a long rest during an optional quest, and one of my companions had a dialogue tree all about "just thinking on the events of tomorrow and when we meet X"
Writing and voice acting are excellent
There are SO MANY good dialogue options. I just came across a bard struggling to finish writing a song. One of the options is to offer to perform it with her. She hands you a lute. Then you can just pocket the loot and run away with it.
Every fight is hand-crafted to be a unique experience. There is no random combat, and all encounters are interesting or memorable in some way. What environmental advantages do you have? How can you prepare? What are your enemies vulnerable to?
You can change your character's class at any time
Your race, background and class make a huge difference to dialogue and the choices you have
Excellent character creator
The co-op mode generally runs really well. Each player can control one character (if you coop with 3 other people), inventories and conversations can be shared or private. The only minor annoyance here is that when you're in an NPC dialogue, there's no way to tell if your friends are in the conversation too
Pretty much all the cutscenes and dialogues happen using the real character models, in the place you're in. They're not video. Your characters are frequently covered in blood from the latest battle
The ability to jump (combined with advantages to hit when high up) give a whole new element to combat
There are so many things in the game that many people just won't see. For example, you can Detect Thoughts on many NPCs in the game, and there's a recorded voice line for it
The mimics and beholders look amazing
There's a keyboard shortcut to freeze all the UI elements on the screen so you can hover over underlined text effects to read them in more detail
Every enemy can be inspected to see active effects, weaknesses and stats
The game has been patched heavily since release, fixing all the bugs I ran into

Cons

In a game with so much talking, it's a shame you can't switch who's doing the talking during a dialogue. For example, as I'm typing this, my Cleric just started a conversation with someone behind a locked door. One option is to pretend to be someone else with a performance check, and I want my rogue to do it because his performance is higher, but I can't switch
You can't delay your turn to act later
Similar to DO2, vendor inventory only changes when you level up, which leads to hording stuff until you level up, then selling things in pieces to any vendor with enough money
The game does display your chance to hit, but not what's affecting it, so I don't know how to improve it
It's straight out of DND, but I really dislike the whole spell slots mechanic. It makes you want to hold on to your abilities and not use them, or forces you to take long rests all the time. You should be able to just rest after every fight without needing provisions (not that it really matters as I have hundreds of provisions)
There are a ton of dexterity and strength feats in the game, but very few for intelligence or wisdom, so trying to round up that 17 intelligence is annoying
The level up screen often doesn't actually show you new things. Like when Lae'zel reaches level 5 she gains Misty Step, but that doesn't appear on the level up screen so I was rummaging around her items trying to work out WHY she could cast it
I immediately knew how combat, actions, bonus actions, stealthing, spell slots etc worked because I've played D&D before - but I think for someone who didn't know those systems it would be very much like getting thrown in at the deep end; the game doesn't really teach you the basics of how the rules work
Although there are a lot of situations where, if you get a bad roll, you should just continue on and see what happens, there's also many times where there's no good alternative. Sometimes if you fail a roll, the result is just that you don't get to see that content at all.
Every single member of my camp wanted to sleep with me, and I put zero effort into romancing any of them. Every few nights another one of them would want to go on a date and I kept turning all of them down. That felt kind of weird, and would make more sense if you could have friendships with them instead of literally all of them falling in love with you, when you don't ever try to flirt with them.
Inventory management is a constant annoyance

Bugs

I fired a sorcerer spell at an enemy... and nothing happened. It didn't miss, the game just didn't roll to see if it hit and skipped my turn
I was able to move characters when it wasn't their turn (Hag fight)
When you meet Gandrel, I'd already told Astarion to leave forever. I had the option to tell Gandrel where my camp was, which would have been pointless as Astarion wasn't there. I said "I honestly don't know where he is" and Shadowheart disapproved of me because I helped shield Astarion
I wasn't able to give Gale the Necromancy of Thay book to absorb
Sometimes when you choose to jump somewhere and the game confirms you can make it, your character walks halfway there, then says they don't have enough movement
Wyll didn't have "Toggle Non-Lethal Attacks" turned on, yet when I used Flourish (1-4 damage) on an Ancient Mud Mephit, he did 2 damage, and "reduced to 0 to spare the target"
Sometimes when you level up, your spellcasting stat is "None" and Spell DCs show -1
Shadowheart told me about who she worships and supressing her memories twice in two different conversations. The second time, as if she'd never said it before
Hovering over weapons will occasionally show "not proficient with this weapon type" (because your main character isn't), then go back to showing the correct message if you hover again
Every time you have a run-in with the guards (like trespassing), you have to have the same conversation 4 times (once for each member of the party), and that usually involves just ending up fighting or going to prison, and having to reload
If you don't return to Arabella's parents before you complete the Druid Grove story, the quest stays open and you can't finish it
When you re-spec a companion, some of the tooltips that show their class abilities have weird values, such as "While Raging, you are stronger, and you deal LevelMapValue(RageDamage) extra damage with melee weapons"
Trying to select multiple items to "Pick up and add to wares" often just adds one item to your inventory and leaves the others
Weapon tooltips are often wrong the first time you hover over a weapon, showing what stats they'd give if your main character used them instead of the character you have selected

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