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[Baldur’s Gate 3] (Un)Intuitive
I continue to play a lot of Baldur’s Gate 3. Indeed, I’m at 40 hours and still in Act 1.
Some of the problems I have with the game are my own fault. I was super into 3.5e D&D way back in the day, and a lot of my “intuitive” understanding of such systems are still based on that clearly superior ruleset. Just kidding – stuff like Short/Long Rests and similar refinements over the years are definitely welcome. But it did come as a bit of a shock that, say, Rogues are only able to get one Sneak Attack per round in 5e (and BG3). Back in my day, the only way a Rogue could keep up with spellcaster DPS output was being able to poke someone three times in one round and get a pile of d6s each poke.
Okay, that’s clearly my bad. But then the line starts getting a little blurry.
For example: Mage Armor says to increase a target’s AC to 13 + DEX modifier, as long as the target isn’t wearing armor. This sounds like a great bonus for a Barbarian who is already encouraged to not wear armor… but it doesn’t “stack” with their own Unarmored Defense ability (Add CON and DEX modifier to AC when unarmored). Like, I get that it would probably be a bit overpowered, but I had to reread the text several times to understand why it didn’t work – Mage Armor specifically puts AC to “13 + DEX” instead of simply increasing the base AC of 10 to 13.
Of course, that’s just the classical Mage Armor gotcha, that apparently has been getting people for 8+ years. Worked in 3.5e, by the way, but clearly if you read page 14 of the 5e Player’s Handbook: “if you have multiple features that give you different ways to calculate your AC, you choose which one to use.” Okay, Rules As Written, got it. But riddle me this, Batman… what does the BG3 spell Warding Bond do?
If you answered “create an unstoppable priesthood of clerics that only take half damage from everything,” you would obviously be wrong. Conspicuously absent from the BG3 description of Warding Bond is that the missing half of the damage you take can be found on the casting Cleric. Imagine my chagrin when I found that out, only after reading the “buff” that appeared on Shadowheart. But this is again a case of “just read the 5e Player Handbook to know how this 2023 CRPG works.”
Oh, hey, did you know that in BG3 prepared spells can actually be changed at any time outside combat? This is a big change from traditional (and 5e!) D&D rules that otherwise force you to, well, prepare which spells you can cast that day. What this means is that you can cast Mage Armor on yourself (which lasts until a Long Rest), and then drop it out of your list and put something else more useful in its place. You still use up one “casting” for the day, but now you get more options.
You can take things a bit further than that though, by having characters you’re not actively using cast things like Mage Armor while in camp. For example, you can have Gale cast Mage Armor on whomever, then swap Gale out for someone else. I had already been building my party in such a way that one person took utility spells and everyone else took offensive options, but knowing I could basically press the Camp button to essentially hotswap anyone at a moment’s notice took things to the next level. Now you can have your very own early-WoW era buffbot paladin, whose sole purpose is to stay at camp and buff your team.
A lot of this highlights perhaps the biggest issue I have with BG3 at the moment: its inscrutability. A lot of the media praise thus far as been for the exact opposite, that the game is making 5e D&D or CRPGs in general more approachable. And that could certainly be technically accurate. But consider this: there’s no in-game way to determine what your characters will get at the next level up… until you level up. You can’t browse a list of magic spells. There’s a staff you pick up that gives you +1 to unarmed attacks and I have no idea how that works. Do staff attacks count as unarmed? Do you hold it in your off-hand and then make unarmed attacks with your on-hand? Does it only work with Flurry of Blows? I don’t even have a Monk character for which this would be relevant, but it vexes me.
And who knows, I might well turn Gale into a Monk next time I gain a level.
Perhaps the “average” player doesn’t care about any of this and will just take their character to level 12 just as they are. But that doesn’t mean Larian shouldn’t also include some kind of indexed in-game encyclopedia or something. If you have time for a Show Genitals button, surely you can have a Preview Level button. I would settle for a Wiki worth a single god damn, because the Fextralife one is near unusable and filled to the brim with outdated Early Access nonsense.
Anyway. Larian has indicated that they are working towards a Patch 1 with a “gigantic list of tweaks and changes.” Here’s to hoping that a little more clarity and intuitiveness is amongst them.
Impression: Craft the World, pt 2
[Blaugust Day 4]
In the time since I wrote yesterday’s post (over the weekend) and today, I’ve “beat” the first campaign level and spent a total of ~18 hours in Craft the World. For the curious, you completing a campaign world involves finding the portal room, and then defeating the guardians in that and in five other rooms before reconstructing the the portal and getting out.
Across the hours, I believe I have figured out why I don’t like the game: the tech tree. Not the idea of a tech tree – which exists as a tutorial mechanism – but simply how poorly it is paced. For example, here is the beginning part:
Seriously guys?
Early on, you get the ability to craft wooden armor. Great! For that, you need rope. Which requires wool. Which requires sheep. Which might not be anywhere near your spawning location. In my first world, the sheep were all located beyond a goblin camp, which are a group of extremely tough mobs that you can’t hope to defeat without, you know, some armor. It was only later that I realized that the Portal spell you get at the beginning of the game could be used at any distance, but still.
Another example: wooden doors. One of the first “quests” you receive is to construct a shelter for your dwarves. Like most games, a shelter is only a shelter when the walls (including the background ones) are filled in, with the exception of any doors. You can make a wooden hatch pretty early on, which implies the ole Minecraft shelter approach of just digging a hole. However, your Stash is immovably placed on the surface. Thus, right from the start, you experience the uncomfortable dissonance of either A) building a shelter underground, leaving your Stash exposed, or B) crafting an incomplete shelter around your Stash and waiting possibly hours before unlocking “wooden door” technology.
What is almost worse than this clunkiness is how intentionally bad or misleading the entire scenario appears to be. Creating a Shelter requires you to place a Totem, whose description specifically says:
Creates an aura around the house that protects from monsters.
First, I have never seen it actually “scare off” the ghosts that come each night, so either that functionality doesn’t exist, or it requires the Totem to be closer to the Stockpile and not just within the Shelter, which is unintuitive. Second, for the Totem to even be closer to the Stockpile, you either need Wooden Doors or to construct a goofy system of vertical Wooden Hatches, severely slowing down your dwarves’ harvesting of trees/ground-level resources. Or maybe going even further into the Minecraft approach of boxing yourself in at night, then breaking the walls down in the morning?
Regardless, the Tech Tree is poorly designed and badly paced. I still remember getting about halfway through – which requires a ton of useless crafting – and then… suddenly, inexplicably having fun. Like a lot of fun. I was crafting Mine Carts and Elevators and using Scaffolding to reconstruct the terrible Shelter I had been enduring previously. Instead of creating useless items over and over, I was progressing naturally through the Tech Tree. Things faltered a bit more later, but by that point I still had more than enough things to do to keep me busy as I gathered more resources.
Technically speaking, the Tech Tree is only relevant in Campaign mode; if you enter the Sandbox mode, you can ignore the Tech Tree entirely. But it is one of those things that hold back the entire game with its terribleness. After beating the first Campaign world, I unlocked the next, which is an Ice World. I’ve played about 1-2 hours into that world, but everything that was bad originally is still bad now. Do I seriously want to spend another 5+ hours until I get Scaffolding? Or, you know, make heroic efforts tracking down Sheep in order to get Rope? Nope.
The bottom line here is that Craft the World is servicable if you especially like this genre of games, but only if you have already played the much better titles to death.
In An Age 