Tanking Mage

Yesterday, I talked about Baldur’s Gate 3’s multiplayer. Today, I’ll talk about the single player experience. In a nutshell: It’s hard. I mean, holy crap. Even on explorer level, I’m finding myself overwhelmed by the massive number of mobs that any given encounter throws at you.

At first, I thought it was just me. Maybe I’ve lost my touch. After all, it has been a long time since I completed BG1, BG2, and various other off-shoots, like Icewind Dale. But, I’ve been talking with other folks who are playing and I’m not alone. These encounters are set up to be ridiculously difficult.

I can’t tell you the number of times I have had to reload a battle because something would come out of left field and decimate my group, taking members of my party from full health to zero in a single blow. I’ve also had my party walk into fights against massive numbers of mobs, so many that it doesn’t matter how few hit points they have. They will weenie my guys to death before I can manage to control the situtation.

My personal favorite was having two of my characters shoved off a boat in the first round of combat, reducing my party to two members. Those who were left aboard had no chance of winning against all the archers on the enemy boat. I was chucking bottles of alchemist fire left and right, but it wasn’t enough to save me.

The thing is, I am using tactics! I’m using barrels to create explosions, grease to set fire to things, I’m shoving people into chasms and off cliffs every chance that I get. I’m using spells to distract and hinder. But, none of it seems to help, most of the time.

I’ve taken to saving my game mid-combat, if things are going my way. That way, if the dice start suddenly hating me and someone falls to a random crit, I don’t have to redo the whole scenario.

I shouldn’t be surprised by this. I have Divinity: Original Sin (also by Larian Studios.) I’ve never finished it because I eventually hit a combat scenario that made me rage quit and I never returned.

I’m hoping that BG3 doesn’t make me feel the same way. I love, love, LOVE the story and I want to see how this all ends. But, I also only have so much patience for the combat side of things.

My ex-husband, our child, and I all bought Baldur’s Gate 3 over the weekend with the intention to play it together. Now, I want to preface this by saying that the single-player game is absolutely fantastic! The story and characters are well-crafted and engaging. The graphics are gorgeous. And, I am having so much fun playing through the story, sharing my experiences with my family, and then comparing notes to see where our playthroughs are different.

That said, multiplayer is… not so good. It’s clear that BG3 was created with the focus being a single-player experience. Trying to navigate combat with other players was confusing and unintuitive. I was greatly surprised to find out that we could all act at the same time. With it being a turn-based game, I was expecting it to a step-by-step process: Character A moves, then character B, then C and so on. But, it turns out that things are a bit more fluid. Apparently, if you roll initiative and the PCs are side by side in the line-up, you can go in whatever order you want. So, our first battle was all confusion as we were all going at the same time because we could. It turns out that you have to really slow down and talk out your steps before you act, which isn’t a bad thing. We expected to do that, to some extent. But, we were also expecting the game to have hard stops at all times (i.e., an inflexible initiative order), even if all three players were grouped together.

Even after we figured it out and started planning our moves before doing anything, this just doesn’t feel fun. It’s great in single player because you are in control of all the characters. One person is in control of everything that is happening, moving the characters around like chess pieces. In multiplayer, it felt like “combat by committee.” I think what it comes down to is that I prefer a more actiony, frenetic pace in multiplayer games.

Also, I was not a fan of how the dialogue scenes are handled. I was hoping for something like what is in Star Wars: the Old Republic, where all characters are in a scene and each picks a dialogue option. Then, a roll determines who actually speaks. In BG3, you are just a spectator. You can either opt in to watch cut scenes… or not. In which case, you are just standing there with your thumb up your butt while you wait. And, even if you do spectate, that’s all you do: watch. You can suggest an option, but it is ultimately up to whoever started the interaction. They can ignore you completely.

Don’t get me wrong. I do not regret my purchase, at all. I adore BG3… as a single-player game. So, I ended up gifting my ex a copy of Last Epoch. I think that will be a far better family gaming experience.