Finished my first playthrough. Here are my too many opinions.

[Talbot]

First, I don't think I've ever played a game more harmed by its hype. I waited a year for the buzz to die down (and for bugs to be theoretically fixed) before playing it, but I still think I would have enjoyed it a lot more if I'd come in blind than with the expectation of "one of the best RPGs ever."

Ultimately it's a game I liked but didn't love, but underneath that verdict it's more complex. There were certainly elements I loved, but also elements I hated, it just netted out to being a firm but unremarkable thumbs up, for me.

What follows is probably too many of those things I loved, liked, didn't care about, or hated.

What I Loved

- Build-crafting and flexibility was spectacular.
- Combat was great and full of options.
- Most non-core quests have multiple valid approaches/solutions/outcomes.
- The stories around The Emperor and Ketheric were both exceptionally well done, not just in the stories themselves but in the ways and pace at which information was parsed out.
- As a longtime planar nerd, having a game so heavily based around the Githyanki was just delightful.
- Of the companions, Jaheira was the one who stood out to me. I'll talk about the others as I go, but she was the one who felt like she had the most layers/opinions/identity beyond her core "thing." Probably helped by having two previous games of history behind her.

What I Liked a Lot

- Shadowheart had a pretty great storyline, and was the only companion who felt like she really had something worthwhile going on in all three acts, even if I liked the personalities on some of the others more. As a character she's kind of only got the one thing (this is a common issue), but at least that one thing is handled super well.
- Some standout quests: most of the Thorne stuff in Act 2, the Ansur quest, most of House of Hell (more on that later), infiltrating the Goblin camp, and especially the Githyanki Creche.
- Karlach is a really fun character concept, and I enjoyed her a lot in Act 1. She doesn't really get much/any development after, which is a shame, but still fun.
- Lae'zel also a very fun character whose arc kinda immediately stagnates after the Creche, but as with Karlach, I like the character a lot.
- Minthara, third verse same as the first and second. Fun character, gets very little actual development or progression once recruited, but good lines and voice acting.
- Some standout NPCs: Barcus, Aylin (wish they'd done more with her obvious dark side, but still), Alfira, Mizora, Sazza, Voss, Ansur, and the Strange Ox. Was always happy and/or intrigued whenever one of those characters would pop up.
- The world-building was great. Helped no doubt by Faerun having such a rich pre-existing history, but the result is still fantastic.

What I Liked a Little

- Wyll's ok. Another character who's really only the got the one thing (well, two I guess, but they're pretty intertwined), but at least does stuff with said thing. Little flat and generic on the personality front, but it's nice to have a traditional swashbuckler type with a little darkness to him.
- The Iron Throne is a really cool mission idea and if there were a version of it that weren't a buggy mess it'd be one of the best quests in the game. Unfortunately my gnomes liked to run past the ladder and charge into other hallways for reasons unclear.

What I Neutraled

-Halsin's fine. Factory settings Druid plus muscles. Ok.

What I Disliked a Little

- Gortash and Orin are both pretty flat and one-note for the characters who are responsible for driving most of Act 3. They're at least well-performed, but coming after Ketheric they feel like a letdown.
- Minsc is fine in a vacuum but he feels out of tone with most of the rest of the game.
- I know it's a 5e carryover and I don't like it there either, but I dislike feats being tied to class level rather than character level. Just discourages multiclassing without adding much.
- Gale grated on me from go, and his quest I found very dull and self-involved, but he did win me over a little at the very end. He and another companion I wasn't wild about I let make up their own minds, but Gale actually, all by himself, turned down godhood and became a better person. Good job Gale. I still don't want to hang out with you much, but good job.
- Touched on above, but Karlach/Minthara/Lae'zel being such fun characters and yet being given so relatively little to do/having pretty minmal development. More true of Karlach and Minthara, but I wanted more of all three, and more than that I wanted them to have to make more than one choice apiece at some point during a 100 hour game.
- Everybody's horny, but it's more irritating internet horny than actual people who ♥♥♥♥ horny. Rang false to me.
- Structurally, the game feels off. In retrospect Act 2 probably should have been Act 3 and vice versa, or Act 3 should have been split into two acts with the stupid fillery stuff coming before the Shadowlands and the actual high-stakes stuff like Ansur and Raphael coming after. But it's wild to go from unkillable deathgod JK Simmons choking the land in shadowy blight for tragic character reasons to Orin's little make-believe routines and clown body scavenger hunt.
- Five of your first six companions' basic hook is "I have an unwanted curse screwing up my life due to my complicated relationship with an immortal being and I'm angsty about it." Lae'zel almost makes six, minus the curse. I'm sure it's an attempt at a theme, but the game doesn't really go anywhere with it, so it just ends up feeling samey and redundant. Especially noticeable with the first three guys, who all also present with kind of a snarky bravado to mask their angst.
- I was expecting more depth from the companions as a general rule, but in general they felt a lot closer to the Fire Emblem "here's my one thing that defines me! I'll change it if you don't like it senpai!" model than the more complicated riffs you get in something like Dragon Age.
- Related to the above, wish the companions interacted with each other more, had more development/dynamics/relationships between them. Mostly you just get a few lines of banter.
- As a longtime planar nerd, disappointed the Githzerai weren't more involved.
- It's nice that they give you shape-shifting but the downside is that like 95% of the time people just recognize you anyway. Fun when it works, but it almost never does.
- You have all these fun Faerunian races at your disposal and all but one of your companions are at least half Elven or Human. Missed opportunity. Perfect world the evil choices would let you replace the five heroes you lose with like an orc, a bugbear, a duergar, a drider, and a minotaur or something, but c'est la vie.

What I Disliked a Lot

- Inventory system is a nightmare for reasons not clear to me. The cynical view is it's intentionally crap to pad runtime.
- Fast travel points, particularly in Act 2, are awfully scarce for a game with no random encounters and tons of backtracking. Again, feels like padding with no upside.
- Camera and UI generally are pretty frustrating.
- Ridiculous they can't figure out how to make Warlock multiclassing work as intended a year plus after release.
- Awful lot of bugs still for a game with this much post-release support. None were save-destroying, but could-be-fun missions were turned into chores, theoretically impactful scenes were marred by graphical errors, cutscenes would trigger that referenced either things I hadn't done yet or had pointedly refused to do, etc.
- I did four of the romances and they were all pretty crap. Very Ao3/Tumblr-esque self-insert writing where the romances feel out of character and your character/choices/personality feels irrelevant. It's tricky to write a romance for a player generated character, for sure, but it's been done well elsewhere (Dragon Age probably the best at it).
- Tonal issues. I mentioned Minsc and the romances above, which also feel out of place, but there's a bunch more. One of the coolest quests in the game (House of Hope) ending with a fourth wall shattering Disney villain song really soured it for me, characters quoting Shakespeare in a universe he doesn't exist in, and especially Astarion feeling like he wandered in from a Venture Bros spoof on Anne Rice doing a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ Tim Curry impression. There are others, but those are the most egregious that leapt to mind.
- In some ways the game feels unfinished. A plane-hopping fourth act dealing with Vlaakith/Zariel/The Dead 3/etc. would have made a lot of sense and let a lot of the characters who feel like they get short shrift more satisfyingly and organically complete their arcs to the point I have to assume something like that was originally intended, but in its current form the finish feels incomplete to me.

What I Hated

- Slanted/false choices are a real issue. You usually technically have a choice, but too frequently the game really prefers you make it one specific way. You *can* side with the Goblins, but the payoff is one unique camp event in exchange for 3 companions and like a dozen quests. You *can* temporarily side with Moonrise, but the payoff is one unique scene with Ketheric in exchange for 2 (or 3, if you hadn't already lost Halsin) companions, a lot fewer quests, and you still end up having to kill Ketheric/Z'rell/etc. anyway. You *can* be a Githyanki but the game will frequently forget you are or pretend you're not (and a lot of the romance scenes will be unintentionally hilarious because they didn't model them with the skinnier Gith, turning your characters into ♥♥♥♥-mimes just kinda erotically groping or kissing the air near each other). You *can* try to free Orpheus the first chance you get but you just get a non-standard game over. You *can* choose not to eat tadpoles but the game just sorta pretends you did anyway and there's no extra content or payoff for resisting, etc. etc. There's only a few big choices in the game that feel like both options have real pros and cons vs. one being the choice you're supposed to make and the other being the one they put in the game so they can say you have choices.
- There's also a lot of choices you may want to make, but can't. Siding with the Creche, for instance, or redeeming Ketheric, etc. etc. These are things presented as options that aren't actually options which is fine for storytelling but disappointing in a game that's advertised partly on being able to make those kind of calls.
- Astarion generally was a total whiff for me. Didn't think he fit the tone, didn't like his character, didn't like his performance, didn't like his quest, found him somehow simultaneously boring and obnoxious. He's a collection of familiar vampire tropes dialed up to 11 but robbed of most of what usually makes them interesting, just an absolute dud of a character. To the game's credit, they do give you a lot of chances to kill him off narratively, and near the end I finally did.


Tl:DR; Great game in concept marred somewhat in execution by bugs, ♥♥♥♥♥♥ UI, and incomplete storytelling, but still easily a net-positive experience. Doesn't live up to the "greatest RPG ever" hype at all, but I'm still glad I played it.

[wtiger27]

Karlach has extra content in Act 3 if you romance her. Even a achievement. Hot Date. She for myself, has the best romance story of any of the companions that I have had one with. My only gripe with her is, I wish she was a elf or human. But I love her personality.

But overall, your points are just something you don't like or like. It's not a game everyone will like. For me, it is a Masterpiece and well deserving of the hype, reviews and awards it has won. But then again, that is a perspective opinion based on my preferences.

[Talbot]

I did Karlach's romance, I didn't feel like it added much. You get an extra scene with her and she mopes about her incoming death more than I she does if you don't, but you don't really learn much about her that wasn't already there and she isn't really forced to make any interesting choices in the way other five origin characters are.

A lot of my complaints are subjective, for sure. Some of them I think are pretty inarguable, though. Bugs are bad. Mutliclassing not working as the game describes is bad. Inventory management I suppose *could* be a subjective complaint but generally seems to be something even the diehards admit is pretty crud.

[EricHVela]

Those are not uncommon opinions, but I am curious to what bugs turned quests into chores.

[MomoDoom17]

Thought this was gonna be another clickbate but your arguement is well thought out with valid points

[wtiger27]

Originally posted by Talbot:

I did Karlach's romance, I didn't feel like it added much. You get an extra scene with her and she mopes about her incoming death more than I she does if you don't, but you don't really learn much about her that wasn't already there and she isn't really forced to make any interesting choices in the way other five origin characters are.

A lot of my complaints are subjective, for sure. Some of them I think are pretty inarguable, though. Bugs are bad. Mutliclassing not working as the game describes is bad. Inventory management I suppose *could* be a subjective complaint but generally seems to be something even the diehards admit is pretty crud.

Not had that many bugs. I don't use mods for one. And for 2000+ hrs of play time in the game, I think maybe it has crashed twice. The few bugs I have encountered are generally corrected by saving and then reloading that save. Occasionally, tho rare, a earlier save.

I play at 1440p Maxed out in graphic settings and the game has no slow downs. Even in Act 3.

Not noticed any multi-classing issues not working as intended. I have did 9 game ending play runs, all of them with made up of different classes and multi-classing. Now there are a couple I do not care much for. Sorcerer being the number one. I just don't like how it does it's spell casting. Wizard is a lot more fun for me.

Which did you find you had issues with?

[Talbot]

Originally posted by EricHVela:

Those are not uncommon opinions, but I am curious to what bugs turned quests into chores.

- Iron Throne gnomes ignoring the ladders to run back down hallways toward Sahuagin.
- Factory motivators being unclickable
- Roah (halfling Zhent) refusing to flee in the sewers forcing me to kill her instead of dealing with her later
- Whole goblin fortress turning hostile against me when I killed the healer alone behind closed doors with both silence/darkness over her.
- Strange Ox kept turning hostile against me when summoned in final battle
- Enemies occasionally getting frozen in mid-air in unreachable locations
- Final battle not allowing throwing attacks at Elder Brain from any range even with no obstruction
- Poltergeists in haunted house taking like 2 minutes to decide to just dash making combat laborious
- I forget what quest it was but there was one combat where Shadowheart's spells were just unselectable the whole fight (she had slots and was not silenced, no idea why)
- Various weird interactions with invisibility and/or stealth regarding who does/doesn't become hostile
- Various civilians in Act 3 running towards danger instead of away from it, including a customer in the fireworks shop who ran away from the exit and into a Hunger of Hadar casting, presumably out of some heretofor unstated deathwish.

Not really a quest or a bug, but Karlach's romance initiation being hard-locked to the Druid party without the game adequately signposting it also cost me a few hours and feels unnecessary given how unceasingly every other companion tries to jump your bones.

[wtiger27]

Not had almost all those you mentioned. A glitch with the enemy being frozen and inaccessible, has happened before. But that is not common.

Karlach, hard locked to the Druids? You mean if you attack the Druid Grove, she will become pissed? If so, that is understandable.

[Talbot]

Originally posted by wtiger27:

Originally posted by Talbot:

I did Karlach's romance, I didn't feel like it added much. You get an extra scene with her and she mopes about her incoming death more than I she does if you don't, but you don't really learn much about her that wasn't already there and she isn't really forced to make any interesting choices in the way other five origin characters are.

A lot of my complaints are subjective, for sure. Some of them I think are pretty inarguable, though. Bugs are bad. Mutliclassing not working as the game describes is bad. Inventory management I suppose *could* be a subjective complaint but generally seems to be something even the diehards admit is pretty crud.

Not had that many bugs. I don't use mods for one. And for 2000+ hrs of play time in the game, I think maybe it has crashed twice. The few bugs I have encountered are generally corrected by saving and then reloading that save. Occasionally, tho rare, a earlier save.

I play at 1440p Maxed out in graphic settings and the game has no slow downs. Even in Act 3.

Not noticed any multi-classing issues not working as intended. I have did 9 game ending play runs, all of them with made up of different classes and multi-classing. Now there are a couple I do not care much for. Sorcerer being the number one. I just don't like how it does it's spell casting. Wizard is a lot more fun for me.

Which did you find you had issues with?

The multiclassing issue is specifically with Warlock spell slots. You can't choose which slots to use when, it forces you to use your other slots first, despite Warlock spells being easier to refresh. It also wouldn't let me upcast Warlock spells in other slots, which was specifically annoying with Armor of Agathys, which I dipped Warlock to get, but could only cast at first level despite having third level slots available for the Paladin side of the build.

Slowdowns were not a major issue for me, only saw them once when I tried to barrelmancy the Emperor to kill him early.

I played most of the game with very few mods, and played until late Act 1 with none. Late Act 1 I added one to tweak carrying capacity/stacking rules to make the inventory less annoying, and one to let me do multiple romances at once after I realized this wasn't going to be a game I felt like playing six times to see everything. Added a few more mods very late in Act 3 (little QoL stuff, mostly containers) but all the bugs I ran into except the final battle ones happened before then.

Most of my bugs were in combat, but also had some annoying graphical bugs (i.e., clipping, particularly with Karlach's tail vs. capes), but none of those feel likely to be effected by carrying capacity or romance scripts.

[Talbot]

Originally posted by wtiger27:

Not had almost all those you mentioned. A glitch with the enemy being frozen and inaccessible, has happened before. But that is not common.

Karlach, hard locked to the Druids? You mean if you attack the Druid Grove, she will become pissed? If so, that is understandable.

No I mean you can only start Karlach's romance the night of the Druid party. Everyone else you can start whenever.

[Favonius]

Pretty good review.
I would disagree on many points from my own experience, but your arguments are solid and well-described

[Shotgun Merwin]

I've only made it about halfway into act two with all my playthroughs so far, but I agree. I kinda like the game overall, but I honestly think it's one of the weakest d&d games ever made. Both balder's gate as well as nvwn2 were much better games, this might just be a notch above nwn1, that's about it.

Characters all kinda suck, plot is weak and a little bizarre (why do we need to have a main plot about parasites, huh?). Controls are way too complex, loot system is a headache with way too many crap magical items. Graphics are nice at times, but it's an absolute nightmare having to work the camera around most of the time and very buggy too. Not even going to delve into the woke stuff, but it doesn't help. Also never really liked sex and romance in games, just seems so sad and eerie to be having imaginary sex with a bunch of horny yes-bots.

[Talbot]

Originally posted by Shotgun Merwin:

Characters all kinda suck, plot is weak and a little bizarre (why do we need to have a main plot about parasites, huh?). Controls are way too complex, loot system is a headache with way too many crap magical items. Graphics are nice at times, but it's an absolute nightmare having to work the camera around most of the time and very buggy too. Not even going to delve into the woke stuff, but it doesn't help. Also never really liked sex and romance in games, just seems so sad and eerie to be having imaginary sex with a bunch of horny yes-bots.

I'm just gonna cut this off at the pass, I don't have any problem with the "woke" elements of this or any other game and I think people who do, to borrow some wrestling parlance, are working themselves into a shoot to their own detriment.

[Mike Garrison]

Most of the list of bugs you encountered are things I've never had happen in thousands of hours of gameplay. WTF did you do to your game?

Pathing can be a problem. I'm not sure I've ever seen a game with perfect pathing. If a character or NPC is blocked, they will seek an alternate route, even if it is an idiotic alternate route. My guess is that you (or a gnome) had the ladder in the Iron Throne blocked, so they couldn't path up it. Therefore they sought an alternate, even though there is no alternate.

[wtiger27]

Originally posted by Talbot:

Originally posted by wtiger27:

Not had almost all those you mentioned. A glitch with the enemy being frozen and inaccessible, has happened before. But that is not common.

Karlach, hard locked to the Druids? You mean if you attack the Druid Grove, she will become pissed? If so, that is understandable.

No I mean you can only start Karlach's romance the night of the Druid party. Everyone else you can start whenever.

There are opportunities for her romance, to raise her affinity toward your char more positive before the camp party. You can tell you, you want to be able to touch her after Damon has her install the Infernal Iron is one. She responses positively with that.

Any romance options with any companion is based on their approval of your char to begin with. And with Shadowheart and Laz'eal they also will not give you a romance option until the camp party starts.

But I only romance the females. And don't with Minthara. Can't speak on the romance stages with the others.

[Talbot]

Originally posted by Mike Garrison:

Most of the list of bugs you encountered are things I've never had happen in thousands of hours of gameplay. WTF did you do to your game?

Pathing can be a problem. I'm not sure I've ever seen a game with perfect pathing. If a character or NPC is blocked, they will seek an alternate route, even if it is an idiotic alternate route. My guess is that you (or a gnome) had the ladder in the Iron Throne blocked, so they couldn't path up it. Therefore they sought an alternate, even though there is no alternate.

I don't think it was that specific issue for the pathing because there was at least one specific turn where there were four gnomes in range, gnome #1 went up, gnome #2 ran past the ladder and down a hallway, gnome #3 went up successfully, and then gnome #4 did most of a circle around the ladder then ran down a hallway.

Several of the bugs mentioned happened before i added any mods but even the ones that came post-mods I'd be very surprised if they were mod-related given what the mods governed. If I was having inventory or romance bugs I'd have no one to blame but myself but it's hard for me to imagine those scripts influencing NPC behavior or environmental object interactivity.