‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ can be a fantastic experience and a bad game at the same time.
I think the problem with player choice is that you are often not presented with the choice that you or your character would normally want, or that the game intentionally hides the information from you that you would need to make an informed decision. Also this is subjective, but I don’t like being pranked by the dungeon master, I quit tabletop rpgs due to this reason as a kid.
And the case about the game being interactive fiction instead of a “game” game is not entirely unfounded either. Not that I would consider that a bad thing necessarily.
(edit: I wrote this 1h into Act 3. Since then I finished the game & I found Act3 the best part of the game & rather amazing on the whole…)
But ist that not part of it? Being put in situations where you don’t have all the information, where you don’t know the potential outcomes and where you can permanently fuck things up? For me at least, that was a big part of the pull in playing TRPGs and CRPGs. It is, after all, not a strategy game.
In a good rpg, having a couple of these is fine, but in my opinion in Baldur’s Gate 3 these intentionally undecipherable decisions are overabundant. I’m not saying BG3 is bad, in fact many and perhaps most things are absolutely incredible. I just feel that that presented choice options & some parts of the big plot could have been done better.
