Baldur’s Gate 3 is a game of the year contender - but how does its PC release stack up in terms of visuals and performa…
I’m loving the game don’t get me wrong but I wouldn’t say that polished is the word that I would describe it with.
The game is definitely buggy (I believe that playing split screen only makes this more apparent). That being said I don’t know how AAA games are usually shipped because I basically never buy them at launch (except CP2077 which I promptly refunded because that was a complete mess) so if they are usually much worse that is more that the whole industry standard has dropped down massively.
EA definitely helped but I wonder if Larian made the right choice by releasing it ahead of schedule. Maybe not, they are being praised massively for BG3, which is 100% an amazing game but imo it very much needs a patch or two still.
Folks aren’t ready to accept it but it’s true. I’m loving the game, I really am, and I even recommend it, but it really needs more polish. I guess the bar really is just that low for people. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills seeing everyone saying it’s perfect. A game can be great but still need polish.
Agreed, it’s a great game to the point that I’m willing to look past the jankiness, but there are some huge gaps right now. For examples, I have Asterion equipped with a finesse longsword and it seems like the sneak attack animation is missing, the game just hangs for 5 seconds and then computes damage every time.
Yeah I’m kind of baffled that I keep hearing about how polished it is - don’t get me wrong, it’s an amazing game and my wife and I have been playing practically every night - but I don’t think a single night has passed yet where we haven’t run into a fairly major bug, and usually a whole shit load of minor ones
Just last night I went to withers to change my class, when halfway through the dialogue, Li’zael popped up with some random, unprompted dialogue, canceling my class change without refunding my 100g
The title is so clickbaity and dicksucking… The game is great in all areas except the polish. The amount of bugs is staggering, and almost all of them are not things you can easily ignore. It does not put AAA games to shame. It doesn’t even put AA games to shame.
Yeah, came here to say this.
The games content is pure gold. The weight of attacks and spells feel good, the sound design is great, but polish? None.
I’ve had bugs with the UI freezing, there’s awkward 15 seconds after every skill check where the game just sits there before saying success or fail, NPCs show up in weird places when you talk to them sometimes.
Great game, but not polished perfectly.
I don’t doubt your experience but there must be some other factor. I don’t see any of those problems you report.
I didn’t experience any of that the first part of Act 1 (early access, basically), but as I start to progress past that content, I certainly am starting to experience some of these issues. 15 second delays I can attest to. Running on Win10, Ryzen 7700X, 32GB, 4090 with separate OS and game NVMEs.
Nothing besides the camera has been bad enough to break my experience tbf. Sometimes the camera gets stuck and I need to switch characters to make it behave again.
Some people have a higher tolerance for jankiness than I do also.
I think hardware probably contributes to it as well. My brother experiences occasional crashes, but it’s never crashed for me in 2x the amount of playtime.
Compared to other PC releases in recent years it might as well be perfect though lol.
I feel like the UX/UI also needs a lot of work. Tooltips missing important information, an inability to see what future levels in a class/subclass grant me (making it much more difficult to make an informed decision there), I can’t view the inventory/character sheets of companions not currently in my party (requiring four steps of starting dialogue just to check items on a person and swap back to my original party member), a lack of explanation on how things are calculated or what your proficiency bonus is/comes from, etc. Not even counting the numerous visual bugs in the UI, or how the UI just seems oddly sluggish at times for no discernible reason.
I’m genuinely loving a ton of the game. But interacting with the interface is a constant low level annoyance that pulls me out of the experience just a bit all the time and noticeably detracts from my enjoyment as a result.
Any game that
spoiler
___has an owl bear and a dog become friends and playfully chase each other around gets an A+ in my book
AAA Executive 1: What could they have done to be so successful?! No fun micro transactions? No wacky costume packs? What was it?
AAA Executive 2: My second wife’s kid said something about a bear owl and cat playing tag was his favorite part.
AAA Executive 1: That’s it! Lets start pumping out bear cat tag DLCs and events for all our games!
Wife and I are loving it but it needs some tunning for sure. Performance struggles and crashes are pretty common, and my wife clipped through a door just after the tutorial section. Didn’t do anything crazy, just walked right on through a locked door.
Crazy, haven’t experienced anything like that. Do you meet the minimum specs, and are you running it on an HDD or an SSD?
I3 12100f, gtx 1060 3gb, and ssd on Linux. We since switched to steam deck where we have only had 1 crash. I should be hitting a bit over the minimum specs but my bet is I was running out of vram in cutscenes where the detail is higher.
4GB of VRAM is in the minimum requirements, seeing as you have a 12th gen Intel you really might want to look at getting a GPU upgrade. You can find used 6600/XT’s or 6700’s for pretty cheap and that would roughly double (or more) your performance in pretty much every game.
Agreed on the tuning needed, but I’m surprised to hear how many have had crashes. I haven’t had a single crash in like 50 hours of playing and another 50hours with it idling while I take breaks.
I haven’t had any crashes, but I’ve had loads of other issues. Laezel constantly breaks requiring a reload, scripts sometimes don’t fire correctly so you don’t get an important buff or item necessary to progress, my characters constantly end up naked after going to camp because it wants to hide their armor automatically and doesn’t unhide it when you leave, my proficiencies are often not applied to rolls, etc.