These games are definitely worth picking up especially for $10 for the whole series.
this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2024
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The first one is a love letter to the original Baldur's Gate games. Tactical group combat, real time with pause, fantasy. It's an original setting that tries to subvert some Tolkien ideas. It's pretty good, though it does feel a little old-bioware. The story is a basic "global threat -> gather allies" with a touch of political intrigue. The romance is kind of badly done. It's peak "give them gifts until sex happens".
The second one suffered from being extremely rushed. Much asset reuse. It also made the game more "action-y" because I assume some souless suit said that kids don't want tactics they want biff bam ACTION. The story tries to do something interesting in that it follows a single city over a long period of time as tensions rise. It's not as bad as people say, but it's very flawed. The romances are okay. Internet shitheads absolutely lost their minds that gay people exist and might mistakenly think you're interested until you say no thanks.
This one also switched to the dialogue wheel instead of giving you informed choices about what you'd say. It does a subtle thing where your actions in cutscenes and stuff are informed by what style you often pick.
The third one barely holds on to the origins (pun intended). It really wants to be an action game like mass effect. That kind of sucks because we already have mass effect, and I wanted something different for my different game. The story is okay and has some good beats. The characters are really good. The romance is much improved. The gameplay is kind of okay. Mages are really nerfed despite the story saying they're super powerful and dangerous. The world is big and has a lot of shallow quests. There's a shit mobile game style "click a button and wait an hour" mechanic. You can mod that out. The story is also a "global threat -> gather power ". I bet critical analysis of the story is fascinating because a lot of it is kind of suspect, politically. But most gamers are like critically illiterate and probably didn't think about it.
Fun aside: the first game has a "sex scene" where one of the character's naked state is less revealing than her ridiculously revealing "armor ". The third game you can actually see nipples in the sex scenes, but I think they haven't crossed the line to show a vag or erect dong (though I haven't done all the romances). Lots of folks are still ashamed of bodies.
You can import saves from one game into the next. There are a lot of choices to make in all of them.
And that's my off the cuff typed on my phone quick summary of the games.
This is kinda selling mages in the setting short.
Magic in this setting is basically the same as it is in Warhammer 40k: mages get their power from an alternate dream dimension that is also where demons reside, they can spontaneously explode and/or summon demons if they're not careful, and they're heavily regulated/repressed. Rogue mages are hunted down and killed by Templars, and everyone else is mostly confined to wizard towers that double as prison camps.
It never comes across in gameplay, but mages and how they're treated are major plot points in all three games.
That's what I meant. In the story they're super dangerous walking nuclear bombs. In the first game, it kind of lives up to it in the game play. You have a massive fireball (with knockdown!), blood magic shuts down the whole field, and more.
But by the third game, mages are more of a "control" class. If you want to actually do damage and kill monsters, you want to play a rogue. It's extremely disappointing.
I wanted it to be more like dragon's dogma where you summon meteors and tornadoes. Instead it's like some ice cubes and a campfire.
I hope they bring back spells like Virulent Walking Bomb from the first games. That one would poison an enemy and make them explode when they died, and if any enemy nearby died to the explosion or within the next few seconds they'd explode too, and so on.
It wasn't the best spell, but it fit the "mages are one misstep away from becoming eldritch abominations" narrative and damn did it make you feel powerful when the secondaries went off and it turned an entire room full of enemies into mist.
It also made every encounter consist of multiple waves, with enemy reinforcements popping into existence inside your party and rendering positioning nearly useless. It's like they were going down a checklist of ways to make combat less tactical.