Games

People are clamoring around you in a huge chorus of it's fine just roll with it but frankly, I think your point of view is totally valid. While Larian did a great job making every path a valid way to the ending, you can really only ever lock yourself out of content with your choices.

Go too far down one of two branching paths? Hope you can pass a big fat skill check or two, or that one companion will bail. Hope you didn't like that character or want to see more of that content. (Oh, and if you do pass the skill checks, 10 minutes later the companion is like "ugh no it's fine you were right, forget I ever wanted to go that way even though I've been obsessed with it for the last 20 hours" in the name of railroading the character back in line.)

Get interested in the wrong quest too early? Hope you didn't want to finish the main side objective in that one area. No no, even though all the characters are still present, you don't get to finish it. Because we said so. Shoo along to the next place. Go. Get.

And here's hoping you don't get curious about the "evil" path - you lose multiple companions and a whole-ass cast of side characters that are meant to follow you through the game and gain one (1) bit of interesting new content to replace them. Is it still interesting? Absolutely, but it's a consolation prize compared to how much you lose.

It took me 3 playthroughs or so before I finally felt like I was on a save where I was having a good 80%+ of the intended experience. And yeah, you can replay it for what you missed, but not everyone has time for that, especially in a game this immense. I know I've started it up to make my fourth character about half a dozen times and Alt-F4ed during character creation as soon as I think about going through the parts I've thoroughly combed already.

BG3 is my GOTY by a long shot, but people should have more sympathy for this outlook. There are definitely right paths and wrong paths, and while they all lead to the end, the wrong paths have a lot less to look at and a healthy amount of rubbing your face in the fact that you did stuff in the wrong order ("Perhaps you could have...." ok thanks, narrator).

Try to see it like a choose your own adventure instead of "gotta catch 'em all". I find it helps to have a soft rule against savescumming for myself - if I make a mistake, my character made that. The only times I let myself reload is if the outcome of what I did was unclear, and went entirely against what I thought it would do.

I feel like that in most games but not in BG3. I do still reload sometimes if I fail a check, but BG3 makes failures fun! It's rather rare that you're actually locked out of something, and often times a failure leads to interesting outcomes.

I'm sure there is also a lot that I'm missing and don't know about, so there's no sense of FOMO. I really do appreciate that the game doesn't many things. There's no tracking that you're attained 45 of 53 powers, or 237 of 245 hidden biscuits, or that you're missing that last upgrade point to unlock something cool. I also haven't come across any annoying skill quests where you have to take down 14 enemies in 12 seconds while hopping on one leg.

Larian has done a great job of writing interesting content for pretty much every outcome, and it's one of the few games that I feel I will want to replay to see a different side of things. There's a whole quest line in act 1 that you can only get if you fail a random check. I found that pretty novel.

Yeah multiple runs is def the kind of game it is. My first was a Durge and I thought I really explored most of the nooks and crannies. My friends are behind me still on their first one and regularly ask me about stuff I had no idea I missed once or twice! Started run 2 as a good character and it's like a whole new game.

They really did a good job ensuring that you won't totally screw up based on your choices. So just roll with it.

I'm usually the same way with open world games like The Witcher, GTA, RDR, etc, but BG3 puts the story enough on the rails to keep me focused while still letting me make critical choices and enough freedom to explore so it feels amazing when I find little secrets or Easter eggs.

My buddy has played through it twice with 40 hour runs each.

I'm still on my first playthrough at about 70 hours and close to wrapping up act 3.

I rarely replay games, but this is one I fully intend to replay with a different/bigger party (currently playing with one friend, but I'm gonna get two more to buy the game for the next run), a different class (currently playing cleric, thinking about barbarian or bard) and on the highest difficulty.

I think you technically miss quite a lot of content as some choices make other things impossible to pursue. I also take it as it comes, by that I mean I don't reload save states because I failed a dice throw or made mistakes.

I can highly recommend this one :)

I’m the same and I studied every nook and cranny during my first playthrough because FOMO was real. Guess what, I still missed enough things to make a second run no less entertaining―especially if you play a polar opposite of your original character. This game accommodates to pretty much every stupid decision you can throw at it and it's amazing.

Have you tried setting the process priority to high? (Task Manager -> Details -> Right click BG3 -> Det priority to high). This got me a relatively smooth experience.