Baldur's Gate 3 Full Release Discussion Thread

As of earlier today, Baldur's Gate 3 is finally out of Early Access and reached version 1.0. Assuming you're actually finished downloading the game in all of its 122 GB glory, what are people's impressions of the game so far? I'm still brainstorming character ideas, but I'm thinking a Paladin of either the Half-Orc or Dragonborn persuasion.

(I'm not sensitive to spoilers but you may want to put a block on anything story-related.)

i'll see y'all in a month once the PS5 version releases :(

in the meantime i might try to get through BG2 for the first time.

Like @mellotronrules, I'll be waiting for the PS5 version. In the meantime, I'm trying to get through the Enhanced Editions to remind myself of what happened. Playing those on consoles is an . . . interesting experience. BG1 and BG2 could already be punishingly hard, but now add a less-than-optimal control scheme to it for that extra little bit of masochism.

Still tons of fun, though. Video games used to be better. Even just going through the tutorial area I already have way more vivid memories of Baldur's Gate than I do of just about anything else released in the last 20 years.

I played about three years ago when the game first became available, then held off until the full release. I started playing again a couple weeks ago. Last night, I put 4 hours into the final version.

I'm playing a githyanki rogue with the assassin subclass. In many cases, the game presents your character with different dialogue options based on your class and background. One of the really cool things about playing as a githyanki is that the mind flayers are your people's ancient enemy, and you have special dialogue options very early on. When I first encountered an intellect devourer on the ship, I was immediately given an option to recognize it and kill it. Characters from other races are not given this option right away. It's a very early example of how different character types will be able to interact with other characters and the world.

If you played the Early Access version recently, you'll notice that the tutorial section on the ship is much shorter in the final version. You're presented with the same scenarios and tutorials, but the section outside of the ship has been completely removed and the combat encounters seem much easier.

I'm really into it so far. I've added Gale, Asraeion, Lae'zel, and Shadowheart to my party and I just made it to the druid camp.

I’m glad I went for the PC release. I thought about waiting for PS5 but these gamepad controls are… cumbersome. I find myself constantly talking to party members trying to loot or clicking the wrong objects.

There are various ways to fine tune controls but it’s all a little tedious and I find myself reaching for the mouse a lot.

Hadn't touched the game in early access and have now put about 10 hours into the full release. First thing that comes to mind is that I hate the fact that it's a silent protagonist. I understand why they did it, but it just sucks so much life out of the conversations. Which leads me into my second gripe, which is that the game is very much stuck in the early 2000 era of pacing, plot and exposition. It's giving me major Fallout 3 flashbacks. Also not a huge fan of the in conversation dice rolls, and as I predicted, most of the cast is just not my cup of tea. The only character I've enjoyed so far is Gale.

After about eight hours or so I ended up restarting the game because the character I wanted to play just didn't work with the cast or the general vibe of the campaign. So now I'm back to playing the bog standard goody two-shoes help everyone hero character.

I'm sure a lot of people will love it, as it's a very "open" game as far as doing what you want, problem solving and playing into multiple different traditional archetypes, but so far I'm feeling the "indie-ness" and fairly uninspired writing dragging my excitement down. In 10 hours the most exciting thing that's happened was a room filled with traps that blew up my entire party.

I like seeing the dice roll when Skill Checks happen, I know that every dice based game is rolling things in the background and its functionally the same thing but much like Disco Elysium I want to see the dice pull back and punch me in the nose it just hits different.

I played a decent chunk of it with a controller, but also ultimately settled down with the mouse and keyboard controls. The gamepad controls are, I think, pretty good for the most part, but some little things bugged me. Like how if you're looking at something interactable and you just flick the stick, instead of moving the character it flicks to the next interactable over. If you get used to it I imagine that's very good, but eh. I think the game would have greatly benefited from a Dragon Age Origins-ish behind-the-back camera for everything except combat. You can almost get there, but you cannot look up. I bet that will get modded in at some point.

The camera and inventory management are my only complaints thus far. Like Divinity Original Sin 2, there's an incredible amount of loot and interactable objects in this game, but really that just serves to make me wonder if I should lug around this massive inventory of junk or if I should stop looting anything that isn't a chest or a dead high-level character. There's alchemy, there's crafting, is this unique locket that doesn't do anything but has a description just flavor or is it part of a quest? That sort of thing.

But I expected both of these things going in. DOS2 had the exact same inventory problems and I played some of the Early Access and Larian never seemed interested in making a truly third person game, instead just leaving the camera 90% of the way there for whatever reason, and I'm getting better at just not clicking "take all" every time I open something. Everything in this game thus far has been, for me anyway, golden. Exploration, combat, characters, story, I'm pretty damn wrapped up in all of it.

I flip-flopped between playing a half-Drow Rogue and a human Fighter and went with the Rogue, as I usually don't play sneaky-stabby classes, and it's been a lot of fun thus far. I stumbled across a circlet that sets my Intelligence to 17 - like, sets, in the same way the original game's Crom Faeyr set your Strength to 25. I pretty much immediately respec'd out of the Thief subclass and into the Arcane Trickster one so I can cast spells and that's been working out pretty well for me so far. This seems like one of those things where, a year from now, someone will be writing a build guide for a Fighter-Mage where they tell you to dump Intelligence for Strength/Dexterity/Constitution and go straight for this circlet and just wear it the entire game so you can get that stat back (which I will probably be doing, honestly).

I finished Throne of Bhaal about a month ago for the first time so I feel like my memory's pretty fresh on all of the original games, but thus far I haven't come across anything where knowledge of what happens in the original games is all that important. That could absolutely change and I'm very curious to know how those stories link to this one.

This is kind of off topic, but does anyone have any experience with the GeForce Now stuff? I would like to play Baldur's Gate, but I'm not sure my basic ass laptop would even run it, and it'd be nice to not have to pay the extra $10 console game tax. I figured with it being turned based, it's probably completely fine to stream it off one of their fancy computers in the cloud, I just don't know how well their service works.

It's a minor thing but I really thought we all experimented and moved beyond the 'everyone stays spattered with blood' mechanic after fights. Like it's not edgy or cool just wipe off your damn face before speaking to me.

Kinda funny, there's been a fair bit of talk about how this game sets new standards for RPGs, but I just came to the realization that most of my issues with the game stems from the fact that it doesn't meet my expectations for story-driven RPGs after having played Witcher 3 (and to some degree Mass Effect). It's obviously not fair to say that the game is bad because it's not as good as Witcher 3, but I hadn't really realized how much of a cloud that game has put over my enjoyment of other similar games.

For anyone curious, I decided to pick up the game, it does indeed run like absolute garbage on my laptop on the lowest possible settings, and it did look and work pretty well on GeForce Now's free service, once you get past the thirty-minute queue time, and the hour-long play time limit before it throws you back into a queue.

As far as actually playing the game goes, I mostly just farted around with the character created before just jumping in with their pre-made Tiefling character, just to get a sense of the game. I've never been able to get into CRPGs before. There has always just been something that irks me about how the genre tends to handle interface, UI, and combat. I think this game has tweaked that stuff in just the right way that it finally all clicks with me. Even though I've only ever seen TTRPGs being played by other people, the more traditional turn-based combat, and closer adherence to D&D rather than CRPGs just makes more sense to me. I like that it doesn't try to hide some of the table-top elements that most other games do for immersion's sake. I like rolling dice. Show me the dice roll.

Just a fun tip for recruiting characters: you should have Wyll in your party when you go to find Karlach. It allows for some special dialogue.

Speaking with the dead and speaking with animals is extremely useful.

The inventory system is pretty bad. Say what you will about games that have enemies drop items that have "sell this item" in the description, at least then I know that I can get rid of something. I'm pretty sure that quest items are highlighted in orange in the inventory screen, but I've also come across letters and documents that feel like they're telling me about a quest but aren't highlighted. Marking items as "wares" is the same thing as marking them as "junk" which can be quickly sold in bulk, but I had to look that up. I never saw a tutorial message about that the first time I talked to a merchant.

I never played the originals (I tried a few years ago but couldn't get into them), but GameSpot put up a 20 minute video about the story so far. It seems that this takes place 120ish years after the previous games and the more immediately relevant D&D story is the Descent to Avernus campaign.

Yeah just in general I'm trying to avoid taking spells and feats that are like... just for practical combat purposes because there's a lot of interactivity with the skill checks now compared to a lot of other crpgs.

My Warlock has quickly turned into being built to manipulate, I can get a lot of Advantage rolls or read thoughts to avoid stuff entirely. It's great fun although she does get punched in the nose a lot easier in fights.

@efesell: a warlock focused on social manipulation is an appropriate skill set.

I started playing the original games three years ago and just played them off and on until I finally finished them. I love them and I think they're great games, but I also spent a lot of time in wikis and forums trying to figure out how to play them and/or what I might be doing wrong. It's not always immediately obvious that an enemy is immune to something, for instance.

Divinity: Original Sin 2 also had a "mark as wares" option so I looked for that very early on.

You can also Shift + Click to highlight a selection of items and CTRL + Click to click on several items and just send all of those to wares. I didn't notice that quest items were highlighted orange, though!

I'm about 7 hours in and I both like a ton about it and have quibblings about a number of things. It's just very much a DOS game with D&D packaging, and that comes with good and bad, I think. Much more good than bad for my taste though.

Having said that, random question for the group: will we ever solve inventory shit in games? I feel like I'm much more about a streamlined ME2 style one before something like this, but I also feel that for a more tabletop styled adventure like this one, a big, flexible inventory is valuable. Regardless, I fucking hate using the inventory in this game with a controller. It's not even that bad, it's just not good enough to be fucking annoying enough to make me irritated whenever I have to significantly interact with it, which is not so great!

@sethmode: I feel like if they just stopped allowing you to pick up all the trash items it solves like 90% of the issue. You could still have them as objects in the world that you can move etc, but there's no real point to picking them up. It's one of the limitations I've put on myself when playing Bethesda games to make them more enjoyable. Only loot enemies and chests, and only pick up items I actually need. I started doing the same in this game, but also liberally using the highlight feature to not miss useful/important items, and it's cut down my time spent on inventory management drastically.

@ares42: Man, you are 100% right and in a perfect world, where I have better impulse control/ability to let things go, I'd do it. I have the best intentions and fall back into the same problems for myself every time.

I've been having a lot of trouble with various boss encounters I've stumbled across until I finally adapted to proper tabletop mindset of seeing how many simultaneous rounds I can make happen against the thing before the DM is forced to say roll Initiative.

Pillars of Eternity gives you an invisible bottomless chest that you carry with you all the time. Every character has their own individual inventory, but that's for items that you think they're actually going to use. For instance, you might keep scrolls in your Wizard's inventory, a selection of weapon types for your Fighter, or a handful of traps for your Rogue. Everything else goes into this bottomless box. When you click on a group of dead enemies, you click the bottomless box, you click "take all". As a player, I would ask developers to consider one question - is it really important to you that players consider the importance of what they're carrying, forcing them to drop things they deem less important? If so, have a smaller number of more significant items so it's easier to sort through. If you want a zillion interactable objects, any one of which might be useful in some creative way, just give us an infinite inventory.

Maintaining an inventory in tabletop can be fun, but the thing about tabletop is that your characters likely aren't running around with a load of garbage in their inventory. There are a zillion things to pick up here and there's not really a good indication of what I need to keep around and what I don't. DOS 1 and 2 were somewhat infamous for having some combinations of items that were brilliant along with a ton of recipes for potions, food, scrolls, and equipment, some of which could be incredibly powerful, so I assume that's true here - but I don't know what's useful and what isn't. Should I carry around every single bloodstone I see? What if I find a recipe for something that needs bloodstones fifty hours into the game and I can't find any because I sold them all to a merchant I no longer have access to? Sure, I could send them to the camp traveler's box, but that fucking thing is even more of a nightmare to sort through.

My final point, and one that I've never seen brought up anywhere else but that I'd love to see discussed more often, is that grid inventories SUCK ASS. I'd love to say that as forcefully as possible in text. I love these games but for some reason all of them insist on using these fucking grids and I loathe it. Why is it a good idea to have players look at a ton of small icons, some of which aren't immediately all that distinguishable from another, and hover the mouse over every fucking one of them just to see what it is? Why is that just accepted as "this is the best we can do, deal with it?" I would point everyone who ever aspires to develop RPGs with a large inventory system to a mod for Skyrim called SkyUI, which I've brought up here before. It's a spreadsheet, a word which might scare everyone away, but just look at it. You click on the type of items you want to look at (armor, weapons, magic, miscellaneous) and you get a selection of values to sort by (name, weight, gold value, attack value, armor value, etc.) and from there you can look at whatever effects the item might have. Why can't we use this more often? Why can't I sort a spreadsheet of armor by type (light, medium, heavy) and then AC value and just see everything I need to right there?

Anyway, this got way longer than I intended it to be and is way more rant-y than I thought it would be, but yesterday I did stop playing the game and think about this for a little while.

@justin258: I really enjoyed your reply! 100% on grids especially.

Pillars of Eternity is such a great example. The crux of it is, I will make any conceit/suspension of disbelief you need me to for the flimsiest of narrative reasons if it simply makes your game like...even 5% less tedious. I don't think whatever assumed "commitment to the experience" reason that exists for why we make antiquated inventory systems is good enough for doing said system. I'm never happy that I collected a bunch of shit, because even when I know I have something because I've kept everything, I still can't find it because I'VE KEPT EVERYTHING.

Really, really, really like the game so far. The level of care and craft gone into this thing is like nothing I've seen before.

My only complaints are:

• Inventory is COMPLETE SHIT. So shit. I don't understand. Why did they not innovate something when they raised the bar for nearly everything else in an RPG and just videogames in general.
• Some light annoyances with certain dialogs not letting me RP a certain angle. Like when I was given a task by an NPC I had no plans of working with and I went to talk to their enemy. I eventually end up in a dialog where it was basically "IM WITH THE BAD PERSON, DO AS I SAY" or "I AGREE WITH YOU LETS KILL HER". That was just one time, but it kind of stunk and stood out.

Also playing on GeForce Now Ultimate. Guess I never need to invest in a new computer again. Just pay 20 bucks every time a game I want to play comes out... which isnt very often.

Imagine if the Dungeons and Dragons movie came out after Baldur's Gate 3. I can almost guarantee that it would have done better. Conversely, I think the D&D movie coming out made more people interested in Baldur's Gate 3, myself being among those people, since I really loved the movie, and was never really a D&D fan like that.

Question for everyone: Should I just recruit every possible companion and send them to camp if I am not really considering them to be part of my main party?

Is it possible to do that for all of the companions?

I didn't invite Astarion or Wyll to my party, but I am interested to see a dialogue between Wyll and Karlach at some point.

@mistersims: As far as I can tell the game very much follows the Bioware formula of having companions at base, talking to them and eventually they unlock missions. You use whoever you wanna use for your party, you can even just get hirelings if you want, doesn't really matter except for some encounter specific dialogue here and there.

@mistersims: That's basically what I have been doing. I invited Astarion to my party but the minute he disagreed with one of my actions, I sent him back to camp. I am sure he can be an asset for sneaky stuff, though so I want him to be available in a pinch.

I am pretty sure you can just do that with every party member with zero consequence, similar to how it is handled in Mass Effect and Dragon Age games.

@noboners: In some scenarios the approval/disapproval can come in even if they’re at camp.

I’ve never had Gale in my active party but every so often I do something and get a little “Nice” from him in the corner.

Then again, given the narrative conceit in play I guess they WOULD know.

@ares42@noboners@efesell Interesting. Thank you all for your replies. I'm not so worried about the party members disagreeing with my actions, as playing a genuinely helpful good character with Lae'zel in my party subjects me to many disagreements lol. I'm doing a custom Tiefling Druid char, with Shadowheart, Gale and Lae'zel in the party (haven't found Karlach yet, who may just replace Lae'zel for me). But yeah I just dont want to miss out on some interesting interactions (even though, that is kind of the point of a D&D playthrough). Also, I like seeing how everyone has their different tents set up in camp.

Also party members in this game are REALLY reactive. Everyone generally has dialogue for most story beats, new arrivals, who you’ve decided to romance… they’re all terrible gossips.

Having put 50 hours into the game now I feel like this game is the perfect example of a 8/10 game. People often judge games by taking off points for things they didn't like, which tends to come off as very archaic, but this game is the ultimate "this is good, but I know exactly how it could've been even better". It's the Witcher 2 to Witcher 3. Witcher 2 is a great game on its own, but when compared to Witcher 3 you easily see how they turned everything up to 11.

My only glaring complaint in this game is just... there's seemingly no top level UI way to manage your party and it's the most confusing thing to not have in a game like this. It has to just be that Larian sees something special about the way they do it otherwise it makes no sense to survive all of EA in this state.

It's usually not a problem but the moment that you realize you need to juggle equipment from multiple party members it turns into a confusing and unncessary hassle real fast.

@efesell: Yep thats my only complaint as well. Its difficult to articulate exactly what the issue is but its like the game is designed to be purely single player and someone has modded in a janky multi-character mod.

Like in Dragon Age Origins I played as my Avatar character and most of the time thats just what I did, over the shoulder. But I could still zoom out and highlight Anders and Morrigan and Sten and give them commands quickly in unison or separately.

You just cant seem to do that in this game. Trying to set up the ultimate stealth ambush? (which you can totally do and its SO effective and awesome.) But you're fighting the UI the ENTIRE way. Every time I click on the character I want to play as it resets the camera, resets everything in a really frustrating way.

I have found some solace in being able to shift click and ctrl click inventory items to grab huge swaths of it at a time to then SEND TO SHADOWHEART etc.

Even selling multiples at a vendor isnt as smooth as it should be. So much clicking just to sell some trash of no value to anyone. Like a fork in Elderscrolls.

Other then that though, wow, blown away by this game. The characters are so emotive, well written, well realized. Everything reacts and interacts with you in such interesting ways. Sometimes I just reload scenario's just to see how differently I can interact with them.

Its just a fun time, top to bottom. It really makes non-combat skills meaningful and exciting. You can really avoid combat almost entirely if you really get creative. Only real bummer is you seem to get far more XP from just killing dudes then by doing this. Still fun.

I'm curious to see if this continues passed the Early Access First Act area. I have a hard time picturing them maintaining this level of interactivity outside of the heavily playtest and worked on first area but who knows with these guys.

You can seriously talk to almost all of the dead people you encounter. Sometimes its just a fun gimmick, sometimes you can learn important info about a quest or character by talking to the right body. Its wild stuff.

This game is dangerous. It has time vacuum qualities to it. I sat down to play it for a couple hours intending to maybe build a character and get off the ship but I ended up playing it the entire evening. I would blink and an entire hour would disappear.

I mean this in the nicest way, but this game feels like a PC game from 15-20 years ago. I appreciate that it's not hand-holdy. It just dumps you in, shows you a few tool tips, and lets you figure things out. Because the game doesn't go out of its way to explain everything, I'm spending a lot more time figuring the systems myself and discovering tons of things, which for me is a lot more fun than playing a long, heavily guardrailed tutorial. I figured out early to read the tool tips/explanations and to right click things and that has solved 99% of my issues.

I played it on Steam Deck a bit too because I was curious how it ran on there and how the controller setup works. I was surprised how intuitive the controller layout is. The game plays completely differently with a controller but I picked up how it worked almost instantly and once I figured out what all the buttons did I was doing just as well. The game is pretty intense for the Steam Deck to run but after a bit of tinkering I got it so it wasn't running the Steam Deck's APU at max power and stopped the fan from running super loud. It seems like a totally valid way to play the game though the textures are noticeably worse, which is to be expected.

I can see myself playing through this game several times like I did with old BioWare games (I think I played through KOTOR like 6 times?). There's been enough interesting choices that I want to see how it plays out when you choose other options.

I almost never put more than an hour of play time into a single gaming session these days, but I've already put 60 hours into this game. What's even crazier for me is that I've just been starting multiple new games, playing with different character classes, making different choices, which is something I never do. I've only just now made it to the Githyanki camp in the playthrough that I'm the furthest in.

@brian_: Someday I'll have a character that I actually get all the way to Act 2.

I was a bit....let down (?) by how something happened.

I got off the Nautilloid and found the Gith fighter in a cage. I freed her after failing both checks with bad rolls, but she got out of the cage somehow.

I got into the scripted fight and in the first round, the two Tieflings got better initiative than me, and both went first. They both focused the Gith, and killed her before I could react.

So, out of my control, I lost a main companion in the first 90 minutes. I'm not annoyed by it, as it's D&D, but its still frustrating.

And no, I'm not save scumming, that's against the spirit of the game

@sombre: Gonna be honest, if you aren't willing to save scum at least worst case scenarios then you are going to have an incredibly frustrating time all throughout. Larian designs a lot of scenarios that encourage it in the first place and that's only amplified with the addition of Dice.

If it was against the spirit of the game they wouldn't have put F5 and F8 there for quicksave and quickload.

If it's in the game, it's a valid way to play. The people who claim things are against the "spirit of the game" are usually just gatekeeping. Larian even provided an Ironman mode for those people so they can go sit in their corner feeling superior while the rest of us have fun playing the game how we want to.

I haven’t played this game yet, as a console gamer, but I’ve been following this thread as a sort of barometer for how ready I might actually be to give a game like this a shot.

Maybe “not in the spirit of the game” isn’t the right phrase but when you live your whole life without hotkeys for saving and loading, I gotta say the entire concept of save scumming has always been a little…gamey to me, for lack of a better phrase for it. But I’m also in the Abby Russell school of “my save is my save”, aka One Save to Save It All, aka “why does the save screen have all these different slots on it? I’m already using one!”

Similarly, I’ve always found the idea of “the bad ending” being a disappointing outcome odd. If the way you played the game didn’t get you “the good one”, I’ll never understand why that makes players upset or feel like they didn’t get the full experience. Which again is probably owed to living a life in which saving has always been a relatively cumbersome activity compared to just rolling with the punches.

@nodima: Not save scumming is one thing but the whole this is my save why would I need another is just like wow you have a lot of misplaced faith in the integrity of most video games.

@sombre: You put a lot of faith in the developers with that. They intend for you to have it, it's a safety net for them too. They don't have to think about the consequences of their AI (nonsensically, IMO) attacking the Gith you just freed instead of the aggressive person who just lied to them and freed their captive against their wish. You have to live with a decision the (bad) AI made because the developers didn't have to worry about permanently saddling you with a dead teammate, they figured you probably have a save to load, hell they give you an auto-save before that dialogue bit.

You are counting on the developers not putting in bad/dumb/pointless checks in the game. Let me tell you, they absolutely do. You can fail a check to read a dogs name tag. Seriously. You can fumble looking at something well enough to read it. Is that fun or good design? Would a "real" dungeon master ask you to roll a check for reading a pet's name tag? No. That's bad. But hey, if you fail at their bad design now you have to live with it!

Not to mention the more obvious struggle you WILL run into. What's a save scum if you die? Let's say you walked up to those Tieflings, failed the skill checks, then they went fast and murdered the shit out of you instead of the Gith. Do you have to load your save and intentionally fail the checks? What if you accidentally pass a check and they let the Gith go do you have to save scum until they're mean again? Or is your game actually over because you died? In which case why aren't you playing on hardcore?

Damn near EVERY major fight in this game starts with a dice roll or two during conversation. If you ever lose a fight how are you going to reconcile those dice rolls changing on a redo?

Sounds like you're a save scummer.

While it's still a great game you can really tell the minute you get to Act 2 and it's not because of a narrative shift. As you might expect from how long it was in EA Act 1 is polished to a mirror sheen but Act 2 has instantly hit me with all sorts of jank. Save often, and definitely in multiple slots for this one.

@efesell: On a similar note, I just got into the city and my performance absolutely tanked. Was already having some issues in the outskirts area, but nothing unplayable. It's also become abundantly clear that the game has memory leaks, so the only way for me to keep it playable is to regularly reboot the game at this point. Makes me wonder how the console versions are gonna turn out.

I'm 121 hours in, likely somewhere close to the end of act 2 from what I can tell. I still feel like I'm just ramping up on the main narrative, in the best way. It just feels so huge, in a way I haven't felt since Elden Ring just kept getting bigger, with a story I haven't been this engaged with since Disco Elyisum and a sense of humor I haven't seen since....well, Divinity: OS 2. I've really been in heaven with this game and unless Starfeild or the Phantom Liberty expansion for Cyberpunk really knocks my socks off, then I don't really see anything else coming close to hitting my GOTY, which is really saying something because it's been a year of banger after banger. This delayed orgasm of pandemic releases is really great, albeit unsustainable in the long run, though it does hold true to my theory that odd-numbered years have more and better games.

edit: 26 of those hours were already there from early access over the past 3 years, so I guess I'm actually more like 95 hours in.

On PC at least, the controller support does allow you to Quicksave - you pause, mash a button dedicated to quicksaving, and it saves. I wouldn't tell you to abuse quicksaving and quickloading, as I'm not personally doing that either, but I am going to strongly - as strongly as I possibly can - advise you to keep multiple save slots.

This game is, in my experience, far less buggy than most massive AAA RPGs at launch, but frankly it's still one of those and still has some occasional bugs. I don't think this game is going to be prone to corrupted saves or anything drastic like that, but I could see someone running across something that makes them want to load an older save.

I'm personally sticking with the dice rolls I get. I've had some things not go my way that I thought would work out and some things I very much expected to not go my way turn out OK and having moments where I go "oops, uh, I'm in trouble" are a lot of fun for me. Not knowing for sure if I'm going to fail or succeed a check is interesting and cool and at least somewhat novel in comparison to the usual "if you have X amount of Y skill you pass Z check automatically".

...narratively at least, mechanically I think this game is mostly pretty easy. I've only wiped a few times. It's not as hard as Divinity: Original Sin 2 and it's definitely not as hard as the original games even when playing those on Beamdog's Normal difficulty.

Huh, btw, the title screen where it goes underground after clicking, and then a door opens up and a little party of adventurers come out. It's almost too small to tell, but the guy bearing the torch is Swen Vincke, I'm pretty sure. The hair and general head/face shape looks a lot like him, despite the low light and tiny model.

@ares42: I have been on a life induced break from BG3 so I didn't delve further, but I think I saw it mentioned somewhere or written about that you should long rest as often as possible to cut down on things like this? Not sure its effectiveness as of yet.

I wondered about the shift to act to for the EA reasons mentioned. Feels like Act 2 is where the REAL CRPG begins, from a performance perspective.