Game Thoughts: Baldur's Gate 3
I recently spent a few weeks completely enthralled by Baulder's Gate 3 before my annoyances with the game's mechanics finally outweighed my fun and I put it down for good (Around the middle of Act 2.)
The game is unquestionably a masterpiece. We are served a world lush with rich characters, filled with interesting stories, and peppered with discoverable lore. Astounding care was poured into giving players a simulacra of the creative freedoms offered by traditional table-top RPGs through the many available paths, dialogue options, and unexpected interactions. It really feels at times that the developers thought of everything.
However, the adherence to D&D mechanics was a major turn-off for me. A table-top RPG is a structure crafted of many rules that, by design, can be bent or ignored. A living, conscious Game Master is responsible for deciding when the laws that govern the very fabric of their tiny universe need to be re-shaped to ensure that the players in their world are having fun. One could argue that every rule in a tabletop RPG is fundamentally designed to optimize for player enjoyment, and so this flexibility to change any rule to the tastes and personalities of the people around the table is key to the overall enjoyment of these games.
Perhaps the GM lets players "take-10" to skip rolls outside of dangerous situations, or reads the table during a drawn out fight and, realizing nobody is enjoying the grind, changes gears or spices things up. The rules and mechanics are simply a framework around which players and the GM improvise an adventure.
Wrought in the the strictness of code, these fluid rules become iron shackles, inalterable, weighing down an otherwise immersive experience. Battles may be engaging in that they're a great chance to explore the versatility of the magic and combat systems, but they still feel stiff and inorganic without the table talk and loose improvisation of true tabletop games. Every locked chest -- an occasional feature of a tabletop game but abundant in a videogame -- is a dice roll with needless opportunities for un-fun failure. Leveling up is a baffling and unintuitive process if you're unfamiliar with the source material, and it's simply bad UX to suddenly present players with the depth of choice out-of-the-box that the D&D system has to offer. All little the pain-points and nits I've seen GMs waive to keep things moving are unavoidable here -- the team did an unbelievably good job in faithfully encoding nearly every rule of modern D&D, but I can't help but feel they shouldn't have, as the secret sauce can't be coded.
All that to express very verbosely that the "crunch" of 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons feels like a poor set of rules for a videogame. Design technology and techniques for tabletop- and video- games have simply evolved in different directions.
With that in mind, I believe Bauldur's Gate 3 is still absolute the best possible videogame implementation of the D&D rules and mechanics. The time I did spend with the game was a fantastic experience, and I can't stress enough how well-executed everything was. The game shines with the love and attention the team poured into it, and even the very rules I've just spent an essay complaining about were accurately implemented or translated into game mechanics that feel accurate to the originals.