Baldur's Gate 3 ● What was shown? Impressions of the gameplay.
Larian Studios held a private screening of Baldur's Gate III at the annual PAX conference series. According to the developers, the game is still too raw, and therefore journalists and conference attendees were not allowed to touch it and play in person.
But on the other hand, you could watch the gameplay, how the game developer plays and listen to his comments. The first thing you need to understand before you sit down to play is that you are starting to play the visual embodiment of the board game, and not the fantasy RPG in the classic understanding of this definition.
All your actions and decisions will be adjusted to the random rolls of the virtual dice, which you will sometimes even observe on your screen, although the options allow you to hide this element. According to the developers, they tried to find a middle ground between ordinary ordinary players who have never played board games and vice versa, hardcore RPGs, for whom board games and their mechanics are paramount.
And whether the developers managed to please everyone at once, it will be clear only at the release, it is difficult to draw any definitive conclusions from what was shown at the exhibition. But now there are various funny and funny situations inherent only in board games.
During the demonstration of the game, the developer threw the archer off the cliff, and then threw a box on his head, after which laughter was heard in the hall, because these are the situations that arise at the table when people gather to play Dungeons & Dragons.
All restrictions are reduced only to the chance of success on the die rolls and the DM's decision as to how your planned events unfold. As such, there are few restrictions, and therefore situations are too different, it all comes down to your imagination.
Combat in the game has now become completely turn-based instead of real-time fights with an active pause. Good or bad, everyone decides for himself, this is closer to the discussions related to taste. And about the premises and interactivity with objects, there is plenty of it here, you can break stairs, complicating the path for your enemies, you can drop chandeliers suspended from the ceiling on the heads of enemies or bring down structures under the feet of enemies, damaging their supports, spill oil on the floor and set it on fire, dragging barrels of gunpowder to enemies and then blowing them up.
The environment can be used to the maximum for their own purposes, and that's great. And due to the fact that jumps appeared in the game, you can take various convenient and advantageous positions, or even get into hidden zones and locations where you cannot get there in an easy way.
According to the executive producer of the game, the setting and the feeling of the game are more important than the mechanics that are directly copied by the various descendants of Baldurs Gate, in many ways the main task for the developers was to give all the same sensations from the passage of the game that they received when passing the original two parts of the series, rather than directly transfer all the mechanics of the old parts.
According to him, this is still a party RPG, Dungeons & Dragons is still, and Baldur's Gate III and the previous two parts have a lot in common, which may not be noticed at first glance. And an important element, of course, is the relationship of the party members, and therefore the developers tried to give it a special the meaning of how they interact with each other, how the protagonist feels about them, whether they are trying to please them or vice versa.
The developers want this aspect to become central again. At the demonstration, they showed four party members and during the whole game they showed different activity, inserted their own lines, spoke about the events. And even if you turn on the Divinity Original Sin 2 gameplay after watching Baldur Gates 3 gameplay, it might seem that you are watching the same game, it feels like everything was just copied directly from there.
We added some new chips and wrapped it all in a different story. The game is of course in an early stage of development, it is practically PRE Alpha and it would be wrong to criticize it now for anything, but still I would like to note one detail that I liked the least, namely the game interface.
It looks as cheap as possible, as in typical Korean-made MMO games. Well, maybe this is just my nit-picking and here it is really a matter of taste, but I didn't like it as much as possible. Looks like typical MMOs or indie survival games created on Unity using stock icons, dies and fonts.
Everything is the most standard, flat and colorful, without a single specific style. In general, I would give the 2d design and interface the lowest possible mark, and something tells me that it will not change even by the time the game is released. Well, the decision to switch all battles to a full turn-based mode, instead of an active slot, was also not very pleasant.
Otherwise, this is the purest standard game from Larrian. It will definitely appeal to fans of Divinity Original Sin, but will fans of the original Baldur Gates parts like it? Only time will tell. As a standalone game, and even more so as a video embodiment of a board game, the project is expected to be solid.
As a continuation of Baldur Gates, I'm not sure. What was shown at the exhibition did not cause any nostalgic feelings in me. You may have your own opinion about this, because the difference in perception and tastes also plays an important role here.
