Hey, sorry if I missed your previous assessments but how is BG3 compared to Pillars or Divinity?
I haven't bought BG3 yet. Many of the things you are saying were real bugbears for me for BG 1 and 2
It sounds like BG3 is much like Divinity OS2 where you just go walking around bumping into enemies to see if you can win. If you cant, you just have to remember you cant go that way yet and walk around. And then probably forget the fight before moving to the next Act. If the combat wasnt so fun, I probably would have given up. And it probably DnD rules in BG3 meaning it incentivizes you not to use spells
I did not find the same issues with Pillars, mainly because almost every action in combat actually hits, even if its minor, and reduces time spent on combat. But Diviniity had some really cool combat puzzles that made the experience fun
I don't know Divinity, but I think Pillars is signficantly better than BG3.
I suppose there are lots of things that kind of bother me - as you say, the D&D system tends to promote not using spells (they created increasingly powerful cantrips to get round this to some extent) or resting all the time. And you will be resting a lot because so many fights - at least early on - push your party hard. There are also two "short rest" abilities per proper rest to recharge some HP and abilities, so assume three significant fights per rest. However, I find (long) resting often immersion-breaking. Your party is halfway through a fortress, and you take an 8h time-out? The enemy isn't going to notice all that sound of battle and the corpses you left strewn in the entrance hall to call in a ton of reinforcements and hunt for who did it? And the rest mechanic in BG3 is super-cumbersome. It is fair to say plenty of these problems existed in BG 1&2 as well, but we should have moved on in the last 20 years.
If you can "explore freely" but this means encountering fights you can't win or dodge, then you can't really explore freely. There are better ways to manage this than death and reload. Avoiding fights with dialogue is fine, but they should be predictable by the dialogue choices (and potentially guided to the right paths by clues), and not overly RNG dependent (D&D I find very RNJesusy). If a fight after dialogue is the end result, it needs to be proportional to the circumstances. I quite liked Pathfinder, which has some truly horrific battles... but optional. They are dropped in as challenges for players who want to undertake them, and not mandatory to progress- this is nice design.
Broadly, I just don't think BG3 is that well written. It's gone for exotic (illithids, devils, blahblahblah) rather than deep or sophisticated. As a story, often the more players have options the weaker the narrative is, and I think that's the case here. For instance, 8 companions all of whom are apparently bisexual and interested in the PC because you carried out some tasks, because the devs want players to have their pick of digital fuckbuddy: but that devalues them as characters. That was their design choice, and fine, because I guess a lot of players want that. It's not necessarily my style - I feel it's like being given what appears to be a complex, real world with "choices matter", but also rendering it superficial and eager to please.
However, whilst this all sounds very negative and I do find elements of the game frankly very annoying, generally I'd say it's a good game.
