I cannot believe how half baked this game is.
They add endings with patches, they add subclasses with patches, they add decicions with patches. THis is just one big early access it seems. It was buggy and it was missing decisions. some were annoying (gayle flirting with you lacked the "i love you as a friend" option and only had, i hate you/ cum in my mouth.) options. Thief tiefling kids would force you to initiate a fight with fucking guards when you express how they should not steal etc. This is really funny, people just gaslighted themselves to liking the game. all the "options" in the game were just combat stuff.
5e is so lazy that they had to change the action system, now jumping is a bonus action lol. make it a move action you idiots! implementations of shoving, jumping and other variety of actions are badly designed. They put some manuevers into specific item types, oh you have a staff, oh ok once per encounter you can do this!!! why cannot all the combat actions be inherent to combat itself, with variety of changes of success or strategies come from class and feat design like all the other editions did? because they have to put importance to items. In 5e, items also suck, but also mandatory to have. they wanted to do more than oh this sword deals 1d6 cold dmg, and they also wanted to implement build options for characters through use of items, but that shit is bland and bad.
The freedom of the game is being able to deal with combat with many options, which is what all other games alreay had. the only difference is the system is bad, the rework of the system is also bad, and they had the larian magic of, you can loot and interact with every item stuff. that worked on divinity original sins series, but even then it was just a meme thing. put explosives into a barrel that you can remove from your bag, then let it explode is in the same tier of memery with bag of rats and peasant railgun. It is a very dishonest and rulebreaking thing that any respectable DM would stay away doing it. But Larian consistently wants people to pull it of. I love doing those stuff sometimes and i have nothing agains it, but this thick memery is just killing the immersion, realism, and adventuring for me.
Act 1 is all bad. every side quest you have taken, aside from the hag one, revolves around mind flayers. this makes the situation less believable. it is like everyone just waited for you to come so they can put you on rails and move you towards act 2. druids, thieflings, dungeons, underworld lack any history, lack any defining trait because of that focus. the hag quest, is fun but also bad. It is just accaptance of normalization of occult elements in fantasy, a bad reversal of monkey paw stiuations. In Bg2, De'Arniese Keep, or Tradesmeet etc all had localized problems. In some cases, a quest you had to do also makes you go through other quests. Main quest itself requires you to do some adventuring so you can collect money to save a friend or find your enemy it is a very good way to do it. But aside from this, De'Arnies keep is just an adventure on itself, a troll chief just invaded it with yuan-ti and some other monsters. There are shady things about it but it is never explained in detail and in no way it is connected to the main quest line. so that quest makes you feel like the world is unique and does not revolve around you and does not wait for you even in reality all of the events are hard scripted. You go to a palace to steal something, find mafia there, no role play, no exposition, they just attack you, but through their magical items, their classes etc you have some idea of what they are doing and when they are doing. BG2 had planar adventures, little adventures where you try to find who killed a little boy and took his teddy bear, random encounters (both as random encounters but also encounters that you can search for, like when you go to bridge district with rogue stone, you are teleported to a evil guys demiplane where you can loot a lich to gain the best staff or randomly stumbling into a trolls cae and save people even though in both cases there was no info, no requirement or no need to find those things.) It was a great game with great balance of adventure, story and intrigue in it that bioware never been able to replicate again.
Act 2 of BG3 is fine i guess. it had a solid theme, still had the issues of act 1 but to a lesser degree. Act 3 is just shit i do not want to analyse it.
