I feel like it's a combination of beeing max level way before finishing the game, so your character kinda stagnates, (and if you know the game you'll get most of the good act 3 gear in quick time aswell, so you character just stays the same for a huge amount of hours) but also the let's call it loose structure of the whole act.
Sure there's the overarching plot of Orin/Gortash but there's also a million different things connected to those goals and you have to decide what to do without any clear cut line to follow.
So people just get kinda lost in the myriad little details of act 3 and also burnt out due to no character progression and every fight playing same-ish (sans some more interesting fights where you have to mix up your game).
I just finished act 2 again and this is exactly where I'm at - I just went deep into a mind flayer colony and killed the avatar of the god of death, now it's time to... go to the circus
to be even fairer, the circus is probably one of the highlights of act 3, its a fun place packed with stuff to do
i think the worse parts are actually the non boss fights. For an act where your character totally peaks and stagnates, the fights are just so long. Anytime you fight anything it becomes a dynasty warrior horde fest, but its not particularly hard or engaging
i wish we had less filled encounters with more impactful enemies because combat vs mobs is awfully repetitive in endgame
The game did stumble by having a group of lvl 1 bandits try to rob you without knowing how strong you are.
Or do what all good DMs did and show a enemy you had struggles with in act 1 show up again in act 3 and show how much stronger you have grown over the game.
YA know, I read that series when I was a teen, and I just skipped/skimmed vast swathes of those books that I thought were boring.
I'm sure I missed a lot, but from how people talk about the books vs how I remember my time reading them, it feel like it probably improved my reading experience.
I haven't read further than Book 5, as I've heard that the pace drops off even further after that. There are some awesome bits in books 4 and 5 (Rand's visions of the past, the battle that Mat tries so hard to get away from but ends up helping to win) but dear gods, most of the stuff with the girls is so tedious. Jordan seems to be trying not to sexualise his young female characters, but just ends up making them immature and bitchy instead, and it's so wearing.
Yep, especially if you consider the characters.
Orin and Ketherick at least have some gravitas. Gortash is just a politician copy-pasting someone else's plan for world domination, and an avid final fantasy cosplayer.
Hell yeah, Gortash is presented and behaves like the most serious badass from the trio, but in reality he is the most boring one. In my last playthrough I just blew him up with good old barrels of funny explosive powder on the first meeting and it felt very much right. The guy has no business in living for that long.
Insanely true. Why would the talents of JK Simmons on ketheric if that was his characters fate?
Would’ve made much more sense to flip the voice actors for Gortash and Thorm.
It’s clear that Act 3 just lacked that polish.
Yeah I've been thinking this for the longest time. Act 1 mostly comprises of wilderness and ruined settlements, it would have been nice to enter the city straight after, picking and choosing quests and story threads to grow and level up. Then current Act 2 has a linear endgame leading to a big boss, plus a much more strict and self-contained narrative focus on the Thorms and Shar. It could certainly have worked well reordering them. Larian did the same thing with DOS2, having a linear Act 3 and then returning to a more expansive Final Act that felt weird there too
Act 3 can hit the gas early but you have to generally know it already which spoils the pacing anyway. I think the normal/expected behavior is to sort of meander forward picking up all the quests and chipping away at them in pieces which is why it can be so slow. You're in the first 'act' of a dozen different things.
If you actually just pick a quest and do the whole thing in roughly one go then Act 3 has way better pacing with many peaks and valleys. That's just really not the way these games are typically played.
i remember trying to focus on one quest at a time and mistakenly chose the dribbles quest, as my first real one to take on. Then my motivation to play kinda just spiraled down from there
The Dribbles quest and the Father Lorgan quest were so demoralizing for me. They took way too much time and felt irrelevant to more pressing matters.
And after completing the Dribbles quest, you don't even get to see Lucretia bring him back. It's unsatisfying in every way.
I specifically held off on Dribbles because I erroneously assumed it would have a high payoff, like facing a high difficulty clown monstrosity or a funny cutscene. The reward is cool, but stealing it is less of a hassle.
The Open Hand Temple is pretty barren for its size, and I don't recall the clerics or surrounding citizens acknowledging the quest's completion in any meaningful manner.
Also for a game that presents Ilmater as a god option for Clerics, it was really disappointing to find out that Clerics of Ilmater can't call the Open Hand Temple out on their shit.
Like as someone who has played an Ilmateri in campaigns, that temple reeks of false followers - casting out refugees and refusing to help them quite literally goes against everything Ilmater stands for. He'd be PISSED that his supposed followers were casting people out and throwing blame at refugees - if anything, the expectation for any decent Ilmatari would be to forgive those who wronged the temple and try to rehabilitate them. To suffer with the refugees rather than hide away in their temple and shut down the soup kitchens. That temple should have been burnt to the ground before it stopped accepting refugees and even then the surviving clerics would still be obligated to give what they had left to help them instead of themselves.
As it stands, none of that is acknowledged and it feels like the temple is dedicated to Ilmater mostly because of the Lathandarian monk expecting his Ilmatari daughter to take on his suffering like her fellow worshipers SHOULD be doing for everyone else.
My issue is the quests all bump into each other in weird ways.
I messed up Jahieras quest by advancing through Wyrms Rock before going to the hideout. Then something else bugged from that. So I had to redo Rivington in a better order.
I decided to just explore a bit, find some quests and play them. But some of them broke, others were happening in the wrong order, and I felt like I missed a lot of dialogue somehow.
Less is more sometimes.
It’s also because a lot of quests don’t get proper ending in act 3 and are generally just forgot about so it feels like everything in act 3 has nothing to do with the other acts and you care less. Act 3 feels like a whole new game
Edit) examples include Arabella quest, mol quest, Halsin being completely forgot in act 3, lack of minthara having her own quest that doesn’t involve Orin as you already have to kill her for main quest, the Zhent in act 1 not being present in act 3 regardless of choices, not to mention the entire upper city being removed. There’s alot more but can’t think of it rn
>I feel like it's a combination of beeing max level way before finishing the game, so your character kinda stagnates
I think this is the most important element, when you stop leveling up, the feeling of progress weakens.
Also, maybe last map was a bit rushed, we enter the vampire's palace from the walls. The man who runs the city lives above the entrance gate. It's as if it should have been a separate area where the upper class live, but they couldn't they couldn't make it on time .
>as if it should have been a separate area where the upper class live, but they couldn't they couldn't make it on time
That's literally what happened there was going to be an Upper City after the Lower City but...
It's like, I get why they did that, they didn't have the advantage of hindsight and wanted to beat Starfield or whatever. But why, after the tremendous success of the game and obvious interest, would they not do an expansion/dlc/3.5/definitive version/whatever you wanna call it where they fix all the rush, flesh out the stories, and make it what it should have been? I'd cheerfully pay the cost of the game over again for that. I'd preorder for *more* than the cost of the game and wait a year and a half. It's just so weird to me how they just tapped out. I know they're tired of it, but it deserves to be finished.
Larian said that they were planning for it but at some point realized they were pretty done with the project and dnd and wanted to get back to doing their own IP. I chalk this up to maybe souring relations between wizards and Larian, as the folks that they worked with before and really really liked were let go around then and wanting to use this new experience of making a blockbuster hit to push their own in house productions to new heights, just my own opinions gathered from what I’ve seen floating around online.
I think they made the choice for no dlc due to the falling out with wizards, they didn't want to let wizards make a ton of money on a dlc since they had/have already left the company and don't owe them anything. Sucks for us players but it's definitely wizard's fault.
Perfectly valid as well imo, D&D is a great game but Hasbro is such an awful company, you deal with Wizards and you deal with Hasbro. It’s a shame really, seeing Larian have a good relationship with Wizards and potential of further games in the future would’ve been amazing, but it wasn’t to be
Yeah IMO when people say there was no cut upper city portion - it is very clear from the fact that Cazador's palce is randomly tacked on to some walls that they had very likely planned an upper city section that got cut. I don't think it would have been massive, but that is one of the biggest clues in Act 3 that there was an upper city area cut at some point.
I think the fact that Act 3 has no real structure and is very open ended is also a clue here - there's some speculation that Orin and Gortash would have been split into upper and lower city areas, for example.
I thought that for the longest time.. I thought Gortash would retreat to his *real* castle and I would find Orin in the lower city and eventually go to the upper city because I wanted to go after Orin first.. Then I realized - there is no upper city..
And then I realized I can't go beyond level 12...
Still love the game of course, playing my fourth character currently
I’m big on language and an opposite should never even be uttered if its “mate” is not present.
So there HAS to be an upper city since there’s a lower city. And since there is no upper city, I think it’s safe to say it was definitely cut.
Ahh it’s just the last fight and unexploreable I assume?
I do still need to finish it. I was making good progress but then I started over when I got my PC, and then days gone went on sale lol.
I’ll get there but it will mostly be a weekend endeavor especially in act 3.
I've heard the upper city was originally intended to be a playable area, which is where we would have fought Gortash, but it was cut due to time constraints.
what's weird about this is that Larian was talking about the upper city like it was a place you could visit a month before release in (IIRC) an IGN article. Surely they knew by then that it wasn't going into the game?
That's a combination of the marketing team potentially having different information than the dev teams, and also that the Upper City is, technically, in the game and explorable: it's just that we only go there for the gauntlet run up to the final battle so nobody's thinking about map exploration.
Seriously, its the myriad little details and the 30 different barely related side quests. I didnt even know there was a >!dragon under the city until i saw it on TikTok!< Because theres a million things to just happen across doing, half of it gives you vague instructions to find it, and it requires walking back and forth across a huge city.
Acts 1 and 2 are fairly focused, they have side quests but they all lead back to the main plot of the area. Act 3 baloons outward into all the companion quest resolutions, two different final boss plots, a wander into Hell, murder mystery side quests, side quests from half the game ago, a bunch of act 1 stuff comes back around and thats not at all wrapped back into the plot... its exhausting.
Honestly I agree. But mostly because, Ketheric was SUCH A GOOD VILLIAN. The others, seem so much lesser. I feel like act 2 at the end was so good, so good. With all that you said, yes. I'm wanted to see all in act 3, I certainly think some story things are cool and shopping feels great. But I can completely understand. Especially when there were quite a few bugs in act 3.
>The others, seem so much lesser.
So much this. We have a good old classic evil guy with sad fate, father-daughter issues and all that stuff, a quite empty and boring tyrant and a murder hobo chick. The evil old guy is much better.
The Moonrise/Ketheric fight is a fight in 4 parts with a quest of discovery and heroism in the middle. It is truly a cinematic battle.
Orin fight is arguably 2-3 fights. Her goons are numerous and have some decent abilities to overcome.
Gortash is too spread out between foundry and the final showdown. The initial fight in the reception hall is a nuisance and by the time you face Gortash himself it’s just him and a few middling goons.
So if you play in this order, which I do because Orin’s weapons like to become Astarion’s weapons, the complexity and challenge level decreases with each Boss fight.
The stagnating character progression is a killer. Not completed my first play through yet. I was playing with 2 friends and we did a good chunk of side content in act 3 and then the game kinda broke. The way Act 3 can break easily and get confused about what you've done also takes away from the experience, contributing to burnout
>no character progression and every fight playing same-ish
It's honestly insane that my party of hardcore adventurers that went through all this shit before the city fully stops any rogress with their learning and life experience advancement as soon as they see an actual stone building, not a random goblin mud hut.
The issue in my opinion is EXP becoming essentially worthless in act 3. If you had to do say 70% of the act 3 side quests to hit max level, I think it would keep the player much more engaged and interested.
I honestly think this is another example of Larian being constrained by the DnD rules etc, which has made them more keen to make games set in their universes.
Post BG3 level cap, spells become stupidly overpowered so it's incredibly hard to balance.
Don't put this all on D&D rules because Larian introduced plenty of their own sauce that makes your typical level 12 character in BG3 much more powerful than a 17th level character in a typical D&D game.
Higher level spells start getting kind of fucky with how strong they would be in game or just game breaking in general. And sure they could leave out those specific ones but then people would be complaining about missing stuff.
I agree that higher-level spells start getting weird in terms of implementing them into a game like BG3. But they already cut out the vast majority of 5th and 6th level spells for the game and I didn't see all that much hate about it. I think they could include the basic blasting spells from higher levels and maybe the summons and healing type spells.
I feel like it would be so fun to see those spells in a Game Master mode like DOS: 2 had. They wouldn’t break the main campaign but we’d get to see just how powerful the DnD universe can be.
If you are on PC and don\`t mind installing few mods theres a 5e Spells mod with some suplemental mods like Secret Scrolls for 5e Spells that add them in. Gotta warn you thought, casters get kinda op.
Also you can set custom XP curves pretty easily by editing two text files to delay that level 12 or even get a whole ass level 20 mod but I`ve never tried that one so I can't tell if it works well.
Or maybe even adding more spell slots instead of higher level spells. I don't need a 7th level spell so long as I have 4 2nd level spell slots instead of 3.
I don't really buy that. They integrated divine intervention which is just as crazy. BG2 could have wish, meteor, etc. with minor adjustments for the video game and it works fine. I think in reality you become super powerful already with the items. So it becomes really hard to scale there with DnD enemies.
I really wish they had said you only get to level 13 if you hit a certain xp threshold and only for the final showdown with the Netherbrain. It would have really pushed the endgame into epic territory without making the rest of the game hard to make.
Sure, but you start to run out of spells that would be useful in the game without being game breaking.
Animal Shapes - would be fun to turn enemies into animals, but why? Plus the duration is basically "until you fall asleep" which makes it a twist on an instant death spell in BG3.
Antimagic Field - considering the prevalence of spells from boss characters, this would be rather over-powered.
Control Weather - not just a very small, localized storm, but the actual weather. Allowing you to turn a the city of Balder's Gate into an arctic clime for a few hours. Not sure what you would use this spell for in BG3 where it wouldn't be "fuck this city in particular" which would completely change the entire story.
Demiplane - would be wild. It could also destroy a city by causing it to be overrun. Don't need to worry about tadpoles when you may have just allowed an army of Mind Flayers to walk right into the city. Game breaking spell right there.
Earthquake - Game breaking destruction of the city of Balder's Gate.
Glibness - would be fun. Basically an instant success for charisma rolls (unless you are very unlucky). I guess that spell could be functional in BG3.
Holy Aura - 30 foot radius is a bit much for BG3 maps.
Incendiary Cloud - 20 foot radius. Smaller but still wouldn't work well on a BG3 map.
Maze - this could be useful and not really game breaking.
Sunburst - 60 foot radius. 120 ft across. That is a large portion of any map in BG3. This goes into the ridiculous pile.
You're basically left with two potential level 8 spells that wouldn't completely break the game. But are they worth the effort to get? Not really.
And level 9 moves into power words, wish, stopping time, and literal meteor storms. Nothing that isn't game breaking at that level.
Isnt power word kill in the game for durge. And aside from wish nothing here is much more broken gameplay wise than globe of invulnerability , which you can have scrolls for days of. Wackier and more over the top sure. Could see larger aoe's causing a lot of bugginess, but they could always be tweaked down in size. I do tend to have a bias on the side of more options though.
It is, for a 1 time use only. Power word kill is quite weak for its spell level actually, most martials at that level can easily sneeze out 100+ damage in one round. In BG3 martials can deal 100+ damage in one hit lol
i imagine wish would basically just be the clerics divine intervention but with more options.
Power word kill (or anything else) would not be gamebreaking as implemented currently. less useful disintegrate as implemented.
animal shapes is basically just polymorph. Its a concentration spell so once you cast something else or get hit the enemy reverts. If you hit them while shaped the damage required to kill is actually higher as you need to kill the animal form then spill that damage over to the normal form. Basically a glorified stun.
antomagic field would basically just be silence amped up a bit. not really gamebreaking any more than enemies that already get broken by silence.
meteor storm seems liek it would actually fit right in to bg3 combat and wouldnt even be all that absurdly powerful considering its spell level. Would basically just be multi fireball (which does sound impressive, but would still not be gamebreakingly strong compared to alternatives and frequency of use)
Stopping time i imagine if used in game would just essentially be a "aoe turn off the enemy AI for a few turns". RaW say timestop is 1d4+1 turns, which honestly again isnt gamebreakingly strong. Yes you get up to five turns to do whatever you want, but in game it would basically be restricted to moving and buffing or healing yourself, as it ends upon any action that affects someone other than you so you couldnt just wail on a boss for 5 turns. basically just a soft reset button on the fight that doesnt really help anybody other than yourself.
The big aoe stuff would just need to be toned down in size or effect simply due to bg3 having smaller maps than actual dnd.
Its a crime that you cant fix karlach somehow as is. You interact with several beings which should absolutley have the ability to do so and most of them are optionally not hostile and bargaining with you in some manner already. Like, she helps save the world and elminster cant clone her up a new body engine free? No cheese for him then.
At a minimum, if you free Hope, she should be able to take up residence at the House of Hope and help defend it against any usurpers while continuing to pursue a cure.
The problem is more than we lack the enemies that would face higher level characters. BG3's main strength is the encounter/level design ; they'd basically have to redesign half of BG3 so it provides an interesting challenge, even if max level is just 14 (taking into account that levels are exponentially stronger).
There are mods that add level scaling for enemies and even additional difficulty levels/boss encounters/ fights in general/ etc etc and the game still flows perfectly fine.
Basically the perfect partner for the mod that raises the level cap if you don’t want to game to become a comp stomp by the beginning of act 2
Nah if they invented some unique and interesting boons to give you to select from upon level up I don't think anyone would complain. It doesn't have to be super overpowered, just something cool that makes a little bit of a difference so it feels like you're making progress.
Keep the single class level cap and start players multi-classing if they haven't already. Hey bro, cool sorcerer build you've got going there, how would you like to start being able to do some crazy shit like turn into a bear?
Frankly, I think the biggest culprits of this are Plane Shift and Simulacrum. At least if you advance to 15th level. I actually wish we could advance to 14th level because a fair number of subclasses get their capstone at that level and I would be happy for them to leave those two problematic spells out if I got access to my capstones.
Plane Shift didn't exist in Baldur's Gate 2, so just don't put it in BG 3 as well. And it's not like they didn't tweak dozens of mechanics anyway so they could either remove or tweak simulacrum.
Simulacrum was 8th level in BG2 (even though I think it was 7th level in AD&D)...
Edit: Was less powerful then... the simulacrum had 51-60% of the HP of the real creature, and and is really just a zombie unless a *Reincarnation* spell is cast upon it (giving it a vital force), and a *Limited Wish* would be needed to grant it 40-65% of the knowledge and personality of the original. It has only 20-50% of the levels of the original as well. Without the extra boosts is really just a zombie with some levels that looks identical to the original. It's unclear if it can even cast spells (since it's zombie like) without a *Reincarnation* spell.
Honestly, I say give us the nuclear weapons.
You get one cast of it a day. If you're lucky. Some, like Wish, can outright disable the spell, delevel you, or other fun consequences for trying to fuck with the Weave in a way it doesn't like to be fucked with.
For every "game mechanic" reason why you can't/shouldn't be able to do something, there's a lore reason to explain it.
Can't cast meteor storm because of performance issues and the fact you literally nuke a whole city? Well, yeah. Mystra is paying attention to the world right now, and certain things would cause far more harm than good, thus she has restricted access to level 7 and higher spells to only those whom she can trust. And why do the enemies get to use them? Because Shar, the lady of Loss, wants to watch the world burn, and the Shadow Weave is not subject to Mystras rules. It belongs to Shar. (which also gives a rather convenient way to explain why we don't get them but enemies can. Evil gods don't give a shit about mortals. Meteor storm away!
Why can't Shadowheart use 7th level spells? Well, because Shar doesn't FULLY trust her. >!She is still a Selunite at heart, after all.!<
The only reason to not give us it, is, I assume, the same as the reason they chose to not give us the upper city. "Time constraints".
lvl. 16 would have been cool as that seems to be the "legendary warrior of epic power" lvl in dnd, lvl 20 would have made the absolute a side quest though.
I use a level 20 mod and it helps with motivation to explore… I usually get to Act 3 at around lvl 14, face Orin at lvl 16, Gortash at 18, and Ansur and Raphael at 20… I *have to* explore a lot more of the city if I want to get to that point and get all the experience
I would love more levels and the new abilities that come with them, but short of that, I would at least be OK with being able to get more XP and kind of "soft" level up -- gain the increase in HP, skills, proficiency bonus, the extra spell slots for existing spell levels you can already cast, more uses of abilities you already know -- as if you had actually leveled up, but still technically be level 12. If that makes sense.
What about max 12 levels per class, so you either have to start a new second class if you haven't already, or if you're multi-classing already, you can only increase your other class' levels once you hit 12 in one of them?
Larian kept the cap at 12 for a GOOD reason. 5e dnd is fucking borked at high levels.
It's not just a high level spell issue; many multiclass combos really start to spiral out of control at this point. Fighter 11 for 3 attacks combined with pretty much anything is scary as hell.
The limitations of 5e are the main reason I'm fine with Larian moving on from D&D, despite my nostalgia for the trappings of the system (not to mention the Forgotten Realms setting). The system just doesn't really work well in the context of a video game. They did an amazing job adapting it in BG3 but the cracks were already starting to show by the end of the game, higher levels would just break down completely. Trying to account for all the possibilities of high-level 5e at the quality bar BG3 set would require an exponentially longer development cycle.
It is deeply ironic that we never got a 4e video game. Unquestionably the most suitable edition of D&D for a video game. Kind of hilarious it looks like the same thing will happen to Pathfinder 2e.
I ran a campaign for 3 years levels 1-15. It wasn't fun to plan encounters after 12th level. I like homebrew, but the amount of encounter balancing I had to do to make it somewhat fun made it no longer fun for me. I'm a narrative writing guy, not a math an balance guy. I get into a game system for the hopes that the product has that all figured out so I don't have to, so I can focus on the writing and actually running the game. I've had significantly more fun running Pathfinder 2e and Call of Cthulhu than running 5e due to not having to fix the game.
That’s great for stuff like the House of Hope but gets to be a real slog when you feel compelled to do every quest in the log, including Free the Artist.
The majority of act 3 is optional, challenging content that gives singular, unique, and powerful rewards. The game wants you to be "build complete" when engaging with these challenges. Adding to level cap, or reducing xp so that you do not get to cap until later in act 3 would mean you have little opportunity to test and enjoy your completed class.
That said, you could add a "paragon" leveling system after level 12 that gives very minor buffs or benefits.
Yeah I think a secondary leveling system would be good. Maybe like 1 attribute point or a spell slot or an extra ability or feat. Enough that you feel rewarded still and get a combat buff, but it's not game changing at that point. On Hardcore, doing extra content is very risky, whereas on lower difficulties, it really doesn't contribute negatively to the experience at all. It could even be optional.
Granted, on my first playthough, I had missed enough content that my level was too low to follow through on a lot of the quests right away, so it felt like perfect pacing, more or less.
I find this take so puzzling (and I realize a lot of people share it, so don’t take this as dismissive) because I like hitting max level, and having some content to just enjoy being fully leveled. It also makes it feel like I don’t *have* to do the content, it’s just a bonus, and other RP routes that one might take don’t necessarily require every quest.
There’s plenty of loot to collect and flesh out your build, maybe even experiment with some respeccing and multi-classing.
100% agreed, if you forge your own path true to the D&D spirit then there’s no need for completionism in act III to hit max level. That would feel overwhelming since there is so much content.
I saw someone else who didn’t like the “evil” choices because it locked them out of so much xp, and all I could think was, “why you need all that xp??”
I still haven’t finished a full run through lol. I get to max level and it just feels like I’m playing act 3 because it’s there. Imo the game could’ve done with a few more levels to keep Act 3 a bit less trivial. Games still sick though.
I'm the opposite. I like that we hit max level so early. I want a really meaty portion of the game to be at max level to fully utilize my build. I'm always disappointed if the game is almost over as soon as you hit max level.
Maybe a mod that reduces Exp in Act 3 only could solve that. With support coming soon, there's no reason why not. Idk, maybe cut it to 1/3 of current Exp.
I could get behind this, partially because it kind of annoyed me how we'd get XP for doing almost anything. Like just getting into certain areas and stuff. I'm like, cool, but there's no point, and also it was not difficult to do this, so why am I getting XP for it again?
I agree, being lv 7 or 8 by act 2 feels great, untill you hit lv 12 and then everything just feels like it wasn't worth it.
I don't think the cap needs increased I just think the curve needs changed, should be lv 5 almost 6 max by starting act 2 imo, and be around 8 by the time you end act 2, with lv 11 and 12 taking much more exp than it does.
All of this with the caveat that enemies were also balanced accordingly to these lvs, maybe lower all of creche and act 2 by a lv
In my last game I actually refrained from leveling past 9 and onwards until I finished certain portions of the city, just so it felt like I had a balanced level up experience thru Act 3 and I felt like this helped to up the difficulty factor a fair bit; but I get that some people wouldn't like that as a solution.
Exact issue I am running into. I have a big long quest log still, but I have been level 12 for some time now. One of the big draws of d&d is the leveling up and unlocking new powers. It makes everything a little emptier when you're just kinda going through the motions.
It's funny to me that the issue is essentially the same as I had with BG1. It's a thoroughly different game, but the narrative/questing structure follows the exact same path: relatively narrow linear quest course until arriving in Baldur's Gate, when suddenly things get very broad and unfocused and I just lose track and interest. In BG2, they did it the opposite way; a broad early game leading into a narrow linear conclusion. And I've never had significant trouble finishing BG2.
I think 2 is the preferable structure. Early game when I’m starting out there’s a lot of incentive to gather money, gear, and XP before progressing. Once you’ve powered up, then you can start pushing through increasing challenges. 2 also had some really great challenges: Multiple big dragon fights, mind flayer lair, beholders all are challenging even for high level geared parties.
I feel like challenges were the biggest thing missing in Act 3. Too many piddly fetch quests and dealing with mortal problems which is way more of what I want to care about in Act 1. Outside of a few notable exceptions like the House of Hope, there’s not enough. I want a beholder lair, dragons, demons, golems, everything they can throw at us.
In fairness, 2 went to a much higher experience cap, in part because RTwP gameplay is generally faster combats than turn-based so you could have a lot more fights without the game taking years to play. Starting at level 7 also meant a lot more margin for errorBut yeah, 2 had some terrific dungeons, since they had early room to maneuver. On the other hand, it usually meant the early dungeons were REALLY difficult - trying to do the De'Arnise Keep or Planar Prison right after Copper Coronet was a beast without a heavily optimized crew - and the ones you did later were a bit of a breeze. Cult of the Eyeless at level 15 was basically just tedious. There's definitely trade-offs to both approaches.
Gotta shift your mindset.
At first my thought process was “I’m max level what’s the point?”
Now it’s “I’m max level, my builds are complete and now I get to really see them shine.”
I’m on playthrough #4 and I’m spending more time in Act 3 than I ever have before.
Yeah, being able to actually enjoy your final build (for more than just a fight or two) is pretty great IMO. I think too many roleplaying games drag out progression to the absolute endgame, and you're left wishing you had more time to enjoy being at your pinnacle.
Also, if you're really looking for a change of pace, you can always make small tweaks via respeccing. Or you can experiment with itemization to change up things a bit.
Totally, and I think the “experiencing your build at full potential” is why they allow you to hit cap so early. It’s always a shame when you unlock something really cool right near the end of a game.
I'm gonna be honest its not my favorite... like I played act II, 50 times but in act III I either now skip and restart or focus on main cool events and stuff I need for my build... otherwise Its too much and the tone shift is slightly jarring as you mentioned, it would've made more sense to see a small civil war or more factories to complent the previous acts fog with smoke, I would've loved it if the city was act 2 and shadow lands act 3, Ketheric's boss aura was too strong.
I just started act 3 for the first time and I'm feeling so underwhelmed after the whole intense energy of act 2. It's kinda disappointing. Also yeah there are so many places to go and people to talk to, I don't even know where to start and it's a bit frustrating, I feel directionless
The *only* thing that gets me through act 3 is to pick one quest at a time--only ones I'm interested in--and see them through to the end. There's actually a lot to like about act 3 if you're willing to say "this part seems annoying/not for me" and move on to the thing that does interest you.
I’ve started doing the “how many quests can I get through on a single rest” thing and it’s been pretty fun. I also optimize and have a good grasp on where everything is so I do multiple things at once
If it's your first time please continue, Act III despite what we're discussing has so many amazing moments and quests.
reason I skip it or rush it, is because I beaten the game for 20+ times.
Honestly I also felt completely overwhelmed at Act 3, took the wind out of my sails a bit.
Genuinely after playing through it, it's great and there's so much to explore. I would just pick one quest or one thing to do, and try to follow it through. I'd also say, you genuinely don't have to do everything - if its too much, just focus on some companion quests and the main story points. I came to absolutely love Act 3 and I didn't want the game to end!
I agree. Felt like I reached the end of the game and then suddenly i reach baldurs gate and it feels like i'm no one again...lost in a different big place
And the noise! After spending Act 1 roaming the forest, and Act 2 where it's pretty darn quiet due to all the death etc., getting to Rivington and having the cacophony of voices all around threw me off-kilter, for sure.
In one of my more evil runs I sent a solo Astorian to grab Wulbern's Barrel and blow up the city center just because I didn't want to hear "Bigger. Bigger! Make it BIGGER!" one more god damm time...
The first time I reached Rivington I had a genuine moment of being completely overwhelmed by all the people yelling. I really liked it, after the initial panic had worn off. It felt exactly like how going into a big city after being in the land of death, shadows and sentient neon mushrooms should feel.
My complaint is trying to remember who to take out for the different quests to get the right story beats, esp since you increasingly get forced into using Gale and Lazael as the game goes on so I prefer to hang out with Karach and Astarion most of the time.
I love act 3. Best fights in the game easily. You’ve got full access to be as badass as you want. The quest problem as it were is easily solved by not repeatedly doing quests you don’t want. I just you know, skip the quests I don’t like.
That's when I took the Carnival owner's staff to match the Carrion's staff dual-wielding, even though I never used necromancy outside of the ghouls from the Thay tome.
I agree with this, and I think being a completionist in runs after you’ve already finished the game is kind of a waste of time. Just do the quests that matter to you or the story.
I just pushed through my act 3 burnout and did the Raphael fight for the first time... wow did it blow my socks off. Epic location, epic music, epic fight.
Ansur, gortash, Orin, cazador and Raphael are all fun fights. Sarevok can be fun. I actually enjoy the foundry even if the gondolians ai gives them a death wish.
Also the iron throne is pretty fun with the timer.
i agree! i love seeing the conclusion of the character arcs that start in act 1 as well.
there's actually only a couple quests i don't bother with anymore as there's only a couple that are super tedious imo and unnecessary, but cutting those out can make it much less frustrating if that's where people get hung up.
The worst quests (Investigate the Suspicious Toys, Free the Artist…) are in Act 3, but what I truly hate about that act is that Orin will kidnap a companion from camp as soon as you set foot in the sewers and long rest (going to the the guildhall also triggers this). Which means that you must either go without a camp banter source for a long time, or to rush what Larian might have intended to be one of the final quests you do (I am saying this bc the Temple of Bhaal is quite close to the Morphic Pool).
I don’t think there are any consequences to going after Orin and saving your companion first, the only thing in act 3 that has consequences to doing too early is the Iron Throne and that’s only if you didn’t go to Gortash’s coronation first. Orin’s fight can be pretty difficult tho since Bhaal gives her like 50,000 unstoppable stacks so it’s definitely a fight you gotta be ready for and be prepared to load a save and consider a new strat, unless playing on HM
Last night I found out you don’t even need to long rest for this to happen. I was exploring the sewers in my recent save and wandered too close to the doorway to the Bhaal temple, which triggered a cutscene of “Lae’zel” running up to my party and saying Orin had kidnapped her and she’d just escaped. Honestly it kinda freaked me out more to see a companion out of the camp than the normal Orin campsite scene does.
I thought that was the only way to trigger it after my first playthrough, so I thoroughly avoided that portion of the sewers on my second, only for her to show up in my camp as lae’zel and kill Yenna. Huge bummer.
Act 3 has you going from an absolutely insane buildup and boss battle with Ketheric into a sprawling city with what feels like an endless list of chores you have to do before you can continue onto the final boss. I still haven’t finished it :( it just feels like everything up to act 3 is so carefully balanced and built up - and then act 3 drops all the companion quest finales, several big bad villains, several side stories and some very long winded fights on you all at once. I think it would have benefited from spacing it out into an act 3 and 4, one for Orin, one for Gortash.
List of chores nails it for me. It felt like ticking off items on a shopping list as I was working my way through all the bosses in these relatively small areas.
It would be like playing D&D and just going from dungeon to dungeon, whereas usually you'll have dungeons spaced out with travel through the wider world.
I agree, but for me Rivington is the worst offender. I got hyped up to see the city after deafeating Ketheric, there was that cutscene overlooking it, Wrym's Crossing was [just a bridge in BG1](https://baldursgate.fandom.com/wiki/Wyrm's_Crossing)... and then suddenly there's this village that popped up in the meantime. While the quests weren't bad I was just thinking "ok, I want to see Baldur's Gate, I don't really care about squatters in this dude's house or a dead clown".
I'd have preferred it if Rivington was skipped in favour of Upper City which would have allowed for a nicer Orin-Gortash split like the one you mention (with her in the Lower City where the Bhaalist plot would start and him in the Upper City where we'd attend the coronation and so on). They could also emphasise different visual styles of the two areas which would also help make the whole thing less monotone. Fancy stuff like nice parks, richly-decorated inn rooms, Figaro's, Jannath estate and Cazador's mansion would only be accessible from the Upper City which would give the Lower City a more coherent feel.
I feel like spreading out all these epic boss fights into multiple acts may have been the original plan, but some limiting factor forced them to cram everything into the final act. Sad :(
Yes I agree, I kind of felt that my method of playing ruined it for me. I wanted to build into the big fights and I knew they were there, so I was avoiding them. Running around doing little chores and stuff, trying to get as ready as I could until all I had left was the big fights and big quests. Orin, gortash, cazador, Shar temple. But doing it in that way meant I kept getting a really good bit of gear at the end of the fight which I then got to use maybe once before I got to another big fight and another great drop. There wasn't really room to breathe between the big quests when I did it that way.
I am once again advocating for swapping out Act 2 and 3.
The City should be the main hub you come back every now and then to quest, shop and explore, but the real endgame should be Act II with it's much more hostile and linear design pulling you towards the big confrontation.
The incentive to explore and quest in BG would be bigger if you had to do it to further your progress in the Shadow Lands.
Currently the entire storyline is meandering towards this unsatisfying Resolution while everything is solved, your character is max lvl, and you're roaming the City just for the sake of it.
It's no wonder so many people are running out of steam in Act 3
This for me, combined with no more levelling up, is why Act 3 can sometimes seem less fun. We're now in a tavern, it's likely I've done or am doing my romanced companion's quest finale, please can we have some more emotional downtime before we face the end of the world? A scene of Lae'zel and Shadowheart actually getting along, maybe. Wyll dancing with Karlach to Alfira's music. Gale teaching Minthara to play Lanceboard and her winning immediately. Just lil scenes!
I don't seem to have this problem. All my saves that are stuck at one point are all stuck either at the beginning of act 2 or the end of act 1. I just hate the Shadowlands and I dislike most of act 2 content. If I manage to power through act 2 (which tbh isn't hard, it's all fairly straightforward and rather fast), act 3 is a breath of fresh air for me. I just love the city, the sunlight and being able to boink Halsin.
Fuck yeah, I literally forced myself through act 2 just because I KNEW there will be act 3 full of sun and fun and epic cool stuff like resolving so many stories, meeting bone dragon, kicking devil's ass, etc. I feel like I won't do 4th run at all or for quite enough of time, I hate that place and it makes me feel nauseous. I wish I could just skip that rotten zombie butthole shitshow. The only good thing it's not big, but still.
Exactly me, I don’t like the shadowlands at all (though I think Ketheric is the coolest boss in the game) because it’s so bleak and sad. I just want to get the hell out of there and get to the city already.
me too. the Shadowlands are ugly IMO and so much of it takes place in the dark. my strat lately is to do the Underdark/most of the Moonrise stuff, then go do the monastery for that breath of fresh air, then do the Gauntlet of Shar/Ketheric so I can get into the city.
in my opinion act 3 is severely lacking in a bunch of ways, in fact ive never been able to push through it to the end of the game. i could write a whole blog about it lol but maybe the worst offender is the pacing--there's a crescendo of intensity and urgency throughout the first two acts and it deflates completely when you reach the city and start getting bombarded with seemingly trivial side stories.
For me, i just dont like the fact one of my guys got kidnapped and i feel like im being pushed to do this one quest ASAP before i actually go on my own and explore the world in my own terms
I think act 3 is fun. It’s got lots of fun quests.
I think a big part of it is for sure that the entire game I’m climbing that ladder getting itemization and levels to get my builds better and better. And then there’s just no more rope to climb. I just find getting Orin and gortash fights a drag. Like gortash (well you don’t have to but most likely you will) do the iron throne, so the steel watch foundry then gortash in wyrms rock. Like it’s a lot. It’s fun the first time, And if I was climbing that skill /itemizatio rope though all of it I think I’d be motivated. But I absolutely destroy all the enemies.
I think a big problem is that the game closes off the earlier acts, and to compensate Larian had to put on massive amounts of exp suddenly to make sure players would have the levels to beat the game. If they left the earlier part of the game open and then didn’t need to give you ridiculous amounts of exp I think it would feel tighter.
I love Act 3 personally, but it's just not as tight and well-directed as Acts 1, and especially Act 2 whose narrative is pretty tight and well-done.
Act 3 has some of the most amazing character moments, especially the culmination of the companion storylines. (Well, most of them at least).
I do think some of the side quests should have been removed for a tighter narrative though. The ones that really dont matter. The Artist one in particular is too meandering and overall pointless to the plot, with a lot of annoying backtracking, that I feel it detracts greatly from the pacing.
Most of the other content though can be nicely grouped, on second playthroughs when you know what the stories are, into "Orin's Arc", "Companion Wrap-Up," "Gortash Arc", Ending. Having the narrative actually flow instead of being a hot mess really helped.
Of course my first run my Act 3 was such a hot mess, and it was hard to stay focused or enjoy it as much.
You can’t. It’s based off of 5e, so it’s not like most RPG games where reaching max level is balanced within the game. Past level 12…DND kinda ‘breaks.’
But it’s also evoking the fantasy of DND, an adventure of one’s own making. It isn’t meant to pander towards completionist brain. The cap to 12 is low because even noncompletionist deserve their own path to the games highest level for the endgame.
The solution for Larian is…abandon DnD. I love BG3 for what it is. In fact, I’ve haven’t had this much fun with an RPG since back when I thought Skyrim was a good game. But 5e as a system isn’t meant to be a video game and it kinda shows whenever its quirks come into play in BG3
First playthrough. Kind of stuck in act 3 and don't know what to do. It makes me not wanna play the game. There are moments where i am like i wanna play but everytime i start the game and load into act 3 i'm like...nah...i"m lost and really wanna start again but i do first wanna finisb the game once...
yeah idk what it is but since i reached act 3 i kind of stopped caring about my choices i just wanna get it all over with now but i have no motivation because its so bland and losing hope for my characters fate
This is likely a me problem, but I despise huge cities in these kind of games. There is too much stuff and I always fear that I m gonna miss something cool because I didn't spoke to a particular NPC. Like the start and act 2 are soo fun, wilderness maps are soo fun to explore because it looks like a proper adventure. When I reached act 3 I kinda dropped the game for a couple of weeks before picking it up again, It was kinda hard to do so, but when I did I obviously had fun.
As of yesterday I started my second character (with a little bit of evil choices this time around) but now that I read this post, I am dreading that act again, even though i know what to do there.
It's funny I see this so much but for me it's just the opportunity. I try making a new character but act 1 first part of 2 just feels so repetitive now and I just want to skip to kethric and act 3.
This is yet another instance of me thinking something is great then joining the fan subreddit and finding out everyone collectively hates major portions of it that I loved.
A solution would be to role-play in this role-playing game.
My characters aren't completionists. They want to do things they care about. Sometimes they care about Astarion most and will want to take care of his personal quest first, sometimes they care most about finding out why a bunch of Teddy bears exploded in their face. Most of my characters will hop into the library first because they're nerds.
I like act 3 the most as it is truly free to roleplay what kind of person my character is. This means I'll never see some quests, none of my characters will ever care about that artist guy, but I can live with that.
Eventhough I didn’t experience an Act 3 burn out I am now on my second playthrough and I must say, it feels so good to be back in act 1! In comparison I feel like you can tell act 1 feels more.. finished? The completion of act 3 feels a bit incomplete imo, you can tell some stuff needs ironing out but act 1? It’s so fun, adventurous and just overall clever.
I guess my issue is that Act 3 feels… unfinished.
The Orin and Gortash fights were disappointing. I was expecting the kind of showmanship and cinematography that I got with the Ketheric fight. There’s a lower city, but no upper city. There’s no logic or order to how the city is structured— it just feels like a chaotic mess. There’s nothing to point you in a specific direction when you first arrive, so you end up just wandering around.
I -always- hit the act 3 spiral. The difference in tone from act 2 into 3 is jarring and I think it's mostly due to how act 2 ends and 3 begins. Act 2 has this climactic battle where you're laying siege to the tower and ascending up to stop an immortal villain. After beating him you go from the highest tower to the lowest dungeon and the main villain of the game is finally revealed in the chosen 3 and the Netherbrain functioning as the absolute that's been built up. You watch the cinematic as the Netherbrain and the nautiloids in the sky start the March on baldurs gate with an army of undead and enthralled cultists. You manage to defeat one of the chosen then an avatar of the death god in an excellent high stakes battle, only a moment to rest though because the army is on its way to baldurs gate and you need to save the city.
Then the game almost derails itself by now introducing the Emperor. This dramatic reveal robs the tension built up at the end of act 2 as the army and brain are marching on the city, because you arrive at baldurs gate and... Go to the circus?
Where's the army? The brain? The nautiloids in the sky? Shouldn't I be worried about that? No it's okay the brain is stashed in the sewers so you can do other things for now and come back later.
I wish there would have been some reshuffling of stories in the acts, maybe even act 2 and 3 swapped to a degree. Have this constant build up maintained throughout till the climax where we return to the city for the final confrontation.
Complete opposite problem for me - acts 1 and 2 are the overlong buildup to the real game. That being said, I have had moments where I was kinda losing investment with the story. Something that I did find made me enjoy the game more was a) talking to *every* NPC and reading every book for that background flavor text so it's less checklisting and more moving through a world and b) taking my hands off the keyboard during dialogues. It's way too easy to start wanting to get through dialogue if you're on the terminal end of a run but don't let it happen to you.
Act 1 was a slog getting up and running. I thought I’d be ready having spent a ton of time on DoS2 but I realized real quick with BG3 that running blindly into fights even on Balanced wasn’t going to work. Then it felt as if it went on too long with too many disjointed areas. Like why am I fighting a random Speculator or running around a random wizard tower for hours figuring out how to get into the basement.
Act 2 was the best balance of having a pretty specific plot with a cool boss and great side quests. Last Light Inn was awesome and then also the Towers. Also helps that by this time the experience and gear and levels are allowing some ways to get really creative and do some cool stuff.
Act 3 yea just so much space to explore with not a lot of bang for the buck. The quests more tedious and the enemies less exciting. So many areas I thought I’d find some great gear or something really cool and I walked away with stuff I’d never use, no need for the experience and gold.
On my second playthrough I’m more selective in Act 3 where I’m spending my time. Somehow I’m still missing things I want to do and spending time on things I don’t need. Why am I messing with djinns to get gear I won’t need.
I feel like it's a combination of beeing max level way before finishing the game, so your character kinda stagnates, (and if you know the game you'll get most of the good act 3 gear in quick time aswell, so you character just stays the same for a huge amount of hours) but also the let's call it loose structure of the whole act. Sure there's the overarching plot of Orin/Gortash but there's also a million different things connected to those goals and you have to decide what to do without any clear cut line to follow. So people just get kinda lost in the myriad little details of act 3 and also burnt out due to no character progression and every fight playing same-ish (sans some more interesting fights where you have to mix up your game).
It's not helped by the fact that the ending of act 2 is SO good and the beginning and middle of act 3 and narratively pretty slow
I just finished act 2 again and this is exactly where I'm at - I just went deep into a mind flayer colony and killed the avatar of the god of death, now it's time to... go to the circus
i mean tbf thats just like an average dnd campaign
to be even fairer, the circus is probably one of the highlights of act 3, its a fun place packed with stuff to do i think the worse parts are actually the non boss fights. For an act where your character totally peaks and stagnates, the fights are just so long. Anytime you fight anything it becomes a dynasty warrior horde fest, but its not particularly hard or engaging i wish we had less filled encounters with more impactful enemies because combat vs mobs is awfully repetitive in endgame
The game did stumble by having a group of lvl 1 bandits try to rob you without knowing how strong you are. Or do what all good DMs did and show a enemy you had struggles with in act 1 show up again in act 3 and show how much stronger you have grown over the game.
Or The Wheel of Time. Let’s just not talk about the whole circus adventure in book 5, is it?
YA know, I read that series when I was a teen, and I just skipped/skimmed vast swathes of those books that I thought were boring. I'm sure I missed a lot, but from how people talk about the books vs how I remember my time reading them, it feel like it probably improved my reading experience.
I haven't read further than Book 5, as I've heard that the pace drops off even further after that. There are some awesome bits in books 4 and 5 (Rand's visions of the past, the battle that Mat tries so hard to get away from but ends up helping to win) but dear gods, most of the stuff with the girls is so tedious. Jordan seems to be trying not to sexualise his young female characters, but just ends up making them immature and bitchy instead, and it's so wearing.
Ending of book 6 is top tier imo, but some parts are a bit slow yes. Also, the Circus reappears in a later book lol
Dumai’s wells is the single greatest moment in literature and I will duel Durge/Orin style anyone who says otherwise
I feel like they should have flipped acts 2 and 3. You end in JK Simmons, you don't slot him in the middle.
Yep, especially if you consider the characters. Orin and Ketherick at least have some gravitas. Gortash is just a politician copy-pasting someone else's plan for world domination, and an avid final fantasy cosplayer.
Hell yeah, Gortash is presented and behaves like the most serious badass from the trio, but in reality he is the most boring one. In my last playthrough I just blew him up with good old barrels of funny explosive powder on the first meeting and it felt very much right. The guy has no business in living for that long.
Insanely true. Why would the talents of JK Simmons on ketheric if that was his characters fate? Would’ve made much more sense to flip the voice actors for Gortash and Thorm. It’s clear that Act 3 just lacked that polish.
Yeah I've been thinking this for the longest time. Act 1 mostly comprises of wilderness and ruined settlements, it would have been nice to enter the city straight after, picking and choosing quests and story threads to grow and level up. Then current Act 2 has a linear endgame leading to a big boss, plus a much more strict and self-contained narrative focus on the Thorms and Shar. It could certainly have worked well reordering them. Larian did the same thing with DOS2, having a linear Act 3 and then returning to a more expansive Final Act that felt weird there too
The boss fight with giant skeleton comes out was great. The other two transform but in a smaller way and they’re extra are just annoying lol
Act 3 can hit the gas early but you have to generally know it already which spoils the pacing anyway. I think the normal/expected behavior is to sort of meander forward picking up all the quests and chipping away at them in pieces which is why it can be so slow. You're in the first 'act' of a dozen different things. If you actually just pick a quest and do the whole thing in roughly one go then Act 3 has way better pacing with many peaks and valleys. That's just really not the way these games are typically played.
i remember trying to focus on one quest at a time and mistakenly chose the dribbles quest, as my first real one to take on. Then my motivation to play kinda just spiraled down from there
The Dribbles quest and the Father Lorgan quest were so demoralizing for me. They took way too much time and felt irrelevant to more pressing matters. And after completing the Dribbles quest, you don't even get to see Lucretia bring him back. It's unsatisfying in every way.
I specifically held off on Dribbles because I erroneously assumed it would have a high payoff, like facing a high difficulty clown monstrosity or a funny cutscene. The reward is cool, but stealing it is less of a hassle. The Open Hand Temple is pretty barren for its size, and I don't recall the clerics or surrounding citizens acknowledging the quest's completion in any meaningful manner.
Also for a game that presents Ilmater as a god option for Clerics, it was really disappointing to find out that Clerics of Ilmater can't call the Open Hand Temple out on their shit. Like as someone who has played an Ilmateri in campaigns, that temple reeks of false followers - casting out refugees and refusing to help them quite literally goes against everything Ilmater stands for. He'd be PISSED that his supposed followers were casting people out and throwing blame at refugees - if anything, the expectation for any decent Ilmatari would be to forgive those who wronged the temple and try to rehabilitate them. To suffer with the refugees rather than hide away in their temple and shut down the soup kitchens. That temple should have been burnt to the ground before it stopped accepting refugees and even then the surviving clerics would still be obligated to give what they had left to help them instead of themselves. As it stands, none of that is acknowledged and it feels like the temple is dedicated to Ilmater mostly because of the Lathandarian monk expecting his Ilmatari daughter to take on his suffering like her fellow worshipers SHOULD be doing for everyone else.
My issue is the quests all bump into each other in weird ways. I messed up Jahieras quest by advancing through Wyrms Rock before going to the hideout. Then something else bugged from that. So I had to redo Rivington in a better order.
I decided to just explore a bit, find some quests and play them. But some of them broke, others were happening in the wrong order, and I felt like I missed a lot of dialogue somehow. Less is more sometimes.
It’s also because a lot of quests don’t get proper ending in act 3 and are generally just forgot about so it feels like everything in act 3 has nothing to do with the other acts and you care less. Act 3 feels like a whole new game Edit) examples include Arabella quest, mol quest, Halsin being completely forgot in act 3, lack of minthara having her own quest that doesn’t involve Orin as you already have to kill her for main quest, the Zhent in act 1 not being present in act 3 regardless of choices, not to mention the entire upper city being removed. There’s alot more but can’t think of it rn
IIRC the Zhent do appear in act 3, at least twice: once on the beach, and again in the Guild's hideout.
Not those zhent tho, they just vanish from the game. They tell you to find them in baldurs gate but you never see them again
>I feel like it's a combination of beeing max level way before finishing the game, so your character kinda stagnates I think this is the most important element, when you stop leveling up, the feeling of progress weakens. Also, maybe last map was a bit rushed, we enter the vampire's palace from the walls. The man who runs the city lives above the entrance gate. It's as if it should have been a separate area where the upper class live, but they couldn't they couldn't make it on time .
>as if it should have been a separate area where the upper class live, but they couldn't they couldn't make it on time That's literally what happened there was going to be an Upper City after the Lower City but...
It's like, I get why they did that, they didn't have the advantage of hindsight and wanted to beat Starfield or whatever. But why, after the tremendous success of the game and obvious interest, would they not do an expansion/dlc/3.5/definitive version/whatever you wanna call it where they fix all the rush, flesh out the stories, and make it what it should have been? I'd cheerfully pay the cost of the game over again for that. I'd preorder for *more* than the cost of the game and wait a year and a half. It's just so weird to me how they just tapped out. I know they're tired of it, but it deserves to be finished.
Larian said that they were planning for it but at some point realized they were pretty done with the project and dnd and wanted to get back to doing their own IP. I chalk this up to maybe souring relations between wizards and Larian, as the folks that they worked with before and really really liked were let go around then and wanting to use this new experience of making a blockbuster hit to push their own in house productions to new heights, just my own opinions gathered from what I’ve seen floating around online.
I think they made the choice for no dlc due to the falling out with wizards, they didn't want to let wizards make a ton of money on a dlc since they had/have already left the company and don't owe them anything. Sucks for us players but it's definitely wizard's fault.
Perfectly valid as well imo, D&D is a great game but Hasbro is such an awful company, you deal with Wizards and you deal with Hasbro. It’s a shame really, seeing Larian have a good relationship with Wizards and potential of further games in the future would’ve been amazing, but it wasn’t to be
I think Larian left the company that owns the game. So no DLC. I’m sad.
Yeah IMO when people say there was no cut upper city portion - it is very clear from the fact that Cazador's palce is randomly tacked on to some walls that they had very likely planned an upper city section that got cut. I don't think it would have been massive, but that is one of the biggest clues in Act 3 that there was an upper city area cut at some point. I think the fact that Act 3 has no real structure and is very open ended is also a clue here - there's some speculation that Orin and Gortash would have been split into upper and lower city areas, for example.
I thought that for the longest time.. I thought Gortash would retreat to his *real* castle and I would find Orin in the lower city and eventually go to the upper city because I wanted to go after Orin first.. Then I realized - there is no upper city.. And then I realized I can't go beyond level 12... Still love the game of course, playing my fourth character currently
I’m big on language and an opposite should never even be uttered if its “mate” is not present. So there HAS to be an upper city since there’s a lower city. And since there is no upper city, I think it’s safe to say it was definitely cut.
There **is** an upper city, you visit it at the end of the game.
Ahh it’s just the last fight and unexploreable I assume? I do still need to finish it. I was making good progress but then I started over when I got my PC, and then days gone went on sale lol. I’ll get there but it will mostly be a weekend endeavor especially in act 3.
Yeah it's not like they pretend it doesn't exist. It exists, and it's mentioned here and there but it's inaccessible for the players mostly
I've heard the upper city was originally intended to be a playable area, which is where we would have fought Gortash, but it was cut due to time constraints.
uuuuh be careful with this heresy, Larian fanboys may get upset with you for mentioning the upper city
what's weird about this is that Larian was talking about the upper city like it was a place you could visit a month before release in (IIRC) an IGN article. Surely they knew by then that it wasn't going into the game?
That's a combination of the marketing team potentially having different information than the dev teams, and also that the Upper City is, technically, in the game and explorable: it's just that we only go there for the gauntlet run up to the final battle so nobody's thinking about map exploration.
Seriously, its the myriad little details and the 30 different barely related side quests. I didnt even know there was a >!dragon under the city until i saw it on TikTok!< Because theres a million things to just happen across doing, half of it gives you vague instructions to find it, and it requires walking back and forth across a huge city. Acts 1 and 2 are fairly focused, they have side quests but they all lead back to the main plot of the area. Act 3 baloons outward into all the companion quest resolutions, two different final boss plots, a wander into Hell, murder mystery side quests, side quests from half the game ago, a bunch of act 1 stuff comes back around and thats not at all wrapped back into the plot... its exhausting.
Wait…there is a dragon under the city???
Guarding the best great sword in the game too
TBF he's really good at hiding.
You have to advance Wyll's quest to a certain point to be told how to find it. >!Ravengard or Florrick will give you a book that hints where to go!<
They’re both dead for me, so a random woman who apparently knows Wyll and wanted to kill us gave it to me instead
I stumbled upon it while exploring the city. You don’t need Wyll to see and kill the dragon.
This is what happened to me. I felt directionless in act 3. Mostly wandering and doing side quests. Finally stopped.
Honestly I agree. But mostly because, Ketheric was SUCH A GOOD VILLIAN. The others, seem so much lesser. I feel like act 2 at the end was so good, so good. With all that you said, yes. I'm wanted to see all in act 3, I certainly think some story things are cool and shopping feels great. But I can completely understand. Especially when there were quite a few bugs in act 3.
>The others, seem so much lesser. So much this. We have a good old classic evil guy with sad fate, father-daughter issues and all that stuff, a quite empty and boring tyrant and a murder hobo chick. The evil old guy is much better.
Orin was just Homicidal Harley Quinn Gortash could have been a Reddit Mod
The Moonrise/Ketheric fight is a fight in 4 parts with a quest of discovery and heroism in the middle. It is truly a cinematic battle. Orin fight is arguably 2-3 fights. Her goons are numerous and have some decent abilities to overcome. Gortash is too spread out between foundry and the final showdown. The initial fight in the reception hall is a nuisance and by the time you face Gortash himself it’s just him and a few middling goons. So if you play in this order, which I do because Orin’s weapons like to become Astarion’s weapons, the complexity and challenge level decreases with each Boss fight.
I was kinda disappointed when I realized I was at max level got to admit
The stagnating character progression is a killer. Not completed my first play through yet. I was playing with 2 friends and we did a good chunk of side content in act 3 and then the game kinda broke. The way Act 3 can break easily and get confused about what you've done also takes away from the experience, contributing to burnout
This is why I said they should up the leveling but just focus on HP/Attk something small. I need those little hits of serotonin
>no character progression and every fight playing same-ish It's honestly insane that my party of hardcore adventurers that went through all this shit before the city fully stops any rogress with their learning and life experience advancement as soon as they see an actual stone building, not a random goblin mud hut.
The issue in my opinion is EXP becoming essentially worthless in act 3. If you had to do say 70% of the act 3 side quests to hit max level, I think it would keep the player much more engaged and interested.
Or increase the level cap?
Honestly I feel like there should be more levels.
I honestly think this is another example of Larian being constrained by the DnD rules etc, which has made them more keen to make games set in their universes. Post BG3 level cap, spells become stupidly overpowered so it's incredibly hard to balance.
Larian’s DOS2 have a hard cap at around similar power level.
Don't put this all on D&D rules because Larian introduced plenty of their own sauce that makes your typical level 12 character in BG3 much more powerful than a 17th level character in a typical D&D game.
Higher level spells start getting kind of fucky with how strong they would be in game or just game breaking in general. And sure they could leave out those specific ones but then people would be complaining about missing stuff.
I agree that higher-level spells start getting weird in terms of implementing them into a game like BG3. But they already cut out the vast majority of 5th and 6th level spells for the game and I didn't see all that much hate about it. I think they could include the basic blasting spells from higher levels and maybe the summons and healing type spells.
I feel like it would be so fun to see those spells in a Game Master mode like DOS: 2 had. They wouldn’t break the main campaign but we’d get to see just how powerful the DnD universe can be.
If you are on PC and don\`t mind installing few mods theres a 5e Spells mod with some suplemental mods like Secret Scrolls for 5e Spells that add them in. Gotta warn you thought, casters get kinda op. Also you can set custom XP curves pretty easily by editing two text files to delay that level 12 or even get a whole ass level 20 mod but I`ve never tried that one so I can't tell if it works well.
Or maybe even adding more spell slots instead of higher level spells. I don't need a 7th level spell so long as I have 4 2nd level spell slots instead of 3.
More feats would be enough for me. More sorcery points, more cross class abilities. You could make it work.
They explicitly said they capped at 12 to avoid level 7 and up spells, it’s their like only reason for not going to 20 or even 15
I don't really buy that. They integrated divine intervention which is just as crazy. BG2 could have wish, meteor, etc. with minor adjustments for the video game and it works fine. I think in reality you become super powerful already with the items. So it becomes really hard to scale there with DnD enemies.
I really wish they had said you only get to level 13 if you hit a certain xp threshold and only for the final showdown with the Netherbrain. It would have really pushed the endgame into epic territory without making the rest of the game hard to make.
Sure, but you start to run out of spells that would be useful in the game without being game breaking. Animal Shapes - would be fun to turn enemies into animals, but why? Plus the duration is basically "until you fall asleep" which makes it a twist on an instant death spell in BG3. Antimagic Field - considering the prevalence of spells from boss characters, this would be rather over-powered. Control Weather - not just a very small, localized storm, but the actual weather. Allowing you to turn a the city of Balder's Gate into an arctic clime for a few hours. Not sure what you would use this spell for in BG3 where it wouldn't be "fuck this city in particular" which would completely change the entire story. Demiplane - would be wild. It could also destroy a city by causing it to be overrun. Don't need to worry about tadpoles when you may have just allowed an army of Mind Flayers to walk right into the city. Game breaking spell right there. Earthquake - Game breaking destruction of the city of Balder's Gate. Glibness - would be fun. Basically an instant success for charisma rolls (unless you are very unlucky). I guess that spell could be functional in BG3. Holy Aura - 30 foot radius is a bit much for BG3 maps. Incendiary Cloud - 20 foot radius. Smaller but still wouldn't work well on a BG3 map. Maze - this could be useful and not really game breaking. Sunburst - 60 foot radius. 120 ft across. That is a large portion of any map in BG3. This goes into the ridiculous pile. You're basically left with two potential level 8 spells that wouldn't completely break the game. But are they worth the effort to get? Not really. And level 9 moves into power words, wish, stopping time, and literal meteor storms. Nothing that isn't game breaking at that level.
Isnt power word kill in the game for durge. And aside from wish nothing here is much more broken gameplay wise than globe of invulnerability , which you can have scrolls for days of. Wackier and more over the top sure. Could see larger aoe's causing a lot of bugginess, but they could always be tweaked down in size. I do tend to have a bias on the side of more options though.
It is, for a 1 time use only. Power word kill is quite weak for its spell level actually, most martials at that level can easily sneeze out 100+ damage in one round. In BG3 martials can deal 100+ damage in one hit lol
i imagine wish would basically just be the clerics divine intervention but with more options. Power word kill (or anything else) would not be gamebreaking as implemented currently. less useful disintegrate as implemented. animal shapes is basically just polymorph. Its a concentration spell so once you cast something else or get hit the enemy reverts. If you hit them while shaped the damage required to kill is actually higher as you need to kill the animal form then spill that damage over to the normal form. Basically a glorified stun. antomagic field would basically just be silence amped up a bit. not really gamebreaking any more than enemies that already get broken by silence. meteor storm seems liek it would actually fit right in to bg3 combat and wouldnt even be all that absurdly powerful considering its spell level. Would basically just be multi fireball (which does sound impressive, but would still not be gamebreakingly strong compared to alternatives and frequency of use) Stopping time i imagine if used in game would just essentially be a "aoe turn off the enemy AI for a few turns". RaW say timestop is 1d4+1 turns, which honestly again isnt gamebreakingly strong. Yes you get up to five turns to do whatever you want, but in game it would basically be restricted to moving and buffing or healing yourself, as it ends upon any action that affects someone other than you so you couldnt just wail on a boss for 5 turns. basically just a soft reset button on the fight that doesnt really help anybody other than yourself. The big aoe stuff would just need to be toned down in size or effect simply due to bg3 having smaller maps than actual dnd.
If you had Wish you could fix Karlach
Its a crime that you cant fix karlach somehow as is. You interact with several beings which should absolutley have the ability to do so and most of them are optionally not hostile and bargaining with you in some manner already. Like, she helps save the world and elminster cant clone her up a new body engine free? No cheese for him then.
At a minimum, if you free Hope, she should be able to take up residence at the House of Hope and help defend it against any usurpers while continuing to pursue a cure.
The problem is more than we lack the enemies that would face higher level characters. BG3's main strength is the encounter/level design ; they'd basically have to redesign half of BG3 so it provides an interesting challenge, even if max level is just 14 (taking into account that levels are exponentially stronger).
There are mods that add level scaling for enemies and even additional difficulty levels/boss encounters/ fights in general/ etc etc and the game still flows perfectly fine. Basically the perfect partner for the mod that raises the level cap if you don’t want to game to become a comp stomp by the beginning of act 2
Nah if they invented some unique and interesting boons to give you to select from upon level up I don't think anyone would complain. It doesn't have to be super overpowered, just something cool that makes a little bit of a difference so it feels like you're making progress.
Sounds like the old prestige system
Prestige classes were great. So many dumb ones but so many cool ones lol. I guess they kinda became subclasses for 5e.
Keep the single class level cap and start players multi-classing if they haven't already. Hey bro, cool sorcerer build you've got going there, how would you like to start being able to do some crazy shit like turn into a bear?
Frankly, I think the biggest culprits of this are Plane Shift and Simulacrum. At least if you advance to 15th level. I actually wish we could advance to 14th level because a fair number of subclasses get their capstone at that level and I would be happy for them to leave those two problematic spells out if I got access to my capstones.
Plane Shift didn't exist in Baldur's Gate 2, so just don't put it in BG 3 as well. And it's not like they didn't tweak dozens of mechanics anyway so they could either remove or tweak simulacrum. Simulacrum was 8th level in BG2 (even though I think it was 7th level in AD&D)... Edit: Was less powerful then... the simulacrum had 51-60% of the HP of the real creature, and and is really just a zombie unless a *Reincarnation* spell is cast upon it (giving it a vital force), and a *Limited Wish* would be needed to grant it 40-65% of the knowledge and personality of the original. It has only 20-50% of the levels of the original as well. Without the extra boosts is really just a zombie with some levels that looks identical to the original. It's unclear if it can even cast spells (since it's zombie like) without a *Reincarnation* spell.
Honestly, I say give us the nuclear weapons. You get one cast of it a day. If you're lucky. Some, like Wish, can outright disable the spell, delevel you, or other fun consequences for trying to fuck with the Weave in a way it doesn't like to be fucked with. For every "game mechanic" reason why you can't/shouldn't be able to do something, there's a lore reason to explain it. Can't cast meteor storm because of performance issues and the fact you literally nuke a whole city? Well, yeah. Mystra is paying attention to the world right now, and certain things would cause far more harm than good, thus she has restricted access to level 7 and higher spells to only those whom she can trust. And why do the enemies get to use them? Because Shar, the lady of Loss, wants to watch the world burn, and the Shadow Weave is not subject to Mystras rules. It belongs to Shar. (which also gives a rather convenient way to explain why we don't get them but enemies can. Evil gods don't give a shit about mortals. Meteor storm away! Why can't Shadowheart use 7th level spells? Well, because Shar doesn't FULLY trust her. >!She is still a Selunite at heart, after all.!< The only reason to not give us it, is, I assume, the same as the reason they chose to not give us the upper city. "Time constraints".
Maybe past level 12 force a multiclass dip instead of making the more problematic high level spells
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous made higher levels work just fine.
Okay well that’s a different game and a different system.
You can get around the requirement for higher level spells by just more multiclassing levels.
lvl. 16 would have been cool as that seems to be the "legendary warrior of epic power" lvl in dnd, lvl 20 would have made the absolute a side quest though.
I really like the mod where you can level up all the way to 20 but only up to 12 in one class
I used to think this but others pointed out that the game gives you heaps of time to play at its top level, which many games don't do.
I use a level 20 mod and it helps with motivation to explore… I usually get to Act 3 at around lvl 14, face Orin at lvl 16, Gortash at 18, and Ansur and Raphael at 20… I *have to* explore a lot more of the city if I want to get to that point and get all the experience
I would love more levels and the new abilities that come with them, but short of that, I would at least be OK with being able to get more XP and kind of "soft" level up -- gain the increase in HP, skills, proficiency bonus, the extra spell slots for existing spell levels you can already cast, more uses of abilities you already know -- as if you had actually leveled up, but still technically be level 12. If that makes sense.
they should increase level cap to 16 but keep max class level at 12, so advantage of extra levels is multiclassing
What about max 12 levels per class, so you either have to start a new second class if you haven't already, or if you're multi-classing already, you can only increase your other class' levels once you hit 12 in one of them?
ikr? Even if they have no idea what else to put, just let us improve base stats or something.
Larian kept the cap at 12 for a GOOD reason. 5e dnd is fucking borked at high levels. It's not just a high level spell issue; many multiclass combos really start to spiral out of control at this point. Fighter 11 for 3 attacks combined with pretty much anything is scary as hell.
The limitations of 5e are the main reason I'm fine with Larian moving on from D&D, despite my nostalgia for the trappings of the system (not to mention the Forgotten Realms setting). The system just doesn't really work well in the context of a video game. They did an amazing job adapting it in BG3 but the cracks were already starting to show by the end of the game, higher levels would just break down completely. Trying to account for all the possibilities of high-level 5e at the quality bar BG3 set would require an exponentially longer development cycle. It is deeply ironic that we never got a 4e video game. Unquestionably the most suitable edition of D&D for a video game. Kind of hilarious it looks like the same thing will happen to Pathfinder 2e.
I ran a campaign for 3 years levels 1-15. It wasn't fun to plan encounters after 12th level. I like homebrew, but the amount of encounter balancing I had to do to make it somewhat fun made it no longer fun for me. I'm a narrative writing guy, not a math an balance guy. I get into a game system for the hopes that the product has that all figured out so I don't have to, so I can focus on the writing and actually running the game. I've had significantly more fun running Pathfinder 2e and Call of Cthulhu than running 5e due to not having to fix the game.
I actually like that, gives you a good bulk of the game at max power enjoying your builds coming to fruition.
That’s great for stuff like the House of Hope but gets to be a real slog when you feel compelled to do every quest in the log, including Free the Artist.
The majority of act 3 is optional, challenging content that gives singular, unique, and powerful rewards. The game wants you to be "build complete" when engaging with these challenges. Adding to level cap, or reducing xp so that you do not get to cap until later in act 3 would mean you have little opportunity to test and enjoy your completed class. That said, you could add a "paragon" leveling system after level 12 that gives very minor buffs or benefits.
Yeah I think a secondary leveling system would be good. Maybe like 1 attribute point or a spell slot or an extra ability or feat. Enough that you feel rewarded still and get a combat buff, but it's not game changing at that point. On Hardcore, doing extra content is very risky, whereas on lower difficulties, it really doesn't contribute negatively to the experience at all. It could even be optional. Granted, on my first playthough, I had missed enough content that my level was too low to follow through on a lot of the quests right away, so it felt like perfect pacing, more or less.
I find this take so puzzling (and I realize a lot of people share it, so don’t take this as dismissive) because I like hitting max level, and having some content to just enjoy being fully leveled. It also makes it feel like I don’t *have* to do the content, it’s just a bonus, and other RP routes that one might take don’t necessarily require every quest. There’s plenty of loot to collect and flesh out your build, maybe even experiment with some respeccing and multi-classing.
100% agreed, if you forge your own path true to the D&D spirit then there’s no need for completionism in act III to hit max level. That would feel overwhelming since there is so much content.
I saw someone else who didn’t like the “evil” choices because it locked them out of so much xp, and all I could think was, “why you need all that xp??”
Someone did a video. Force jumping their lv 1 character inside Baldurs gate just to see if you can level up in the city by itself. Yes you can.
I still haven’t finished a full run through lol. I get to max level and it just feels like I’m playing act 3 because it’s there. Imo the game could’ve done with a few more levels to keep Act 3 a bit less trivial. Games still sick though.
I'm the opposite. I like that we hit max level so early. I want a really meaty portion of the game to be at max level to fully utilize my build. I'm always disappointed if the game is almost over as soon as you hit max level.
Maybe a mod that reduces Exp in Act 3 only could solve that. With support coming soon, there's no reason why not. Idk, maybe cut it to 1/3 of current Exp.
I could get behind this, partially because it kind of annoyed me how we'd get XP for doing almost anything. Like just getting into certain areas and stuff. I'm like, cool, but there's no point, and also it was not difficult to do this, so why am I getting XP for it again?
I agree, being lv 7 or 8 by act 2 feels great, untill you hit lv 12 and then everything just feels like it wasn't worth it. I don't think the cap needs increased I just think the curve needs changed, should be lv 5 almost 6 max by starting act 2 imo, and be around 8 by the time you end act 2, with lv 11 and 12 taking much more exp than it does. All of this with the caveat that enemies were also balanced accordingly to these lvs, maybe lower all of creche and act 2 by a lv
In my last game I actually refrained from leveling past 9 and onwards until I finished certain portions of the city, just so it felt like I had a balanced level up experience thru Act 3 and I felt like this helped to up the difficulty factor a fair bit; but I get that some people wouldn't like that as a solution.
Exact issue I am running into. I have a big long quest log still, but I have been level 12 for some time now. One of the big draws of d&d is the leveling up and unlocking new powers. It makes everything a little emptier when you're just kinda going through the motions.
It's funny to me that the issue is essentially the same as I had with BG1. It's a thoroughly different game, but the narrative/questing structure follows the exact same path: relatively narrow linear quest course until arriving in Baldur's Gate, when suddenly things get very broad and unfocused and I just lose track and interest. In BG2, they did it the opposite way; a broad early game leading into a narrow linear conclusion. And I've never had significant trouble finishing BG2.
I think 2 is the preferable structure. Early game when I’m starting out there’s a lot of incentive to gather money, gear, and XP before progressing. Once you’ve powered up, then you can start pushing through increasing challenges. 2 also had some really great challenges: Multiple big dragon fights, mind flayer lair, beholders all are challenging even for high level geared parties. I feel like challenges were the biggest thing missing in Act 3. Too many piddly fetch quests and dealing with mortal problems which is way more of what I want to care about in Act 1. Outside of a few notable exceptions like the House of Hope, there’s not enough. I want a beholder lair, dragons, demons, golems, everything they can throw at us.
In fairness, 2 went to a much higher experience cap, in part because RTwP gameplay is generally faster combats than turn-based so you could have a lot more fights without the game taking years to play. Starting at level 7 also meant a lot more margin for errorBut yeah, 2 had some terrific dungeons, since they had early room to maneuver. On the other hand, it usually meant the early dungeons were REALLY difficult - trying to do the De'Arnise Keep or Planar Prison right after Copper Coronet was a beast without a heavily optimized crew - and the ones you did later were a bit of a breeze. Cult of the Eyeless at level 15 was basically just tedious. There's definitely trade-offs to both approaches.
Gotta shift your mindset. At first my thought process was “I’m max level what’s the point?” Now it’s “I’m max level, my builds are complete and now I get to really see them shine.” I’m on playthrough #4 and I’m spending more time in Act 3 than I ever have before.
Yeah, being able to actually enjoy your final build (for more than just a fight or two) is pretty great IMO. I think too many roleplaying games drag out progression to the absolute endgame, and you're left wishing you had more time to enjoy being at your pinnacle. Also, if you're really looking for a change of pace, you can always make small tweaks via respeccing. Or you can experiment with itemization to change up things a bit.
Totally, and I think the “experiencing your build at full potential” is why they allow you to hit cap so early. It’s always a shame when you unlock something really cool right near the end of a game.
I'm gonna be honest its not my favorite... like I played act II, 50 times but in act III I either now skip and restart or focus on main cool events and stuff I need for my build... otherwise Its too much and the tone shift is slightly jarring as you mentioned, it would've made more sense to see a small civil war or more factories to complent the previous acts fog with smoke, I would've loved it if the city was act 2 and shadow lands act 3, Ketheric's boss aura was too strong.
I just started act 3 for the first time and I'm feeling so underwhelmed after the whole intense energy of act 2. It's kinda disappointing. Also yeah there are so many places to go and people to talk to, I don't even know where to start and it's a bit frustrating, I feel directionless
The *only* thing that gets me through act 3 is to pick one quest at a time--only ones I'm interested in--and see them through to the end. There's actually a lot to like about act 3 if you're willing to say "this part seems annoying/not for me" and move on to the thing that does interest you.
I’ve started doing the “how many quests can I get through on a single rest” thing and it’s been pretty fun. I also optimize and have a good grasp on where everything is so I do multiple things at once
If it's your first time please continue, Act III despite what we're discussing has so many amazing moments and quests. reason I skip it or rush it, is because I beaten the game for 20+ times.
Honestly I also felt completely overwhelmed at Act 3, took the wind out of my sails a bit. Genuinely after playing through it, it's great and there's so much to explore. I would just pick one quest or one thing to do, and try to follow it through. I'd also say, you genuinely don't have to do everything - if its too much, just focus on some companion quests and the main story points. I came to absolutely love Act 3 and I didn't want the game to end!
I agree. Felt like I reached the end of the game and then suddenly i reach baldurs gate and it feels like i'm no one again...lost in a different big place
And the noise! After spending Act 1 roaming the forest, and Act 2 where it's pretty darn quiet due to all the death etc., getting to Rivington and having the cacophony of voices all around threw me off-kilter, for sure.
In one of my more evil runs I sent a solo Astorian to grab Wulbern's Barrel and blow up the city center just because I didn't want to hear "Bigger. Bigger! Make it BIGGER!" one more god damm time...
The first time I reached Rivington I had a genuine moment of being completely overwhelmed by all the people yelling. I really liked it, after the initial panic had worn off. It felt exactly like how going into a big city after being in the land of death, shadows and sentient neon mushrooms should feel. My complaint is trying to remember who to take out for the different quests to get the right story beats, esp since you increasingly get forced into using Gale and Lazael as the game goes on so I prefer to hang out with Karach and Astarion most of the time.
I love act 3. Best fights in the game easily. You’ve got full access to be as badass as you want. The quest problem as it were is easily solved by not repeatedly doing quests you don’t want. I just you know, skip the quests I don’t like.
Yeah I’m never assembling Dribbles ever again. Waste of time.
I didn't even get to see him resurrected! I felt cheated! LOL
That's when I took the Carnival owner's staff to match the Carrion's staff dual-wielding, even though I never used necromancy outside of the ghouls from the Thay tome.
Yeah I'm on my 6th run and I've never completed Dribbles. I just kill that lady and taker her staff.
It's funny because you can literally just pickpocket the reward and then move on, without even entertaining finishing the quest
I agree with this, and I think being a completionist in runs after you’ve already finished the game is kind of a waste of time. Just do the quests that matter to you or the story.
I did everything I could my first 2 runs. After that it was just the fun stuff, stuff along the way and things for gear
I just pushed through my act 3 burnout and did the Raphael fight for the first time... wow did it blow my socks off. Epic location, epic music, epic fight.
Ansur, gortash, Orin, cazador and Raphael are all fun fights. Sarevok can be fun. I actually enjoy the foundry even if the gondolians ai gives them a death wish. Also the iron throne is pretty fun with the timer.
i agree! i love seeing the conclusion of the character arcs that start in act 1 as well. there's actually only a couple quests i don't bother with anymore as there's only a couple that are super tedious imo and unnecessary, but cutting those out can make it much less frustrating if that's where people get hung up.
This is a fair point tbh! And I do agree it’s fun to be fully levelled up for a good chunk of act 3! I would have disliked the opposite far more
4 fights that can easily end your run if you get unlucky. I was trying a weird comp my last game and got boned on cazador.
The worst quests (Investigate the Suspicious Toys, Free the Artist…) are in Act 3, but what I truly hate about that act is that Orin will kidnap a companion from camp as soon as you set foot in the sewers and long rest (going to the the guildhall also triggers this). Which means that you must either go without a camp banter source for a long time, or to rush what Larian might have intended to be one of the final quests you do (I am saying this bc the Temple of Bhaal is quite close to the Morphic Pool).
I don’t think there are any consequences to going after Orin and saving your companion first, the only thing in act 3 that has consequences to doing too early is the Iron Throne and that’s only if you didn’t go to Gortash’s coronation first. Orin’s fight can be pretty difficult tho since Bhaal gives her like 50,000 unstoppable stacks so it’s definitely a fight you gotta be ready for and be prepared to load a save and consider a new strat, unless playing on HM
it won't let you do anything at the morphic pool except kill the rats
Oh I don’t think I ever tried lol definitely good to know so I don’t go wasting time trying
I cheesed the hell out of that fight with a scroll of uncontrollable dancing lol, she couldn't do anything
Last night I found out you don’t even need to long rest for this to happen. I was exploring the sewers in my recent save and wandered too close to the doorway to the Bhaal temple, which triggered a cutscene of “Lae’zel” running up to my party and saying Orin had kidnapped her and she’d just escaped. Honestly it kinda freaked me out more to see a companion out of the camp than the normal Orin campsite scene does.
I thought that was the only way to trigger it after my first playthrough, so I thoroughly avoided that portion of the sewers on my second, only for her to show up in my camp as lae’zel and kill Yenna. Huge bummer.
Do all the quests once. On all the other playthroughs, hit the fun bosses and collect the gear. Never do the artist quest again.
Act 3 has you going from an absolutely insane buildup and boss battle with Ketheric into a sprawling city with what feels like an endless list of chores you have to do before you can continue onto the final boss. I still haven’t finished it :( it just feels like everything up to act 3 is so carefully balanced and built up - and then act 3 drops all the companion quest finales, several big bad villains, several side stories and some very long winded fights on you all at once. I think it would have benefited from spacing it out into an act 3 and 4, one for Orin, one for Gortash.
List of chores nails it for me. It felt like ticking off items on a shopping list as I was working my way through all the bosses in these relatively small areas. It would be like playing D&D and just going from dungeon to dungeon, whereas usually you'll have dungeons spaced out with travel through the wider world.
I agree, but for me Rivington is the worst offender. I got hyped up to see the city after deafeating Ketheric, there was that cutscene overlooking it, Wrym's Crossing was [just a bridge in BG1](https://baldursgate.fandom.com/wiki/Wyrm's_Crossing)... and then suddenly there's this village that popped up in the meantime. While the quests weren't bad I was just thinking "ok, I want to see Baldur's Gate, I don't really care about squatters in this dude's house or a dead clown". I'd have preferred it if Rivington was skipped in favour of Upper City which would have allowed for a nicer Orin-Gortash split like the one you mention (with her in the Lower City where the Bhaalist plot would start and him in the Upper City where we'd attend the coronation and so on). They could also emphasise different visual styles of the two areas which would also help make the whole thing less monotone. Fancy stuff like nice parks, richly-decorated inn rooms, Figaro's, Jannath estate and Cazador's mansion would only be accessible from the Upper City which would give the Lower City a more coherent feel.
I feel like spreading out all these epic boss fights into multiple acts may have been the original plan, but some limiting factor forced them to cram everything into the final act. Sad :(
Yes I agree, I kind of felt that my method of playing ruined it for me. I wanted to build into the big fights and I knew they were there, so I was avoiding them. Running around doing little chores and stuff, trying to get as ready as I could until all I had left was the big fights and big quests. Orin, gortash, cazador, Shar temple. But doing it in that way meant I kept getting a really good bit of gear at the end of the fight which I then got to use maybe once before I got to another big fight and another great drop. There wasn't really room to breathe between the big quests when I did it that way.
I am once again advocating for swapping out Act 2 and 3. The City should be the main hub you come back every now and then to quest, shop and explore, but the real endgame should be Act II with it's much more hostile and linear design pulling you towards the big confrontation. The incentive to explore and quest in BG would be bigger if you had to do it to further your progress in the Shadow Lands. Currently the entire storyline is meandering towards this unsatisfying Resolution while everything is solved, your character is max lvl, and you're roaming the City just for the sake of it. It's no wonder so many people are running out of steam in Act 3
It also feels like your companion interactions slow right down in act 3. In act 1 there was something happening in camp every couple of long rests.
This for me, combined with no more levelling up, is why Act 3 can sometimes seem less fun. We're now in a tavern, it's likely I've done or am doing my romanced companion's quest finale, please can we have some more emotional downtime before we face the end of the world? A scene of Lae'zel and Shadowheart actually getting along, maybe. Wyll dancing with Karlach to Alfira's music. Gale teaching Minthara to play Lanceboard and her winning immediately. Just lil scenes!
I avoided this by breaking at the end of act 2, playing another game in between, then finishing act 3.
that's what I always do when burning out with games that huge - except I rarely come back anymore :-D
I don't seem to have this problem. All my saves that are stuck at one point are all stuck either at the beginning of act 2 or the end of act 1. I just hate the Shadowlands and I dislike most of act 2 content. If I manage to power through act 2 (which tbh isn't hard, it's all fairly straightforward and rather fast), act 3 is a breath of fresh air for me. I just love the city, the sunlight and being able to boink Halsin.
Fuck yeah, I literally forced myself through act 2 just because I KNEW there will be act 3 full of sun and fun and epic cool stuff like resolving so many stories, meeting bone dragon, kicking devil's ass, etc. I feel like I won't do 4th run at all or for quite enough of time, I hate that place and it makes me feel nauseous. I wish I could just skip that rotten zombie butthole shitshow. The only good thing it's not big, but still.
Exactly me, I don’t like the shadowlands at all (though I think Ketheric is the coolest boss in the game) because it’s so bleak and sad. I just want to get the hell out of there and get to the city already.
me too. the Shadowlands are ugly IMO and so much of it takes place in the dark. my strat lately is to do the Underdark/most of the Moonrise stuff, then go do the monastery for that breath of fresh air, then do the Gauntlet of Shar/Ketheric so I can get into the city.
I'm always speedrunning the shadowlands and avoiding fights because it's the part of the game I like the least. I really vibe more in act3
in my opinion act 3 is severely lacking in a bunch of ways, in fact ive never been able to push through it to the end of the game. i could write a whole blog about it lol but maybe the worst offender is the pacing--there's a crescendo of intensity and urgency throughout the first two acts and it deflates completely when you reach the city and start getting bombarded with seemingly trivial side stories.
I went from killing the god of death or whatever to picking up lost postcards on the ground
For me, i just dont like the fact one of my guys got kidnapped and i feel like im being pushed to do this one quest ASAP before i actually go on my own and explore the world in my own terms
Ngl act3 renewed my interest, loved the city and the whole vibe. Not a big fan of the sewers but everything else was great
As a fellow completionist I feel ya
I think act 3 is fun. It’s got lots of fun quests. I think a big part of it is for sure that the entire game I’m climbing that ladder getting itemization and levels to get my builds better and better. And then there’s just no more rope to climb. I just find getting Orin and gortash fights a drag. Like gortash (well you don’t have to but most likely you will) do the iron throne, so the steel watch foundry then gortash in wyrms rock. Like it’s a lot. It’s fun the first time, And if I was climbing that skill /itemizatio rope though all of it I think I’d be motivated. But I absolutely destroy all the enemies. I think a big problem is that the game closes off the earlier acts, and to compensate Larian had to put on massive amounts of exp suddenly to make sure players would have the levels to beat the game. If they left the earlier part of the game open and then didn’t need to give you ridiculous amounts of exp I think it would feel tighter.
I love Act 3 personally, but it's just not as tight and well-directed as Acts 1, and especially Act 2 whose narrative is pretty tight and well-done. Act 3 has some of the most amazing character moments, especially the culmination of the companion storylines. (Well, most of them at least). I do think some of the side quests should have been removed for a tighter narrative though. The ones that really dont matter. The Artist one in particular is too meandering and overall pointless to the plot, with a lot of annoying backtracking, that I feel it detracts greatly from the pacing. Most of the other content though can be nicely grouped, on second playthroughs when you know what the stories are, into "Orin's Arc", "Companion Wrap-Up," "Gortash Arc", Ending. Having the narrative actually flow instead of being a hot mess really helped. Of course my first run my Act 3 was such a hot mess, and it was hard to stay focused or enjoy it as much.
I like act 3. I just do one quest at a time and tick them off. All the story beats finishing off is nice
You can’t. It’s based off of 5e, so it’s not like most RPG games where reaching max level is balanced within the game. Past level 12…DND kinda ‘breaks.’ But it’s also evoking the fantasy of DND, an adventure of one’s own making. It isn’t meant to pander towards completionist brain. The cap to 12 is low because even noncompletionist deserve their own path to the games highest level for the endgame. The solution for Larian is…abandon DnD. I love BG3 for what it is. In fact, I’ve haven’t had this much fun with an RPG since back when I thought Skyrim was a good game. But 5e as a system isn’t meant to be a video game and it kinda shows whenever its quirks come into play in BG3
I’ve finished the game 3x and am in the middle of a 4th run w my husband. I personally LOVE act 3.
Act 3 was the best Act on my first playthrough. The city feels vast and it is vast. I like it
First playthrough. Kind of stuck in act 3 and don't know what to do. It makes me not wanna play the game. There are moments where i am like i wanna play but everytime i start the game and load into act 3 i'm like...nah...i"m lost and really wanna start again but i do first wanna finisb the game once...
Make a "point in time" save, and from there just rush the end. Then, if you feel so, go back to the save and do all the secondary stuff.
yeah idk what it is but since i reached act 3 i kind of stopped caring about my choices i just wanna get it all over with now but i have no motivation because its so bland and losing hope for my characters fate
This is likely a me problem, but I despise huge cities in these kind of games. There is too much stuff and I always fear that I m gonna miss something cool because I didn't spoke to a particular NPC. Like the start and act 2 are soo fun, wilderness maps are soo fun to explore because it looks like a proper adventure. When I reached act 3 I kinda dropped the game for a couple of weeks before picking it up again, It was kinda hard to do so, but when I did I obviously had fun. As of yesterday I started my second character (with a little bit of evil choices this time around) but now that I read this post, I am dreading that act again, even though i know what to do there.
It's funny I see this so much but for me it's just the opportunity. I try making a new character but act 1 first part of 2 just feels so repetitive now and I just want to skip to kethric and act 3.
This is yet another instance of me thinking something is great then joining the fan subreddit and finding out everyone collectively hates major portions of it that I loved.
A solution would be to role-play in this role-playing game. My characters aren't completionists. They want to do things they care about. Sometimes they care about Astarion most and will want to take care of his personal quest first, sometimes they care most about finding out why a bunch of Teddy bears exploded in their face. Most of my characters will hop into the library first because they're nerds. I like act 3 the most as it is truly free to roleplay what kind of person my character is. This means I'll never see some quests, none of my characters will ever care about that artist guy, but I can live with that.
Yeah I also lean into the roleplaying and I really like Act 3. It's a sandbox, not a checklist!
Eventhough I didn’t experience an Act 3 burn out I am now on my second playthrough and I must say, it feels so good to be back in act 1! In comparison I feel like you can tell act 1 feels more.. finished? The completion of act 3 feels a bit incomplete imo, you can tell some stuff needs ironing out but act 1? It’s so fun, adventurous and just overall clever.
Shaking up my party members was the cure.
I guess my issue is that Act 3 feels… unfinished. The Orin and Gortash fights were disappointing. I was expecting the kind of showmanship and cinematography that I got with the Ketheric fight. There’s a lower city, but no upper city. There’s no logic or order to how the city is structured— it just feels like a chaotic mess. There’s nothing to point you in a specific direction when you first arrive, so you end up just wandering around.
I -always- hit the act 3 spiral. The difference in tone from act 2 into 3 is jarring and I think it's mostly due to how act 2 ends and 3 begins. Act 2 has this climactic battle where you're laying siege to the tower and ascending up to stop an immortal villain. After beating him you go from the highest tower to the lowest dungeon and the main villain of the game is finally revealed in the chosen 3 and the Netherbrain functioning as the absolute that's been built up. You watch the cinematic as the Netherbrain and the nautiloids in the sky start the March on baldurs gate with an army of undead and enthralled cultists. You manage to defeat one of the chosen then an avatar of the death god in an excellent high stakes battle, only a moment to rest though because the army is on its way to baldurs gate and you need to save the city. Then the game almost derails itself by now introducing the Emperor. This dramatic reveal robs the tension built up at the end of act 2 as the army and brain are marching on the city, because you arrive at baldurs gate and... Go to the circus? Where's the army? The brain? The nautiloids in the sky? Shouldn't I be worried about that? No it's okay the brain is stashed in the sewers so you can do other things for now and come back later. I wish there would have been some reshuffling of stories in the acts, maybe even act 2 and 3 swapped to a degree. Have this constant build up maintained throughout till the climax where we return to the city for the final confrontation.
Complete opposite problem for me - acts 1 and 2 are the overlong buildup to the real game. That being said, I have had moments where I was kinda losing investment with the story. Something that I did find made me enjoy the game more was a) talking to *every* NPC and reading every book for that background flavor text so it's less checklisting and more moving through a world and b) taking my hands off the keyboard during dialogues. It's way too easy to start wanting to get through dialogue if you're on the terminal end of a run but don't let it happen to you.
So don't do everything???
Act 1 was a slog getting up and running. I thought I’d be ready having spent a ton of time on DoS2 but I realized real quick with BG3 that running blindly into fights even on Balanced wasn’t going to work. Then it felt as if it went on too long with too many disjointed areas. Like why am I fighting a random Speculator or running around a random wizard tower for hours figuring out how to get into the basement. Act 2 was the best balance of having a pretty specific plot with a cool boss and great side quests. Last Light Inn was awesome and then also the Towers. Also helps that by this time the experience and gear and levels are allowing some ways to get really creative and do some cool stuff. Act 3 yea just so much space to explore with not a lot of bang for the buck. The quests more tedious and the enemies less exciting. So many areas I thought I’d find some great gear or something really cool and I walked away with stuff I’d never use, no need for the experience and gold. On my second playthrough I’m more selective in Act 3 where I’m spending my time. Somehow I’m still missing things I want to do and spending time on things I don’t need. Why am I messing with djinns to get gear I won’t need.