Baldur’s Gate 3 It looks like a great single player experience. I wish you tried that Instead of playing with my best friends!
It’s not about difficulty: I fully expected to get hit, shot, stabbed, or destroyed in any way due to overwhelming enemies so quickly. I wish developer Larian had designed a multiplayer experience that gave me my first weird idea of what was going on.
Want to make sure you don’t miss any important conversation that could determine the course of the game? Better make sure you see your buddy’s character pictures on the left of the screen like the hawk! At any given moment, they might click on something or walk somewhere that triggers a movie scene, and that little conversation ticker is the difference between listening or not listening.
Do you want to be nice to the locals instead of becoming a mass murderer and watching entire settlements come under the sword? Well, I sure hope none of your party come past Some NPCs walk instead higher them when two people click at once! Not that anything in the game explained that to me after that. In my view, they attacked without provocation, we defended ourselves, and then committed unstoppable carnage.
Want to trade your hard-earned loot for a coin? The first few times I tried this, I was greeted with a completely gray chat menu with no dialogue options – apparently Larian’s way of telling you that a trader is busy trading with another player. I guess I should have noticed, but maybe the game could be saying something.
Paradoxically, it was the one place where each player had overt control that brought my whole group to a halt: we must have spent a full eight minutes arguing about How to sleep at night. Apparently, if more than one player clicks on the sleeping bag, it cancels the sleeping process – and so far everyone He needs to click “Yes” on the pop-up dialog within 30 seconds to confirm that he wants to go to sleep, otherwise the game will automatically cancel the process itself. You can’t leave it up to the party leader, and you can’t jump into your sleeping bag either.
Now we get that, but it seems emblematic of Larian’s proven multiplayer design.
Its a good pen and paper rpg, like the one out there Baldur’s Gate Trying to imitate, the party hangs on the Dungeon Master’s every word. The game is run by a human being, and every player is always together, listening, trying to gather everything they can about what’s going on. Every bit of humor, every revelation of a conspiracy, is usually witnessed by every player simultaneously – and while you’re still running into plenty of problems, it’s always clear why and who’s at fault. I realize that adding a realistic direct message would be difficult for a video game, but surely we can do better than this?
Eventually, my group of friends agreed to basically restart the entire game – not only because of the wreck we’d inadvertently caused, but because two of our group had literally lost sight of the plot. We didn’t understand what this world was about – we missed so many conversations – or how to roleplay our characters doing good once the game thought we were bent on destruction.
Now, we’re taking things slow, letting one player lead while the others hold back to avoid the same thing happening again. But it didn’t take long for us to part as we entered a new town, and I still found myself squeezing in too late to overhear the conversations.
That’s almost enough to make me wish this wasn’t a free-roaming multiplayer game, but one that other players simply join in when it’s time to battle.