Except you can’t make it wider than five slots and not taller than ten. Considering you can easily have hundreds of items in there it’s terribly inadequate. The whole inventory management is terrible, is it really too much to ask to have tabs for different item types? This is stuff I really can’t believe they kept through three whole years of early access.
One really cannot underestimate how important presentation and production values is to the vast majority of players, even those taking the hobby seriously enough to read reviews and post on serious gaming forums. If a game is all textboxes, doesn’t feature decent enough graphics and isn’t fully voiced people just won’t be impressed with it or won’t even give it the time of day.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is just a CRPG with AAA production values, which we haven’t really gotten since Dragon Age: Origins, which is 14 years old at this point. And there is something to it, going into some random cave and starting a questline with unique character models, voiced dialogue and cutscenes is kind of more fun than only getting textboxes, even if the actual things you do aren’t any more involved or deep.
I don’t question the quality of the game, I just don’t feel that just doing Baldur’s Gate again, twenty years later, really warrants ALL of the hype. Like the games from that time people still talk about, like Planescape Torment, Arcanum, even something like Fallout 2 or somewhat later Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines are games that are just a bit more “out there”. Baldur’s Gate feels comparably more vanilla compared to those. It’s full of tropes and it does them well, but as far as I’ve played it doesn’t always manage to rise above them and even from a design standpoint it is not that much different from original Baldurs Gate games.
I guess this is more of a lament about the state of the industry right now, but the fact that twenty years of gaming evolution leads to just doing the same types of games again but doesn’t really fill me with that much excitement.
Really seems like they hit a nerve with this game, which seems to be that people want these giant RPGs with tons of quests, choices and companions, but also want them to have actual cutscenes and not just textboxes as far as presentation goes. Probably helps that this is like the first AAA CRPG like this since like Dragon Age: Origins, which came out 14 goddamn years ago. I don’t quite think the overwhelming praise the game has gotten is quite warranted, since it just doesn’t seem inspired to be more than a good DnD campaign, but at that it is really good and manages to be just polished and streamlined to be a hit (even though parts of it feel undercooked and janky, like the map or the inventory system).
Halsin will literally confess his love for you after you ask him about his romantic life once. It’s ridiculous. And it is way too easy otherwise to have maxed out affinity with everyone in your camp, everyone loves the player being a good-two-shoes. Seriously have no idea where these articles come from that praise the companion mechanics in any way.