very early game soft spoilers
I managed to play an hour or so of the game. The early part feels really boring. Disregard that I tried to fly my spaceship to Kreet for five minutes without realising that I had to press A and select it to land on it because I probably skipped some tutorial prompt. When I get to New Atlantis the game feels really lifeless. There are many interactable characters around with good voice acting but the combination of the atmosphere, the music, the way that conversations go, the generic chosen one plot, it feels really boring.
Does it get better?
Also my diplomat character cannot persuade for shit.
I find it a bit surprising that when games like Disco Elysium and Baldur’s Gate 3 exist, the standard for player-NPC interactions in AAA RPGs is still the same as it was like ten or fifteen years ago. This game was supposed to be some kind of revolution but the loop still seems to be following map markers and shooting bad guys with some spaceship traversal thrown in between. I will give the game some more time though. Let’s see how it goes.
Because those games are not RPG. Those are glorified shooter adventure games, it blur betweens games like Fallout 4, NMS, Red Dead Redemption 2, GTA 5, souls-likes (F4 is the only one of those being an RPG though fairly simplicistic one).
Baldur 3 came and smashed all them aside as RPG proving that that genre did not died, it was murdered by publishers. Problem is, Baldur took years upon years of work and is still unfnished, so the devs WILL keep churning out shooters with RPG label because it is simply more cost-effective.
Disco Elysium also had a lot of work done post initial release. I consider myself incredibly blessed that I only paid attention to it after the Final Cut was out. The voice acting is stellar.
Yeah, Baldur will also be continued, devs confirmed for example the endings are being worked upon. And they should, the “best” ending is basically turning everything into warzone trying to turn back into status quo, and to get something actually positive out of it you need to jump the tricky hoops into few quests (basically impossible without accidentally stepping upon the correct combination of not signalled decisions or without game guide). Rest of endings are even worse, they barely count as any ending, just few short scenes and that’s it.
I think Baldur was rushed to come out before Starfield since the target audiences for both games are very overlapping.
I have 104 hours in BG3 and have not yet passed Act I LOL
Not to say the endings aren’t underdeveloped, you are almost certainly right there, I am just unsure if I will even see them before they’re updated!
Entire game took me 150 hours with trying to go everywhere and do everything and i’m a veteran who played nearly every single such game, so yeah, the size and scope of game is impressive. About the acts i think act 1 is the biggest with the matryoshka dungeons (and don’t forget to go to monastery to get the legendary Lathander morningstar!), lower city in act 3 is very big plus all the buildings and sewers. Act II is the smallest and it’s good since its pretty dreary and boring (do the harpers quest asap to get the freedom of movement).
Much of the reason it’s taken me so long is down to a combination of poor performance and constantly, constantly rerolling characters because something else seems so interesting at the moment. Oo, I’ve read Drow are treated very differently! How will the tiefling/druid conflict resolve in the face of a tiefling druid? I think I’ll try Wyll’s story! What if Karlach and Shadowheart fell in love? Bah! There is simply so much to enjoy.
One issue is that games can take so long to develop and that development is (probably—I have no real idea) so bureaucracised, there’s no real room to keep up with what others are doing. I’ve not played Starfield yet, btw.