I'm just a little bit late to the Baldurs Gate 3 party, but I searched on here and didn't see much follow up discussion about it after the review thread. I'm also trying to submit more to Lemmy so the communities can grow, so I thought I'd bring it back up now that it has been out for a few weeks.
I only just bought Baldurs Gate 3 this week and finally got time to sit down and play it tonight for the first time really and I am so impressed. The character creator allows so much character expression. I made a generic red Tiefling and when I saw there was an option to add vitiligo, I immediately built out a head canon where my character is a Tiefling that is slowly being transformed into a human by a curse from his past. I never would have thought of a character like this, but the character creator just provided some pretty unique designs and options.
Everything just feels so polished. I've played Pathfinder Kingmaker before this and parts of Wasteland 2, but I've never been much of a CRPG fan. I feel like the user interface in this game is a lot easier to follow and read. It's especially nice because I played in co-op with a friend that doesn't play much in the way of RPGs and has only ever played tabletop D&D once and he was able to easily slot in and start figuring out how things work together and where everything in the UI was. It was very entry-level friendly for our experience and it made the entire experience a lot better.
Also it's kind of a weird thing but I'm really impressed with the facial animations so far. I was expecting Bioware or Bethesda style faces where their lips move, but their faces are otherwise lifeless. I've been loving seeing the character seemingly actually move their eyebrows and their jaws when they're speaking.
I'm not super far into the game since I've only had time today to play it, but I'm super excited to play more when I get the chance.
What have your experiences been like? Any fun stories or characters you've made?
I was considering getting it for my steam deck. If you don't mind me asking, how bad was the performance?
Well, my problem is partly that I play docked, so every issue is magnified up to 50 inches... so take what I say with a pinch of salt.
I managed to get it to run at a fairly stable 30fps, but the settings were so low that everything looked pretty muddy and basic. You can turn off the FSR to get it to look less blurry at 800p, but it still looked pretty bad. Generally, everything just looked a bit unstable, you know? Hair was pixelated, lines were jaggy everything felt jumpy and gritty. I'm sure it would look better on the SD screen itself.
I also read that Act 3 onwards takes a further hit to performance... so at that point I decided to cut my losses. Shame... it's the first game where I've genuinely felt the SD isn't up to it.
I noticed the same as I primarily play docked too. But I got sucked into the game and just have been dealing with it. I figured on subsequent playthroughs maybe I'll play it on my desktop PC.
Phew... I was starting to think I was the only docked Steamdeck gamer in the whole universe!
I've played about 70% of my 20ish hours so far on Steam deck, and honestly, it's awesome. Controls work out of the box since release. I don't really care all that much about graphics, and they're passable on the deck. I can imagine it's probably really bad if you dock it and play on the big screen, but handheld it's perfectly fine and very convenient. Drains battery like a mf, though.
Have you gotten to act 2 or 3? From what I've heard the deck plays fine until you get too far into the game, and then it is unplayable.
I think I had a consistent 30 FPS on medium settings. Said performance degraded as the game progressed. My high end PC struggles with Act 3 for some reason, I don't know where the bottleneck is there, but I decided from there that I wouldn't even try to run the game on the Steam Deck that late in to the game.
I'm playing on desktop mode and the graphics are more than good enough for me, but I'm not a AAA hound, aside from rare occasions like this so I don't mind.