From ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ to ‘Tears of the Kingdom’ to the same-day drop of ‘Marvel’s Spider-Man 2’ and ‘Super Mario Bros. Wonder,’ 2023 has been a fantastic year for gamers. But where does it stand historically in the GOAT gaming year debate?
To me, it fell into the same trap basically every cRPG falls into; late game combat is a chore. Once the number of enemies and skills you have to juggle gets high enough, you can’t realistically use real-time on the harder fights, but you can run into so many enemies that turn-based takes forever.
I don’t even really mean that as a criticism of Larian, since nobody else ever managed to fix that issue either. It’s a big reason why the genre died off for so long.
Real-time isn’t an option at all in BG3, and RTWP always felt messy to me anyway, even as I’m now playing Pillars of Eternity. Especially in a lot of those old Infinity Engine games, it felt like it incentivized devs to add more trash mobs, as opposed to paying closer attention to pacing and encounter design.
What made BG3 “antiquated” to you? Just the nature of it being a cRPG? I thought it had some really good modern game design.
To me, it fell into the same trap basically every cRPG falls into; late game combat is a chore. Once the number of enemies and skills you have to juggle gets high enough, you can’t realistically use real-time on the harder fights, but you can run into so many enemies that turn-based takes forever.
I don’t even really mean that as a criticism of Larian, since nobody else ever managed to fix that issue either. It’s a big reason why the genre died off for so long.
Real-time isn’t an option at all in BG3, and RTWP always felt messy to me anyway, even as I’m now playing Pillars of Eternity. Especially in a lot of those old Infinity Engine games, it felt like it incentivized devs to add more trash mobs, as opposed to paying closer attention to pacing and encounter design.