Baldur’s Gate 3. I loved it as a cRPG fan who grew up on them. It’s ambitious, innovative and I’m really happy it’s brought the genre to a whole new audience. I hope we see something of a genre revival. But if you’ve been online at all you’ve seen all the praise I could give it already anyway, so lets talk about the bad.

It’s shockingly buggy and it’s weird that it’s always just a footnote in the discourse. I’m not sure I’ve ever finished a game this broken before. I was constantly encountering issues that would cause me to reload a save. There are plenty of posts about the bugs - pretty much every single quest in the game will have dozens of threads about various issues - but when it comes down to reviews people are really forgiving of it in a way I haven’t really seen before.

It’s also made some fundamentally terrible design decisions that wont be fixed by patches. Long resting to progress the story triggers is particularly awful. It absolute kills the pacing, despite the narrative suggesting a heavy time pressure (that isn’t actually there), and encourages you to just nova everything. I found myself just spamming long rests after every narrative beat until the cutscenes stopped triggering just to make sure which was very tedious.