I’m really enjoying it so far. I’m solidly in the middle of Act 2 and about to start The Winter March part 1.
I’m playing it on my Steam Deck and I’m really liking how I’ve got the controls set up. I grabbed a community template and made some additions of my own. I added a virtual menu for the left trackpad and changed the right joystick to handle scrolling long text and menus.
The story is good and I’m hanging in there on Easy. I figured I’d end up going down to the Story difficulty.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is incredibly detailed in combat though, so much so that it takes sometime to wrap your head around it. I’m addition to pushing and jumping, which both sound so simple but have a huge effect on gameplay, there’s also environmental things that you just don’t think of because in other games in the genre it isn’t an option. As an example, there’s a giant spider that wanders around on webs and summons smaller spiders from eggs, you can sneak around to destroy the eggs before combat to stop summoning and destroy the webs whilst the spider is on them to cause it to drop and take extreme damage.
So you’re right that character building may be better in Pathfinder - I really do love casting touch spells through weapons, it’s great - the combat in Baldur’s Gate 3 is far more interactive and dynamic. It’s also way more accessible.
Either is a good choice, but I give the edge to Baldur’s Gate 3 because, well, every single line is voice acted and motion captured, and the freedom you get in the story is astounding. It’s such a profound improvement, a night and day difference from the basically everything else in the genre.
I agree, they also solved the “everything is on fire” problem that Divinity had with its element interactions. And it is what I hope the most Owlcat takes inspiration from.
It still feels like the game is lacking in the combat diversity department compared to Pathfinder. From the way you buff characters before a dungeon/combat to how you can specialise your characters. Some of it may just be product of how Pathfinder and D&D 5ed are, and some of it may be a product of trying to make it more accessible as you put it, at the cost of choice and complexity.
Yeah, never got to fight that boss. Started (and ended) the combat by eldritch blasting the poor baby over the edge into the abyss when I first saw it.
No doubt BG3 is a better game for the general gaming crowd, but if combat and complex character building is your jam, I’d say Pathfinder might be a more enjoyable game.