Been playing this game for weeks. I completed it and then started a new game.
The game's story is excellent, but it absolutely does not justify the tedium it makes you endure to experience it.
In a 40 minute sitting, I'd spend the entire thing simply having characters dialogue at me. What's the point of the open world then? Car chases are scripted so that you don't even have to fire a single shot. The enemies will just eventually blow up. 70% of dialogue choices are just for roleplay and don't change a thing or make extremely minor changes. The combat and shootouts are mid.
Act 1 is a chore to get through on replay. There are so many touches they could have added to make it interactive. The Flathead robot mission... why not let us pilot the bot in first-person to do all the tasks, like a stealth minigame? I can think of a few games that let you do something similar. Instead, it is 20 or more steps that are essentially "look at this object and wait."
The best part of the game for me was the middle, where the plot becomes more elaborate, evocative and the relationships with Judy, Panam, Johnny etc develop. But even there the game was navigating me through a seedy open world in order to show me glorified cutscene after cutscene. Then shootouts that were really nothing special.
Witcher 3 was dialogue heavy, nuanced and compelling. It had tedium, but I never felt like the open world was superficial or that the tedium overshadowed the rest of the game. Side tasks like Gwent or contracts were fun and absorbing. The most boring expositional bit was using Witcher sense to explore, but even then at least you were interacting with your surroundings more, not just sitting there being talked at.
Did anyone else feel this way?
Yeah, it's no Baldur's Gate 3, and I do hope they learn more lessons from contemporary CRPGs, but I'd say it has other strengths. I liked the combat, and I liked the story, characters, and world-building. Open worlds in most open world games are pretty shallow, and I'd say both this and The Witcher 3 follow that same template to the same ends, but at the very least, it allows you to approach an objective how you'd like after scouting it out, which feels satisfying. It's RPG-lite, which manifests as a pretty good action game with some story branching, and I'm not upset about that, as much as I'd prefer they lean into the RPG stuff harder.
Baldurs gate has fucking ruined me.