imecth

I’m talking about the definition of the words “deep” and “shallow”, here.

Giving you choices does not add depth, it substracts it, the developers have to write twice as much content that you won’t see, and because they have to account for each choice the story is much stricter in how it can evolve. Choices and replayability are opposites to story depth.

Anyhow, my argument was more about the fact that they don’t delve beyond the surface of things much, even companions barely have a single questline each. It’s very much a theme park crpg, everything has to be short lived and interesting lest they bore the audience.

You really shouldn’t base your opinion on how other people perceive it, we’re in a bg3 thread, most people here see it positively - so do i for that matter, but any criticism here is gonna be met adversarially. It’s always weird interacting with a fanbase when 80% of ppl that started bg3 never finished it, most ppl here never really got the full experience.

a huge map with a 1000 pointless quests

Act 3 in bg3 is exactly that though. The game has huge pacing issues. The whole tadpole stuff goes completely limp halfway through act 1. Companions interactions die off after act 1. Act 2 is full of rewrites and undercooked content. The emperor was obviously added very late in game development and the story twist as a result is cheap as hell. There’s no bad guy path - most of the evil interactions are killing off people and effectively locking yourself out of content. I could go on…

I’ll take bg3, disco Elysium or mass effect over Skyrim any day of the week.

I too. That doesn’t mean bg3 is perfect by any stretch, it’s the epitome of a theme park crpg, and quite frankly your shallow ocean analogy too. One encounter with harpies, one encounter with owlbears, one encounter with fungi, one random dragon tossed in… Everything starts and ends in a flash.

The op did give an alternative, I can’t speak much for it however.

Baldur’s gate 3 barely has any character building after picking a class at the start. It really doesn’t feel you’re building a character so much as following a template. And worse, the classes are all very vanilla. Pathfinder wotr for example has much better character building, the mythic classes add a ton of depth and interesting interlacing.

The big problem about exploration in bg3 is that there’s just not much to do. Most dungeons are like a handful of rooms and that’s that. You go in, you talk to a few people, you do 1 combat and rarely 2 and go out. There’s no sprawling or sense of discovery. I’ll recommend Underrail for exploration.

I generally agree with his statement, bg3 is very simple in terms of character building and has shallow exploration/questing (particularly after act 1). But then again, that’s the case for most AAA games out there - they are made in a way that anyone can play them to the end.