Baldur's Gate 3 Patch 7: Absolute Frenzy

Smashing Goblins

In an exciting whirlwind flurry of activity from an seemingly unintentional tease tweet, to an official announcement to a panel and sudden drop of the patch the very same day, Baldur's Gate 3 Early Access Patch 7 has launched for everyone to greedily devour in another playthrough of Chapter 1. This time the big addition to the game is the classic Barbarian class, complete with rage states, two subclasses and, my favourite, aesthetic character flourishes tied to the subclass discipline you picked. (A few extra customisation options are always appreciated.) There's also a completely reworked UI available to try out that goes a good distance to fix the whole 'mess of clutter' inventory screen from before, and this may be incidental but I've personally noticed huge optimisation buffs. It's not perfect, but I'm actually seeing smooth and steady framerates in some early sections and that just wasn't so much as feasible last time. And last but by no means least, we have the improvised weapon ability which allows anyone to grab something from the environment and use it as an weapon. Best used, in my mind, by literally picking up one enemy and chucking them at another! This also comes with a reworking to the 'throw item' mechanic, so that now you can throw a weapon and actually inflict the intended damage that a throwing axe or knife would. (And weapon throwing is even animated!)

But what about the big one? The feature that'll bring all the excitable BG fans to the yard? Yes, the Barbarian class doesn't drastic change up the fundamentals of gameplay the game but it adds flavourful options for aggressive support, frontline tanking and tough damage dealing. I like to think of Barbarians as a fighter class, but with a lot more burning fury and rustic personality stirred into the pot for good measure. This isn't even one of the classes you have to finagle around with the Early Access limitations in order to wring a decent damage potential out of them, the Barbarian comes pretty packed out of the box with Rage state, (buffs physical damage resistance, advantage on strength checks and saving throws and a small blanket buff to damage dealt) a natural trait that provides a constitution-based buff to Armor class whenever no body armour is worn and a slew of powerful subclass bonuses which can easily turn any old Barbarian into a powerhouse. (I've also noticed that Larian has thrown at least one enemy NPC Barbarian into the world, so watch out for that.)

Playing my third BG3 character, a 'blind' Githyanki Barbarian called 'Carinie No-eyes', has won me some pretty impressive early impressions already. Being able to charge right in the middle of the fray in order to draw attention, coupled with one of the subclasses (I picked Wolf Heart) which gives attack advantage against all enemies 2 meters away from my Barbarian, pretty much instantly makes me a heavy duty support for all of my teammates, increasing their chance to hit and crit everyone just by standing in the middle of a group. With this vanguard playstyle I've felt a lot more encouraged to try more violent pathways in quests, including starting a civil war in the Druids cove, (which I don't exactly recommend. Twenty plus NPCs in a single fight makes the turn-based battles take forever) marching up to that Ogre trio and just going swinging for a bloodbath and slapping an Owl Bear to death for no other reason than to see if I could. (Barely- but 'yes I can'.) If you're looking for a confidence boosting class to try some of the more action heavy alternative quest options, I don't know if it's going to get better than the Barbarian class right now. (Maybe the Paladin once that launches. I suppose we'll see.)

And then we have the UI overhaul. Oh, what an exciting little surprise treat this is! Gone are the days of blocky crowed features littering screen real estate, here are the user-friendly, and a tiny bit stylish, sleek menus with clearly labelled tabs and filters so that you easily relate what abilities count as actions and what are bonus actions, and what are class abilities and what are learned abilities and just all the small incidental you need to get a handle of your class quickly. I also think some of the tooltips have been rewritten so that important infomation is displayed, such as moves that take up your concentration slot actually listing that fact, which is a godsend for me. (I was always messing that up.) The turn-order UI is very different now, with it all being listed in a row instead of clumped in the corner. And maybe this was with the old version and I'm just noticing now, but if you hover over the portraits in the turn-order, you can see the move resources that each enemy still has available, just in case you forget who's expended their reaction move. The inventory is a lot nicer, and sports a search bar, but I still default to the team inventory screen most of the time; I don't know why we even need individual character inventory screens. Shop interfaces haven't been touched yet however, they still need some loving. 

'Improvised weapons' is something that I've heard the community asking after for a while now, and it's implantation is about as supplementary as you can expect. The ability to pick up and chuck things makes for a nice effect, but it's typically not that much more useful then weapons and damage items you have on your person. Being capable of picking up and throwing people on the otherhand (permitting your character is strong enough to lift them) has all sorts of utilities. You can pick up a goblin and chuck it into it's pack to do small amounts of damage, but more importantly set-it up for a large AOE incoming from a teammate. You can chuck enemies into fire or acid pools to force a debuff on them. And I suppose you could theoretically throw an enemy off a ledge, but I haven't had the chance to try this out myself yet. Now all of these scenarios' were possible with 'push' (with the exception of chucking one enemy at another in order to deal damage. That one is new.) but that's situational and you could only take advantage of the opportunities the enemy was presenting for you. Now you can forge those moments for yourself provided you're dealing with a brawny character. Now all Larian need to do is fix the physics engine they broke, presumably with this feature. (Spiders no longer fall when you take their web bridge floors out from under them. I'm sensing a hotfix incoming.)

Another little thing that Swen snuck into the Patch 7 stream without extrapolating on, was the plethora of new magical equipment in the game that use new keywords. Now new magical equipment is always exciting, and Baldur's Gate 3 has magical tools that honestly eclipse anything that BG 1 or 2 was offering early game. Now we're looking at items which really change up your playstyle by encouraging you to play totally differently in order to benefit from their power. Point in case being the momentum keyword that I'm still learning about, but which seems to want the player to take active risks early on, at least with the item I got. I also found an item which might have been in Patch 6, but I still think is super cool to talk about anyway, being a pair of boots that task you with using 'dash', and everytime you do that character builds electric static charge that then get's distributed into the next person they hit. How cool is that?

 

Finally, at least for what I'm willing to cover, there are the optimisation fixes which comes as Larian better familiarises themselves with the lighting remake they did in the last patch. My game has buttery smooth moments now, which it never did before what with my less-than-fresh hardware; although I have switched that up with a lot more crashes. I'm talking about six in an hour, and that was mostly due to a save that corrupted out of nowhere, but somehow that makes the situation a little bit worse. Seems I've traded out poor performance for poor stability, and being unable to reliably play the game does sort of edge my class of hardware out of the target demographic unfortunately. Is the thing ever going to run okay for people like me, who have the recommended specs but only just? I dunno, it certainly seems like we're holding on by a thread with these issues. (It's a lot more of a pressing complication than the floating spider bug or the false positive files warning in the launcher.)

I've just started my Barbarian journey but, crashes willing, I'm very encouraged to stick it all out to the end and see where we end up. Because once again the experience feels fresh and that's one of the things I laud Baldur's Gate 3 for the most. The presentation and compositions of the fights feels endlessly cinematic, sure, the detail and design of the world is complex and tucked with enough alternate paths and clever walkarounds to rival the best stealth-action title, but it's the amount of gameplay variety introduced by each class and race which makes me giddy. If they can keep this up until release (and maybe even add in the Dragonborn race if we're really nice and eat all our vegetables) then we're going to get one of the most replayable, variety packed RPGs (not just CRPGs) of all time. But we'll have to wait until 2023 to find out... bugger...