Baldur's Gate 3 (Zero Punctuation) 

This week's episode of Zero Punctuation is brought to you by Humble Bundle. www.dpbolvw.net/click-100402551-15598945

If you're not familiar with Yahtzee's review style, he liked it.

You weren't save scumming, you were just roleplaying a chrono mage

Side note: There is a command to turn your entire party into stealth mode: shift + c

Yahtzee in his 20s: Friendless, single, misanthropic cynic Yahtzee in his 40s: DnD playing, married father, willing to give shit he used to not like a chance

So, Baldur's Gate 3 has just enough support for non-combat options to make you forget about the fact that, at its core, it's still primarily a combat sim? Damn, it really does capture the essence of D&D doesn't it

"Ooh, you mean you can break doors AND stack crates?" Yahtzee usually makes me chuckle, but this actually made me laugh.

Another option for the Goblin murder problem is to recruit a surprisingly intelligent Ogre by promising he can eat the corpses of the dead. Then, once you've killed half the map and want to do the other half, promise them 1000g to kill the other half. Let them all die and pay nothing. I love this game.

So, you didn't find the button that puts your whole party into stealth mode yet? I'd tell you where it is, but it's doing such a good job at hiding, and that's what stealth is all about.

"Get in the fucking party bus, Teddy Ruxpin" made me inhale my tea, cheers

I do think it is a super flexible game. In the scenario yahtzee was describing where you have to kill the 3 leaders. 2 of them, you can convince them to go to a private room where you can fight them without alerting the rest of horde (you have to kill the alerting eyes first). The third one is harder because he's on his throne being cheered by like 7 other goblins. For him, I cast crown of madness, he went berserk and absolutely murdered all of his party members. Then I swooped in with my party and finished him off. I love this game

I spent the entirety of the first act intimidating people while running around in my underpants. 10/10

I think the freedom of choice in BG3 really becomes apparent once you've also watched someone else play it. Comparing two different playthroughs can be like night and day. Really been enjoying it so far.

Eloquence Bard really is Yahtzee's style given how fast and verbose he is.

Props for him, for not mentioning the willy customization even once in the entire review. Not even as joke. That's a character arc right there.

"I shove people off by day and get people off by night." Sounds like a motto you would see on Yahtzee's family coat of arms.

The game did have a lot of times where you can talk bosses into killing themselves, which is always a positive.

The druid situation did have an alternative solution. You could have sided with the goblins, which is why the druid said don't recruit him unless you're sure because it'll turn everyone hostile.

Finally, the one reviewer I respect talks about the game im excited about

What really caught my eye with Baldur's Gate 3 was not the heaps of praise it is receiving, but the fact that it was made by Larian Studios, the developers behind the long-running Divinity series. Been a fan of theirs for quite a while now and I'm really glad that their years of experience with the RPG genre is paying off with three big hits in a row.

"It was vaginas!" being so enthusiastically exclaimed has to be in contention for best ending line to a review ever.

I think the whole "roll with it" is for non fatal encounters, when you fail a check or step on the 14th trap in a row. For combat encounters you can run away, but only if you are not shorter than your opponent as they will just keep dashing up to you and get reaction attacks when you try to flee. If only there was some sort of morale check or something to give monsters a chance to flee and save themselves if a combat encounter was going badly, rather than fight to the death in the hope of getting that lucky last hit off.

I LOVE how the ad roll is done this episode! The ZP-style animation, all done before the episode begins proper so it doesn't interrupt anything, it's perfect!

Can't believe Escapist messed up so bad they lost Yahtzee. Can't wait to watch whatever new content he puts out.

Super useful tips the game didn't tell me right away - Shift C for your entire party to sneak :D - ` to highlight all creatures near by including your party, non hostile nps and enemies - alt for highlighting items on the ground

The Silence spell is pretty handy for alarms as well as spells. Also two of the goblin fights can be stealthed pretty well with the right planning/dialog options.

I’m sure BG3 isn’t for everyone…but it’s definitely for me. I love taking my time, looking at all the ways around a corner before I hit something. It’s such a ‘flexible’ game, I mean it may not have easy ways around certain events and fights…but there are so, so many ways to do everything else (not to mention fighting, itself) The story is awesome, the character development is fantastic, the mystery is interesting, and the gameplay feels tailor-made for me. Like i said, it might not be for everyone but it’s the best game I’ve played in a long, long time

I found out that if you roll a nat 20 in some checks you'll do something different which I did not expect

It’s a very flexible game. My friends and I are playing on our own and we’re sharing how we personally worked things out. For example, if you’re a Drow the goblins just sort of let you in without any sort of antagonism - this means you don’t have to do the worg poop thing or really get questioned at all. The goblins just assume you’re related to the drow that’s commanding them.

ad roll at the beginning is way better than putting it at the end

I mean, the situation Yahtzee describes is very much his own fault. If he'd actually tried to do something about the Goblin leaders, he'd realise he could get the Priestess to go somewhere entirely isolated by passing persuasion checks, and to trick the Drow general into attacking the Grove on her own with a small band if you dupe her into thinking you'll open the gates. It does have a whole lot of outside the box solutions, but you do actually have to try.

“I also got a lot of mileage out of shoving people off cliffs” -Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw

In regards to the encounter he talked about where you have to kill three goblin leaders, my experience with that is that taking the druid with you is very different from leaving him behind. Taking him with you pretty much puts you into a near non stop combat encounter (especially if you don't prevent the enemy from calling reinforcements) while leaving him behind lets you still wander around and potentially fight the goblin leaders and a small group separately. It can still end in a non stop fight, but you can prevent that if the druid isn't with you.

I feel validated that I did the same approach as Yatz during the goblin camp. XD I had to do SO many long rests along the path of extreme violence. The other BG3 player at work, meanwhile, found ways to stealthily kill them all and was shocked I went with the direct route.

You can actually seperate the 3 bosses and get each one with just a few adds. They also often place conveniently place themselves under a giant chandelier or next to a chasm :)

An entire party based on being useless in combat and bangability. I can see that having consequences during combat portions.

Larian needs to tweet this video and proclaim "Even Yahtzee liked it!" the people not familiar with his videos would be like "He did?"

The Druid rescue went completely different for me! I think because I'd already planned to double cross the Dark Elf chick

Seems like Yahtzee will be pretty happy with Act 2 given how much he wants to talk bosses to death. The freedom is definitely still there.

Ad read first was perfect, no notes. Its the most eloquent way you can do it without Yahtzee stopping to do a passive-aggressive ad read mid-video.

Big fan of this game. Lots of replayability in it for me with all the classes and subclasses to try. I just cleared the goblin bosses so I pretty sure im about to be heading into act 2. The RP and story elements have been very immersive for me.

The flexibility with saving the druid, is to not save him and just walk up to the goblin leaders and say. "Yo, I'm with you. Let's burn that grove to the ground." And you can do that, lmao. He'll actually escape on his own.

The Boggles remind me, clearly, of Stephanie Sterling, and also of the one time i saw Yatz and Sterling share a stage at the Escapist Festival in Durham, NC, in like 2011. What a magical panel that was. A Panel to End All Panels.

I did manage to successfully Order 66 the whole goblin leadership and rescue the hostages, but that took a lot of save-scumming. It also later occurred to me that I could have done a bunch of stuff to make things easier like poisoning the grog or dragging convenient explosive barrels around. Closest I got to that was parking Asterion in the rafters above the hobgoblin leader and throwing grease bottles at the top and bottom of every ladder leading up there before sniping everyone in the room to death.

Man it has been a long time since I watched a Zero Punctuation review. They had no RU-vid presence when I first discovered him. Glad to see Yahtzee is still kicking.

if you're creative then you can totaly kill all 3 Goblim Bosses without raising the alarm or agro on you. Play that bit like Hitman, if you want to stealth it. BG3 is indeed fantasticly versitile, yet so many mechanics are indeed poorly explained, if explained at all.

Having played a lot of BG3 there is definitely a lot of flexibility in how you complete main quests, but a lot of it is gated through dice rolls, stacking modifiers on the right characters and making full use of all the game mechanics can make them sufficiently likely to roll positive, but ultimately the game always has some luck element, and things going wrong is just part of the fun. Part of the problem is that some of the fights are hard unless you know the full array of mechanics, and that's what BG3 does badly, I had to sit and watch a 20m tutorial on how spell slots work, before I properly understood them, and how stealth works. It's a game that is rewarding to play through more than once, especially in coop with 3 friends, because then you do genuinely get to see different outcomes of the same events, it also rewards side questing a lot because the creatures don't auto scale their difficulty like they do in so many other games, so thorough side questing and really carefully searching the world will help you level your characters and it becomes easier to win impromptu fights.

Correction: in contrast to Mortimer, weasels are a heck of fighters. They kill rabbits, which are 2-4 times their size. They are super fast, have insane dexterity, and at least the same amount of determination. They hunt and and bite their prey until it dies of exhaustion, blood loss or system breakdown.

You actually CAN totally kill the goblin leaders stealthily. At least 2 of them from my own experience. The drow leader and the goblin leader goes down without much of a fight.

Ah, yes, the old edging strategy. Those goblins keep coming and coming, and I keep tossing them off with a big smile.

To whomever it may concern, including Yahtzee: Shift + C lets you stealth everyone at once. Doing it again unstealths you again. The G key lets you ungroup all party members so you can sneak somewhere with whomever you have selected currently. Hitting G again regroups you again. Also, rather than frontally assaulting the goblin camp, you can instead let them assault the defensible grove. Or y'know, just join them. There ARE choices, you just have to go get 'em.

3:08 I had that experience too. The thing is on K&M you are supposed to press Shift + "c" for the whole party to go stealth.

Sounds like Yahtzee reeeeaaally rushed his way through this one because there were a lot more options to play closer to how he wanted.

Holy f that was a positive ZP fram yatz. but then again this game is like catnip for dnd players

3:08 here's something that might help with that: Hold shift and then press C to have the whole party go into stealth. More free hints; Hold controle and then click to do a main weapons attack. Also hold Alt to see name tags on intractable items/objects.

Is it too late to tell him there's a group stealth button? (That the game refuses to fucking tell you about, along with about a hundred other useful things like ending concentration, dipping your weapon in ground surfaces to buff it and oh, you know, the fucking abilities your class will get at any level higher than the one you just got.)

This ad works the best out of all the stuff you tried. And good review, it's a great game, has some bugs, but as he said, it's just well built and thought out.

3:50 Hey Barrelmancy is legitimate strategy and I just want to share with my new gobo friends!

The ever consistent problem with games that let players solve encounters with both non-combat or combat based solutions is that inevitably most of them always include some mandatory combat encounters that can't be solved any other way, and which the player will be grossly unprepared for if they've been min-maxing non-combat abilities.

To respond to the bit about emergent gameplay and the goblin leader example - It is actually possible to go about it in multiple ways. Using things like minor illusion, the throw/shove, stealth, deception, items, map layouts, and various dialogue influences, you can actually tackle this in many ways. Some people will use barrels to create massive bombs that kill everyone in one hit. You can use various options to gain access to the camp as well. Touching on the specific bit with Halsin, if you manage to gain access to the camp and don't let anyone escape during that fight you will still be incognito. You can isolate the Drow Leader and the gobbo shes arguing with if you stealth kill the scrying eye and patrolling gobbo (you can toss them into the chasm for an instant kill and not start combat as long as nobody sees). You can then kill the Leader and the other gobbo without alerting the rest of the camp. Gut can be isolated if you ask about the tadpole and take a specific but obvious dialogue option, and if you kill her while shes isolated you will remain incognito. You can use the second floor rafters to take out smaller groups of hobbos one by one as well from stealth, especially if you have a rogue with a bow or something. But you're free to use other tactics like the chasms, and minor illusion to draw out gobbos and get them isolated. It mostly just takes some creative application of the tools given to you, and you'll start seeing those opportunities the more you keep them in mind.

0:52 for those horrified by the mundane boring start of the video, thank me later

I'm about 30 hours in and I'm enjoying it. Yes I've reloaded saves because when I mess up we all die, might be my playstyle. I try to talk my way through stuff to get as much information as possible and then fight but yes things can go bad lol I'm running a cleric that likes to fight but still like having a few other bruisers in the group other than myself. :)

I'd agree with the micromanaging thing. D&D has you playing one character, where D&D type games have you playing... a lot more, up to six for some cRPGs. It makes an already complicated thing a lot more complicated.

Circle of Daggers is practically a win button for most encounters.

Dude, the enemy Shoving is excessive. Sometimes, they'll Shove just to Shove, but one time, a random goblin Shoved one of my party members a good 20ft into a bottomless chasm of insta-death and I just had to doubletake, because that felt kinda cheesy. So what I did was reload my save to right before that combat and Shove that stupid goblin down the bottomless chasm and see how they liked that.

Loved that tou got to review the game, mate. Was looking forward to your opinions. Although I will jump in the bandwagon of people clarifying: you can 100% kill the globlin leaders in a variety of ways, including stealth.

If the "micromanage your party" scares you, there is excellent mods that gives AI control of your party and they are generally pretty good in a fight too.

I don't know if it's intentional but the shape of Mortimer's beard gives him a permanent :3 face. _GET IN IN THE FUCKING PARTY BUS, TEDDY RUXPIN._

You could kill all the goblins at a feast by poisoning said feast

I think taking halsan with you does actually affect stealth. I remember I didn't took him and sneakingly just hold person onto the drow lady and killed her instantly, if I took the bear with me I won't have to do that. But I guess it all depends on how much you know of a game

For the record there are a surprising number of ways to stealth-kill the goblin camp leaders. You can lure Gut in to a side-room and shank her unseen, drop a statue on her, drop Minthara down a pit by sabotaging a bridge, shove her in to a chasm, and that's not to mention stealthing explosives everywhere or summoning an terrifying ogre party you struck a deal with to do it for you.

One thing about the game I noticed, is that a lot of the 'complexity' is really just 'freedom'. The player has the freedom to utilize quirky playstyles and explore, but at the end of the day the game is fundamentally just dialogue and combat. With enough charisma and enough fireballs you can accomplish everything in the game even on the hardest difficulty, due to getting over 100 camp supplies on average per encounter. Try playing the game with 4 sorcerers, cast haste before you enter combat, and see how many problems you can solve with 12 fireballs per turn. (Or you can cast 60 magic missiles per turn in case of fire immunity.)

Often times, having “many options” for dealing with problems in games boils down to “many different ways to be a murder hobo.”

You don't actually have to go on each individual character to put your whole party in stealth, just press shift+c!

The Benny Hill moment Yahtzee describes in the middle of this video involving minotaurs, is a staple of all D&D. Even the table top game. Nice to see a game that can honor tradition like that. Even if it's completely coincidental. LoL :)

My favorite part of BG3 so far is how I used Astarion on said goblin camp and its leaders. I broke in through the roof, sent Astarion in alone in steath mode with a bow, used sneak ranged attack on everyone, one hitting them from the rafters, and wiped the whole camp including leaders out without having to get into one instance of combat. So like in all RPG's stealth is the broken "Fuck you I win" option.

Yahtz always finds a way to make me cackle like a madman… he just has a way with words

This is the nearest I've seen to a glowing review on ZP. PS5 version pre-ordered!

Annnnnd last video i am watching from the escapist. Y'all done screwed the pooch.

"I don't entirely buy this popular perception that Baldur's Gate 3 is a super flexible game where every problem has multiple solutions, but I'm sure I barely scratched the surface of it in my usual limited 1 week of playtime." It's a shame that Yahtzee faced the internet cycle of frantic review timeframes to ride the ever shortening wave of hype for maximum views. I think Yahtzee should consider revisiting this game later once he's had some time to properly play it and experiment. Because while the video was well-made, many points in it came off as a bit rushed or underinformed. Even making assumptions based on "most games require me to do X, so I l'll roll with the assumption this one does too." A major part of understanding this game and feeling it click, for me, was talking to other people and hearing how they approached the same problems in wildly different ways. And both of us saying, "I thought the game expected me to do it the way I did, that's crazy you can even do that." He's not wrong about everything, but based on this review, I think a game like this requires more time to really digest.

There's a button for group stealth mode.

As I get older and follow news more I really start to cringe at people making jokes about abusing imprisoned people in the basement (around 1:25) mostly because there seems to be a lot real-world horrible stories like this. The anology could have been to pretty much anything else and the joke would remain the same tbh.

I don't think they mean that every goblin has multiple ways to kill him, but that every big picture problem has multiple solutions that can drag the story in different ways. Do you kill all the goblins? Do you just rescue Halsin? Do you just fuck off and escort the tieflings? Do you join the goblins? Do you join the goblins but then betray them because one of their leaders has a cool clothing set you want? But my problem is one you experienced. Failure always feels bad. In real D&D or in Disco Elysium, failure just feels like the story will change in a new interesting way. Here it just feels like your day is going to be worse. So, yeah, save scum in this game.

Among my friends, we have between 35 and 200 hours into the game. None of us have had the exact same experience. We all have completely different parties and have all shown each other at least one hidden detail even in the first few hours of play. It's very replayable, which is awesome. Next playthrough, I'm going to be an arse

I haven't finished this video yet, but I did want to point out that if you press Shift+C all your party members will enter stealth. I'm pretty sure the game does not explain this which is kind of annoying and would have saved me a lot of trouble.

the fact yahtzee never does the ad reads himself tells me one of two equally funny things one: he just refuses to for some reason, or two: the sponsor has requested that someone else read them

Ironically, my bard HAS in multiple occasions avoided or straight ENDED conflicts just with their tongue, no combat needed.

You can "stealth kill" one of the Goblin bosses if you get them alone in a room, and sort of do another one by getting them to stand on a rickety bridge, but the third isn't going down without a really loud, large fight. Thank god for that handy spider pit right over there :) This path will at least save you having to fight literally every goblin in the base.

The gameplay for BG3 is so unusual to me. Ive never seen a games difficultly be so varied depending on the person. My gf seemed to hit the sweet spot where combat encounters would really test her and she would have to improvise in really cool ways. Since i played DOS2 and the EA Im finding the game insanely easy, i bulldoze every fight rarely getting my tanks hit and generally not using tactics outside of bonk, offensive spell, and occasional heal, unlike the plethora of debuffs my gf uses. Other games are easy for everyone, or hard for (nearly) everyone at the same difficulty, this one fluctuates a lot due to the nature of the DnD system. While i find the combat a bit boring as a result its great to see so many people getting into it, and having those magic gameplay moments where you just HAVE to tell someone about what crazy shit you did to win.

hey you can kill the goblin leader stealthly ! you can lure one of them alone in their chamber and then attack them, sure they will call for help, but that's when the silence spell become useful for more than anti magic ! loved the review, great laughs, very good points (the UI, pathfinding and explaining the mechanics especially)

Protip: Learn the hotkeys. C puts you into stealth. Shift+C puts the whole party into stealth. Or just ungroup your stealthy party member to do all the stealthy stuff, and then group them back into the party proper.

I in fact, did actually stealth kill all the goblin leaders, hitman style. The is actually as flexible and creative as people say

I'm old enough to recognize a Boglin when I see one. Nicely done.

This is one of the few times I agree with Yahtzee 100 percent with his assessment of a game. Even the more tedious parts bring me back for more. I have been having a blast with the game and the goblins found this out the hard way.

For at least 2 of the goblin leaders you can talk to them in a way that makes getting them killed much easier. Once you can lead away to a private area. The other can be convinced to leave the goblin camp (and you might help them or double-cross them).

I took a little emotional damage at the implication that mind flayers and nautiloids aren't part of "traditional D&D-land". They've been there since before most of us were born, this weird idea that scifi and fantasy have to stay separate is an extremely modern invention.

I think the combat failure problem boils down to you not knowing how your character fights as well as they should in the story. The one where you finally win is the canon version of events, where you're finally synced up. its sad theres no lose scenarios that are interesting narritively. You dont end up in prison, or forced to fight in a pit for goblin amusement, or have the tadpole in your brain take you over and kill them all but then wear down your defences a bit more.

clicked the nanosecond i saw the bell

I enjoy that there's several parts of the game that you can talk your way out of and some of them even lead to the deaths of those you're persuading/deceiving, however there are a few sections where no matter what you choose, you *have* to fight. I don't go around talking to literally everyone, my character looks for the important folk and let them think I'm on their side while he decides which side hes actually on, so when theres some npc tucked in a corner that i missed who would have been on my side if I'd spoken to them earlier, its kinda frustrating. Doubly so when i feel i should still be given a chance to turn them to my side via persuasion after the fact especially when they're only fighting to get paid. Like yo, I'm made of gold! *LET ME PAY YOU*

To answer the credits roll question: 1, Lore is good if you're trying to fill more than one niche: extra skills, a couple more non-bard spells. 2, Eloquence wasn't in the PHB. If you made your character back in the day, or are just playing Core-only campaign, it may still be your best option. Your only other choice is Valor, and I don't think that's a popular one.