Agreed, Sandstorm just feels soooo sluggish, like your character is literally moving in slow motion. And the maps have too much verticality in them.

Yup, sadly the first act is the best the game gets and even then it's pretty mid, because it's literally just the starting island of Divinity Original Sin 2 with slightly different plot. Entertaining enough, but not enough to play it for 100+ hours, especially if you played DOS2 prior. The combat is only challenging for the first... 5 or so levels (because you have almost no equipment and few options when it comes to spells and abilities) and once you're past that you can quite easily steam roll through every encounter (unless you decided to make it hard on yourself and your team is full of wizards or other casters that have to long rest after every fight). Personally with 3 melees (Battlemaster Tav, Eldritch Knight Lae'Zel and Berserker Karlach) and a... cheerleader (since the default build on Shart is only somewhat good at healing and health pots drop so often it's faster to just throw them at people instead of using healing spells... and as a melee she's not doing jack) I steamrolled through the entirety of Act 2. The story is at best mediocre and usually just fanfic-levels of bad and the cRPG elements are as important as they are in about any other "RPG" game, i.e. your character's build is the pinnacle of role-playing. Between bugs locking you out of some interaction/alternative ways of completing quests and "obviously correct" choices (i.e. garbage like the "Goblins vs Grove" questline where not siding with the Grove literally just removes content without replacing it with anything except for changing like... two dialogue lines that don't actually matter). I hope Wayward Realms will end up better, but who knows when it will even be released.

@@LecherousLizard I'm putting a lot of hope in Wayward Realms. Also, I think BG3 would have been significantly better if it just had nothing to do with the old games. The story was decent enough to stand on its own merits. I put 80 hours into BG3 and really tried to stick with it... and I just can't. Not now anyway. I'll probably try again in a few months, but I suspect it'll just get me in the mood for the old games again. Which is fine by me.

@@nicholasrova3698 Nah, I reckon a significant chunk of people wouldn't bother if "Baldur's Gate" wasn't in the title. And... it honestly has nothing to do with the previous Baldur's Gate games. Beyond the usual DnD things, about the only things that somehow reference older games are completely inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, like, I only know that Jaheira was a companion in one (or both?) of the previous games. I'm pretty sure she doesn't even have a dialogue to explain why she even exists in BG3. And as I mentioned, I'm unable to see the story as anything better than "mediocre" and that's before accounting for the fact the game is completely linear with two endings that you pick 5 minutes before the credits roll. It took Larian like half a year to add a proper ending sequence (which is entirely about companions) all the while they were vehemently trying to bullshit people the game was finished on release. And as I heard they are STILL adding endings. Honestly I'm still perplexed why BG3 got so popular, but that's a recurring theme lately. For example Hogwarts Legacy is an absolute bottom of the barrel, but it's also sold in the millions, likely on the brand name alone.

@@LecherousLizard It got popular because it was a decent game unburdened by micro transactions in a dry spell of games. Also, most people didn't play pass the first chapter (me included) to notice that it gets worse on a technical level. Story-wise I guess is more subjective, and I'd say so far it is rather average, but not terrible. Also, if you played the old games you'd notice the connections more... and they're dumb. The game could still be called BG3, but maybe have some kind of subtitle to differentiate it, like Illithid Saga or something. The old BG aspects were poorly done 'member berries that didn't add to the story and shredded the old games lore (which were better in my opinion), though much of that was already done by WotC prior to BG3.

@@nicholasrova3698 They absolutely shredded Sarevok, Viconia, the lore around Bhaalspawn and Gorion's Ward, the Dead Three, some parts of the Illithid lore... The game might be good on a gameplay point of view(at least for a bit), but the writing and the disgusting treatment of the legacy characters is really sickening. Soon as i saw it was Larian developing this game, i already prepared to butchering of stuff(cause they already don't care about their own characters and lore being consistent... imagine how many fucks they give about someone else's), and the moment Viconia was leaked, i also knew she'd be one of the biggest victims.