I feel you on the deepthroating shit. It’s a great game, no doubt about it. But some of these articles act like it’s the second coming of Christ, and if I am to be entirely honest… It’s not quite as good as the original games. It’s lacking a lot of depth in the story telling (it’s almost entirely voiced so there’s more brevity in any given conversation than the pages upon pages of text even a random nobody can give you in BG2), but makes up for it with mechanical depth.
I agree it’s a big deal for a major release to not have MTX or a season pass or other bullshit, and that should definitely be applauded. But some of the things I’ve seen said about the game are out right fraudulent. Like an article the other day saying it is the most polished AAA game in over a decade, which is absurd. The game is plagued with issues and the polish is literally the one thing I can not give it praises for. It even feels amateur in a lot of ways. Like it has many little issues I would not expect from a seasoned developer, and many bugs ranging from minor inconveniences to full blown game breaking stuff like scripts firing wrong leading to an outcome you didn’t choose to take or characters becoming comoletely broken being unable to move or be interacted with.
Story is great. It actually feels like a remix of the first Baldur’s Gate story. Characters are some of the best I’ve seen in a long time. The combat is super fun, especially when you try to do weird random shit just to see if it works; cuz 90% of the time it does. There is a depth to the changes you can have on the world at large that are extremely cool and haven’t been done on such a scale before in all the RPGs I’ve played over the years…
Although that last part is where the previous talk about bugs really starts to drag the experience down. There have been so many points in my two playthroughs of the game where I took one path, but got the dialogue and changes to the world of another path. Like currently, my party keeps talking about one of the companions killing another. But they didn’t; I stopped that from happening. So now this character is standing around in the background while other characters talk about her death. And that’s not even the worst one I’ve encountered.