Chapter 3 is generally considered to be "too long" by everyone. And it's true, it feels that way. The city is friggin' *huge* and there is a side-quest or event at every corner, not to mention countless areas to explore and narrative threads to follow.
This seems like a weird thing to complain about. If this was an actual pen-and-paper session it would be great, actually.
But in a video game context, there is a different metric on which you measure progression: Levelling. People might deny that, but it feels *good* getting that XP for your exploits bringing you further to that next increase in power and ability.
BG3 has its characters capped at Level 12. A decision that makes sense, balance-wise, because the already badly balanced 5th edition completely falls apart after that.
So going through Chapter 3 feels like you're being frozen somehow, walking on a treadmill with no real purpose. You're here to kill the Absolute, right? So let's fucking gooooo.
But you don't. You help a lot of people with their problems, find a missing girl, solve a murder case (which doesn't serve much of a point in the grand scheme of plot things), find the scattered remains of a clown (Orin has *a lot* of connected content compared to the other chosen), meet crazy people in the sewers or get involved in some artist-mummy-drama.
Admittedly, the whole underwater rescue mission was amazing, absolutely brilliant, but the pacing overall is whack.
And while a good deed should be its own reward, it feels like you're doing it for nothing. You get showered with XP for your heroic deeds that do absolutely nothing for you because you reached Level 12 before even arriving in the city. There is nothing to gain here anymore. You are max level, you just want to bring the big baddie down. Let adventurers of lower level handle the little stuff.
Yes, there is cool new loot to be found. But, ehh, the loot you want evolves with the levels you make and, let's be real, there is not much coming that truly improves your character at this point. You sell most of it. The moment you have the staff from Ramazith's tower, Cazador's staff is just vendor trash. Less redundant items, more impactful, powerful ones, please.
And, yes, there are mods that allow levelling beyond 12. But they don't fix the problem the designers already addressed with their decision to cap progress. Basically all encounters are a cakewalk at Level 12, even in Tactical. It certainly won't get better or more interesting at Level 15 or 20. Enemies would have to scale with it, which in turn might break immersion.
And it's not a problem with levelling in a story-based game, it's a problem how the levelling curve is made. It's a problem at the very heart of D&D.
The design error, in my most humble opinion, is this: You cannot tell a story of this scope in D&D5 without either allowing for heroes to be ridiculously powerful, because otherwise you'd rob players of one of the most important rewards in the game, or make the levelling curve much, much, slower. But that would also be unsatisfying, seeing as you need a certain minimum level in D&D to feel halfway competent (gods, this system is broken, srsly). You'd need a flush of XP early on and then slower, way slower, progression after level 5 or so.
Which opens another problem: If you only get to Level 12 very late in the game, you'll never truly use all of the abilities you gained until then, rendering half of the spells and powers useless (which some of them are already because of the way 5E works, but that is another topic altogether).
Where am I even getting with this? I dunno. Maybe the conclusion here is that 5E is not a good system choice for a story like BG3. But that is always my conclusion about 5E.
Or maybe the modders who made further progress possible have it right. This is what D&D is about, after all.
But levelling alone won't fix it. Maybe key encounters in Chapter 3 should be re-worked and the level cap raised to 20, because, let's be real, facing an elder brain wearing a netherese crown should be a challenge for epic level heroes. BG2 didn't shy away from letting its heroes go far, far, into the epic levels, no matter how ridiculous they got. My party was around Level 40 when they reached the Throne of Bhaal and they literally smacked god-like entities around. (which made seeing a low-level Jaheira a bit weird, tbh, wtf happened to you, girl?!)
So maybe BG3 should have embraced the broken glory of high-level D&D as well. This is not Divinity. Original Sin, after all (where you progressed until the very end, btw). They tried to "fix" the broken parts of the ruleset but in turn broke parts of their narrative. Maybe it would have been better to just roll with it and let us enjoy our silly overpowered characters as we rake in the XP in this beautifully detailed final chapter.
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