This article contains spoilers for Act 2 of Baldur's Gate 3.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Baldur's Gate 3 is a mammoth game so, if there's a part of its story that isn't really working for you, it may not be working for you for a long time. I spent more than 40 hours trying to escape Act 2, and by the end, to paraphrase the game, I was hanging on by an arse hair.
Tav and company's sojourn through the Shadow-Cursed Lands is completely at odds with the open-ended nature of the first act. In my first 40 hours with Larian's latest, I felt like anything was possible. I could ally myself with the druids or the goblins, and whatever I chose, there were several ways to see it through. Earlier on into the game's release, I wrote about how interesting it was that you could miss companions entirely if you didn't go to the right place, and that decision on Larian's part felt like a microcosm of the game as a whole. You could go in any direction, pick any quest and, when you wanted to wrap Act 1 up, you had multiple paths to leave, each fully fleshed out.
Remembering that openness made Act 2 feel all the more frustrating. I felt like I only had one path forward if I wanted to make it through Moonrise Towers and on to Baldur's Gate. Act 2 is funnel after funnel. Whereas Act 1 presents the Druid Grove and Goblin Camp as two equally valid paths forward, all of Act 2 routes through Moonrise Towers. You can go straight there or make a stop off at Last Light Inn, and there are many, many minor choices to make along the way. But since the choke point is always the same, it gives the whole act an on-rails feeling. And because we know we're eventually going to ride those rails into Baldur's Gate itself, idling away the hours in the Shadow-Cursed Lands feels like a too-long layover in a dimly lit station.
Act 2 isn't bad, but it just keeps going on and on and on. If you're anything like me, you just want to get to Baldur's Gate. But the drawn-out battle for Last Light Inn, the lengthy phase of poking around in Moonrise Towers, the long descent into 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the Gauntlet of Shar, and the trip back to Moonrise Towers all stood in my way. That return trip to Moonrise Towers came with a long series of battles as I worked my way up to Ketheric Thorm at the top. I had hoped that beating the J.K. Simmons-voiced villain would be the signal that it was time to get this engine going to Baldur's Gate. Instead, after that first fight, Thorn descended underneath the tower, revealing yet another area.
It isn't all that big, but if you were hoping to get out of the Shadow-Cursed Lands, you're out of luck. In fact, you need to face a really tough two-phase boss fight before you can move on, first fighting Thorm as a human, then besting him once he transforms into a huge monster who can knock your party members out with a swing of his giant scythe. I tried the fight over and over again with a variety of different approaches. Eventually, I had to give in and admit that maybe I was a little underleveled for it. I knocked the difficulty down, cleared the fight on that first try, and moved on.
But not to Baldur's Gate! No, not yet. After defeating Thorm, I had a fight with some Githyanki raiders as I was leaving the Shadow-Cursed Lands. That wasn't difficult, but as soon as I got to camp on the outskirts of Baldur's Gate, I got pulled into the Astral Plane for one more combat encounter and a long conversation with my Dream Visitor who, it turned out, was a Mind Flayer in disguise. This bit didn't take all that long, but it was yet another obstacle between my party and the big city I'd dreamed of seeing since I crash landed on the beach. To borrow a metaphor from 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:another of this year's biggest games, Act 2 felt like a Symbiote that was clinging to me: dark,🌠 oozing villainy, and impossible to shake off.
But when I last saved my game, I had finally contained Act 2, shoving it into a canister and sending it off to the lab. I stepped out into the sunshine of Act 3. A child approached me and asked if I knew where his parents were. I didn't, but I could choose to give him some money. I did, and he walked away. I looked ahead at the town of Rivington. It wasn't quite Baldur's Gate. But it also wasn't the Shadow-Cursed Lands, and that was a monumental relief.
