I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate 3 since early access. Not the entirety of early access, but enough that I was well sick of the wilderness area by the time the game launched. I went through the heartbreak of bad patches, unsatisfying endings, endless bugs and hotfixes that drove me into a rage-quit mode on several occasions, and still I played on.

I’ve been a Baldur’s Gate fan since the first game. Like so many other gamers. When it first came out, I hated it. Tossed it aside as too boring. Then picked it back up a month later and was instantly hooked. Timing, I guess.

That long-term fandom probably helped keep me engaged with Baldur’s Gate 3 when I otherwise would have given up on it. And it is, now that it has long since reached a level of stability and maturity, an absolutely epic RPG.

So I listed to the Larian stans and bought a package of Divinity games from Steam. I want to like them so much, but I just don’t.

It’s all in the pacing…

I will give Larian top grades for graphics, character creation, and writing. I’ve been playing around with Divinity: Original Sin a bit. The music in the bar, and the way the characters invoke a spider in combat both crack me up. This is just the sort of touch that makes me love RPGs above all other types of games. A big category, I know.

But then there’s the pacing. To move, you use the typical WASD keys, but they move your camera not your character. Then you click on the ground where you want to move and your party slowly jogs that way. For me, it’s hard to find a good rhythm of keys and mouse. And everyone moves just a little too sloooooowly.

I love turn-based combat, especially for a game with D&D-like rules where strategy and inventiveness are more important than mashing a few buttons faster than the other guy. But again, the time it takes to complete a round of combat makes me want to gouge out my eyes with a melon scoop. JUST DO IT!

I am, perhaps, grown impatient in my dotage. I get really bored having a party of four battling a crowd of lower-level beasties when the combat software takes so long to calculate and execute the moves of the other guys. Ten to fifteen seconds isn’t bad when you’re fighting a group of 4 or 5. When you’re fighting a mob of 15-20, it can be several minutes of waiting for the opponents to strike before getting a turn with ONE CHARACTER.

I had a relatively high-end system at the time BG3 came out, and some battles felt like playing chess over dial-up. I’m an old man. I don’t have that kind of time left. I wish there were a fast-forward feature to breeze through the combat calculations. Now that I’m playing on a low-end system, the tedium is like a very specific form of condensed evil driving spikes of malice through my cerebral cortex.

Divinity: Original Sin could really benefit from some more lower-level skirmishes at the beginning of the game. I’ve re-started it about five or six times, even using a leveling guide made by a kind soul on Steam. And I keep hitting the same wall where I’m faced with a whole bunch of objectives in town I can’t complete because of insufficient skill levels, but all the battles that would allow me to level up are against enemies several levels higher than my party members.

It’s doable… but there isn’t enough progress that I feel myself getting sucked into the game. It’s more like I have to throw myself at it hoping to get to a point where the pacing is enjoyable enough to keep me engaged. I don’t want to have to throw myself at the same challenges time and time again. Not if it means spending 10-15 minutes re-configuring the party and returning to the same spot. And then another 10 for the battle.

I just spent 90 minutes battling Cazador. And lost. I don’t mind losing, but I’m not spending another 90 minutes waiting for bats to fly around and werewolves to lumber from one place to another.

I could have had lunch.

Larian games are just…tedious when it comes to combat. How does anybody have the time?