Baldur's Gate 3 vs Starfield - The Ultimate RPG Showdown

BG3 is just one of the best games ever made.

I spent more time building ships than playing BG3 😂

I'm willing to bet (and hoping I'm right) that Starfield will consider fixing their faults and we'll see a "2.0 update" / DLC expansion like Cyberpunk. Xbox desperately needs more content; exclusive or not, because comparisons like this only justify that PS Premium Price.

one is an rpg and the other is starfield

This isn't even a fair fight. A better comparison would have been Zelda vs BG3.

Even putting bg3 and Starfield together in the comparison is flattering to the latter.

At the end it's really hard to rely on these type of comparison as it really depends on the taste and likes of the player. You can take the same thing with another gamer and get a total different outcome. At the end these really no, "One's is better or superior over the other". There are some who may prefer a fantasy game with turn based gameplay while other want a sci-fi rpg that let's them explore the galaxy. So there's really no definite winner here.

Starfield came out at the perfect time for me, and while it's by no means as finely crafted as Baldur's Gate 3, in it I'm able to just let go and immerse myself in a fun video game for a while. It's very "gamey" but it turns out that my imagination is better at filling in the gaps with a game like Starfield than in a much more well realized game like Baldur's Gate 3. It's almost ironic considering tabletop gaming is 90% imagination.

I was getting a sort of choice fatigue from Baldur's Gate 3 after about 20 hours or so, often feeling overwhelmed by the amount of potential outcomes leading to either reloading 20 times before making a decision or picking something as randomly as the die roll. I found it difficult to "role play" because I was by myself playing a video game, not at a table with friends/an audience, and would often overthink what I imagined my character to do in a given situation, causing frustration at myself, which is not what I want when playing an immersive rpg.

Then Starfield came out and reminded me that choices are only there for me to have fun with, and even though it doesn't really matter what I choose, my engagement is what propels my own story forward. While I consider Starfield to be inferior to Baldur's Gate 3 in nearly every way, Starfield encourages me to have my own adventure, and I think will allow me to go back to Baldur's Gate 3 with a new outlook and find a better groove. Either way, I'm in NG+ in Starfield and am still playing every day and finding new things to keep my imagination active. Oh and laughing at and mocking all the trademark Bethesda bugs in a brand new game is like the warm embrace of an old friend after being absent for many years.

PLEASE more bg3 content

Hmmm I have "No man's sky" and I really love it ... why should I buy Starfield now? ;)

Bethesda peak for RPG mechanics was Morrowind their other games just kept dumbing down the mechanics.

as someone who just bought starfield instead if bg3.........i have regrets and will now buy bg3 lol

I am playing them both. BG3 is by far the superior game. Hands down. It's rare that I'm that drawn into a game so quickly, but BG3 had me saying "wow" minutes into it. Sorry Bethesda, but BG3 is it.

20 planets with more to do is way better than 1000 empty planets. IDK how they managed to drop the ball on this one. This is a game that might be a game that would be better to wait a year until you buy it and first experience this. It's sad to think about, but I'm almost certain SF will get game of the year over BG3 just because it's of its developer.

BG3 wayyyyy better

lol lets compare a diamond to a turd...both should never even be in the same sentence together imo.

I like your vid, but the whole concept of “just add it in DLC later” is the type of mindset I want game devs to throw out the window, incinerate, then bury. That’s a horrible way to look at game developing and I’m glad you weren’t in charge of this game. Putting thousands of planets into the cons section is wild to me

BG3 > Starfield and it's not even close. Plot, Character Development, Inventory, Player Creativity on problem solving, Voice Acting, Character creation, rewards for exploration, satisfying combat. In the opening of BG3 you're dropped into a chaotic experience and run into a living breathing world. In Starfield you're a generic ass space miner in a boring ass mine that touches a mcguffin and somehow that is supposed to make you give a fuck about the plot. I'm on my 4th playthrough of BG3 and still finding shit. I'm 12 hours in to Starfield and its a slog. For a game about space exploration the space exploration SUUUUUCKS.

Want to fly through space? NOPE fuck you go through menus and click on a planet and watch the loading screen. Oh it's a space age time surely there's a better way to get a round planets once we land right? NOPE get walking bitch. Enjoy that barren ass planet with fuck all to do on it. Thank god it's on gamepass so I didn't have to buy it because it's such a let down.

Starfield is a great action adventure game, in 2016.
Baldur's Gate 3 is one of the greatest RPGs of all time.

Why do I get the feeling the narrator hasn't played either game?

Like Mike Tyson fighting Steven Segal.
Both are considered experts in their craft, but Tyson bodies Segal 100 times outta 100.

BG3 all the way, Starfield is fun but has no where near the polish

I do not agree with the 'whatever the fans what' critique. Does Larian do whatever the fans call for? Or do they make the games THEY want and it happens to align perfectly with what RPG fans love.

The 'do whatever the fans want' mentality can easily be attributed to the cause of the issues in gaming. Suits knock on the dev's door with actual real data to prove fans want x, y, and z and devs say 'fuck making this game I wanted to make, I'll make the game the data says fans want'.. And its garbage, every single time. In other words, let the artist paint. Push back at the suits, not the artist.

Love BG3. Just couldn’t get into Starfield, it just isn’t what I was expecting. But hopefully fans of both, love both.

Lol why even make a video comparing these two? BG3 wins hands-down, even though I play and love both.

BG3 is most definitely the game of the year. It's just the epitome of what a complete experience should be. I'm not even a fan of turn based RPGs and I found it hard to find any fault in it.

why is this a video? there is no possible way you can label stat field a heavy hitter

BG3 is undoubtedly GOTY.
Starfield is a tap water attempt at a space fairing rpg.

In the end, Starfield is going to be about the mods and modding community. It’s a mediocre game but that alone is worth buying it for. The Bethesda modding community is a beautiful thing to behold.

They're two totally different types of RPG games that aren't in any way competing against each other

I like that you chose a side at the end and weren't just like "whatever you prefer"

3 minutes in and I can see beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are a ballers gate fanboy so theres no need to finish watching.
I would ask if youve actually put any real time into starfield but its a moot point, I doubt you could force yourself to do so being a ball G fanboy.
I havent played ballg3 so I guess I cant complain about anything other than that 1990 turn based combat, now thats complete garbage.
I'll stick with starfield.
But I will say if you cant be objective you shouldnt be putting your opinion in a public forum.
Really, turn based vs real time and you think turn based is better, that shit is from when computers first came out in the 90s, I cant believe games still use that antiquated system!!!

Starfield on the other hand.... woof.... a breakdown of thoughts on Starfield - It likes tripping over itself at every possible instance. It's a mediocre game, there's fun to be had but starfield REALLY likes to get in the way of having fun in Starfield. Write-up and thoughts on it follow -

For a game ostensibly about exploration Starfield does an impressive job at making it both feel bad and making it boring. Favorite example here is the automated shipyard you can stumble into early in - it is full of, you'll be amazed to hear, ship parts, functioning robots, operational manufacturing equipment and mostly/fully assembled ships to rummage through. Find the terminal entries, find the datalogs, learn someone hal-9000'd the drones to jack the facility for personal use, get chest of randomly generated non-related gear as a reward not a junker ship, not ship components, not manufacturing stuff but literal RNG gear. There aren't many games where getting nothing would have been an improvement for dungeon exploration yet starfield manages to do exactly that.

Ground exploration does not help in this regards. Sure you've got a ~20mi^2 zone with scattered points of interest to traverse at walking / sprinting speed, because "Having a ground transport would make them feel too small" but random generation doesn't make for good stories and slogging through it kinda, again, feels bad and quickly becomes boring. It actually feels reasonable if you adjust your player speed to 5x to 10x default, you can actually check out a zone without glazing over.

Starfield's skill systems and level locked item generation constantly get in its own way - You have the 4 tiered gate for ship components (Level, piloting skill, ship engineering skill, credits) that require a notable amount of, if not aggressively abusing exploits, an exp grinding slog. This repeats itself for weapon & armor modifications and outpost building.

The factions are all awful ranging from My First Little Police State brought to you by bargain bin Starship Troopers as the UC, the bastard love child of american hyperindividualistic libertarian cowboys and the gutter swill iteration of the Independents from Firefly for the FC, a poli-sci dropouts idea of what anarchist pirates look like in the crimson fleet (aka Lulz evil spez piratz no law hur hur hur,) to walmart clearance rack Arasaka & gangers in neon, the reintroduction of the British Museum's acquisition branch and their wallet-daddy in constellation, and the plethora of non-factions such as ecliptic, spacers, house va'ruun, sanctum, and our pick-a-universe quantum hoppers. There's drawing inspiration from yet making them their own thing and then there's whatever happened here.

Borderlands style tiered loot tied to level and difficulty setting. Skinner Box design (Randomized risk, randomized reward.) tied to procedural generation & events. Designed to be addictive, to "drive engagement," but not to be good.

Then there's the main-line quests for each faction. The amount of eye-rolls this has garnered is impressive from the "terramorph mystery" to the "a wizard did it" jump through literal hoops of the temples to filling out job applications and fetch quests for the supplier of the grand UC fleet. That feel-bad and meaningless to what you do shines through here like nothing else and it gets so much worse when you NG+ it.

Longer I linger on Starfield's particular design choices and that the first playthrough of main quest line is a tutorial, seeing the recycled assets & systems (the lego ships components are an iteration of the build-a-vault from Fo4, outposts are settlements, star-powers are dragon shouts but worse, and the sheer amount of assets pulled from fo4 and Arkane's Prey series can get really jarring,) the more Starfield feels like an asset flip. A high budget asset flip but an asset flip nevertheless.

Breaking this down into two posts as one is simple, the other is not. Baldur's Gate 3 is a love letter to dungeons and dragons as a setting and CRPG's as a whole. While it's 3'rd act can be a bug riddled incomplete mess, Larian quickly responds to problems and is pretty rapid fire on updates to clean up the mess (See the patch 3.0 notes) while also caring about a players time and investment into the characters and setting and it shows in all sorts of weird minute details that most developers don't bother with.