I was a huge adventure game fan back in the 90s, and I also completed BG3 a few months ago ( it took me a solid 6 months to finish the game ). Quite frankly, I truly think there are no puzzles whatsoever in bg3. Very very very occasionally you need object X to satisfy character Y, but that’s about it. I think this is partly due to the game changing directions based on what you do ( so you can’t get stuck and therefore there’s no puzzle solving !) , but I never had the same feeling I had with monkey island, fate of Atlantis etc.
Maybe they're not strictly "puzzles" in the traditional LucasArts or Myst sense, but maybe more like "problems". That is, you have a lot of agency as a player in determining the outcome of your quests, companions, world events, etc., and you're not tied into any one way of achieving those. Given a quest, it's never just "gather X, put them together in Y fashion, then use them to Z". There's almost always a way to talk your way to a different solution, or use violence, or subterfuge, or a spell, or shapeshifting, or jumping/flying over the location, etc.
I wasn't arguing that BG3 is a puzzle/adventure game (sorry if that was unclear), but that it doesn't suffer from that "only one esoteric and preposterous solution" that 90s-era adventure games often had (looking at you, Sierra Entertainment especially, with puzzles like needing to stick a banana into a jetpack to stop a killer robot: https://spacequest.fandom.com/wiki/W-D40#Game_Involvement... and that was the only way to proceed).
By contrast, in BG3 you can beat the game in many different ways, leading to completely different outcomes (and playtimes). I did a physics-based playthrough that mostly just shoved and threw people around and off cliffs, with no idea who they were or what they wanted from me, but the game gave me the freedom to do that. It's also possible to do a mostly peaceful playthrough with a lot of talking (yawn).
The Owlbear cave is a good example (no spoilers... but there's a lot of different outcomes for the mother and child owlbear, depending on your party makeup and actions etc.)
Games these days are a lot better at giving you different ways to solve a situation (or the entire game), not just following a strictly linear puzzle/narrative/questline. It's like the opposite of the "Moon Logic Puzzle" trope.
Ah ! I had indeed misunderstood you, thanks a lot for the clarification.
We definitely agree. I thoroughly enjoyed bg3, and remember feeling no resistance because things would play out the way I wanted them to happen.
Apart from the occasional fighting parts, I’ve wondered quite a bit about what makes bg3 a challenge - and I still don’t have the answer, probably because there’s little to no challenge in bg3. I’ve decided though that the game is not about the technical challenge ( or any challenge for that matter ) but about the fact that you can freely bend the story to your wishes , and do things the way you want, and the problems you solve are the ones that, to some extent, you choose to create / address - what you call ‘problems’ and I agree with you.
This makes the game structurally different from COMI ( which is about solving puzzles so about meeting some kind of challenge ), but neither more nor less enjoyable- they’re just different games.
