The first one is a love letter to the original Baldur’s Gate games. Tactical group combat, real time with pause, fantasy. It’s an original setting that tries to subvert some Tolkien ideas. It’s pretty good, though it does feel a little old-bioware. The story is a basic “global threat -> gather allies” with a touch of political intrigue. The romance is kind of badly done. It’s peak “give them gifts until sex happens”.

The second one suffered from being extremely rushed. Much asset reuse. It also made the game more “action-y” because I assume some souless suit said that kids don’t want tactics they want biff bam ACTION. The story tries to do something interesting in that it follows a single city over a long period of time as tensions rise. It’s not as bad as people say, but it’s very flawed. The romances are okay. Internet shitheads absolutely lost their minds that gay people exist and might mistakenly think you’re interested until you say no thanks.

This one also switched to the dialogue wheel instead of giving you informed choices about what you’d say. It does a subtle thing where your actions in cutscenes and stuff are informed by what style you often pick.

The third one barely holds on to the origins (pun intended). It really wants to be an action game like mass effect. That kind of sucks because we already have mass effect, and I wanted something different for my different game. The story is okay and has some good beats. The characters are really good. The romance is much improved. The gameplay is kind of okay. Mages are really nerfed despite the story saying they’re super powerful and dangerous. The world is big and has a lot of shallow quests. There’s a shit mobile game style “click a button and wait an hour” mechanic. You can mod that out. The story is also a "global threat -> gather power ". I bet critical analysis of the story is fascinating because a lot of it is kind of suspect, politically. But most gamers are like critically illiterate and probably didn’t think about it.

Fun aside: the first game has a “sex scene” where one of the character’s naked state is less revealing than her ridiculously revealing "armor ". The third game you can actually see nipples in the sex scenes, but I think they haven’t crossed the line to show a vag or erect dong (though I haven’t done all the romances). Lots of folks are still ashamed of bodies.

You can import saves from one game into the next. There are a lot of choices to make in all of them.

And that’s my off the cuff typed on my phone quick summary of the games.

Fantasy series with a very D&D-esque world and a combat system that feels a bit like an MMO or a turnbased tactics game. It’s real time with optional pausing, and you operate your whole party at once, with the ability to pause to give each of them precise orders, or to pre-program them with specific responses to situation.

I think it mainly became popular on the back of its characters. The story was good but nothing special, and personally I found the combat in Origins to be absolutely terrible. But building up your party, getting to know the characters and making decisions that affect them was amazing. At least on par in this respect with the original Mass Effect trilogy.

Mostly about deep-dicking elves. I think there’s some combat as well.

As someone who’s never played, which ones the good one?

In Origins there is a lot of grimdark stuff. Women taken into the tunnels and turned into unwilling broodmares that you need to murder

You can save and stop playing whenever.

The world is dark - especially in the first game. There is slavery, racism, demons, and a few even darker topics. There are optional sex scenes, but they’re rather clean. One of the demon models is rather skimpy. But in the third game you can pick your time in the game while kids are watching to be mostly fun with bright colours and some fantasy fighting. That might be harder in the first.

There are similarities with Mass Effect, but they do play very differently. The dialog system is very similar in 2 and 3, as are the companion interactions in all three.

Can I play it in front of my kids?

It’s been a while since I played, but I think the answer is mostly yes. There are sex scenes, but they’re pretty well-telegraphed ahead of time and I don’t think you can get into them by accident.

how long from startup to the next save point?

What’s a save point, to you? The game allows saving at any point (except maybe during combat?), but this may or may not be a satisfying experience to you. For the most satisfying experience you’d probably want to consider your camp the save point, and that can go a couple of hours between occurences, depending on the quest and how good you are (/the difficulty level).

Is it a lot like Mass Effect?

A very similar narrative style with the focus on your relation to the NPCs. Gameplay is very different. Much more about tactics and less about action. Personally I found that balance really awkward and not enjoyable: I’d rather lean more into the action like a Skyrim (or, indeed, ME) style game, or do tactics properly in a turn-based manner like BG3 or Lord of the Rings: Tactics. But I stuck it out for the story & characters which were great, though I couldn’t bring myself to keep going with the big DLC once I lost momentum thanks to finishing the main story, or to pick up either of the sequels.

Pg-13, you can save anytime except for combat and cutscenes, not in the slightest

Never played it but from what i heard it’s kinda like mass effect in medieval fantasy

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Inquisition works well enough. It has a few quirks, but it runs good enough to play it through.

Mass effect 3 had a dragon age armor that boosted biotics I believe

I mean I would assume so. I primarily played inquisition and origins on console and never actually played the second. I would assume there’s a modding community but don’t really know.

Outfits, weapons, junk is worth real money.

I played through the third recently, yes there are a few mods. The game isn’t very mod friendly so there’s not a ton there but I found like a dozen or so that were worth installing on nexus.

Game still kinda sucks but good enough for one play through if you liked the first (two)