Thing with bard is you do not get a bard companion at least in the beginning (I have only played so far into it). You get a cleric, thief, fighter, and wizard pretty early. Granted you can respec anyone to whatever you want but bardic inspiration combined with guidance from the cleric is pretty nice for the various non combat rolls and then it gives you two sources of healing word and bardic inspiration is pretty nice in combat as well. The biggest annoyance factor is the bard can't inspire themselves.
Two roll buffs and healing word is tempting. Good to know you get a thief early, although there’s also the question of whether to do one of the origin characters or not…
I don't think it matters nearly as much as the article makes it sound. Especially since multiclassing is super viable in 5E and BG3 removed all kinds of requirements for multiclassing and even allows you to respec. Meaning even multiclass combos that struggle if played out at level 1 can just be recreated later. And that means you can recreate the toolkit of a Bard fairly easily and focus more on the aspect you actually enjoy.
I think any class with ritual casting is going to feel very rewarding in your first playthrough, assuming you don't forget to utilize it. So you have Bard, Cleric, Druid, and Wizard, and Arcane Trickster and Eldritch Knight. But even any class with just cantrips are already going to give you a lot you might not be used to from other RPGs.
The only class I wouldn't recommend for the first playthrough might be Paladin. The oath just limits your choices in certain situations. And while you could break your oath and become an "Oathbreaker", I personally don't feel this is the best for the first time playing. I think being able to explore all options available without having to consider your oaths makes for a better first-time-playing experience. But Paladin is on the list for my second round.
Edit: I forgot that BG3 made changes to Arcane Trickster and Eldritch Knight, they can both also ritual cast. In general, there are a lot of changes made that make the game way more open and allows you things to make it fun.
Does breaking your oath make you an Oathbreaker in BG3? Because that’s not how Oathbreaker works in 5e.
A Paladin who forsakes their oath would just be a fighter. Oathbreakers are specifically Paladins who call upon the forces of evil for their strength rather than the divine. They don’t just break their oath, but twist and pervert it for some dark power.
I haven't played a Paladin yet, so I am not sure how the mechanic is implemented. But the oathbreaker subclass exist in BG3 and you can't choose it on character creation. So there is some way of becoming one.
Right? Ranger is probably at the bottom of my list just cause in 5e (as has been noted everywhere else), it seems to lack its own identity. If you’re familiar with those rules, do you feel like BG3 does anything to make the Ranger more worthwhile than the tabletop version?
This is my first entry into anything D&D / 5e honestly and the lack of identity kind of drew me to the ranger, I wanted to go for a melee front fighter but the barbarian and warrior trees seemed a bit too focused
Beast master ranger with the heavy armour proficiency ended up being the “do anything” class when I swapped between a couple
I couldn't get in to this game, myself. Granted, due to that, I've only played about an hour of it but this game felt much more like a Visual Novel than an RPG, to me. Stats seemed to have no bearing on anything other than what the narrative decided they have a bearing on. It was therefore, very difficult to figure out who my character was. Otherwise, you're just clicking on things and reading reams of text.
I get that they were trying to go for a more tabletop version of an RPG but without a DM, I find that near impossible to translate 1:1. I would have preferred a more Baldur's Gate approach to the game.
It’s more akin to Planescape: Torment than something like Baldur’s Gate. The game is dense with writing and dialogue, and the majority of it is derived from your stats. Granted, there are a couple of skill checks that you can’t fail due to being story important, but it’s only those two specific instances - everything else is heavily stat-based. There’s also ideologies that the game tracks, so you can be an egotistic superstar cop, a doomsaying apocalypse cop, a normal cop, or even a super-political cop that becomes more drilled down if you want to engage in the fascist, communist, moderate, and/or liberal aspects of the game - and the game does respond to that, including noting how you can be both a communist and a fascist, or some other combination of ideologies.
To help put it in perspective, your stats are, quite literally, your character’s brain. Having low stats doesn’t really impact the game, but you also can become sort of neurotic with high stats - which does have its upsides and downsides (except Encyclopedia, it will drown you in world-building exposition that doesn’t really help and drags out conversations at the higher levels). It’s much more “role-playing” and less “game”.
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