Couldn't find a thread on this, which given the player count is surprising: Baldur’s Gate 3 hit a player count all-time peak of 814,466 concurrent players on the 6th of August, making it the 9th most consecutively played game of all time on Steam. https://www.radiotimes.com/technology/gaming/baldurs-gate-3-player-count/ Anyone else playing / enjoying / want to form up a co-op 4 player party and go monster hunting?
I've never played any of the previous Baldur's Gate games, but the more I hear about this one the more I realise it's right up my alley... Not keen on the full-fat £50 price tag though.
I love the Baldur's Gate series, but this one doesn't play well with Linux yet and I've no free time anyway. Maybe one day!
I can't claim to know the ins and outs, but it plays just fine on the Steam Deck, so it can't be that far off working on non-Steam based penguin installs, surely?
It seems if you launch the game in dx11 mode, use --skip-launcher flag and use proton experimental, you're golden. It may not even require that much anymore, this is info from older reports on protondb.
It’s definable got some adult content sprinkled in. Spoiler Are you sure? Spoiler While relieving a town of its non-nailed down stuff, I open the doors to a barn and find a Bugbear railing a Ogre over a corpse #backawayslowly
Seen lots of mixed reports on ProtonDB so it might be a bit hit and miss on whether it works properly on Linux yet, hopefully a few more patches and hotfixes and it'll be fine. I've been playing a fair bit through Early Access, enjoying seeing the changes they've made between that and launch. Doing a bit of a slow playthrough as I don't have heaps of time to play, playing on Tactician as well so I've sort of got to take my time and think carefully about how to tackle some of the battles. I think my only complaint at the moment is that there are too many empty containers all over the place - they really could have halved those in release.
I've put around ten hours into it on the Deck, and the only problem I had I'd put firmly in the hardware column. Might be worth a nosey. In the steam environment I didn't have to change a thing - I couldn't off hand say whether it was Vulkan or DX11. I don't mind the empty containers. I'm usually rolling in gold by the time I get to the second act, what with the excessive looting.
Good god this game is rock hard... So many party wipes... Really really enjoying it though, even when I've had to re-load my game three times over because I failed a really critical encounter or my party got wiped... The thing that's bugging me the most though? This: Y'see, when the battery is low in the mouse you get a visual warning: the mouse and charging dock both flash red. I'd be playing BG3 via controller, but the mouse flashes red. "Hm, better charge that then". Leave it on charge for a couple of hours, should be good to go. Except it flashes red when playing BG3. "Hmmm... bit worrying that... I'll leave it on charge overnight and see what happens tomorrow...". Freshly charged mouse, fire up BG3, load my save, aaaaaaaaaannnnddddd.... mouse & dock flash red. For days I thought that my mouse's battery was on the way out until I realised what was going on. Razer f***ing Synapse, a bloated piece of software I damn well didn't ask for but can't properly configure my mouse without, is applying some game-specific profile and making the mouse flash red when the game is loading - main menu, loading a save, new map area, etc. FFFFFFfffffffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu Ha! Spoiler I had a successful check when I encountered this door and I decided to not disturb matters! I was enjoying it on the Deck until a major encounter in Act 2 where the performance was tanking down below 15fps - 30-40fps was tolerable, but I just couldn't play it that low. If I enable FSR to get the performance up a bit then all party members get really blurry. None of the other geometry or textures seem to be affected, it's just the party characters.
I'm curious which encounter that was.. I'm thinking I know which one, as I have a dim-ish memory of some shoddy performance in one or two spots on that act, but. Spoiler That barn is one I just.. Walk around very quickly. Didn't need to see that the first time, didn't get any good loot, just carry right on by now! My most frustrating party wipes were in the Underdark, with.. I forget the name because I refused to go back into them after the first time, the burrowing thing. Had a knack for turning up, and knocking everyone bar one character off the edge, annnnd then trouncing said solo character.
Spoiler: Nasty performance in Act 2 It’s in the Shadow Cursed Lands. I can’t remember where you pick the quest up - I think it’s if you’re being a Nice Dude and managed to save the Harpers and the Selune cleric Wot’s’ername at the Last Light Inn (which was another really nasty fight!). You go off with a pack of 4 Harpers to ambush a True Soul patrol and relieve the weird creepy half-spider dude of its moon… lantern… thingy… In fact a lot of the really horrible fights so far have been in the Shadow Cursed Lands! That whole area dropped my Deck performance to 25-30fps anyway, but that fight in particular was down to ~15-18fps - nasty.
That is the main one I was thinking of - There are multiple ways to get to that exact moment, but yeah the performance is uhh.. Not great during it. Given how irregularly it happens, though, I think it's pretty heavily linked to the location and all the uhh.. Location-y-ness of it.
Honestly, performance aside, this whole area is a total bitch. I’ve even considered dropping the difficulty level down (if that’s possible mid-game). I’m probably not making the most effective use of all party members, but I’m totally out of practice with this kind of RPG; you have to be so much more tactical in combat and you can’t rely on your main character being able to simply bludgeon their way through. I never normally worry about stat buffs/de-buffs, but they're absolutely necessary in this game and there are so many options to choose from. I am enjoying playing as a Monk, it’s a class that’s not normally available and that I wouldn’t usually choose if it was. It has led to some quite funny dialogue interactions as well, such as… Spoiler … when I first met Jaheira at the Last Light Inn. I tell her I’m “just a simple monk”, and in reply she tells me that she’s seen “just a simple monk” break a man’s spine . But I might have a word with Withers and re-spec some of my character choices. There are a couple of characters I’m really happy with, like Karlach, but there’s more than a few where I’m probably not making the best use of their skills, subclasses, spell/ability choices, etc, like Wyll and Shadowheart. At least I assume Withers can re-spec party members as well as the main player character… Also doesn’t help that there are a few characters I’m really reluctant to dismiss, like Shadowheart and Karlach. I’m romancing Shadowheart and it just feels cruel to keep her cooped up at camp! And Karlach is just an absolute blast to have around. She’s a brutally effective Barbarian warrior who is as sweet and excitable as a puppy. Karlach has had some of the best and most fun dialogue & character interactions so far, … Spoiler … watching her go weak at the knees and fangirl like crazy when you meet Jaheira was absolutely adorable.
That is exactly why I stopped using both my Razer keyboard AND my beloved little Viper mini. I just couldn't handle the fact that they had built popups into them trying to nag you into running that shite.
Karlach is a delight, and like you say, exceptionally useful. Personally, I found my 'dream team' to be Shadowheart (Medium armour, mace and shield), Karlach (Medium armour, two hander), and Wyll (Light armour, rapier). I tried the Lae'zel woman, but my god. She and Shadowheart don't shut the hell up - And it's not fun like Karlach's chatter. Don't forget to check your spell book for magic inclined characters, you can go learn spells from those thousands of scrolls you pick up for some pocket change gold. Not sure if that works for "NPC" party members, but it's useful as heck on the PC. Some act two spoilery spoilers, mostly about the location. Spoiler I found once I got the lantern, and the contents of said lantern out of the lantern, it was a lot easier in the shadow lands - But I did find several ambushes that were a pig to deal with, and of course there's the tower and its dungeon.. It's especially irksome because there's some pretty key parts of certain character's stories that mean you really need to take a proper gander around the whole area. There's a few spots in the first area that you can basically totally skip if you don't fancy it and largely have the same experience, but Shadow Lands has a bunch of stuff. One character you recruit there enables a character in act 3 to be recruited, there's the whole main story bit that ties into a party membery you already have, there's a pretty short but still challenging bit about the curse itself if you have the right character at camp, I suspect if you have Asterion there's some stuff to do with him too - But I hate that tosser, so I avoid collecting him at all anymore. There's some to do with the refugees as well.. It's a lot of back and forth in a 'don't touch anything or you have to fight for your life' area.. Dark Urge with all party members was a blast, but solo was an absolute pig. Still fun, though. I made excessive use of enhanced leap to avoid certain sections..
I found shanking someone, repositioning, repeat shanking, reposition that’s possible with the dark urge benefits allows mass murder quite efficiently. Clearing out the inn of its inhabitants took quite a while on my lonesome.
This is why I've always tried to stick to Corsair peripherals in the past. I already had so many Corsair components with arr-gee-bee that I basically had to use iCUE or put up with gaudy unicorn vomit... Not really a choice in my book - I don't mind lighting, and I don't mind RGB lighting, but I can't stand that default rainbow flashing/cycling pattern... And then my new motherboard has its own garbage background program that's needed in order to update BIOS/firmware, so... *sigh*, fine, I'll install that AS WELL then... (Athough thankfully that one doesn't stay running.) And then the Stream Deck needs its own little background bollocks... and so does my mixing desk... and so does my graphics card... And by this time I figure Razer Synapse can't possibly make things any worse, so... f' it - I might as well buy that Razer Viper Ultimate that's on offer. Until, of course, Synapse metaphorically shanks me in the kidneys when I least expect it. SHOO, SHOO, GO AWAY, (almost) ALL OF YOU I remembered this earlier today, and I'm pretty sure it works on magically-inclined party members. I re-spec'ed my main PC last night, and I'm going to stick with keeping their focus on physical combat in the Monk class, rather than magic. EDIT: I don't even know if they've got a single spell slot. In fact I'm even going to try unarmed combat instead of using a quarterstaff - I always seem to land damage more consistently with Flurry of Blows bonus actions (I know that's two attacks). Their strength is still relatively low though, and I don't want to sacrifice too many points in other abilities to beef it up - I tried dropping one point in constitution in favour of strength and it was a bad idea... Bad, bad, bad idea...
