God damn this game is kicking my arse… I got stuck on a massive fight in Act 2, but managed to totally cheese it. Spoiler: Act 2 plot spoilers The fight with Yurgir. Nothing in the entire area, not even kicking Ketheric Thorm’s undead arse seven ways from Sunday, gave me as much trouble as that fight… I lost count of how many times I tried it… Eventually I managed to pass some difficult skill checks in dialogue and convinced him to kill himself. **** off back to whatever hell you came from, and take that smarmy sack or turds Raphael with you! I’m just into Act 3 and now I’m stuck again on an even harder fight! Spoiler: Act 3/Shadowheart spoilers So after getting in a few fights around the lower city, including one where I accidentally AOE’d some random civvies with a Fear spell while fighting sahaguin(sp?) (and then the city watch jumped in to attack me and left the monsters alone…!), I finally found Shadowheart’s old gaff. I’m romancing Shadowheart (half-elf solidarity!), and in Act 2 I convinced her to turn from Shar and spare Dame Aylin (because who wouldn’t want the hulking great daughter of a goddess hanging around camp? (Although I didn’t know that would happen ahead of time - I just can’t help but be a goody-two-shoes in RPGs!)). But of course now I have to fight the Mother Superior and her minions… I don’t think I’ve ever been in a fight against this many opponents before, and those ****ing dark/void clouds are absolutely crippling me. I’m tempted to re-spec my character into a monstrously tanky fighter, just so I can have more heavy-hitters in this one single fight. I’m really enjoying this game, I don’t think I’ve ever played something with so much narrative and so many options to explore. I’ve played nearly 50hrs and I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface. But I have absolutely no qualms in switching to Easy for the really double hard b******d fights, or save-scumming the balls out of this game. I tend to let a lot of the failed skill checks in dialogue slide, but I have re-loaded so many seemingly unwinnable fights…
Comments on that first spoiler Spoiler I hate that guy. I've managed to talk him into killing himself, and having all his minions kill each other, I've managed to get him out of his stupid deal, and I've killed him - Every single one is a pain in the ass, and I'm sure I'm barely scratching the surface of that interaction too..
I like that my 50w laptop 3050 can run this at 1080p reasonably well. First play on tactician mode as I am a BG1 and 2 vet: wipe, wipe, wipe, wipe... My main is a lightening sorcerer. Rerolled some companions into more helpful builds too. I haven't tried online co-op, I have the GOG version, I imagine it is cross platform?
Larian have said that cross platform play “is coming”: https://www.techradar.com/gaming/co...arian-studios-director-of-publishing-confirms. You can already share saves between PC and PS5 and similar functionality for PC and Xbox is also coming, but there’s no indication of timescales for cross-platform multiplayer that I’ve seen. I have the Steam version, and from what I’ve seen of the multiplayer menu it seems heavily integrated into the Steam services, so I don’t know if Steam and GOG users on the PC can party up.
Feh! I am completing a doctoral portfolio (12,000 words to go) before writing 3 more chapters of a 26,000 word thesis, alongside my full time job, and I insist on allowing myself 30 minutes AM and PM for some 5th edition D&D. They've really kept the spirit of the first two. Although, I only fully played the enhanced editions and the first act of the original BG1. No time? No excuse!
I have written 33,957 words over the last 19 13 [working] days... for a single client. Not counting headlines, subheads, captions, metadata, nor imagery. I have just finished another book, which was sent to the printers earlier this week. Owing to scheduling clashes, I had to do the school run and feed the kids during peak productivity hours the past two days in a row. I started my research at 0700 yesterday morning and shut the office down at 2130 last night, and finally sat down with a Cup Noodle to turn my brain off and watch something on the Magic Lantern. Today will be more of the same, with the added bonus of having to fight a PolarFire SoC Video Kit to write up a hands-on piece on using the FPGA fabric to accelerate on-device machine learning for computer vision. I, at least, find time for a few rounds of Lexica on my phone, so I've not given up gaming completely.
Luxury! When we were young, we used to have to lick road wit' tongue and our dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt... and we were lucky! [/montypython] Seriously though, I wish I wrote that prodigiously! Props to you. Although I am a psychologist by trade, not a writer!
A couple of times I’ve been tempted to try my hand at freelance writing work. Every time I’ve had this whim, all it’s taken to slap that idea firmly out of my head is the merest hint from Gareth about his workload. Nah, I’ll stick to my cushy 0730-1600 gig, thanks
It is extremely rare for me to put so many hours into a game so soon after purchasing it. I bought it at the very end of September and it's been pretty much all I've played since then. Yeah, yeah, I know, "those are rookie numbers", etc. But ~113 hours in just over 3 weeks is unheard of for me. The only other "modern" game that beats it in terms of playing time is Cyberpunk 2077 - I've got 175hrs in that, but I bought it in Feb '21 and I've had at least three playthroughs so far.
113 hours is more than I've played in all games cumulatively in 2023, adulthood being what it is, so well done. The wife got this game for Xmas and we've been playing co-op. So far so good. However I'm a bit bemused by the amount of praise poured on it, much of which is directed at the branching and reactive nature of the campaign. This basically boils down to a lot of legwork having gone into accounting for player choices, which is commendable but not revolutionary - games have done this for decades, it's just not common because it eats a lot of dev time for not much subjective improvement of a player's experience on a single playthrough. You have to reload saves or play multiple times to actually notice all the work that they've put in, so arguably they've put in too much in that department (since it's only a single campaign which a lot of players will only play once). More broadly, I'm a bit baffled - gaslit, even - by people praising the game as a revolutionary experience overall, because the previous DND games (and a few other titles too) offered very similar experiences. Mass Effect achieved similar things in storytelling, character development and player agency, while Neverwinter Nights was a very similar DND implementation and Fallout 2 & New Vegas were by all accounts equally deep role-playing experiences. Witcher 3 was a similar world/exploration/narrative experience with equally beautiful design and equally rich lore. Many games of the past few years are equally good looking, and many do a much better job of calibrating difficulty, teaching game mechanics and presenting comprehensible interfaces. NWN is, in fact, so similar in structure, gameplay and scope that I get deja vu playing BG3 - in many ways it is just a polished current gen revival of NWN. Which is fine. I loved NWN and I'm loving BG3. But I'm surprised by all the rhetoric about how revolutionary it is. It is, by big picture RPG standards, just a good, solid game. The avalanche of praise heaped on BG3 and the total lack of noise in wider gamer culture over Dragon Age Origins (a game so similar that playing this has made me want to go back and replay that properly, giving it the chance I never gave it at the time) begs the question of why. Why did DAO get so overlooked, while BG3 is a generational moment? Probably because the wider culture has primed people to be receptive to this genre. Stranger Things and Game of Thrones, in particular, laid fertile soil for fantasy interest to grow in. DAO's tragedy was being released far too soon, at a time when DND was still for weird nerds.
What I feel is different about the branching narratives in BG3 is that these choices have consequences. Taking the example of Mass Effect, and I'll wrap this bit in spoilers... Spoiler Mass Effect promised so much and forced you to make a lot of decisions throughout the trilogy. But the ending of ME3 basically rendered all those choices meaningless: the player was given a simple choice of just a handful of outcomes, so it didn't matter how you'd played the games or who you chose to save/sacrifice. But in BG3 you can drastically influence how the story progresses, the events that happen, and how the story ends. The decisions you've made are meaningful because they have tangible consequences. And it doesn't boil things down to a simplistic and binary "good vs bad"; sometimes doing what you think is the "right" thing in BG3 will have negative consequences for both you the player and other characters, locations, etc, in the game. What this represents is player agency: you're not Gordon Freeman running around a twisted version of his workplace and being told what to do by NPCs, you the player are free to choose how you accomplish your goals and how you approach any given scenario. The amount of effort Larian have put in to accommodate so much player freedom is incredibly impressive, you certainly don't see that kind of effort in many modern games. I found out recently that you can speak to almost every single non-hostile animal in the game; there's no need to speak to most animals in the game, but it's the kind of thing that a smartarse D&D player would probably try. There are limits of course, but playing the game makes you feel like they really did think of everything. It also helps that it's well-written, has fantastic voice acting, and has a good deal of humour thrown in. It also represents a stand-out game in terms of technical quality - especially for PC gaming IMO. How many times over the last couple of years have we seen "big" games with lots of hype/buzz (whether you buy into it or not) fall flat on release. It took 3 years to get Cyberpunk 2077 to the point it arguably should have been when it released; Jedi Survivor and Starfield had absolutely dire performance on PC; Starfield promised so much and delivered basically the same formula we've seen from Bethesda so many times; and so on... BG3 wasn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but in terms of quality control it was far far better than any other "big" release we've seen for a long time. There has been a lot of praise lavished on Larian Studios and Baldur's Gate 3. It's easy for that praise to slip into the realms of hyperbole, but in many ways the praise is well earned. I agree, I don't think the core gameplay or the core mechanics are particularly revolutionary or new. It's also easy to forget (or not realise) that people have been trying to get Baldur's Gate 3 made since Baldur's Gate 2 was released. EDIT: And even though Larian Studios has "only" been working on it for six years, they have a huge amount of experience in RPG games (in fact a lot of mechanics are similar to what they did in Divinity: Original Sin). Its various different elements (gameplay, ruleset, graphics, character animations, narrative, world-building, lore, dialogue, voice acting, etc) are done incredibly well in their own right, and all those elements are brought together into a final product that's well-polished and of a high technical standard. Against the backdrop of the current state of gaming, personally I think that is the main achievement that Baldur's Gate 3 represents. I don't think BG3 represents a new "standard" for gaming, even cRPG games, or a yardstick by which all future games should be measured. And that's not a bad thing. But I think it should be celebrated when something comes along that stands out from the crowd for all the right reasons. And that's not a bad thing either.
Agreed, perhaps it's not yet obvious to me how reactive and accomodating the player agency stuff is yet because I'm still only about 20 hours in. It's all quite straightforward and hand-holdey storytelling at this juncture. Side note, though, this game does an absolutely dreadful job of explaining things to new players, the menus are not the best laid out and we've spent ages simply finding stuff in the GUI - always by autodidactic stumbling around, unguided by any kind of tutorial, hints or reminders. It's strange to play a game so dense with well designed features and mechanics that doesn't bother to explain itself at all. The changes from core 5e are very minor but very well chosen. I keep spotting little tweaks and every time I'm like "oh good, they fixed that, that was always kinda stupid". The gameplay works so well, too, it makes you appreciate (in a way that's hard to see in a tabletop campaign) how well designed 5e is. Also the level designs are excellent. Also the camera angles/controls are terrible, why is it flat out impossible to look up. I managed to unlock the camera in combat to float about and see where everyone was once but couldn't replicate it, so either a bug or another totally buried bit of functionality. The ability to revive dead players without going on an epic quest to raise the price of a small village is a nice change from tabletop, the availability of save/load functionality more so. I have never liked the iron-man mode baked into tabletop RPGs. Being able to pay a fee to reroll your levelling decisions is also brilliant, because sooner or later you always pick a duff feature that you regret. Being able to pet dogs is the game feature nobody asked for but everybody needed.
