legend

Lot's of games. What does "is art" actually mean? Every game is an authored medium that evokes emotions and reflection, but I guess in this definition we'd be excluding "fun" and "exhilaration" as a valid emotions for art? If so, still lots of games But some stand outs for evoking hoity toity emotions and reflections might be: Ico SOMA The Witcher 3 Senua's Sacrifice The Last of Us God of War (new ones) Persona 5 Pentiment Disco Elysium etc.

Skyrim in space with fewer bugs and enjoyable combat sounds solid enough to me!

Well invent technology that might as well be magic and use it to build a hellscape.

I'd tell you to remember you said this when you're old, but there's the rub.

Feels like you're just arguing that it should be called something different. Regardless of name, rolling a 20 and 1 still have important unique impacts on outcomes separate from the other dice number rolls.And while combat crits also have an affect on damage, its core function is on the hit success/failure: like in DC checks, for an attack roll it's possible for it otherwise to be impossible to hit or inversely miss a target *unless* you get a crit success/fail. E.g., if an enemy has a 22 AC and I have +0 attack, the only way I'm hitting them is via a crit. And if an enemy is wearing robes with 10 AC and I have a +10 attack bonus, then the only way I'm missing is with a crit fail. Given all that, it's much simpler to refer to the unique role of 20 vs 1 in dialog DC and combat attack rolls as critical success/fail rather than make up a whole new name for each setting

Crit matters outside of combat. DC checks can be above 20 and otherwise be impossible for some characters unless they crit succeed. Inversely, with modifiers, a char might always pass a DC except for a crit fail which autofails.

I maintain that D20s are a bad design decision and that probably leads to people wanting to save scum more. Multiple dice summed together has much better distributions that more consistently match expectations of someone being proficient at something. I would also get rid of crit fails. It can sometimes be funny when the enemy crit fails something major, but I think that's overshadowed by the frustration of crit fails and basically losing your turn feeling like you did nothing. However, these changes would require completely re balancing DnD which is no small task!

I'm very much of the mind that you should play how you want. Save scumming is also a great way to ease the difficulty for people who are struggling. I'm somewhere in between. I save extremely regularly when just moving about the world, but mostly just as a check point. I don't save scum dice rolls, but I do sometimes save, say an option I know I don't want to keep but just want to see how it plays out and then reload. I usually don't save within combat either. If it's a long fight I will occasionally save at points in the fight as checkpoints just so I don't have to redo everything if I fail, but not to save scum lucky combat rolls.

I really hope BGS knocks it out the park. And I'll play this game even if it is just Skyrim in space (which it almost surely is). But it will be sad, because the open world RPG genre has evolved so much beyond what Bethesda did even though they were one of the early pioneers of it, and it would suck if they weren't able to step up with it.

I don't think it will take a month, but if you're itching to play and don't mind reverting back to your previous character, then sure, go for it I suppose!

I think he's talking about how people react to the game. Even if the game sells a lot, it's not great for MS if the reaction is lukewarm because a perception that MS can't release great exclusives is not good for the brand.

Larian is one of the most responsive devs to feedback and even just adding huge new features for free. So if this wasn't a bug before, you can be near certain it will be fixed. But, yes, you would have to wait a little while for the next patch or two (depending on how early it was reported). If you weren't very far and just want to play, resetting might be fine. But if you were further along, maybe just wait a few days? Seems like it would be more annoying to start over and not get back to where you were by the time a fix is released and then reload your previous char save.

You trying to beat best at number of times you restart a game before finishing it?

Great updates coming to BG3: Baldur's Gate 3 - Community Update #24: Looking To The Future - Steam News STORE.STEAMPOWERED.COM Hello all, Since launching last month, a lot of tweaks and updates can already be seen in Baldur's Gate 3. Over the past few weeks we've chased down bugs, polished up some cinematics, and used your feedback to help organize our thoughts and inform our plans going forward. The first major patch just launched, solving over 1000 bugs to hopefully make Baldur’s Gate 3 an even better experience. But it was still a patch designed primarily to... The highlights are: They're expanding the epilogue for the characters, starting with Karlach who will get more epilogue info in Patch 2. Performance improvements across the board, but in particular in Act 3. They will be making it so if you start a coop game and then play without your friend, you can hide their character (in the most Larian way possible) and free the slot for a regular party member. Then if they rejoin later, you can bring their character back.

In DnD, every time you gain a character level you can to choose which class you put that level into and each class has its own level. So if you are character level 12, the sum of all class levels has to equal 12. E.g, 8 fighter class level + 4 bard class level. In the regular game, you can have 12 character levels max. The mod he described lets your character level go above 12 as long as no class level is above 12. So in the mod, you could be character level 20 made up of level 12 fighter and level 8 bard class levels, or anything lese of the sort. Mods can't easily let your class levels go higher than 12, because then they'd have to implement the additional rules that come with each class (subclass) levels (and the corresponding spell lists) which the game doesn't have. A bigger mod could of course add those too, but you're not going to see something like that so close to release cause, uh, it's a lot of rules for a lot classes/subclasses!

Hot damn!

I saw a comment from Larian's director of publishing that they had been working with the voice actress for the narrator (who is awesome) for 10 years. Which I assumed meant she worked on DOS2, and she did! She was Malady, and she apparently put together on youtube some of her favorite lines, which are, indeed, excellent. Makes me want to do another playthrough of DOS2 after BG3.

Also, I feel compelled to share this legendary special scene from the the PS2 launch game Summoner.

When you play Monk, absolutely get mobile as your first feat. Monks can run so far and Mobile makes it so you can hit someone and then walk away without incurring a opportunity attack. It's so good. My main basically ran all around the battle field, shoving people off cliffs and taking out ranged/magic when needed. The first one sounds good. The latter 2 do sound like they could break the game balance though.

Based on reviews, pretty sure it's not.

There are actual probability thought exercises that are meaningful and useful to point to instead! Pascal's wager does active damage by expressing itself as if it were proper probabilistic reasoning when it's anything but. It practically assumes the answer before it begins. It's an exemplar of pseudoscientific thinking and what not to do. Given how bad people are at thinking clearly I really don't want to encourage more bad thinking like it by highlighting it as something reasonable. Feels like we're choosing between a turd and vomit, but I guess everyone's got their own taste

It's not "internally consistent" unless you make a whole bunch of other truly absurd assumptions, including "God counts fake belief as real" and "other hypothetical gods who would punish you for false belief are impossible." It's vague rhetoric pretending to be rigorous by using the language of probability, but it is not. We should not celebrate this kind of pseudoscience but condemn it for the farce that it is.

Ooph, I would not point to Pascal's wager as a good argument. I'm not sure I would for any God argument, but Pascal's wager generally sucks I would stick with your first part: you either have faith because you feel compelled to believe or you don't. If you're looking for justification for your belief in God, you'll only find mental gymnastics.

The cliffnotes of reasons I do not believe in a God: Humanity has very little idea about how the universe exists as it does. There is a sea of possible explanations, mostly filled with possibilities we haven't even considered. Even if we treated them all as "equally good" any one of them is unlikely to be it. The position of "I don't know" over this sea of possibilities implies that any specific idea like "a god exists and made the universe" is probably not it. "God did it" in the abstract isn't actually an explanation of anything. It's "not even wrong," yet adds a whole slew of assumptions, which makes it a worse than useless model. Specific claims of any specific God's deeds are regularly inconsistent with observation. Specific claims about any specific God's nature are regularly inconsistent with each other. The more we learn about the universe, the weirder it is, and the notion of a God is far too much of a dumb early man idea to match the trend.