legend

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.

4 minutes ago, Paperclyp said:

I see. I just find that onus go be more on MS than the pressure to be on this game in particular. 
 

Though this could be a tipping point for Bethesda. Was Fallout 4 an underwhelming blip or was it indicative of the quality of game they’re able to make anymore. 

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.

13 minutes ago, Bacon said:

I'm not far in, just about to start act 2, but I have a lot of hours put into the game. But I really want to play the game. If it gets fixed before I'm caught up, great, I can go back to my old character, but I have no idea how long that will be. This bug started with Patch 1 so it hasn't had a lot of time to make the rounds. I have seen very few people talking about it, and none of them even claimed to report it and I have at least reported it twice. And like, if it takes too long for them to respond, like a month plus and I didn't play the game at all, I would have just restarted anyway.

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!

19 minutes ago, Paperclyp said:

I guess like, I would be surprised if it was anything other than a massive sales success unless there is something deeply wrong with it, so I don’t think it’s in much danger of missing a reasonable expectation, even if that is high. 
 

If you’re talking something more nebulous than that I just am not sure what we’re talking about lol. 

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.

5 minutes ago, Bacon said:

I had no desire to restart, but this is literally unplayable for me.

If refuse to play my character like this and I want to keep playing. I have no idea if the bug will ever be fixed.

 

Like, I actually pretty fucking upset about it.

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.

2 hours ago, Bacon said:

Please god, fix my character.

I have fucking restarted.

This is my new one

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

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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.

47 minutes ago, Bitgod said:

Oh, multi-class stops you at total of 12 levels?  That's pretty jank.  I might have to use that mod, I'm doing a Palock.

 

Oh, read your next one.  So it's just a max of 12 for one class, so you CAN be 8+12=20?

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.

1 hour ago, Mr.Vic20 said:

And the first playthrough is complete! 

 

Main Character: Paladin High Elf 

  Reveal hidden contents

Who became a mind flayer

Total time: 120 hours! 

Liked: Depth of options, combinations, lots more to discover on play through 2

Disliked: Bugs, inability to skip enemy turns (toward end of game battles can last an hour+)

Person Rating: 9.5

Next Main: Monk

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.

1 hour ago, Spork3245 said:

There’s a couple of mods I’m debating on adding:

 

A never overburdened mod <- I f’n hate weight limits in games like this. You have basically a magical inventory where you can carry around dead bodies and giant barrels of explosives sight unseen. But oh no, 1001lbs? You better knock off a pound and magically send it over to your camp or your character loses all their movement points!

 

Multi-Classing lvl limit increase <- instead of being limited to level 12, you can now have a combined total of 20 (no class can go past 12 still, but if you’re doing like Paladin + Warlock you could put each at 10, or one at 8 and one at 12, or whatever other combination)

 

Increase Party Limit <- this probably risks making the game way too easy, but the whole thing of “hey, we’re all gonna die unless we figure this out… but I’m only going to have 3 of you with me at any time because reasons” in pretty much all games like this has always annoyed me  

The first one sounds good. The latter 2 do sound like they could break the game balance though.

On 6/14/2023 at 9:00 PM, legend said:

"This will be first From game I enjoy," I tell myself for the fourth time in a row.

Based on reviews, pretty sure it's not.

3 minutes ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

It's been more than 25 years since I read it -- so my memory is a bit fuzzy. However, my recollection was that he argued if you acted like you believed in God, and tried in good faith to believe, eventually you would.

As I don't believe in God, I don't think the argument holds up largely for the reason of having to pick "A God" and knowing how to pick the right one.  But, I still believe it is a fascinating thought exercise.

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.

3 minutes ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

And in the whole history of philosopher's trying to provide a framework for religion, Pascal's Wager was the only one that stuck with me. [Particularly given the fact that I have an economics degree.]

Feels like we're choosing between a turd and vomit, but I guess everyone's got their own taste  

32 minutes ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

I'll beg to differ.  Pascal's wager attacks it from a different angle than most others, in that it doesn't try to prove god actually exists, but attempts to provide a rational argument for why you should have faith -- at least it's mostly internally coherent, which IMHO isn't something I can say for most of the other arguments.

 

The intelligent design theory -- in where complexity means there has to be an intelligent designer falls apart when there are a whole series of scientific theories that show how complexity can develop without one.  

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.

38 minutes ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

This really feels like a middle-school level analysis of one of St. Thomas Aquinas's arguments -- and IMHO, this guy really doesn't understand most of the science he's trying to reference.  

It's been decades since I spent any time on the philosophy of the existence of god, but I haven't ever found one that was even remotely satisfying to me -- and I've read arguments from some pretty sophisticated philosophers.  If you want to believe, you have to do it based on faith alone -- because there isn't a coherent argument that can stand up to any scientific/philosophical scrutiny.  [Similarly, it's also virtually impossible to prove the nonexistence of God (or almost anything else).]

If you're looking at reasons to believe in God, I think Pascal's Wager is fascinating. 

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.

2 hours ago, Kal-El814 said:

Meanwhile, at EA…

 

Absolutely insane. 

2 hours ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

 

Dragon Age: Dreadwolf's development does appear to be encountering some issues:

 

Dragon Age Dreadwolf keeps getting delayed internally, report claims | VGC

WWW.VIDEOGAMESCHRONICLE.COM

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BioWare is currently said to be targeting a summer 2024 release “at the earliest”…

 

 

Given that, they should restart it and make it more like a DA:O given that Larian just proved people want these games. I'm sure EA understands that now.

38 minutes ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

Patch #1 has gone live.

 

Patch #1 Now Live!

BALDURSGATE3.GAME

---

<p>Patch #1 is now live for Baldur's Gate 3, addressing over 1000 bugs, glitches, and blockers.</p> <ul> </ul>

 

 

Baldur's Gate 3's first major update is so big, the patch notes exceeded Steam's text limit

WWW.EUROGAMER.NET

---

Larian has released its first "major" update for Baldur's Gate 3, and when the studio said major it wasn't kidding.

 

 

Quintessential Larian move.

1 hour ago, Dodger said:

It does seem that other than whatever games Sony moneyhats to keep away from Xbox in general Devs seem to get games running just fine on the S. LIke I haven't seen mass outcry that games on the S are just broken unplayable messes because it's just so shitty. If anything I see the opposite, games come out at 1080P 30/60 FPS and people are mostly impressed it gets the job done. Devs are getting the games on it and getting them to apparently run well for the parameters the system is aiming for. So is it really the big roadblock they make it seem?

Most games up until about now were also cross gen games where they were designed to support substantially worse systems than the S. For such games, the S isn't going to be a problem because it's not the bottom. But that's starting to change. That developers can make games that work doesn't mean there are not sacrifices either. It can just as easily be the case that developers begrudgingly target the series S as the base from the start and work from there, and that they may have done things differently if they could have started higher. And then you have the fact that even if developers who did target higher get it to work, that doesn't mean it didn't cost them significant effort which indirectly affects us all in various ways.

In other words, we're reaching the transition point where it's going to start to be a pain, and BG3 is the first very clear example of that pain. When these systems first came out, my prediction was the S wouldn't be so much of a problem for the first few years because of cross-gen and just general slowness to update to new targets but that it would start to be more of an issue after that. And so far that prediction seems about right!

Sorry, these are painfully pedestrian arguments that have been made and debunked about a trillion times already.

20 minutes ago, Dodger said:

 

I'd like to think we live in a world of nuance where we understand this is is a rare case by case basis and not something that will happen with every other game. But then I remember social media exists so nevermind. 

The thing is, the series S had always been a bad idea for this very reason. It drags things down and it's only going to become more of a nuisance as the generation goes on and as cross-gen games evaporate in favor of games that demand new technology.

So caving on this is good because it means more games can free themselves of its nonsense, even if not all.

Wow, they caved!

I still liked it and am glad I played it, but it has flaws.  FF7R was substantially better at striking the right balance of action and RPG IMO and I expected FF7R part 2 releasing soon will also be better. This year is also one of the most packed gaming years in some time, so it gets easily overshadowed and you could easily wait for a lull.

56 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

Fixed

I actually enjoy 3 quite a lot! It's got obvious problems, but the whole is quite enjoyable.