legend

Yeah, the trailer looks cool, but I'm also of the mind that that means nothing  I'll give it a shot and hope to be pleasantly surprised while expecting vapidness.

That said, can't be worse the Episode 9  

3 hours ago, Kal-El814 said:

I spent years meditating at a mountain temple, in complete silence, while sitting on a bed of nails. I came away stronger, better, in desperate need of a tetanus shot... and a complete indifference towards spoilers. It can be learned. You CAN be better.

Plausibly for a large set of narratives, spoilers won't matter. But if part of the designed narrative experience is for you to be trying to figure things out from the same information the characters have, that experience is completely broken by spoilers. I suppose you can just say you don't enjoy the experience of trying to figure things out with the characters, but there is nothing wrong with liking that and spoilers fuck it.

For games this is even worse. There's not many games where your choices *actually* matter (even though all PR says they always do), but for example, I've made choices in BG3 based on the limited information I have, and that specific experience is fucked if someone tells me how things ultimately unfold. Same thing in Witcher 3. Obviously those games have other things going for them that even warrants replays, but that specific experience requires no spoilers.

32 minutes ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

 

I haven't watched this, but I do want to say that as someone whose never bothered with Cleric in DnD proper, BG3 has made me a convert. Clerics are so fucking good. Spirit Guardians is fucking amazing on its own and you get high armor to keep concentration spells going (especially compared to other spell casters). You just turn on spirit guardians and walk around melting everyone. And for some of the fights where you have a ton of scrub enemies, it's so fucking OP. They'll just run at you and die!

24 minutes ago, Massdriver said:

I think I'm going to lower the difficulty to normal so that I can move quicker through the game. I don't have enough time to play. I know too many people passing me up story wise and want to experience it in sync with them. 

No harm in that. As I said, this game benefits from replays so you can always replay on normal again if you want!

7 hours ago, Bacon said:

Jesus Christ I just busted a nut

  Hide contents

 

As long as it is, this game really needs multiple playthroughs I think.So much unique stuff for different classes and approaches.

Following the same arc as The Last Night, I see.

2 hours ago, Bacon said:

oh no

It's reddit tho so who really knows lol.

The first response is:

Quote

For as hard I think this ending misses the landing, it really puts into perspective just how bad ME3's was. Not even comparable at all.

I think I'll be okay  

11 minutes ago, Bacon said:

True, but maybe that should have waited a few months instead of launching it early. I mean, you can beat the game, but I guess it's up to the individual if reaching the credits is enough to consider the game complete.

 

Course, I'm not even outta act 1 yet, but I have seen the doom a gloom of people who have completed act 3.

I'm not really worried about it. I just finished act 2 and have loved every moment. The game got incredible scores across the board too. There will be people who are unhappy because there will always be people that are unhappy. This is already such an incredible achievement, particularly as someone who is a DnD player that I'm just not worried about it.

If I hate it though I'll eat crow. I loved ME3 up until star child which poisoned me on the series and I'm only now slowly recovering from it. So I suppose it could happen! But seems unlikely  

I do, however, fully expect Larian to release an a whole bunch of improvements including expanded content 1 year later all released free because that's what they did for the Divinity games.

Although I do wonder (and hope) that they also do a large scale paid expansion with a new campaign (even if shorter) given how enormously popular the game is.

13 minutes ago, Bacon said:

Seems like the game is still in EA.

Then it would be the most polished EA game of this scale to ever release. As it is, it's far more polished and a finished product than most game releases.

5 hours ago, Spork3245 said:

BTW, @legend , since you were helping me earlier with my question about a noob build, I wanted to let you know that I decided to go Paladin with a Warlock multi class (because the combo, in theory, is kinda lulzy)

As an RP that is a pretty funny combo. But on the up side they're both Charisma-based casters which is a good synergy!

10 hours ago, Bitgod said:

This game has broken me.

 

I love how everyone is grimacing except Asterion.

13 hours ago, Bacon said:

I don't wanna race through it, but I am not a fan of long combat encounters in general. I would always skip or FF>> enemy turns if I could. And it's not that the turn isn't going my way, as in advantageous, it's that nothing is even happening. Like, I'm not here reloading after every time Lae'zel goes down, or Gale gets fuckin' sniped for the umpteenth time. Like, I know I said I reload a lot, but that was on Sroc, and I mentioned rerolling to Durge Barb to stop that.

So what are you actually reloading for that makes it go faster than just playing it out if not the rolls not going your way?

2 hours ago, Bacon said:

I don't. But part of the point that I made is that I don't want combat to drag and reloading is just faster. Cuz all that happens is literally doing the exact same thing next turn. It's actually pretty shit. No amount of colon-p is going to change my opinion on that.

I guess I don't see the combat as something you need to race through and I don't see a turn not always going my way as making it "drag."

Oh, you could just play the game and not save scum every fucking dice roll  

8 minutes ago, Xbob42 said:

It's been redeployed, you're good to go.

EDIT: Weird, new replies weren't showing up until I posted this, you already knew!

I appreciate you updating me all the same!

The hot fix issue has been fixed!

9 hours ago, HardAct said:

Yea,

    I'm buying it this weekend as I want to support the devs. I do hate spending these launch prices but money is not an issue I just have so many AAA games to still play as it is. Even games like Divinity II, Tyranny, Pillars of Eternity and Torment: Tides of Numenera. Looking forward to it alot!

That's the CRPG dream list right there! All of those games are great!

They expect the hot fix issue that's resulting in incompatible saves to be fixed by end of day EU (so a few hours? Depends on what end of day means to them!). This is really problematic for me as someone who's been playing it every evening and now has the morning off  

55 minutes ago, best3444 said:

 

Got it. 

As a rule of thumb, if something breaks the top 10 of all time of something, but the number seems low to you, you're probably not appreciating the context of that number rather than it not being significant  

Even if they could, I would not release this right now while everyone is still playing BG3  

44 minutes ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

yeah as you pointed out the issue here and in many situations is a shit greedy publisher. Developers can’t do shit if publishers or executives (of self publishing) just push games out the door before they’re ready or keep expanding the scope, changing directions, all while not increasing the budget or extending timelines to appropriate deliver on any of it. 
 

Larian also isn’t releasing broken ass console versions. Meanwhile CDPR pushed out console versions of CP2077 that wasn’t in a releasable state for another year. While I’m sure testers, coders, designers, etc would have rather held off so it wasn’t an embarrassing mess. 
 

the people responsible for the decisions that lead to bad games at release aren’t the people that were tweeting or who many are blaming. They’re acting like a writer or a design lead can unilaterally tell the CEO or publisher to fuck off that they’re going to release the game in 6 years, not 2. 
 

the people who need to learn the lessons of BG3’s development aren’t learning shit, because the only thing they care about, money, is still rolling in. You think EA is looking at BG3 and thinking “yeah, FIFA doesn’t need loot boxes” when micro transactions bring in billions? 
 

im sure there are game directors that just aren’t asking for the extra couple of weeks or few months, and if they did they’d get them. But I’m sure more get told no and that they need to release on a specific day so share holders will be happy. 

Yeah I fully believe the primary problem is executives and publishers insisting on "what will sell" and insisting on continual revenue mechanisms that make the game design worse. We ought to embrace Larian's success and push these people to budge on their nonsense, although the likely effect is most executives and publishers will ignore it and continue doing what they do.

So, PC Gamer liked it...

Baldur's Gate 3 review | PC Gamer

WWW.PCGAMER.COM

---

The new pinnacle of the genre.

Quote

After spending 160 hours unravelling conspiracies, setting fire to monsters and finding increasingly fancy hats for my Bard, I can now confidently say that Baldur's Gate 3 is the greatest RPG I've ever played. If I wasn't writing this review, I'd be rolling a brand new character and jumping in for another hundred hours. I've got it bad. 

It's also the highest score they've given a game in 16 years.

4 hours ago, Fizzzzle said:

The thing I hate is the conversation from devs about a game like Baldurs Gate 3 not giving gamers too much of an expectation that other games will be better, because making games is haaaarrrrd. 

 

"Larian had a decade of experience in the same genre to perfect it." Cool, so did BioWare, that didn't stop EA from turning their games to shit.

 

"Larian is a large studio." Cool, they have like 400 people. You know how many people Blizzard has? ~1500. 

 

I do hope it's something of a wake up call for the industry, even though I won't be. Baldurs Gate 3 was a massive gamble that paid off because they did it right. It was an investment that took 6-7  years to pay off, and I think that's what AAA Devs are allergic to these days. When the only thing saving your job is next quarters profits, it's hard to sell the idea of a massive game that won't see a profit until you're long gone.

The person who originally started that controversy on twitter later doubled down saying it's not possible for others due the "INSANE" funding Larian had due to the IP.

The head of publishing at Larian then went on to point out that not only did they receive no funding from WotC, they had to pay for the DnD license and beg them to give it to them.  

2 hours ago, Paperclyp said:

So to me that’s weird then - that most games’ reviews are from time of release - cuz I just don’t think we’re good at contextualizing quality beyond time and place. Though maybe part of it is we (perhaps rightly) didn’t make it as big a deal as we did now, like a game’s “score” or rank overall. It was just more of a reference or way to assist someone’s purchasing decision. 
 

I was listening to old giant bomb pods and they explain their 5 star system and why they think it’s the right way to go, and as time goes on I tend to agree with them. 
 

Regardless, I shouldn’t derail this topic any further. BG3 is incredible and as I mentioned before absolutely could be a top 5 game ever for me, maybe higher. 

Well, what I'm saying is it doesn't matter if we do or don't. You don't need to actively think contextually about the timeline and how standards may change to be affected by the current state of affairs. Games being less polished at any given point and time means the unpolished parts are probably going to be something the drives some person nuts. And the more unpolished it is, the more chances that some people will find issue with those things thus lowering the aggregate rating.

We even see that with BG3 now. For example, there is a good case to made that it just doesn't introduce players to the rules and world well enough. This is something that's going to be a breaking issue for some people even if most people can get over it and that will pull the ratings down.

But increasingly, we are seeing better methods in games to handle this kind of thing. FFXVI has the pause and word highlights. The Pillars games did something similar. As time goes on, that kind of thing and the right way to do it may become better and future games may not fail in this regard.

We can also see this happening in hindsight. While BG3 has these issues the original BG and BG2 were *so much worse* in their interface. These problems absolutely turned some people off from the originals games at the time, but while BG3 still suffers from this, it's light years better and will turn fewer people off from the game as a consequence, thus resulting in higher aggregate scores.