legend

I appreciate you updating me all the same!

The hot fix issue has been fixed!

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

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

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

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.

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.

I think it's important to bear in mind that a game topping the aggregate ratings doesn't mean it's the best game ever made, it means... well, that it's the most highly rated game on aggregate! But a game can reach that position without actually being any reviewer's favorite game. Aggregation sites are all subject to the complexities of voting theory which is riddled with weird counter intuitive properties. So while topping the aggregate ratings is impressive, I do think it's important to remember precisely what that measure is and isn't

I think reviews can be added from venues for older game and sometimes work there way into to the aggregate, but largely it's the reviews at the time it was released.

You're right, they're not reviewed that way. But I do think that because we continue to smooth rough edges in games, it makes it easier for someone to find fault in an older game even if it was great. And if it's easier for someone to find fault, it's harder to top the aggregate ratings since the more people that find faults the lower the aggregate. At some point I think we'll saturate on that regard, but I don't think we're there yet.

There is some bias on opencritic because they only track "recentish" games for which scores can be crawled. Stuff from the 80s isn't going to make the list. Or if there are any instances, they're very few. But that aside, while there are things about the game industry that have gotten worse (*cough* $20 "micro" transactions where the only thing micro is the content you get *cough*), on the whole games continue to get better and it is reasonable to expect that. Relatively speaking, games are a new medium, which means it takes time to learn what works and for the community hone the craft. Games are also *heavily* reliant on hardware, software tooling, and just "process" (e.g., voice acting/mocap studios, etc) to make the game, all of which improve through continual development. And on top of even that, more games are made as time goes on and it becomes more mainstream. That means there's more chances for the "best" to be on the more recent side than not. So on the whole, I do think games have been getting better with time since their inception so I think it's appropriate for the "best" games to skew more recent.. And in this case, I don't think you can find a better RPG than BG3. You can find a small handful of ones that are maybe equally good in different ways, but not better, and BG3 excels in ways we haven't really seen with the closest being DOS2 (for obvious reasons).

Depends a bit on how the damage range is implemented. If it's implemented as a uniform distribution over a small range (i.e., the extremes are just as likely as the average) that does behave a little differently than multiple dice which progressively become less likely as you get further away from the average. The multiple die also allows for very rare events that either feel absolutely amazing for absolutely horrible I think keeping some degree of those really rare events is usually fun -- it gives you something to talk about, especially in a social game -- and the nice thing about multiple die is its a natural consequence of the simple mechanic, rather than something that has to be hacked on. But your mileage may vary.

I mean, I could have said "bell curve" but then it would feel like I was just talking down to you

I agree. If you want to argue that FF turn-based is still viable and can be successful, I would point to Persona 5.

Those big ranges are not actually bad. Big ranges happen when you have many dice rolls, but the benefit of many dice rolls is the low range (and high range) is virtually impossible. you get a Gaussian-like distribution. As a reference point consider that a regular Gaussian distribution for continuous values has some probability density across the entire range of real numbers from - infinity to + infinity, but in practice you're not going to see results bigger than 10 because the probability of extremes drops off exponentially. That's why I said I'm not opposed to dice, but D20s are awful and multiple dice provides a much better game dynamic. There is an argument that it's difficult to communicate that fact to players though.

Holy shit, it's only gone up with more reviews. It's now the highest rated game of all time on open critic:

Yeah the DOS2 mechanics are awesome and I absolutely want them to come back to the series. BG3's biggest "strict" improvement is that the engine lets them be more personal. *Much* better rendered people and you can pull the camera down low to feel more apart of the world. Perhaps motivated by that, they really focused more on the character stories and the world just feels better. But while I like DnD a lot, there are a lot of gameplay decisions I'm not super fond of. D20s suck, but DnD will never remove them at this point because it's kind of a the face of the series. I'm not opposed to dice rolls, but multiple dice rolls (e.g., 3d6 or 2d10) leads to much more enjoyable RNG that feels like it makes more sense (because the distribution becomes more Gaussian). If your character is not proficient at something, they'll basically never make it, whereas a proficient character will make it regularly without much fuss.

I also finally got to watch it. Fantastic. This is shaping up to be one of the best superhero trilogies. Every aspect of it is good. The core narrative is good, the meta narrative around it, the art direction (my god this must have been a bitch to animate), the voice acting, the music. They are just crushing it with this series.

There has been at least one instance where something was time sensitive for me, but it was pointed out. Otherwise no, other than the fact that if you want the benefits a long rest (ability regen like spell slots, and I *think* regaining short rest options), you need to consume camp supplies, which are a finite, though generally plentiful resource.

There's the share button, but your phone is fine

Take a picture of what it's showing you and share it here.

I appreciate this person acknowledged that Monk feels better in this than typical 5e, but I think Monk should be higher rated than this. based on my playthrough thus far. First, you *must* get the mobile feat, which lets you hit someone, and then run away avoiding opp attacks *and* it lets you run really far. So much of BG3 is based around character positioning and the Monk is so fucking good at this. You can basically hit someone and run so far away that they can't reach you again. And if a ranged character targets you, you an to catch the arrow mid flight and throw it back at them. Finally, if you play Dark Urge, you're given at some point a cape that turns you invisible upon killing an enemy, which synergizes with this class so fucking well.