Baldur's Gate Baldur's Gate 3 RELEASE THREAD

[Grauken]

Fake news, there are these throwing bombs lying everywhere, the ones with acid/bleed suck ass, but void bulbs are OP and worth looting even more than the demon sword.

Knowing myself I will save them for possible use beyond the point in the game where the base damage from my party makes them not worth to use anymore

 

[Eisenheinrich]

People talking about what D&D setting Larian might tackle next - did you see the news that WotC will be releasing a new set of Planescape books sometime this year? I expect them to try and rope in Larian to make a new game for Planescape at one point.

As much as I like BG3 and would like Larian to make IWD3 and BG4, giving them Planescape would be a disaster. They wouldn't be able to write any serious stuff even if their survival depended on it.

There was talk in the early access thread for BG3 about what Larian might have been like if Swen got into Dark Sun when he was younger, but as things are right now, yeah, Larian seems to struggle to write more serious tones in their story for longer than just the occasional conversation.

Dark Sun was the more gritty and mature Sword&Sorcery setting, right?

 

[Swen]

Good video about how a normie found BG3 and finally gets introduced to crpg's

 

[Grauken]

People talking about what D&D setting Larian might tackle next - did you see the news that WotC will be releasing a new set of Planescape books sometime this year? I expect them to try and rope in Larian to make a new game for Planescape at one point.

As much as I like BG3 and would like Larian to make IWD3 and BG4, giving them Planescape would be a disaster. They wouldn't be able to write any serious stuff even if their survival depended on it.

There was talk in the early access thread for BG3 about what Larian might have been like if Swen got into Dark Sun when he was younger, but as things are right now, yeah, Larian seems to struggle to write more serious tones in their story for longer than just the occasional conversation.

Dark Sun was the more gritty and mature Sword&Sorcery setting, right?

It was Fallout Forgotten Realms with Psi powers and Insect player characters. More gritty and mature, questionable.

 

[Shaki]

Infinitron When can we expect the codex review?

That depends on you, Swen. Y'all got any more of that marketing budget?

 

[gurugeorge]

I'm out in the open now and everything is so frikking bright, fuzzy and bloomy. Shiiet imma fiddle with the graphics setting to tone that shit down.

For me it looked a bit like there is a bright haze over parts of the map. Could be the game was never tested with our old videocards. Some fiddling with my TV's brightness and with the game's gamma brought things to a normal state.

I found I had to turn the gamma right down to get the game looking right. Like, if you get the left image really barely visible, just to the point where you can see the whole image very faintly, it comes out just right, everything looks proper solid (really good in fact) and not washed-out. I wonder if it's something to do with the game being tuned for more modern monitors out of the box, or HDD or something like that?

 

[Grunker]

Infinitron When can we expect the codex review?

When Grunker finishes the game and writes it. Could be a while.

I had to go back to work in the middle of Act 2. Having the time to finish a review as well as finishing this thing seems like a dubious proposition

 

[Louis_Cypher]

My casual gamer friends have begun playing this

I try gauging it's impact among casuals, based on what I can see with friends or colleagues. First, before release, it seems anecdotally, that huge levels of Cyberpunk 2077-level hype existed, and captured casuals (it was never going to fail at launch given this pre-order hype). They were watching Swen videos and lapping up the hype over reactivity. Now that it's out, I see relative non-RPG gamers (Assassin's Creed tier) are playing. It hasn't really gone beyond habitual gamers however.

I'm wondering what proportion of those are going to bounce off a full CRPG, not knowing what they got into.

Speaking about accessability... Normies don't neccecarily want shallower games when they dip into this genre, which is where I think studios got 'accessable' so wrong. However, they may have some big conceptual barriers that prevents enjoyment of CRPG combat. I think one of the biggest filters, is not knowing what a CRPG fight is meant to 'play out' like, without an explicit example of tactics. Playing a Wizard, they will pick something named 'Fireball' every time, over what they percieve to be a trash spell like Tasha's Laughter. Other games explicitly teach people an obvious "exploit weakness" mechanic, in the tutorial, like say Persona's "press turn" system or whatever; I'm not sure conditions like prone are ever explained, unless I missed a tooltip. That might be the biggest entry barrier for newbs; not knowing what causes crits, not knowing what crits do, what is paralysis, etc.

 

[Swen]

Btw you need to understand the game is "hard" on balanced for most normies.

Lots of reviews like this

 

[Grunker]

Btw you need to understand the game is "hard" on balanced for most normies.

Lots of reviews like this

Nobody is complaining that it's easy on normal. Hell make normal the new story mode for all I care.

We're complaining the hardest difficulty is so easy

But again, this game should be really easy to difficulty mod. I fully expect a good and polished mod within like a year if the modding is flexible enough.

Reducing kill XP (NOT quest XP) by something 25% would probably solve one-third of the issue by itself.

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

Good video about how a normie found BG3 and finally gets introduced to crpg's

Man, this guy is supposed to be a "likable darling" for many, but I can't stand his taste about almost anything.

 

[Grauken]

Btw you need to understand the game is "hard" on balanced for most normies.

Lots of reviews like this

Nobody is complaining that it's easy on normal. Hell make normal the new story mode for all I care.

We're complaining the hardest difficulty is so easy

But again, this game should be really easy to difficulty mod. I fully expect a good and polished mod within like a year if the modding is flexible enough.

Reducing kill XP (NOT quest XP) by something 25% would probably solve one-third of the issue by itself.

Lol, you want a difficulty above tactician, Swen says normies want a difficulty below story-mode

 

[Swen]

Good video about how a normie found BG3 and finally gets introduced to crpg's

Man, this guy is supposed to be a "likable darling" for many, but I can't stand his taste about almost anything.

He's adored by your friends at retardera though

 

[Eisenheinrich]

Bizarre statement. I hate DOS2 and I really like this game, but the exploration and fundamental structural design is 1:1 DOS. It has copied so many mechanics directly

Pretty much the same.
I believe the change in tone and setting simply makes much more than we realise.
If anything, the transition from DOS to BGIII should be studied as a brilliant case of how much style can matter.
I still can't really put my finger on what exactly makes me interested in most npcs interactions in BGIII when it was the total opposite in DOSII, where I couldn't help skipping most of the cutscenes.

I already felt the same with POE>POE2, where the latter, despite an objectively worst narrative state overall, just felt more immersive thanks to (imo) the artstyle, tone and universal voice acting.

Thank you, you did the explaining much better than I was able. Both you and Grunker are right.

 

[Fedora Master]

 

[gurugeorge]

You know something's out of place when it feels out of place in a kitchen sink fantasy setting.

The problem is more that they look like aliens but behave like 21st century modern western humans

That too, very true.

The way Karlach describes Avernus it's like she's been on a somewhat tour in Iraq for a couple years.

I think its there for possibly two reason, one as an overcorrection to perceived "exoticism is racism" by woke crowds so instead of making foreign and alien creatures exotic and alien, they act like everybody is the same, which is utterly inane especially in a bonkers fantasy setting, the second reason might be that they actually believe the first reason to be correct (and not just for woke reasons) because whoever wrote this didn't travel much and hasn't really lived in other cultures hence thinks people from other cultures are actually very much the same all over except on the surface, which is amusingly wrong-headed.

That's just the bog-standard view of liberalism - nice, middle-class liberals think there's a nice, middle-class liberal inside every apparently-crazed bug-eyed foreigner, struggling to get out

 

[Desiderius]

You know something's out of place when it feels out of place in a kitchen sink fantasy setting.

The problem is more that they look like aliens but behave like 21st century modern western humans

That too, very true.

The way Karlach describes Avernus it's like she's been on a somewhat tour in Iraq for a couple years.

I think its there for possibly two reason, one as an overcorrection to perceived "exoticism is racism" by woke crowds so instead of making foreign and alien creatures exotic and alien, they act like everybody is the same, which is utterly inane especially in a bonkers fantasy setting, the second reason might be that they actually believe the first reason to be correct (and not just for woke reasons) because whoever wrote this didn't travel much and hasn't really lived in other cultures hence thinks people from other cultures are actually very much the same all over except on the surface, which is amusingly wrong-headed.

That's just the bog-standard view of liberalism - nice, middle-class liberals think there's a nice, middle-class liberal inside every apparently-crazed bug-eyed foreigner, struggling to get out

Californication, though I think they're getting afraid to even fornicate at this point.

It's just arrested development. They're all eleven-year-old girls.

 

[Herumor]

People talking about what D&D setting Larian might tackle next - did you see the news that WotC will be releasing a new set of Planescape books sometime this year? I expect them to try and rope in Larian to make a new game for Planescape at one point.

As much as I like BG3 and would like Larian to make IWD3 and BG4, giving them Planescape would be a disaster. They wouldn't be able to write any serious stuff even if their survival depended on it.

There was talk in the early access thread for BG3 about what Larian might have been like if Swen got into Dark Sun when he was younger, but as things are right now, yeah, Larian seems to struggle to write more serious tones in their story for longer than just the occasional conversation.

Dark Sun was the more gritty and mature Sword&Sorcery setting, right?

It was Fallout Forgotten Realms with Psi powers and Insect player characters. More gritty and mature, questionable.

It's really a great setting, with lots to explore and experience - provided you're not expecting some kind of lighthearted adventure. It's not doom and gloom, but it's not sunshine and rainbows either. Usual magic doesn't work, you have to take the life force of the world to fuel your spells and you can do it in two ways: drain the shit out of everything without a care in the world or do it slowly, little by little, to give the world around you a chance to recuperate. There's no deities, afterlife is fucked as well from what I remember, and every civilized society on Athas tends to be ruled by tyrannical sorcerer-kings who practice defiling magic, have their templars to enforce their laws and orders. Slavery is rampant, halflings are cannibals, elves are nomad and thieves, thri-kreens love eating elf-flesh and so on.

Also, never ever read Prism Pentad.

 

[koyota]

But besides for the

Spoiler

one note

is the Hag stuff anymore connected to Act 1 than gnoll area?

I have a question about Waukeen's Rest and the Toll Collector's office. They seem pretty disconnected from the rest of the 1st map's story, and I'm constantly feeling like I've stumbled into some place that I have no business being in.

The game’s biggest structural issue by far is lack of cohesion and sense of place

Probably the result of reworking things and making shit up along the way.
Knowing Larian, they were probably making big changes to quests and areas as late as six months ago.

Enjoy it is a sub-module.
Take the game as a PnP campaign experience someone would play once a week Friday.

Stuff in the north could be a "monster of the week" one off module and more than welcome it.

For what I`ve played - still on first act - the entire game feels like it is recreating adventure modules as accurately as you could for a CRPG.

 

[AwesomeButton]

morally object

Oh please

 

[Eisenheinrich]

Only 146 pages?

Weaklings

Codex rule:

Hate threads get big.

This game is actually played and not just talked over.

 

[Grauken]

Prism Pentad

I loved those novel, really great. Some of the best D&D-based fiction I remember

 

[Lyre Mors]

Oh please

Hey, despite his posturing about "popamole" and "decline", that's the true reason for his negative reaction. Misguided and uninformed as it may be.

 

[Abu Antar]

My casual gamer friends have begun playing this and like 70% of them fall for the miscommunication that makes people believe they do *either* Underdark *or* Mountain Pass, and as a result they're underleveled when they reach Act 2.

Larian really screwed up with that shit.

I was going to the Mountain Pass, but I got a very brutal warning of not going there.

 

[AwesomeButton]

View attachment 39838
View attachment 39839

That Baldur's Gate writing, huh?