Baldur's Gate Baldur's Gate 3 RELEASE THREAD

[Kiste]

Imagine thinking this was actually real and we're not consuming "history" written by his contemporary haters.

Caliguila was evil. I've seen the movie. He had this big decapitation machine. Hollywood wouldn't lie about this.

Now, Nero? He was a good boy, smeared by Christians.

 

[Mebrilia the Viera Queen]

Even if its horny as some said that is the original vision of Greenwood for the setting. The biowarian good christian version of faerun is just a washed out version of it. Forgotten Realms has many mature things. Is not Tolkien.

 

[Grunker]

are we really so surprised that incel codexers fail at reading social cues

 

[BruceVC]

Haven't read much nor did I play any of the EA. Plan on giving this a go when I build my new rig next week. However, the little I have read says that right now this is more of a "Sexual harassment simulator" with you the player being the target of said harassment. Everyone hits on you / wants to sleep with you constantly anytime you choose a nice dialogue response? True / hyperbole? If so does this game allow you to create your own party like Icewind Dale to avoid this cringe?

True ane not hyperbole and bollocks to anyone who dares say otherwise. Never in ANY rpg have i had to endure so many “i see you as a friend...and something more“. Seriously bioware games get a bad rap but i have never seen anything like this.

If your pc is nice and sociable, it will keep happening, at time of writing i’ve just had bear dude declare his love to me which was just as puzzling as with gale since i NEVER used this character and talked to him like twice.

you probably come across as gay to anyone you talk to

I know it shouldn't come as a surprise, but I can't get over how many people here fail at reading basic social cues.

- The game allows you to show interest, and to respond to interest shown to you. Yes.
- You could try looking for the meaning behind the words, before clicking the dialog option. But that's either an unknown concept to you, or you consider yourself obligated to click all the dialogue lines.
- You answer to flirting, and/or attempts by the NPC to direct the discussion towards romantic subjects, and then you wonder what happened. It's hilarious. I bet most such complainers are just as clueless IRL.

Are Baldur's Gate 3's social interactions indeed too difficult for hardcore gamers, becuase they written realistically, unlike Bioware's? It appears so

I support the optional Romance arcs as a component of party interaction but Im disappointed there arent any hot women like Viconia or Isabella?

It not a big deal and when I play the game maybe my view will change but so far from what I have seen none of the female NPC are that inspirational or my type from a Romance option

 

[dukeofwoodberry]

So any good multiclasses people have tried or do multiclasses suck harder than faggots like Gale

 

[dukeofwoodberry]

are we really so surprised that uncle codexers fail at reading social cues

Do you think every party member should be a faggot, faggot?

 

[Grunker]

are we really so surprised that uncle codexers fail at reading social cues

faggot, faggot?

so eloquent

 

[Kiste]

I know it shouldn't come as a surprise, but I can't get over how many people here fail at reading basic social cues.

- The game allows you to show interest, and to respond to interest shown to you. Yes.
- You could try looking for the meaning behind the words, before clicking the dialog option. But that's either an unknown concept to you, or you consider yourself obligated to click all the dialogue lines.
- You answer to flirting, and/or attempts by the NPC to direct the discussion towards romantic subjects, and then you wonder what happened. It's hilarious. I bet most such complainers are just as clueless IRL.

Are Baldur's Gate 3's social interactions indeed too difficult for hardcore gamers, becuase they written realistically, unlike Bioware's? It appears so

You're talking to a bunch of spergs here, who - of course - have problems reading social cues. That's what makes them spergs.

Vampire twink, bear bloke and magic boy all wanted some of my massive Gnome cock but I simply said "no" early on and so far they haven't bothered me again.

 

[Irxy]

from what i've heard not every failed check is "rock falls" so reloading after each fail is not even best course of action.

I haven't really seen any failed checks which are better than success, which makes sense, and this game has tons of checks everywhere, there are probably more checks than combat encounters.
That said, 2/3 of checks are fluff without any negative conseqences, and failing those does sometimes lead to amusing results. Not often though.

 

[Eisenheinrich]

Guys, is it gay to be considered hot by everyone in a video game?

 

[dukeofwoodberry]

are we really so surprised that uncle codexers fail at reading social cues

faggot, faggot?

so eloquent

Do you think it makes sense for every party member in the game to be gay?

 

[AwesomeButton]

For bear druid i made the fatal mistake of offering a drink at the grove after party, nothing about the dialogue suggested i was hitting on him.

Ok. Let's calm down. A couple of simple questions.

How often do you go to parties?

Do you offer drinks to men when at a party, or otherwise demonstrate specific care that other men should be having a good time at the party?

When at a party, how often do you get drinks offered to you by men? How does this make you feel?

 

[processdaemon]

Everybody has mindflayer tadpoles in their brains, maybe it's the tadpoles that are bisexual

 

[BrotherFrank]

.

- The game allows you to show interest, and to respond to interest shown to you. Yes.
- You could try looking for the meaning behind the words, before clicking the dialog option. But that's either an unknown concept to you, or you consider yourself obligated to click all the dialogue lines.
- You answer to flirting, and/or attempts by the NPC to direct the discussion towards romantic subjects, and then you wonder what happened. It's hilarious. I bet most such complainers are just as clueless IRL.

Are Baldur's Gate 3's social interactions indeed too difficult for hardcore gamers, becuase they written realistically, unlike Bioware's? It appears so

Why are you lying dude?
It’s not like i’m not used to this kinda thing, i’ve been a bioware defender forever and normally love romance bs in these games so you’d think i of all people would know how to navigate these situations and avoid the options clearly hinting at romance.

But with gale i NEVER got this option.
Same with bear dude, as i said the ONLY thing i did was offer a drink which didn’t seem gay, it was a fucking party and i had been telling other npcs to loosen up and have fun. I did not realise said “have fun” implied i wanted a hook up and i sure af don’t want lessons in social cues from people who think this consitutes hitting on someone.

Same with wyll, i was nice to the dude because we are both folk heroes so accrued approval like crazy. How the fuck this translated into me wanting to bum him is a mystery for the ages.

I could keep going for every character but tldr Astarion is the only one where it somewhat made sense and you can tell from the second you meet him he will make a pass at your pc.. And you know what? I actually found him the most tolerable because of it, at least there was no ambiguity nor did it come out of the blue when the proposal dropped.

Seriously, when i initially started playing and this happened the first few times, i believed you and the rest acting like one has to keep deliberately picking the obviously gay choices to get these outcomes, i believed this whole hahaha codexers dunno how to be sociable lol rhetoric.
But now i think it’s the other way around, what universe do you people live in when merely being nice to companions constitutes romantic interest? Where are the crystal clear obviously gay options i apparently keep accidentally selecting then forgetting their existence?

Jfc this isn’t a hill i am ready to die on nor do i care THIS much about it other then being that every time i turn down a npc it comes off as cold but the rest of you acting like this isn‘t a trend with the game and gaslighting others into thinking they did something wrong and are picking obviously gay options because hahaha you are social spergs schtick is getting old.

 

[Kiste]

Ok. Let's calm down. A couple of simple questions.

How often do you go to parties?

Do you offer drinks to men when at a party, or otherwise demonstrate specific care that other men should be having a good time at the party?

When at a party, how often do you get drinks offered to you by men? How does this make you feel?

Actually, it does look a bit like you're trying to gaslight BrotherFrank.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Seems i found another bug. Edge panning sometimes stops working (usually after a reload) and only way to make it go again is to pan at least once using the wsad.

Tried savescumming some more on dialogue checks but so far it has no bearing on the outcome. You don't even get fresh lore stuff. Tried it on the dying mindflyier, was totally pointless.

Just rescued Gale. Like, wow, did you guys know wizards are supposed to be smart? Look at all the smart words they use. Hahaha, funny right? They did it better in NWN2 with Sand and NWN2 OC kinda sucked for NPCs to begin with.

Graphics are wierd btw while they aren't exactly shit i find it somewhat difficult to spot stuff you can loot and it's all the more aggravating because sometimes lootable objects aren't hightlighted when you press alt.

[EDIT] Lmao, was Gale actually written as a woman originally?

If they had to make a character this whimsical, they should have made him a gnome.

 

[Alex]

That's a cope

Well, truth is could go either way. But I’m more responding to the charge that I dislike it for moral reasons instead of the fact Larian sucks and shill campaigns piss me off

To be fair, I find the moral reasoning to not even try this pretty compelling. The world is bad enough without paying for degeneracy such as bear sex or penis a and b or gay companions or 5e.

Thats so funny coming from Brazil, the nation of trannys.

I would ask you which nation nowadays would have the moral high ground; but you are from germany, the place that invented modern trannies, so...

 

[BrotherFrank]

Ok. Let's calm down. A couple of simple questions.

How often do you go to parties?

Do you offer drinks to men when at a party, or otherwise demonstrate specific care that other men should be having a good time at the party?

When at a party, how often do you get drinks offered to you by men? How does this make you feel?

1) Not as much as i used to but i was decently sociable in my hey day.

2) Depends but yeah, if i see a bro standing alone in the corner looking miserable then i will try and hype them up. And this was the exact context with bear druid, hell i had literally just picked a similar option with one of the tiefling npcs who was all grouchy and there was no issue here. Its a party bro, grab a drink and have fun!

3) It happens all the time? It’s always been rather normal in my circles that each one buys a round of drinks for others. 0 gay thing about it. Likewise my reaction if someone buys me a drink and assuming it’s not a rando stranger in which case i ‘ll assume drinks are spiked: thanks!

 

[dukeofwoodberry]

Ok. Let's calm down. A couple of simple questions.

How often do you go to parties?

Do you offer drinks to men when at a party, or otherwise demonstrate specific care that other men should be having a good time at the party?

When at a party, how often do you get drinks offered to you by men? How does this make you feel?

1) Not as much as i used to but i was decently sociable in my hey day.

2) Depends but yeah, if i see a bro standing alone in the corner looking miserable then i will try and hype them up. And this was the exact context with bear druid, hell i had literally just picked a similar option with one of the tiefling npcs who was all grouchy and there was no issue here. Its a party bro, grab a drink and have fun!

3) It happens all the time? It’s always been rather normal in my circles that each one buys a round of drinks for others. 0 gay thing about it. Likewise my reaction if someone buys me a drink and assuming it’s not a rando stranger in which case i ‘ll assume drinks are spiked: thanks!

According to these weirdos, male comradery doesn't exist only faggotry

 

[Mebrilia the Viera Queen]

Human Warlock! Fey pact!
That is my character.

 

[Zarniwoop]

Haven't read much nor did I play any of the EA. Plan on giving this a go when I build my new rig next week. However, the little I have read says that right now this is more of a "Sexual harassment simulator" with you the player being the target of said harassment. Everyone hits on you / wants to sleep with you constantly anytime you choose a nice dialogue response? True / hyperbole? If so does this game allow you to create your own party like Icewind Dale to avoid this cringe?

Total hyperbole.

Only the male characters harass you.

 

[Orud]

You're a legit faggot for defending this nonsense lol

Really? Because when a male NPC tells me "Do not wish to sour our friendship, but I have to know if it can be something more", I pick "I'm afraid I just don't see you that way" out of the following 3 options? :

1. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't interested - but I'm already in a relationship.
2. I'm afraid I just don't see you that way.
3. If I wanted to rut with half a tonne of dumb muscle, I'd seduce a deep rothe.

Can you give me some examples where it's clear you're not going to a rum and tumble, or are you just going to keep jumping on the hate bandwagon?

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

Fucking Disco Elysium is 97 and you think your review scores matter LMAO

I mean, it's the iOS ranking.
I doubt there are many better games than these two there.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/baldurs-gate-3-RPG-standards-swen-vincke-interview/

Larian founder responds to debate over Baldur's Gate 3 'raising the bar' for RPGs: 'this is videogames, standards just die every day'​

Baldur's Gate 3's success ignited an argument over whether it's a one-off anomaly or a new standard for the RPG genre.

Baldur's Gate 3 is an exceptional game: a grognardy CRPG with complex and barely-explained D&D rules and a massive mainstream success, even before its console releases. With Diablo 4's always-online grind providing the perfect contrast, it's come across to some as a victory over malignant modern videogame trends: Where other companies build cosmetics stores and battle passes, Larian Studios has succeeded through good old fashioned respect for player freedom, ambition, and quality craftwork, or so go some popular posts and articles.

A handful of game developers, meanwhile, have cautioned against oversimplifying the lesson, arguing that Baldur's Gate 3 is an anomaly that even big studios won't be able to replicate. Online arguing has ensued.

In an interview with PC Gamer earlier this week, Larian founder Swen Vincke weighed in on the debate, which he finds somewhat perplexing. It's a given that not any studio could make Baldur's Gate 3, he said, but he questions the importance of videogame "standards," which he says "die every day" as new ideas emerge and old one are reinvented.

Backing up to the start, this conversation coalesced in large part around a Twitter thread by game designer (and former PC Gamer contributor) Xalavier Nelson Jr, who sought to "gently, pre-emptively push back against players" who would use their excitement for Baldur's Gate 3 to "apply criticism or a 'raised standard' to RPGs going forward." His argument was that Baldur's Gate 3 isn't a schema that any RPG developer can work to, but the product of a particular developer taking a huge risk under a particular set of circumstances.

"In an era of megagames, Baldur's Gate 3 is one of the largest attempted, built by a specialized group of people using mature tech specially built to make *this specific game*, reinforced by invaluable mass player feedback AND market validation ahead of its launch," wrote Nelson. "This is not a new baseline for RPGs—this is an anomaly. Trying to do the same thing in the same way, especially without the same advantages, could kill an entire GROUP of studios."

Responding to the thread, Obsidian designer Josh Sawyer agreed that "the conditions under which BG3 was made are atypical," as did Diablo 4 senior designer Chris Balser, who said that "people too often only look at the fruits of labour and not the labour itself." On the flipside, a lot of gamers read these cautions against rising expectations as defensive. Why not expect more from RPGs after a developer has successfully pushed the genre's boundaries in a direction we like?

Asked about the debate, Vincke agreed that Baldur's Gate 3 could only have come about under certain circumstances—"obviously, yeah, if you're a 50 man studio or 10 man studio, you shouldn't try to make a game like BG3," he said—but he questioned the reality of the "standards" being argued over.

"The problem I have is with the use of the word 'standards,'" Vincke said. "This is videogames, standards just die every day. Things get reinvented. New things appear all the time. When I was starting out in the industry, Assassin's Creed set the new standard. It was over—nobody could make games like Assassin's Creed, there was too much budget behind it, that was going to be the future, everybody had to consolidate, blah blah blah. That didn't materialize. In videogames there's so much free space to explore, still, in the creative tree."

To the extent that standards do exist, Vincke found it "strange" that developers from larger studios would be concerned about boundary-pushing, pointing specifically to the new creative possibilities that technological advancements can enable. As for RPGs in particular, he noted that it doesn't take an enormous game like Baldur's Gate 3 to change the genre.

"Disco Elysium changed standards on the fly with a small team, right?" said Vincke. "That's a completely different standard now. There are so many games that change standards, to the point that there's no standards, was my thing. But I think you should always strive to evolve, especially in this medium which is different than other media in the sense that technological evolution has always been a big part of it. There's always been innovation, but at the same time, it doesn't require massive technological evolution to do something crazy, and cool, and different than what anybody else has done before."

The disagreements here may come down to mismatched premises. Audience expectations obviously evolve as games evolve, and any argument that gamers shouldn't want or expect high quality games is easy to reject. "I'm not saying that at all," said Nelson in a video follow-up to his Twitter thread. Rather, the designer meant that no amount of investment can guarantee a good, hit game, which made Baldur's Gate 3 a tremendous risk to develop, and attempts to replicate it under different circumstances very likely to fail. We have seen that kind of thing happen in the past, like when EA set a very successful developer, BioWare, on building an answer to Destiny 2, and it totally flopped.

But if the best aspects of Larian's approach do rub off on other RPG projects, even in small ways, I certainly won't be disappointed. And if studios with lots of money are going to invest it in big risky projects, I can think of worse things for them to fail at than intricate, systems-driven RPGs, especially if those RPGs store my save files on my damn PC instead of a server somewhere to keep me from bypassing a cosmetics shop—so I only follow the argument so far myself. Gamers aren't speaking as industry executives when they say that Baldur's Gate 3 raises the bar, just as people who'd like to see more of this kind of thing. I don't think anyone means that every future RPG ought to surpass Baldur's Gate 3's size and complexity.

The rallying cries that tend to rise to the top of social media do leave out a lot of reality, though. For one thing, I'm not sure the games industry has been proven wrong in any meaningful way here in the first place. People do like live service games—unless we pretend everyone who plays Destiny 2 is being manipulated by mind flayer tadpoles—and you don't even have to look away from the mainstream to find that big singleplayer RPGs never went away. Starfield releases next month! And when we do turn just one degree towards smaller publishers and developers, I can start naming excellent, non-live servicey games until I run out of breath, even if I stick to recent releases: Wartales, Tchia, Remnant 2, Dave the Diver, Amnesia: The Bunker…

Hell, ultra-nerdy CRPGs didn't even go away: If the success of Baldur's Gate 3 is just down to an old-school philosophy, then where's the 800,000 concurrents for the Pillars of Eternity and Wasteland games? So of course there's more to it than 'Larian just went and made a good game.' Vincke himself was afraid the launch would be a bust right up until it wasn't.

It also isn't true that Larian totally rejected modern trends: The tone of Baldur's Gate 3 is contemporary, reminiscent of the extremely popular Critical Role D&D streamers and other tabletop broadcasters (and to a lesser extent the recent D&D movie), it's indulgent with its sex and romance, and the technical quality of its graphics is a few bars higher than that of Larian's last big RPG, Divinity: Original Sin 2. That game was our 2017 Game of the Year, but not quite the mainstream hit that Baldur's Gate 3 has been, and I feel pretty confident in saying that the sexier, nuder companion rendering has had some part to play in that.

Not that I'm against sexy, nude RPG characters, but if you want to argue about that, allow me to direct you to my brave pals Fraser and Robin.