Baldur's Gate Baldur's Gate 3 RELEASE THREAD

[RatTower]

So far, it seems to me that some encounters can be cheesed very easily once you understand how environmental elements can be transformed into damage (or even instant-death if you throw someone off a cliff).

If you don't cheese Tactician is fine as far as difficulty goes. The game gives you a lot of rope to have some fun cheesing stuff, but don't expect difficulty balanced toward it, since some of the cheese is basically insta-win buttons. If that bothers you, get the fuck out

Well someone's got a short fuze. Almost like those powder kegs I use to cheese combat encounters

But anyway, I don't see why cheesing shouldn't be considered in balancing.
At least if you are providing a difficulty setting that specifically tells you to take advantage of all your options.
To me, personally, that sounds like an invitation for bullshit strategies. And I haven't even used utility items yet.

If they don't take that into consideration, well fine, that's how it is. It's still fun combat.
It's just that KotC (which can also often be cheesed past level 5 btw) has better encounter balance. That's all.
If critics give BG3 such high praise, well of course I'll have to compare it to that.

It could probably be fixed easily as well. Just replace some of the trash mobs with medium-challenge enemies.
There is a mod that ups the saving and attack throws of enemies, but it feels like a cheap solution.
I'd say better enemy group composition would fix it.

On the other hand: In the current setup solo runs might be interesting.

 

[Grauken]

It's just that KotC (which can also often be cheesed past level 5 btw) has better encounter balance. That's all.
If critics give BG3 such high praise, well of course I'll have to compare it to that.

You don't have as much freedom to cheese in KotC as in BG3, so of course its easier to balance for those things. And if you balance it around cheese strategies you make Tactician just not fun for those not using those strategies, so I don't expect much changes. Your best bet are mods

 

[Swen]

You don't like MILFs?

Swen, I swear, if you ever arrive in Poland even Jean-Claude Van Damme will not be able to protect you.

I'm going to kick your ass with such a force you will fly around the world and travel more distance than Tin-Tin during all 24 comic book issues.

I bet you are a Walloon, you lazy hack. You are so lazy you grab your dick and wait for an earthquake when you want to masturbate.

Actually, maybe you are Flemish. This would explain how souless your games are.

Go choke on a chocolate waffle.

Poland was a mistake

But we Belgian bros still love you

Learn how to speak to elders, you jumped out of Netherlands cock just 2 centuries ago and still got no moral spine.

Akzually, we're older than you guys

 

[janior]

ngl wish lilura was posting in this thread

 

[Swen]

 

[RatTower]

It's just that KotC (which can also often be cheesed past level 5 btw) has better encounter balance. That's all.
If critics give BG3 such high praise, well of course I'll have to compare it to that.

You don't have as much freedom to cheese in KotC as in BG3, so of course its easier to balance for those things. And if you balance it around cheese strategies you make Tactician just not fun for those not using those strategies, so I don't expect much changes. Your best bet are mods

Probably. BG3 definitely has more variables to balance than KotC - which is part of why the combat is fun I guess.
I still hope for an expansion that specifically focuses on high-level encounters.
Chances are very slim but maybe they pull off something like Heart of Winter.

 

[Alienman]

Swen When will you fix the hotfix?

 

[Shaki]

It's just that KotC (which can also often be cheesed past level 5 btw) has better encounter balance. That's all.
If critics give BG3 such high praise, well of course I'll have to compare it to that.

You don't have as much freedom to cheese in KotC as in BG3, so of course its easier to balance for those things. And if you balance it around cheese strategies you make Tactician just not fun for those not using those strategies, so I don't expect much changes. Your best bet are mods

Larian trying to balance around cheese, would probably just end up with a perfect challenge level for playing without cheese, so they should do exactly that.

 

[gurugeorge]

So this game gets a 97 from pcgamer, will probably win GOTY, and go down in history as the best RPG ever.

But is it actually any good?
I'm like ten hours in and it's fine I guess?

Any player characters here think it's as good as everyone's saying?

It's not a 97 for sure, but it's a good game, even very good in places, worth the money and well worth a play, even with the degenerate trash and occasional bugs and broken bits. More like, I dunno, 75-80 or something, depending on the strictness of one's standards? Coldly and objectively, somewhere in that ballpark.

Unless you're 100% pure grognard, you will have quite a few moments of immersion and lots of enjoyable combat encounters.

 

[Avarize]

Can anyone else see a future where companies take the absolute worst aspects from BG3 and makes them the focus of future cRPGs? Tactical combat? Interesting world building? Quality writing? Pffftttt, fuck that, we need more hypersexual companions with an inordinate amount of focus placed on them and whatever irrelevant bullshit the writer thinks makes them "interesting" and "immersive". No company was actually putting out good cRPGs before BG3 so maybe it's not really a loss, but I can definitely see this leading to a further push towards the horrible "cinematic gaming" trend that is already quite big.

There's a recent IGN video were they concluded that one of the major reasons for the success is that companions are so horny.

 

[Parabalus]

Those aren't "perception or survival" checks though.

You originally asked for "Some examples."

Of failing checks which lead to stuff you couldn't get on a success, not getting the same thing.

Assassin is a good example, next time I found her is at the victory party.

 

[Swen]

So this game gets a 97 from pcgamer, will probably win GOTY, and go down in history as the best RPG ever.

But is it actually any good?
I'm like ten hours in and it's fine I guess?

Any player characters here think it's as good as everyone's saying?

It's not a 97 for sure, but it's a good game, even very good in places, worth the money and well worth a play, even with the degenerate trash and occasional bugs and broken bits. More like, I dunno, 75-80 or something, depending on the strictness of one's standards? Coldly and objectively, somewhere in that ballpark.

Unless you're 100% pure grognard, you will have quite a few moments of immersion and lots of enjoyable combat encounters.

80? LMFAO! Keep coping, BG3 is the best CRPG ever made.

 

[gurugeorge]

So this game gets a 97 from pcgamer, will probably win GOTY, and go down in history as the best RPG ever.

But is it actually any good?
I'm like ten hours in and it's fine I guess?

Any player characters here think it's as good as everyone's saying?

It's not a 97 for sure, but it's a good game, even very good in places, worth the money and well worth a play, even with the degenerate trash and occasional bugs and broken bits. More like, I dunno, 75-80 or something, depending on the strictness of one's standards? Coldly and objectively, somewhere in that ballpark.

Unless you're 100% pure grognard, you will have quite a few moments of immersion and lots of enjoyable combat encounters.

80? LMFAO! Keep coping, BG3 is the best CRPG ever made.

Nah, it's still not as good as the BG games were relative to their time. You could reasonably say it's the biggest, most content-rich and most ambitious CRPG ever made to date, but it has too many flaws (degeneracy saturation, juvenile Larian stuff, diversity hire writing, disrespected lore, combat not as good as Solasta's, etc., etc., etc.) to actually be a 90% and up game.

It has some great moments, for sure, but so have many of the other big recent CRPGs. It doesn't "blow out of the water" games like the Owlcat games, the Pillows games - heck, even CP2077 had its deeply immersive moments too. It's in that general pack, better in some respects, worse in others. I think only in terms of reactivity you could say it has the edge, but its flaws (and those other games' virtues) balance that out.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Swen's guide to writing an illithid story:
- Don't focus on illithids too much, shove devils, netheril artifact and dead three into the story too.
- Don't focus on the eldritch horror.
- Put a lot of effort on humanizing illithids outside of Elder's Brain control. They are not alien. They are just like us!
- Make a scene where a shirtless illithid tries to seduce you.

GOTY material, thank you Swen.

In a D&D comic I read from the 80s/early 90s, the illithid is outsmarted by the Shaggy of the group. They created an illusion of Khelben Blackstaff who stood in between the illithid and a beholder (and not any beholder, but Xanathar) and both were victims of their attacks. The illithid was petrified and "sent to a rock garden", as one character put it, and Xanathar had its INT reduced by the illithid's ray. So yeah.

 

[Strange Fellow]

Please, combat in this game is miles above Solasta.

 

[Shaki]

So this game gets a 97 from pcgamer, will probably win GOTY, and go down in history as the best RPG ever.

But is it actually any good?
I'm like ten hours in and it's fine I guess?

Any player characters here think it's as good as everyone's saying?

It's not a 97 for sure, but it's a good game, even very good in places, worth the money and well worth a play, even with the degenerate trash and occasional bugs and broken bits. More like, I dunno, 75-80 or something, depending on the strictness of one's standards? Coldly and objectively, somewhere in that ballpark.

Unless you're 100% pure grognard, you will have quite a few moments of immersion and lots of enjoyable combat encounters.

It's interesting because it's kinda unique among RPGs, in the fact that in doesn't really do anything badly. Most of "greats" are flawed gems, remembered for 1-2 things they did perfectly, which was often revolutionary and bought them the place on the top list for decades to come. For BG3, nearly every aspect of it (except for amount of cinematics/voice acting I guess) was done better by another game, but these games usually also done much worse in other aspects. Arcanum for example, has by far better reactivity than BG3, it's less linear, and even the gimmicks like speaking to the dead are better implemented and far more impactful - in being a game that makes you feel it reacts to your character and choices, it's still not even close to being surpassed, after all these years. But at the same time it also is MUCH worse in nearly all other aspects, and if you just rated every part of the game individually then added the scores, BG3 would be far, faaaar ahead of it.

I guess ultimately it can be judged both as a muh greatest RPG evah like Swen keeps telling us, and as a just good product with nothing special in it, depending on what method of scoring you'd use. If you judge RPGs as a sum of their parts, then it's probably legit top 1. If you're from the school of people who think games are more than sum of their parts, and being unforgettable in one aspect is far more important than not being bad in another, then it's probably just Dragon Age Origins on steroids for you, and it wont make top 10. Nonetheless, I think pretty much everyone who likes any type of RPG, will find at least some fun in this game, and grognards saying they absolutely hate it and it has no redeeming qualities, are lying to themselves as much as to us.

 

[janior]

if owlcat games are cardboard boxes, bg3 is at least a nice sand castle

 

[Lagole Gon]

Swen's guide to writing an illithid story:
- Don't focus on illithids too much, shove devils, netheril artifact and dead three into the story too.
- Don't focus on the eldritch horror.
- Put a lot of effort on humanizing illithids outside of Elder's Brain control. They are not alien. They are just like us!
- Make a scene where a shirtless illithid tries to seduce you.

GOTY material, thank you Swen.

In a D&D comic I read from the 80s/early 90s, the illithid is outsmarted by the Shaggy of the group. They created an illusion of Khelben Blackstaff who stood in between the illithid and a beholder (and not any beholder, but Xanathar) and both were victims of their attacks. The illithid was petrified and "sent to a rock garden", as one character put it, and Xanathar had its INT reduced by the illithid's ray. So yeah.

Did he try to make out with Shaggy at any point?

 

[Shaki]

So this game gets a 97 from pcgamer, will probably win GOTY, and go down in history as the best RPG ever.

But is it actually any good?
I'm like ten hours in and it's fine I guess?

Any player characters here think it's as good as everyone's saying?

It's not a 97 for sure, but it's a good game, even very good in places, worth the money and well worth a play, even with the degenerate trash and occasional bugs and broken bits. More like, I dunno, 75-80 or something, depending on the strictness of one's standards? Coldly and objectively, somewhere in that ballpark.

Unless you're 100% pure grognard, you will have quite a few moments of immersion and lots of enjoyable combat encounters.

80? LMFAO! Keep coping, BG3 is the best CRPG ever made.

Didn't you love game journos tho, and weren't posting their opinions for the last 200 pages? Eurogamer gave it 80/100

 

[perfectslumbers]

It's interesting because it's kinda unique among RPGs, in the fact that in doesn't really do anything badly.

In that sense maybe it is a proper sequel to BG2.

I disagree with it not doing anything badly though. The story and companions are genuinely eyerolling.

 

[Grauken]

Arcanum for example, has by far better reactivity than BG3, it's less linear, and even the gimmicks like speaking to the dead is implemented much better in it and far more useful - in being a game that makes you feel it reacts to your character and choices, it's still not even close to being surpassed, after all these years.

What Arcanum does better is thematic depth. The world building and the plot and even side quests are all build around a strong core concept that empowers them together and creates something bigger that makes it easy to overlook the game's considerable flaws. Though there are few games of that caliber. Deus Ex, Planescape Torment and then it gets thin.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Swen's guide to writing an illithid story:
- Don't focus on illithids too much, shove devils, netheril artifact and dead three into the story too.
- Don't focus on the eldritch horror.
- Put a lot of effort on humanizing illithids outside of Elder's Brain control. They are not alien. They are just like us!
- Make a scene where a shirtless illithid tries to seduce you.

GOTY material, thank you Swen.

In a D&D comic I read from the 80s/early 90s, the illithid is outsmarted by the Shaggy of the group. They created an illusion of Khelben Blackstaff who stood in between the illithid and a beholder (and not any beholder, but Xanathar) and both were victims of their attacks. The illithid was petrified and "sent to a rock garden", as one character put it, and Xanathar had its INT reduced by the illithid's ray. So yeah.

Did he try to make out with Shaggy at any point?

The drow temptress did, but the guy used Shove which ended up in this lady being eaten by a crocodile.

Actually, a lot of those stories had pretty grim outcomes. I was like 10 reading this shit.

 

[Parabalus]

If you snap the drow's neck as Dark Urge, where is her body? Can you loot her?

What do you get in return? Seems like a shit deal.

 

[Vic]

Arcanum for example, has by far better reactivity than BG3, it's less linear, and even the gimmicks like speaking to the dead is implemented much better in it and far more useful - in being a game that makes you feel it reacts to your character and choices, it's still not even close to being surpassed, after all these years.

What Arcanum does better is thematic depth. The world building and the plot and even side quests are all build around a strong core concept that empowers them together and creates something bigger that makes it easy to overlook the game's considerable flaws. Though there are few games of that caliber. Deus Ex, Planescape Torment and then it gets thin.

DISCO ELYSIUM

 

[Vic]

if owlcat games are cardboard boxes, bg3 is at least a nice sand castle

what does that mean?? a cardboard box is more durable than a sandcastle