Baldur's Gate Baldur's Gate 3 RELEASE THREAD

[Grauken]

Can't help you there buddy, I just spent an hour talking to everybody in my camp about important things.

I can't help but get the mental image of an overweight dude sitting in darkness and talking to his monitor, as if he was playing with dolls or smth

Exactly, that's how I imagine you too, splendid

 

[Swen]

Codextards still crying BG3 is the biggest CRPG success ever.

Tears on the cuckdex will be mined for years, god bless Larian.

 

[processdaemon]

When does Act 3 supposedly start dropping off? I'm pottering around it now and enjoying all the sidequests and haven't hit any major bugs that required reloading. Is it a matter of preference with regard to the city map vs. the mostly outdoor maps in the first 2 Acts?

 

[AwesomeButton]

Dude, you are literally in a club of 5 weird people who actually praise this game here

I think a lot of people are praising elements of the game. And I don't think AB is completely uncritical of it either.

Meb is definitely in shill overdrive though.

It would not come off as defending, even to mumbling idiots who can't into reading comprehension, if what they deem to be well-founded criticism wasn't either false, gross exaggeration, or not even a comment on the game but on the health of the moral fabric in the western world. At least as they understand it with their peabrains, educated mostly by youtube.

 

[Grunker]

When does Act 3 supposedly start dropping off? I'm pottering around it now and enjoying all the sidequests and haven't hit any major bugs that required reloading. Is it a matter of preference with regard to the city map vs. the mostly outdoor maps in the first 2 Acts?

I had a lot of bugs, but I dunno why people would talk about a drop off in terms of content. It’s just a bulky as the previous acts if not more

 

[Zeltak]

When does Act 3 supposedly start dropping off? I'm pottering around it now and enjoying all the sidequests and haven't hit any major bugs that required reloading. Is it a matter of preference with regard to the city map vs. the mostly outdoor maps in the first 2 Acts?

Maybe you got lucky my playthrough of Act 3 was bugged to hell. The most annoying one was that the UI sometimes disappeared during combat and was instead stuck in dialogue mode.

 

[janior]

also heard act 2 is supossedly a drop off but it's as good as act 1 so far just tonally different(which is a good thing)

 

[Orud]

One thing that I find shocking is how Larian has managed to drum into the public the idea that BG3 has created and/or reinvented role-playing games.

After talking to some people I noticed some percieved as if they were totally revolutionary concepts things like branching quest trees, interparty banter and relationships, an applied ruleset where you can see dice rolls and things like that which are the bread and butter of many many RPGs.

At one point someone whose experience in RPGs is WOW, DDO and Neverwinter Online said that hopefully this is the path that RPGs are going to follow from now as if everything made BG3 was just primitive garbage made for simple people when they have been like this for 35 years.

It would be massive if doubling down on RPG mechanics is what attracts the CoD crowd, rather than trying your best to completely abandon them... like Bioware's been trying to do for the past 2 decades.

 

[processdaemon]

With regard to the bugs it's possible I am getting lucky or that the most recent hotfix sorted out a bunch of stuff that bothered others before I got here, but contentwise it feels like there's more to do here than in Act 2 at least. Not that that reflects badly on Act 2, the Shadow Cursed Lands should of course be more desolate, but I'm pleasantly surprised by Act 3 so far given that it seems to be the most criticised part of the game.

 

[gurugeorge]

If you know a game will have "playersexual" romances you can be assured that romance system will be pure shit and most likely the party companions will be shit too. You don't care about giving the party members their own personalities and characteristics outside of satiating the desires of a handful of reddit fags and trannies

This is it. I mean, I'm all for the immershun and having conversations with my imaginary friends that flesh them out as characters and make them seem real in the virtual world, and to exclude the possibility of romance altogether in that context would be a bit silly. To me, the early to mid period BioWare level of companion shenanigans was pitched about right for that.

But the relationships here are definitely weighted too far towards showing off the Loverslab Lite stuff in cutscenes - the point here being that you can only have like 4 or 5 max conversation options in a given conversation, and if you fill out those options with several varieties of "adult relationship" what you're ipso facto blocking out is the possibility of fulfilling the very purpose of having companion conversations in the first place; instead of fleshing out your companions and making them seem like real people through conversing with them, you're making them monomaniacally monodimensional sex slaves.

 

[darkpatriot]

What's with you people

Nothing my good sir, there are no degenerates here.

Embrace wholesomeness,

I encountered some kind of bug and owlbear pup never appeared at my camp after the gobbos gave him to me.

I have some good news for everyone! It turns out that the Owlbear cub showing up was just very delayed and didn't happen until like 7 rests after I freed him. I guess there were too many other more important camp events the kept being queued up.

 

[perfectslumbers]

When does Act 3 supposedly start dropping off? I'm pottering around it now and enjoying all the sidequests and haven't hit any major bugs that required reloading. Is it a matter of preference with regard to the city map vs. the mostly outdoor maps in the first 2 Acts?

Encounter design falls off a cliff immediately in act 3 in my opinion, save a few highlights. The worst problem with act 3 is the main quest with Orin and Gortash, both super poorly made. The side quests vary and some are good and some are meh. There's lots of scripting issues too where if you do things weirdly you'll have NPCs talking about things that never happened or refusing to acknowledge things that did happen, but if you manage to stay on rails accidentally then I assume that won't happen.

 

[Dishonoredbr]

https://www.pcgamer.com/a-triumph-b...er-rpg-architects-weigh-in-on-baldurs-gate-3/

 

[dukeofwoodberry]

If you know a game will have "playersexual" romances you can be assured that romance system will be pure shit and most likely the party companions will be shit too. You don't care about giving the party members their own personalities and characteristics outside of satiating the desires of a handful of reddit fags and trannies

This is it. I mean, I'm all for the immershun and having conversations with my imaginary friends that flesh them out as characters and make them seem real in the virtual world, and to exclude the possibility of romance altogether in that context would be a bit silly. To me, the early to mid period BioWare level of companion shenanigans was pitched about right for that.

But the relationships here are definitely weighted too far towards showing off the Loverslab Lite stuff in cutscenes - the point here being that you can only have like 4 or 5 max conversation options in a given conversation, and if you fill out those options with several varieties of "adult relationship" what you're ipso facto blocking out is the possibility of fulfilling the very purpose of having companion conversations in the first place; instead of fleshing out your companions and making them seem like real people through conversing with them, you're making them monomaniacally monodimensional sex slaves.

They literally took some cringey sex/romance flash game and made it their system in BG3. I checked out reddit and I saw this exact comment over and over, "I get rejected enough in real life, I don't want to get rejected in my game too." It's a romance system to stroke the egos of pathetic incels, fags and trannies and they don't want any dysgenic freak to feel bad that character x doesn't want to fuck them.

Party members exist only to stroke the egos of reddit freaks. That's why they love you almost immediately, praise you constantly, and all want to fuck you right away (save shadow pussy.) It's a system designed for ugly reddit losers

 

[copebot]

Re: integration-- every single American city is de facto segregated. Even some of the most census-diverse cities in the country are set up in ways so that people of different races almost never mix. The US developed an entirely alternate kind of transportation based on the personal car once trains and other forms of public transportation were integrated by law. The only places where you really see much racial diversity are in places that have been integrated by law. Even then, those institutions that are de jure integrated do everything that they can to work the system (e.g. hiring/admitting seven black women for every black man).

When a game does the United Colors of Benetton thing, they are trying to reflect the propaganda of the system rather than what that system actually produces. Most other historic societies that involved multiple cultures used something like a millet or satrap system to segregate entire regions or a quarter system within a diverse urban environment. A quarter system just formalizes what people do in any case. Look up Schelling segregation (of Schelling point fame); it explains how slight preferences always lead to complete segregation on a long enough timeline. With fantasy environments, it doesn't even make sense for different species to live under the same laws and to share the same culture. Think about the life pattern of an elf: they are children for such a short period of time and then they live for centuries. A human's life cycle before industrialization means that they spend half their lives as juveniles (if they make it that long). How would it be possible to treat those two species with any type of fairness under the law?

 

[Lagole Gon]

Playing at a very slow pace now.
I find it shocking that Jaheira and Minsc seem very well-written so far.

With the eyes of my imagination I can picture a Larian writer sweating, almost crying, fighting off the need to smuggle some backstory about Jaheira fighting in Blood War. Or shagging a god, or whatever.

 

[gurugeorge]

What's with you people

Nothing my good sir, there are no degenerates here.

Embrace wholesomeness,

I encountered some kind of bug and owlbear pup never appeared at my camp after the gobbos gave him to me.

I have some good news for everyone! It turns out that the Owlbear cub showing up was just very delayed and didn't happen until like 7 rests after I freed him. I guess there were too many other more important camp events the kept being queued up.

I've said this already but I'll say it again just in case it might be helpful to someone else to catch it. On starting a second playthrough from the beginning with the Approval Tweaks mod, I've realized that what the game "wants" you to do is use up your short rests after every fight and long rest as soon as your companions say they're tired (the abundance of resources should have been a clue to that as well, doh), and do quick rounds of convos in camp.

If you do that, the companion interaction is definitely more sane and less weird from the beginning, and you don't get the "you wait for half an hour then you get 5 buses in a row" effect I had in my main playthrough. Timings of conversational topics match events in the game better. And especially with the mod, the relationships start off more casual and natural, with companions talking about the weather more for a while (so to speak). It unfolds more naturally and you get more snippets of nice voice acting that I totally misssed on my main playthrough early in the game, when I was having very few long rests.

 

[darkpatriot]

Soon Starfield will come out and the crowd will move on

Come on, I believe in you and AwesomeButton, as loyal Paladins of Swen, surely you won't abandon him for Todd
just because of the jetpack sex

Dude you are like 10 people screeching about the same things. Is preatty clear that even the codex is liking the game despite all the crying.

10 morons fighting for imaginary internet cred. Normal people play the game, while they are sucking their thumbs trying to come up with a shitpost.

If someone doesn't shit on the game, he must be a "Defender". What losers

Dude, you are literally in a club of 5 weird people who actually praise this game here

The Codex has a habit of people acting much more hostile towards games than they actually are and focusing on criticizing things about them rather than praising them.

But the reason people are able to criticize it is because they bought it and played it, usually through most of the game if not completing it. And someone who played through 40 hours of something definitely didn't hate it to the very core of their being, and were probably actually quite enjoying themselves most of that time.

You are going to see the same thing here shortly with Starfield. Bethesda being one of the studios you are supposed to ritually hate on the codex, despite playing most of their games.

That isn't a defense against the criticisms of the game in this thread though. Most of the criticisms I have seen in this thread I agree with and think are pretty valid.

 

[processdaemon]

When does Act 3 supposedly start dropping off? I'm pottering around it now and enjoying all the sidequests and haven't hit any major bugs that required reloading. Is it a matter of preference with regard to the city map vs. the mostly outdoor maps in the first 2 Acts?

Encounter design falls off a cliff immediately in act 3 in my opinion, save a few highlights. The worst problem with act 3 is the main quest with Orin and Gortash, both super poorly made. The side quests vary and some are good and some are meh. There's lots of scripting issues too where if you do things weirdly you'll have NPCs talking about things that never happened or refusing to acknowledge things that did happen, but if you manage to stay on rails accidentally then I assume that won't happen.

I've only skimmed the surface of the Orin and Gortash quests so far (I'm going to hit the sewers after I'm done taking out the rest of the people on the murder list) so if that's where it falls down then it makes sense that I haven't seen much of a decline yet, thanks for the heads up.

 

[Larianshill]

Playing at a very slow pace now.
I find it shocking that Jaheira and Minsc seem very well-written so far.

With the eyes of my imagination I can picture a Larian writer sweating, almost crying, doing his best not to smuggle some backstory about Jaheira fighting in Blood War.

I loved Minsc's musings on siding with

Spoiler

the Zhentarim

 

[darkpatriot]

Re: integration-- every single American city is de facto segregated. Even some of the most census-diverse cities in the country are set up in ways so that people of different races almost never mix. The US developed an entirely alternate kind of transportation based on the personal car once trains and other forms of public transportation were integrated by law. The only places where you really see much racial diversity are in places that have been integrated by law. Even then, those institutions that are de jure integrated do everything that they can to work the system (e.g. hiring/admitting seven black women for every black man).

When a game does the United Colors of Benetton thing, they are trying to reflect the propaganda of the system rather than what that system actually produces.

Not my experience. Maybe I just live in a much more diverse area (I live in Texas, where no one etnicity is a majority), but I currently, and always have, had people of different ethnicities in all the neighborhoods I have lived in, schools I have gone to, and workplaces I have worked at. One major reason I always roll my eyes at all the "race war now!" type folks on the codex. Somehow the places I have lived my entire life have managed to withstand diversity without breaking out into violent racial conflict, and even managed to be some of the best places to live and work in the country with massive growth.

And it certainly isn't because it is forced.

While there are plenty of places where there isn't much diversity due to one ethnic group being a very strong majority, there are many places where that isn't true as well as I have visited other parts of the country that clearly had a fairly diverse group of people walking around and interacting. It is also a very big country, so I wouldn't assume whatever personal experience you have had (or read about) are the norm across the country.



I think the extreme diversity often seen in fantasy games just doesn't make a lot of sense though, unless there is a very specific reason for it. People generally can't travel as easily in fantasy settings as they can in modern days, so there just wouldn't be that much traveling around and settling down different places. An area on the boundary/interface between two different cultures might have a fair amount of mixing/interaction between the two (although after a period of time there will be a merging of the two into a hybrid culture), and same thing with would happen in an area that was recently invaded or conquered.

But half a dozen different cultures all co-existing in the same place? You better have a very good explanation for that.

 

[MerchantKing]

The best companion in the entire Baldur's Gate series:

Just wait until you hear about where he spends most of his time.

 

[MerchantKing]

What's with you people

Nothing my good sir, there are no degenerates here.

Embrace wholesomeness,

I encountered some kind of bug and owlbear pup never appeared at my camp after the gobbos gave him to me.

>cute scene is in degenerate game
>OMG SO WHOLESOME
Why are people like this these days?

 

[Lagole Gon]

I killed the Zenth halfling trader.

Shame, she was kind of cute.

 

[dukeofwoodberry]

Re: integration-- every single American city is de facto segregated. Even some of the most census-diverse cities in the country are set up in ways so that people of different races almost never mix. The US developed an entirely alternate kind of transportation based on the personal car once trains and other forms of public transportation were integrated by law. The only places where you really see much racial diversity are in places that have been integrated by law. Even then, those institutions that are de jure integrated do everything that they can to work the system (e.g. hiring/admitting seven black women for every black man).

When a game does the United Colors of Benetton thing, they are trying to reflect the propaganda of the system rather than what that system actually produces.

Not my experience. Maybe I just live in a much more diverse area (I live in Texas, where no one etnicity is a majority), but I currently, and always have, had people of different ethnicities in all the neighborhoods I have lived in, schools I have gone to, and workplaces I have worked at. One major reason I always roll my eyes at all the "race war now!" type folks on the codex. Somehow the places I have lived my entire life have managed to withstand diversity without breaking out into violent racial conflict, and even managed to be some of the best places to live and work in the country with massive growth.

And it certainly isn't because it is forced.

While there are plenty of places where there isn't much diversity due to one ethnic group being a very strong majority, there are many places where that isn't true as well as I have visited other parts of the country that clearly had a fairly diverse group of people walking around and interacting. It is also a very big country, so I wouldn't assume whatever personal experience you have had (or read about) are the norm across the country.



I think the extreme diversity often seen in fantasy games just doesn't make a lot of sense though, unless there is a very specific reason for it. People generally can't travel as easily in fantasy settings as they can in modern days, so there just wouldn't be that much traveling around and settling down different places. An area on the boundary between two different cultures might have a fair amount of mixing/interaction between the two (although after a period of time there will be a merging of the two cultures), and same thing with would happen in an area that was recently invaded or conquered.

But half a dozen different cultures all co-existing in the same place? You better have a very good explanation for that.

There's literally a Harvard study that shows the more diverse a community, the less close people are. People stay in more and interact less. They want to interact less. But let's trust your gay little anecdotal evidence.

I was in the military and most of my time blacks hung together, at lunch together, went out to together. Yeah I was cool with some of them and we worked together fine but most people's closest friends were their own race