Baldur's Gate Baldur's Gate 3 RELEASE THREAD

[janior]

hold person, turn undead, fireball are def mvp spells for my party in this game

 

[gurugeorge]

Funnily enough about the woke themes, the lae'zel romance is really not following this at all. It starts with her being all bossy, i dominate you type stuff, progresses with her pretending the mc is more into her than she is, then locks you in the romance proper when she litterally asks you to dominate her. In game it being a duel where if you win, she submits. I wonder if the woke squadron is already complaining the Lae'zel romance destroys her strong wamen archetype.

I'd reckon the Minthara scene after annihilating the Grove would receive even more attention than that. She straightup tells you she's gonna sleep with you, whether you want her to or not. Rejecting her in the camp, no matter how I tried, ended up with her fighting/killing me. So yeah, she essentially rapes you, but I have yet to hear complaints over that. It just goes to show that at the end of the day, no one really cares if its a one-off, especially if it makes sense within the setting. Having this many bisexual companions doesn't really make sense, but it's just one small blip in the entire thing, and I can see it for the cheap marketing ploy that it is, without it letting affect my enjoyment of the game. The game is overtly sexual, especially in Act 1, but that seems to be more for shock factor than them trying to please a certain type of consumer or push a specific agenda. It dies down hard anyway by the time you finish act 1.

Meh. It's always been the whole woke (voluntary) blindspot that rape is a purely male on female or male on child crime. Other forms of rape are barely acknowledged as existing. So yeah I'd say a female drow raping the MC would be given a pass easily. Compared to a strong wamen character framed as femdom later revealed to only deply wanting to find a man strong enough to be submissive to.

Even when I was a Feminist, I kind of questioned the fixed association between rape and males. When women rape they tend to rape young boys (obviously because of the physical strength disparity), and it's not a negligible percentage by any means, and far from the snickering types of comment would insinuate, the young boy doesn't always luck out with a rapey hottie.

The really curious thing is the automatic association of the pokey thing as the only "positive" value - as if a prehensile "mouth" figuratively eating and digesting something and sucking it dry weren't the more universal and primeval form of dominance, or as if the male's giving of seed couldn't be given a "negative," passive or sacrificial value too.

 

[Rhobar121]

I do hope that I am not the only one who killed that disgusting tranny in Act 3.

Spoiler

I was really surprised they even let me kill the tranny, last time I tried killing super annoying NPC self insert character - the genius girlboss tiefling kids leader - she turned out to be straight up immortal

I assume they didn't want to get banned in several countries.
In germany, something like this could cause problems for the game.

 

[Rhobar121]

In Jaheira's case, I'm wondering if her problem is due to the difficulty level because in my game she just used spells and didn't try to approach enemy paladins most of the time without shapeshifting.

 

[AwesomeButton]

An easier way is just to kill the cult mobs in the tower before doing the nightsong quest.

Sure, but it's too late for that in my case.

In Jaheira's case, I'm wondering if her problem is due to the difficulty level because in my game she just used spells and didn't try to approach enemy paladins most of the time without shapeshifting.

Couldn't be the difficulty. I'm on Balanced.

 

[Swen]

 

[AwesomeButton]

BTW, in the latest patch they've removed waypoints from the map which are from outside your current Act.

 

[Rhobar121]

BTW, in the latest patch they've removed waypoints from the map which are from outside your current Act.

It doesn't happen automatically after finishing the temple?

 

[Alienman]

Wrote another article to bring up a few more points with the game that I missed, left out or just thought about after I had written the review. You can read it here, or down below if you are interested! I mostly discuss some things we have been talking about in this thread.

Spoiler

Welcome to yet another Baldur’s Gate 3 article – are you fed up yet? If not, in this post, I will talk about some additional stuff that I left out in my review – mostly because of space, and to be honest, some things I came to think about after it was written. There won’t be too much about the story here, however, I will talk about it, especially the ending – so here comes the spoiler warning. It will mostly be about the game mechanics and things of that nature that I think should be mentioned.

Camp & resting mechanics
Let’s start with camp mechanics since I didn’t touch that at all in my review. As it works, to rest you need 40 supplies (80 on tactician). The supplies are not too hard to find, as every kind of food item you find in the world adds to the supply pool. However, they come with weight, but here is the weird part – you can circumvent this problem very easily since you can send all the stuff you find in the world through some kind of magical portal directly into your camp chest. I have to say, I find this decision a bit confusing – why to have restrictions when you can bypass the problem with weight just like that? It makes no sense to me. I think limitations like that are important for RPGs, as it asks you to be careful with what you pick up, but if you can just ignore it through magical means – why even bother having it?

The camp mechanics are also tightly interwoven into the narrative experience, both for the main plot and the companion’s storyline. The progression of the game depends on you resting in camp and how often you do it. This means there is a high chance of missing potential important cutscenes, especially when it comes to your party comrades. No resting, no progression, and with that you will miss important story beats. What is an oddity here, at least in my playthrough, is that Astarion is supposed to try to suck your blood during one of the resting periods (he is a vampire), but that scene was entirely skipped in my game. And I rested often, let me tell you, as I was playing a wizard with limited spell slots, yet, it never occurred. This caused some story issues, as later on in the game, my companions and Astarion himself made references to his vampiric nature without my character (as in me) knowing anything about this. Confusing, to say the least.

Resting feels a bit disconnected overall. Mostly you will be transported to a suitable location, but if you rest early in the game, you have this very posh camp already set up when your character might only carry a sword and some raggedy clothes. Where did all this fancy equipment come from? Later on in the game, it makes more sense, especially in the third act where you actually rent a floor in an inn, but I feel it never loses some of that awkwardness. Another example is when you decide to rest in the “enemy” fortress in Act 1, and apparently, you and your crew just cordon off a section of the fortress for your sleeping needs. I see what they were going for here, but I think Pathfinder: Kingmaker made it much better, and believable. In that game, you just make a small camp in the area you are currently visiting. The game doesn’t transport you anywhere or anything, and you can still get attacked during the rest period. And when you want to talk to your comrades in arms, you do so in a designated safe zone, aka hub-area.

Difficulty, AI & combat encounters
I wouldn’t say Baldur’s Gate 3 is a hard game per se since most of the fights depend on your rolls, which are heavily influenced by RNG. What I mean is luck is a major factor, even if the use of skills, and class knowledge is important. I started my first run on tactician, which I struggled with up until Act 2 when I finally made the switch to normal for a more “fun” experience. I’m no turn-based Dungeon and Dragon expert, so tactician mode frustrated me when I was playing my wizard, and in general, I don’t enjoy increased difficulty that comes at the expense of messing with the rules. According to what I have been reading the changes to tactician from normal are increased health for the enemies, easier hit-chance for them, and added special equipment – like fire arrows, elemental bombs, and scrolls. My main issue here was that my character was always the main target of the enemy. You see, the AI always goes for the guy in cloth armor, which many times meant that he got taken out in the first round, often by getting one-shotted. The added environmental mechanics are not much fun either, as it increases the risk of everything being coated with fire by 50%.

However, on my second playthrough, while even being 1 to 2 men down for the longest time, has been going much better. This time I rolled a rogue and started on normal from the get-go. Frankly, the game has been way too easy, except for the few boss encounters that had a few levels above my party, which often meant that the boss could terminate my dudes with one solid blast. So, I’m not sure what to make of the difficulty settings. I probably got better at the game, and maybe that warrants a difficulty increase, or I have just taken a much more optimal route through the game with my knowledge of it. What I can say though, is that the one-shotting of low health and low armor units during the first round in combat is frustrating as hell. Gale suffered the same fate as my wizard when I brought him along. The AI seems to make a beeline for these types of characters, as mentioned. Even taking reactionary attacks by doing so by my party members. That doesn’t make too much sense to me. I guess everyone in Baldur’s Gate has an intense suicidal hatred for mages!

The combat encounters are very varied and are for the most part more than just a room with angry creatures of various kind that needs to be dispatched. Often the encounters have something special to them, something that needs to be disabled, a guy that needs rescuing, or some dude hiding out on the other side of the map that needs to be killed quickly before he casts some kind of instadeath spell. These encounters do become more mundane, and a bit annoying in Act 3, like the factory assault at the docks. Even so, for the most part, they are a part of the main design throughout Baldur’s Gate 3, which is pretty cool and adds a lot of different combat scenarios to the game. Especially the bosses since they always seem to come with unique mechanics. Yet, I must say, some normal tank and spank encounters would be appreciated, so you once in a while can feel like a badass without having to figure out a puzzle before kicking someone’s ass. This is a minor issue though.

The Ending
I won’t be talking about the specifics of the ending here, about what happened or anything, but still – spoiler warning. I found the ending satisfactory, in that you kill the big bad, and stand triumphed at the end of the day. Other than that, it’s a bit of a waste, and comes very fast, and a little bit out of left-field thanks to the twist. I will not say what the twist is, but it undermines the whole story to that point, specifically the action of the antagonists. It was all a lie, you see – very classic subversion stuff, however, it does feel a bit cheap that late in the game. The ending scenario got a couple of missions that follow each other, and one of the unique mechanics of these missions is that you can call in military support, depending on who you helped out during the game. I liked this aspect, and I thought it was a great mechanic, and it was fun to see the folk you helped finally spring to action.

However, it’s way too underutilized. Of the three final battle maps, you can only use them on two (from what I noticed), and the fights are over very quickly! I would have loved to see more use of this mechanic because it was fun to fight alongside the people you helped and to try to keep them alive since if they died, they were lost forever. Another problem with the ending is that it seems to be a binary choice ending, regardless of what you have done in the past. And there is no epilogue, things just end with the narrator proclaiming (in my case) that I was the HERO of Baldur’s Gate, a city I didn’t care that much about in the first place. I hope this gets expanded in the inevitable “enhanced edition”.

World simulation
As I mentioned in my review there is no day and light cycle, or weather effects in the game, which limits the world simulation, as expected. The NPCs don’t follow any kind of natural routines, they remain in their place until the world shifts around them because of narrative reasons. This isn’t too different from many other RPGs, but I must say it’s a little bit disappointing still, considering how much sandbox gameplay disappears because of this. For example thieving. You will have to nick stuff in broad daylight while the NPCs do their business, and they never leave the proximity of important chests, or whatever you want to plunder. What they do react to though, is monsters, and well, dynamic interaction in the form of violence. I accidentally summoned a young beholder in the grove, and the shopkeeper and a few others left their place of work to come and help. Pretty cool stuff, but overall, the game is very static, and any NPC movement is a highly scripted kind of event. This is far from Gothic level of life simulation, and it’s a shame not more development went into this aspect.

Flying & jumping
While both flying and jump is a great addition to the gameplay, particularly for exploration, it does come with some oddities. Jumping is not so bad, however, on later levels, the natural jumping for characters with high athletics and strength becomes cartoony, as they can jump several meters in either direction without any kind of spell. It looks ridiculous, yet I take it for what it is, a silly interpretation of the rules that becomes useful when exploring dangerous dungeons. What does not work so well is flying. It’s a pretty good way to go around of course, but how it works is a bit baffling and limits the use of the skill. It’s basically an extension of jumping since you can only reach places you can see. This means it makes it very hard to use it for its intended purpose – flying around anywhere and getting to out-of-reach places. Another thing with flying is that you can’t hover in midair. This makes it worthless in combat, beyond maybe escaping enemies. In Solasta: Crown of the Magister (which is also a game based on DnD 5th Edition) you can hover in the air, and blast things from the sky. It makes it a much better spell, a most useful spell to escape melee-based enemies, which surely could have been needed when it comes to weak wizards.

Full game for 60 bucks with no BS
One of the more refreshing things (even if I won the game) is that Baldur’s Gate 3 is sold as a full package, with no additional bullshit DLCs, or micro-transactions. It’s just like the games of old, and in this day and age that should be celebrated. What is funny too that ties into this, is that there are a lot of butthurt developers saying that this game should absolutely not be treated as the norm. That it’s an impossible standard and such malarkey. I call fake news on that one. In my opinion, all games should try to reach for excellence and to give the player an experience out of the ordinary. I think that should be the set goal for every developer, and if they can’t reach that, well, that’s another story, but they should try at least. According to a lot of them, Baldur’s Gate 3 is some kind of one-off miracle, and it isn’t even that great. It just comes off as incredibly sour grapes, and defeatists, on top of being anti-consumer, which is an issue that has been a part of this industry for the longest time now. “We have to increase prices” & “We need to sell skins” in an industry that makes more money than both Hollywood and the music industry combined. Sure, I believe you, Mr. CEO of Big Corp Gaming Company.

That’s all I have to talk about this time around, I’m sure more things will pop up in my head eventually, so expect more Baldur’s Gate 3 content on the blog in the future. Actually, I can already think about a few things, like how it’s Shadowheart’s game more than the player. Anyway, game on, and I will see you all next time.

Thanks for reading.

 

[Tyranicon]

If you take control of Jaheira during that battle, you find out that most of her spells are empty and she only has the ice nuke spell and a few others.

I wish they either gave her a good melee or ranged build, instead of just casting ice storm, slipping on it and dying.

 

[Konjad]

Honestly, I've never seen a well done evil path in any cRPG, at best a well-written cartonish evil path

Vendetta - The Curse of Raven's Cry

Asshole choices usually lead you to get more money and more entertaining quest solutions.

 

[Lord of Riva]

Even when I was a Feminist, I kind of questioned the fixed association between rape and males.

Thank you for waking up.

 

[Shaki]

If you take control of Jaheira during that battle, you find out that most of her spells are empty and she only has the ice nuke spell and a few others.

I wish they either gave her a good melee or ranged build, instead of just casting ice storm, slipping on it and dying.

That's being faithful to the originals, BG1/2 also did this shit where NPC casters, would usually have like 1-2 spells to spam and nothing else. It was one of the major changes SCS made, it gave all NPC casters the spells they should have access to, according to their level. Hopefully some day we'll get something similar for BG3.

 

[Shaki]

Honestly, I've never seen a well done evil path in any cRPG, at best a well-written cartonish evil path

MotB has a great evil path

 

[Parabalus]

An easier way is just to kill the cult mobs in the tower before doing the nightsong quest.

Sure, but it's too late for that in my case.

In Jaheira's case, I'm wondering if her problem is due to the difficulty level because in my game she just used spells and didn't try to approach enemy paladins most of the time without shapeshifting.

Couldn't be the difficulty. I'm on Balanced.

For me she spammed Ice Storm and it was quite effective.

 

[Lawntoilet]

Honestly, I've never seen a well done evil path in any cRPG, at best a well-written cartonish evil path

Vendetta - The Curse of Raven's Cry

Asshole choices usually lead you to get more money and more entertaining quest solutions.

Expeditions: Conquistador & Viking

 

[Lagole Gon]

So I was talking to some metrosexual negro dwarven trader... And it struck me.
Not counting gray dwarves... Is there at least one traditional dwarven dwarf in this game?
Beard, strong will, craftsmanship? Because I can't remember a single one.

I guess now dwarves are just humans but short?

 

[AwesomeButton]

BTW, in the latest patch they've removed waypoints from the map which are from outside your current Act.

It doesn't happen automatically after finishing the temple?

Aha, then it wasn't the patch.

 

[turkishronin]

Funnily enough about the woke themes, the lae'zel romance is really not following this at all. It starts with her being all bossy, i dominate you type stuff, progresses with her pretending the mc is more into her than she is, then locks you in the romance proper when she litterally asks you to dominate her. In game it being a duel where if you win, she submits. I wonder if the woke squadron is already complaining the Lae'zel romance destroys her strong wamen archetype.

I'd reckon the Minthara scene after annihilating the Grove would receive even more attention than that. She straightup tells you she's gonna sleep with you, whether you want her to or not. Rejecting her in the camp, no matter how I tried, ended up with her fighting/killing me. So yeah, she essentially rapes you, but I have yet to hear complaints over that. It just goes to show that at the end of the day, no one really cares if its a one-off, especially if it makes sense within the setting. Having this many bisexual companions doesn't really make sense, but it's just one small blip in the entire thing, and I can see it for the cheap marketing ploy that it is, without it letting affect my enjoyment of the game. The game is overtly sexual, especially in Act 1, but that seems to be more for shock factor than them trying to please a certain type of consumer or push a specific agenda. It dies down hard anyway by the time you finish act 1.

Meh. It's always been the whole woke (voluntary) blindspot that rape is a purely male on female or male on child crime. Other forms of rape are barely acknowledged as existing. So yeah I'd say a female drow raping the MC would be given a pass easily. Compared to a strong wamen character framed as femdom later revealed to only deply wanting to find a man strong enough to be submissive to.

Even when I was a Feminist, I kind of questioned the fixed association between rape and males. When women rape they tend to rape young boys (obviously because of the physical strength disparity), and it's not a negligible percentage by any means, and far from the snickering types of comment would insinuate, the young boy doesn't always luck out with a rapey hottie.

The really curious thing is the automatic association of the pokey thing as the only "positive" value - as if a prehensile "mouth" figuratively eating and digesting something and sucking it dry weren't the more universal and primeval form of dominance, or as if the male's giving of seed couldn't be given a "negative," passive or sacrificial value too.

Women can't rape retard because the act of rape requires a penis.
Stop stealing male culture and giving it away to women for "equity"

 

[Shaki]

Even when I was a Feminist, I kind of questioned the fixed association between rape and males. When women rape they tend to rape young boys (obviously because of the physical strength disparity), and it's not a negligible percentage by any means, and far from the snickering types of comment would insinuate, the young boy doesn't always luck out with a rapey hottie.

The really curious thing is the automatic association of the pokey thing as the only "positive" value - as if a prehensile "mouth" figuratively eating and digesting something and sucking it dry weren't the more universal and primeval form of dominance, or as if the male's giving of seed couldn't be given a "negative," passive or sacrificial value too.

Women can't rape retard because the act of rape requires a penis.
Stop stealing male culture and giving it away to women for "equity"

How can you get raped by a bitch, it's literally just soy retards seeking attention who cry about being "raped", even when I was like 12 yo I could easily overpower any foid, lmao. This shit is literally made up by fags who are jealous of niggers and women having the perma victim card and wanting to be a victim too.

 

[Desiderius]

Wrote another article to bring up a few more points with the game that I missed, left out or just thought about after I had written the review. You can read it here, or down below if you are interested! I mostly discuss some things we have been talking about in this thread.

Spoiler

Welcome to yet another Baldur’s Gate 3 article – are you fed up yet? If not, in this post, I will talk about some additional stuff that I left out in my review – mostly because of space, and to be honest, some things I came to think about after it was written. There won’t be too much about the story here, however, I will talk about it, especially the ending – so here comes the spoiler warning. It will mostly be about the game mechanics and things of that nature that I think should be mentioned.

Camp & resting mechanics
Let’s start with camp mechanics since I didn’t touch that at all in my review. As it works, to rest you need 40 supplies (80 on tactician). The supplies are not too hard to find, as every kind of food item you find in the world adds to the supply pool. However, they come with weight, but here is the weird part – you can circumvent this problem very easily since you can send all the stuff you find in the world through some kind of magical portal directly into your camp chest. I have to say, I find this decision a bit confusing – why to have restrictions when you can bypass the problem with weight just like that? It makes no sense to me. I think limitations like that are important for RPGs, as it asks you to be careful with what you pick up, but if you can just ignore it through magical means – why even bother having it?

The camp mechanics are also tightly interwoven into the narrative experience, both for the main plot and the companion’s storyline. The progression of the game depends on you resting in camp and how often you do it. This means there is a high chance of missing potential important cutscenes, especially when it comes to your party comrades. No resting, no progression, and with that you will miss important story beats. What is an oddity here, at least in my playthrough, is that Astarion is supposed to try to suck your blood during one of the resting periods (he is a vampire), but that scene was entirely skipped in my game. And I rested often, let me tell you, as I was playing a wizard with limited spell slots, yet, it never occurred. This caused some story issues, as later on in the game, my companions and Astarion himself made references to his vampiric nature without my character (as in me) knowing anything about this. Confusing, to say the least.

Resting feels a bit disconnected overall. Mostly you will be transported to a suitable location, but if you rest early in the game, you have this very posh camp already set up when your character might only carry a sword and some raggedy clothes. Where did all this fancy equipment come from? Later on in the game, it makes more sense, especially in the third act where you actually rent a floor in an inn, but I feel it never loses some of that awkwardness. Another example is when you decide to rest in the “enemy” fortress in Act 1, and apparently, you and your crew just cordon off a section of the fortress for your sleeping needs. I see what they were going for here, but I think Pathfinder: Kingmaker made it much better, and believable. In that game, you just make a small camp in the area you are currently visiting. The game doesn’t transport you anywhere or anything, and you can still get attacked during the rest period. And when you want to talk to your comrades in arms, you do so in a designated safe zone, aka hub-area.

Difficulty, AI & combat encounters
I wouldn’t say Baldur’s Gate 3 is a hard game per se since most of the fights depend on your rolls, which are heavily influenced by RNG. What I mean is luck is a major factor, even if the use of skills, and class knowledge is important. I started my first run on tactician, which I struggled with up until Act 2 when I finally made the switch to normal for a more “fun” experience. I’m no turn-based Dungeon and Dragon expert, so tactician mode frustrated me when I was playing my wizard, and in general, I don’t enjoy increased difficulty that comes at the expense of messing with the rules. According to what I have been reading the changes to tactician from normal are increased health for the enemies, easier hit-chance for them, and added special equipment – like fire arrows, elemental bombs, and scrolls. My main issue here was that my character was always the main target of the enemy. You see, the AI always goes for the guy in cloth armor, which many times meant that he got taken out in the first round, often by getting one-shotted. The added environmental mechanics are not much fun either, as it increases the risk of everything being coated with fire by 50%.

However, on my second playthrough, while even being 1 to 2 men down for the longest time, has been going much better. This time I rolled a rogue and started on normal from the get-go. Frankly, the game has been way too easy, except for the few boss encounters that had a few levels above my party, which often meant that the boss could terminate my dudes with one solid blast. So, I’m not sure what to make of the difficulty settings. I probably got better at the game, and maybe that warrants a difficulty increase, or I have just taken a much more optimal route through the game with my knowledge of it. What I can say though, is that the one-shotting of low health and low armor units during the first round in combat is frustrating as hell. Gale suffered the same fate as my wizard when I brought him along. The AI seems to make a beeline for these types of characters, as mentioned. Even taking reactionary attacks by doing so by my party members. That doesn’t make too much sense to me. I guess everyone in Baldur’s Gate has an intense suicidal hatred for mages!

The combat encounters are very varied and are for the most part more than just a room with angry creatures of various kind that needs to be dispatched. Often the encounters have something special to them, something that needs to be disabled, a guy that needs rescuing, or some dude hiding out on the other side of the map that needs to be killed quickly before he casts some kind of instadeath spell. These encounters do become more mundane, and a bit annoying in Act 3, like the factory assault at the docks. Even so, for the most part, they are a part of the main design throughout Baldur’s Gate 3, which is pretty cool and adds a lot of different combat scenarios to the game. Especially the bosses since they always seem to come with unique mechanics. Yet, I must say, some normal tank and spank encounters would be appreciated, so you once in a while can feel like a badass without having to figure out a puzzle before kicking someone’s ass. This is a minor issue though.

The Ending
I won’t be talking about the specifics of the ending here, about what happened or anything, but still – spoiler warning. I found the ending satisfactory, in that you kill the big bad, and stand triumphed at the end of the day. Other than that, it’s a bit of a waste, and comes very fast, and a little bit out of left-field thanks to the twist. I will not say what the twist is, but it undermines the whole story to that point, specifically the action of the antagonists. It was all a lie, you see – very classic subversion stuff, however, it does feel a bit cheap that late in the game. The ending scenario got a couple of missions that follow each other, and one of the unique mechanics of these missions is that you can call in military support, depending on who you helped out during the game. I liked this aspect, and I thought it was a great mechanic, and it was fun to see the folk you helped finally spring to action.

However, it’s way too underutilized. Of the three final battle maps, you can only use them on two (from what I noticed), and the fights are over very quickly! I would have loved to see more use of this mechanic because it was fun to fight alongside the people you helped and to try to keep them alive since if they died, they were lost forever. Another problem with the ending is that it seems to be a binary choice ending, regardless of what you have done in the past. And there is no epilogue, things just end with the narrator proclaiming (in my case) that I was the HERO of Baldur’s Gate, a city I didn’t care that much about in the first place. I hope this gets expanded in the inevitable “enhanced edition”.

World simulation
As I mentioned in my review there is no day and light cycle, or weather effects in the game, which limits the world simulation, as expected. The NPCs don’t follow any kind of natural routines, they remain in their place until the world shifts around them because of narrative reasons. This isn’t too different from many other RPGs, but I must say it’s a little bit disappointing still, considering how much sandbox gameplay disappears because of this. For example thieving. You will have to nick stuff in broad daylight while the NPCs do their business, and they never leave the proximity of important chests, or whatever you want to plunder. What they do react to though, is monsters, and well, dynamic interaction in the form of violence. I accidentally summoned a young beholder in the grove, and the shopkeeper and a few others left their place of work to come and help. Pretty cool stuff, but overall, the game is very static, and any NPC movement is a highly scripted kind of event. This is far from Gothic level of life simulation, and it’s a shame not more development went into this aspect.

Flying & jumping
While both flying and jump is a great addition to the gameplay, particularly for exploration, it does come with some oddities. Jumping is not so bad, however, on later levels, the natural jumping for characters with high athletics and strength becomes cartoony, as they can jump several meters in either direction without any kind of spell. It looks ridiculous, yet I take it for what it is, a silly interpretation of the rules that becomes useful when exploring dangerous dungeons. What does not work so well is flying. It’s a pretty good way to go around of course, but how it works is a bit baffling and limits the use of the skill. It’s basically an extension of jumping since you can only reach places you can see. This means it makes it very hard to use it for its intended purpose – flying around anywhere and getting to out-of-reach places. Another thing with flying is that you can’t hover in midair. This makes it worthless in combat, beyond maybe escaping enemies. In Solasta: Crown of the Magister (which is also a game based on DnD 5th Edition) you can hover in the air, and blast things from the sky. It makes it a much better spell, a most useful spell to escape melee-based enemies, which surely could have been needed when it comes to weak wizards.

Full game for 60 bucks with no BS
One of the more refreshing things (even if I won the game) is that Baldur’s Gate 3 is sold as a full package, with no additional bullshit DLCs, or micro-transactions. It’s just like the games of old, and in this day and age that should be celebrated. What is funny too that ties into this, is that there are a lot of butthurt developers saying that this game should absolutely not be treated as the norm. That it’s an impossible standard and such malarkey. I call fake news on that one. In my opinion, all games should try to reach for excellence and to give the player an experience out of the ordinary. I think that should be the set goal for every developer, and if they can’t reach that, well, that’s another story, but they should try at least. According to a lot of them, Baldur’s Gate 3 is some kind of one-off miracle, and it isn’t even that great. It just comes off as incredibly sour grapes, and defeatists, on top of being anti-consumer, which is an issue that has been a part of this industry for the longest time now. “We have to increase prices” & “We need to sell skins” in an industry that makes more money than both Hollywood and the music industry combined. Sure, I believe you, Mr. CEO of Big Corp Gaming Company.

That’s all I have to talk about this time around, I’m sure more things will pop up in my head eventually, so expect more Baldur’s Gate 3 content on the blog in the future. Actually, I can already think about a few things, like how it’s Shadowheart’s game more than the player. Anyway, game on, and I will see you all next time.

Thanks for reading.

You can trigger a dialogue about Vampirism if you have Astarion in your party and pass a couple skill checks at the two animals he’s exanguinated around Moonhaven.

There’s also a passed out Hobgoblin there he can top up on.

 

[Gargaune]

patch_baldurs_gate_3_Release_-_v4.1.1.3636828_-_Patch_Patch0_Hotfix3_(66686)_to_Live_-_v4.1.1.3648072_-_Patch_Patch0_Hotfix4_Launcher_fix_(66847).exe

I've never had to

a filename before, I wonder if Larian are aware that Windows paths do actually have a character limit. Because together with my folders, the above's pushing 224 against a default max of 260. There's a certain point where technical ineptitude in a software outfit becomes seriously aggravating.

Anyway, is v4.1.1.3648072 the "good" one that doesn't break your game like it's the Owlcat Olympics?

I would like to take a moment to recognise Larian - and possibly GOG too, in a joint capacity - for achieving a true milestone of stupidity in IT support. Seriously, that guy on the phone asking if you've turned it off and on again? Not a prayer, Swen's got this award in the bag.

Here's the rub - that TLDR filename that I poster earlier? Yeah, I really shouldn't have TLDR'd it. Because, as you know, Larian put out a class A gamebreaking bug in their last HF4 patch. Now, any normal person would assume that if they have three outstanding patches off the current build - HF3, HF4 and HF4 "fixed" - they need to install them in sequence, and especially that third one which fixes the broken second one.

But we're not in normal land this time, we're in Larian world, baby! So what these scintillating geniuses did was left the broken HF4 patch up for everyone to download, and then put the HF4 "fix" as a patch for the HF3 build! So if you installed the broken HF4, there's no rollback and no upgrade chain, your only option is to uninstall the game, download the full latest build, and then install that again. For anyone looking to manually update their game, skip v4.1.1.3645567 and go from v4.1.1.3636828 straight to v4.1.1.3648072.

Honestly, "I'm not even angry etc." anymore. Owlcat's patch cycle on PFKM was meme-worthy but they just skipped manual patches, they didn't pull this. I thought that Larian's 500-man workforce constituted a proper AAA studio, but actually they're more like a pile of 50 indie studios. Bad ones.

 

[Jermu]

rip white Wyll

 

[Barbarian]

rip white Wyll

His father, who appears in game(Duke Ravengard) is black though. Would need to be changed as well.

 

[Derringer]

This is the kind of shit only a braindead normie finds funny.

Fans of Misnc were always braindead normies.

It gets worse when they pull bad characters into games with even worse characters to elevate them.