Baldur's Gate Baldur's Gate 3 RELEASE THREAD

[Alienman]

Damn, this game is a rollercoaster. Started to play again this morning, and had a pleasant time. Had fun infiltrating the goblin hideout, lots of weird stuff to do there. However, after this main event was over, the game once again throws me into the eye-rolling parts. Think it was mentioned here before, but suddenly everyone wants to sleep with you. And you have to bob and weave the dialogue options not to end up as someone's sex toy. Jesus Christ guys, can't we go five minutes adventuring without talking about poking each other. Anyway, after that, that meandering feeling hit me again... the world just feels so god damn theme parky, and I think it gets amplified in how you control the characters. Ran into a small village that was burning down, I couldn't give a crap about them, but hey free XP if you manage to rescue someone. And then 15 seconds from that there was a dragon flying about. I just don't even feel strongly about the dungeon diving, it just comes off as so... much busy work instead of adventuring. And I love going into dungeons otherwise.

I had a great couple of battles against the goblins, but then I fought gnolls outside in the world, and holy shit- the game went full Divinity. Floor coated in all kind of substances that either melts you or light you on fire. And somehow these assholes got 3 range attacks each turn. Ranged combat just seems OP in general, so I guess they copied that correctly from the BG games. Man, I really don't know how to feel about this game. There are parts that are good, but I think it might be too much Divinity in it for me, overall.

 

[Grunker]

One question - is the evil playthrough good?

It's the first RPG I can remember playing where it seems like evil is the default path and good is lesser - at least I hope there's a payoff for all this resisting because it sure do seem like evil gets ALOT of toys. Not just the mind flayer powers - there's a lot of side-content that rewards evil with stuff.

Two buts:

1) Morality really isn't clear-cut most times, my character is an arrogant, aloof asshole 90% of the time, just doesn't do chaotic evil stuff and generally sides with the good in binary choices
2) Companions are an exception to the "evil feels default" rule. They're all basically moral degenerates in some form or another and the obvious arc is to redeem them. But you can make them fall.

 

[Grunker]

Is Pact of the Blade working right? My pact weapon has a lower hit chance than my blast.

Nope! Its fucked. I had to respec Wyll because of this same bug. It "forgets" to use CHA as the base stat after the 1st summoning of the pact weapon.

Are you sure? I used Wyll for a good while and to me it seemed like the bug was simply that you had to recast it at the start or before the start of each combat.

 

[Darkwind]

One question - is the evil playthrough good?

I love to do that in currentyear RPGs adjusted for MODERN AUDIENCES written by women and male feminists. Loved to just kill and backstab everyone in Outer Worlds, in the few hours I could bear playing that game.

Yep! Dark Urge is best though, because they ripped off Spawn to some degree. You get the "Evil Jester" NPC who is a servant, but not really, just like the Violator was in that comic. A nice touch, if not terribly original but there are entire dialog trees and cutscenes all about you either fighting off this entity or giving into it. So some thought went into this beyond the "Kill Everyone and be an asshole" you typically see on you average evil playthrough.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Darkwind]

Is Pact of the Blade working right? My pact weapon has a lower hit chance than my blast.

Nope! Its fucked. I had to respec Wyll because of this same bug. It "forgets" to use CHA as the base stat after the 1st summoning of the pact weapon.

Are you sure? I used Wyll for a good while and to me it seemed like the bug was simply that you had to recast it at the start or before the start of each combat.

I will retest it from an earlier savegame before I rerolled him but it seemed jacked up when I tried it if I recall. I'm curious now though so will try it out. I still like him as a Sorlock multiclass though as I ended up with way more melee people than I thought I'd have so it kinda worked out anyways. Though the other 2 warlock subclasses seem really bad by comparison. Pact of the Chain & Tome look very weak from the bit of time I spent playing around with them.

 

[AwesomeButton]

The DA:O comparisons are right. It's basically a sequel to it instead of BG2, and that's fine with me. The game is great despite some usual cringe Larian dialogue.

Depends on what you are comparing I guess. Mechanically, BG3 is different, and superior to both DAO and the BG1/2, in terms of how it translates PnP mechanics and ethos to the videogame medium.

If you take a sober look at BG1, it had great reception because of two things - good production values and D&D ruleset. BG2 added the relationships angle, but the marketing was riding more on anything else on the fact that it was a successor to BG1, and that it was going to be a high-level campaign. Still at the time no other game could offer the kind of gameplay, and more than anything, it was accessible, more accessible than the turn-based Fallout/2.

Going to BG3 today, what does it have going for it? The same two things - production values, the adapted D&D ruleset. The relationships of course are back in full force. Out of these three, the best selling points are the relationships, presented through the high production values. The mechanics are notably not being heavily advertised, because nowadays the market is so wide, and accessibility is so good, that most of the potential player base is unfamiliar with the PnP mechanics, and efforts on accessibility are directed at the player's not needing to be familiar with them at all.

So everything Larian/WotC have done makes perfect sense. And this BG is both a better PnP adaptation, and a more accessible game than the previous. By these metrics, it is objectively better than BG/BG2.

I think BG/BG2 were so innovative that they should be seen as their own branch in the RPG kingdom and judged on their merits within their branch. I think they still remain unsurpassed in certain criteria if compared to games of their pedigree.

 

[Mojobeard]

I really haven't played that far yet, but man, there's a lot of barbarian speech options to get Advantage. And for some other checks too, but they've been rarer.
They're not generally that imaginative, lots of "ROAR" and "DIE", but that's the average barbarian player socializing in tabletop anyway. I hope the trend stays for later chapters.

 

[AwesomeButton]

It's supposed to look like this

Nice... Oh yeah, baby, look at that scroll bar... Unfortunately, it doesn't look like that on my end.

Sorry to suggest stupid shit, but are you sure your display is set to the right ratio ingame? I also have my scrollbar on the left hand side of the screen. Which itself is... well if there was a perverted game, it's that.

Oh, the aspect ratio's set correctly... It's not IMPLEMENTED correctly! That was it, it's missing the left hand objects, the scroll bar and the little button below it.

Amazing. Six fucking years, four hundred devs, and they couldn't get the UI to scale properly. The whole industry's getting lazy from indies to CDPR, you get 16:9 UIs with black framing, but Larian couldn't even manage that. No wonder they didn't fix the toilet chain, click listeners must terrify them.

It beggars belief that they still can't get a toilet chain system (for this is basically the same system) that doesn't remember the fucking order you had your characters in before you unchained them.

Yeah, the stubbornness with which they stick to so bad UI practices makes me suspect that someone wrote that code 10-12 years ago and since then has left the company and now there is no one who can refactor it in a way that won't introduce an unpredictable amount of bugs.

 

[Tyranicon]

Now that I have a full party, game went from being balls hard to easy as hell.

But wait, what about Tactician Mode?

• Enemies receive 30% HP buff
• Enemies throw barrels at you
• More painted surfaces

>Have two women in camp

>They instantly start catfighting and thirsting over player's cock

What did they mean by this?

Is harem playthrough viable option in this western eroge?
We can expect polyamory mod if it isn't - this party size mod is step in that direction.

Larian is seriously stepping on your toes, Tyranicon.

More devs should join the harem train. It's the most masculine fetish, after all.

 

[Larianshill]

I really haven't played that far yet, but man, there's a lot of barbarian speech options to get Advantage. And for some other checks too, but they've been rarer.
They're not generally that imaginative, lots of "ROAR" and "DIE", but that's the average barbarian player socializing in tabletop anyway. I hope the trend stays for later chapters.

Lmao at Lae'zel's look

 

[Mojobeard]

Oh I'm never going to give the frog anything intelligent looking.

 

[Grunker]

I really haven't played that far yet, but man, there's a lot of barbarian speech options to get Advantage.

It's 5E's way of making up for the mismatch between them supposed to be intimidating but often having too low Charisma score to capitalize on it.

Now that I have a full party, game went from being balls hard to easy as hell.

But wait, what about Tactician Mode?

• Enemies receive 30% HP buff
• Enemies throw barrels at you
• More painted surfaces

• 
  
  Where did you get this? It's not correct from my experience.
  
  Tactician is still pretty easy, though.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Grunker what class were you playing again?

 

[Turisas]

Oh I'm never going to give the frog anything intelligent looking.

Kind of lame that her armor wasn't locked - in the beginning at least - despite all the preachings of frogyanki supremacy. Just handed it over to the first goober she met.

 

[Grunker]

Grunker what class were you playing again?

Lore Bard

 

[Turisas]

Lore Bard

 

[OttoQuitmarck]

What the hell. Act 1 also has a gigantic underdark map? How freaking big is this game?

 

[AwesomeButton]

agris , I've found the extraction tool, found the right .pak file, exported the texture, wiped it out in photoshop to be perfectly transparent. I'm now looking for directions on how to package that as a mod.

BTW, I got a quest that told me to just "Investigate NPC X" with no directions on where to go and how to investigate, and no quest marker, which at the surface level seems to be the kind of quest design you are talking about. It still wasn't very involved an investigation though.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Grunker what class were you playing again?

Lore Bard

You want to try out multiplayer for a second playthrough? I can't find a buddy for multiplayer on my first run, and negotiating schedules with multiplayer buddies is a bitch, but in principle, I'm interested in trying it out. The novelty should come at least form being a different character.

 

[Tyranicon]

Where did you get this? It's not correct from my experience.

Tactician is still pretty easy, though.
[/LIST]

https://progameguides.com/baldurs-gate/bg3-tactician-difficulty-guide/

enemy HP will be significantly higher throughout the campaign. But in addition to this, you are likely to see more environmental items to use (or have used against you), such as barrels, while enemy units will have their AI better-tuned, meaning they are more likely to attack your squishier units first.

• Enemy HP: You’ll see a 30 percent rise in enemy HP from Explorer to Balanced and a further 30 percent rise from Balanced to Tactician.
• Hit chance: Enemies have a five percent greater chance to hit on Balanced, as compared to Explorer. However, this doesn’t rise again in Tactician mode.
• Tactics: This only increases between Balanced and Tactician Difficulty, meaning you’ll need to position your troops with more skill to succeed.
• Hazards: Again, this only increases from Balanced to Tactician. It will make most battles more strategic as you’ll have to worry more about your environment.

Larian's encounter design is frustrating. Especially any battle where you get 10 useless allies spending their entire turns dashing to the fight, and by the time they get there the fight's over.

But I don't mind the game being easier because now I can just slaughter my way through entire segments of the game without having to talk to a single NPC or having to sneak. Lol at the underdark getting purged.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Is Pact of the Blade working right? My pact weapon has a lower hit chance than my blast.

A bit of a stupid question, but have you activated the skill?

I just re-activated it. No idea what was going on there, it clearly showed -1 from my 8 Str but now it's correct:
View attachment 39664

There's a great deal of jank remaining in BG3, even after years of Early Access. I noticed that the damage range for weapons in the character screen's roll-over information box is often inaccurate when first transferring or equipping a weapon, but it seems to immediately revise itself to being accurate when bringing the information box up again for a second time. Wouldn't surprise me if particular abilities were bugged, though.

Larian also seems to have had trouble in scripting properly for various paths through the game. For example, after defeating the adventurers who were hunting Karlach, the game immediately shifted out of combat mode and had a now-AI-controlled Karlach running around the room starting fires that damaged my remaining characters. I directed them to run away ASAP, only for the game to then give me a message about my player-character wondering whether the adventurers were telling the truth about the quarry they were seeking, as though I had encountered them first and been suckered into hunting down Karlach. Several other occasions also in which the game obviously referenced events that had happened differently or hadn't occurred (yet), though it doesn't seem that any chain of events has been broken (but it's difficult to be certain).

 

[Vic]

BG3 is the best modern CRPG I’ve played, once you chose the perfect dick shape for your body type.

Much better than DOS2 but that’s probably because of the more mature (both in age and in tone) setting.

I was actually surprised not to see any tranny shit in the game despite the initial character creation.

All in-game characters are well done and not once was I triggered by pozzedness.

That includes the gay vampire who I immediately shamed for trying to suck blood. Felt good to put that cocksucker in his place.

Tho some of the choices are a bit drastic and there are still many graphical glitches in the game.

A lot of emphasis was placed on life like facial expressions and the voice acting is superb. I am beginning to develop an attraction to Shadowheart.

A true breath of fresh air for CRPG fans in these trying times.

 

[Grunker]

Grunker what class were you playing again?

Lore Bard

You want to try out multiplayer for a second playthrough? I can't find a buddy for multiplayer on my first run, and negotiating schedules with multiplayer buddies is a bitch, but in principle, I'm interested in trying it out. The novelty should come at least form being a different character.

I would, but I already got a multiplayer buddy for second playthrough. Sorry my mang. Lotssa Codex bros playing this one though it seems

 

[Grauken]

Lotssa Codex bros playing this one though it seems

yeah, but most of us are completely asocial