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I'm not sure if there's ever been a game with a larger disconnect between the time that could and should pass on your adventures and the time that actually does, because time is basically "frozen" on the same day until you go and rest. If you hike from the Nautiloid to the old temple where you meet Withers, then move on to the Grove, explore that, talk to the people, maybe even clear out parts of the Blighted Village - well, that's like a couple of hours of real life cRPG time, but in terms of any regular PnP campaign that would be several sessions, easily, and quite a lot of time for the characters. That's just all not very well designed, at least not for me and my preferences. Act 1 is basically the sum total of all Baldur's Gate wilderness areas stitched together, forming one giant map, with the really big holes of nothing removed. It is a super dense blob of things to do you're thrown in with no sense of time progression at all (mostly because there really is none, aside from the game's internal round counter and a pseudo-advancement of time when you go to camp and come back without resting) and arguably worse, no clear sense of direction. Baldur's Gate at least was nice enough to provide you with a destination and a trail to pick up that would not prove to be overly problematic to your party. You could vector away from that, of course, and run into your fair share of maps you should not be in and find yourself fighting Ankhegs or getting wiped out by Basilisks with your trusty level one group (although those Basilisks make for really good experience even with very low level characters once you know what you're doing) but if you follow Baldur's Gate 3's meager pointers the game - quite literally and in a break of immersion - tells you that your party is in for a really bad time if you move on or you end up potentially facing a hike in encounter difficulty that puts the Owlfinder games to shame while trying to solve the Druid Grove's problems. All things you should logically prioritize because the game drives home how much of a priority they are. Instead you have to go on side adventures to reach a good enough level. Well, have to, there are ways around everything, as always, but as far as the "intended" way to play the game goes, I have no idea how it got all those glowing reviews. Yes, going to the Friendly Arm Inn and then to Nashkell without spending some time poking around in Beregost would net you two pretty annoying battles with assassins in Baldur's Gate that could potentially be devastating, but they're nothing compared to the killer sheep in Larian's game. Then again, I don't know how glowing reviews come to be for a lot of games, TV shows and movies, so clearly it is not just the Baldur's Gate 3's problem.

tl;dw Game good

You can have sex with one. Everything is called a romance these days.

Rich of Lae'zel to call anyone ugly and Astarion kinda looks like recently deceased Wagner boss Prigozhin especially when he makes dour faces. Anyway, Internet told me you can romance an actual bona fide Mindflayer, so that's who I'm going after in the distant future. Unless there is something even more outlandish.

There are some encounters with a massive amount of enemies, and then you wish this had real-time combat.

I thought it was a bug. I tried to do it a second time, but it didn’t work. Anyway, after saving the grove, it was time for the party and only half of the companions wanted to sleep with me. Not sure what you guys are doing to have all of them interested. That said, the game really tried to get me to seduce the other half, considering the dialogue options. I was surprised the Tieflings were behaving and the hireling didn’t say that “this vessel is at your disposal”. Considering that it's a puppet, who knows what Withers is into. As for actually doing it, I'll wait for Karlach. She did explicitly say it would be ok for me to have relations with someone else (or more than one for that matter), but I decided not to. Even so, Astarion rejected and despised me, not that I hinted at anything. Shadowheart and Gale were subtle, so I pretended I didn’t know what they were talking about. Wyll was feeling depressed, and I just left him alone. As for Lae’zel, she went full horny (and pissed off) out of nowhere, but also assumed I was not interested, implying she would do something by herself. Perhaps I should have brought the Loviatar guy to make her company, instead of killing him. That is actually really nice. For me, she went from "We need to find the Githyanki kindergarten" to "You are a trophy that makes me crazy, but since you don't let me join the party, you won't feel my fingers." Edit: Astarion doesn't find me attractive: Drunk Shadowheart:

Per usual, apologies if already posted semi-recently, I don't keep track anymore. But I can confirm when you have a lot of cats (I had nine once), this can be a nightly occurrence. Fall asleep on the living room sofa at your own risk. 😛

I think that my biggest issue with BG3 is the lack of a pause button. The second would be lack of a day/night cycle and time only passing with Long Rests. It's a pretty staggering thing that's missing from a game that's otherwise unusually reactive. Baa.

I’m not really a fan, so I couldn’t tell what was old and what was new. A single slow ballad, that was like half a capella, half slow guitar and one song I recognised at the end, the rest was hard rock/heavy rock/guitar rock/whatever I made a few clips on my phone, but I need to get home from the airport before I can convert them to something shareable. Just clips, not full bootlegs. I’ll put them up here later edit: the joojeh I got at the Persian place was awesome. I would be surprised if @Katphood wasn’t familiar with it 👋 edit2: My old phone has made some pretty good recordings in the past, but at this concert, it was definitely NOT up to the task. Crappy audio quality which in no way is a reflection of the actual experience (my brain can compensate a bit because I know what it really sounded like) 😖

I uhh, did not know about manual turn based for quite a while into the game when I tried to do some prebuffs before an ambush. The day/night stuff and lack of weather effects does bother me a lot, I'm in the Underdark now and it's a refreshing break to what has been mostly a very bright and sunny experience. It's also kind of weird because there is a subclass based around storms and another around darkness (as well as a vampire spawn and a Shar worshipper as companions), so you'd think they'd throw them a bone and let them play in the rain or night. I think that there is less of it and it does move faster than PoE/2, which tended to be a very slow games due to several factors (especially Deadfire). I think of all the time I've spent in the game maybe 20% has been in combat. It may be, but if you cool her down (I used water, but maybe cold damage stuff could work too) she does have some extra dialogue after that. Findom. I think Lae'zel drastically overestimates her own and the Githyanki's generally competence and power so when she calls you ugly she's trying to "neg" you and dominate. If it comes across as awkward and unpleasant then that's inline with real life. For my party Karlach told me to have fun, Astarion wanted to ****, Lae'zel wanted to **** Astarion, Gale told me Shadowheart was a special lady and also hit on me, Wyll wanted to brood, and Shadowheart wanted to get drunk. Alfira's blood is still on the ground from that time the urge murdered her and the imp butler has been a no show lately.

What I found to be really disconcerting was that she went straight from "YOU SURE ARE AN UGLY BASTARD" to "HEY I'M QUITE FOND OF YOU, NOW I THINK YOU'RE VERY PRETTY" in literally the next line. I was dying inside so much, and was like...okay, I guess this is one of those games where I'm going to have to not talk to my companions sometimes. I'm not playing a visual novel or dating simulator here, I don't want characters to immediately glue themselves to me in the cringiest manner possible. Honestly, I wish I could just disable the approval system entirely and just leave everyone at neutral or maybe mild approval with no way of going higher. Yeah, that's pretty much my situation: there really hadn't been any combat that I needed to do anything besides cast cantrips and shoot arrows for a very long while, and I was making judicious use of always sneaking around and attacking before being seen, which usually means that my characters get two attacks before enemies get even one. Most battles end before enemies can move. (Also, while all of that could be accomplished in "a couple of real life cRPG hours", in practice it took significantly longer because of wandering around looking at every little thing I can.) It's definitely not constructed in a way that I feel I can really get into, and I think that's a shame. My sense of time, direction, pacing, and just...there being any sort of realness/grounding to the game world or its characters are all severely off for a myriad of reasons, both little and large...and though I seem to enjoy myself fine enough when I am actually playing it (which has been a handful of hours each week - shorter sessions being my way of trying to pace the game, perhaps), there's this increasingly grave feeling of discontent looming over me that I really don't like. Actually, it's very similar to the feeling I get when I try to watch a show that is just fun or funny without offering much anything else that I care about, like Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. For a few hours, that might be fine, but it becomes a much tougher ask with longer durations. I've been using the "manually enter turn-based mode" 'pause' button a ton whenever I'm playing. It's too useful for a number of situations to ignore. Also, no day/night cycle is about as bad as there being very little environmental audio, if not worse: it feels like I've been in daylight for bloody forever. Never underestimate the power of a windy or even rainy night. P.S. Confession time: I thought the turn-based combat would be my biggest problem in this game, but honestly, it feels like combat moves faster in this game than it did in Pillars of Eternity, or maybe there's just a lot less of it, or its use feels more appropriate, or...something. It surprisingly has not been too much of an issue for me, which makes it doubly unfortunate that I'm having trouble sticking to the game because of other issues.

Is the 5090 out yet? I was fine with DLSS/FSR/whatever being available as a way to extend life of older gpu's/allow lower end rigs to keep playing a while, or just as one user-optimization option. I'm less fine with dev's pushing it as almost the only user-optimization, where fiddling with (other) settings more and more often does very little to increase performance, plus at least on paper listing DLSS etc. as something you need on for the "system requirements." I love me some shiny graphics at times, although I've never cared about "Ultra" at all, but could we focus more on gameplay now instead of marketing uber lighting/shadows/effects and hyper real (but still uncanny valley) faces and figures while waiting for gpu tech or dev. engine programming skills to catch up a bit?

Throw some water at her. You naughty Lae'zel

I think it makes sense for Astarion and Karlach to be very horny, they did spend a very long time not being able to do.....well anything really. Gale, Lae'zel, and Wyll are excessively horny though, of those maybe Gale has a reason to be because he's got another looming death besides the tadpole that should be turning him into a tentacle monster. Shadowheart is the most normal among the group, and when....well I won't spoil anything but that should be a big alarm.

Naturally, who else would it be? Not coincidentally, my favorite character in OG Dragon Ball (far and away the best Dragon Ball don't @ me) is Oolong, given he's for all intents and purposes Zhu Bajie, just like Goku is Sun Wukong. Oolong appears in DBZ and so on, but in a much diminished role as the series devolved from the fun, goofy hijinks of the original to he's power level 100000! Oh yeah, well I powered up to 500000. Oh yeah, well I'm now power level 90000000000. And so on. As for the new Grim Dawn expansion, I'm all for it. The best loot em up gets bigger and even better, what's not to love?

Combine with Boots of Speed and you're back at normal move speed. Maybe one can add additonal ways to profit from the self-induced hobble? There should be other items that trigger something useful on getting hit or crit... 🤔 What usually makes self-healing tricks less potent (without resting too much) in PoE is that they only affect endurance but not health.

Sorry about the necro, but I just accidentally came across this thread and I would like to chime in and say that there are definitely more ways to make Xoti/Maia romance happen. On my first playthrough I did not look for this outcome specifically and everything just happened naturally. I played a Goldpact Paladin choosing mostly Rational/Stoic dialogue options in dialogues. I also did not encourage any Watcher/Xoti romance stuff. In particular I did not have the two specific dialogues you mention (I spoke with Serafen on the deck of the Defiant, so Eder couldn't hear us) and I did not even have him in my party while speaking to Syri the Siren. I never picked that dialogue line or in any way pushed Xoti towards Maia before their romance happened. I did remove Eder from my party once I arrived in Neketaka and could add Pallegina and Maia to my team. In fact all this time I thought that Xoti/Maia romance was inevitable if you did not go out of your way to discourage it. Game ending spoiler alert:

The disconnect between severity of crime and punishment in the USA is something bizarre too. IMHO.

Hello all, Managed to get to finish the game on RELAX mode, because i wanted to learn the game mechanics. Absolutely one of the greatest rpg game, i ever played, because of the replayability. Never, ever understimate power of Team Boars! 😄

TL;DR: Typical Bethesda game.

Now it's time for the party:

https://blog.playerauctions.com/starfield/starfield-leaker-facing-a-12-year-sentence/