Humanoid

BG3 lets you force turn-based mode though. I don't think any of the other games do? JA3 included, sadly.

Yeah, fairly edge case because there are very few quests with the optional objective of not killing anyone, and in any other situation it would not make any mechanical difference whatsoever. There is some tracking though - at least a singular counter - because I think those containers have a finite capacity of corpses.

It enrages me and that's despite the fact I never even got to play up to that section myself, only seeing someone else experience the horror. Granted BG3 can result in a similar experience occurring with the Tiefling kids, but not as egregiously so.

I don't know what Lamplighters is trying to be, and I'm not sure the game does either. Early 20th century setting? That's good. Weird cartoonish 3D aesthetic? That's bad. Tactical turn-based combat? That's good. Real-time only stealth sections? That's bad. I dunno, maybe I'll go watch one of those long-form YouTube reviews to get more than that surface treatment of it, but the general discourse around the game isn't promising. Also, petty as it is, the name evokes the infamous Little Lamplight segment of FO3.

One of the odd little changes with 2.0 is that dumping bodies in a ...well, dumpster, is now explicitly lethal. Not that it makes any mechanical difference to gameplay as they were never climbing out of that dumpster anyway even pre-patch, but yeah, odd.

Bit of the opposite for me, I wish I could more easily filter out the useless orange/purple clothes and dispose of them, whether they be in my bags, my wardrobe, or are yet to be looted. Always a massive letdown to see the rare loot icon only to find out it's just clothes.

I'm taking it slowly, relearning the mechanics as I haven't played the game since April last year, and not seriously since the year before. Started by making a throwaway character to play part of the prologue with, going through all the tutorials and such with a blank slate. But there's too much content for me to bother re-doing to take this character seriously, and the advanced start likely skips too much for me to be able to build any sense of character, so it was always the intention for me to resume my old save. As of yesterday I've done that. I've probably split my attribute points too thin for the new system, but they're not refunded by 2.0 so I'll play around with it as-is for now. Doing a few base-game sidequests first to get my bearings (when I loaded the save up I was sneaking around my own apartment because I didn't recognise where I was) before I start the Phantom Liberty content.

Market cap of around 4.3b USD at the moment.

They should just follow the established naming convention: Switch Swiitch Swiiitch etc.

JK Simmons? Is that the person who wrote the Harry Potter books?

I think a big part of the problem is that Larian has chosen to change their approach from previous games, where none of your dialogue options were actually verbatim. It thus adds another layer of obfuscation between you and the game, where you can only guess at the intention behind the written dialogue line. Now in most cases it's fairly obvious: DOS2: *Ask him to tell you more about LOOM* BG3: "Hey, tell me more about LOOM" But when it comes to interpersonal relationship building... DOS2: *Flirt with him* BG3: "I don't want to kick your head in" Yeah... BG3 really needs to tag the lines where any interpretation other than the literal one is possible. [Flirt] "I don't want to kick your head in" Problem solved.

Character animations are probably the one thing where it's fair to compare BG3 and Starfield directly against each other. And it's no contest. BG3's motion captured faces are amongst the best ever seen in video games, Starfield's are just one step above using literal sock puppets.

Nope, it's literally only Anomen for female player characters, who is no option at all. Haer'Dalis is a mod.

So according to Wikipedia, The Chinese Room sacked all their employees in 2017 and at that point the company was down to just the two directors working out of their house. In the six years since then they've been acquired, released one new mobile game, and re-released one of their old games for mobile. Alrighty then.

Indeed, just classic Bethesda jank that will live as long as they continue to use this engine. It's just amazing to see a developer with such a pathological inability to improve on past mistakes.

I've seen fairly little gameplay so far, but the first few minutes of live gameplay I saw went like this (it was the Spiffing Brit on YouTube I believe): - Player is involved a dialogue with a quest NPC with psychotically exaggerated facial animations (I note that eyebrows in particular seem horrible in the game), player accidentally sits as well but that's actually unintentional good roleplaying as the NPC is seated adjacent. - Conversation turns hostile, NPC starts firing away while the game plays a 5 second canned "standing up from seated" animation for the player. I'm pretty sure it's the exact same animation they used in Skyrim. - Player retreats to an airlock and closes the heavy steel door of the airlock. The other airlock door opens shortly thereafter because they automatically operate in sequence, and it just clips through the player (otherwise it would have squished them against the wall). - The whole exercise was pointless anyway, as the bullets travel straight through the door as it it weren't there. Maybe people no longer classify the above things as bugs, but it's certainly not good gameplay, and it's four immersion-breaking glitches occurring in the space of a minute. It certainly feels neither good nor polished. Now to be fair, I watched for another 30 minutes or so and there was nothing else that came close to being as quintessentially Bethesda as that sequence, but it also shows that they've made zero improvement to that type of interaction in the 12 years since Skyrim. ____ Found the sequence:

20 years worth of accumulated bugs in the engine will do that to any PC. But yeah, also pre-loaded, but we'll see how far I get given I'm likely to be finally starting my BG3 co-op campaign tonight. I guess Starfield is going to be my default single-player game for a couple of weeks, up to the moment Phantom Liberty is released.

Yes, but people who pay for it get to play it on Day -5, so Microsoft are playing silly buggers here. That said, I'm not in a rush personally and am not even entertaining the notion of paying for it. I have however just paid to extend my Game Pass out to late 2026 by buying a bunch of 90-day Xbox Live Gold codes (that convert to 50 days of Game Pass Ultimate).

Nah, seems like he wasn't a gamer at all, and Starfield was just a tiny portion of the stolen goods he was selling. Seemed more like the world's stupidest advertising stunt. The "theft of goods $2500-10000" item on his charge sheet is a massive underestimate. His seller page is cleaned out now, but it was still up for a good few days after the arrest and the retail value of what was there had to be approaching six digits, if not over. He was selling job lots of games, electronics, perfumes, power tools, etc, like bundles of 10 Go Pros, 20 Bluetooth speakers, 50 copies of Just Dance (as one listing, not 50 individual listings), etc. Check out the Wayback Machine archive of just the first page (of nine) and it's probably already $10k+ worth of stolen goods there. He's a warehouse been apparently doing this systematically so even the total value of the stuff he's got listed *right now* would just be a fraction of his total business over time. Obviously I'm not saying it's worth 12 years, but your estimation of what he stole is probably out by a couple orders of magnitude because the retail value of Starfield would only have been a couple percent of the total of what he had listed.

Fortunately the patch has fixed it so that you still get martial weapon proficiency by multiclassing into Ranger, previously it was a tradeoff where starting Rogue gives an extra skill proficiency but loses martial weapons. More relevant now too since Sharpshooter has been fixed as to properly apply the hit penalty to off-hand shots. But yeah, as someone who always plays rogues in RPGs (well, for about 20 years, I was a Sorcerer in BG2), 5E is doing its damndest to make me drop that habit. I just despise having to put all my eggs into one big sneak attack basket. The key thing is that in 5E, the default ability to dual-wield only applies to melee weapons. BG3 lets you do it with any one-handed weapon which opens up this possibility. Funny thing is that in 5E you do take a feat (Crossbow Expert) to enable this build, but ironically it's not to dual-wield hand crossbows. Instead the feat allows you to shoot it with one hand, transfer it to the other hand, and shoot it again. Therefore BG3 isn't even simply ignoring a feat requirement, but instead doing its own thing completely.

Yeah, going through the patch notes I see plenty of fixes addressing continuity issues like that.

I think it holds true for both expansions to both NWN games? No personal experience though as the only campaign I played across all six base games and expansions anywhere near to completion was SoZ. For the apostrophe stripping, I see GOG has also stripped it from "Sid Meiers Covert Action" so that's consistent I guess. Steam has the apostrophe for every Sid game intact, I don't see any non-Sid games to see how they handled those however.

Ultima 4, Civilization 4, TMNT 4 (Turtles in Time), Super Mario 4 (World), ...Leisure Suit Larry 4? EDIT: I can accept SimCity 4 I suppose.

Sounds like something for fans to do with mod tools should they ever be released, maybe with AI voice synthesis. What would Larian's influence on an already fully-written game even be? Plus, from a selfish perspective, I kind of want them to get away from D&D. No doubt it's contributed to the commercial success of the game but it's more of a good game in spite of the ruleset, not because of it.

The Blighted Village is definitely the least coherent part of Act 1. They just threw the kitchen sink at it and it ends up feeling like a nonsensical place that no one ever would have lived in.