Wormerine

Playing as halfling, cutscenes have been mixed. Some work alright, there is pretty regular feeling that NPCs weren't quite meant to be looking down, and fairly regularly a cutscene breaks. In EA, at least, short races playthroughs were always a big more buggy than usual, so my guess would be that the same is true in 1.0.

Public Service Announcement - the game has ability shortcuts! It maybe had shortcuts for couple EA patches and I just didn't notice. They can be assigned through otherwise useless "custom" tab of the hotbar. There, in the top row you shall see a numeric number assigned. Those numbers work regardless if this tab is selected or not.

No one knows, and no one cares (left it on the default). He hasn't get laid since his times at the Bard college many moons ago, and probably won't get laid on this adventure either. I don't know, I found it greatly disturbing to scroll through my cartoon's halfing selection of genitalias. In cyberpunk it didn't exactly felt great, but at least felt somewhat appropriate to the setting. Here it is just weird. edit. Actually, in the backstory I made up, there is a rich dwarf woman that has been his patron over the years - that's more or less what I thought of when was creating his guardian and the form it could take. But I don't know how appropriate it will be with what the guardinan will be on the game, nor what was the exact nature or relation ship between Andreas and the nobledwarfwoman. For now I am thinking of it as a more pragmatic one, from Andreas side at least. Tim Cain's approved reviewed posted a nice, non-spoiler review for BG3

Manage to play a bit yesterday - I encountered nasty "syncing saves" bug, which meant I couldn't save the game (double check immediately after starting the game folks!). I went through the whole tutorial area, before I realised it. Fortunately it is shorter in EA, and aside from character creator, it wasn't a big waste of time. I think it might have something to do with old EA saves - I did go through the effort of erasing everything before installing 1.0, but it didn't help for some reason. Erased save folder once again, and it's been all good for now. Say hi to Andreas le Vilour, an aging, burned out bard, stuck entertaining rich folks in Baldur's Gate instead of pursuing research and true mastery of his craft. His long years of creative vegetation has been interupted when he was abducted by Findflayers on his way to an out of town gig, and infested with a tadpole. So far impressions are positive. No big improvements over EA, but it's all much more polished and enjoyable to play. Companion introduction got a big or a lot of uplift - actual narrative differences are a bit better, but I think Larian did a good job making those characters feel more natural and fit better. I have always enjoyed my BG3 playthroughs that early in their run time, so we will see how things will progress. Edit. Ahh complaints. In spite of hope that dataminig gave us, shields STILL don't deplay on character's backs. How annoying. Also character creation, while it received a visual uplift is still pretty bad. One of the main issues was lack of any information about character progression - what will your character actually do in the game - or even what subclasses are available, if you pick a class that doesn't automatically pick on on lvl1. I optimistically assumed that new "details" button will be just that, however, what it does is display proficiencies that come with that class.... which is already displayed on the main screen anyway. WTF Larian. How is that helpful to anyone.

Nah, Haligtree is the most late gamey dungeon of ER. Well done with Malenia. She took me hours and multiple evenings to beat, and in the end I still looked the guides. I couldn’t figure out a way to deal with her triple AOE attack, and later I lost patience with her 2nd phase clone attack. I was definitely annoyed by her design. I think if we could spawn her in a training room, and run some of the attacks over and over it would be fine - but going against her time after time, only to die to her special attack, and not quite know what I should try to do the next time really annoyed me. Interestingly, for me she was the boss I levelled up and equipped a shield for. My usual dual weilding katanas we’re a bit too slow for her, and getting hit was too costly.

Interesting order of doing things. You can still access Leyndell’s sewers.

You keep telling that yourself, buddy

Ok, that pig down the ladder animation is gold. I don't whom the player is controlling, but it gives me an impression that pathfinding bug which made followers run up and down the ladders throughout EA, might still not be purged.

It is. Unless Gorgon assumes the 3 day early access is still a thing - it is not. It's been scrapped for PC once the game's release has been moved a month earlier. https://twitter.com/baldursgate3/status/1684597242496253952?s=20 As I don't want to start anything new before BG3 come out I have been finishing some leftovers: Weird West - oddly enough the final character had some decent sidequests. I wish there was more of those in the game. I liked it alright, but I thought content was a bit too repetitive. And the game wasn't balanced enough to encourage using the sandbox. Return to Monkey Island - I really liked it. I don't know why people were upset about the ending. It is very Monkey Island - like. MI2 went very meta as well.

Uhh, completely forgot about this bit. This and Haligtree gave me strong “DS2 cruelty” vibes.

That's a great policy. I waited 2 full years before playing Cyb77 and I was still disappointed

Baldur’s Gate3? It’s out on Thursday and available for 2nd round of beta testing

There is one more dragon in the Forum, but I would miss it myself if not for the wiki. Guidance on finding him in spoilers, if you are curious:

Which late-game dragon are we talking about? The two headed one?

Well, we don’t know when exactly 4 companions become companions. In the only bit from act2 that has been revealed two of the confirmed companions were still NPCs. Perhaps they will join our party in act2 - but they also might not until later.

QT fetish: yeah. Snappy writing and style: no.

It’s a double edged sword. I think the idea is that we arrive in Deadfire at the moment when colonisation has just begun - we are meant to participate in a history, which in PoE1 we were only reading about. I appreciated how Humana’s culture was taught through quests, rather than requiring reading bunch of books. As Boreorer mentioned, DLCs dice a bit more into Deadfire’s history. Personally I didn’t find Deadfire lacking in history in texture - it seemed like fairly peaceful, slow developing area before other faction arrived, with not much historical records - similar to how we don’t know much about Glanfathans before Aedyr’s colonisation.

I know. I though I would never say: “I am glad Troika didn’t get to do Baldurs Gate3”

All power to Josh for taking all Deadfire criticism on himself - ah, ungrateful reality of life - you create a massive RPG with some of the best designs I have seen, and you apologise for the few missteps, cause dumb-dumbs didn’t buy it on launch. I don’t see any of the owners coming forward for vetoing Josh, and putting Ship2ship combat as a stretch goal.

My guess would be that precasting multiple spell buffs before combat encounter is boring. PoEs allowed for buffing in combat only, 5e went with concentration. Personally I like it - I find having to protect your caster from damage to keep everyone stronger. Solasta has a very powerful feat (flawless concentration?) that prevents concentration checks unless damage exceeds 10. It is probably too powerful, but makes it much, much easier to keep the concentration spells up.

It is. Never intended for it to be taken as anything more.

I don’t think he outed it - just pointed to DND origins and how it’s original designs trickle down in player behaviours to this day. While I never played tabletop DND I can imagine how it could work better in tabletop setting - if players make wacky, poorly functioning character DM can design with that in mind. I think the challenge (and fear) of cRPGs is that devs design single content that have to satisfy all players. I think what speaks to me is Josh point about not trusting dev about content being balanced around my flaws build - what IF the game locks me off a compelling path or boss because I didn’t min-max hard enough? One would think difficulty settings would cover that, giving various type of players different experiences but it is rarely as simple as that. Even so - how poorly optimised character is good enough for normal? JS discussed this issue in his post about balance in cRPGs. Is there a core issue to be discovered? It wasn’t true than, but now the game is profitable, and in general is liked, in spite of some of its issues. If I remember well he lists changes they made from PoE1=>PoE2, their thought process behind them, and if they turned out good or bad. Is there any interesting take on Owlcat games that can be had? Those are combat focused games, where ridiculous amount of options and complexity of the system, and often gruelling unfair difficulty makes for a heaven for min-maxers, and not much else. I think JS focused on Divinities because they also were new cRPG IPs using bespoke system. Pathfinders, being a licensed tabletop system and IP, works a bit differently. While being different games, with relatively small audience overlap, they were in a more similar position, than adaptation of existing popular TT properties.

JS channel update - I don’t think I have seen those posted before: Pentiment talk on making Pentiment: more on OEI Tools (Obsidian dialogue thing) for Pentiment (spoilers) On power gaming in 5e and Baldur’s Gate3:

The difference is that I never encountered the Biff (outside his cameo in BG2 theatre) after playing games for about 20 years. What Larian did is tie a mandatory quest item to a skippable companion. In EA box has been very dodgy narratively unless you took Shadowheart with you. Hopefully they polished the various ways of getting the box in the final release, so it feels more natural no matter what the player decides to do.