Wormerine

Sven said he is not looking to do another big game like that. They are looking to do smaller projects at least for a bit. But who knows - maybe BG3 success will push them toward pursuing more mega-games. I also thought BG3 EA was a major step forward from D:OS2 - a game I wasn't particularly fond of. Still, during EA I lost hope in Larian addressing some long standing problems with their design. While some aspects of the game still aren't quite to my liking, I think they did manage to minimize those issues. I am still being sceptical - I am already getting a bit annoyed by some of the Larian's cheese, and I dread going to Grimforge with it's plethera of instant death draps. Still, it seems a solid balance pass has been done for release. It is an interesting question. I would love to hear game designers opinion on BG3 (Josh S. or Tim Cain) to see if they see some creative new designs that I miss. In my humble opinion, what BG3 has, that other cRPGs don't is the scope. You get cinematic dialogue, you get insane amount of reactivity, you get a lot of systems that can appeal to different players. There is the focus on "the feel" rather than the mechanics - I think it is telling that when advertising "first player experience" during the last Panel from Hell, Larian highlighter unique class animations, while not having such a basic of a feature as class progression preview. Not to say that BG3 is better than those two - smaller scale have their advantages, and I think games like PoE, PF or DE excel in their respective niches. But I think overall more people will find something to enjoy in BG3. And there is production value - I think for mainstream, this is key to success: have someone see an add, or see someone play on twitch and find the game appealing. cRPG tend to be a slog to watch - I don't think it is bad, the proof of pudding is in the eating, and in case of games playing experince is far more important to me than watching experience, but I think current market really favours titles that are fun to watch. Yeah, yeah. They got their Witcher3, we will see what their Cyberpunk will look like.

Not really. It's just not a very elegant UI Yeah, I didn't see the coming. That is will do well was fairly predictible (I think it already sold 2,5m in early access), but it seemed to break into the mainstream in the way I didn't expect. And so far I am enjoying the game much more than I expected. I really like rewrite of Wyll. It's still more or less the same character, just more charismatic with a better told story. To my shock I am quite enjoying the companions overall - even Astarion. To my shock, because I found them to be insufferable in early access. Funny how much impact small rewrites can have on characters.

As far as I am concerned they started with wrong UI design (action bar from D:OS2) and than started to add features to make it viable. I think it's biggest failure is in tutorialising the mechanics - playing Solasta I never had an issue understanding how the class works, what consumes what resource, and what options i have. BG3 is messy in that regard. That said, the UI revision they did midway through EA was a great improvement, and 1.0 is still better than what we have. My prefer method is: 1) remove all (red) weapon skills. Those can be displayed by pressing weapon icon (together with relevant items, like arrows for ranged weapons) 2) If melee class - organise their skills. They tend to not have much, so hotbar is usually enough to have them neatly organised... at least on low levels. 3) if spellcaster - remove all spells consuming a resource from the hotbar. Leave cantrips and item spells only, and organise them in the way so I can see which is which, and what action they consume (main/bonus). If I want to use higher level spell, I will use drop down menu anyway 4) Go to "custom" tab, and assign shortcuts for commonly used skills - so damage cantrips etc. 5) set all reactions to "ask" 6) you can assign passives to main bar - so move non-lethal attack and class specific toggles (like push eldrich blast) to main bar when applicable. More management that I wish I would have to do (preferable would be none, except for occasional shortcuts. Hotbar shoudl be just that - a bar to access "hot" skills, not "design proper UI" toolbox) I am sure the game will be better with time. It is a game in which a lot can happen, and I am sure something is bound to break eventually. So far, though, it is far more polished that I expected. No issues worth mentioning. The real test will be once I leave EA area, that received less public scrutiny over the last 3 years. If companions gain their subclasses later (Laezel, Wyll, Astarion) you choose the subclass on level up. Same with PC. For some unknown reason the game automatically picks first subclass and doesn't highlight it. Abysmally bad design, if you ask me. If you want to change the choices the game made for you and never told you about, your friendly camp ghul will do it for you.

Fortunately, I can't give you specifics, but:

Which UI? Charactercreation/lvl up, is overall an improvement, but I found it confusing at times. I think I could easily miss some choices (even key choices) if I wouldn’t know what I am looking for. For example I don’t like how the game automatically selects things x even key things like subclass. It is especially problematic with classes who get their subclass later (like bard) - there is no fanfare that we get to make an important choice in character’s development. I could easily imagine people just picking stuff the game tells them to and moving forward, not realising they got assigned a subclass. hotbar is over engineered, but at least there are drop down menu. I find it functional, if not elegant.

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.