Wormerine

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.

Sorry, it’s late my English is off. You will miss out on origin content if you create custom character - I am not aware of any Tav specific content. [speculation] Picking an origin might push you into specific situation at times outside player control - specifically dark urge has been rumoured to occasionally take control away from the player. As we haven’t seen origins being played, we don’t really know how they evolved since d:OS2.

You won’t get the content and story tied to this origin (though you can see their story as companions). There is also Dark Urge, who is a customisable origin.

1) can I move my battlenet progress over to steam? 2) can you make me want to play Overwatch2 again?

Yes, almost every spell left surface at the start of EA. I think I have seen saving throws from fire arrows in recent Panel from Hell, so maybe they won’t be a guaranteed hit in 1.0. They have been completely wrecking concentration spells, together with guaranteed damage granades. It doesn’t seem like BG3 will support starting with custom party (though 4 instance multiplayer trick will likely still be a thing). There will be hirelings available through the camp ghull. I got an impression we will need to collect them but I am not 100% sure. I think hirelings are to some extend pre-made, but respec allows to not only reset levels but also change class of our hirelings, PC and companions.

So…. JA3 is good? So far the reception seems to be positive.

I am coming back regularly and trying to S rank it. Managed the lowest difficulty but got stuck on higher ones. There are two missions that I find frustratingly difficult to S - the biggest offender being the one where you fight V’s summons over and over again.

Depends when you played. The UI got major overhaul couple months ago (Here is my old feedback on it. Not shilling here, just the first thing that came to my mind to showcase it). In early days it was just a hotbar, which was a royal mess. Now we have proper drop down menus, but the game can be cumbersome. Unlike Solasta, I don’t think BG3 UI helps in understanding games mechanics, which I think could be a big problem for new players. And yes, a lot of things tend to take too many clicks to do - both in hotbar and party management. It is much more playable now than it was on launch - having to spend a minute or two managing a hotbar for every character has been a real pain. Now you can mostly play from the get go, and customise hotbar as you play.

To be fair, they do work hard to recreate Sven’s time with Ultima7 [harr, harr]

Noclip got their hands on some old tapes of game related media that were to be thrown out. They will be digitising and uploading stuff on a new dedicated channel. Probably worth keeping an eye on what they upload in case something interesting pops up. https://youtube.com/@NoclipArchive