Bartimaeus

It is weird, and I get pretty uncomfortable at times. I can at least use the free camera tactical view in this game, unlike Dragon Age: Origins, and that is a big positive even if I still have problems with it. It was literally unusable in Dragon Age: Origins and I pretty much just let the AI play every battle for me because of how miserable I would get every time I would try to take control. I have not had any performance issues...but I already demonstrated that with my 10x speed Cheat Engine speedhack .gif, which is dependent on your CPU actually being able to process everything that quickly. I'm gonna blame it on Intel, because that just seems like the right and proper thing to do at this point, . Yeah, everyone being like "WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE IN A DAY OR TWO" and me being like "but I have to explore every last inch of this beach" is your classic player behavior vs. main story dissonance. I could come back later...but characters might have moved around by then, perhaps even resolved some things by themselves without my help, so I have to do it now. And you know, there's really no reason not to talk to animals and corpses with the appropriate spells while you're at it...

I kind of just forced myself to believe that she happened to get distracted by a butterfly at that particular moment. Her default INT score is 10, but I haven't really seen anything to suggest it should be past something more like 6-8. She doesn't even seem like a good liar, and she's a priestess of Shar for goodness sake, deception's kind of supposed to be her thing. Well, maybe she's several layers deep - being a patently bad liar about some things to hide being a good liar about other things. But then that would mean her intelligence isn't high enough, so I don't think so. In other news, having spent a little more time talking to him and seeing him play with very annoying children and just talk in a generally very annoying manner, I have now gone full His hour of death shall be beautiful and perfect, and possibly tasty. P.S. Why is my character constantly cutting off her own head while running around with a great sword? It's weird, she holds it appropriately enough with two hands while standing around, looks fine, but then she starts running with it one-handed and it cuts right into her neck. Lady, didn't your parents ever tell you not to run around with comically massive swords? At the very least, they could've instructed you how to do it safely. (e): Okay, weird, I switched out a couple of items and suddenly my character learned how to run with a great sword without lopping her own head off. Well, at least she's learning. Descriptions say they don't get used if you succeed, and I just tested it: I had two, I succeeded at lockpicking a door, I still had two after.

I don't know why they're called the Matildas, but I love their name and they've got my vote. Hopefully the story behind it doesn't suck.

I've now seen the introductions of all these characters, and this is pretty spot on. Wyll has the very worst introduction and I already want to kill him, Lae'zel's isn't much better but she has the advantage of being the first person you meet and you kind of are in need of her so that helps her case, Astarion's is annoying with how telegraphed and forced it is but also Shadowheart literally saw him 'sneak' up on me and put a knife up to my neck and she did absolutely nothing to help me so it made her look bad as well, Gale's is good (though I accidentally bit his hand off and killed him the first time I met him, but really that just made his introduction even better), and Shadowheart...as you said, she doesn't really have one, but that's fine. All in all, the only person I want to kill is Wyll, which is good, because we're both warlocks and there can only be one.

I think I've told a more detailed version of this story here before, but the very first Baldur's Gate character I played when I was a young and very stupid child happened to be a bard, and for various reasons relating to that experience, I will not play or even have a bard in my party ever again. @majestic irrationally hates AMD, I irrationally hate bards. Guess I'm sticking with warlock, and if a completely normal bard NPC even says a word to me in this game, I am going to disembowel them and eat their organs. I feel like being able to kill both the mind flayer and demonic lieutenant at the end of the tutorial (which is what I did) with the help of the intellect devourer is even better, though. I guess you can kill everything, but it would seem to start getting a bit difficult - those two cambions come in and start making things difficult awfully fast. But her name is Bloodless, why would she be interested in blood? Maybe because she doesn't have any? Well, whatever, best not to question any of the nonsense that happens in anime games. When I was making my character, I was choosing between half-elf and tiefling, and the only hair that I felt worked well with a tiefling's horns was Shadowheart's hair style, which is what eventually made me go with the half-elf, as I didn't want two characters with the same hair style. Well, Shadowheart has the big braid or whatever the heck thing it is as well, which isn't usable by the player, but I mean the rest of it. I think I found a couple of zero effect hats from random loot and tried them on her and her hair became ridiculous and terrible with them, so they get yoinked off immediately. She can wear her circlet for the entire game if it means not having to see her hair spontaneously get longer and flattened out ever again.

The mind flayer warlock. Wanted something Charisma-based, and I did want to be a caster but I don't enjoy failing dialogue dice rolls all the time. I didn't know there already was a warlock in the game, guess I won't be using him much. Maybe I'll murder him, I am "the Dark Urge" after all. I'm not even sure what the point of crippling the intellect devourer is, but I also did that with this new character. I don't know, seeing my blood-covered character look with suspicion and hatred at it kinda convinced me to try it. I'm not a hundred percent sure how I'll play my new lady yet, it'll perhaps depends on how much blood I can bathe in. Hmm, good to know. Honestly, I'm not sure what the right call is, it's difficult to know when you've played and know so relatively little. I'm bad at playing these long games - chances of me finishing it are probably pretty low to begin with, never mind replaying it again, so there's kind of that pressure to try to do things how I want to just right on the first try, even though that's kind of impossible.

I'm always here for Cheat Engine speedhack shilling: https://www.cheatengine.org/downloads.php 150 MB GIF enclosed: P.S. I had to start over because Shadowheart...was just not suitable for being the main character. She's a cleric and she just fails at everything, and playing an NPC as the main character seems to pretty much eliminate any unique dialogue (...and agency) that they might have had if they were in your party, so it just doesn't seem like a great idea. So I took a page from KP and did The Dark Urge instead. I especially enjoyed my character waking up covered in a small pool of somebody else's blood.

I'm pretty sure I've used a cat familiar in BG to pickpocket someone before, so I think this all checks out. Really have to watch out for those cats.

I kissed a mindflayer, and the game told me it was the very first time in Shadowheart's life that she had ever felt happy: the end. Well, game over, but a happy ending is a happy ending.

maybe you just didn't play around with them enough yet there's still time to fix that

I think if I blacklisted every company I feel has unduly screwed me over, I wouldn't be able to buy a motherboard, GPU, or hard drive from anyone at this point. Power supplies and RAM out the wazoo, though!

I've always hated the slider system because of how horribly messy and inexact it is, but I went and looked at all the different female faces for each race, and I felt...being able to mix and match a few preset features would've been nice. A nose from this face, a mouth from that, eyes from here...would've gone a long way to making face customization much better. Due to a particular face feature that I'm particularly sensitive towards and which I feel the game largely got wrong, I immediately crossed out the majority of faces right off the bat based purely off of that one thing. Being able to change just that one feature by taking it from one of the few faces that I felt got it right would've gone a very long ways to making my decisions...well, less automatic. Interestingly, the lady githyanki had double the amount of faces that I would've been fine with at 4/7 compared to the next nearest, which was half-elf at 2/7; every other race was 1 or 0. Multiple races having zero choices that I think are at least acceptable might be considered a problem - but as always, I am both very sensitive and particular relative to the average person, so... Rigging up an adjustable body system would've been a whole other thing, and I can see why they didn't really want to bother with it, especially with how quickly such systems can become weird/goofy. Luckily for me, I don't really care about that, at least not nearly as much as I do about face/hair, but that's certainly not the case for everyone.

Better not be the case, I didn't give them my prettiest high class goth girl design just for that crap. Yeah, and I fixed the mini-map to always be statically oriented while I was at it. Still, I hated fussing around with the camera in the NWN games, it was somehow even more intolerable in the half or so that I played of Dragon Age: Origins before I quit, and I'm certain that I will be annoyed with it here as well.

I watched the RLM review for it and the sound/music design seemed to be Mike's biggest complaint (and Jay's until he got used it after the first hour), and it kinda set me against watching it. Overbearing, inappropriate sound design is utterly wearisome. They compared the film to 12 Angry Men, and then joked about inexplicably setting it to some generic trash-heap Hans Zimmer score and how much it would wreck the film, then actually made a separate video showing just that a couple of days later and I was like "okay, so I guess I shouldn't watch Oppenheimer, because yeah, I get really annoyed by that crap". So obnoxious. Shut up with your gosh-awful score and just let the characters speak and scenes play naturally...and while you're at it, make sure that we can actually hear them and that you haven't mixed the audio so badly that entire lines are completely inaudible. It's not a problem unique to Nolan by any means, but he seems to be one of the worst and most high profile offenders of it.

I figured the game would be a lot smaller after being installed - usually, different languages take up a pretty good portion of the installer size. But, um, the 109 GB multi-language GOG installer instead became 125 GB after being installed. So...I guess not. Made my guardian, got through the first cutscene, tried to figure out the camera controls, saved my game and quit. No static camera makes me wanna cry. Not that I quit because of that, just can't play right now, .

Oh. Huh, well, that ended up being a lot more accurate than I thought it would be, even if it's not quite right. But...I'm just playing as Shadowheart, so I have no bloody idea what she would find trustworthy. I guess Shadowheart must like sickly goth girls? I ended up deciding that them big ol' half-elf ears needed to be just a little less...uh, prominent, so I went away from the ballerina buns. If it's supposed to be someone your PC trusts, I guess it ended up probably being for the best, since...well, I rather envisioned this original version as being some kind of crazy axe murderer, vaguely in the vein of that one psychotic android lady from Blade Runner, which doesn't really seem like the best fit now knowing that it's not exactly the worm itself. But really, I feel like if you select to play one of the NPCs, you should at least have the option of a pre-generated guardian, because there's absolutely no way I could figure out what Shadowheart's "guardian" should look like without at least having played the game a little first. They could've given you the option of picking someone that looks like whatever Shar is supposed to look like, for example. Oh well, whatever. Hey, pimples and freckles and other skin defects/textures, even if they're small/minor, are much better than unnaturally flawless skin that just makes your character look like they got completely airbrushed over! ...That's not really what you were talking about, though.

Okay, I'm going through the character creator now trying to design a guardian, whatever the hell that is. The game doesn't tell you anything about what it is, and designing a character with zero context for what they're supposed to be is incredibly difficult, so I'm going to assume it's the mental manifestation of the worm they shoved into your brain in the opening cutscene, as I have literally zero other information to go off of. So, confession time: I know I've been complaining about this game and 3D graphics in general a lot, but...this game has the opposite problem that most games have for me: there are way too many hair styles that I like. How the hell am I supposed to choose between Carrion Feathers, Highbrow Low Moralist, Sensible Extravagance, Ballerina Buns, Flaunting Bounce, or Springtime Entanglement? And there are honestly like...ten other choices that I like too, that if they were in most any other game's character creator (like the Souls games or that Harry Potter game), I would go "thank goodness, there's at least one decent option I can choose". Damn it all, hoisted by my own petard. Well, there's not a lot of face customization, so I suppose the least they could do is have a pile of good hair options - though they do look a little oddly low quality and also have this weird fuzzy effect as I move the camera around, even though I'm at maximum settings, but I figure I won't ever notice that in the actual game. Maybe. The facial hair, on the other hand, looks almost universally terrible and people should demand better than this pixely mess.

In my previous post, I actually intended to say "I seriously hope it's a fake/assumed name, or maybe even some kind of title - she's a priestess of Shar and they're a pretty silly bunch, right?", but somehow it got forgotten. Well, if that's the case, I suppose that's fine. Yeah, I'm a big proponent of starting off simple myself. No way to make me lose interest in something faster than hitting me with another lousy "end of the world"-type plot right off the bat. You can have an end of the world plot, whatever, fine, but c'mon, at least try to build to it.

Definitely better, but...yeah, still not awesome. As the premiere hater of modern 3D graphics here on the Obsidian forums, I absolutely do not care about fidelity - I would just prefer games to have cohesive, attractive, and/or unique visual styles that manage to avoid patently obvious visual bugbears and anything approaching the uncanny valley effect. I really hate looking at games that came out in the late 90s and early to mid 2000s and completely unironically thinking "these graphics bother me less than roughly 98% of what releases today". That should not happen, but something is wrong with my brain and it does...all the danged time, and character faces/hair is persistently one of the worst offenders these days. I will say for BG3, I think it was a great idea in allowing the player to hijack one of the main NPCs and just play as them. That's something I've often wanted for a number of games, including the original Baldur's Gate - being able to make Imoen the main character would've been awesome (even if it had lead to more limited/in-character dialogue options). Though I'm not really sure about this particular cast of characters - I'd probably play as either Shadowheart (...even though that's a truly advanced level of stupid name for a character) or maybe the Githyanki lady. I think both of them are evil(?), which also seems like a plus.

I did just watch somebody else's "all hairstyles" video, and it does look like they generally rendered better there. I'd personally say character graphics should probably have extremely high priority and use higher level of detail relative to the rest of the game even when using low quality settings to avoid bizarre-looking characters like that, but that's just me.

you know, I've never really understood the 'pixely ultra-sharp painted on hair that somehow manages to look like a bizarre particle effect directly attached to my character's head/face' visual style for hair in modern 3d games

maybe they should spend a little less time making 16K textures that take up a hundred plus gigabytes and more time on having animations that don't make characters look like animatronics but at least they (presumably) finished the game, unlike the majority of early access scams

the who in the what now? the what in the what now? fake edit: not the character you're talking about but i am officially frightened

Man, I am so out of the game on the latest hybrids.

I'm glad Larian is continuing to at least play into my theory of the Baldur's Gate series essentially being an elaborate mind flayer alien invasion plot in the vein of the X-Files. It's the least they could do after making the game turn-based.