kanisatha

Belarus and Kazakstan also inherited nukes from the USSR and gave them up. The only country to voluntarily give up nukes it had developed was South Africa.

Well, I want the game to be a realistic sim of what third-stage space exploration would actually be like, so I'm not only okay with this but am very happy they did it this way.

RIP Jimmy Buffett. A sad day for me and my fellow parrotheads.

My current PC also cannot run it, but I'm going to buy the game anyway as a show of support for what I consider (as a passionate fan of human space exploration) to be one of the best RPGs in recent years. I should be able to buy my new PC sometime next spring.

Well, I'd have to ask: what have these people (as individuals) done lately? Maybe they were just taking up space on developer teams. Maybe they did this even back in the day when Bioware was making BG2 or DA:O. It's a tough question to ask, but I'm never convinced that just because someone has held a job for a very long time, they were/are good at that job. What I see far too often is people somehow managing to hold on to jobs for years and years in which they haven't really done any meaningful work.

Yes this is one of my main issues, although I wouldn't use the word 'perfect' to describe my expectations for any game. But also, my past experiences with mods were less than satisfactory, where adding the mod to my game was extremely cumbersome and aggravating, and then keeping the mod (and mod manager) updated was additionally aggravating. But here, adding the Unity Mod Manager was quite easy and problem-free, as was adding the UB mod itself. So, fingers crossed.

Having finished my P:WotR run I went back to Solasta. And I finally, after all these years, broke down and registered for a Nexus Mods account so that I could apply the Community Unfinished Business mod to Solasta. I mainly activated three things in the mod, exactly the three biggest gripes I've had with the game: a party of six, multiclassing, and removing attunement. Then I started playing the official user module, Caer Falcarn, that comes with the modding tools DLC. Now Solasta is sooooooo incredibly awesome! I'm so loving the game, and looking forward to playing Palace of Ice and also some of the more popular user modules out there.

Yeah, same. I didn't read that Bioware statement as saying a lot of veterans were among those laid off. It's only around 50 people, all of whom have been offered jobs in others parts of EA. And furthermore, just because someone is a "veteran" doesn't automatically mean they're good at what they do. I remain confident in DA:D and continue to be very excited about this game.

The fact that the Russians have significantly increased shelling of the Kar'kiv area and other towns in the northeast says to me the Ukrainians are making good headway towards cutting off Russia's Crimea landbridge. Clearly the Russians are trying to ease the Ukrainian pressure in the south by trying to get the Ukrainians to divert some of their forces to the northeast by threatening re-invasion there.

According to many accounts on the Larian forum this is quite common throughout the game, where the game assumes you said/did things a certain way, and responds based on that assumption, regardless of what you *actually* said/did in the game.

Just a few days ago the Niger junta met with Wagner to coordinate military planning, and the coup leader openly stated he was counting on Wagner to safeguard the coup from any military threat. Now would be a good time for ECOWAS to act, if they were going to be doing something anyway.

Is anyone here surprised? My only surprise is that Prig was that naive and stupid as to fly in Russian airspace. According to US intel, the plane carried the entire upper leadership of Wagner. Yay for Africa!! Btw, I can even believe that Prig and his buddies were told by Putin this is how it's going to be, along the lines of how the generals who conspired against Hitler in that bomb plot were given the "option" of poison.

But is this true to the extent that you can also get *good* encounter/quest/story/companions outcomes?

Yes! ^This! And not just on this failing but on failing after failing. People go out of their way to give Larian a pass, which they absolutely would not do for, say, Bethesda or CDPR or even Obsidian. And this is true of even pro reviewers and gaming journalists who give up all objectivity when it comes to Larian.

This is what I'm seeing in Steam forum comments and of course reddit as well: the "this is the greatest game ever made" crowd whining about and attacking and trying to shut down anyone who dares to disagree and have even the tiniest criticism of the game. And it's also what I as a critic of the game have often been subjected to in the Larian forum (although I also have been defended by at least some people, @Wormerine included ). What is it about BG3 specifically that's making so many people behave this way, I wonder?

Finally a somewhat balanced review of the game. Good on Eurogamer.

Congrats to the three winners!! Would be nice if we had a community manager type posting at least short replies to all the questions asked.

Thanks! This is why I previously said I want to see what people in this forum eventually provide as feedback on the game, because unlike the Larian forum this forum has many people who I respect as intelligent and thoughtful people who can be counted on to provide honest and objective feedback.

I'd also point out that when I said things I don't like/I'm not interested in engaging with, I included systems and not just content. For me, all of the following in BG3 are either awful or a waste of resources that could've been spent on things I consider to be central to a good cRPG: all of the cinematics; full voice acting; the origin PC system; the Dark Urge PC system; all of the romances; the entire combat system; the entire tadpole system (not an exhaustive list; I may have missed a few more things). All of that taken together surely makes up a HUGE part of the game.

And I would agree with all this ... except in that BG3 does none of this. Yes, only having all the "correct" choices available to you is poor game design. But in BG3 you only have all the "incorrect" choices available and (for me) no correct choices. So it is exactly the issue you identify, just flipped. Several posters on the Larian forum have said that playing the super-good heroic character who wants only to do good and heroic things, *and* where the game recognizes and acknowledges and rewards the player for taking this path, is at best extremely difficult and convoluted to pull off (and perhaps not possible at all). I have looked at youtube videos showing all the major game endings, and not one of them is one I would consider to be a truly "good" ending. For example, whereas there are huge rewards for using the tadpoles, there are no rewards whatsoever for not using them. Even worse, in several dialogue instances, the game doesn't even recognize that you have chosen to not use the tadpoles and simply assumes that you have. This also happens for many other choices one makes on the "good" side, where the game does not acknowledge them in subsequent dialogues or choices or outcomes. Again, I'm basing all of this on feedback in the Larian forum from people playing the game (and who are huge fans of the game). So railroading looks to be a huge part of how BG3 is set up, just railroading us always toward the bad/evil side.

Not at all, because in WotR all of this is offset by a huge amount of content on the other side, more than enough to keep someone like me happy.

No, that's not the system involved at all.

Whereas these are the kinds of things one can do in the game that makes the game attractive to many, for me as someone who would never under any circumstances do any of this stuff I cannot justify paying for such a huge amount of content and systems in the game that I will simply never engage with.

No thanks. I don't want anything resembling BG3, and nothing to do with WotC. Obsidian's model for making good games is just fine, except for the recent 'first-person-only' thing they're doing.