kanisatha

I'm a huge, huge, huge Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Nicks fan. Was a fan of their music even when I was a kid back in Asia in the '70s. I think I even posted something here when Christine McVie died. Sometimes, with songs like Go Your Own Way, Say You Love Me, Second Hand News, Seven Wonders, etc., I put them on repeat on my old CD player and just listen again and again. Takes me back to when my life was simple and carefree.

Fair enough. As far as combat goes, though, per what's in that Gameinformer article, seems like they have done a good job of evolving real-time action combat into something that's fun. If you don't like RT action combat, then sure, you're not going to be a fan. It's no different than for me with my utter dislike of TB combat. As far as I am concerned, the worst RT action combat system is way better than the best TB combat system.

All true enough, but from a policy stand-point you can't do much about the past, especially the distant past. So my point is about the future, and re-establishing the original principle underlying the concept of sovereignty, which was reciprocity: your sovereignty is recognized and accepted by others only if you recognize and accept others' sovereignty.

We'll see about DA4 (the trailer being a trailer and not necessarily representative of how the game will be), but I disagree about BG3 and DA4 being the same in cinematics. There is no RPG out there, including upcoming games, that even comes close to BG3's extent of cinematics. Larian themselve have boasted about the extent of cinematics in their game, claiming a whopping 175+ hours of cinematics that they recorded for their game (and that was before all the post-release updates and patches). And therein lies the real issue, because I'm not opposed to some cinematics in a AAA RPG. It's that BG3 has gone so far into cinematics that for me effectively the game is far too much like watching a movie than playing a game.

I would really love to see the US government publicly take the position that henceforth the United States' policy on the sovereignty and territorial integrity of other countries will be exactly the same as their policy towards Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Putin couldn't get the Ukrainians to surrender on the battlefield so he's demanding they surrender at the negotiations table? What an ass. LOL

Never said I'll never play it. BG3 is a very unique game for me in that it is a game I soooooooo very much *wanted* to love, because of how much I love the first two games. So that's why I spent so much time on the Larian forum talking about the game, and the things I was unhappy with, in a desperate hope someone at Larian would give my feedback some consideration and the final game at release would be at least okay. As such, launch day for BG3 was a bitterly disappointing day for me. But I feel that in time my strong negative feelings toward the game will soften and I'll be open to playing it. I also feel, very strongly, that given the many, many core elements of the game (TB combat, all the cinematics and voice acting, the whole tadpole system, origin companions, to name the main ones), that I detest, it is reasonable for me to not pay anywhere near full price for the game. So I'll wait and get the game when it is around 50% off, give or take.

But as I've said often, I was one of the first to join the Larian BG3 foum after the game was announced, and have been very diligent in readings posts there and very active in discussing the game. And I have also watched a lot of hours of BG3 streaming. But whatever.

I can very easily say exactly this sort of thing about BG3 and its cast of characters. <shrug> For me, Varric is a character I absolutely love and consider one of the best-written characters in all of fantasy gaming. There are also several other characters from across the three DA games I love. But there are no characters, not a single one, from BG3 that I would consider well-written or worth remembering/caring about.

^This. Seems like Obsidian is doing what WotC has done with D&D's FR setting. Lore is consistent only within a specific game series, and not the entire franchise. So, if there is ever a PoE3, we can expect it will honor lore/events from the first two games. But any other series of games, games that are set in Eora but NOT PoE games, won't necessarily honor what happened in the PoE games.

With Carrie Patel now confirming that Avowed can be played switching between first and third person at will, and how the art-style and world look in the latest trailer, I am loving Avowed. And this extended gameplay trailer for Dragon Age 4 looks fantastic as well to me. It looks very much closer to Origin than Inquisition, and I like both the way the gameplay is working and the art-style. I'm so happy to have big, amazing RPGs back again without stupid turn-based combat. BG3 can kiss my brown ass. Avowed and DA4 both look awesome. And now with my new computer up and running, I can play them! Oh happy day!!

I too am in the camp of very much liking that this game leaves out romances. They don't add anything useful or interesting to the roleplaying experience while sucking up a lot of valuable development resources. I also much prefer that the game gives us very strong roleplay options and paths for building non-sexual relationships with our companions. That's exactly the way to go.

What Russia is basically doing is plundering from their future to prop up their present. Western welfare societies pretty much do the same thing, but just not in as draconian a way as what Russia is doing right now.

It's just worked out that my preferences have always been for the odd-numbered CIVs, so I'm hoping this game turns out to be a good one.

Why would this result in a "segregating" of the modding scene? A mod can be made available in both places, no?

I hear you all, but for me the inconvenience is pretty significant. When I recently started playing enhanced BG1 I wanted to include a whole slew of mods for the first time. All the many mods people have been talking up for years. But once I started doing it, I quit after adding in around three mods because it was too much of a pain. I especially hated that you needed to add the mods in a specific sequence, and if you got even one small thing wrong, you had to delete all the mods, make sure you once again had a clean copy of the game, and then restart the process of adding the mods. Sorry, but that's just ridiculous!

Yes I'm aware of this. But ideally, Larian will come through with their promise of Steam Workshop for BG3, and then these mods will be available there. I really like just being able to activate mods in Steam Worshop and not doing the whole downloading and manually adding in a bunch of mods one by one.

No way! I love being able to set my games--old or new--to max graphics settings and no performance compromises when I play.

No, not at all. I'm strictly RPG and strategy gaming. But the thing is, my current machine is nine years old. I always get max use out of my computers before I junk them. So I always try to get the "best" when I buy, so that 8-10 years later it is still at least okay. P.S. I do have a nice 25" 4k display.

Yup. I make a decent living, but don't spend much on myself. And no kids. So I'm glad to find something I can spend my hard-earned money on that will bring me a lot of joy and happiness.

According to a recent Politico story, the "allow" side is winning in the vigorous internal debate within the Administration on this issue.

Btw, I finally got that deal I've been waiting on for my new gaming computer. It gets to me June 11th. Soooooo excited! I can finally start playing the big new games!! 14th gen i9 14900KF processor (24 core, 68 MB cache, 2.4-6.0 GHz thermal velocity boost) RTX 4090 GPU (24 GB GDDR6X) 32 GB memory (DDR5, 5600 MT/s) 2 TB SSD

I'm waiting for (and need) many, many mods for BG3 to make it even remotely playable for me, beginning with a 6-person party mod.

Hope you've been well @daven.

It's a Bioware game, so aren't romance options mandatory? I would expect they'd be just like in the previous games, and especially so since this game has been rebuilt as a more tightly narrative-driven game.