kanisatha

It's quite alright. It's been this way my whole life in America. I quite often even receive snail-mail addressed to "Ms.".

Ahem, I'm a he But yes, I have not yet played the game. My take on the game is based on having been very active on the Larian forum right from when the game was announced, and reading through all the threads and debating these points there very thoroughly there, and also spending many hours watching streams of the game through its development and since release.

I think I've posted about my reasons in the BG3 thread, so I may not be quite comprehensive here with my issues, but (not in rank-order) ... Too much resources wasted on cinematics and VO that should've been spent on core cRPG elements. Gameplay ddevelopment decisions were clearly made with what was needed for co-op play over single-player. The entire combat system. Avoiding combat results in lesser outcomes than fighting, and also results in less XP and loot. Main story full of plot holes. Too much disregard for decades of established FR lore. The entire "origin" PCs concept. The custom PC being the least attractive way to play the game because the custom PC is the least plugged into the game (your origin companions are more central to the game than your custom PC). Choices throughout the game often not including obvious good-alignment options (or where good-alignment options are silly/unrealistic) and where choices favor playing evil (according to people I would trust on the Larian forum, there is no consistently good path the PC can take through the whole game, though a consistently evil path exists and is easy to accomplish). All companions being some form of primadonna/diva/hipster type character, and not a single sympathetic character among them. Poor writing. Period.

Looks like 2024 is what's going to be my year of awesome RPGs. But with my luck it'll also be the year the world ends.

Same with me.

It's just that I soooooo want to play a new Forgotten Realms game. But sadly for me, BG3 has turned out to be complete crap as far as I'm concerned. So I'm still left with that hankering. But I suppose you are right. I need to forget about not just this game but any prospective FR game and accept that I'm never going to get such a game.

I've been wondering too.

Sorry to hear. Yeah, as others have said, hang in there and don't lose hope. Something will come up soon. Maybe you should consider coming out here to "new" England. Lots of tech jobs here.

I'm the same, and yet I never have much free time. It's why I'm so looking forward to retirement.

Truly hope this isn't implying something bad in your life.

It amazes me how quickly you guys are able to get through games. How do you find the time?!

Indeed! Excellent point. This is what was being analyzed in the Foreign Affairs article I recently linked.

I'm with @BruceVC on this, but I also want such games to depict people and the environment in a real way. I just cannot get into games that have cartoon-like art styles/imagery. Just can't seem to be able to gain immersion in the game if things don't look at least somewhat realistic (but not necessarily talking high-end graphics here).

Quite a few of you here will find this analysis to be very interesting and on point: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/putins-new-story-about-war-ukraine

I was about to post making this exact point. We constantly have a stream of former-blah blah people forming new studios from which we have not yet seen a single game worth talking about. I expect this guy won't be any different.

So awards like this matter to you? Just curious, because they don't matter to me at all, but I'm always interested in why things matter to people.

That's strange. I went through the whole DLC, did every questline all the way through or almost all the way, and never had this issue with a low-level NPC who could not be kept from dying. You may want to check a guide. The Neoseeker and Fandom.com wiki guides are particularly good.

You can get quite far into each faction's quests before you start breaking them, though doing certain quests ahead of others makes a big difference. But the problem is that it is not always clear when you are about to get to that point of breaking another faction's questline. It is even possible to cross the no turning back point in a questline without knowing it beforehand. I think they have done this intentionally to force players to not try doing everything in one playthrough, so that they can claim the game has good replayability.

It also may point to piss-poor marketing as a major culprit here. Potential fans had to find or stumble upon the game over time because Obsidian did not lead them to it.

I agree with you about '80s rock music, and also Def Leppard specifically. But for me the '80s were awesome across the board generally. I was class of '86 in high school and class of '89 in college, so that was quintissentially my decade.

I'd be totally up for that if the hookers are also real.

Sure, but my post was general and separate from and not tied to that video in any way.

BG3 is seeing sales success as a AAA cRPG heavily because it is a D&D game, because D&D already has a very long-standing fanbase that is 15 million strong. A game franchise that does not have a D&D-like huge pre-existing fanbase (i.e. Pathfinder, PoE, etc.) will never sell enough to make a AAA game profitable. As an example, the only way Bioware could produce AAA-level sales for its Dragon Age franchise was to move its DA games away from being cRPGs. The notion that cRPGs now have mainstream crossover appeal because of BG3 is utter nonsense. BG3 has mainstream crossover appeal because D&D now has mainstream crossover appeal. And on top of that you throw in a whole bunch of gratuitous interactive sex and nudity into the game and you've got yourself a ton of sales. But this "model" will never work for PoE.

For now. That can eventually change.

Don't do it, Microsoft. There's no "lesson" to be learned from the garbage that is BG3, and I don't want anything similar from Obsidian.