kanisatha

Maybe we should send him a "Hope you feel better soon" card.

Yeah, and there's plenty of other precedents for it. It's not something new in videogames. Strategy games (i.e Civilization and many wargames) that are TB typically operate exactly this way.

Yes exactly. And the main benefit is supposedly exactly for multiplayer. But for me as a strictly single player, it still works out so much better than traditional TB. As I've said in other contexts on various forums, this is exactly how my PnP group used to play D&D back in the day.

I also have been so looking forward to a new adventure in the Realms. But for me, what I've seen so far of BG3 is not good enough for me to give it a try. But I remain hopeful that as more information becomes available my impression will change enough for me to be willing to try it. However, there is one thing that I want to note about the TB combat system in BG3. It is not a traditional TB system, with individual initiative rolls and each character, party members and enemies alike, taking their turns in strict sequence. Rather, here it is party initiative, with just a single roll for the party and for the enemy side. Then, during the party's turn, the player can move and take actions for all their party members in any order they want including taking a partial action for one character, moving on to another character, then returning to complete the action for the previous character. So effectively it is simultaneous TB combat. In both the Larian and Beamdog forums (can't recall if I did it here), in response to questions about how a TB system might be changed to be more palatable to me, I offered exactly this idea as a way to make TB combat "better" for me. So I will say that this change is significant to me, and I hope Larian won't end up changing it back due to whining from TB/PnP D&D purists.

Criticized by whom? TB purists? It's entirely subjective. For me there are no games out there with a good TB combat system.

I'd be interested in your take. I always preferred RTwP but was not opposed to TB combat systems. And then I played D:OS1. The ONLY thing I got out of playing D:OS1 was an abiding hatred for TB combat. So it is precisely D:OS that killed TB combat for me.

Whereas I would MUCH rather have, and would happily play, a PoE game like Witcher 3 or even DA:I, while I would reject a PoE game that's anything like D:OS2.

This^. That encounter with the devourers was so mind-numbingly aggravating. TB fans keep saying in TB games you don't need the "filler" encounters. Well, I don't see any difference (proportionately speaking) in number of encounters between RTwP and TB games. At least if TB games did actually have fewer combat encounters that would be a plus, not because of fewer filler encounters but because it would represent less time spent on aggravating TB combat.

I also hope we get more single-player, party-based, Aora-based classic RPGs. For me, I would absolutely need it to be RTwP; otherwise I won't play it. I'm not wedded to the isometric perspective though, as long as it is not first-person. And I like the PoE mechanics and ruleset precisely because it is NOT D20/D&D mechanics. Thank God for people trying to create new mechanics and rulesets, especially specifically made for videogames rather than tabletop games.

I am looking forward to Dragon Age 4 but not BG3.

I was prepared to be disappointed with this game right from its first announcement, but this reveal really saddened me greatly that I will not get to play a game called BG3 even though that is something I've been hoping for for 20 years. I hate TB combat, but I was willing to give this game a chance if everything else about it was awesome and only the combat was something horrible. But what I see is a game that sucks across the board: cartoony horrible D:OS graphics, very limited character creation freedom, companions that are set and having very little that we can do to shape them, a dialog system that reads and sounds utterly ridiculous, party size reduced to 4 clearly to satisfy co-op play at the expense of single player, and overall a TT simulator experience rather than a videogame experience. Disappointing in every possible way. As a passionate fan of the original BG games and of the Forgotten Realms setting in which I desperately want to see more games, it crushes me that Larian has made a game here that effectively excludes me.

Haha. Yes I saw this (NATO and Article 5). My students and I discussed it in my International Security class this afternoon. And yes apparently a group of refugees stormed the Greek border.

This is so awesome! This is what I worked on in my NASA-funded master's thesis project way back in the early 90s: understanding how the transfer of liquid rocket fuel from one spacecraft to another would work.

You are correct. Someone from the studio confirmed it in a subsequent interview that only the very last little bit is gameplay footage and even then pre-alpha.

Hehe funny that the guy's actual name was deemed possibly offensive and got starred out in my post.

@IndiraLightfoot, not to be a downer but FYI Chris ****' statement about seven "D&D" games being planned includes saying that not all those games will be RPGs. He even explicitly says some may be strategy games and the like because he wants to expand D&D across as many different gaming genres as possible.

Oh it's definitely not MY hope. I'm for RTwP all the way and will pass on the game if it is TB. I would much rather have a DA-style game than a D:OS-style game any day. And a BG3 that is essentially D:OS2 in the FR setting would be the worst of all outcomes.

I've been making this prediction on other forums and will do it here as well. Swen continues to claim he is making a "next-generation" RPG that is going to "revolutionize" the genre. What I think BG3 will be is a game that is very much in the style of a glitzy-graphics third-person perspective AAA action RPG, but where those games in the past have been RT/RTwP games this game will introduce TB combat into that AAA action RPG genre. This is what will then be passed off as next-gen/revolutionary/innovative/genre-breaking blah blah.

I hope the US makes it very clear to the sultan of Turkey that neither the US nor NATO will be bailing his sorry ass out in Syria and that he is on his own there. I am very strongly pro-Kurdish and am happy to see the Turks getting their due for what they've done to the Kurds.

The game is very friendly to the player's choice for how you set up your PC. Don't overlook that you can mix and match several classes and archtypes into your character (which you can also do to all your companions). From a metagaming pov, LG is a very useful alignment to have in the game, and the game uses skill checks a LOT so building your PC with skill checks in mind is a very good way to go.

Gamerguides. The neoseeker one (and also the yekbot one) are essentially the same material as the gamerguides one but just organized and presented differently. Also, the gamepedia wiki site for the game is pretty good with its tables for kingdom events and the like.

Yes indeed. Then I might actually choose to return to tabletop gaming.

If you are planning on using a walkthrough, I would strongly recommend the official walkthrough. It is very well done. And that walkthrough does help you know what to do when, but where you can avoid looking at the walkthrough for the specifics of each area/encounter.

Just to note, you can set the overall difficulty to 'normal' and then customize specific parts of it with the various toggles. Also, there is something to be said for doing kingdom management on easy rather than auto because once you learn how it works it is actually quite easy to handle.

Yes indeed. 100% agree. I especially like the odds of a great find on Enceladus. I think Ganymede could also be useful to study.