Wormerine

Time to play a game: “let’s overanalyse each word that comes from Tim’s mouth to try to figure out what he is working on at Obsidian: 5:00 1) Tim knows I am watching and is too smart to reveal he is working on a new IP 2) Tim works on existing IP 3) Tim works on a new IP, but it is not his. I still know nothing.

Well, BG3 spend 5ish? years in EA, so it checks out. Good luck with Act2. My 1st playthrough stopped there, I slogged through it in 2nd playthrough, and two consequent attempts stopped in act2 as well. I don't think you need to do all of its content to progress, and I wonder if my completionist mindset works against me in that act. It is soooo big, and narratively rather static.

Strange, It says it supports windows10. I was initially to suggest Linux, as BG3 has apparently a pretty great Linux support, but it seems GOG doesn't support Linux? Laaaame

If AI could truly think for itself, wouldn’t it just develop its own biases and bull****? AI is a human creation and it will be controlled and influenced by people. It is not and will not be an all knowing, all-wise and fair god.

Well, also Fallout1. Still, I fundamentally don’t understand why the common need for “you do this now or you DIEEEEE. Also here is a world full of sideactivities to explore.” I mean I do get it. Universal thread of destruction is an easy narrative hook for a custom protagonist. It still just doesn’t make sense. Surely, your hook should be about exploration and discovery, and reason to engage with the world, not the opposite. Obsidian usually is good with this stuff, though I felt both Pillars did have this issue as well.

ok, finished Silksong. 100% completion, all achievemnents unlocked, but 4 ones speedrun and ironman related. I liked it very much. I have nitpicks, though a lot of it is related to optional content so I don't know how to feel about it. Some 100% requirements I thought were unreasonably tedious or obscure, but then again, it is completely optional to do so . I am sure someone figuring some things out, for me it was googling things out once I run out of ideas and went "how the heck was I supposed to find that?!". Not as good of a metroidvania as Hollow Knight, but much better action-platformer. Loved movement, really liked combat. Most bosses are excellent, few are tedious. Ah, I wasn't too fond of act3. The bosses that become available there are great, but overall I am not sure of the new content available there required an entire new act3. Then again, I thought Castlevania's reverse castle was a bit lame as well.

Well, maybe. If your story is "I have a ticking bomb and need to solve it ASAP", then I would say you either create a linear adventure that will support this story, or create more open adventure that still forces player to hurry and move forward. I just don't think urgency and here is massive world full of optional content mesh together. Neither is a bad choice, and I just don't those two choices go well together. And of course, various games suffer from it in various ways. That a problem is common, doesn't make it non-existent, and if you make narratively centric game, it sticks out if the experience of playing the game doesn't support said narrative - at least it does to me. If game builds up someone to be a powerful being they should be a difficult fight. If the game builds up something as urgent, at least it should provide narrative excuse as to why we might want to get distracted. I am not saying that such flawes make a game automatically terrible, but it might negatively impact the experience for some looking to get immersed in the story.

ha! Yes, I forgot how annoying the itemization was in D:OS2. I didn't watch the video, so am just replaying to your post. Even back in a day when Baldur's Gate2 was in my mind the gold standard for everything that is right and good, the dissonance between main quest urgency and what I thought was the intended and enjoyable way of playing the game stand out as a flaw. By principle, I believe that game's narrative should be tied to a gameplay exerience - if the narrative requires swift forward, gameplay should at the very least encourage it as well. If you go for laidback do what you want experience - come up with the scenario that supports it. I get that devs want movie like hook propelling things forward, but at least to me, it hurts it more in the long run. It forces me as a player to ask myself a question: "is the threat presented by the game narratively real or a facade", and I just don't think it's in games best interest to have me think that. That said, I didn't think Cyberpunk2077 was a particularly bad example of that, but it did roll my eyes every time V got "worse" after progressing main story a bit. It was just a bit too obvious that his condition doesn't exist unless one does very specific quests. I didn't find C77 story very effective, but that wasn't a part that suck out to me. To me Baldur's Gate3 was a far, far, far worse offender. In C77 there might be a bit of dissonance between the game's story and players affinity for side content but in BG3 the characters didn't seem to decide if they have a ticking bomb in their heads or not.

It will be interesting to see what they will keep from D:OS and D&D and what they will change.

Oh comeon, I don't think I have encountered a single trap like that. Though I did spent most of the evening banging my head against Karmelita yesterday. To be fair, it's been a while since I played so I am a bit rusty, and my stick drift does muddy up my execution.

Or were the original Divinity games mere spin-offs or turn-based RPG Sven really wanted to make in the first place?

Yeah, that’s something that I found disappoint as well. I wish I could Hitman my way through this entire quest. I tout quite an effort to try to find a systemic solution but at least in Early Access scripting seem to always get in the way.

Just when I thought to myself “I should really wrap up Silksong” and spend an evening hunting some of the few remaining secrets and bosses.

Well, it’s not Original Sin3, so I assume it will not play like those. I didn’t play previous Divinity games but from what I understand they were actionRPG. I assumed this new divinity would also be somewhere under his umbrella, though I can’t begin to guess what could it look like.

Hmm, I might concede on Giths as I don't think you can avoid fighting them if you do all of the content there. Goblins though - is great. In fact the Goblin camp is one bit of BG3 that I love without hesitation and if all of the game was of that quality it would be 10/10 game for me. It's organic, it offers narratively sound objectives that can be completed in a multitude ways utilizing a neat combination of scripted and systemic options. If you decide to obliterate the whole camp, that can be tedious but that's a very specific, systemic outcome - you decided to fight essencially a city of neutral NPCs, so you do just that. There are so many neat things you can do to affect that combat encounter - tip off Minthara about the location of the Grove, but then help defend the Grove, getting a pretty great big battle and massively reducing camp's forces. Poison the drink at the party to make the outside battle easier. Sabotage war drums so enemies you are fighting now can't easily call for help from the rest of the room. Plenty of opportunities to silently dispatch smaller packs of enemies before engaging everyone else. There are so many ways of dealing with the camp, thoughout my hours of Early Access it was one part of the run I was always actively looking forward to. It seems I was always able to find a fresh way to express how my NPC would deal with that situation. Even my palladin coldly fighting through the whole camp out of principle - it's tedious, but fitting the character and an act.