It is also helpful to know that if you make any mistakes in you character build, you can respec your class and ability scores very early in the game for a fairly low price. The things that you cannot change are your origin, race or appearance, but these don't have such a great impact (unless you take the Dark Urge origin and find a bit too bloody for your tastes - in which case you have to start over)
Personally, I never played DND but I did play a bunch of RPGs before (such as the Pathfinder games on PC) and I love checking out character build guides. The learning curve of BG3 was pretty smooth for me.
I feel like someone generally familiar with RPGs will be fine with the basic mechanics of BG3. It’s my first exposure to the 5e rules - bonus moves, reactions, feats, etc - but they mostly make sense. I may not have combat as optimized as someone with tons of practice, but it works most of the time.
Long term character building, though? When I was presented with class specializations at L3, with nothing to tell me about what they get at L4, 5, 6…those choices seemed completely arbitrary. Being able to respec on the cheap if you feel like you’ve made a mistake is nice reassurance.
OTOH, making choices of specialization and feats without a long term plan, but entirely on the immediate circumstances and whim, feels a lot more like how I planned my IRL degree, job, home… So, immersion?
I think I’ll take a break from Final Fantasy 14 for a while. The story was just so uninteresting for so long, that I just don’t want to continue right now. Everything else was good enough, the different jobs I tried were fun, but I just need to do something else.
Other than that, I started Baldurs Gate 3 with a friend, we are still relatively early, exploring the first region.
If you can get past the UI, I recommend at least trying FFXI. The stories are so good, the XIV writers spent half of SHB and EW adapting them. Kato did the scenario for the vanilla game and the first expansion, Rise of the Zilart, and his world building brilliance is at its best there. The world is so real and immersive, and there are all kinds of connections between world events and characters both big and small.
I’m good for a while, but I’ll probably go back to WoW eventually. It’s the only other MMO I’ve played (far more than FF14) and it’s basically comfort food for me. A bunch of friends also still play it, so that’s a plus as well.
Ahhh ok. I’m using a controller at the moment for accessibility reasons, but I’ll definitely look into doing that when I can again! Maybe it’ll show if I just idle a couple seconds over the selection
Right on 🤙🏻 I figured there had to be with how accessible the controller options truly are - I haven’t been able to check since my initial response. I should get to relatively soon though! Option on the controller is: select --> enable help tools
Larian studios seems great. I would like more companies to invest in / hire studios similar to Larian. Sure, WotC sucks. But I will vote with my dollars for them to work with Larian. Maybe it means in the future more gaming companies might look like Larian. Everybody has to draw their own line, though.
Prosperous Universe is quite different from a typical incremental game, but it scratches the same itch for me. The game is very complex, and other players drive the economy, leading to some price/availability unpredictability that is interesting. Gotta keep your bases fueled, but you also want to wait for prices to rise or fall, and potentially use your ships to trade at other markets.
It’s quite nonlinear in progression and there’s a lot of ways to expand.
I haven’t played BG1 or BG2, but so far I haven’t felt that BG3 requires prior knowledge in order to understand the story. As for DND knowledge, the only things I know about the game are from the bits and pieces that I glean from watching Critical Role. BG3 is doing a wonderful job filling in the missing pieces of knowledge with really handy tooltips and descriptions of how everything works. If anything, it’s probably the most interesting primer to DND I’ve ever encountered.
Anti-Idle: The Game is one of my all-time favourites. It’s got a ton of sub-games and some really interesting resource flows between them. And as per the title you can idle or not, but there are rewards for active play.
Continuing the PSO2:NGS grind. Leciel is extremely fun, just the right amount of tension and challenge, and constant novel boss “twists”. Yesterday we had a boss with breakable parts and a breakable bomb, as well as buffs to damage to breakable parts. The strat was to stagger him by breaking his legs then do a mad rush to break the bomb before it wiped the entire party.
Beyond that, continuing my journey through .hack//IMOQ. It’s immediately clear how special this series is. Not just for being the seminal story about an imaginary game, and being fairly unique in actually looking at how people interact with games as a third place, and the queer potential of video games; but also for actually providing a playable version of the imaginary game. Including an MMO version of the MMO!
I really want .hack to come back. Log Horizon rules, and I like the more heroic, legendary, and optimistic tone and theming, but there’s something really appealing at how realistic .hack is without being dark, gritty, or cynical. The sense of romance in the game’s backstory is great too. All this weird background fabric about genius programmers singlehandedly changing the course of the world, people overhwelmed by emotions; meanwhile the spotlight is on real people.
RPGs in the style of the Ultima games, specifically ones that use a keyword-based conversion system. Aside from the Ultima series itself, the only other examples I know of that use a system like this are Cythera - a 1990s Macintosh shareware game that was very similar to Ultima 6 and 7 - and The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind.
My partner is very tuned into the various ethical mishaps happening in the world and keeps me apprised of which companies are doing shitty stuff and which people/companies I should stop supporting.
Problem: the set of companies you shouldn’t support due to unethical behavior is pretty much all of them. As the saying goes, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. If doing business with someone with blood on their hands puts blood on your hands, then only the hands of hermits and children are clean.
This is one of the reasons why I use free and open source software wherever possible, but very few games are FOSS and most of them were commercial before being FOSSified (e.g. Doom).
bin.pol.social
Aktywne