Planning on playing through Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 for the first time this week. Know almost nothing about the game, nothing about DnD rulesets, just diving directly in because a partner very highly recommended them.
Edit: Ended up buying Baldur’s Gate 3 and getting into it instead, looks like I’m gonna be playing it in 3 > 1 > 2 order. As a side note, performance was way better on Vulkan than Directx11 for me, despite common advice being to use Directx11 on Linux for the game.
They are absolutely lovely, though undeniably very old school. BG1 is more action-adventurey with a bigger emphasis on exploration, BG2 is very story-heavy. They have aged remarkably well, considering they’re over 20 years old. The handpainted backgrounds still look pretty.
With potential increased interest due to BG3, I wonder if it would be an idea to create a community for the classic Baldur’s Gates 🤔
I’d like that, or a classic CRPG community with a certain timeframe. Two of my favourite games now are the original Fallouts after playing them for the first time only a few years ago. I’d love to see more of the games from that era.
I have actually pondered a “classic gaming” or “old school games” type community for these types of (primarily) PC games from the era up to maybe 2010.
Retro Gaming communities typically focus more on old console and/or arcade type stuff.
Haha yeah same here. I guess we sit back and hope someone else takes up the mantle.
As for names, I’m not sure. There’s already some retro/vintage PC communities on SDF but they are more hardware focused. Old PC Games? Retro PC Games? The Beforetime? No idea.
Also, what would be the appropriate cutoff for the timeframe? I just threw 2010 out there, but maybe even slightly later? What is a good milestone to cut off at? I was thinking starting at 1993 with the release of Doom.
Doom seems like a solid start, it was revolutionary. You could also push it to 1990. As for an end date I’d have to think about that. 2000 or 2003 gives a 10 year range with a lot of influential releases, but might be a bit limited. If you did 2013 that’s a 20 year range, but it could also be a shifting time frame where it is for games of a certain age. If it was 10 years or older games then it would start with an end date of 2013 and the range would expand every year. The issue with that is it would lose focus on older games eventually.
I was thinking Doom as a sort of watershed moment in gaming, and going earlier than that and you could argue those titles belong on the already-existing retro gaming communities.1993 actually had both Doom and the first FIFA, it’s got a lot going for it as a start year.
Looking at releases for 2013 though we have things like GTA V, BioShock: Infinite and The Last of Us. I definitely would hesitate to call those “old school games”. 2011 has Skyrim. Does that qualify? Otherwise I’m starting to feel more drawn to the 1990-2010 timeframe; nice round numbers and should sort of capture the era of classic gaming. 2010 has Red Dead Redemption 1, Mass Effect 2 and Civilization 5. Is it fair to say those are some of the last old school games or do we need to go older? A two decade window seems good.
I agree that an open ended timeframe would lead to lost focus over time. If it’s 10+ years old as the criteria, it would mean we’re just 2 years away from The Witcher 3 qualifying for a community meant for stuff like Fallout 1&2. That just feels… wrong.
Yeah good points on open ended timeframe and the 2013 end date. 2010 seems pretty good, the only odd one out for that list would be civ 5 because it’s so widely played.
I’m in my 30s now so I have to remember that someone who was 5 in 2010 would be 18 now, and red dead redemption 1 would definitely be considered old. I think that’s a solid timeframe, 1990 to 2010. If Lemmy ever gets big enough to warrant it there could eventually be games by decades communities as well.
If you don’t care about round numbers and it being exactly two decades you could also do 1993-2009, starting with Doom and ending with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. There is a different kind of symmetry to that, and I honestly kind of like it.
The only issue I would have with a 93 start date is it excludes games like Dune, Wolfenstein 3D, and the original Civilisation, which were earlier in the 90s.
Having said that, every cut off point has its flaws, and a more focused range could lead to a more focused and spirited community. Very weird that COD:MW2 is 14 years old btw.
Very fair points as well about those games. I think maybe a looser guideline would be more appropriate than strict dates. I really like the Doom - CoD: MW2 bookending to encapsulate that golden era of gaming, but I wouldn’t delete any post about Civ 1, if I was actually running the community.
And yeah, time flies. It was equally scary earlier when I realized Witcher 3 is almost ten years old.
I just started Baldur's Gate recently and beat it minutes ago. It's not the first D&D game I've played before, but I'm far from well-versed in it. I had to Google "THAC0" a couple of times to understand what the game was trying to tell me, as well as understanding certain status effects. There's a presupposition of knowledge that the game has with its players, but it's still fairly okay at initiating people to D&D.
THAC0 is… yeah. I guess the systems take some getting used to. And it gets a little more complicated at higher levels with different layers of protective spells and counter-spells.
I already started it and bought BG3 as well. I had played Planescape: Torment about 10 years ago, so some of this was familiar, but it and Baldur's Gate have some different philosophies around things like combat and party size. One thing I'm fairly confident will be a thing of the past when I get to BG3 is trash mobs. BG1 at times feels like it's being run by an asshole DM who's out to kill the party with tons of trash mobs between rests rather than providing a good time.
Imagine you're at the table with your friends, and the DM says, "Then, from the darkness of the dungeon emerges...6 Kobolds!" You beat them, the party is pumped about it, and then the DM says, "As you press further on across the bridge, you come across...7 more Kobolds!" I'm not exactly sure what the thinking was, but between the aforementioned trash mobs and the magic casters who attack you with debilitating adverse affects that do tons of damage and take you out of the fight for like 20 straight turns, BG1 can be cheap as hell, even on easy difficulty. I get the sense that BG3 will still be difficult, but from my brief time with Divinity: Original Sin and what I've seen of BG3 footage, I'm expecting them to have more consideration for each combat encounter.
And oh yeah, BG1 also had a few areas with really narrow passageways that the AI pathfinding was not really able to adequately handle, as friendly characters would bump into each other and not be able to figure out how to move.
Yeah, these old games were kind of a wild west when it comes to design. I also love Fallout 2 to bits for example, but god damn can it feel cheap and frustrating at times. On the other hand there are loads of ways to cheese encounters, too, if you’re interested in making things easier. Backstabs, Snares, Cloudkill (and similar effects), abusing Fog of War. Almost all of BG1 can be cheesed with Skull Trap. And almost all of BG2 can be cheesed with Set Snare.
I’ve only started playing BG3, but so far it’s been a lot easier and simpler than both the old games and Divinity, which maybe is to be expected with it being based on D&D 5E rules. Compared to D:OS 2 combat has been a lot less complex and challenging. Granted I’m playing on medium difficulty. I didn’t want to start off on Tactician after the Divinity games, but maybe I need to here.
Anyway, I hope you’ll enjoy BG2. It’s one of my all-time favorite games still, and I replay it every now and again. There are so many ways to set up fun parties with loads of interactions, especially if you use the Tweak that prevents companions from killing each other even if they hate each other. Some of the best interactions are from mixed-alignment parties.
narrow passageways that the AI pathfinding was not really able to adequately handle
I must confess that these days I always play with DebugMode=1 and one of the primary reasons is to be able to use Ctrl+J to teleport the whole squad when pathfinding acts up.
I definitely organically discovered the cheese you can do with fog of war, but most of the strategies you mentioned were things that I just did not come across organically. I would love to have more of the debilitating spells that the enemy NPCs were using on me, and I did come across things like Sleep that would rarely work against an opponent challenging enough to deem it worthwhile, especially considering how many enemies you're likely to run into until your next rest compared to how many spell slots you'll have.
Summons are a really powerful way to deplete enemy spells, just send them in one by one. Summon Skeletons is good for this.
As you move onto BG2, using spells to counter enemy protections becomes more important, like using Breach to deal with Stoneskin etc. Though as a caveat, I’ve been using Sword Coast Stratagems so long I barely remember what combat is like without it.
I’m playing through Baldur’s gate 1 atm as well. I tried it and didn’t enjoy it back in the early 2000s but now I’m digging it. I still don’t like real time with pauses combat, but I can forgive it with the party size. I do wish there were other ways around things than combat most of the time though, but early DnD was primarily a dungeon crawler so that’s fine.
I have been busy this week so I have played mostly Slay the Spire. Being able to get up and walk away at any time let’s me play in my limited down time at work, or while I am working on dinner.
I’ve also been dabbling in a mobile game called To Arms.
The simplest and most likely reason is just because they don't have to. Playstation is leading Xbox by a lot this generation (so far, things can change) and PlayStation just has no incentive to add value to something they're already selling record numbers of. Xbox is trying to attract customers, customer playstation has left on the cutting room floor, and backwards compatibility is a way to do that.
Not to mention the closer you get to modern day, the more games rely on company servers to remain running. Long gone are the days of simple platformers like Super Mario Bros. Many games made in the last 15 years are multi-player games with a basic ass single player added on for ‘compliance’ reasons. It’d still be great for those that want it, but I don’t feel like I’m missing out on much that I can’t replicate myself with ROMs and emulators should the need arise.
I’m playing Sekiro for the first time and am loving it! It’s my first FromSoftware game. Mechanically it’s quite similar to Jedi Survivor, the other game I’ve been playing lately, but is a lot less friendly and more straightforward (as far as plot and other stuff going on). However, it works really well and is very enjoyable to get good at.
Xbox’s Backwards Compatibility is definitely a big deal; but as someone who loves old games as a concept and has never thrown out a console, it’s not as big a selling point as you would think/ hope.
I personally wanted to try some of the PS2/PS3 only games and didn’t have a PS3, so I bought one used a while back. I probably only logged maybe 10 hours in it before getting completely side tracked by my backlog of modern games. And while I know that’s anecdotal evidence, it really seems like the allure of classic games might not be enough of a selling point.
This is something I think Xbox had the right idea about. While BC is very useful in concept, there aren’t so many classic games that would draw people away from modern games; so you only have to support those few games.
With that in mind, I think Sony could offer BC for their relevant PS2/ PS3 exclusives since they would only need to guarantee emulator performance for a much smaller number of games. I don’t think it’s likely for Sony to do this until they are no longer the dominant console, though, as they can make more money selling their PS3 subscription service.
From a game presentation standpoint, BC is a huge issue and I would personally love to see it happen for the PS5 (and I’d like to see it expanded to all games for the Xbox as well); but I doubt there would be much return on investment for developing the BC features, and that’s the only motivation for corporations.
You’re absolutely right. However I will add to your initial point. If I could have paid an extra $100 - $150 (for the hardware) in order to have PS1-PS3 games play on my PS5, I would have just so I could have it as an option. Bonus points if the entire PS3 digital library (especially the PS1 classics) were still available.
Not the original commenter, but I did pay the extra $100-150 for the PS3 for backwards compatibility. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have. I played maybe like 3 PS2 games on it. I was far more interested in then current-gen games. I sorta got swept up in the hype of BC back in the day, especially when Sony stopped production of BC PS3s. I literally ran out and got one before they all disappeared; I still have it.
Looking back, the option wasn’t worth it. But we’re different people, different consumers. Our needs and wants differ.
Bottles as flatpak is an amazing way to run windows dependent software isolated from your main system. Flatpak will automatically bundle Wine and 32 bit library runtimes and bottles packages in DXVK (no need to enable multilib). If you use ProtonUPQT you can even get the bleeding edge GE wine as a runner for your programs in bottles.
I pirate because Steam is a garbage program for playing games and Valve is an evil company. So I pay for games in Steam but will just pirate a Non DRM-Non steam affiliated copy of the game to backup on my own local storage.
There are rumors of the Switch getting a successor next year. My biggest wish is for it to be compatible with the current games, included digital purchases. Honestly, if I can import my digital library and saves I’m already sold on a switch successor
Diablo 4. I’m still playing my first character, Necromancer. I put on some chill music and work on completing all the quests and dungeons. It’s really relaxing and thoughtless. I finally killed the random spawning Butcher and was so excited I text my wife about it. Lol
GTA Online. Me and my kids have a Motorcycle Club and we cruise around and shoot people together and it brings me joy!
I wish that was true, there are so many games I would go back and play again. PS3 was a technical marvel for it’s time, however using it was so complicated that we only got to see it’s true potential by the end of it’s lifecycle with games like TLOU. So just speaking of raw power, PS5 could %100 not emulate PS3 games flawlessly as we barely have PS3 emulation on PCs. Technical part aside, it just doesn’t make business sense for Sony to invest in it. You also have to keep in mind if Sony offers PS3 emulation, it can’t stutter or crash on some games. it needs to be a commercial grade product which is not even guaranteed with PS2 or NES emulation on PC
I’ve played lot of games on the PC without issue like lollipop chainsaw, asura’s wrath, drakengard 3, and shadows of the damned without issue at 4k/60. Was really surprising to me, but rpcs3 has made great strides and if a game has been marked playable it’s been a fantastic experience. And that’s with someone unaffiliated with Sony making it possible. Seeing what Xbox accomplished with Xbox One when it came to 360 compatability it wouldn’t surprise me if Sony did better than what RPCS3 did.
There’s some notable attention given the games that don’t emulate well like MGS4 and red dead with it coming across as buggy, but lot of other titles do run really well as if they were official remastered ports.
This is part of the reason why I haven’t thought of buying a console since the PS3. There are a lot of games that were made for the ps2/1 that I really loved and I can probably never play them again because PlayStations lack that feature. They have effectively been erased, which is really sad.
I sold my PS3 a long time ago, and I’ve been using Steam on my PC since then. Now I won’t have to worry about losing access to titles I bought just because they’re locked to certain hardware that will eventually not be made any more.
What I’ve liked best is that the settings menus makes it so that the game can scale with your hardware. So if you have the capable hardware you aren’t left waiting a decade for a remaster release and nextgen console release to play with some settings turned up.
Sony changed their CPU architecture every time until PS4/5. The only reason some PS3s could play PS2 games is because they had also had PS2 hardware in them. Xbox has been x86 the whole time.
The simple answer is that microsoft is a far more advanced company in terms of programming an OS, the gap shows when you compare console securities, where virtually every nintendo or sony device had software vulnerabilities, while microsoft consoles tended to need to be hardmodded
As someone who programmed drivers for nt, it’s not, the reason it’s easier is because they started later.
Xbox is a mature x86 windows platform, vs ps1 which is an embedded mips system.
They started with their windows directx stack and just kept with it, while ps did a random walk all over the place.
Msft also had really boring hardware, like, they started with a crappy pc, then made a crappy ppc pc, then went back to a crappy pc. The software was simplistic, while Sony made really interesting hardware designs, that turned out to be hard to program, till the ps4 when they just gave up.
Msft traditionally isn’t very good at operating systems, they’ve just had infinite resources and infinite monkeys for 40+ years, and they’ve been stubborn enough to make it work somehow.
I would argue they had to give it up to get the indie scene onboard as I heard many nightmare stories for indies from PS3 era. Was it worth it? I’m sure contributed a great deal to the success of PS4 but it made the PS into just a more affordable gaming PC.
Totally worth it, they spent unimaginable resources trying to make those architectures programmable, now that’s all almost free, they just compete for published titles and maybe some secondary features.
MSFT was in a better position because they didn’t need to spend those resources, and more importantly the devs didn’t either, they could write windows games then port them over easily. Now it’s just as easy to do that for ps4/5. All that matters is nailing exclusives and looking cool, plus some marketing which msft sucks at.
It’s too early to decide if it was. Yes it was the safest bet, Even though PS4 had a great deal of success you also need to keep in mind, a lot of it was because of politics. Nintendo and MS made huge mistakes at that time and Sony basically ate their lunch.
The older generations were always innovative and pushed the envelop as far as possible, but now PS just a gaming PC that is not upgradable like an actual PC. if you don’t recall, the most hyped thing about PS5 was the controller, which is not what you expect the main point of buying a new consol to be.
On the topic of exclusives, I personally hate them. I think it makes a false sense of value in modern consoles where in the past they were intentionally made to take advantage of the architecture to showcase the unique quirks (and ofc the power) of this machine in a tiny box. Now they are usually just political leverages even though the games can be ported to other platforms.
So to reiterate, I agree it definitely had positive net for Sony in the short run, we’ll have to wait and see if it will payout in the long run.
Exclusives are terrible for the customer, but they’re a way for corporate to control the market, which is a good for them.
We’ll see, but I was on the dev side of that nightmare, Sony would have gotten crushed the next gen, they barely made it out of ps3 with their extended developers in tact, nobody liked programming the cell, everybody loves the current system.
But it does reduce competitive surface area, so we’ll see. Nintendo is winning now because they didn’t follow the same path but they did innovate, more than almost anyone before.
My question is: What innovation do you see that could have been worth a unique architecture to Sony’s developers?
I agree with your sentiment, after all what is a game console without games.
What I want isn’t necessarily a unique architechture, rather I want a unique experience. I think looking at Smartphone landscape expresses my concerns much clearer. All phones today are basically just reskins of same phone in design, purpose and architechture. Sure there are some novelty phones with smaller audiences for the sake of novelty but what makes you choose a phone over the other is just marketing at this point. I’m afraid that’s where we’re headed with consoles. The difference is the home consoles are replaceable.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, to use the phone metaphor, every improvement in one phone rapidly spread to others, so even budget phones have features better than the top of the line phones a decade ago.
Now game developers can go back to focusing on games, and console makers can focus on trying to make better consoles without having to blow ludicrous resources on supporting developers or just making the thing work, they just rely on amd making better chips which seems to have worked.
I totally get where you’re going, and I agree we need that macro-innovation as it were, but games were a nightmare of hacks and bullshit for decades, I think a period of consolidation is good right now, then we can start the whole race all over again with crazy new tech.
It doesnt say anything about modern consoles though. Although its dofferent at the start, their modern consoles are still effectively full of exploits. Hell VERY recently, “backup” PS4 titles are running on the PS5. Security is the main reason why BOTH the PS5 and the Nintendo Switch do not have easily accessible web browsers while Microsoft can.
I heard that the Xbox is basically like a PC (since Microsoft is so adept at this), so backwards compatibility is natural. But what you said about x86 architecture is interesting.
The original Xbox, Xbox One, and S/X are all basically x86 PCs, but the 360 was basically a Power Mac. Microsoft was literally using PowerMac G5 towers as early development kits for the 360.
Supporting 360 games is pretty time consuming and requires emulation. MS has been slowly chipping away at it for years.
The Xbox 360 was based on the same weird, in-order PowerPC 970 derived CPU as the PS3, it just had three of them stuck together instead of one of them tied to seven weird Cell units. The TL;DR of how Xbox backwards compatibility has been achieved is that Microsoft's whole approach with the Xbox has always been to create a PC-like environment which makes porting games to or from the Xbox simpler.
The real star of the show here is the Windows NT kernel and DirectX. Microsoft's core APIs have been designed to be portable and platform-agnostic since the beginning of the NT days (of course, that isn't necessarily true of the rest of the Windows operating system we use on our PCs). Developers could still program their games mostly as though they were targeting a Windows PC using DirectX since all the same high-level APIs worked in basically the same way, just with less memory and some platform-specific optimisations to keep in mind (stuff like the 10MB of eDRAM, or that you could always assume three 3.2GHz in-order CPU cores with 2-way SMT).
Xbox 360 games on the Xbox One seem to be run through something akin to Dolphin's "Übershaders" - in this case, per-game optimised modifications of an entire Xenon GPU stack implemented in software running alongside the entire Xbox 360 operating environment in a hypervisor. This is aided by the integration of hardware-level support for certain texture and audio formats common in Xbox 360 games into the Xbox One's CPU design, similarly to how Apple's M-series SoCs integrate support for x86-style memory ordering to greatly accelerate Rosetta 2.
Microsoft's APIs for developers to target tend to be fairly platform-agnostic - see Windows CE, which could run on anything from ARM handhelds to the Hitachi SH-4 powered Sega Dreamcast. This enables developers who are mostly experienced in coding for x86 PCs running Windows to relatively easily start writing programs (or games) for other platforms using those APIs. This also has the beneficial side-effect of allowing Microsoft to, with their collective first-hand knowledge of those APIs, create compatibility layers on an x86 system that can run code targeted at a different platform.
The PowerPC cores aren’t the problem, emulating that is pretty straightforward. It’s the many SPUs that present a huge headache to emulate in a performant manner.
And yeah, MS building everything on Windows and DirectX also makes things considerably easier.
Funnily enough, one of the few legitimately impactful non-enterprise uses of AVX512 I'm aware of is that it does a really good job of accelerating emulation of the Cell SPUs in RPCS3. But you're absolutely right, those things are very funky and implementing their functions is by far the most difficult part of PS3 emulation.
Luckily, I think most games either didn't do much with them or left programming for them to middleware, so it would mostly be first- and second-party games that would need super-extensive customisation and testing. Sony could probably figure it out, if they were convinced there was sufficient demand and potential profit on the other side.
bin.pol.social
Najnowsze