There are actually plenty tutorials, but because of the open exploring aspect, players aren’t visiting those tutorial spots that the dev anticipated. They nudge you a bit using the enemy levels, but it should have covered more during the prologue.
I politely disagree. Baldur's Gate III teaches you absolutely nothing about its rules and systems. You are expected to discover the rules and systems on your own. Things like crowd control, the actual numerical advantages of height, and repositioning while in dialog are never explained.
It is the most frustrating aspect of Larian games, imo.
repositioning while in dialog are never explained.
I’m a few hours in and I don’t know what you mean? Do you mean being able to switch to a different character in a dialog? If so I’d love to know how to do that. I hate starting dialogue where I need charisma with my low charisma character
Well, no. I mean using other characters while one is in a conversation. During conversations, there are some buttons in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen. One of those will allow you to swap to another character. You will then be able to do whatever you wish with those characters while the original character is in their conversation.
If you wish to use a different character for a conversation, you can simply start the conversation with the given character.
Literally all of Candlekeep is a tutorial with the quests and the guys in green robes everywhere. It’s kinda great, actually. Allowed you to skip it if you wanted, but there if you need it.
I’ve found that bg3 is pretty bad at telling the player things. Such as why you have a advantage or disadvantage on attacks. Another example is I had to search on the internet to figure out what concentration saves against. I know now that I can hover over things in the combat log to see the rolls. But you wouldn’t really know that unless you have played rpg’s like dnd before. It should tell you in a tooltip for concentration.
Funny, thinking back to that tutorial they teach you a couple of mechanics (like rebooting your ship) that are almost never used in game. OTOH, there are, what, 300 different bindings in the game now?
I found the Odyssey tutorial was frustratingly opaque as to how the entire new UI worked.
Continuing my first time playthrough of Apollo Justice on my way through the rest of the Ace Attorney series.
And returning to Death Stranding since I beat the game to max out the prepper shelters (mission givers) and to slowly work towards Legend of Legends (completing every single repeatable mission on "hard" mode).
Now that the story is over Death Stranding is a fantastic "throw on a podcast and grind" kind of game. Very soothing.
Still working through side quests in Borderlands 3 as well. Really enjoying the shooting in this one. As acclaimed as 2 is, I just couldn't stand the shooting model until at least Pre Sequel, but 3's shooting genuinely feels quite good now.
I'm a PC player so I probably won't get to play the second one for quite a long time, but I'm excited as well. Kojima doesn't usually iterate in a straightforward manner in sequels, so it's hard to know just quite what we'll get out of it.
Death Stranding was already one of the most novel and interesting games I've ever played in both story and gameplay, so I'm glad we'll get to see some more of it.
I hope you enjoy the Apollo Justice series! Will you be playing the Investigations series with Edgeworth too?
I played all the Ace Attorney games for the first time during the pandemic and had an absolute blast! The Great Ace Attorney duology is definitely my favourite of the bunch by far, but they are all so charming!
As a kid I endlessly replayed the original trilogy and never wanted to try Apollo because "I thought his hair looked dumb", so after trying it now and realizing that even with a new character it's still Ace Attorney I won't be skipping any other games.
So yes, I'll be doing the Edgeworth Investigations next! I'm excited. Eventually I'll make my way through the 3DS titles and then to Great Ace Attorney too.
Is there a way around the stealth / hiding from the black fog thingy or does it get less as you progress? This is the only thing that held me back playing further. And I was so impressed by everything else in the game. It is a bit sad, I really want to continue playing.
You do get a way to combat them fairly easily later on, but it’s still usually best to avoid them unless they are very dense or blocking your path directly. It does not become less frequent, it gets more frequent, but you can actually engage them
They won't go away, but you will eventually learn and see where they are. Sometimes you'll have to engage them, a lot of the time you can get around them.
They're not in all areas, but you will be able to understand how to deal with them and once you can fight back you can handle them.
I was terrified by them in the beginning and didn't want to have to deal with them, but now I really think they're cool and enjoy taking them down. You really go from helpless and confused to knowledgeable and prepared.
Seconding the movement. Everyone wants at least one feather and a handful of hooves and energy drinks but if you stack up you can literally just fly around the map. It’s even more fun with movement utilities like the commando’s slide, you can launch jump like crazy.
DRG has a whole list of things that just feel good:
Fucking obliterating one grunt with your biggest gun or explosive as you board the drop pod
Going back to rescue your teammate that didn't make it to the drop pod even though it technically barely matters as long as one person makes it back alive
When building liquid morkite pipes that run parallel for a while, lining the support points up
Using a bulk detonator to kill a dreadnought
Mining a crassus detonator gold sphere by drilling all of the surrounding terrain away so that the entire sphere pops at once and collapses in to a neat pile
In general there’s nothing wrong with using a VPN. And in particular, steam doesn’t care that my home network funneled all traffic via work for a while.
I would 100% be buying things on GOG whenever possible – if they had a Linux client.
Because they don’t, the convenience of Steam and Proton integration generally offsets concerns I have about losing access to things if Steam ever goes under. It’s a tradeoff.
At the moment I pretty much only buy games on Steam. GoG has been pretty hostile to Linux over the years, whereas Valve is the only gaming focused company that robustly supports Linux on both a hardware and software level. The money I give to their platform directly supports Linux gaming and everyone directly benefits from this.
Valve is also an exceptionally rare example of a privately owned, not publicly traded company of their size. Gabe Newell himself owns a majority stake and has shown that he is more interested in running a company that can make effective long term decisions than a company that desperately suckles at the teats of short term profits and corporatocracy. As long as this stays true, Valve is in a vastly better position to resist enshittification than most big tech companies out there. Valve doesn’t need to pull a Red Hat unless fundamental things change, and Gabe seems pretty happy to be in a position where he doesn’t need another layer of corporate overlords.
I’d definitely prefer to have DRM free stuff, but Steam is a pretty good compromise at the moment. If Valve ever goes to shit, I’ll just take steps to access the games I own in a way that is independently well supported on Linux. I suspect there will be multiple ways to do so if it ever comes to this. Proton being open source counts for a lot.
The only multiplayer game I really play is Team Fortress 2. I learnt the mechanics over a decade ago and I understand it. My reflexes aren’t amazing, but I “get it”. I can’t be bothered to learn any new multiplayer game mechanics, so when I want to get online and play a shooter I go for TF2.
Coop games are another matter, but yeah, TF2. My desire to play it comes and goes, but it’s always there waiting for me.
Ally is worse than the steam deck in everything unless it’s plugged in and you’re using a keyboard and mouse, at that point you should get a laptop
Emulators also have no issue
The res is lower so it can play higher demanding games, necessary res scales with screen size, a 1 cm screen doesn’t matter if it’s 10 pixels or 10 million but a 200 cm screen you’d want the 10 million
Rivals might compete but they aren’t big enough to handle volume (you might be waiting a long time)
I played but did not get very far into Divinity: Original Sin, mostly because I tried twice to play them co-op, and coordinating adults' schedules is hard. I love how systemic those games are, but the presentation is limited to what you'd expect from an old-school CRPG. Shortly before release, I saw that this game retains all of that creativity while upping the presentation to the level of something like a Mass Effect, which makes it much more appealing. I hear that Ralph of SkillUp had exactly the same reaction to BG3. So, deep systems + finally catching up in production value and presentation.
I’ve played the Divinity games, which are very good CRPGs, but in my opinion, Baldur’s Gate 3 is in another league compared to those. The amount of choices and possibilities the game offers and its sheer vastness are amazing. Add to that the many fully voiced and well directed cutscenes and you have an awesome game that manages to appeal not only to hardcore CRPG fans.
I have a Steam Deck and was considering “upgrading” to something that has more power.
But then I wanted to play Torchlight 2, an action-rpg designed for mouse and keyboard that does not have controller support. I wasn’t even going to try it, but saw that Runic Games had an input profile for it. The left stick controls your character like it supporter controllers, but it’s all using the mouse. The touchpads work for precise targeting. And I’m able to use all 10 skill buttons using modifier keys and adding the back buttons. Plus I was able to easily adapt this to Diablo 3, a non-steam game without controller support.
If you want to be limited to games designed with controllers in mind, go for one of the alternatives. But if you want to be able to play mouse and keyboard games, there’s nothing that competes with the Steam Deck.
How do I find input profiles and how do I install them? Only way I am doing it right now is first to install the game and then looking in the controller settings if there is a community profile.
To be honest I’m not sure how to browse if you haven’t installed the game. If you want to copy from another game you can save the configuration as a template and then import it to the other game.
Because of scheduling conflicts, I wasn’t able to continue my coop playthrough with a friend until today, so I started a solo campaign, and put in about 40 hours last week.
Because I’ve only seen people falling over themselves, talking about how this game is the second coming of Christ, here a few relatively minor issues I have with it.
The camera is terrible. There’s constantly something in the way and the game isn’t smart enough to know that I don’t really want to move to the stalactite thirty meters above me, just because it was in my way in the middle of the screen. Cramped spaces are probably the worst, walls everywhere, and you have to do constant 180s with the camera to see every corner.
I usually don’t mind inventory management, but I hate it in this game. I’m definitely to blame as well, since I just pick up everything, but it’s always such a pain to organize through everything. The sorting options aren’t that good, and sometimes stuff feels completely random. Also, (unless I’m missing something) why can’t you access the inventory of your companions, that aren’t in your party?
Why is the pathing still ass in this game, it’s the third one Larian made in this style. My characters just love walking into traps (that I’ve discovered) or shit on the ground. It’s just really fun to micromanage four characters, just so they can get safely through a few mines or don’t take a 50 cm shortcut through a patch of fire. I think Divinity had at least an option to pause the game, when you found a trap, so you might have a chance to change the course, but this is missing in this game.
Lastly, I wish your companions were more involved, when you have a conversation with someone. I could be deciding the fate of the world with my choices, but Astarion is just T-posing behind me (not literally, but you get what I mean). At least an occasional line when the “X character approves / disapproves” notification pops up would be nice.
I still have a great time and enjoy the game, but some of these things have existed since the D:OS games, so it’s a shame they still aren’t improved.
I definitely agree about your companions chiming in on conversations. Maybe I've just been spoiled by games like Mass Effect and the like, but the lack of input seems like an obvious problem to me.
Even BG2 had more interjections from your party members than BG3 I think, and I get that it was mostly text but still, that was 23 years ago. In BG3 someone sometimes adds a comment at the beginning or end of a conversation, but it seems like they rarely if ever butt in in the middle.
The whole “X Approves/Y Disapproves” definitely feels a little telling, not showing and I wish they would comment on what’s going on instead, even if it was only recycling a handful of general comments from a pool.
Playing through BG2 now, the interjections are rare and don't really budge the flow of the conversation in any direction. It's a very small amount of color to inform you of their personalities.
Oh it was definitely rare that an interjection would actually change the outcome of the dialogues, but that color and flavor you mentioned does a lot to make characters feel more alive. Same goes for the way party members just randomly start conversations when walking around in BG2.
Worth noting I always play with the Gibberlings Fixpack installed. IIRC the vanilla game is really sensitive about party members having to be physically close to the talking NPC to interject into dialogues.
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