Often when we talk about "hype" surrounding a release, it’s in anticipation of shared cultural euphoria more than that of a great gaming experience.
Maybe I'm hijacking the discussion, but also I don't care. That quote is the first line of the article. That's pretty much exactly what I was trying to talk about the last time I commented about BG3 and called all the excitement surrounding it just "hype" and people were crawling out of the bushes to downvote and dunk on me for criticizing their new favorite game. Every time I looked at my message inbox I was making that "wtf" face the guy made when fucking O'Reilly said "tide goes in, tides goes out, you can't explain that."
I didn't insult anyone. I shared a neutral opinion here but all you people just keep going for that cheap dopamine hit of "let's just downvote this guy together so we can feel good about ourselves" instead of actually talking.
Internet points are worthless anyway. I find a bit of mild humor in the fact that everybody downvoting my comments here actually seems illiterate since everything needed to understand what I am trying to say is in that top level comment.
Though really, I know none of you people are engaging me in good faith at all. Why don't you guys go back to Reddit and Twitter?
I loved acts 1 and 2. But, somehow I made it through those without any mention of the names Gortash or Orin, so for them to show up at the end of act 2 and suddenly THIS is the bigger bad beyond ketheric was…weird. and then, the transition into act 3 felt very poorly executed, suddenly Gortash is THE head Duke of all of baldurs gate? Whyls dad is now mind controlled and there was no option to prevent that from happening? Just felt a little railroady after all the branching upon branching of the first two acts
I’m telling this because I assume you have finished the game: Gortash is related to Karlach’s backstory so you can get some hints from before, and Orin is related to Dark Urge’s backstory so yeah, same.
IIRC you also hear about Gortash from Councilor Florrick in the Last Light Inn. She says she’s going to ask him for help against Ketheric.
I also remember reading about Gortash and Orin while rummaging through Ketheric’s things in Moonrise. They definitely were not featured prominently but they were hinted at if you go looking!
You have pictures and visions of the 3 leaders from the goblins. In the ruined town and in the goblin fortress. They are hints for gortash and orin in various other places too.
That’s not an issue, that’s an rpg: the ability to make different choices (informed and uninformed) leads to different experiences and different events each with knockon effects for thr story. It’s only a problem if the game isn’t clever enough to account for all of the different things you’ve done.
There are hints of the cult of Bhaal and Gortash taking over all over acts 1 and 2. I just found a note in act 1 in the entry to the zent basement talking about Gortash. The goblins talk about their 3 leaders, and you quickly understand that they’re not the goblin, the drow and the hobgoblin.
Ketheric was merely the first step, and saving the duke comes in act 3. There are many pathes to save him or not. Really that’s not railroad that’s happening, that’s vilains having more in their bag that you’d hope for.
These are good vilains, and it is a good story. Far better than a story that doesn’t move forward and has its vilains protected by scenarium.
I haven’t played it myself (yet) but apparently Divinity Original Sin 2 was similar and the “Definitive Edition” that came about a year later fixed Act 3. So I hope the same thing happens for BG3.
What part exactly is a spoiler? That you can fight Raphael? Something that anyone can intuit the moment you meet the character. That the game comes in three acts? That the game has an ending?
Basically everything including and past Gortach becoming the Duke. I’m in the beginning of Act 3 and had no idea there was a Raphael fight until your comment.
Talking about plot points in the last act of the game, yes, is going to be a spoiler.
Sorry, I conflated your comment with the reply to yours which is full of spoilers.
I still had no idea that there was a Raphael fight until you brought it up. Anything in Act 3 is pretty much a spoiler, since it only just came out on PS5 and a lot of folks won’t have gotten there yet. Just be a little more vague with the details if you don’t want to use tags. Not everyone has finished the game yet.
Larian is largely getting a free pass for an unoptimized mess in act 2 and 3. Pent up demand for a good CRPG has made a lot of gold completely ignore the very obvious issues.
Wasn’t this a thing forever ago and didn’t Nintendo just laugh at them? They just had a super successful console and now have more successful IPs than ever, they would be straight up insane to sell a business that runs this good.
Microsoft’s market cap is $2.44 trillion, with $111 billion worth of cash (not equity, cash) in the bank.
Microsoft is 43 times bigger than Nintendo. They can pay for Nintendo with only cash, if they desire.
These trillion-dollar players are an order of magnitude larger than anyone around them. They can do what they want, same as how Apple ($2.8 trillion) can easily buy Disney ($150.5 billion) if they wished.
This isn’t an exact science, but you can use market cap to ballpark these things and get an idea of how much an acquisition would cost. For example, Twitter had a market cap of $31 billion in August 2022, and Elon bought it a few months later for $44 billion. That’s a 1.4x increase, so applying the same math buying all of Disney would “only” cost about $214 billion - which both Apple and Microsoft (and Google) could do. Nintendo would cost about $80 billion, which Microsoft could do without even taking out a loan.
The issue isn’t necessarily the price; it’s the regulators.
im getting really tired of all of these MS acquisitions. I know the nintendo one is very unlikely, but i would be pissed as fuck to see valve swallowed up by this terrifying beast.
Valve isn’t any more likely than Nintendo, given you can’t buy shares because there are none, and it’s a money printing machine that would have a truly absurd value.
Holy monopoly if that happened. Also imagine the damage to Japanese culture if one of their treasured companies was owned by a company in another country.
Xbox games are on PC. Playstation games are on PC. Nintendo is Nintendo. If Microsoft ever bought out Nintendo, Nintendo would disappear, effectively making consoles obsolete. People will still buy consoles, but they would be pissing away their money.
There will always be a market for consoles. If you buy a game, know for a fact that it works. If you have a PC, it can start to be obsolete, or your graphics card might not be supported, or your OS might not be patched, or…
There will also always be a market for PCs, because you can do things cheaper, and/or better than consoles.
While I don’t expect every single Xbox and PS owner to drop their preferred console in favor of PC, even though they should, those issues you listed as benefits of console over PC aren’t real. Consoles become obsolete just like PC hardware, your graphics card might not be supported is the same situation, your OS might not be patched is not an issue whatsoever. It’s just a shame that console owners think those things are issues.
PCs slowly drift out of support for games. Over the years, some, but not all, of AAA games just don’t work on your computer. Consoles have static generations where things either work or they don’t. This is the pro and the con of the PC.
You simply do not have that problem with a PS4, it works for PS4 games. If you want a game that is only released for the PS5, then you buy a PS5.
PCs over the years are home to new operating systems that kill off older standards that run games (dos support, 64 bit architecture, etc) but that happens once every 20 years. With console gaming, it happens once every 6 years. If I want to play Half-Life 2, I can. If I had a PS5 and wanted to play GTA San Andreas, I couldn’t.
Xbox has backwards compatibility for games all the way back to the original Xbox. Not only is there backwards compatibility, but pretty much all those old games also get HDR support and some of the big ones like Red Dead Redemption and Mass Effect also got 4k textures for 10+ year old games, free of charge (don’t have to buy a remaster, etc)
Completely ignoring that collectors preserve computer games the same way they do consoles, and just preserve a computer with the necessary requirements.
And both those computers and those consoles are subject to deterioration which has been a large argument towards backing up games through emulation. While you may never want to good luck finding a working Atari Jaguar CD, and that's just one of the easier examples.
I’ve never had a game stop working, ports to PC occasionally break but I’ve never had one just quit being compatible. Hell I can boot up early 90’s games on my windows 10 machine right now right alongside early 2000’s, 2010’s, etc.
To do the same on console you’d have to have like five or six different console gens and their discs just laying around all over the place.
I have a PC where I could (and regularly) play almost every single game ever made, from Pong to Elden Rings. If I bought a PS5 today, I could only play games exclusively made for PS5 (not many, mind you), this also means a lot of PS1, through PS4, games that have never been ported are unplayable on a PS5. On my PC however, I can comfortably play almost every single game from every single generation of PlayStation up to PS4. I can also play every single AAA game ever released in history. Something that the PS5 cannot do, it only plays PS5 games.
I primarily play PS consoles. I prefer the controller. With today’s technology and cross-platform play, I can still keep playing the controller that I like with friends I have developed over the years.
PC will be my way forward as I transition past this generation. I’ve been on Sony since the PS1 (I’m old). Plus, at least I can play the older PS1/2/3 titles on PC without a SUBSCRIPTION.
Nah man PC building is too much, I wanted to do it in my new place so I could run some emulators in my living room, thought I’d finally use Steam etc. but the prices to build are painful. I’ll take a console and go without retro gaming for a bit.
I’d love if they bought Nintendo, it would make me buy Xbox and whatever service I could use on a PC and Xbox. Their psn.
Nintendo suck. Their games get delayed, their consoles are mid. They literally only sell because of Mario and Zelda. That’s why they absolutely drip feed that content. The only reason we’re getting a new Mario Bros is because they’ll announce a new console next year and they can re release it. And charge full whack because they have a captive market.
At least if Microsoft had Mario we’d get regular releases of new Mario games. That’s all I want Nintendo for.
Their games get delayed because they actually finish them before release. They’re one of the last AAA publishers who still believe in quality control. This is a very bad take.
It’s not a very bad take, Sony does the same thing, we have 2 fully sledged open world Horizon Games and 2 incredible God of War games released in the time it’s taken Nintendo to announce a Mario Bros platformer for their flagship device. Literally the most Nintendo game ever and they couldn’t get one that wasn’t a port on to the Switch
Odd examples to pick, Horizon Forbidden West and God of War Ragnarok were both delayed and the first original Mario platformer for the switch came out in 2017 (Odyssey - if you think 3d Mario games aren’t platformers you haven’t played them). Nintendo has also been releasing tons of other games as well so it’s not like they’ve been doing nothing.
Also, to be fair, When you have a platform with 10 times the total sales (Wii U sold ~14m, the switch is at ~130m right now) it makes sense to port over the good games from the console no one owned. Mario Kart 8 deluxe, a game originally from the Wii U, has sold ~55m copies, which is about 4 times what the entire Wii U console sold. There’s a reason they kept doing it, and it’s because most of the Wii U titles were good games that people will enjoy which released on a dead platform.
If you’re going to criticize Nintendo, criticize actually valid things like the scummy price increases on the ports (not just the ports’ existence), the poor online system that costs up to $50 per year per account, and a legal team who goes after anyone doing anything that isn’t directly playing the game. To be clear, a Microsoft buyout probably wouldn’t change any of those things because it’s making them money. Look no further than American companies like Disney largely using the same strategies Nintendo does. Microsoft is no different.
To be fair, the Switch has Super Mario Maker 2, which is the definitive 2D Mario platformer. The only real advantage that Wonder has is that the game isn’t limited by the items in the game, and the trust that the levels are curated to be good. Otherwise Mario Maker is a superior product. It honestly feels weird to see Wonder being released at all.
Yeah I’m not sure if Wonder will be good, I mean probably because they have a high standard and all but still. I do think Maker is different in that the world design is unimportant, secret levels and Easter eggs etc. and there is zero curation. I actually gave up after a bit because I kept just getting ridiculous levels that were boring.
The gaming world’s response to MS buying Nintendo would make the whole Unity debacle look like a mild inconvenience in comparison… and that’s what I predict for the US, not to mention how Japan would respond to this.
This was in 2020 they were thinking this, and it doesn’t seem like Nintendo was interested at all.
Microsoft offered to buy them back in 2000 or something, and got laughed at. Nintendo is not looking to be bought out. Nintendo does things its way and stays in its lane.
I honestly don't have the faintest belief that Nintendo would ever take the deal. Sure they don't diversify their platforms, but they also have the best cut from their platform.
Also, Firefox supports ublock Origin on Android (no clue about iThings, but probably everything is reskinned safari in apple land).
Pi-hole is also an option and while it isn’t perfect, it can block many ads at the network/dns level for devices that can’t support adblockers. prepares shotgun while eyeing new smart tv suspiciously
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