I’m trying to see some stuff in BG1 and 2 that I missed as I take another lap through the entire series, and I remember BG1 being a fairly easy, straight-forward game, but now that I’m replaying it, I remember that’s only the tail end of the game. Early in the game, when you’re stuck at level 1 for hours, lots of attacks just one-shot you, and it takes so long to get level 2. In Baldur’s Gate 3, you’re barely out of the tutorial area before you get level 2, so you just don’t have that problem with low HP.
I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of 2e, but I think first level HP might be set in stone by class, and the Enhanced Editions of BG1 and 2 give you a max HP per level option, which doesn’t really help at level 1. Dynaheir keeps getting smoked with her mere 6HP, and she can’t get to level 2 fast enough.
If you’re revisiting BG1 via the Enhanced Edition it’s actually been changed a lot from the original game. One of the biggest differences is that summoning spells don’t scale in the number of minions you get the way they did in the original. I remember summoning great big walls of skeletons with Animate Dead and just having my entire party pelt the enemy with slings and arrows from relative safety. Can’t do that anymore!
Pelting the enemy with slings and arrows still works, but now and then they’ll still target me at range and land a hit. I don’t have a summoner in my party either, so I doubt I’d see a difference, especially at level 1.
I actually prefer walls of text these days. I find myself too impatient to sit through long, voice-acted diatribes. I can read 10 times faster than the voice actor can speak, so I just end up turning on subtitles and skipping most of the voice acting anyway.
I also just find that voice acting tends to compromise the amount of writing. They just won’t have the VA read a wall of text and instead they’ll cut it right down, removing tons of nuance. Voice also similarly compromises the amount of dialogue options available to the character. I have yet to see a voice acted game with the sheer breadth and depth of dialogue option choices as games like Planescape Torment or Fallout 2.
While I agree with you on how mediocre voice acting drags down most games, BG3 is one of the very few where the voice acting elevated the dialogue for me and the dialogue felt a lot less rambling than in NWN and other similar games. In BG3 the player character dialogue options are pretty robust, sometimes having six or more options to choose from, since the character doesn’t speak. I haven’t played Planescape Torment or Fallout 2 to compare, so I’ll take your word on them.
On a side note, BG3 was one of the games where the dialogue choices do matter. The worst are games where there are only a few poorly described choices and they have zero impact on what happens after! While I live Battletech (2019) the dialoge choices were completely pointless other than microfosing information. They would have been better off just having the NPCs banter after a single choice.
Personal preferences of course, which is why I love how many games there are to choose from.
I don’t normally like that kind of character but he really grew on me fast. Astarian, Gale, and Karlach are my absolute favorites but the cast as a whole is solid.
That’s what I am glad they included enough for personal preference and included the ability to respec them so they weren’t locked into their starting classes.
While I didn’t like his class much, it was his personality that really got me. I saw he can become a literal god in some endings. Sure didn’t happen in mine!
I tried, but I just can’t go back and play Oblivion after playing Skyrim with all the quality of life mods. I’m waiting on the Skyblivion release to revisit it.
I’d say TES as well, but with Oblivion > Morrowind. I had trouble getting used to it being more toward the RPG side than Action. But it’s rewarding if you see it through.
I couldn’t ever get into oblivion since skyrim was my first Bethesda game and a lot of oblivion felt like (to me) slightly janky skyrim. I was able to get into morroeind though because it was just so diffrent.
And I’m from the other end where I came from Morrowind and couldn’t get into Oblivion because it was so generic compared to the earlier game. Monsters leveling to the character made it so safe.
I remember when the monster that was spawning everywhere changed type I knew I had leveled up.
I actually did. After waiting 10 years for a new TES game after Skyrim, I got bored and installed Morrowblivion. Played that all the way through. Then I played Oblivion with some visual mods. It was still quite fun, though I didn’t do a full play through. If I hadn’t already done a full play through, then Oblivion would still be an awesome game after playing Skyrim.
If I go with unique experiences as a criteria just to mix it up a bit I have a few
Playing xwing with a f16 flight stick is really fun and one of my first gaming experiences outside of nes and arcades. Just really fun fast paced fighter combat. A close second would be everspace or Chorus on a controller.
Playing one of the big multiplayer arcade cabinets like Simpsons or X-Men was the original couch co-op with whoever was at the arcade not playing pinball or pool.
Beating your first boss in a dark souls or elden ring game feels like a big accomplishment, sometimes even more than the later ones when your character gets more powerful.
Going from small groups with friends to raids in an MMORPG feels like starting a whole new game, EverQuest and wow were big ones for me.
Playing one of the big multiplayer arcade cabinets like Simpsons or X-Men was the original couch co-op with whoever was at the arcade not playing pinball or pool.
I bought the 4-Player co-op X-Men arcade cabinet from Arcade1up and it’s been a blast playing it all the way through with my son.
That sounds like an awesome experience, I have a friend with a mame cab in their basement that I would probably spend too much time on it if I had one. I went with the cheaper option for mame and arcade legacy using a raspberry pi running batocera, but for some games it’s just not the same without the arcade controls.
I’m not sure there can ever even be a “best game ever”, but in any case mine is Grand Theft Auto 3.
Picture the scene. You’ve got your shiny PlayStation 2. You’ve got a bunch of games, but honestly, a lot of it could have been done on the PS1 with worse graphics.
And this bad boy drops, and never stops surprising you with all the absolute chaos you can cause. Not much of a story to go on, but the sheer scale of it was amazing. A whole city of driving, slightly wonky shooting and even flying (a bit). It was a game that just felt like the hardware was designed specifically for that.
We were no longer just playing games. We were living in the future. And we’ve never gone back.
I’m going to contradict myself a little, because Vice City is the better game. It’s got an actual story, a great voice cast, helicopter gunships, and the finest soundtrack of any game ever made.
But it was very much built on GTA3. The mind was already blown. It wasn’t going to happen again.
When it dropped my folks were on a trip and I was staying with my grandma. Rolled into circuit city to get a copy and then dick behind the counter told me I wasn’t old enough (12) to play the game. My grandma had my back though and told him off. Good times.
If you play enough, pure random chance will eventually get you a game that feels like a fair fight.
But quite often, video game matchmaking systems will fail to accurately estimate player skill correctly, creating teams where one will utterly demolish the other.
Or, as a counter-point, perhaps they are nearly evenly matched, and the slight difference in skill between them is disproportionately reflected in the scoreboard. I’ve seen this happen in fighting games, but admittedly, I haven’t really played a matchmade team game in a long, long time, because they kind of stopped making those games for me.
Not so much a counterpoint. It’s actually a factor that I’ve thought about too, and I think it adds to the problem.
In one of my other comments here, I talk about how it’s an impossible problem, and how I’d solve it by not trying to find a bunch of players of the exact same skill level to begin with. You go for roughly even teams, not precisely even players.
If you have 10 people at almost the same skill level, the tiniest difference in ability gets massively magnified, because that’s the only deciding factor that’s left.
But maybe the meme loses its humor by having less of that kernel of truth that a good joke relies on? Like, if you don’t think the matchmaking is bullshit, it’s not going to be funny, you know?
The only kernel of truth required is that most people have experienced completely unfair matches, and attribute that to the shortcomings of modern skill-based matchmaking.
What exactly the mechanics behind those shortcomings are, matters little.
You also have the team synergy as a factor in a team based game. Even if the match is perfectly balanced if people have any grief with each other in the same team(bad previous interaction, bias against certain characters, the good old racism/bigotry against other player or just difference in playstyles) the match is doomed.
The same player isn’t going to perform identically every session, and accounting for every possible weapon or character/class they might play, potential synergies with teammates, or potential advantages/disadvantages in matchups against any given opponents…
It all makes for a literally infinite number of variables, all of which must be accounted for.
The correct way to get interesting matches, imo, is to make it semi-random, and not try to have all the players on both teams be exactly the same skill level. Rather, put players on both teams from a range of estimated skill levels. This way both teams have weaker links for the other team to potentially exploit, and both teams have strong players which will try to stop that.
Instead, the system should just enforce common sense stuff, like not pitting someone who is literally playing for the very first time, against a team with someone who is 2000 hours in, and hence might straight up deny the new guy a chance to play at all.
I should know. I literally wrote THE team balancer for titanfall 2 community servers. For a time it even used the Tone online database of player stats, to know how to balance players that had never played on a given server before.
I was genuinely shocked how good the resulting games were. All I did was take the completely random players that decide to join a server, and simply figured out a slightly smarter way than other balancer scripts at the time, to divide them into two teams that are close enough to equal.
I’ve personally gotten a lot out of all the AI enhanced graphics technologies, and pretty much consider these applications the absolute perfect use case for the AI we have today. Yes, they shouldn’t be a substitute for optimisation, but overcorrecting the other way and attempting to claim that DLSS is garbage that ruins everything and looks like shit is also bad (and untrue).
Even frame generation has its uses, as long as you don’t play something fast paced where there is a lot of camera movement and/or you’ll feel the added input lag too much.
A special shout-out to the redheaded stepchild of the family too: DLDSR is a fantastic technology and once you’ve tried it you’ll never want to go back.
While I really enjoyed Alyx, it’s very much a game built around it’s own limitations. It’s more of a survival horror game in a way, because of the limits on ammo and deliberately mechanical reloading. There’s no melee at all, so once you’re out of bullets you’re done for.
For all the roughness of Half Life 2 VR Mod, I find myself enjoying it more because it has fewer limitations imposed by the move to VR. It doesn’t always work (and the vehicle sections in particular really push it), but as a mod of a 20 year old game, it’s really good.
Most of the games I play are so niche that 'matchmaking' simply consists of whoever's available. Or sometimes it even requires pinging people on Discord.
Yup, either this or the matchmaking is in find-the-most-toxic-people-available mode. I almost stopped playing online to be honest, I’d rather play couch co-op or even a good solo game.
Personally, I think it’s about how impresonal modern matchmaking is.
You’re only ever playing against “enemies” and “enemies” should be “hated with the hot passion of a burning sun”. And if you lose, you’re never at fault, because your teammates sabotaged you!
People don’t have to maintain cordial relationships, because they will never meet their teammates or opponents again.
Compare that to stuff that works using servers, where each team is made up of the same pool of people from one round to the next. People actually make friends with each other, friend or foe, and have more fun as a result.
Yeah, you unlocked many memories of mine. I played CS back in 90s, train with bots and learn map layouts at home, then play team vs team in a club. A bit later with ADSL started to play online and it was still kinda cool. When life fast forwarded me to Quake Arena and R6S it was very fun but I never ever made any online friend. Maybe a couple of people in R6 with whom I played a few times but even then the toxicity outweighed the team play fun.
Yeah, taht is more or less where I come down. “AI” upscaling is spectacular. Frame gen is much more hit or miss
The main problem is that, as with most things, people are stupid. They don’t understand that an outlet like Digital Foundry or even Gamers Nexus are going to be harsh on upscaling/frame gen because it actively makes it hard for them to give you guidance on what performance you can expect. So “This is horrible for benchmarking” becomes “This is horrible”
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