I'm debating whether to get "Total War: Warhammer" (just part 1) and/or "V rising". They both appeal to me but I'm a frugal/patient gamer and the deals don't appear to be that special
TW:Warhammer 1 has the added bonus that if you like TW:W games and in a few years buy the second Warhammer you can ‘merge’ the campaigns in to a bigger campaign called Mortal Empires. You can play all the factions (and DLCs you own) from both games in that campaign. Same applies to Warhammer 3
Loaded up Vampyr after ditching it a while ago. Remembered why I didn’t enjoy it and ditched it again.
Took a break, listened to some podcasts, saw Jusant finally got an accessibility update which makes it actually playable for me, so going to spend some more time with that, since I can actually enjoy it without destroying my wrists now.
IMHO, some of the beauty of Baldur’s Gate 3 lies in the ability to start playing immediately, and discover the mechanics little by little as you go. Instead of an impenetrable wall of complexity, it gives you a world to explore while learning something new every time you play.
For me, it’s a combination of “just jump in and wing it” and building on top of working knowledge from previous similar games. But I’m very much a “learning while doing” person, so if I tried to research how to play a game first, it’s not like the knowledge would sink in. I build up a working knowledge by jumping in and trying stuff out, and a lot of knowledge has at least some cross-compatibility between games of the same genre, even if the game mechanics are a bit different. As I play a lot of games with my partner, we’re often both learning a new game at the same time, and you’d be amazed how often we’ll have a conversation that can be summarised as “I’ve discovered how to do X. It’s like Y from game Z, except you do A instead of B.”
When the game allows for it, I always play on the easiest difficulty setting while I’m learning, as that makes the game more forgiving of mistakes. There’s no shame in playing on easy mode, even for serious gamers. :)
I’ve gotten back into Minecraft lately, after not playing it at all for at least a year. I finally reached a couple major milestones, like defeating the Enderdragon and obtaining netherite scraps (still don’t have any netherite equipment yet–obtaining smithing templates is a real pain). Playing on a couple SMP servers has also motivated me to put actual effort into beautifying my bases, rather than just living in a tiny wooden shack I made on day one or two.
Complexity gives the games depth which allows them to hold interest. You can try something, figure out how to play the game that way, and then go and start a new character to figure out how to play the game another utilizing the knowledge you've gained from prior experimentation.
Some of the inventory management can be annoying at times, but again it's an opportunity to employ knowledge as a means to identify the items that aren't particularly useful to one playstyle and could be useful under another set of abilities/attributes or some set of combinations allowed by the game.
A game that only has one right answer quickly becomes a boring precision button pushing simulator to people who prefer more complexity, variety and depth in their gaming experience.
Not that one preference or the other is inherently correct, but hopefully it can be understood that different people want different things from their games.
Insanely deep rpgs are a bit of an issue for me as well. And I generally do love rpg games, but I feel like the good ones should ease you into decisions a bit better than dropping you into a character creator.
Baldur's Gate 3 has a lot of mechanics to it, but it does a really good job of onboarding you in most of them. On character creation, or on leveling up, or anything where the game asks you to make a decision about how you've built out your character, there are tooltips to explain the mechanics. Mouse over it if you're on mouse + keyboard, or press Select or click in the right analog stick if you're on controller (it should tell you which one). It will explain everything you need to know there. But if you'd like to breeze past the character creation screen, you can choose an origin character, which are pre-made, or you can stick to basics. Choose a Fighter with 17 Strength if you want to do melee stuff. Choose a Rogue with 17 Dexterity if you want to do ranged attacks like bows. Choose a Wizard with 17 Intelligence if you want to do magic; magic uses "spell slots" instead of mana or MP, which basically just means you can use a spell that many times. When you get the option to choose a "feat", which is approximately every 4 levels, upgrade that primary attribute until it hits 20, which is the max. Whatever that attribute is (the ones I just listed for those classes), the higher it is, the more likely you are to hit with your attacks.
The gist of it is, when you find a complicated game, you can often just engage with it on the most basic level, and then once you master that basic level, you build on it a little bit at a time. BG3 is a long game, so you've got plenty of opportunity to master what you know before building on it; rinse, repeat. I've applied this same methodology to fighting games plenty of times as well, which many people would consider to be a difficult genre to learn. We got rid of game manuals a long time ago, so complex games have had to get better and better at teaching you how to play while you're playing.
I had the same overwhelming reaction to BG3's creation menu, but honestly, the game goes the mile to let you change everything later if you feel like it and honestly there's a "go with the flow" vibe by the fact that very few cases have instant game over conclusions.
I would say though that combat tends to be a measure twice and cut once because there's often an easy way of dealing with it, being either using the environment or exploring first another location that might give an advantage.
I love both Baldur's Gate III and fighting games but disagree. I think both are woefully inadequate at explaining their rules to players. Larian games need to not only make BGIII's rules as clear as a rulebook but also make tactics and strategies plain and clear to the user. Otherwise, it is very easy to fall back on decades of video game expectation only to realize your expectations are wrong. I had a co-op game of BG3 with a friend. My friend couldn't understand why he had to position his units anywhere. Didn't understand why inventory wasn't just immediately being teleported to a shared infinite item box. Didn't understand the basic mechanics of D&D combat (which even then, Larian changes to various degrees) Didn't understand why decisions had any meaningful consequences. Didn't even understand what he was supposed to be doing narratively despite there being a quest log and having us recap the story up to the point we were.
While fighting game tutorials have gotten better, I still have yet to experience one that explains very basic things that the FGC takes for granted. Things like health bars being identical physical lengths but representing different numerical values. Things like "waiting for your turn." Things like meter management.
Complex games are great. But complex games need to recognize that they have a larger duty to teach than simpler games. I think video game design needs to take a page out of tabletop game design and provide some analog to the tabletop rulebook: complete with not just rules but detailed explanations, sidebars, and examples of play.
I agree that fighting games haven't made it where they need to be yet. In fact, I've only ever found one that explains how to defend against a command grab, which is a very basic thing they should be doing better. As you agreed though, they're getting a lot closer, with a lot of intermediate steps along the way.
I disagree that the teaching tools are insufficient if they never teach you about something like positioning in Baldur's Gate. For one, you can observe that your opponents are doing so, and you can observe which things that makes easier or harder for you and why, like now it's harder for your melee character to hit them when they run away. That's way better than someone telling you about it, and it's better onboarding to not info dump all the rules at once.
While I agree in principle, I think a game needs to make it clear when something isn't window dressing. My buddy just couldn't understand why positioning mattered. It never clicked for him because he figured RPG combat was just "swing a sword/shoot an arrow until the other guy dies". We had to explain it to him. He also never thought to explore the UI for information as to why his movement was reduced or why he was disadvantaged, despite having icons next to his character with tooltips explaining what status effects were in play. While it may seem obvious that things are happening on screen and one could deduce that something meaningful is occuring, I think if I'm honest, I can't blame my buddy for not understanding. I've fallen victim to it myself.
Sometimes we just don't, on our own, interpret information as being meaningful. Consequently, we unduly discard it before making decisions. I think it's important to be told in one form or the other when something matters. Whether that's tutorialization or otherwise, I think it's important. I think the more complicated the game, the easier it is for a player to fall in to a trap of discarding important information and subsequently becoming frustrated.
I think even something as simple as the game making its expectations clear from the start could go a long way. Something as simple as conveying to the user that they are expected to be attentive as they play.
This line strikes me as curious. Were you playing co-op together for his first time through? There are a lot of tutorials in the early game that explain so much of this stuff that you have to explicitly dismiss that they're hard to miss...unless you're in a discord call with some friends. And did you have to explain it to him, or was that just the first opportunity he had to raise the question, and you answered right away without him having time to figure it out himself? Did he ask you because he found the game difficult, or did you just tell him without him even asking because you observed that he wasn't using his movement? The opening moments of the game actually require you to use your movement in turn based combat in order to continue, and you can observe which enemies can reach you or not as you approach your objective.
If your friend really had this hard of a time learning that without trying to see how to overcome the challenge by just doing anything else besides what didn't work, it sounds like the type of person that Sony gets for their play tests that tells them they need to give an answer to a puzzle after looking at it for only a few seconds. I don't know that you can onboard that person without frustrating everyone else, other than easy mode, which BG3 does have, and it tells you what kinds of expectations it has of you on that screen.
And did you have to explain it to him, or was that just the first opportunity he had to raise the question, and you answered right away without him having time to figure it out himself?
I suppose it was a bit of both.
It was three of us playing. I had finished the game already by the time we started. At first, we left it to him to explore the systems on his own. He got frustrated with that and would complain that we weren't telling him what to do. So, we gradually explained more and more until we just started making decisions on our own. He was still frustrated. For example, late in to Act I, he would continue to throw his cleric in to the middle of battle as a melee fighter and die. Shortly after that, we all decided to stop playing.
There are a lot of tutorials in the early game that explain so much of this stuff that you have to explicitly dismiss that they're hard to miss.
I must have missed them, then. I don't recall any tutorials explaining anything beyond the cursory "you have to be in range to attack" or "potions heal HP" type of things. In fact, I loaded up my save and perused the tutorials again. The tutorial titled "Combat" simply tells you that there's an initiative roll, combatants are listed at the top of the screen, and during a turn, a character may take an action, bonus action, and move. It's entirely unhelpful. It may as well be a fighting game tutorial which says, "use punches and kicks to defeat your opponent."
The opening moments of the game actually require you to use your movement in turn based combat in order to continue, and you can observe which enemies can reach you or not as you approach your objective.
I got through it by just running past most everyone. Sure, you can clearly see you have to move and that you have actions to take but nothing else is explained beyond that. I think that opening sequence is a great example of the lack of explanations in the game. My buddy thought he had to kill absolutely everyone on the nautiloid. We tried twice before telling him that you can continue moving past enemies. The thought never occured to him. I can't blame him, either. All you're told is that you have to connect the transponder in a certain amount of turns and narratively, there's a sense of urgency. Nothing tells you that you don't have to kill everything on the screen. That might seem painfully obvious but that's my point: things obvious to one person are not obvious to another. That doesn't make someone stupid, either. They just have different experiences and different expectations.
Nothing in the game explains that encounters are not immutable. Nothing in the game, as far as I can remember, explains the value of environmental elements and how to leverage them in combat. Nothing explains the tactical value of oil or water on the ground. Nothing explains the concept of crowd control at all. Nothing explains how to keep backline party members safe. This is all left for the player to discover.
I've been playing Larian games for a long time and I don't remember a single one of BGIII, DOS2, or DOS ever explaining these concepts. If you walk in to these games without the understanding that you are expected to be observant and play around with the game mechanics, you will have a bad time. There are innumerable posts on the Web by people frustrated with the game because they don't know what to do. My buddy is not an isolated example. People think differently.
My buddy tried fighting in melee combat as a low-level cleric. That might be a totally valid thing to do in something like Final Fantasy. My buddy thought he had to kill every enemy on the nautiloid. Maybe that's just what you do in something like Diablo. Hell, I just finished a dungeon in Star Ocean which required exactly that. (It even told me upfront that would be the expectation of the dungeon) We are taught things which influence our decision making process. Without being told otherwise, it can be hard to understand exactly what is being asked of us as players as we try to reconcile those expections with our experiences.
My buddy didn't need to be told what to do. What he needed to be told is what he can do and why he might want to do those things. In that, Larian failed him and, in my opinion as an adoring fan of their games, they have a habit of doing so.
I don't think you actually let your friend fail and try to figure out how to not fail, and I don't think it makes the game better when you're so afraid of letting the player fail and apply what they've learned that there aren't actually any decisions to make, like those Sony examples (God of War and Horizon's latest entries, to be specific, were the ones that caught flak for this). That's where the fun comes from.
I don't recall any tutorials explaining anything beyond the cursory "you have to be in range to attack"
And that's all you need to know in order to determine that positioning matters. They also explain opportunity attacks.
The tutorial titled "Combat" simply tells you that there's an initiative roll, combatants are listed at the top of the screen, and during a turn, a character may take an action, bonus action, and move.
Which are a few of the things you said your friend was unaware of, despite the fact that several of these things are reiterated on most of the cards for your available actions during combat.
I've been playing Larian games for a long time and I don't remember a single one of BGIII, DOS2, or DOS ever explaining these concepts.
Me neither, but even in my brief time with DOS1, I don't recall needing to be told either. I just somehow found out that poison clouds can be set on fire, and very quickly.
This is not an insult to your friend, but just because he falls into the group that didn't catch on immediately, I don't think that's indicative that the game is bad at teaching you how to play it. The Nautiloid highlights exactly where you have to go and how many turns you have to do it. If you let him fail once and try again, presumably, he'd realize that what he was doing wasn't working and notice that giant UI element telling him how many turns he had to get to his objective.
Games like Baldur’s Gate assume you have at least some DnD experience. I remember playing Neverwinter Nights for the first time long ago and being really glad I played one session of DnD before it.
Oh wow, okay, good to know. Well my brother has agreed to play the co-op with me and help me out. Maybe I’ll learn to love it. Just not sure I want to 😂
I'm not so sure. I've not played the first two to be able to measure between them, but I do recall thinking that if I hadn't been so into watching videos of other peoples' dnd campaigns, I would be so helplessly far out of my depth.
As it was, I was already struggling a little bit with which class was best for my likely playstyle. Who can use what armor, why, and what happens when they don't. What skills go with what stats. The general info they don't have a need to go over when you're not the one at the table.
Those aren't things OP would know enough about to even know they don't know, so I'm glad they have someone helping them. I don't consider myself anything remotely resembling intelligent and they're starting out with less. For being easily one of the best things I've played in years, it would feel impossibly daunting for a noob
I'm no D&D expert myself. I got through those other two BG games with a lot of frustration (and "narrative"/god mode for the last quarter of BG2), and pretty much the only things I didn't understand just from reading tooltips in BG3 were the numbers governing saving throw DCs and the to hit chance with certain spells.
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