I'm skeptical of any article like this on its face. The whole beauty of a well done RPG, especially a CRPG, is that you get choices on how to build your character and how you handle encounters and can be successful with many of them.
If bard is the most fun for you, awesome. If it's "objectively better", the game is flawed.
Arguably, that’s the whole point. I never played the original Fallout thinking I could play every option. I’ve seen people complaining about “you have to use savescumming or you miss half the dialogue.” No, that’s called “replayability” so when you go back and try as a different type of character, there will be paths you’ll be locked out of, but there will also be paths that were previously closed now open.
that's something I've noticed about bg3 (only 1-2h in) vs the old ones and even ps:torment.
in most of those you can continue the dialog and usually circle back to the other choices.
in bg3 its seems much more like, you say one option you're stuck with it - which seems much better.
i'll be interested to see on the replay - but i guess itll be up to me to play it differently.
Bg3 makes you feel like your choices matter. I havnt progressed very far (10 hours in and mostly exploring) and there have been points in dialog or exploring the open world when I pass a “point of no return”. This is where I can tell there will be a consequence (good or bad) to my choices, but perhaps it’s not immediately seen. I havnt had most of these choices pay off yet, but it builds anticipation and makes me want to see how this will play out and wonder if it will come up further down the line when I least expect.
That’s actually my biggest criticism of D&D. Bards are better choices than rogues or fighters or wizards. Same goes with clerics or druids. sprinkle on a bit of paladin, a couple feats, and some magic gauntlets, and they can invalidate whole swathes of staple fantasy archetypes entirely.
if by better you mean, more fun, i think that's slightly up to you.
you can have just as much fun with a more constrained character who keeps losing dice rolls - it might be harder work though.
no, i mean more empowered to interact with the game world. They have more agency in more arenas of play. You can play a goober of any class and have fun, i agree, but a goober who picks a “better” class will be able to create more comedies of errors beyond “Player fails to hit thing with a big stick”.
That's the issue with how combat oriented D&D is. While there is a wide assortment of abilities between classes and their roles in combat, a lot of non-combat situations are reduced to just roling high on a skill check, not many choices and approaches to be made. There might be the odd utility spell, but even that isn't a choice for martial classes. Because of that, Bards dominate non-combat encounters, with Jack of all Trades and Expertise.
It’s not a problem for a videogame, but D&D5e (actually most D&D editions) is not a balanced game at all. In fact the only RPG that I’ve played and would call balanced is Pathfinder 2e.
So I was not expecting Baldur’s Gate to be balanced at all given it’s based on D&D5e.
Bards are objectively the best if you want the full breadth of options to move the story around. If you want to kick ass in combat or sling more spells, other classes are better at those aspects of the game, but Bards are going to give you a lot more to play with in terms of the RP.
Not spoiling anything either, but you can always try bard and change your class later, as there is a mechanic in the game for that.
I had been planning to play as a bard (I’m normally a rogue in RPGs, but we’ve got one in the party), then watched part of a Let’s Play where someone did, and the sight of the bard pulling out a violin in the middle of a battle was so ridiculous I immediately dismissed the idea because I knew I went be able to take my character seriously 🤣
I just finished downloading it and am playing as a ranger, and I’m not quite far into it enough to see how I like it, but I picked it because another Let’s Play I watched (I watched the first hour of several to see what it was like before I decided to get it) played as a ranger and it seemed interesting.
Maybe next playthrough I’ll give bard a go, just because I know they’re a good class.
Right? Ranger is probably at the bottom of my list just cause in 5e (as has been noted everywhere else), it seems to lack its own identity. If you’re familiar with those rules, do you feel like BG3 does anything to make the Ranger more worthwhile than the tabletop version?
This is my first entry into anything D&D / 5e honestly and the lack of identity kind of drew me to the ranger, I wanted to go for a melee front fighter but the barbarian and warrior trees seemed a bit too focused
Beast master ranger with the heavy armour proficiency ended up being the “do anything” class when I swapped between a couple
Thing with bard is you do not get a bard companion at least in the beginning (I have only played so far into it). You get a cleric, thief, fighter, and wizard pretty early. Granted you can respec anyone to whatever you want but bardic inspiration combined with guidance from the cleric is pretty nice for the various non combat rolls and then it gives you two sources of healing word and bardic inspiration is pretty nice in combat as well. The biggest annoyance factor is the bard can't inspire themselves.
Two roll buffs and healing word is tempting. Good to know you get a thief early, although there’s also the question of whether to do one of the origin characters or not…
Honestly, better to pirate the game because ZA/UM fucked over the original devs and now they don’t get any money from the game’s sales - and it ruined any potential for a sequel.
I don't normally do this, and I'll go do some searching of my own, but any chance for a tldw on the video? What's the background? 2.5 hours is a bit much and the intro was sort of wandering and more or less.just repeated that yes, the game was stolen from them.
I can understand why fantasy settings are pretty stale, not just in games but in a variety of other media as well. Fantasy can be complex, and using old, familiar tropes (elves are haughty and love nature, dwarves are stubborn and love gold, humans are the world’s jack-of-all-trades) lowers the barrier to entry, which is really important when you want something to be easily marketable to as large an audience as possible. People know what to expect from familiar fantasy tropes, which means they can focus on plot and gameplay rather than going “so what’s that character supposed to be?”
But it’s boring. I love it when a fantasy setting isn’t afraid to trust the intelligence and curiosity of its audience and do something weird.
Anime if anything seems to be doing worse at this. Nearly every fantasy or fantasy adjacent anime goes for a knock-off D&D MMO style and it feels so tired. They don't want their audience to need to make the smallest effort to understand the world and the role of the characters in it.
That’s so disappointing. I haven’t really kept up with anime in recent years, but what I loved about the anime I watched when I was much, much younger was how different it was compared to the western media I was familiar with.
I think the difference is that a lot more English speakers watch anime as it’s airing in Japan now. Anime used to have to be at least somewhat interesting for someone in the west to even be aware of it, but now we get to see all the shit they’re putting out that never would have made it over here before.
Dr. Stone, Attack on Titan, Demon Slayer, Jujutsu Kaisen – you don’t have to look very hard to find anime that doesn’t look anything like western fantasy
I couldn't get in to this game, myself. Granted, due to that, I've only played about an hour of it but this game felt much more like a Visual Novel than an RPG, to me. Stats seemed to have no bearing on anything other than what the narrative decided they have a bearing on. It was therefore, very difficult to figure out who my character was. Otherwise, you're just clicking on things and reading reams of text.
I get that they were trying to go for a more tabletop version of an RPG but without a DM, I find that near impossible to translate 1:1. I would have preferred a more Baldur's Gate approach to the game.
It’s more akin to Planescape: Torment than something like Baldur’s Gate. The game is dense with writing and dialogue, and the majority of it is derived from your stats. Granted, there are a couple of skill checks that you can’t fail due to being story important, but it’s only those two specific instances - everything else is heavily stat-based. There’s also ideologies that the game tracks, so you can be an egotistic superstar cop, a doomsaying apocalypse cop, a normal cop, or even a super-political cop that becomes more drilled down if you want to engage in the fascist, communist, moderate, and/or liberal aspects of the game - and the game does respond to that, including noting how you can be both a communist and a fascist, or some other combination of ideologies.
To help put it in perspective, your stats are, quite literally, your character’s brain. Having low stats doesn’t really impact the game, but you also can become sort of neurotic with high stats - which does have its upsides and downsides (except Encyclopedia, it will drown you in world-building exposition that doesn’t really help and drags out conversations at the higher levels). It’s much more “role-playing” and less “game”.
A friendly reminder that the creators in the past have asked those interested in the game to pirate it instead, though of course I do not endorse such activities.
What in the fuck. Can devs please start compressing this shit better? I know this is more of a me problem, but this is like half my SSD just for this game alone. Ridiculous.
I was going to install CoD: Cold War from PS+ on my PS5 since I wanted to check out the campaign but I'd never buy it. Fuckin 230 GB for that shit. I lol'd a bit and moved on to something else. So ridiculous.
Lmao 230gigs fuck that. Sitting here cursing my own life because I have 10 gigs of Sims 4 mods. For 230GB the game better come with a hologram that pops out of a USB port to suck my fucking cock.
The only games I'll bother keeping installed that are over 100gb are my ESO with all the addons on PC, and Star Wars Battlefront II on PS5, and only because my friends and I play co-op every Friday night. But it's still ludicrous. My most played game recently, Battlebit Remastered, is a whopping 3 GB lol.
Just one more reason why the obsession with the latest greatest OMGWTF HIGH DEFINITION GRAPHICS is the worst thing to happen to gaming since the Atari Jaguar.
We can compress textures into ridiculously small sizes, I doubt it's a problem. Audio on the other hand...
In a dialogue heavy game such as this one, each voice line for each language must be shipped with the game on steam. There's no way to split the downloads between regions and languages from within developer console on steam.
I think it's one of the most popular requests devs posted in the dev forums.
Standard lossless compression (without further assumptions) is already very close to being as optimal as it can get: At some point the pure entropy of these huge datasets just is not containable anymore.
The most likely savior in this case would be procedural rendering (i.e. instead of storing textures and meshes, you store a function that deterministically generates the meshes and textures). These already are starting to become popular due to better engine support, but pose a huge challenge from a design POV (the nice e.g. blender-esque interfaces don't really translate well to this kind of process).
Not everything can be easily compressed to significantly smaller sizes. In fact, for any random arrangement of bytes, finding one that is compressable by any significant amount is rare.
I’m sure that what can be compressed is compressed in these game files. What we really need is more intelligent assets. When downloading, the platform should take your localization settings and only download the assets required for that locale. I bet this would heavily reduce the size of many of these games.
I don't think that localization would help much. Most, probably all, assets that are taking up so much storage space are not going to include language directly.
I'd be willing to bet that the game will be available in a compressed format from a repack site with no content loss. At least 30% smaller. A recent example that I just checked, Forspoken, Original Size: 103.9 GB Repack Size: from 63.6 GB
Before I had an unlimited connection for monthly bandwidth usage I would frequently download an already purchased game from the repack site and then have steam "repair" it. Shadow of Mordor/Shadow of War come to mind specifically. Saved so much of my limits at the time.
What they need to do is utilize steam's branch feature to allow smaller installs for low resolution assets and with minimal language support without an opt in to other languages needed.
The steam deck really has me wishing Steam had pushed for that as part of fully verified (or have "great on deck" be a tier above and only for games that do the extras like that). So much space is spent on things I don't need at 800p
Eh… you can have high quality assets or you can have small size, but you can’t have both.
Game assets are typically some of the most heavily compressed assets there are (it’s often quicker, even from SSDs, to load a compressed asset and uncompress it than otherwise). There’s an entire middleware industry grown up around minimising asset sizes while keeping quality. 122 GB to me just screams “this game is fucking massive” rather than “this game is horribly unoptimised”.
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