MudMan

MudMan, rok temu

Solasta is alright. Very "TTRPG in a computer" type stuff, if that's your bag. Not as cinematic or high budget as BG3, but it plays well enough.

MudMan, rok temu

I like both, frankly. I get going with free positioning in BG3, mostly because that's how it is in both BG1&2 and Divinity OS 1&2, so it'd be a weird change. But also, it makes sense on CRPGs where you're trying to depict very fluid, dynamic "do what you want" situations more than tactical precision.

I do hate in BG3 when I accidentally step on something or a command to do something places a character on top of a hazard first, but... you know, table top jank captured, I suppose.

I will say that I'm not sure "immersion" is what the grid triggers for me one way or the other, though. Mostly grid tactical games are about optimization and precision while free roaming is about looser, fluid improvisation. If it's a full-on tactics game I'd prefer a grid for that reason, for narrative RPGs I can go either way.

I did like Midnight Suns quite a bit, although that's because I'm also a CCG guy and a superhero nerd, so that angle works for me. Weirdly, it was XCOM 2 that didn't quite do it for me compared to the first.

MudMan, rok temu

I may not be the right guy to answer that. What I played of it felt very... knowing. Tool-like. It really seemed to want you to know what you wanted to do with it, just in the way it presents itself. Once I got to playing it felt like a good one of those, though, it mostly didn't get in its own way as much as I feared it would.

I'm assuming you already played the Divinity Original Sin games if you're not considering rolling into those after BG3, right? Because those are pretty much more of that.

The other obvious "basically DnD" option is the Pathfinder duology, but those games go hard in ways I definitely would not recommend for "looking into getting" into anything. It's be ready to start over from an unwinnable scenario 30 hours in or stay away.

MudMan, rok temu

Not 5e. I'm not a tabletop guy, but my read on Pathfinder from Osmosis is that it's DnD for the people that never got over 3 or 3.5. Like, literally it's based on DnD through that whole open format they were trying to shut down recently. You can tell in the videogames, too. In many ways they feel more like the old BG releases than BG3. If those games were unreasonably huge and had some wild campaign-wide mechanics.

MudMan, rok temu

I'll say this, of all the DnD-like CRPGs it's the one I hear mentioned the least, and it absolutely deserves to be a lot more visible because it's far from the worst of those.

MudMan, rok temu

I feel like a lot of design decisions downstream are dependent on that choice. You could absolutely lock gridless combat to a grid, but I don't think it'd feel the same.

I'm trying to remember a game that has done that, because I'm pretty sure there's at least one.

MudMan, rok temu

It's not magic, it's an Nvidia server you're paying for on a time share. And it's decent, but frankly, as the kind of person that can tell when my 120Hz VRR display is hitting a flat frametime by eye it's nowhere near comparable to local play, even in optimal circumstances.

Streaming is a nice option when you need a hardware-independent, location-independent way to run a heavy game, or as a stopgap when your client hardware can't cut it with a modern release the cloud service covers, but it's not an optimal experience and it's problematic if it becomes a primary way to run games for a host of other reasons. I actually find GFN to be a solid idea, in terms of tapping into libraries you already own, but it's absolutely a secondary, value-added solution to either running games on client or even pushing your own stream from a server you own.