Patch 2 came out yesterday and was supposed to address some Act 3 issues. Have you played since then? I’ve also noticed some bugs in Act 3 but nothing gamebreaking thankfully.
Epic narratives have their place, but if you follow the 5E rules they don’t work well mechanically.
Fighting actual Gods in D&D should be fairly comfortable for a party of level 20 characters, which is part of the problem. The way the scaling of character power compared to enemy power works, fighting a group of goblins on the dirt road as a level 1 party is magnitudes more challenging than fighting an actual God as a level 20 party.
Was it the engine or the ruleset? It’s widely accepted that D&D 5E is sorta hot garbage at higher levels so I was assuming that’s what Larian was referring to.
That would explain it, though not make it any less poorly designed. I also picked her up just at the very end of Act 1 and already had plenty of the item needed.
The romances could do with a bit of an overhaul, in my opinion. Feels like several of them have weird pacing, and so many characters go from 0-100 in the blink of an eye. You say a single affirmation to Halsin and he acts like he’s been in love with you his whole life and you’re soulmates. Dude, I just offered you a drink at a celebration out of common courtesy.
With every other NPC being so horny it’s actually been refreshing to have Karlach just behave like a buddy in my playthrough, but in general for the Karlach romance to be so fiddly you need to follow a guide to not lock yourself out of it just sounds… poorly implemented.
I would have been interested in seeing it but my save was completely hardlocked out of it. In contrast to basically every other character she never ever came on to me (middle of Act 3 currently).
I must have done something in the wrong order, I’ve heard others have had trouble with it as well.
I remember the time when I was really excited about this game. The original writer and composer were both returning, it looked so promising. But we all know what happened, and after Rik Schaffer himself said the soul of the project left when Brian Mitsoda was fired my expectations are firmly settled at the bottom.
I think there is already a mod that turns off all approval gains, but beware that I think this also blocks off several companions’ personal quests, since they’re related to the relationship. At least that’s what I heard.
The mod I’m using tweaks approval so the gains are smaller for little stuff, losses are bigger and important story decisions etc become more significant (in both directions). I unfortunately didn’t find it until I was already near-max with several companions but it should in theory make it more difficult to end up with everyone being in love with you before the third long rest.
It’s made worse by Larians decision to absolutely juice the approval gains when going from Early Access to Full Release, apparently. Makes everything move way too fast and really exacerbates the issue.
Absolutely agreed. I asked one person if they wanted to share a drink at a celebration (that’s just social decorum, right?) and have done no flirting before or after that and now that person talks to me like they’ve been in love with me their whole life.
And I get the idea that you want to let everyone sleep with their favorite NPC regardless of who they’re playing as but it just feels weird to me that everyone is so both pansexual and horny. It makes me feel like nobody has any preferences and just falls in love with you because you’re the main character.
And in general it also lessens the sense of camaraderie a bit for me when it comes down to sex so much. I wish some companions had other interests and had no desire to get in your pants.
Baldur’s Gate 2 is one of my favourite games of all time, and I was extremely worried and sceptical that BG3 could live up to the hype and the name of the franchise.
To the first point, it definitely has. The game is fantastic, deep, fun and absorbing, with gorgeous environments, interesting nooks, crannies and dungeons to explore and lots of fun making custom multiclass combos for your character.
It does a good job of creating a facsimile of playing Pen-and-Paper D&D with an abundance of skill checks and visible Dice Rolls, and if you decide to roll with your failures instead of save-scumming it has lots of different permutations for events and decisions can have serious consequences.
When it comes to how it relates to the previous games, I’m at the end of Act 2 and have yet to discover a real reason for this game to be called “Baldur’s Gate 3”. So far it has been entirely standalone, narratively. There might still be connections further down the road, however.
The real difference is in the writing. If what you love about the old Baldur’s Gates were the characters and the writing and you want and expect more of that then you will be disappointed. First of all, this game takes place 100 years after BG2 so expect very few familiar faces. The one returning character I’ve encountered so far has not felt particularly recognisable, either. It’s a damn good game, but it definitely feels like an unmistakably Larian game, and not a Baldur’s Gate game, writing wise. It particularly comes through in the companions.
As someone who adores the old games, I still recommend trying it as I’m having a lot of fun with it, but you might want to pretend it’s called “Divinity: Faerun” and not Baldur’s Gate 3 to enjoy it fully.
I agree, and it comes through in the companions, too. And despite them singling out Jaheira in the article I have a hard time recognising much of her, except for the appearance. Maybe the hundred years passing is the excuse but I wish her bossy, sarcastic, witty personality was more present and recognisable.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the game and it has been monopolizing my attention but it’s still not beating the Divinity 3 allegations (though I’m only at the end of Act 2, still).
It depends on what types of mods you have installed, and when they came out. Leveled lists used to be a reason, but many modern F:NV mods instead add entries to leveled lists via scripts on startup (thanks JIP!) and so are all compatible with each other.
I needed Bash for Cell edits primarily, because I wanted to use the old Interior Lighting Overhaul since I think it looks better than the newer scripted ones.
Wrye Flash is also great to combine patches into a single file to keep the load order down. Even with the mod limit remover, F:NV gets unstable if it has too many .esp’s loaded. The patch combining feature is automatic and easy to use.
I did spend a huge amount of time creating a personal compatibility patch in xEdit. It’s extremely simple to do manually once you learn it, but can take time. I had several overhauls like CCO and Vicious Wastes that I wanted to combine, with overlaps where I wanted to use the CCO version for some things and the VW for others, for example. I also had to do some manual edits to make sure I got the Brave New World faces and voices working with New Vegas Redesigned 3, the auto-patch missed some.
I feel like there might be room for an old school PC gaming community here on Lemmy. There is usually a console/arcade game focus on the retro gaming communities, but it would be great to have a place to discuss releases from that 1990-2009 or so era.