So they spent advertising money on freelance shills. Ok, that is just another form of advertising like paying an advertising company to do advertising.
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.
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.
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.
If nothing else, the total volume of great games that are available to play keeps increasing because of massive improvements in backwards compatibility through steam and other online game distributors.
Are they getting worse overall or are we just comparing all of the current AAA games to the best AAA of the past few decades? Or comparing the current versions of series to the high points, which might just be the first game in the series?
We definitely have a number of high quality AAA games that come out each year. Most prior years had a few high quality AAA games and a lot of mediocre or terrible ones too. It’s kind of like music where the average quality over time is actually pretty consistent, but in any given year there are a lot of turds and there are certain trends that are common to those turds.
90% of every entertainment medium tends to be terrible, but when we look back we mostly remember the 10% that were good and only a few of the absolute worst to laugh at.
If a game is going to have mtx, they shouldn’t be charging for it during a prerelease. They have multiple ethical ways to handle it that would garner better feedback.
Leave it out entirely and focus on the gameplay. That is what should be selling the game anyway.
Have the mtx but without a way to pay real money. Give the players the option to ‘purchase’ in game currency and give them a running total.
The latter would be reset at release, but would gather feedback on what people want to spend and if the promo process is well implemented.
Both would run counter to the actual purpose of the vast majority of mtx which is fleecing whales and this is EA.
The most ethical implementation of mtx that I know of is actually for a paid game, Helldivers 2. The in game promo stuff is minimal and does not negatively impact the menus or interacting with the ship. The option to buy stuff doesn’t use dark patterns, but it is easily available. When they did set prices too high for a collaboration thing they apologized due to feedback and gave the other half of the stuff that would have been for sale to every single player. It is basically the exact opposite of Call of Duty’s mtx.
So you refuse to accept that people mean what they say and feel the need to defend a for profit company by twisting any complaints into some kind of faked outrage conspiracy.