This game really keeps on upping the ante on how evil you can possibly be.
Too bad its not releasing on last gen consoles.
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Karlach, my beloved!
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As a fan of both Divinity games and both Baldur games, yes, it is worth a play-through; grab some friends if possible and let the fun begin!
If you are a Paladin of Vengence donât spare a bad guy like I did you will break your oath
Also
Wyll romance spoilers
He proposed to me with an acorn but I said yes anyway
The modding community scares me with the desperation of some folks to âfixâ Baldurâs Gate by making white, barbie dolls with no hair at all, or gigantic extremities of unusual designs to wield in your wrassling of a certain bear.
The rest of them are some of the most wholesome fixes with about fifty or so trying to figure out a way to re-write a certain Tieflingâs story so she can stay on Faerun, and the amount of furniture being thrown at each otherâs heads over how this is to be achieved is glorious to watch in the Discord.
I finished the story yesterday and
Oh my god her ending is so horrible no matter what choice you make. She basically gets three choices....go to hell....turn into a squid monster..or literally explode. I mean come on there should be a way to save her in a game where you have almost unlimited choices and freedom in just about any situation. I mean wouldn't Mizora step in and tempt Wyll with a new contract to save her? What about the Gnomes you rescue from the Iron Throne? Couldn't they do something?
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Karlach my queen
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tbf the companions are very flawed in terms of design
most notably, none of them are orcs.
i will be making a mod to rectify this. wyll is already super cute and gale already has a handsome smile but i can make them both better with tusks.
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âIt is possible to make no mistakes and still lose. That isnât failure, that is life.â
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Early on I had an camp encounter which seemed sort of poorly designed
Early game spoiler
Astarion drank my blood and killed me. I was left with the somewhat bewildering situation of being dead but no game over (I hadnât experienced character death outside of total party wipes yet so I didnât know how it worked). And apparently, dying on certain terrain (such as a bedroll, apparently, the only place youâd die in that scene) means you canât use a revivify scroll unless you move the body. The only way to move a body, unless youâre really strong I guess, is to strip the corpse naked, add it to a characterâs inventory, and drop the corpse somewhere else. I had to google all that because picking up dead characters as inventory items was not something Iâd been introduced to.
Anyway so Astarion killed me, leaving the other characters standing wordlessly around my corpse. Laezel strips me naked, carries me a few feet, and resurrects me. And nobody acknowledges what happens except Astarion! Laezel and Shadowheart are at each otherâs throats constantly but nobody wants to say âhey that guy killed you thatâs sorta susâ?
It was pretty easy to get killed by Astarion in that scene if, I guess, you are a gormless vampire truster like me, and I thought the resulting situation was pretty goofy
Anyways I am playing the game now. My character is a tiefling wizard who looks like this
https://i.imgur.com/49VdHOl.jpg
I donât really know Tiefling lore though because my only forgotten realms knowledge comes from neverwinter nights and like one Drizzt book and neither of them focused on Tieflings very much. I guess weâre demons and thatâs cool but Iâd prefer if they had spaceships like certain other demon-resembling playable races in other games. But I guess the squid men are the ones with dimensional ships in this world
Iâm about 10 hrs in and having fun, though I think some of the praise was a bit overblown (it feels like a good CRPG, nothing revolutionary, still a genre I think has some flaws and prone to ambitious RPG jank such as the scenario I described earlier).
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TL:DR Mode.
Tieflings were born from 1 of 3 ways.
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An Evil Outsider (Devil/Demon/etc) and a Mortal had hot, wet, unprotected hand-holding and vigorous head-patting, produced a Cambion (half-Outsider) and that Cambion has offspring, which would result in random offspring down the line coming up as a Tiefling, which may or may not breed true, depending upon the author.
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Children conceived in an area suffused with good/evil/elemental magic, or planar magic, may be affected and be born with traits of that magic, and Tieflings are the most common result because Evil is generally not worried about side-effects.
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You made a deal with the Infernal/Demonic powers and as a result were altered by it, or your children were.
They are in a similar vein to Half-Orcs in that polite society reviles them and they face significant amount of abuse and social ostracism unless they either prove theyâre champions or somebody important vouches for them, leading to a lot of bad things happening to both races.
Strangely enough, in the 80âs-90âs, Half-Orcs and Tieflings were the edgy choice for races, or assumed to be, because you wanted to be a âbad guyâ but claim to be good.
Early 2000âs till now, theyâre the down bad races because everyone wants to marry one.
80âs-90âs Half Orc
Modern Half Orc
(No, I donât have this book or the synopsis, google at your own risk)
80âs-90âs Tieflings
Modern Tieflings
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tbh i think people are just surprised that a game is being released in a playable state with actual quality control and no added day-one dlcs. we havenât really had that since elden ring lmao.
Divinity: Original Sin 2 is better in almost every way, but I kinda knew that going in. And the game not being as good as DOS2 is kinda like saying black tea isnât as good as chai. Both are good. I just like chai a LOT better.
Personally I have always kinda been super mid on Forgotten Realms. Dragonlance is the only canon setting for D&D that I like, and thatâs mostly because itâs kinda in that âso bad itâs goodâ realm. Forgotten Realms has always just been Mid to Bad.
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Thatâs the rub. Itâs a very competent CRPG in an era that has forgotten what CRPGs are. The game released in a finished, playable state with none of the jank people have come to expect from releases. Remember for all its beloved status, Witcher 3 fans still had to contend with Roach manifesting on rooftops.
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Even ignoring that itâs a complete game, with minimal bugs, and without a cash shop or day 1 paid DLC, I would still say this game is well above average as someone who now has (embarrassingly) almost 100 hours of playtime.
Cons include what youâve mentioned- I came across one or two instances where the story didnât seem to match up with my actions. Iâve also been in this weird glitch zone where my character was somewhere NPCs didnât want them to be, but I also wasnât able to leave, and had to do some weird stuff to get out while suffering huge damage to the reputation with the trader nearby. It didnât end up mattering but it was kinda annoying.
Additionally, mage hand being a cantrip with its own spell slot that requires a rest to reset is ridiculous and kind of feels like a slap to arcane tricksters⌠not that I was using it all to often on Astarion before I stopped using him as a companion.
Still, these cons are forgivable grievances considering all the things the game does well.
Compared to other games in its genre like Pathfinder or PoE, the combat in BG3 seems appropriately paced for its turn based mode, which appeals to me a bit more. The other games turn based just feels like a slog, and while the simultaneous turns certainly go faster, it also becomes harder to keep up with more difficult fights because you have so much more to monitor. Those games become a constant pause and go struggle, unless youâre playing on the easiest of difficulties and have the most passive classes selected. I think PoE does the best job at highlighting text and giving synopses of lore concepts, but having any knowledge of the world doesnât seem critical for BG3. Itâs fine if you donât know where Chult or Calisham are, but if youâve played any 5E campaign, you probably appreciate the references to places you may have visited. I loved venturing through the Underdark as my real life group is currently playing Out of the Abyss. Granted, Easter eggs like that arenât what make a game good. Theyâre just icing.
I could go deeper into why the cut scenes are great, the sound effects are impressive, the puzzles are cool, and more, but I think the biggest thing is just that this game feels like there was passion thrown into it. That feeling is a culmination of all the things it does right, you know? And you just donât always see that anymore, which is a sad reality.
Edit- why did this thread get moved off of WrA?!?
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I just realised I could have described Tieflings as having been this.
80âs-90âs âOur father, who art in heaven.â
Today âOh daddy, all up in there.â
On a less unibrow note, if anyone needs to understand the Githâyanki and the Githâzerai?
One of my favourite Youtubers, even if I sometimes want to throw heavy furniture in the direction of their head.
I wish I had noticed this before posting again, erk.
If you havenât played yet, do go for it.
I admit I get that way too but Iâve been playing BG3 aâŚnormal amount. Black Dragonborn Gloomstalker/Assassin Dark Urge but good.
Of course no amount of hype, no matter how much or how little, was going to to keep me away from this game. I played Baldurâs Gate when it came out in the 90s, got the second game and the Dark Alliances as gifts, played the expansionsâŚ
And I loved DoS2. I needed BG3 in my life.
The problem with BG3 raising the industry standards is that itâs just not really practical for everyone. It was in development for 4-5+ years with a huge studio and also on Steam early access for 3 years. The budget behind the game was immense which is something most indie developer donât have.
So expecting your $60 to get a 75-100 hour singleplayer experience is a bit of a stretch going forward. Historically most fantasy RPG games are only 30-40 hour playthroughs. BG3 just feels incredibly long to play and Iâm 70 hours in and just about to get into Act 3.
Also, these games donât release with cash shops or DLC, but usually have expansion packs.
The raised industry standard doesnât really apply to small dev teams. Large game studios are the ones those comments are aimed at - the ones that have the resources and bankroll to put something together that everyone will enjoy, and yet somehow fall short and get shown up by Valheim or BattleBit remastered.
And Iâm not sure what you mean about RPGs historically being short games. Those are the ones that take the longest and have the most replayability. Its not out of the realm of reason to expect a purely single player game to last you a long while- it never has been.