Hey all! Another weekly thread is here.
This time I am also hoping for some feedback!
If anyone has any ideas for more weekly thread topics you would like to see, go ahead an leave a comment below!
Baldur’s Gate 3.
I can probably count the number of games I’ve paid full price for in the past 15 years on one hand, and this is one of them. No regrets whatsoever.Looking back on Steam, last time was GTA V. Prior to that Skyrim, and prior to that Portal 2.
I swear 40-50% of all dialogue, interactions, etc. reflect the character I built. It is insane. They made D&D into a video game. They actually did it.
I didn’t pay full price for it and I’m being punished for it. The pirated copy I downloaded had a virus on it :(
The game is brilliant though! Shoving people into pits is the best class hands down.
Honestly if it’s not worth paying for it’s probably not worth playing. Your time is more valuable than that.
I get what you mean but not everyone can afford $60 games. In some parts of the world that’s more than half a month’s salary.
In those places, the games are differently priced. Regional pricing is on Steam, epic, and a few other stores. Also, I only buy games, I don’t pirate and I rarely buy games for 60 dollars. I typically just wait a bit and pick them up for 30 or less. That said I understand, pirating is easier and for AAA games it might truly not matter if you do or not. Indie games are certainly a different story and each purchase, even extremely discounted, gives the developer that little bit more which can mean a lot.
I live in one of those places and we don’t have regional pricing. When Steam starts offering competitive pricing in Africa I’ll start buying games at full price but for the moment I’ll stick to buying games on sale and piracy.
What currency do you use? Rand?
Shillings. I’ll let you guess which kind of shillings ;)
Shoving gobbos from a cliff to kill them by falling damage. Soo good!
Seen the hype, but man, I don’t feel like slogging through a 100 hour RPG at this point in my life.
I play with a friend. If it works out anything like Divinity: Original Sin 2 we’ll be finished maybe around April or something.
We usually play about 1 hour at a time, almost never more than 1.5 hour… and about 2-4 times a week. So it’ll take a long while, but it’s a lot of fun.As a new dad I don’t have the time for games that I used to, but I’ve been playing BG2 for a few hours every week, and now BG3 has taken over, it’s actually a perfect game to play whenever you just have a short time on your hand.
It’s one of those game experiences where I think of my character all the time when not playing. Can’t wait to get back, when the little one is sleeping again.
I’m playing Sekiro for the first time and am loving it! It’s my first FromSoftware game. Mechanically it’s quite similar to Jedi Survivor, the other game I’ve been playing lately, but is a lot less friendly and more straightforward (as far as plot and other stuff going on). However, it works really well and is very enjoyable to get good at.
Hell yeah Sekiro is one of my absolute favorites 🙏
Planning on playing through Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 for the first time this week. Know almost nothing about the game, nothing about DnD rulesets, just diving directly in because a partner very highly recommended them.
Edit: Ended up buying Baldur’s Gate 3 and getting into it instead, looks like I’m gonna be playing it in 3 > 1 > 2 order. As a side note, performance was way better on Vulkan than Directx11 for me, despite common advice being to use Directx11 on Linux for the game.
They are absolutely lovely, though undeniably very old school. BG1 is more action-adventurey with a bigger emphasis on exploration, BG2 is very story-heavy. They have aged remarkably well, considering they’re over 20 years old. The handpainted backgrounds still look pretty.
With potential increased interest due to BG3, I wonder if it would be an idea to create a community for the classic Baldur’s Gates 🤔
I’d like that, or a classic CRPG community with a certain timeframe. Two of my favourite games now are the original Fallouts after playing them for the first time only a few years ago. I’d love to see more of the games from that era.
I have actually pondered a “classic gaming” or “old school games” type community for these types of (primarily) PC games from the era up to maybe 2010.
Retro Gaming communities typically focus more on old console and/or arcade type stuff.
Yeah I’ve noticed that too with most retro gaming communities. I’d like a more PC focused one too
What would be a good name for it? Sadly I don’t think I have it in me to moderate, so I hesitate to create it myself.
Haha yeah same here. I guess we sit back and hope someone else takes up the mantle.
As for names, I’m not sure. There’s already some retro/vintage PC communities on SDF but they are more hardware focused. Old PC Games? Retro PC Games? The Beforetime? No idea.
Also, what would be the appropriate cutoff for the timeframe? I just threw 2010 out there, but maybe even slightly later? What is a good milestone to cut off at? I was thinking starting at 1993 with the release of Doom.
I just started Baldur’s Gate recently and beat it minutes ago. It’s not the first D&D game I’ve played before, but I’m far from well-versed in it. I had to Google “THAC0” a couple of times to understand what the game was trying to tell me, as well as understanding certain status effects. There’s a presupposition of knowledge that the game has with its players, but it’s still fairly okay at initiating people to D&D.
THAC0 is… yeah. I guess the systems take some getting used to. And it gets a little more complicated at higher levels with different layers of protective spells and counter-spells.
Are you planning on playing the second as well?
I already started it and bought BG3 as well. I had played Planescape: Torment about 10 years ago, so some of this was familiar, but it and Baldur’s Gate have some different philosophies around things like combat and party size. One thing I’m fairly confident will be a thing of the past when I get to BG3 is trash mobs. BG1 at times feels like it’s being run by an asshole DM who’s out to kill the party with tons of trash mobs between rests rather than providing a good time.
Imagine you’re at the table with your friends, and the DM says, “Then, from the darkness of the dungeon emerges…6 Kobolds!” You beat them, the party is pumped about it, and then the DM says, “As you press further on across the bridge, you come across…7 more Kobolds!” I’m not exactly sure what the thinking was, but between the aforementioned trash mobs and the magic casters who attack you with debilitating adverse affects that do tons of damage and take you out of the fight for like 20 straight turns, BG1 can be cheap as hell, even on easy difficulty. I get the sense that BG3 will still be difficult, but from my brief time with Divinity: Original Sin and what I’ve seen of BG3 footage, I’m expecting them to have more consideration for each combat encounter.
And oh yeah, BG1 also had a few areas with really narrow passageways that the AI pathfinding was not really able to adequately handle, as friendly characters would bump into each other and not be able to figure out how to move.
Yeah, these old games were kind of a wild west when it comes to design. I also love Fallout 2 to bits for example, but god damn can it feel cheap and frustrating at times. On the other hand there are loads of ways to cheese encounters, too, if you’re interested in making things easier. Backstabs, Snares, Cloudkill (and similar effects), abusing Fog of War. Almost all of BG1 can be cheesed with Skull Trap. And almost all of BG2 can be cheesed with Set Snare.
I’ve only started playing BG3, but so far it’s been a lot easier and simpler than both the old games and Divinity, which maybe is to be expected with it being based on D&D 5E rules. Compared to D:OS 2 combat has been a lot less complex and challenging. Granted I’m playing on medium difficulty. I didn’t want to start off on Tactician after the Divinity games, but maybe I need to here.
Anyway, I hope you’ll enjoy BG2. It’s one of my all-time favorite games still, and I replay it every now and again. There are so many ways to set up fun parties with loads of interactions, especially if you use the Tweak that prevents companions from killing each other even if they hate each other. Some of the best interactions are from mixed-alignment parties.
narrow passageways that the AI pathfinding was not really able to adequately handle
I must confess that these days I always play with DebugMode=1 and one of the primary reasons is to be able to use Ctrl+J to teleport the whole squad when pathfinding acts up.
I definitely organically discovered the cheese you can do with fog of war, but most of the strategies you mentioned were things that I just did not come across organically. I would love to have more of the debilitating spells that the enemy NPCs were using on me, and I did come across things like Sleep that would rarely work against an opponent challenging enough to deem it worthwhile, especially considering how many enemies you’re likely to run into until your next rest compared to how many spell slots you’ll have.
Summons are a really powerful way to deplete enemy spells, just send them in one by one. Summon Skeletons is good for this.
As you move onto BG2, using spells to counter enemy protections becomes more important, like using Breach to deal with Stoneskin etc. Though as a caveat, I’ve been using Sword Coast Stratagems so long I barely remember what combat is like without it.
I’m playing through Baldur’s gate 1 atm as well. I tried it and didn’t enjoy it back in the early 2000s but now I’m digging it. I still don’t like real time with pauses combat, but I can forgive it with the party size. I do wish there were other ways around things than combat most of the time though, but early DnD was primarily a dungeon crawler so that’s fine.
I can’t hear you over the sound of my mind-flayer parasite.
Yes. It has consumed my mind as well.
First time ever paying full price for a steam game. And no regrets.
what game are u guys talking qbout
Baldur’s Gate 3.
Baldurs Gate 3 on my linux machine runs pretty good and smooth. Already died because I failed a persuasion/deception check which led to a party wipe. It wasnt uncalled for either and didn’t came out of the blue. I really enjoy it.
I’m also playing Baldur’s Gate 3 on my Linux machine. Besides some frequent crashes, which I haven’t confirmed if they are the game or my aging hardware, it’s been running fine. I’m currently waiting for it to transfer to my Steam Deck to see how it fares there. I’d love to be able to play in bed, but I fear I may lose a lot of sleep if I do that.
I too am playing on Linux after making the switch last month. BG3, surprisingly, runs perfectly right out of the box. No settings changes, no command line parameters, nothing. Hasn’t crashed once. I’m really impressed.
Just finished Life is Strange and Life is Strange Before the Storm.
Both are great games with a really good soundtrack but I personally preferred the story of the first title.
I’ve tried the original Life Is Strange twice, and both times I >!failed to save Kate!< because I don’t have an infallible memory and quit out of anger.
Edit: fixed the name
Do you mean Kate, the girl who is trying to commit suicide by jumping? As fas as I know, there is no path where Max dies.
Haha yup, thanks.
Reddit style spoilers don’t appear to work on Lemmy. Instead use:
::: spoiler description Spoiler goes here :::Which will look like this:
description
Spoiler goes here
Admittedly, it’s not ideal for inline spoilers, but if you really want to hide for the benefit of others, that’s they way you’re supposed to do it on Lemmy, I guess.
Really? It looks right to me (on Sync). I’ll bear this in mind though next time.
Looks like sync doesn’t implement lemmy spoilers correctly, and still uses reddit spoilers. But the lemmy web-ui doesn’t honour those spoilers and does them the way I showed in my comment. That’s unfortunate, because people using Sync won’t be able to effectively hide spoilers, and will potentially be spoiled on things when Lemmy users use spoilers the way the web-ui tells them to in the editor.
BG3 baybee what other game is there!?
Yaaaaaasssss!!!
For me, I just finished pikmin 4 100%!!! I have now moved on to Jedi survivor, which I am having a lot of fun with.
I got it near launch, but it didn’t run super well. I am happy I waited as the game runs much smoother than it did when it came out
Yall i was fucking with Baldur’s Gate 3 splitscreen with my wife and found out that using an Nvidia graphics card and 2 monitors, I can turn vertical split screen games to broadcast to 2 different monitors so it looks like 1 screen each.
Fucking awesome.
None of my friends were half as impressed as me and the wife were. I feel like a technical God recently (all because I figured out how to enable a setting and set an aspect ratio properly for 2 screens lol)
FF6 with my wife. I was always told it’s the best one but 8 has been my fav so far.
I still have to finish FF8 some day. I started it and kind of liked it, but never got into it. Maybe now some of the fan made HD graphics mods for the remaster are finished.
FF6 is peak, though. I have an emulator on my phone with the Woolsey-uncensored romhack version. Love that game.
From a design perspective, I think you could safely pick anything from V to XII and say it’s the best one, honestly. VI and Chrono Trigger really stand out as the most refined in terms of game design and systems from that particular era.
Without spoiling anything, the episodic storytelling style is taken to its limit in the game’s “part II”, and it allows for some really clever writing. VI is one of those games that kept me thinking long after I finished it.
I just finished Hollow Knight this week (basic ending, didn’t go out of my way to find items I didn’t organically come across). Metroidvanias and 2d side-scrollers in general haven’t traditionally been my thing, but I was persuaded by Monty Zander’s video and…yeah, it’s as good as everyone says. The world is surprisingly immersive for its format and the gameplay is tight and rewarding. Abilities and enemy variety were always changing the way I played, and the different areas each had their own identities and obstacles. The sense of excitement on unlocking a new area and getting to explore it was on par with Elden Ring.
Unfortunately, I moved on to Kena Bridge of Spirits, which I think is a pretty good game so far, but it has some AA jank that I think stands out more after the fine tuning in Hollow Knight, and the combat is a lot more rote. Trying not to be too harsh though because not everything can be what Hollow Knight is, obviously.
You’ve convinced me to start Hollow Knight next.
I agree about Kena, which I finished a couple months ago. I liked it, but IIRC I didn’t enjoy the parrying in particular, especially compared to Sekiro. Didn’t feel as polished.
I’m honored! I do hope you enjoy Hollow Knight, it really is a standout.
That’s the thing about Kena, everything feels slower and less responsive than I’ve come to expect from other games. Parrying is weird too because it does this camera…jolt to focus on the enemy you parried, but it’s more like a cut than a pan, so it’s really jarring for my brain and requires a moment of readjustment each time.
Love Hollow Knight! I know you said Metroidvanias aren’t your thing, but if there are two that I would recommend it would be Hollow Knight and Environmental Station Alpha. ESA has graphics that not everyone will like, but you get used to them, and the gameplay is great. Well worth checking out if you want to see more of the Metroid inspiration coming through in the genre.
Transport Fever 2, because I can ride da choo choos
It’s super chill and relaxing, you just have to ignore the rest of your empire falling into ruin
I have been busy this week so I have played mostly Slay the Spire. Being able to get up and walk away at any time let’s me play in my limited down time at work, or while I am working on dinner.
I’ve also been dabbling in a mobile game called To Arms.
Still Final Fantasy XVI (PS5) and Final Fantasy XII (Switch). Loving both still.
Replaying Witcher 3 for the xth time. So far only ever played the base game, now I look forward to the dlcs. So far I am mostly rushing through the main quest and am now facing the wild hunt at kaer morhen. Never before reached this state with so few side quests completed 😅.
You’ll love the DLCs. Hearts of Stone is the best story in all of TW3, in my opinion.
Hearts of Stone was so good. I think the story being more focused helped compared to Blood and Wine.
I agree. I also think 2 of the 3 endings to B&W are sort of terrible, which soured me on it a little. And the one ending I liked is kind of hidden and obnoxious to get.
B&W was like a nice vacation as Geralt headed into retirement. Pretty landscapes and some fun new skills to play with (loved that you could finally make a crossbow build work).
HoS was just pure, spooky, tragic Witcher goodness. And like you say, the fact that it’s shorter and more focused lead to the writing being tighter and the storytelling working much better.
