Intro
Baldur's Gate 3 is a sprawling, slightly kitschy, long-winded,accessible yet also quite challenging[1] role-playing game with fairly high production values that apparently pissed off other CRPG devs.
A sort of interactive pulp swords & sorcery novel. It's a flawed if IMO provisionally worthy yet lesser sequel to Baldur's Gate 2. Lesser but still rather good.
It is like heroin to CRPG types despite a slight tinge of woke, the dumb and optional romance system, and some flaws which are going to be rectified by mods fairly quickly or solved by the time you get to Baldur's Gate and can actually buy a fucking quiver, gem pouch or potion case. Romances are optional, the personal quests of party members are fairly interesting and quite decent afaict.
It allows up to 4 people to play what's essentially a D&D campaign without someone having to be GM. Perhaps some people would like to play it together in the evenings and it might strengthen this community? If playing thrice weekly for 4 hours, you could probably clear it under half a year even with a bit of save-scumming that's necessary for some of the tough fights.
Don't rush- perhaps Larian will give it paused realtime or FPS play or just speed up the computer turns which should be instant but sometimes (5% of the time) take 200-300 ms to decide per enemy mook.
As it's a significant cultural artifact and probably of interest to enough people on this forum, I believe it deserves its own thread.
For mods: ||It's not related to 'science, politics or philosophy', however, I feel it maybe deserves an exception due to its high profile. Factorio, a decade old game popular with Motte kind of people has 29 hits in search, BG3 has 25 mostly from the last 2 weeks. All argument and no play makes Jack a dull boy, no ? ||
Rules:
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Please post in the appropriate subthread. I'm going to start with 'reviews, technical issues, rant & gripe, gameplay advice, lore'. Feel free to make another top-level subthread if it doesn't fit into the other categories.
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For story and lore discussion not known to people familiar with general D&D, use spoiler tags, which are doubled pipes = '|' repeated twice without the quotes. Spoiler tag end is another set of doubled pipes.
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Story discussion only in the 'lore discussion' thread.
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Please report any comments spoiling the plot outside of the stuff that's in the intro cinematic.
[1]: I'm at around +2sd of ice people mental acuity and a disgusting minmaxing scrub who almost cleared** the infamous 'tactics' mod for BG2+ToB and I'm being challenged by the high difficulty fights in BG3. Even a run-of-the mill fight turns deadly if you're not paying attention, and certain fights are positively malicious.
And I'm just in chapter 2 atm. Yes, if you want you can re-roll PC and every party member for every dungeon but in essence that's just like save-scumming but worse. You don't have to do it, and I only re-rolled main char because I was unfamiliar with the ruleset and wanted to try a few different options. The dungeon puzzles, so far, seem mostly bloody obvious, I've encountered some mildly challenging treasure related ones, surely there's going to be a few good ones too.
**am not sure I ever cleared the final fight of the entire game with the tactics mod.
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Notes -
Griping
Fighting my way through a dungeon and it's really irritating not being able to coordinate your characters to attack all at as a surprise round. In BG1 & BG2 you could pause the game, queue up an action for each party member, and unpause, and let 'er rip. But I can't do that here since BG3 doesn't have an actual pause function. Nor, weirdly, is there the ability to delay / ready an action.
Best work-arounds I've found are putting my entire party in stealth, having one character attack, and the introduce the rest of the party character by character. You're still at the mercy of the initiative rolls here though so focused-fire efforts are a crapshoot. I've tried putting it into turn-based mode but that also seems to be a crap-shoot for turn order. Anyone having better luck on bring down a world-of-hurt all at once?
Most enemies can be surprised, which means you can attack all at once, effectively speaking...
Imo, best way to bring in a world of hurt at once is have your sneaky fighter throw a barrel of water, followed by some nasty cold or electric based spell..
Maybe I'm not just quick enough on the mouse, but I can't seem to get my party to attack simultaneously even from stealth/hiding. The closest I've been able to achieve wassnuffing Dror Ragzlin from the rafters in the goblin base which took a fair amount of positioning to get just right.
Edit to fix spoiler tags.
You don't need to be quick, I believe.
First person attacking from stealth causes enemies to be 'surprised', which means they don't do anyhting on their first turn. A few rare types (early to mid game) can't be surprised, but generally they can be.
Once someone is in combat, someone else can move in and iirc (almost certain) attack the enemies in the same turn as the first player who triggered the battle by joining in.
Finally got it to work on the gnolls nearby the Risen Road. Then got TPKs 4 times in a row because fuck gnolls and their goddamn multiattack bullshit.
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