Forgot to post this yesterday oops :)
Anyway what are you all playing!
Amongst others I’m currently playing Baldur’s Gate 3 in coop mode.
I absolutely love it (I’m also a huge fan of Dragon Age Origins, so no surprise here).
I just wish cut scenes wouldn’t just start playing as soon as one of the players walks into them. Especially since the game is so dense with content (we are still relatively at the beginning though, maybe that changes later on).
I know with most dialogs everybody has the option to listen, but often you’re still going to miss the beginning of the conversation. A “wait for other players” button or something like that would be great.
How do other people handle this?
I got more into Baldurs Gate 3 than I thought.
Because of scheduling conflicts, I wasn’t able to continue my coop playthrough with a friend until today, so I started a solo campaign, and put in about 40 hours last week.
Because I’ve only seen people falling over themselves, talking about how this game is the second coming of Christ, here a few relatively minor issues I have with it.
The camera is terrible. There’s constantly something in the way and the game isn’t smart enough to know that I don’t really want to move to the stalactite thirty meters above me, just because it was in my way in the middle of the screen. Cramped spaces are probably the worst, walls everywhere, and you have to do constant 180s with the camera to see every corner.
I usually don’t mind inventory management, but I hate it in this game. I’m definitely to blame as well, since I just pick up everything, but it’s always such a pain to organize through everything. The sorting options aren’t that good, and sometimes stuff feels completely random. Also, (unless I’m missing something) why can’t you access the inventory of your companions, that aren’t in your party?
Why is the pathing still ass in this game, it’s the third one Larian made in this style. My characters just love walking into traps (that I’ve discovered) or shit on the ground. It’s just really fun to micromanage four characters, just so they can get safely through a few mines or don’t take a 50 cm shortcut through a patch of fire. I think Divinity had at least an option to pause the game, when you found a trap, so you might have a chance to change the course, but this is missing in this game.
Lastly, I wish your companions were more involved, when you have a conversation with someone. I could be deciding the fate of the world with my choices, but Astarion is just T-posing behind me (not literally, but you get what I mean). At least an occasional line when the “X character approves / disapproves” notification pops up would be nice.
I still have a great time and enjoy the game, but some of these things have existed since the D:OS games, so it’s a shame they still aren’t improved.
I definitely agree about your companions chiming in on conversations. Maybe I’ve just been spoiled by games like Mass Effect and the like, but the lack of input seems like an obvious problem to me.
Even BG2 had more interjections from your party members than BG3 I think, and I get that it was mostly text but still, that was 23 years ago. In BG3 someone sometimes adds a comment at the beginning or end of a conversation, but it seems like they rarely if ever butt in in the middle.
The whole “X Approves/Y Disapproves” definitely feels a little telling, not showing and I wish they would comment on what’s going on instead, even if it was only recycling a handful of general comments from a pool.
Playing through BG2 now, the interjections are rare and don’t really budge the flow of the conversation in any direction. It’s a very small amount of color to inform you of their personalities.
Oh it was definitely rare that an interjection would actually change the outcome of the dialogues, but that color and flavor you mentioned does a lot to make characters feel more alive. Same goes for the way party members just randomly start conversations when walking around in BG2.
Worth noting I always play with the Gibberlings Fixpack installed. IIRC the vanilla game is really sensitive about party members having to be physically close to the talking NPC to interject into dialogues.
Since Microsoft’s parity issues, I decided to buy Divinity Original Sin 2 to support Larian. I like the stand they made (as opposed to how CDPR did with Cyberpunk), and figured they deserve the cash.
While the graphics could be better, and that it’s at times difficult to focus on such a dialogue heavy game, I noticed that I’ve already spent 20 hours with it and have barely escaped what could be called the tutorial area (fort joy).
I love it. I’m playing 4 custom characters, all necromancers, two melee oriented, two ranged, and it’s a total crap fest of a party, but I’m making it work real well.
I have just recently picked it back up, vowing to finish it before I buy Baldur’s Gate 3
Def deserves a playthrough with the characters, their stories aren’t bad.
But you choose well with Necros, they are fun as hell.
Fort Joy is the best and largest part of the game, enjoy it! I guess Fort Joy resembles wher Larian wanted to go with the game, the last 2 acts are not even close in comparison
BG3 like everyone else. I’m at 40 hours now, in act 2. Going to play a bit less this week though, as the game hasn’t been great for my sleep cycle.
Well, I, like many many, others am playing Baldur’s gate.
But, honestly, I still find time for ol’ trusty falconBMS. (It’s a tiny but very loyal playerbase, thinking about starting a page for it on lemmy somewhere)
My buddies and I have been on Battlebit a whole lot. It is the first fps I have played since Halo Reach and BFBC2 that has really grabbed my interest. It is just so good. The proximity and squad speak has been so good it has actually led to me making friends via an online game, which I haven’t done simce I was in middle school playing Halo 3
Team Fortress 2 and Wolfenstein 2
@Oha @chloyster team fortress 2 is an amazing game but I found it too hard to play it !
Tf2 isnt about winning. You dont need much skill to have fun imo
I just finished the story for Jedi Survivor. Despite the graphical glitches, which were ample, the story was amazing.
This new “Flashpoint” gamemode in Overwatch is pretty fun not gonna lie.
I’ll probably be playing some Rimworld. Gonna make the highest HRV/h (Human Rights Violations per hour) colony in history!
I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate…2. I just beat Baldur’s Gate 1 and moved right on to 2. Immediately there was a major noticeable change in the scenario design in a very good way when I got to BG2. Dungeons are now puzzles to be solved rather than just marching through mobs of enemies. Chapter 2 lets you go nuts and achieve an explicit objective by any means you like, and it makes at least three of those options pretty obvious. I’m now in Chapter 3 and hope to have finished the game and moved on to BG3 before the PS5 port of BG3 comes out. I’m really enjoying it overall, but sometimes, even on easy mode, it just feels like bullshit. I just took on a boss of a dungeon who was impervious to basically everything I could throw at him, and I just had to reload a previous save and try different spells until I could finally break through his defenses, which I don’t think is the greatest game design in the world, given that there was no foreshadowing that I should be prepared for that. Likewise, in that same dungeon, there were vampires and wraiths that can energy drain me and de-level my characters; there’s one specific way out of this situation as well, and I once again had to reload an earlier save and just have those spells ready to go to solve that problem after knowing via save scumming what’s around the corner. Not only that, but a negative for this game compared to its predecessor is that it respawns enemies in dungeons. So when your only option for forward progress is to rest so that you can equip or cast absolutely critically necessary spells and then you get bombarded by another mob of enemies, it can be super tedious.
BG3 like everyone else seems to be, the System Shock remake, and I started replaying Half Life 2 and Dishonored recently. Just got a Steam Deck so it’s been fun being able to play all of my Steam games wherever I want.
While I do I wish I could reasonably afford BG3, I’ve been having plenty of fun with Dave the Diver regardless. Was waiting for the upcoming QoL update but decided to just go ahead and deal with the annoyances, such a gem of a game. Hard to believe how much fun and varied content they managed to cram in there and have it work well together.
The same thing I play every week Pinky, Transformers:Earth Wars and Star Trek Timelines!
Still playing Baldur’s Gate 3. I really enjoyed Divinity: Original Sin 2 and I’m quite happy that this is an improvement in virtually all respects (the soundtrack being the only letdown so far). I’m especially happy that my biggest problem with D:OS2–the insanely tight level curve–is mostly gone here. It’s still a bit tight in Act 1, but I just started Act 3 and I’ve skipped a entire zone and a half now without being underleveled. I cannot overstate how important it is for roleplaying to not be required to comb the map or do nonsense like getting XP for persuasion successes and then turning around and killing to squeeze out every last point.
There are some negatives here, especially with bugs. Biggest one is Lae’zel simply vanishing from my camp. I found her wandering around a zone later but she wouldn’t join the party even with the dialogue indicating she was. Pretty sure she’s permanently gone now. A bunch of random skills and gear are either outright broken or are inconsistent. Fortunately there are workarounds for that part, but I’m honestly a little surprised to see a game lacking polish like this score as highly as it has in reviews.
I’ve finally moved on with the main story, with the plot progression essentially pausing for 50 hours while I poked around. What’s standing out to me now is that this game is a prime example of “great script writing, mediocre story writing.” The core narrative does hit on some of my personal favorite tropes, like shifting pantheons and otherwise huge stakes, but this story desperately needed more from the antagonists early on. There’s no reason one of them couldn’t have shown up in person to harass the party in Act 1. Merely dealing with underlings of varying narrative quality feels limp. That said, so many of the dialogues are absolutely fantastic, right up there with the best of Bioware’s work that the game is emulating. Better yet, they are paired with engrossing motion capture and impeccable voice acting. Still a shame not to be hearing Alix Wilton Regan in a Larian game, though.
