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.
Shoving gobbos from a cliff to kill them by falling damage. Soo good!
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 ;)
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.
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)
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
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’m playing A Plague Tale: Innocence for the first time – really enjoying the medieval flair and great graphics, though it is definitely a linear game (not my usual cup of tea, but exceptions obviously apply).
I’ll be playing Baldur’s Gate 3 as soon as my COOP friends have time for it… it is installed and ready to go! Very much looking forward to this.
All of them running great on Linux too, which is just amazing.
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’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 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?
My life has been completely subsumed by Baldur’s Gate 3. I spend all day at work thinking about it.
My husband called it a “tactical combat dating sim” and that cracked me up.
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 🙏
Currently playing Nier: Automata. It’s incredibly hard to talk to people about this game without spoilers. It’s all about the story, but the gameplay is pretty good too.
IKR! You do want to recommend the game and talk about it, but you can’t really do so without spoiling it for other people… SkillUp’s review was pretty good in that regard IMO.
I initially started Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered a few days ago, but I wasn’t really in the mood for that game, so I ended up going back to The Witcher 3 to start (and hopefully finish) both DLCs (I’m part way through Heart of Stone atm and have yet to start Blood and Wine).
As for feedback, although weekly might perhaps be too often, maybe a “Show us your collection / show us your setup” kind of thread? This could generate some engagement and lead to interesting discussions imo.
Omg thank you for answering the second part of the question 😆. I think I’ll make another post highlighting this question as it clearly wasn’t looked at super closely, but your suggestion is great! I’ll add it to my list :)
Well I just picked up Last Epoch last night / Monday! It’s an Action RPG so follows the same format as PoE / Diablo. Haven’t been super impressed with the post-campaign experience of D4, and immediately after jumping into Last Epoch I already feel like it has exactly what I was looking for from D4 in terms of power fantasy and buildcrafting potential.
Its still Early Access which I generally don’t pickup, but someone here on Lemmy recommended it and I have to say, so far I regret nothing!
Right now I’m waiting on the new PoE league as well as the GW2 expansion. For now it’s either a MUD, The first Skyrim save I’ve kept long enough to complete the main quest, or Yakuza: Like a dragon.
It really just depends on mood and if anyone else is active on the MUD.
I’m glad to have finally found a Skyrim build I enjoy. I’ve always appreciated the game but never managed to stick with it. This Illusion/Thief/Assassin combo is a great time. Calm + backstab for life.
Yakuza is a delight. It’s a lot like FfXIV in that it’s a pretty fun movie that is sometimes interrupted by RPG game play elements. Loving the humor.
BG3 baybee what other game is there!?
Yaaaaaasssss!!!
BG3, this game is awesome!
Baldur’s Gate 3, naturally. I was enjoying it until I reached the zone border and I got a warning I was underleveled. I was like, really, Larian? We’re doing this again?
My biggest complaint with Divinity: Original Sin 2 was that the level differences were so stark and the XP was so tight that it felt like the game was forcing me to comb through the entire map. Absolutely kills replay value, and BG3 is a game I’d really, really like to save something for a replay.
This ended up being a constant issue in D:OS2 but turned out mostly okay in the first D:OS after a really tight first act. I hope this ends up being more like the latter. Or there’s some way to grind this time around.
Im in act 3 and only encountered the “you’re underleveled” message once at that same point. I havent scoured the areas for everything nor speed run the main story. I think act 1 is tight like you said, but it seems to be much looser as you progress.
That’s good to hear, thanks. I’m not gonna say I did a speedrun on the first area but I was definitely skipping around.
I’m going to finish up these two quests and just leave from that point. If it’s too hard, I can always drop down to Explorer difficulty. As much as I’m enjoying the challenge right now, I’d rather do that than stop roleplaying because I’m XP hunting. I felt like I had to do that a lot in D:OS2 and it was one of the few major negatives in the game.
Is taking on encounters while underleveled as much of a death sentence in BG3 as it was in D:OS2?
I’m early still so only got into one such fight at this point where I got the warning message recommending me to flee. I was level 3 versus level 5s, and the encounter was perfectly doable (playing on medium, not Tactician, mind).
I haven’t actually seen that particular message.
Hmm, I haven’t seen that particular message. I’m still early on plus I have little experience with D&D 5e. I suppose it could go either way at higher levels. Right now it feels challenging but doable. Two levels was definitely pushing it in D:OS2.
I’ve been in two encounters with enemies two levels higher and both resulted in a party member death. Not nearly as big a deal as it was in BG2, but not something I’d recommend allowing every fight. Party comp might play a role here: maybe some are better able to handle it than others.
Party member death in BG 1&2 could be pretty rough yeah, especially in 1, and there were plenty of effects that prevented resurrection, even. Plus, characters dropped all items on Death, so picking everything up and re-equipping it after resurrection was punishment itself, haha.
Death is basically a non-threat in D&D 5E, but I haven’t looked into whether Larian has added any house rules to make it more punishing. In general I’m not a huge fan of the 5E ruleset so we’ll see how I feel about BG3 combat as I get further in. So far it seems more like death is handled like it was in Divinity, with plenty of Revivify Scrolls already.
I turned off Karmic Dice on principle, but maybe that was a mistake. So far the biggest challenge has been terrible luck. I’ve missed so many 80%+ attacks, often in a row. Feels very frustrating.
