Baldur's Gate 3 (PC, PS5, Xbox Series) [no open spoilers]

[Novembruh]

Why do you say this?

Because Larian is making a CRPG with intention. I'm not talking about the time the companies existed - when they reached a point of acclaim and then get rushed at with licensing opportunities, they didn't immediately jettison their identity. The first thing Bioware did, and the lasting point of their legacy, was eschewing what brought them to the table in the chase for wide market appeal. Mass Effect got love and what's the first thing it did? It turned into an action game. ME2 is all-time, no dispute, but it's barely an RPG in mechanics. It's a TPS with story consequence. And even that got sent to the shadowrealm by ME3. Which says nothing of what that decision did to DA2.

Larian made DOS. Got a good amount of attention for it. Made DOS2. Got worldwide acclaim for it. And haven't even moved on the screams from people about RTw/P or even streamlining the games. They doubled down and made it denser and filled it with even more CRPG; not less.

Bioware may have made the BG series, but where did it lead them? To owned part-and-parcel by Electronic Arts and basically soulless. Dragon Age's latest entry is on reboot 3, Mass Effect been on a gurney monopolizing the defribulator for a decade now and Anthem was stillborn. EA killed whatever was left of the company's identity the Bioware hadn't already shed itself of.

And more specifically, my statement was about the listening that Larian has been willing to do in the right direction. They took input from people who played and loved their games, not suits who thought they saw market penetration availability. BG3 right now is damn near a different game from BG3 at the start of early access. The mechanical differences alone are a greater departure than the ME2-to-ME3 transition.

There was hyperbole in the statement, sure, but there's truth. Larian has stayed Larian and are about to put out an anticipated RPG. The last time you could say Bioware was actually Bioware and about the drop an anticipated CRPG that would actually be a CRPG... was 2009. That's 14 years ago

 

[xXMASHERXx]

Because Larian is making a CRPG with intention. I'm not talking about the time the companies existed - when they reached a point of acclaim and then get rushed at with licensing opportunities, they didn't immediately jettison their identity. The first thing Bioware did, and the lasting point of their legacy, was eschewing what brought them to the table in the chase for wide market appeal. Mass Effect got love and what's the first thing it did? It turned into an action game. ME2 is all-time, no dispute, but it's barely an RPG in mechanics. It's a TPS with story consequence. And even that got sent to the shadowrealm by ME3. Which says nothing of what that decision did to DA2.

Larian made DOS. Got a good amount of attention for it. Made DOS2. Got worldwide acclaim for it. And haven't even moved on the screams from people about RTw/P or even streamlining the games. They doubled down and made it denser and filled it with even more CRPG; not less.

Bioware may have made the BG series, but where did it lead them? To owned part-and-parcel by Electronic Arts and basically soulless. Dragon Age's latest entry is on reboot 3, Mass Effect been on a gurney monopolizing the defribulator for a decade now and Anthem was stillborn. EA killed whatever was left of the company's identity the Bioware hadn't already shed itself of.

And more specifically, my statement was about the listening that Larian has been willing to do in the right direction. They took input from people who played and loved their games, not suits who thought they saw market penetration availability. BG3 right now is damn near a different game from BG3 at the start of early access. The mechanical differences alone are a greater departure than the ME2-to-ME3 transition.

There was hyperbole in the statement, sure, but there's truth. Larian has stayed Larian and are about to put out an anticipated RPG. The last time you could say Bioware was actually Bioware and about the drop an anticipated CRPG that would actually be a CRPG... was 2009. That's 14 years ago

I will just say I agree with your point about ME2 which is why I'll never complete the series. The rest of your post is too fanboyish to even address. Would have been better off just saying you like Larian over BioWare

 

[Animal House]

I’m hype af for this one day one cop

 

[MrLogic]

Glad I stopped playing the Early Access a year ago so I can enjoy it fresh when it comes out.

 

[Gizmo_Duck]

 

[CodeKansas]

LITERAL fukking bestiality.

 

[42 Monks]

 

[Gizmo_Duck]

lol at people actually getting upset about this.

This is like a sensible chuckle at best

 

[Hopeofmypeople]

Anyone know what race the creature above is? The one from the preset origin, Is that a Dragonkin?

 

[Gizmo_Duck]

Baldur's Gate 3 preview: the closest we've ever come to a full simulation of D&D

You'll never see everything that Baldur's Gate 3 has to offer – just as it should be

www.gamesradar.com

This heist has gone very wrong, very quickly, much to the embarrassment of Baldur's Gate 3 game director Sven Vincke. Two guards have remained stalwart at their posts, so the plan to create a distraction with one character and stroll through the bank's open doors with another has resolutely failed. Now, a chaotic battle is unfolding on multiple fronts. In the end, it's a combination of a poisonous cloud, a resilient panther, and a couple of sly teleportation spells that get the party into the vault.

The initial plan was genius, albeit heavily rehearsed. Splitting his Wizard from the party, Vincke multi-classed to take advantage of a Sorcerer ability; Metamagic lets you augment the range of spells, and now his Wizard can fly three times as far as he could before – far enough to reach the roof of the bank he's targeting. From there, a Scroll of Gaseous Form lets him travel through the building's pipes and into the bank's offices. After that, the aim was to lead every guard in the building on a merry dance, leaving the vaults undefended. If it had been a success, it would have been a perfect realization of the strengths that D&D systems have brought to Baldur's Gate 3. As it is, it's still a pitch-perfect encapsulation of the chaos that unfurls when even a single dice roll doesn't go your way.
Click to shrink...

Even at the very most surface level, it's impossibly dense. The titular city teems with life, but so does every other settlement you come across, each town an entire soundscape of babbling voices weaving through streets packed with NPCs, every one of whom has a potential part to play in your story. At one moment, I picked a stranger out of the crowd at random, only to find that they had the information to help me on a major quest, but if I hadn't had a specific character in my party, they might never have given it up.

The density of the world is very impressive, but what most struck me is the density of the game's structure, and the freedom that comes with that.

The number of branching paths is so great that lead writer Adam Smith describes it as a spiderweb: "It's not that you start at point A, and then you keep branching and branching and branching. You're always heading towards the same point, but what happens when you get there is very different." Smith points to one major character who was accidentally killed in an early playtest: "The game reacts, the game can let that happen. You can always pull yourself out of it and get back onto the plotline."

"What we realized very quickly is that people will get everywhere. And then we need to put invisible walls up and we need to take away Flight. But we weren't going to do that." It was at that point, he says, that he felt he was no longer making an RPG. Instead, Baldur's Gate 3 had become an immersive sim in the vein of Thief, Deus Ex, or Dishonored.

Smith adds: "It was only when we got to the city that we realized we had to go from 'what's behind this waterfall' to 'what's in these 50 houses?', or 'this person came up through the sewers, so how do people react?"

Larian has spent six years creating Baldur's Gate 3, and three of those in early access. Without that period of public testing and feedback, Smith says, it's almost impossible to imagine the game existing; responses have helped shape entire narrative threads, but they've also given the developers the opportunity to demonstrate the richness of their simulation. Smith says that players needed to be invited into the "choice space," but that it was just as easy to scare them away from investing in the game's freedoms.

 

[Novembruh]

Anyone know what race the creature above is? The one from the preset origin, Is that a Dragonkin?

White Dragonborn (Monk) iirc from the panel

Interesting how different they ended up looking from DOS2's lizard people. I figured they'd just transfer the model in but they didn't. Them motherfukkers look wild.

Wonder if they bleed a different color than red. Finna find out in under a month - I'm killing them fools with prejudice.

Dark Urge being a dedicated origin playthrough where the game is going to push you to be evil/destructive probably gonna be the most played Run #2 by far. Just to see how the game reacts to missing characters. Do they go ME3 and create a 'we have Wrex at home' NPC to fill in the gaps or does the story morph around the absence?

If them druids into that kinda sketchy shyt though, I might just have to side with the goblins in act 1 and get them fools wiped off the map Druid Sanctuary ain't in Harlem, huh?

 

[Gizmo_Duck]

White Dragonborn (Monk) iirc from the panel

Interesting how different they ended up looking from DOS2's lizard people. I figured they'd just transfer the model in but they didn't. Them motherfukkers look wild.

Wonder if they bleed a different color than red. Finna find out in under a month - I'm killing them fools with prejudice.

Dark Urge being a dedicated origin playthrough where the game is going to push you to be evil/destructive probably gonna be the most played Run #2 by far. Just to see how the game reacts to missing characters. Do they go ME3 and create a 'we have Wrex at home' NPC to fill in the gaps or does the story morph around the absence?

If them druids into that kinda sketchy shyt though, I might just have to side with the goblins in act 1 and get them fools wiped off the map Druid Sanctuary ain't in Harlem, huh?

Can you play as them?

 

[Novembruh]

Can you play as them?

yeah

 

[Gizmo_Duck]

Via PCGamesN

Baldur’s Gate 3 has rapidly ascended the Steam sale charts after a Larian livestream showed a sexual tryst between a vampire and a Druid in bear form.

For the week ending Tuesday, July 4, Baldur’s Gate 3 sat at number 25 on the Steam best-seller chart. Now, after the Panel from Hell showcase, Baldur’s Gate 3 has jumped right up to number seven, just above Red Dead Redemption 2 and one beneath Elden Ring.

 

[Gizmo_Duck]