Baldur's Gate III

Yeah if you and your friends are in line to go and there’s no enemy in between you, you can go at the same time. Improves the flow.

Circa, I’m having a lot of fun playing a melee warlock/paladin (see the YouTube below) with with astarion, shadow heart, and Karlach (much better than lae’zel. Just depends if you prefer bashing things (which I do) or casting things. But the party is making tactician a relative breeze. High recommend!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oN4EQuf_ljw

was totally ready to be a curmudgeon and not be into this but no, it's great, just so much going on, chock full of little caves and secret passages and other weird detours around every corner

even the dyes, must have spent an hour experimenting with dyes once I found some

have a question, it seems like the game wants me to do something with all of these movable crates/rocks/wheelbarrows and I'm not sure what

I don’t think it does necessarily? Not yet anyway. I haven’t had any use for that in this game yet, but in the developer’s previous games you could stack crates and such to make stairs to get up to stuff.

You can stack crates for high ground or to reach places, but in general this game just has stuff like rope that looks useful but isn't really.

If the crate/rock/wheelbarrow glows blue and the character completes a check of some sort, then you want to move that sucker out the way to find some hidden treasure. But yeah 99% of rocks should stay where they are... unless you want to pick them up and throw them at goblins

i think i hate the writing and characters in this game! why can't RPGs move past this joss whedon shit. and everyone is always talking

Played this till 4am last night/today, nbd.

Mac release date pushed back?

"later this month" yeah

Gives me time to save up $ so good

Is it better to swap your party members on the regular or generally stick with the same ones? I quite like Gael's character and the voice acting is great, but I already play as a wizard so it's a bit pointless really.

also wonder about that, but I presume at least most of their individual story beats can be found if they are in "camp"

which is a whole other thing I had no idea about prior to starting, I do like it but now I am obsessed with trying to collect all of the people to hang out in my dope camping spot, love the Suikoden/Animal Crossing vibes though there are only a handful of empty bedrolls left (this colors how I interact with anyone because I want them all to be my animal crossing neighbors)

still in the first chapter/area though, was super exciting to recruit a friendly dog

The dog is great, so is the owlcub, my rarest steam achievement atm is patting both dog and owlcub at the same time; kicking goals! .
I'm sticking with the same party besides swapping Lae-zel and Karlach every now and then for them to interact with their specific story points. I just can't be bothered reconfiging my battle strat for an offensive spell caster, and I am already playing warlock sorry Wyll. Wish I had a bard in my party though! seems like a fun class to play

Haha, can't believe I havne't even met Karlach yet.

I picked up a bedroll and it's in my inventory. Is it useful?

Karlach is the best. maybe not the best story of the companions, but definitely the best vibes

Something odd has been happening in that I'm experiencing almost identical stick drift issues with both my PS5 controllers since playing this game.

It seems strange that both controllers would develop a problem where my character sometimes decides he's just gonna go a walking to the left of his own accord.

I've told PS about the issue, and I'm sure it's just a freak hardware issue, but I wonder if anyone else has had this happen and it might be another weird bug in the game.

Karlach rules. I’ve got her running as a Berserker and she can absolutely stomp through some enemies when the situation’s right.

Yeah berserker is so much fun. With great weapon master you can get 4 beefy hits in per turn, very fun.

Just took down a raiding party of level 9 Githyanki as a recent level 8'er (was close to giving up halfway through but we made it work!) and finally found the road to baldur's gate! Loving this game.

i think i hate the writing and characters in this game!

the writing seems...fine to me so far, in line with the previous two which were also just ok, basic sword & sorcery skeletons to hang a story on

I do think it is weird that every party member I've met so far (besides the dog) is super hot and wants to bang, am a lil bit afraid to encourage any of that, crossing my fingers for some weirdo ancient gnome friends or just asexual monster people to pal around with

maybe this is my fault for playing a warlock, max charisma and all how can they resist

This game is hornier than all the jrpg’s I’ve ever played, a true feat

This game is hornier than all the jrpg’s I’ve ever played, a true feat

has anyone else read the novelizations? because I have, twice and the second time just recently in anticipation of BG3, don't want to spoil them but I should because you really don't need to read them they are bad ask me anything

It really really wants you to get it on with all the characters. Gale and Astarion are especially keen. And it's not just my party who are lusting - I walked into a very compromising scene in a goblin village last night.

I'm playing a good, moral, pragmatic character this round so obviously I'm Team Shadowheart but she seems very unfussed. I'm looking forward to a second playthrough where I'm basically going to be a total bastard, sell out my friends to anyone who wants them, be mean to all the tielfings etc...

The horniness was a bug, apparently: https://www.polygon.com/23858507/baldurs-gate-3-horny-bug-gale

I was thinking about doing a run where I RPed as a charismatic bastard, but the writing is so effective that when I had a chance to demean an NPC, I just sort of defaulted to my usual moralistic prig.

I never go evil intentionally, but I accidentally fireballed some innocent gnomes I was supposed to save, and their friends refused to talk to me saying "you've done enough" which was pretty funny.

Is there a way to like, spare enemies or kind of just say "whoa now let's all just calm down here"?

I know you can toggle non-lethal attacks, but it might be useful to say, spare one member of the gang for questioning. Sometimes I don't feel it's fair to literally kill people for defending themselves

There are many ways to skill check out of a fight, but once a fight starts, it's either kill or non-lethal, and even non-lethal will leave them unconscious so there's no further questioning to be done.

I love when I talk my way out of a fight and then like 20 dudes I didn't realize were even nearby just pick up their shit and leave the area because there's no fight to be had.

I accidentally fireballed some innocent gnomes I was supposed to save, and their friends refused to talk to me saying "you've done enough" which was pretty funny.

― what you say is true but by no means (lukas)

When attempting to free the gnome strapped to the windmill, I saw a lever, flipped it, and watched in confusion and mounting horror as the windmill sped up and flung the poor gnome over some distant trees. Then I saw there was a second lever, presumably the 'stop' one. I still feel bad about it.

Also, don't kick the squirrel unless you are doing an evil playthrough or you viciously hate squirrels

XP haha I flung the gnome last night in exactly the same way. Sorry dude!

lol I did the same thing, then promptly reloaded a saved game and did it the right way

I also flung the gnome. That shit killed me

I did not reload... sorry mr. gnome

Grrrr.. well this game has plummeted in my estimation since tonight I've encountered one of the most irritating, broken areas of any game I've ever encountered.

The stupid cave of traps before you meet the Hag. First off, my characters almost always fail to perceive the traps, so I'm fucked from the start. Sometimes on loading I don't see anything, other times there's areas of noxious gas everywhere. If I jump over them, usually only three of my characters make it intact. More often than not, one of my characters will just not bother jumping and just hang back, or they'll walk straight into the mist before making the jump. If I do spot the traps (which is hardly ever) and try to disable them, they explode and kill half my party and I can't revive them because they're literally lying in magma so as soon as I revive them they die again. I did see a hint flash up (all too quickly, it disappeared before I could read it properly) about putting something heavy on the "vents". Trouble is, I can't see anything that would look like a vent. If I try to put a stone (as was suggested when I finally caved and Googled a solution), on the flower type things, nothing happens other than I walk into the mist. I read somewhere that you can use a potion of feather falling and just jump all the way down, which is fair enough but seems like a fudge and it's not intuitive to do this.I finally managed to fudge myself and my other characters down there, with a massive amount of healing. Then the Hag herself made mincemeat of me. It's the stupid traps that annoy me more though. Who decided that this would be a good idea to have in the game? Invisible traps that explode when you try to diffuse them or sneak past? I dunno.. I'm all het up now

I'm sure there's a simple trick with this idiotic area, but if there is, it doesn't seem intuitive or the kind of thing that's designed for a game like this

Do you have astarion with you? The rogues specialty is disarming traps. I know the section you’re talking about, mildly annoying but it wasn’t that bad for me to get through. My pet peeve with the game is when you jump over something, only to relies 5 minutes later that one of your party memebers decided not to jump and now you have to do it all manually again. If this was a one or two time thing, whatever, but it happens every second jump I do I swear! And it’s not that they can’t make the jump, they can! But the computer just seems to decide one random character doesn’t want to jump every time. Kills me

traps are a huge pain in the ass, even with astarion because unlike the previous games finding traps seems to be a passive thing that anyone might "perceive" except they often don't, at this point I just get super nervous whenever a dice roll fails while I'm bumbling around

also the first time I failed to disarm a trap and then my one set of tools broke led to me hoarding everything just in case, I have so many shovels, but so far nothing else has busted during use

only just realized that jumping is pretty important, seems like some characters can make jumps that others can't?

Yeah stronger characters can jump farther.

when you jump over something, only to relies 5 minutes later that one of your party memebers decided not to jump and now you have to do it all manually again

Yes, this was part of why I was getting frustrated. And when I switch to that character, my other characters' AI decides it's time to JUMP BACK to the ledge they just jumped from and rejoin the straggler, often jumping INTO the poison. Yes, yes, I know I can split my group up, but why it happens in the first place is a mystery.
It's not always with jumps either. I was fairly deep into that area when I realised Shadowheart was still just hanging out in the swamp on her own and the AI had just dosed off

Eldritch Knight with expeditious retreat (actually for charging people) enhance leap and misty step is a fun time, you can just whizz round all over the place using your two attacks and shove to squish casters and ranged enemies

I wish there was a good-aligned rogue companion. User salsa shark is providing v effective rogue services with a custom character in our main playthrough, but in my other solo save as an extremely morally inflexible dwarf who splats anything remotely evil without negotiation, its a bit annoying not having an easy way to disarm traps and pick locks unless you want to make nice with someone who is obviously hiding in plain sight as a privately educated English person . I know you can respec people but don't want to bust any origin characters' storylines

They should have also had a bigger variety of species and appearances in the companions imo, I know horny nerds want to have relations with elf supermodels on the computer, but there are far too many elves

H.P., I did have Astarion with me. He wasn't very good at perceiving or disabling traps.

Or maybe it's me? I can't seem to see the traps myself - I don't know what they look like in order to do something about them. Nor these vents that get mentioned for that matter - it's either a sea of gas or just a normal-looking walkway. So I'm about as clueless as the characters.

Sometimes when I walk in the room after loading, I can see noxious gas. Other times it's not there, but if I walk into the rooom everything explodes and everyone pretty much dies. If my characters do perceive the trap, I'm not sure what to do next. If I ask my character to disarm it, he'll either walk straight into the fumes or the trap explodes anyway.

I've watched guides on YouTube on how to do this, but there seems to be more happening in the environment (there are yellow outlines on the ground that weren't showing for me).

I'm sure it's trying to teach me stuff about splitting my group up, jumping, throwing and covering these elusive vents etc...

But it feels very convoluted and fiddly, largely based on trial-and-error, and the sort of thing that would only work in an action RPG than one where you have to manipulate four characters at once.

Lol, I'm very grumpy due to no sleep and too much BG3

Here are my exploits in this area. I just don't get it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEamEBXYrsA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I1qPd5dj1Q

Huh. So I just died and reloaded my game and now I can see the poison clouds whereas I couldn't before. There is no logic here

Haha okay I've done some digging and this might well be a bug. Frustrating though

Full Mac version September 21st. I've put in 47 hours so far in Early Access, so all in Act 1 on characters I won't be able to bring over to the full version. I *think* I've been everywhere.

You know what's especially great about those game? It's a new gen game that doesn't make me feel lonely. So many games out there set you as a solitary loner in a desolate, unforgiving world. I switch this on and it's like "Yay, all my friends!"

I found the baby owlbear and invited it to my camp and convinced the goblin lady to let it go and it ran away AND NEVER SHOWED UP AT CAMP and I am absolutely crushed, do I just restart the whole game now or what

You might need to give it another long rest

I started this game! I find it so overwhelming, my god. I haven’t played party-based RPGs since Ultima, in my teens. Keeping everyone outfitted and dressed is such a job!!

I thought I was cruising through, and assembled a party of four, got them to level 2, but then my cleric fell through a pit into “the crypt” at a time when I was down to one healing potion and all my characters needed a rest… and now couldn’t, because the party was separated

And the first dungeon battle was so, so challenging for me. I had to text a friend for help. I only won by setting the difficulty on easy, enticing the ragey dude into the candle room and finishing him off with the door closed

Sometime later I realized that I have an inventory full of items I can use. This game is a lot of information