Baldur's Gate III

Opening cinematic: https://youtu.be/_hqgv0pU0EM

Who's hyped? I'm hyped.

what do we know about it? 5e rules or 2nd ed? import bg2 chars or start from scratch? tentatively interested.

It's Divinity: Original Sin 3 with a tacked-on license, but they'll probably shoehorn in a lone reference to the hilarious hamster guy tbf

It's a tired meme by this point but I have no interest in Divinity: Original Sin III. Larian's gaudy, would-be humorous aesthetic is the exact opposite of what I want from an isometric CRPG.

Anyway, it's 5e and you'll be starting from scratch. Game will be turn-based, which is a huge turnoff for me because I'm one of those rabid, nostalgia-goggled assholes who'd rather the franchise was left alone.

xp

Here's an archived stream from a few days ago, featuring gameplay that looks and feels almost indistinguishable from D:OS2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSc17QXxfyU

i'm not an original sin fan but i do love the forgotten realms setting and i have yet to play a crpg with 5e mechanics so i am interested now!

If you disregard the title (this is no BG3, not even in spirit) and lower your expectations in terms of writing and art direction, I'm sure it'll deliver a worthwhile combat-oriented experience.

The campfire conversation is very Dragon Age

Yep, definitely. Except BioWare, for all their faults post-BG2, have always excelled at creating memorable characters. The same cannot be said for Larian, alas.

Shadowheart seems pretty cool

https://assets.rockpapershotgun.com/images/2020/05/baldurs-gate-3.jpg/RPSS/resize/640x-1/format/jpg/quality/90

Hoping this game will pleasantly surpass my expectations but everything's just going to be on fire all the time isn't it

They just really properly think it's good when everything's on fire all the time

Larian gonna Larian.

The original BG series is my favourite CRPG franchise of all time, but this one's a hard pass from me. No way I'm falling for Larian's snake oil after trudging through D:OS1&2.

I became more immersed in and devoted to BG1 and BG2 than any game before or since. That might've just been the right time and place and amount of free time in my life for me to have that moment, but nothing I've tried since then has really taken hold.

Pillars of Eternity did it for me, but it too arrived at the right time, just as I was dipping back into gaming.

This is out at the end of the month on PC. It's looking pretty good tbh, and they've maybe toned down the "everything's on fire all of the time" stuff in response to feedback. I enjoyed what I played of the Early access when it first launched but haven't touched it for years at this point

Oh and uh, [most exhausted voice in the world, just desperate for death to come and/or Reddit to stop existing] you can fuck a bear

so it’s set In Provincetown

I love the first two so much, do not understand why they are changing anything, seems to be some kind of a thing in the gaming industry that it always has to be more and "improved" somehow but I would pay a lot of money for just more BG2, maps and party members and quests and dungeons and dragons y'know

Siege of Dragonspear was alright but I think the team that worked on the originals is probably kind of important too

O shit Mac version coming

This will be my first PC RPG in like a decade

It is out!

Anyone interested in playing multiplayer?

I've just put a gaming rig together for my father because he wanted to play age of empires 4 and baldurs gate 3 and his laptop couldn't do it, opinions pending, baldurs gate is his favorite game so I hope it's good

How's does multiplayer work in BG3? I only tried it a couple times with the previous entries where one person was the sort of dm and decided who got the loot or whatever I dunno it was frustrating lol

Shame this isn't cross platform.

very pretty game! Polished, shiny, exciting! Glad I chose to wait on ffxvi, already confident this was a much better use of my money.

Started with a sorcerer but the first two characters added to my party are now a cleric and a wizard! Not fun when enemies get close, but very satisfying to strike down enemies from range.
Good use of bass as well! Get a nice "omph" every time someone is defeated/you level up, very satisfying

Only tried multiplayer for a moment but seems like you can jump in with a new character to someones campaign at any time and you get full autonomy. You can run around and start different battles/conversations than another person

Shame this isn't cross platform.

Most of my mates are PS5 but some are PC

looking forward to trying this out next week, have stayed away from spoilers and really any info at all but I did think to lookup whether or not you could still cast goodberry and am heartened to report that you absolutely can

When this comes for mac I guess I’m in, have to use these 16 gpu cores for something

Friendship ended with Lae'zel, Karlach is my new best friend <3

The scope of this game, not just in terms of the environment but in terms of player choice, is absolutely mind-boggling; it almost makes me worry about the people working at Larian

Yeah Lae'zel tried to slit our throats during our last camp, don't know what else I expected

Next day Karlach got shoved into a spider pit with no easy way out and just took them all on her own. A+ would recommend Karlach

So it looks like this is fully a video game version of AD&D? I don't have any history with it, but it looks pretty crazy. I don't think I have the patience for it (it seems like basic encounters can take quite awhile?) but that's great that it seemingly came out so well. Wonder what it'll be like to play on consoles.

I'm playing on a pc with an xbox controller and it's fine. It'd def be easier with keyboard and mouse, which I used as a kid when I played bg 1 and when I replayed it 3-4 years ago.

but yeah, some encounters feel like chess. This game is fuckin insane though, prob worthwhile playing just to see where game design is at these days

So excited for this, but waiting for the PS5 release.

I played Divinity: OS 2 on console and honestly Larian does a pretty good job of making these games controller friendly.

I'm playing on keyboard + trackpad and feels clunky so far. Only an hour in though. Also I have no idea how to cancel actions, one online guide said "just click on one of your companions' portraits!"and of course I attacked her

You’ll get the hang of it. This is my “hour a day” game at the moment and it really works well in those time intervals. Get a battle in, a significant dialogue encounter, and the ability to explore a bit, then log off and do it all again tomorrow.

Re: Larian’s work ethic, I recommend watching this video. It is about the production of their previous game divinity OS2 (high recommendation, not sure if BG3 has surpassed it for me, they’re sitting equal atm).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKwi_5nePZg

The Larian dude talking here seems like a very shrewd business man and manager. Credit to him for taking a big risk with Divinity OS2, it paid off and now it looks like it’s paying off again with BG3. Interesting to see where they go from here now as a studio

A word of advice: I had been approaching this game with a "I will feel free to ignore side quests and pursue them on a later playthrough," but it seems like that's left me pretty under-leveled for the end of Act I/start of Act II. I could barely deal with the Grymforge area, and when I went to move on to the next part of the main quest I got a warning message that was like "this is going to be too intense for you." So now I'm back in the aboveground area tying up loose ends and clobbering goblins. I didn't expect this game would be at all grindy, but here we are.

look, i have played this game way too much in the past 2 weeks, just absolute goblin mode, so i'll keep a lot to myself but i need to type this out loud (i'll spoiler tag it anyway, and like, the spoilers go up in spoilerness as they progress)
there's a point in act 3 where you (extremely vague spoiler to help you know if we're at the same place):
are sold/given a bag with 5 things in it and told to go upstairs to do the thing you want to do next

if you know what i'm talking about, you know i'm talking about:
going to hell to steal from raphael

the thing is, at the end of the thing i'm talking about, you
are about to fight him, and there's an extremely OTT conversation...... AND THEN THERE'S A SONG

and it's
the most unnecessarily expensive thing out of nowhere in an extremely expensive-to-make game. A LOT OF PEOPLE WON'T EVEN FOLLOW THIS QUEST LINE. and it's so fucking ARCH and CAMP and... AN ENTIRE DISNEY VILLAIN SONG.

so anyway, y'all have 4 months, because
i'm voting it #1 for song of the year on ILM. sorry mitski! it's RAPHAEL'S YEAR.

if you're skipping this specific content i understand but i recommend making a fork save somewhere so you can just... do this content

if you wanna just watch it, i don't know how youtube plays with ilx spoiler tags so i'll just leave the end of the url here: watch?v=ep43h63mYl4
(it's the entire pre-fight convo, plus the fight and the song, on low graphics settings sadly) (but also the first big attack they do, fucking LMAOOOOOOOOOO) ("NO MORE DEALS, IT'S OVER!")

game of the year, easy. sorry jagged alliance sorry zelda sorry starfield preemptively sorry street fighter sorry whatever else came out this year

The free camera movement that lets me scout ahead, spy on enemies etc is very helpful but ... feels kinda like cheating.

I love the design of the myconid grove and the shadow-cursed lands. That they managed to get the shadow-cursed lands to feel gloomy and unsettling but still look pretty, in their own way, seems like a feat - not dissimilar to but probably better done than the underworld in Tears of the Kingdom, which I also loved until it started getting really samey.

So far we've done one delightfully creepy fight and another outright disturbing one (among more routine ones) and it's all very much up my street*, in moderation. Genuinely worried some of this stuff will give me nightmares (that whole bit with Malus Thorn!) because I am a lightweight.

* Aside from Gale getting hot and bothered and flirty with me after a battle with a zombie kid's wraith family, I mean really mate now is not the time or the place

I'm guessing that if I want to get the most out of the main story in BG3, I should start off with single-player? When I played multiplayer DOS2, my group really didn't pay much attention to dialogue.

Probably depends hugely on your gaming partners..? I don't think I'd enjoy it as much solo, but my partner and I are usually on the same page with how we want to play the game and it's helpful to have a co-strategist.

haven't gotten past the character creation screen yet, just finally installed it but this screen made me laugh out loud

https://imgur.io/EXGm01V?r

which led to a google image search for "nude minsc" and of course deviantart never disappoints

whoops

https://imgur.io/EXGm01V?r

So this is great, got it on PS5 yesterday. A more streamlined version of Divinity: OS 2. Though I think I liked the combat system more in DOS2? Too early to say. I’m glad everything isn’t constantly on fire this time around at least.

Not a fan of only being able to re-slot spells when you level up, but I guess that’s a D&D thing. Showing a d20 roll for skill checks is wonderfully satisfying 👍. Conversation trees are about as fun as combat and I can’t say that about pretty much any RPG I’ve played outside of Disco Elysium.

You can change which spells you have memorised using the spellbook menu any time out of combat; to swap the spells you have memorised you sort of have to wait for it to give you the option at certain level-ups but you can also just pay a nominal fee to [NPC met early game] to respect your character whenever you want

This game owns imo

Second sentence should say to change the spells you *know*

Anyone want to play today or tomorrow?

I’d totally pop in for some multiplayer, but the way they do this is a little weird.

Anyone can drop in and play any of your main quest character and drop out. Fun, but said drop-er doesn’t gain anything from the experience outside of having fun.

You CAN bring a custom character into a friend’s game, but apparently once you do they are locked into that friend’s party even after they leave. You can’t even leave them at camp. I understand managing that stuff is really tricky, but that particular decision seems a little insane.

I think they fixed that in Patch 2, you talk to Withers to drop your friend's character from your party.

No - tbf, I arrived with Shadowheart as my girl. He'd already been creepily asking us for threesomes ("swimming") in previous dialogues tho.

Damn, the Underdark goes on for a while

Boredom with Act 2 has been relieved by just going on a murder spree around Moonrise Towers, got the ogre, the mage and the orc woman. Made my way into Thorn's inner sanctum even, at which point of course it turns out he's invulnerable so I still have to do all the shit underneath the masuleum. Will be fun to have the big act 2 battle with all of Thorn's heavy hitters missing at least.

Me approaching the end of BG3: Finally I'll be able to play stuff on my backlog.
Me after beating BH3: But why would I want to?

welp, my atheist run got to the inevitable - Shadowheart turned on me and I had to kill her. I even tried setting everyone to non lethal attacks but the system wasn't having it.

no great loss in objective terms - I'd done pretty much all her storyline in the first run - but it did not feel good

kinda feel like giving the game a rest now but then I've thought that like four times so far in this run and I'm still at it lol

Maybe Tactician isn't such a reach for me now that I understand combat better, because in my second playthrough, I finished Ethel in less than a full round with two characters. (Granted, my team was level 5.)

Super annoyed that I can'5 save wubren because I completed the nightsong thing first. How was that supposed to be obvious to me?

Yes very annoying. I only did it first because someone told me to.

Almost as good as playing BG3: looking at the class spell list and thinking about what you'll pick when you level up.

So Minthara was flirting with me and since I'm doing this second run to experience as much of the game that I haven't as possible, I wanted to go for it, but I knew Karlach would not be amused - so I had her jump off a cliff, got with Minthara and am now going to resurect her and see if I've gotten away with it. I'm going to hell (more than I already did).

hahaah yeah let us know.

i'm STILL in my first playthrough. I swear I'm playing several hours a night too. Maybe I'll regret this as I'm pretty much doing all the quests on my list. Hoping it doens't make subsequent playthroughs boring

Having reached the Underdark in my second playthrough, I can confirm that it's not boring, especially because I didn't come close to doing everything my first time even though the quests in my journal all showed completion.

It worked! Now I just have to live with myself.

Haha that's amazing, daniel

I got to the Raphael fight last night and LOOOOOOOOOL what in the Evanescence Christ Superstar is happening with the music?

I liked it unironically!

yeah it's pretty inspired I think, and suits the character, maybe not as appropriate but would have loved a doomy metal song sung by jk simmons about how he is going to murder me

attempted an honor mode run a few times and yeah, no way lol, am so much not good enough at videogames to pull that off, fun to try but I can't keep playing the first few hours before getting absolutely destroyed by gnolls or the fake paladins or whatever

Florin, have you tried Tactician before? If so, how did that compare with your Honor Mode attempts?

I did try tactician yes, mostly just to do all the evil stuff and it was cool, but there were a dozen times at least I made a grave error, got very murdered and had to reload

Meanwhile on youtube it's like "SOLO HONOR MODE SPEEDRUN JUST SALAMI"

the. Raphael music is fun, it's true. It's just completley unexpected because none of the other boss fights have big campy Tim Rice musical numbers ostensibly sung by the boss themsleves

PSA: you can lose your Honour Mode run in the epilogue!

I definitely think I'm ready for Tactician now because I basically did the Grym fight without taking any damage from it (SH was the only casualty because she walked through lava) and did the Death Shepherd fight in the Mountain Pass in just over a round of combat.

Finally beat the Netherbrain tonight but I stopped playing during the afterparty. 300+ hours that's taken me!

After 320 hours, I finally completed it, and they saved the funniest glitch till last

https://www.reddit.com/u/doglatin80/s/NJuEdov1id

I found out that I often leave my xbox on the character sheet screen, which counts as gameplay time so sadly I do not know how many hours I am really in!

tbf I do go away and come back a lot, it's not constant gameplay

Upgraded my video card so’s to play this even smoother

I'm mostly making roughly the same decisions as I did in my first playthrough, but I did get two new interactions:

Rescued and recruited Minthara.
Got my second visit from the urgent butler.

~40 hours into an honor mode run and terrified

had to watch some youtubes about how to actually play this game because it never occurred to me to throw things or be a monk, pretty clutch

really like Minthara, went through all the trouble to save Halsin only for a shade or whatever to destroy his portal and trap him in shadow hell forever, whoops sorry Halsin

Tavern Brawler breaks the game on normal, especially on a monk. Once I try Tactician or HM, I might consider it again if I find I need to cheese to survive, but just punching everything loses its novelty after 10 hours.

yeah well shortly after my previous post I decided to mess around with the githyanki for absolutely no reason and was handily taken to task lol, ah well, honor mode is hard, nobody cares about my monks or tavern brawlers

was doing pretty good though, should have minded my business

Lol damn well better to learn that sooner than later!

Oh god: in my Dark Urge run, I'm doing Moonrise stuff now, and I just saw a reddit post saying not to long rest, but I have loads of stuff left (I haven't scratched the surface of the Sharran Temple), and I'm out of short rests. The butler already told me to kill Isobel or else, and so now I terrified about what's coming. And despite the dread, please don't spoil me, as I think I have to let this play out.

I started my Tactican run and it was going very easy (I even got the cambion to drop his flaming sword) and didn't take any damage while on the Nautiloid. Then picked up the first four recruits, cleaned up the Intellect Devourers and the dying Mind Flayer, scared off the surface-level tomb raiders, this is all smooth sailing so far I'm really nailing this, then fail the deception check at the door, "Oh well I'll just lockpick it open," but the creep left a trap for my party to step on just inside the door, and then their entire party was already waiting for me and proceeded to wipe me off the map.

mmmhm yeah that got me too the one time I tried that area, have completely skipped all of that every subsequent go, did not realize you can actually find Withers until I watched some youtube playthroughs

the early levels are just so sketchy and dangerous I don't wanna fight anything if I can help it

There's the draw of getting the XP and getting Withers so that I can respec Shart ASAP, but it may have to wait till I pick up Wyll for that sweet sweet Eldritch Blast.

Back in my other game, I'm trying out Halsin a bit more to figure out a better druid build, especially with beefing him up while wild shaped. Apparently certain feats apply to animal forms.

Got through that fight and the skelly one after it (which I accidentally triggered early by seeing if I could move them before they aggroed), and now my Shart is a Tempest cleric. I also managed to save the Tiethling kid in the Harpy fight for the first time ever, which was a pretty good fight.

I keep forgetting to pre-cast stuff though! Main thing I want to try is to exploit wetness (use Mage Hand to throw water at enemies, then hit them with ice or lightning).

Combat has been a lot more fun, too the point where I'm wondering if I should preemptively change it on my Act 2 game...

https://www.ign.com/articles/larian-studios-wont-make-baldurs-gate-3-dlc-expansions-or-baldurs-gate-4

Wonder what the dust up was that caused this?

I'd imagine it's at least partly related to the layoffs at Hasbro:

https://www.pcgamer.com/theres-almost-nobody-left-ceo-of-baldurs-gate-3-dev-swen-vincke-says-the-dandd-team-he-initially-worked-with-is-gone-due-to-hasbro-layoffs/

This fucking sucks

Yeah, this type of shit spells the end days. It’s happening everywhere. Enjoy the carcass of a company you have left after you “more lean, more modern” every quarter.

Optimistically I can say I'm excited for what Larian does next. But sad 2 say goodbye to all my new friends.

idk, from the ign article it's not clear if larian actually wanted to continue working on baldur's gate at all.
i reckon the layoff issue is unrelated to that decision but even then it's still a satisfying "fuck you" from them to hasbro

from where i'm sitting, this reads like good news, that they'll choose do whatever they want instead of being slaves in the d&d mines for the next decade or longer

chihuahua's take sounds like what I've been following (i.e. that it was never really in the cards to continue on with BG4 or more DND), and while understandable, I'm also sad.

The stuff about "No DLC" isn't news, Swen has said that before, but Larian has been continuing to release patches, some of which includes new content. Usually it's bug fixes, but sometimes it's new content, whether that's new voice lines around the camp or the whole epilogue. (I wouldn't expect new quests, though.)

Apparently they're still cooking up new things including epilogue cinematics.

Everything aside, I'm not really sure I need a DLC or a sequel, not for a long long time at least. My first playthrough was 350 hours. It'll be a while till I do another play through

https://www.ign.com/articles/larian-started-work-on-baldurs-gate-3-dlc-then-canceled-it-the-studio-was-elated?utm_source=twitter

LOL pay no attention to what I said.

Yeah, Larian itself will be just fine. Them potentially launching a fresh ip is more exciting than more D&D stuff. And I’d imagine after the Divinity games and BG3 they’d be itching to step outside of the trad-fantasy realm. Which would be dope.

Can’t find the post, but I’ve seen the point made that where Larian signed the original contracts, D&D was much less prominent back in 2017 or so before all the popular attention due to podcasters and Critical Role types and pandemic play making it a hit. 5e had only been out for a couple-few years by then.

Trying to renegotiate a game license now (and expansions and merch tie-ins, no doubt), with the far more massive cultural footprint and Hasbro enshittifying every it touches seems like such a headache that no wonder they said fuck it and went back to doing their own thing .

I hope they make a sci-fi property eventually