Poll of the Day > Baldur's Gate 3 is fucking amazing

(+) Yeah! (+)

I was expecting a lot from Larian but they've exceeded my expectations, holy shit

Agreed, love it. It runs pretty well on my ancient PC too.

el oh el bear sex

I keep hearing about all this weird sexual shit with awkward millennial writing.

There is nothing awkward or millennial about the writing.
And all the sexual shit is optional. I've been playing for 35 hours and haven't run into anything. (Although one character wants to bone me and I said okay but it hasn't happened yet)

I like that so many other companies are like "it's not fair you're making us look bad by making a good game and just leaving it at that instead of monetizing the crap out of it."

i wish there was a demo you could try for a couple hours. I haven't really played these types of RPGs before and they look super intimidating and like there's a big learning curve. I tried playing Pillars of Eternity and got overwhelmed by all the skills/abilities and all of the paragraphs of text. It wasn't my cup of tea and I gave up after about 8 or 9 hours.

Is BG3 anything like PoE?

I can't speak to how BG3 compares to PoE, having played neither, but the older Baldur's Gate games routinely go on sale for a couple dollars on GoG, and the Divinity games are also similar and old enough to see deep sales. If you want to try out the genre, there are plenty of options to do so without dropping $70.

In any of those cases, if you're struggling with all of the skills/abilities, you can always look up build guides to help you get a grasp on them. You don't necessarily have to follow them ton the letter if you don't want to, but they will at least tell you what works and help give you the foundation to be able to figure out everything else.

sodium-chloride posted...

i wish there was a demo you could try for a couple hours. I haven't really played these types of RPGs before and they look super intimidating and like there's a big learning curve. I tried playing Pillars of Eternity and got overwhelmed by all the skills/abilities and all of the paragraphs of text. It wasn't my cup of tea and I gave up after about 8 or 9 hours.

Is BG3 anything like PoE?

Honestly if you were overwhelmed by PoE you should probably just skip this.

I dunno I've heard that PoE is incredibly complicated as far as CRPGs go.
BG3 has a keybind that you can hover over anything and it explains what it does. Also you can respec whenever you want for 100 gold (I just started act 2 and I'm at like 16k)

Zareth posted...

Also you can respec whenever you want for 100 gold (I just started act 2 and I'm at like 16k)

That's pretty generous of the devs

Big fan of games where respeccing is easy, especially when it's easy to screw up a build.

Yep, the respec option is pretty great since they have such deep and diverse class system and so many ways to play. You get the option almost right away and can make a save right after, so you can play the game as any combination of characters you like (while still playing with origin characters that have their own stories etc). Only thing you can't change is their race sadly.

Even in one playthrough though, the respec option can allow you to fine tune your characters based on their levels. You are not restricted from multi-classing like in 5e.....allowing you to be any combination you want (even 1 level of every class). Most of the melee classes get a big bump at level 5, so going pure 5 barbarian/fighter/ranger/paladin etc really pays off initially, but AFTER 5, multiclassing can add alot (and in some cases going pure past 5 like for a barbarian doesn't add that much).

There is alot of customization you can have, but you can also flat out just play simply with a basic set of classes and it's not complicated. The story is great, and it's pretty easy to pick up (two friends have not played a game like this at all and are loving it).

At the same time its not so on the rails that people who do play RPGs feel bored and don't have any choices that matter.

Great game, very worth the money and wait.

Easy respeccing can be nice but it also loses something: having to make builds in RPGs that can survive the leveling process AND be as good as they can be in the endgame.

I don't really have a solution though, because respeccing is pretty convenient...

The levelling/endgame dichotomy is one of the major reasons why I really like easy respecs (at least in ARPGs, which is getting a bit away from CRPGs, but whatever). Slogging through levelling waiting for an endgame build to come online is tedious, but levelling efficiently only to be gimped in endgame feels like a waste. In an ideal world, the levelling process would be balanced such that levelling builds would work just as well in endgame, but very, very few games actually pull that off, and easy respecs are a good way to get around that. It does lose the "try to plan what you'll need and reap the benefits/suffer the consequences accordingly" aspect of permanent specs, but I personally don't put a lot of stock in that (and those that do can just choose not to respec).

It's so lame that the cannon MC name is Tav, I mean what the fuck

sodium-chloride posted...

Is BG3 anything like PoE?

BG1 and BG2 were like PoE, because PoE was literally trying to be a throwback to BG1 and BG2.

But BG3 isn't really like PoE at all, as much as it's more like D:OS1 and D:OS2.



Zareth posted...

It's so lame that the cannon MC name is Tav, I mean what the fuck

Canon names in Forgotten Realms/Faerun are usually fairly dumb. For whatever reason it's always been a terrible setting when it comes to character naming. But doubly so in the more modern content.

It's so bad that a lot of DMs running 5e adventures will literally ignore the canon names of characters and use their own instead, because the canon ones are so terrible they refuse to use them.

The plus side is that it doesn't really matter what the "canon" name for the MC is, because you can always just change it.

Nothing will ever be worse than vanilla World of Warcraft's random name generator, getting you names like Hababalan or Teluaoak

As far as canon names go Tav is miles better than Abdel Adrian lmao

btw I agree BG3 is really good though (act 3 spoilers) they really did sarevok and viconia dirty and that makes me sad.

josh posted...

As far as canon names go Tav is miles better than Abdel Adrian lmao

Also much better than the canon version of Abdel Adrian from the novels, because those novels are so utterly garbage that their only real value is if you use them for toilet paper.

archizzy posted...

Honestly if you were overwhelmed by PoE you should probably just skip this.

I disagree with this. While BG3 is a 'bigger' game than PoE, I think it's also a lot more accessible.