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Baldur's Gate 3 thread (no spoilers outside of spoiler tags) - reviews, technical matters, griping etc.

Intro

Baldur's Gate 3 is a sprawling, slightly kitschy, long-winded,accessible yet also quite challenging[1] role-playing game with fairly high production values that apparently pissed off other CRPG devs.

A sort of interactive pulp swords & sorcery novel. It's a flawed if IMO provisionally worthy yet lesser sequel to Baldur's Gate 2. Lesser but still rather good.

It is like heroin to CRPG types despite a slight tinge of woke, the dumb and optional romance system, and some flaws which are going to be rectified by mods fairly quickly or solved by the time you get to Baldur's Gate and can actually buy a fucking quiver, gem pouch or potion case. Romances are optional, the personal quests of party members are fairly interesting and quite decent afaict.

It allows up to 4 people to play what's essentially a D&D campaign without someone having to be GM. Perhaps some people would like to play it together in the evenings and it might strengthen this community? If playing thrice weekly for 4 hours, you could probably clear it under half a year even with a bit of save-scumming that's necessary for some of the tough fights.

Don't rush- perhaps Larian will give it paused realtime or FPS play or just speed up the computer turns which should be instant but sometimes (5% of the time) take 200-300 ms to decide per enemy mook.

As it's a significant cultural artifact and probably of interest to enough people on this forum, I believe it deserves its own thread.

For mods: ||It's not related to 'science, politics or philosophy', however, I feel it maybe deserves an exception due to its high profile. Factorio, a decade old game popular with Motte kind of people has 29 hits in search, BG3 has 25 mostly from the last 2 weeks. All argument and no play makes Jack a dull boy, no ? ||

Rules:

  1. Please post in the appropriate subthread. I'm going to start with 'reviews, technical issues, rant & gripe, gameplay advice, lore'. Feel free to make another top-level subthread if it doesn't fit into the other categories.

  2. For story and lore discussion not known to people familiar with general D&D, use spoiler tags, which are doubled pipes = '|' repeated twice without the quotes. Spoiler tag end is another set of doubled pipes.

  3. Story discussion only in the 'lore discussion' thread.

  4. Please report any comments spoiling the plot outside of the stuff that's in the intro cinematic.

[1]: I'm at around +2sd of ice people mental acuity and a disgusting minmaxing scrub who almost cleared** the infamous 'tactics' mod for BG2+ToB and I'm being challenged by the high difficulty fights in BG3. Even a run-of-the mill fight turns deadly if you're not paying attention, and certain fights are positively malicious.

And I'm just in chapter 2 atm. Yes, if you want you can re-roll PC and every party member for every dungeon but in essence that's just like save-scumming but worse. You don't have to do it, and I only re-rolled main char because I was unfamiliar with the ruleset and wanted to try a few different options. The dungeon puzzles, so far, seem mostly bloody obvious, I've encountered some mildly challenging treasure related ones, surely there's going to be a few good ones too.

**am not sure I ever cleared the final fight of the entire game with the tactics mod.

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Okay.. chapter 2 question: does anyone know whether shadow-cursed undead / harpers should be neutral to Githyanki spec-ops squads ?

Just got hit with one cunning ploy - I use my rogue and his insane running/ hiding skills to introduce these two groups. No dice. They ignore each other for some bizarre reason.

They really shouldn't. Both groups are happy to attack anyone else on sight? So what gives..

Oh, man. I just started Act 2 and I want to kill the githyanki. I really, really want to kill the githyanki and I'd have given it the good old college try the first time I saw them, were it not for that pesky dragon.

This is highly unusual for me, since I'm generally "oh no, that would be too mean/cruel/violent" when it comes to "smush kill or talky talky?" choices in encounters, but fudge this lot, they need to die yesterday, the stuck-up prats who think they can just swan around murderating anyone they see because they are so superior to non-githyanki.

Gosh, I was not expecting this! Now, gotta get back to plotting how I can wipe them all out at once...

I just started Act 2 and I want to kill the githyanki. I really, really want to kill the githyanki

Did you find the creche under the Rosymorn Monastery?

I just did, and I'm slowly and carefully slaughtering my way through them with no regrets.

Possibly I may go "shouldn't have done that" later if there's an important quest I need them for, but honestly - the more I explore the monastery and find the records of the githyanki landing, attacking and murderating everyone, the fewer qualms I have about "they gotta die, all of 'em".

I have no particular feelings towards them. They do seem needlessly cruel and it's not doing them any favors. Let's just say I think you're going to be pleasantly surprised during act 2 by the githyanki.

I hope so, otherwise It's Clobberin' Time!