Larian, the studio behind the incredibly popular and much-nominated-for-game-awards Baldur’s Gate 3, released a new major patch to the game today (well, a week ago today). There’s a whole lot of stuff in that patch, but the thing I’m most excited for is the opportunity to return to my only complete save file and beat the final boss again so I can see the epilogue they’ve added! My main criticism of BG3’s ending was how abrupt it felt given that you sorta just get through the final cinematic, see a couple other scenes, and then it’s over. No idea who followed up on what and how anyone is doing since, like, the last I saw of Asterion was him running from sunlight as it slowly burned him to a crisp. So now I can go back and see how it all wraps up an appropriate in-game six months after the final battle! I’m very excited for this, which is important because I still haven’t gone back to playing ANY of my other BG3 save files since I stopped playing after hurting my own feelings with how evil and awful I was in my Evil Dark Urge file. I’m finally almost ready to get over that. Ready enough to update the game, anyway, though it might take a bit for me to actually play it since I’ve still got Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars and Spider-Man 2 to finish [I actually played it for too many hours the day after I wrote this and haven’t stopped playing it since]. And Armored Core VI at some point, though I might not make myself wait until after I’ve played that since it’s entirely possible that I might just not really enjoy it. I still haven’t played more than the first level and a couple training things.
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I Finally Finished Baldur’s Gate 3
It took over 130 hours, but I did it. I beat Baldur’s Gate 3. I finished every sidequest, explored every map, fought almost every enemy (there’s some parts near the end where fighting every enemy will get you killed because there’s no end to the number of enemies that will appear to fight you), and finally brought an end to my Dark Urge character’s story. Shadowheart and my character were in a committed, monogamous relationship, my character had denied their Dark Urge so hard it got yote from their body, and everyone lived. I want to append “happily ever after” to that last statement, but I’m pretty sure that Lae’zel is either going to get herself killed or attempt to conquer the Material Plane. Also, while Karlach lived, the jury is out on whether or not she gets to be happy (her ending cinematic was the only one that felt particularly fulfilling, I’ll admit, since all the others felt kind of just “over”). I fought hard to bring what seemed like the best end to the story I began on August third, exactly a month and a day later, and I’m pretty sure it all played out as well as I could have hoped. I mean. as well as I could have hoped given the circumstances. Everyone grew a little bit, no one became an evil megalomaniac, and we all saved the day.
Continue readingThere Are Too Many Mechanics In My Baldur’s Gate 3 Storytime
I finally passed one hundred hours in my save file of Baldur’s Gate 3. I’m really not sure how much time I’d have logged to the game if I could somehow account for the lost progress due to crashes or the hours lost to reverting back a couple or more save files because a choice without sufficient context was going to ruin my experience with the game. I don’t mind reverting in these cases, given how what sometimes feels like a flippant or jokey answer in a dialogue tree can wind up being taken very seriously and sometimes there’s a mismatch between what the game suggests will happen and what actually happens (which seems to be cranked up to eleven as a Dark Urge character). Overall though, as I’ve looked back at my one hundred recorded hours, I realized that a huge amount of that time was spent incredibly focused on the mechanical aspects of the game rather than the roleplaying and inter-character aspects of it. Sure, the ratio is probably much more balanced than most similar games I’ve played, but it feels odd at first blush to realized that it is closer to a standard video game RPG than to my experiences with the tabletop rolepalying game this CRPG was inspired by. As I’ve thought about it more, especially as I played last night, I noticed that, despite only doing one major fight last night, I spent about eighty percent of my play time focused entirely on mechanics. A couple percent of the remainder goes to puzzle solving and logistics and then the rest goes to watching dialogue play out and doing my best to roleplay my player character.
Continue readingResurfacing For Air After A Weekend Lost In Baldur’s Gate 3
Other than preparation for and then hosting a Pathfinder Second Edition one-shot, I spent my entire weekend playing Baldur’s Gate 3. I was finally able to play it in more than drips and drabs (which, for me, meant an hour or two at a time, since I won’t bother to turn my computer on for anything else). I wound up starting a new game with two friends and then taking this large chunk of time to wrap up loose ends, finish map exploration, and, in the wee hours of the morning, finish the main quest points of Act 1. I rescued Halsin, helped the Tieflings, dealt with a swamp witch, got to absolutely wreck some weaker enemies with my brand new level 5 abilities (still haven’t cast Fireball, though, since I mismanaged Wyll’s spell slots and forgot to short rest before the next fight), and prepared myself for an underground adventure. After this, I’m moving into entirely new territory (I never did the Underdark stuff in Early Access) and I’m excited to play chunks of the game I’ve never encountered before.
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