Tobold's Blog: August 2023

Tobold's Blog

Thursday, August 31, 2023

The downside of epic

I have now played 120 hours of early access Baldur's Gate 3, plus 150 hours of the release version of the game. This is a truly epic game, with tons of content. The production value of that content is unique: No other CRPG ever had this amount of voice acting, motion capture and graphical opulence. I am in Act III, at level 11, and seeing how I'll go on a 3-week holiday without PC access on Sunday, it becomes increasingly likely that I won't be able to finish BG3 before that. And surprisingly, I don't care much.

This is not because Baldur's Gate 3 is a bad game, although Act III definitively is less good than Act I, but mostly because BG3 is a bad fit for my gaming needs. If I want to really role-play, I prefer to do that playing actual Dungeons & Dragons. For a video game, I want my CRPGs to be good tactical combat experiences. Which Baldur's Gate 3 is, but when, and only when, it actually provides interesting combat situations. The percentage of time you spend doing combat is okay in Act I, but goes down from there. The city in Act III also has so many more NPCs and so many more houses, that the approach of previous acts to speak with everybody and search every container becomes increasingly hopeless. Which leads to a constant fear of missing out. In Act III you can play for hours, and unless you deliberately play like a murder hobo that wants to kill the whole city, you'll have maybe one interesting combat in the whole play session.

In part that is the fault of the D&D system, which doesn't scale very well. It is a lot easier to provide an interesting combat encounter with goblins for a low-level group than it is to provide an interesting city combat encounter for a level 11 group. You get more and more spells, and they get more powerful, and it becomes more difficult for the game to provide an adequate challenge. I have a bunch of spells already that I never got around to using, because there simply aren't enough turns in a combat, and too few combat situations.

But the whole epic cut-scene / motion capture / voice acting cinematics are also turning out to be somewhat limiting in a way. Before BG3 I played Jagged Alliance 3, which is a much more low-budget game, having spent a lot less money on the story elements. But that meant that I was happily experimenting with several runs, because which mercenaries I chose, what weapons I found, and how I approached different combat situations created a lot more emergent stories, which were different in each run. Baldur's Gate 3 has a lot fewer emergent story situations, and a lot more scripted story situations. And even when I deliberately went out of my way to make very different, and sometimes deliberately bad or evil decisions, there was less variance in the development of the overall game situation than in Jagged Alliance 3. Especially in Act II (and probably Act III), where the game funnels you into the same final boss fight, regardless of how hard you try to avoid that.

Dialogue options in Baldur's Gate 3 are frequently illusionary. I had one dialogue, with an orphan wanting to join my camp, where regardless of whether I said yes or no, the orphan would be in my camp anyway, because it was needed for a subsequent story element. And in many dialogues, the "reasonable" choices are extremely obvious, and everybody who is remotely trying to play a typical heroic fantasy story ends up with the same dialogue. That becomes painfully obvious when you watch some Twitch / YouTube streams, and apart from the order in which things happen, everybody experiences pretty much the same story in the same way. And this is a direct consequence of the epic production values: If it costs a ton of money to produce a dialogue, you will always end up with fewer variations than if that dialogue was just a text box.

I have seen the first versions of AI-driven CRPGs, right now still fully text-based like AI Dungeon. I do think there is a future in which a graphical CRPG has basically infinite, AI-generated content, where as long as you hang out in some village, the AI generates new quest dialogue and the corresponding combat situations in the surrounding areas. But it would be difficult to have that AI dialogue fully voice-acted and animated. The current attempts at AI voice acting are both not quite as good, and a bone of contention between voice actors and game companies. But I would be willing to accept a somewhat lower quality if in exchange the game wasn't limited to give me the pre-recorded content. There are a lot of games in which is story is generic or not very interesting, and I don't mind, because I am far more interested in the gameplay than the story. I don't think you could ever make an AI-assisted game with the dialogue quality of Baldur's Gate 3, but maybe not every game needs that.

Ultimately, while I am enjoying Baldur's Gate 3, I feel that I am missing out on player agency. I am playing through a more or less linear story, on rails. And while that experience is fun, I really don't feel like playing through the same content again, even if I would choose a very different group with different character classes. If you spend more than half of the time experiencing the story and playing through dialogues, it doesn't matter so much what character classes are in your group. I feel I should have only invited 3 companions into my group and never ever talked to the others, so that I could have had a second playthrough with different companions. Once you invited a companion in your camp, even if you never use him, you'll still get to see a part of their story. Or end up constantly switching characters in and out of your party, so the companions are present for the dialogues that are important for their personal stories.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:22 AM Permanent Link (2) comments

Sunday, August 27, 2023

Everybody is cheating

If you follow Baldur's Gate 3 content on a social media platform like YouTube, other BG3 content will be suggested to you. And some of them promise to tell you tricks how to get more or even infinite gold or experience points. You can get infinite gold with pickpocketing, followed by a long rest to reset the vendor gold. You can get double or triple the xp from an encounter by first getting xp for a diplomatic solution, saving / reloading, then getting xp from knocking the enemies out with non-lethal damage, saving / reloading, and finally getting the xp a third time by killing the enemies.

What is surprising is not that these methods exist, but how different people's attitudes are towards various methods of cheating. To me it is rather obvious that save scumming is cheating too, but very few people see it that way. And a lot of people think that getting more gold or xp by an in-game exploit is okay, while getting the same amount of extra gold and xp with a tool like Cheat Engine or a mod is not acceptable. I've watched one streamer who happily save scummed, but wouldn't use the very official "send to camp" function in his inventory, because that felt like cheating to him. Meanwhile the internet is full of Baldur's Gate 3 content of the "should you do this decision" or "how to solve this puzzle" variety, and needless to say that all that is cheating too. I don't think anybody played Baldur's Gate 3 without *any* form of cheating, with reloading a save after things went wrong probably being the most prevalent form.

And I am totally okay with that. Sometimes I just want to see what happens when I do a different decision in a dialogue, without starting a complete new playthrough, so I save scum to try. At some point I got sick and tired of searching every vase and crate for rotten tomatoes, so I stopped doing so and got myself the gold I needed with the help of Cheat Engine. Divinity Original Sin 2 has 4,608 mods on the Steam Workshop, and I would expect that Baldur's Gate 3 Steam Workshop mod support is coming too. And while there are some purely cosmetic mods, most mods are a form of cheating too, changing gameplay. And that is great: For example for Jagged Alliance 3 I was able to use mods to fine-tune the game to be much more to my personal liking. And there is a bunch of things I would change about Baldur's Gate 3 if I could, especially regarding inventory management and items; e.g. for me the game would gain a lot of replayability if I could randomize loot instead of always finding the same stuff at the same location (not sure if that would be possible with a mod).

These are very complex games, and different people have different areas of the game they like more or like less, or that they find easier or harder. Whatever method we use, save scumming, in-game exploits, looking up solutions, cheat software, or mods, is fine as long as we use it to make the game more fun to us. We just need to realize that everybody is doing that, one way or another. The "holier than thou" attitude that often reigns on the internet regarding cheating is really not justified. Everybody is cheating.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:02 AM Permanent Link (5) comments

Friday, August 25, 2023

My group in Baldur's Gate 3

I killed the final boss of Act II yesterday, and reached level 10 with the xp from that kill. After an extremely long sequence of events between acts, I am now at the very start of Act III. And I would like to talk about the group I am using for that. There is some discussion of what I consider essential to have in a group, but there are also some spoilers involved, as the events of Baldur's Gate 3 give you some character build options that aren't from the original Dungeons & Dragons game.

My main character is a Bard 6 / Warlock 4. I pushed Warlock to 4 in order to get the ability improvement feat. If I had for example done Bard 7 / Warlock 3, my charisma would be 2 lower now. I could consider a lot of different options for my main character, but I would always use a character class based on charisma. There are huge advantages in this game to making your main character the "face" of your party, with high charisma and a proficiency in Persuasion, with Deception or Intimidation being an option too. There is a very large number of dialogue options that can be resolved with Persuasion checks, and some of them are rather essential, especially in the interaction of your main character with the companions. You can lose companions or have them develop in ways you don't want if you can't persuade them otherwise. And if you aren't skilled here, you could only either save scum or accept the bad results.

As a multiclass character, my main only has access to level 3 bard spells and level 2 warlock spells. I compensated for that by turning him into a half-illithid and using all the 21 tadpoles I found on him. Reaching Act III unlocked the final level of those illithid powers, and I found it much better to use all the found tadpoles on just one character instead of trying to spread those powers. The final level of powers is really good, and makes up for the lack of high-level spells on my main. Note that for the power of cantrips, it is the overall character level that counts, and so I already have 3 Eldritch Blasts, as BG3 gives the third one out at level 10 already. Very often my main can simply cast Hex on an enemy and destroy him with Eldritch Blasts, which makes him very useful in prolonged engagements, as this doesn't use up any spell slots.

The reason I took bard besides warlock is that I am also using my main character as the one doing all the Sleight of Hand checks. I would very much recommend having one character in the group with high dexterity and a proficiency in Sleight of Hand. There are a huge number of locks to pick and traps to disarm. That character doesn't need to be the main, though. You could use Astarion as a companion for this, or some hireling. In my second playthrough I used my ranger for this, and that worked well too. Although intelligence is a dump stat 8 for my main, I am using the Warped Headband of Intellect from the ogre in Act I to have 17 int, which gives me reasonable success chances for various knowledge checks as well.

My second character is Shadowheart. What is absolutely essential about that is that you should have a character in your group with access to the Guidance cantrip, a cleric or druid. I'm repeating myself here, but Baldur's Gate 3 has you do hundreds of skill checks. Anything you can do to improve your chances of succeeding those checks is good, and thus I would consider access to Guidance essential. Note that if you kill the Strange Ox, you get a ring that adds another 1d4 to your skill checks if you are shapeshifted. And if you have the Deluxe Edition of the game, you have the Mask of the Shapeshifter, and can always have that bonus.

Clerics are rather good in Baldur's Gate 3. And the story of Shadowheart is very much weaved into the main story of the game, especially in Act II. I respec'd Shadowheart to life domain, but kept her as single class cleric, now level 10. Spiritual Weapon at spell level 2, Spirit Guardians at spell level 3, and Guardian of Faith at spell level 4 are things that I use in basically every major combat. And Guiding Bolt is rather good for a spell level 1 option. Another spell level 3 that I used a lot in Act II is Daylight, which not only is extremely helpful against shadows, but also brightens up your screen considerably, and makes it much easier to see stuff in dark places.

My third character is Gale, although I find his personal story somewhat weak. Having a self-destruct button that kills the whole party and ends the game is probably the most useless ability of any character in any RPG ever, even if it technically gets you an "ending". In case you wondered, yes, that gives you an achievement, and 5% of BG3 players have that achievement. All of which then reloaded a previous save and kept playing, I assume. Anyway, having a character with access to arcane spells is rather useful. And a wizard can have access to pretty much every arcane spell in the game, because he can learn them from scrolls. That makes a wizard a lot more versatile than a sorcerer or warlock. Especially since in BG3 you can select different spells anytime outside combat, no rest needed. Which is very useful for ritual spells that last until the next long rest, like Longstrider. Gale is casting that on all of my characters at the start of every day. Spells like Enhance Leap or Featherfall help your group to get around. And arcane casters have the best selection of area of effect spells that go boom, like Fireball. Note that there is a bug / feature in BG3 which allows you to make a multiclass sorcerer X / wizard 1, and still learn all spells from scrolls. I am not sure whether that is working as intended, because that combo is pretty overpowered. In my second playthrough I used a sorc/wiz like that, and twinned Haste on two DPS characters is extremely powerful.

The last of my characters is Karlach. With the magic items I found up to now, I was able to get her to AC 18, which is high for a barbarian. And the damage output when raging is higher than that of Lae'zel as a fighter. Having said that, Karlach's role in the group as melee "tank" is basically interchangeable with any fighter or paladin. I just like her cheery disposition. And with D&D rules not having a lot of ways to hold aggro, I could probably also use for example a ranger as damage dealer. Note that I do switch out Karlach for Lae'zael when the story calls for it, e.g. when visiting the githyanki creche.

Although I never use Astarion or Wyll in combat, sometimes I put them in the group for a social interaction that is related with their backstory. But even if I didn't, I couldn't totally ignore their backstory, because sometimes camp events just pop up that involve them. My error basically was to talk to them and invite them into my camp. I do consider it completely possible to do a first playthrough with Shadowheart, Gale, and Lae'zael as companions without ever picking up Astarion, Wyll, and Karlach. Then you basically wouldn't see their stories, and could do a second playthrough with a "fresh" set of companions.

Personally I have given up on the idea of a second playthrough in 2023. I will finish the game with the group I described in this post, and then at the very least have a long break. There are a number of reasons for that, but the most important one for me was discovering that you can't really do an evil playthrough and play a very different story from the good playthrough. By the end of Act II you know who the bad guys are, and not fighting them is not an option. You can fight them with the purpose of usurping their evil powers, sure, but you'd still fight them, not join them. The second reason is that Baldur's Gate 3 has a lot of non-combat content, in the form of dialogue and exploration, and a second playthrough would have you go through much of the same dialogue and find the same items in the same crates. So I would like to forget a lot of that before going through this again. And the third reason is that Act II is less polished than Act I, and I hear that Act III is even less polished. Given Larian's track record, it is very likely that one day I'll get a free upgrade to a "definitive edition" of Baldur's Gate 3, in which Acts II and III are improved to the same level as Act I. And that would probably be a better time for a second playthrough, rather than just after the first. It isn't as if 2023 is short on great games.

- posted by Tobold @ 2:36 PM Permanent Link (1) comments

Wednesday, August 23, 2023

Baldur's Gate 3 review score and purchase recommendation

After rising for a short time to 97 on Metacritic, Baldur's Gate 3 there now is back to 96, on par with Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Meanwhile the user score has gone down from 92 to 88. So what do those score tell us? Frankly, not much!

Some people believe that a score of 96 means that if you would take 100 random gamers, 96 of them would like the game. That is complete nonsense. There is absolutely no mathematical correlation between a game's review score and it's probability that somebody will like it. The fundamental reason for that is that any review score has an invisible "within its genre" qualifier attached to it. Elden Ring has the same review score as Baldur's Gate 3, and there are a *lot* of people who like one of these much more than the other, because the other just isn't their style / genre. If you strongly dislike the inherent slow speed and fiddliness of complex turn-based CRPGs, and much prefer simpler action games, even a mediocre game of the right genre might very well be a better fit for you than Baldur's Gate 3. There simply aren't 96% of gamers that like turn-based games.

The other problem with review scores is the imperfect process of people reviewing games. For example Baldur's Gate 3 has an extremely polished Act I, due to that being the part that got all the user input during 3 years of early access, and less polished Acts II and III, with reportedly some serious bugs in Act III. But Act I is so big that a typical reviewer who wasn't already playing early access probably never left Act I before writing his review. If in an alternate universe Baldur's Gate 3 would have lots of bugs in Act I and have an extremely polished Act III, it's review score would be a lot lower. On the other hand, you should probably dismiss my complaints about Baldur's Gate 3, because they are coming from somebody who has played that game for over 200 hours now. After such a long time, certain things in any game start to grate on you. These are complaints at an extremely high level, which aren't relevant for you if you are still asking yourself whether you should buy the game or not.

If you generally like turn-based tactical and role-playing games, you probably should buy Baldur's Gate 3. There is no guarantee that you will like every aspect of it, but overall it is not only a very good game in its genre, but is at a point where it will be used as a reference for years to come. If you never played a turn-based CRPG before, there is no saying whether you will like BG3 or not. Unlike Elden Ring (where I had to use a cheat mod to be able to play it), you can turn down the difficulty level of BG3 to a point where you'll be fine even if you haven't got a clue about D&D combat. You don't need to "git gud" to play Baldur's Gate 3, you can just play it as a story experience. Then it mostly depends on whether you like story experiences; BG3 has tons of cinematic cut-scenes and voiced-over dialogue, but again not everybody likes these things. In general, watching some Twitch streams or YouTube playthroughs for a while is probably going to give you a better response on whether this is the game for you than any review score.

- posted by Tobold @ 7:48 AM Permanent Link (6) comments

Tuesday, August 22, 2023

My personal experience with Baldur's Gate 3 - Act II

My group in Baldur's Gate 3 is now at level 9, and I have done a large part of Act II. So I would like to talk about my personal experience in that Act, which obviously will contain spoilers. You have been warned.

My overall experience of Act II is one of disappointment on several levels. First of all, you really feel the difference between Act I having been in early access for three years and constantly improved due to player feedback, and Act II, for which that has not been the case. Possibly as a consequence, or for other reasons, the density of content of interest in Act II is much lower. There are a lot of areas which contain only filler content, like a few crates with rotten food and a skeleton with just a bone in the inventory. The Blighted Village in Act I had something going on in even the most deserted barn; the deserted town of Reithwin has larger buildings with less going on, and a lot of empty buildings and areas. Lower density of relevant content puts the player in front of an impossible choice: Either you still open every container you pass by and find just a lot of rotten tomatoes, or you give up on that and then miss the occasional magic object hidden that way.

The other big disappointment of Act II for me was a bubble bursting about how much choice I actually had in Baldur's Gate 3. I basically made a logical error and tried to play through content in the "wrong order", and the game punished me for it. *Repeated Spoiler Warning* In the latter half of Act II you need to face the big bad guy in Moonrise Tower, but you have also learned that the secret of his immortality is hidden in his family mausoleum. The error I made was thinking that I shouldn't visit Moonrise Tower before I hadn't "turned off" the archvillains immortality. So I went to the mausoleum first, and got to a point where the game warned me that I shouldn't proceed without finishing whatever other quests I had in Act II. I *assumed* that meant quests other than those involving Moonrise Tower; I was wrong. By finishing the mausoleum I got a bunch of failed quest messages telling me that I hadn't rescued the people from Moonrise Tower that I was supposed to rescue. So the *correct* order is going to Moonrise Tower first, doing the rescue quests, presumably finding out that you can't harm the archvillain, and only *then* doing the mausoleum, after which you return to Moonrise Tower for the final showdown of the act. As I really, really wanted to rescue these people, I had to reload an older save game, and will have to do the boss fight of the mausoleum again. And I am not happy that deciding to do some content first locks me out of other content.

My third disappointment with Act II is again with regards to freedom of choice, and concerns my experiment with starting a second playthrough as an evil character. Yes, *technically* you can make lots of evil choices in Baldur's Gate 3, for example siding with the goblins and killing the tieflings in Emerald Grove. But playing Act II as a good guy revealed that a lot of content in Act II is about interacting with, and rescuing again, the tieflings you met in Act I at Emerald Grove. If you do an evil playthrough, Act II will simply have a lot less quest content, and that in a part of the game which is already lower in content. Also, an evil playthrough will end you up with significantly less access to traders. While that has a certain logic, if you burn down villages you have less access to interaction with society, it isn't as if Baldur's Gate 3 really provides you with some compensation, the advantages of being evil. Even in my good playthrough, I made an error at the githyanki creche, where I didn't find and trade with the githyanki quartermaster before the whole place turned hostile. When you then kill the quartermaster, he does *not* have the inventory he previously would have sold you, and so I was missing out on some very good magic items I could have otherwise bought.

In summary, Act II showed me that Baldur's Gate 3 is a lot more linear than I thought, and that the game punishes you for deviating from the intended path through the game. And evil playthrough is possible, but not equivalent to the standard heroic goodness path.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:20 AM Permanent Link (2) comments

Monday, August 21, 2023

Disney remakes The Birth of a Nation

In case you are missing historical knowledge, or, more likely these days on the internet, any sense of humor, I would like to point out that the headline of this post is satirical. While Wikipedia correctly describes The Birth of a Nation as a landmark of film history, nobody would ever remake it, as its extremely racist core message would be unacceptable to modern audiences. I used satire for my headline to make a point: "Go woke and go broke" would equally work on advertising or media with an overly right-wing message. The culture wars are carried by a minority of society on both sides, and there is a huge number of people who would prefer their beer and their movies to remain apolitical.

For media products, even more importantly, most people care more about the quality of the product than about its political connotations. The Rings of Power simply isn't very good, and has one of the least sympathetic main characters ever; progressive production values don't change anything about that. Hogwart's Legacy simply is a good video game that is fun to play; political protest against an only remotely related author doesn't change anything about that.

The issue with remakes is a slightly different one: Are you passing the torch, or are you torching the past? Disney could easily create new intellectual property with a modern fairy tale, featuring a progressive Disney princess. If instead they market their new film as a remake of an older movie, that is because they know how nostalgic people can get. But you can't simultaneously use nostalgia marketing and have the cast of your new movie repeatedly declare how the old movie is an outdated piece of shit and that the "remake" wouldn't be in any way related to that old garbage.

A remake of The Birth of a Nation is impossible, because it would either be politically unacceptable, or, if made politically correct, be unrecognizable as a remake. But the Disney movies of the 20th century were successful because they rarely were overtly political in any direction. Millions of little girls grew up dreaming of being a Disney princess. These are now millions of adult women, mothers and grandmothers. Telling these women that their childhood dreams were morally reprehensible is not a good marketing strategy. A subtler "update" with a lot less virtue signaling would have worked a lot better.

- posted by Tobold @ 8:47 AM Permanent Link (3) comments

Sunday, August 20, 2023

Inventory management in Baldur's Gate 3

I finished a major fight in Act II of Baldur's Gate 3 today, in which I had to defend a position against waves of enemies. As I was level 8 and had a good selection of area-of-effect spells, I killed a rather large number of enemies in that fight. And my first thought after winning the fight was: "Oh shit, this is going to be annoying to loot". I believe that this is bad game design, players should be happy about loot, not dreading it.

Basically Baldur's Gate 3 has too much junk loot, and not enough quality of life features for inventory management. Some loot, like for example rotten food, you don't even want to pick up. Some loot you can actually use for your characters, but those are few and far between. The majority of loot items you don't want for your characters, but they are valuable enough to sell; but they also have some weight, and so you need to manage that. There are some quality of life features: You can sort by type, weight, value, or order you picked the items up; but the "type" classification is very broad, so that you can for example have all weapons as one type, but they won't be sorted by sub-type of weapon. You can mark items as "wares" for selling, but you still need to carry them to a trader, and that trader needs to have sufficient gold to buy them, so you might have to visit several traders for a large stash. If the loot is too heavy, you can send it "to camp", but you'll still have to recover it from there and bring it to traders when you want to sell. The system would be okay if there wasn't so much loot, but in BG3 there is a huge quantity of low-value loot. And there is no area looting, you need to go through every corpse, every crate, every barrel, so the overall process of looting everything and selling it is complicated, time-consuming, and not much fun. You only do it, because many vendors have something you need for sale; curiously I have more items equipped that I bought from vendors than that I looted from enemies.

My recommendation is to pick up light-weight containers, like pouches, and use them to sort your inventory, keeping your arrows, your potions, and your scrolls neatly tidied away from your gear. I tend to carry a bunch of gear with me in Baldur's Gate 3, because there is so much gear that allows you to cast a single spell once per day. Equip the shield that allows you to cast Aid, cast the spell at the start of the day, then equip another shield that is more suitable for combat, etc.

The other big problem with the huge quantity of loot is that you end up not using even the stuff that is potentially useful. Hands up everybody who still has the void bulbs and caustic bulbs collected during the tutorial in his inventory! Throwable items, potions, and scrolls tend to pile up in my inventory because of the action economy of D&D combat: If you can only do one standard action per turn, you most of the time want that to be the best spell or best weapon attack you have; situationally useful items can easily be forgotten by the time the situation comes around where they would actually have been worth using. And the way I build my characters, I don't even have a lot of spare bonus actions during a fight.

I do think Baldur's Gate 3 could use some more quality of life features around loot and inventory management. A "loot all in area" button, for example. Selling stuff directly from inventory without needing to visit a trader. Better sorting features, and better ways to keep your inventory tidy. But most of all I hope that future Larian Studios games will simply have less loot and fewer containers to search for loot. Picking a lock on a chest to find 5 potatoes and a carrot isn't fun. Clicking on 20 wooden crates and barrels in a warehouse isn't fun. Going back and forth from a battlefield to a trader to sell everything isn't fun. Loot should be more fun than that.

- posted by Tobold @ 1:55 PM Permanent Link (2) comments

Friday, August 18, 2023

Holidays and Starfield

For as long as this blog exists, I have been taking a "European style" 3-week holiday every year in July. This year, because we moved into our new house this summer, we pushed that 3-week holiday back into September. And as usual, I will bring my iPad and my Switch, but no PC. So, not much PC gaming for me in September. And I just realized that given the current situation, that suits me just fine. I bought several games this year at release, and that is something I don't want to make a habit of. While I haven't been disappointed by any of those games I bought on release, the state of triple-A gaming market is such, that getting disappointed by a game bought on release day is certainly a danger.

In particular I am talking about Starfield. Just like Baldur's Gate 3, Steam tagged Starfield with the "RPG" tag. But with what little research I did about this game, I can already say that Starfield will be a very, very different game than Baldur's Gate 3. So different, that it is questionable whether these two games are actually in the same genre. And, unfortunately for Starfield, on all the points where you can point out major differences (procedurally generated vs. handcrafted, science fiction vs. fantasy, turn-based vs. real-time combat) my personal preferences lie on the side of Baldur's Gate 3. Which, at least for me, makes Starfield a bit "the RPG I would have bought in 2023 if I hadn't already gotten Tears of the Kingdom and Baldur's Gate 3".

Now don't get me wrong, I might still end up buying Starfield. But with a release date right at the start of my 3-week absence from PC gaming, I wouldn't have bought it on release even if I had wanted to. And, in the absence of an early access version, and an embargo for streamers until a week before release, I still have some major questions about the quality and interest of gameplay for me of Starfield. Given that their previous release was Fallout 76, Bethesda certainly made more effort to release Starfield as a more polished product, but right now nobody knows how well they succeeded with that.

And increasingly review sites block either all or all negative user reviews for 36+ hours after release, so that it is very hard to get an accurate reading of the quality of a game early on from reviews. I'm not saying that "review bombing" isn't an issue, but the measure also prevents the word getting out on buggy releases. I have a rather interesting Chrome extension called Metacritic score/time graph, and it adds a graph to the critics review page of a game that shows the data points of review scores over time. There is frequently a decline in review scores over the first month, suggesting that the release day reviews were either just shallowly surfing the hype, or just plain bought. After a month, many games also show an increasing difference between average critic review scores and user review scores. Overwatch 2, released last October, had release day reviews as high as 90 or even 95, and is now down to a critic review average of 79 on Metacritic, with a user review average of 14, and only 9% of over 140,000 user reviews on Steam being positive.

Thus I will probably watch some streamed gameplay content of Starfield on my tablet during my holidays, and have a look at the evolution of critic and user scores on Metacritic, and on Steam, at the end of September, when I will be back. By then it should be a lot clearer whether this is actually a good game, which would be worth me leaving my turn-based fantasy comfort zone for; or whether it is another entry on this year's long list of hyped games on which the tenor of the reviews changed quickly into the negative after release. If I buy Starfield, I doubt I will buy it because of the "RPG" label; I still have some hope that it is a reasonably good shooter / exploration / base and ship building game. I would be very, very surprised if turns out to be a good role-playing game with a strong story.

- posted by Tobold @ 1:56 PM Permanent Link (3) comments

Tuesday, August 15, 2023

Skipping Act I of Baldur's Gate 3

Having played through all of the content of Act I repeatedly in early access, and once since release, I was wondering whether I would be able to ever replay Baldur's Gate 3, or whether the thought of doing Act I yet another time would stop me. I started to consider whether it would be possible to simply skip Act I and really start playing the game at Act II, which I know a lot less. So I ran an experiment, with some success. Be warned that this contains spoilers.

Bad news first, you can't skip Act I without cheating. While you theoretically can just do the main story, leaving out much of the overworld and all of Underdark in Act I, the overall result would be entering Act II at a too low level to succeed there. So what I did was use a general cheat mod called WeMod (I'm sure there are others too) at the very start of the game to give me 16 times more xp than normal during the tutorial part on the ship. That got me up to level 5, at which point I disabled the cheat mod and played the rest in a regular way.

Now my next problem was getting a party. Nothing keeps you from meeting Shadowheart, Astarion, Gale, Lae'zel, and Wyll like in any normal playthrough. But I had decided to do an evil playthrough, using The Dark Urge. And I wanted to play him *really* evil, not as a good guy trying to suppress his dark urges. That was both to see some consequences I hadn't seen yet in my regular playthrough, and because siding with the goblins against the thieflings and druids is actually faster than the other way around. But the companions with good alignment run away if you do that. And as I had collected all the companions in my first run, and done cutscenes even with those that weren't part of my regular party, I wanted to do a run without *any* of those companions (though I might pick up Minthara later).

What I did was use my level 5 character solo to enter the Dank Crypt under the Overgrown Ruins through the hatch in the east. Then I just needed to solo the skeletons to unlock Withers. Having him in the camp then allowed me to get hirelings instead of companions, which are characters without dialogue or story. You can't build them completely freely, but there are 12 different hirelings covering *all* of Baldur's Gate 3 character classes. So of course I made a group *without* the standard fighter, rogue, cleric and wizard. Using a group with different character classes was more interesting to me.

Now I could have simply sneaked into Act II like that, but I wanted to have at least the main quest of Act I finished to the point where it tells me where to go to in Act II. Now the first battle between goblins and the grove is unavoidable, and you aren't able to pick sides. I just started that battle and ran away, and still got treated by dialogue later as if I had helped. The grove still wins without your help, although with several characters including Wyll dying in my case. Which was fine with me, I'm the bad guy here. By running away and doing a long rest I managed to basically skip that long battle. Then I came back, entered the grove, freed Sazza (not strictly necessary) and got her out through the secret tunnel. With her help it was a bit easier to enter the goblin fortress peacefully and get to Minthara. There I chose the dialogue option to do as she wanted and help the goblins destroy the grove. Back to the grove I needed to do another long rest and talk to Zevlor on the gate to get the option to betray him and start the second battle on the side of the goblins.

While this leads to a potential sex scene with Minthara, you don't get her as companion at that point, but only much later in Act II. But she does tell you to go to Moonrise, so you basically get the same main quest goal as if you had freed Halsin and got the information where to go from him. And this was all I had to do in Act I. I didn't have to kill a single goblin, didn't have to do the north or the south of the Act I map, and didn't have to do the Underdark. I can access the Mountain Pass of Act II through the entrance at the goblin camp, and not bother with the githyanki or the duergar. And while of course I don't get the loot of Act I, the nature of the game is that the loot of Act II would have replaced the earlier gear anyway. Overall I just needed under 3 hours to "finish"/"skip" Act I and have a viable party to properly start playing Act II. But that was just an experiment, saved for maybe later, and I'll go back to my first playthrough with good alignment and companions now.

- posted by Tobold @ 8:16 AM Permanent Link (3) comments

Monday, August 14, 2023

What does Baldur's Gate 3 mean for gaming?

So Baldur's Gate 3 is continuing to break all sorts of records. Last weekend there were actually more concurrent BG3 players on Steam than on release weekend. The game sold 4.4 million copies on Steam alone already, so not counting GOG, and there appear to be lots of preorders for the PS5 release in three weeks. That is good news for Larian Studios, because Baldur's Gate 3 selling better than they expected also means they are making tons of profit, as every additional unit sold is nearly pure profit in this business. All of this success creates a lot of interesting questions, for which I don't really have good answers.

One question is in how far a single very successful game *adds* to money and time spent gaming overall, or whether it is more of a zero-sum game. While not everybody buying Baldur's Gate 3 will finish the game, some people will spend well over a hundred hours playing this. Pick a number for what you think the average play time per player will be, multiply by at least 5 million copies, if not 10 when PS5 is included, and you get hundreds of millions of hours spent playing BG3. Would these hours otherwise have been spent watching Netflix or hanging out on social media? Or are these hours that other games this year will get played less? The answer is almost certainly somewhere in the middle, but I can't say where.

A lot of gaming enthusiasts who have gotten fed up with the current triple A game model of "live service games" with battle passes or loot boxes are praising Baldur's Gate 3 for it's simple $60 buy-to-own business model. But I think it would be too optimistic to think that some of these live service games are currently experiencing sharp drops in player and revenue numbers, because everybody is playing BG3, and so all the managers in the video game business will emulate the BG3 model instead. First of all there is the very important issue of game genre: Baldur's Gate 3 as a turn-based roleplaying game is probably not competing all that much with some multiplayer shooter. I would imagine that there are some people at Bethesda very unhappy these days, because it is pretty inevitable that Starfield will be compared by everybody and on many different aspects with BG3. But I'm not convinced that this affects Destiny 2 or Fortnite very much. Maybe Diablo IV, but we could argue all day whether Diablo IV and BG3 are part of the same genre or not.

Managers at large game companies would probably point out that Larian Studios "left money on the table". That poses the interesting question in how far the business model contributed to the success of Baldur's Gate 3. Would BG3 have sold any less if Larian would be selling dice skins or stuff like that? At the very least I don't think anybody would have minded a DLC, but while Larian hasn't absolutely excluded that option, they don't seem to be much in favor. I would have loved a DLC with an alternative Act I, to make up for the fact that I played Act I too much in early access, and would totally pay $30 for that. But I can see how much work that would be, and Larian said they'd rather make Divinity Original Sin 3.

As a huge fan of turn-based roleplaying games, I am very happy that Baldur's Gate 3 showed that there is life left in that genre; especially since the disappointment of Final Fantasy 16 going full real-time. On the other hand it is totally possible that Baldur's Gate 3 actually reduces the number of other turn-based roleplaying games produced. The natural response to something so overwhelming as the success of Baldur's Gate 3 is "fight or flight", and many game developers might decide that doing something else is a better idea than competing against this. On the other hand, with BG3 *not* being a live service game, there might well be demand for another good turn-based RPG next year. I'll buy Divinity Original Sin 3, but I don't expect it to be released before 2027, so I don't think Larian is cornering the market here.

- posted by Tobold @ 1:54 PM Permanent Link (2) comments

Sunday, August 13, 2023

Baldur's Gate 3 - Act I

It took me a week, over 40 hours played, to finish Act I of Baldur's Gate 3. Which is probably more than for most other people. The reason for this was that I know Act I of BG3 very well from early access. And so I decided to do absolutely everything from this act: Every corner of the overworld, the complete goblin fortress, every corner of the Underdark, and all of Grymforge, including the Adamantine Forge. As a result my group is already level 6, while level 5 would probably be sufficient to advance to Act II.

Playing Act I after having it already explored in depth during early access meant that I wasn't terribly surprised by various events or turns in the story. And so I took those situations and treated them as a D&D / BG3 puzzles: How can my group deal with this game situation most efficiently? Spoiler warning, but in my playthrough Auntie Ethel never left her tea house alive to hole up in the underground, I managed through several tries to find a way to kill her in the first round, before she could teleport away. I avoided being surprised by the Spectator with the use of a Darkness spell. And I avoided getting surprised by the Magma Mephits by hiding in Darkness and sending an animated skeleton forward to trigger their summoning. All this stuff isn't strictly necessary to win, but it helped me understand some of the finer details in the game mechanics of BG3, e.g. surprise from somebody who is already there, but invisible, compared to surprise from creatures summoned upon a trigger.

Looking at videos giving advice on how to play BG3, I noticed that I am playing on a very different level. Not really surprising given both my early access experience and 40 years experience with D&D. For example in several videos it is pointed out that you can use the "dip" action on your weapon to slightly increase damage output. Which is good advice if, and only if, you aren't using your bonus action for anything else. With more D&D / BG3 experience, the action economy (1 standard action, 1 bonus action, plus movement) becomes very ingrained, and I typically build characters in a way that they have use for their bonus action every round. For example the barbarian can use a bonus action to fly into rage, and then use his bonus action to make one additional attack every round afterwards, which is a lot more valuable than dipping his weapon into something. My warlock uses his bonus action for Hex, my cleric for Spiritual Weapon, and so on. I could probably play the game on the high difficulty level, but I do enjoy trying out various spells and things that might be suboptimal, and that works better on balanced difficulty.

The part that is the least fun for me in Baldur's Gate 3 is the gold economy. If you want to have enough gold, you need to click on every barrel, every crate, every corpse and loot absolutely everything. You can "send to camp" if that gets too heavy, but you still need to go to a trader regularly and sell all that junk. Junk loot, which only has a weight and gold value, but is either outright useless or simply not useful enough to keep, like a bunch of non-magical weapons, has always been my least favorite part of role-playing games. I much prefer games which have a lot less loot, but anything you do find is potentially useful.

I'm not saying that anybody should play Act I as I did, but I would like to end this post on a caveat: There are several story developments and interactions with companions that are scripted to happen during long rests. As I mentioned earlier, the game doesn't punish you for doing too many long rests, as long as you have the food for it. If you take relatively many in Act I, camp events simply stop happening, because you used up all the available cutscenes. But curiously you could theoretically be *too* efficient and play through Act I using *too few* long rests, and then these camp events would lag behind your progress in the main story. So don't hesitate to long rest.

- posted by Tobold @ 8:54 AM Permanent Link (2) comments

Tuesday, August 08, 2023

Baldur's Gate 3 and D&D

Baldur's Gate 3 is in many ways a good representation of the 5th edition Dungeons & Dragon pen & paper roleplaying game in video game form. In this post I would like to discuss where a knowledge of D&D helps you to play BG3 better, and where there are differences between the pen & paper and the video game rules.

Dungeons & Dragons very much is a game of resource management. In combat you have an economy of actions to manage, and usually you only get one main action, one bonus action, plus movement. But there are also spell slots and abilities that you can use only between 1 and X times between rests (short or long, depending on the ability), and that gives an economy of abilities over the course of the "adventuring day". What most players of D&D have realized, and what is true for Baldur's Gate 3 as well, is that the sense of urgency the story pushes is mostly fake. No, you are not going to transform into a mindflayer because you took too many long rests. And if you are like me and pick up all the potatoes and chicken lying around, you probably have hundreds of camp supplies and can easily afford the 40 supplies it needs for a long rest. Your group is strongest after a long rest, you can rest pretty much everywhere, and in consequence you absolutely should do a long rest before a major fight. You can do some minor fights and exploring with only half your spell slots left, but save often and reload / long rest / redo if you run into anything more dangerous.

Note that some character classes and builds are less susceptible to running out of resources than others. As long as a warrior has hitpoints, he can keep fighting at pretty good efficiency. If a warlock manages to keep up concentration on his hex spell, he can shoot Eldritch Blasts forever with good efficiency. Other classes have cantrips that are a lot less efficient. Vicious Mockery gives a nice debuff on enemies, but does very little damage. Which is why my bard is multiclass warlock. Shadowheart fortunately gets a Fire Bolt cantrip from her race, which depending on the saving throws and armor of the target can be more efficient than Sacred Flame. But as I said before, if cantrips are the only thing that you have left, you should really do a long rest. Short rests are mainly a quick way to heal, but otherwise are important only for warlocks. If I have a warlock spell slot remaining, I use it for Armor of Agathys, then short rest to get the slot back.

The power curve of D&D with regards to level is a weird one, and it fully translates to Baldur's Gate 3. Level 1 characters are extremely weak, but fortunately in BG3 you should reach level 2 at the end of the tutorial, or very shortly after. The next big jump in power comes at level 5: Many melee classes get a second attack, cantrips double in power, and full spellcasters get access to powerful level 3 spells like fireball. In Act I of Baldur's Gate 3 there are a few major "boss fights" which are apparently designed for the group being level 5, and which would be very hard earlier on. Again, save often, and if you run into a fight you can't win even at fully rested power, reload, and maybe level up elsewhere.

Some differences between Baldur's Gate 3 and the pen & paper 5E D&D rules are pretty obvious. For example in BG3 if you wield a weapon you are proficient with, that unlocks some special attacks, like Cleave for a Greataxe or Greatsword. Other differences in rules are more subtle, and can be overlooked if as experienced D&D player you "know" that something doesn't work in the tabletop rules, and thus you don't try it. For example in BG3 you can heal another character at a distance, even an unconscious one, by simple throwing a healing potion at him, which is very different from D&D rules.

You also need to be careful with preconceived notions about which spells and abilities are useful and not. For example in pen & paper D&D the Create Water spell is mostly useless. Baldur's Gate 3 inherited the concept of "surfaces" from Divinity Original Sin games, and water is a lot more useful here to extinguish fire or wash away acid. This is also important for character stats. Strength is more useful in BG3 for carrying capacity and jump distance than it is in pen & paper D&D. And in Baldur's Gate 3 it is a huge advantage if you make a main character which is Charisma bases, e.g. a bard, sorcerer, warlock, or paladin, because the game has a lot of dialogue options in which Charisma-based skills are very frequently used. I do more Charisma checks in one session of BG3 than I did in years of playing D&D, although if you play a highly political D&D campaign your mileage may vary on this.

The availability of items in Baldur's Gate 3 might also be very different from a typical D&D campaign. Wizards (either Gale or a player-created one) are very powerful in BG3, because you can buy scrolls at nearly every trader, thus giving the wizard a huge variety of spells compared to other classes. On the other hand I haven't seen a single full plate armor yet, thus some D&D builds relying on heavy armor are less viable in BG3 than in some D&D campaigns. I haven't tried it out yet, but rangers are potentially more useful in BG3 than in classic D&D, in part because of a very high availability of arrows with additional magic damage.

I can very much recommend Baldur's Gate 3 to players of Dungeons & Dragons, because knowing D&D rules often helps a lot. But keep in mind that there are some differences due to this being a video game.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:57 AM Permanent Link (3) comments

Sunday, August 06, 2023

Replayability of role-playing games

I'm 17 hours into Baldur's Gate 3 and haven't encountered anything yet that I hadn't seen before. I think I would have preferred if there had been a way to use an early access save game from the end of Act I and directly proceed into Act II. Even better, I wish for a system like World of Warcraft has. I played a lot of different characters in World of Warcraft; but that wasn't so bad, because different races had different starting areas, and those slowly converged over the level progress. There were lots of low level zones, and fewer high level zones.

There is a logic to that WoW design of different low level zones: Players probably like to try out different characters, play each of them for a while, and then decide which one they like the best and want to keep playing until the end. If every time you want to try out a new character you have to go through the same quests and story, that is getting boring really fast. So I think a game like Baldur's Gate 3, which has a really huge Act I, would have been better served with let's say 5 different starting points, each with 20% of that content.

Other than the start, I am mostly content with how Baldur's Gate 3 is working out for me. The download was impressively fast on Steam, I was able to play just 1 hour after release, with only a few minor hickups. I made a custom character, bard level 1, then 3 levels of warlock, and that is working out quite good as well. In 5E D&D, warlock spell slots work very differently than the spell slots of other casters, and warlocks are mostly limited by having very few spell slots. The two level 1 spell slots the level 1 bard adds, and the different spell list he gives access to, are quite beneficial here. The idea is to switch back to bard now, and get to the sword bard subclass at overall level 6 (bard 3, warlock 3), which would probably work well together with the warlock Pact of the Blade. My character also comes with a huge "I win" button, because of the interaction between the Darkness spell and the warlock's Devil's Sight. That is something that is too annoying to use in actual D&D, because it impacts your fellow group members. But in a single-player game without a DM that could do something clever against it, being the only one that can still see on the battlefield defeats a lot of AI monsters.

Where Baldur's Gate 3 fails for me is in providing good content from content creators streaming it on Twitch or YouTube. To their credit, Larian Studios tried to stick as close as possible to the D&D 5th edition rules, but the D&D Player's Handbook is 316 pages long. The highly complex rules make for a deep tactical gameplay in combat, but that doesn't translate into great visuals. Buttons are smalls, menus are nested, status information hidden behind tiny icons: Watching combat in Baldur's Gate 3 isn't always a great experience, especially if the player isn't a great commentator spelling out everything he is trying to achieve. And in many places in Act I, combat only takes about a quarter of your play time, with cutscenes, dialogue, and ability checks taking the rest. Those are a lot more visually obvious for people watching a stream, but not very exciting, because a dialogue has a lot fewer options than a combat situation. Most of the time the "good" response is obvious, and you see streamer after streamer going through the same dialogue choosing the same options.

One extremely bad design choice for streaming is how it deals with darkness. If your character has Darkvision, the image on the screen is a lot brighter than if he has not. That makes total sense for a single-player experience, but totally sucks for viewers of a stream where the main character doesn't have Darkvision. Kudos to Larian Studios for the Twitch Integration features, but unfortunately voting on dialogue options via Twitch is rather slow, and so it rarely really used. And the Twitch Integration features only work on a PC browser, not if you are watching Twitch on a mobile app. All in all I would say that Baldur's Gate 3 is great, but it isn't a great spectator sport.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:48 AM Permanent Link (2) comments

Thursday, August 03, 2023

Death and Money

After early retirement, I bought my first house, with the money I had recently inherited from my parents. That statement is true, albeit somewhat misleading; I could have afforded a house much earlier, and I could have bought a house with my own savings. I used the inherited money because it was on hand, not tied up in some other investment. For a moment I thought that buying your first house so late in life, with inherited money, was somewhat unusual. Then I realized that this might well become a trend.

In many first world countries two things have happened over the past decades: House prices have risen a lot faster than general inflation, and wages have risen slower than general inflation. I won't be going into all the reasons for that, from green belt / zoning laws to globalisation. But the overall effect has been that the price of a single family home as a multiple of that single family annual income has gone up significantly. I just saw a report from the UK, where it was stated that even in the regions with the cheapest houses the house price / annual income is now over the recommended maximum of 5, and in London it can be as high as 14. That is simply unaffordable, even more so with rising mortgage rates.

But there is another side to that coin. Economists have jokes few non-economists understand, and one of them is that we haven't found out how to get a loan from the Martians. Which is to say that every debt, every mortgage of one person is another person's savings. Even if you think you owe that money to your bank, that bank has owners and shareholders, and thus indirectly you own that money to them. Somebody profited from that rise in house prices, and it is the people who own those houses.

Now I have always been opposed to the simplistic and wrong narrative that the boomer generation has somehow conspired to steal all the money from the millennial generation. Parents rarely consciously steal from their children. But the boomer generation, of which I am a part of, had a work life under very different, and more favorable, economic circumstances than the younger generations. And a large majority of those unaffordable single family homes is owned by the family living there. Intergenerational economic inequality has gone up, but that has a natural end. Sooner or later these house owners will die, and the younger generations will inherit that house.

Of course for some families this generational transfer of wealth will happen earlier and voluntarily. A lot of house purchases these days are financed by the "bank of mom and dad". Parents who bought a house when it was still affordable, and have paid off their mortgage, sometimes are willing to take out a mortgage on that now much more expensive house and give the money to their children, so they can put down enough money for their house. Other parents won't be as generous, or would rather hang on to their retirement savings because nobody knows how long they will live. In that case the generational wealth transfer happens at the death of the parents. And from statistical information about life expectancy and typical age of having children it is easy to see that a lot of those inheritances will go from parents in their 80's to children in their late 50's.

Of course there is a lot that is wrong with that picture. It means that for many people having a middle-class education and job becomes less important than having middle-class parents, reducing social mobility. Waiting for your parents to die so that you can afford a house is a terrible thing. And it also means a world in which families with children live in cramped rented apartments, while those single family homes are inhabited mostly by people whose children are out of the house already, and there are a lot of empty rooms.

A sharp drop is house prices would provoke a lot of cries of woe and recession. But in the end, cheaper houses means a better intergenerational wealth distribution. Thus public policy should do a lot more to enable more houses to be built, and to provide more social housing as well, existing house prices be damned.

- posted by Tobold @ 1:29 PM Permanent Link (5) comments

Wednesday, August 02, 2023

BG3 Hype

My personal hype level for the release of Baldur's Gate 3 is low. I have played through Act I several times, and even if it will be updated, I am not exactly looking forward to playing through it again. But it appears that I am alone in that feeling. From what I can make out through the gaming media I consume, the global hype level for Baldur's Gate 3 is enormous.

I am following a bunch of different Twitch streamers. I all found them because at some point in time they were streaming a game I was interested in. And those were mostly tactical and strategy games, like Jagged Alliance 3, Age of Wonders 4, Wartales or Against the Storm. And it seems as if all of them are going to be streaming Baldur's Gate 3 from Friday on. This is especially weird in the Jagged Alliance 3 streaming community, where Friday is treated like the end of the world: "We haven't finished JA3 yet, but let's see how far we get before Friday". I see a lot of streamers on different games putting a countdown to Friday in the description of their current stream. YouTube is also recommending me lots of BG3 videos already.

Note that many streamers are making BG3 plans for Friday, while the release date is Thursday for most of the world. What we don't know is how early we will actually be able to play the game. There is no pre-load, and having the early access version installed isn't going to reduce the amount of data to download. Which means that a very large number of people are going to try to download a very large game from Steam at the same time. It is completely possible that Steam will have problems delivering all that data as fast as we might wish. Steam doesn't crash that often, but I consider it possible that it will show serious performance problems on Thursday. It will be an interesting test for my new 1 Gbit/s internet access, because for once it certainly won't be my internet speed that determines how fast I can download something. BG3 has a download size of "approximately 122 GB", so theoretically I could download it in 20 minutes. I wouldn't be surprised if it takes several hours instead. Only a select group of content creators, who got a special pre-release version of the game this week, will be able to stream that on Thursday. Regular European streamers would be foolish to schedule a BG3 stream for Thursday evening, with the release only being at 5 pm for them. US streamers might try, as the release is in the morning for them, but there is still a risk. Who wants to watch a stream about a guy downloading a game?

The good news is that once you managed to download the game, there is some hope that it will play smoothly from then on. BG3 isn't a live service game, so at least the single-player version should not suffer from so many people all trying to play at once, being stuck on some login screen. Maybe I'm wrong here and there is some hidden connection to Larian servers that will crash, but I haven't seen any sign of that in the early access. The long early access period also means that there is very little risk of a Cyberpunk 2077 -like launch disaster of the "game is very buggy or unplayable" kind.

Where I am unsure about is how good BG3 actually is for streaming content. My experience from the early access is that while BG3 does have some replay value, on the second run one sees a lot of scenes that one has seen before. I don't know if I want to watch somebody playing through Act I. Also the D&D combat system is complex, which is good for me to play, but maybe not ideal for watching. YouTube is better suited for this than Twitch, because Twitch essentially only offers playthroughs, while YouTube can concentrate on "how to" videos for such complex games.

- posted by Tobold @ 7:23 AM Permanent Link (6) comments

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