Videogame Discussion Thread

Anyone playing Baldurs Gate 3? Living well up to the hype but i knew that already after playing their previous effort Divinity original sin 2. Honestly if you like this put the dos2 on your list as well, it's really quite close.

Also just saw the bear scene... jfc i had tears in my eyes laughing.

 

I haven’t followed BG3 development. It’s not really a continuation of the BG1/2 story, right? And is it the DOS2 ruleset or D&D (whichever edition)?

 

I'm not well versed in all the DnD stuff, apparantly it's ruleset 5 or something? Coming from dos2 it's easy to pick up combat wise. Not overly complicated and everything is explained in game with tooltips.
Story wise it's supposed to be a continuation from the previous ones which i never played but apparantly one character makes a return. I bet there are way more tie ins to previous games knowing Larian, they do attention to detail very well.

 

Just finished the Red Dead Redemption II main storyline and now in the Epilogue chapters. Wow! What a f'n story and game.

Look, I am not a gamer. I mostly installed Steam so I could play Forza 4 (because my computer was old and it couldn't handle Forza Horizon 5). And after doing mostly all I can do in FH4, I got an itch for 5. Finally upgraded, but then 5 was mostly the same, just in Mexico and oddball way of doing things. So I decided to check out other games and caught some of the hilarious YT of Jack Black playing RD2. If you haven't seen them, they are hilarious. It made me want to check it out and glad I did.

I had to roll back my Nvidia driver to get it to work. It would not even get to the first mission at all. It would hang in the intro video before you even got to do anything. And since I am not much of a gamer, of course I only got gold on a handful of missions and only that after replay. But as others have said, the story and characters are fantastic and plays out like a movie. I think Jack Black is trying to get a TV series going for RD2 - although he has just said it is a great idea for a show. For those of you who have played it, you all know what I am talking about with all of this.

To be honest though, I was kind of hooked too much and now I am actually kind of glad things are winding down as it is quite an addicting game.

 

Besides the two characters, it's not really a continuation other than the area. Mindflayers are very removed from Baal's storyline of the first two.

They also made more of an effort than Wizards of the Coast to make all the classes fun and viable.

 

Yeap they definitely can their rpgs. Having fun but still more focused on Jagged Alliance 3.

 

Might check that one out after this. Just reached act3 which supposedly is the biggest but also least polished. Probably gonna take it slower waiting for some fixes. So far found some minor annoyances that could either be fixed by reloading or doing some dumb shit.

One instance one of the teammates got stuck in combat and couldn't get ported, so she was missing and i had to backtrack and in the end the only thing that worked was talking to her and sending her back to camp and then picking her up again.
Also the same one who randomly had a missing ui in combat after dialog.

 

Problems of anticipating i guess. Im still doing act 1 slowly and since im on vacations i bet i will have a few updates until then.

Jagged Alliance is much more immediate fun and im enjoying it so far. We'll see if it holds...

 

Never played any jagged alliance games but it does look like commando's which was awesome back in the day.

 

My legit #1 favorite feature in BG3 is seeing the 1D20 ability checks. Even just a simple click on the dice brings back the feeling of nostalgia playing D&D.

It blows my mind how much money Larian might've spent working on voice overs and cinematic animation for all their NPCs.

I've only played about 10 hours and so far it's SO good.

 

I've been playing a shit-ton of Diablo 4. If you've put many hours grinding greater rifts in Diablo 3, or enjoy having lots of different viable builds to min-max all the way to the level cap you will find much to hate, but if you're a casual Diablo fan I believe this is the best of the series. The story is as dumb as the rest of them but they nailed the Diablo aesthetic in terms of the classes, various monsters, dungeons etc. Every class is fun to play. The campaign is arguably the best part of the game, as once you get to level 50 and max-out your build and start grinding for better gear to move up to World Tier 3 and 4 on the way to level 100 I imagine most will get bored or try another class.

 

For people on all-AMD systems who're experiencing ridiculously low FPS on Baldur's Gate III: disable Smart Access Memory if you haven't already.

I was getting 12-30FPS on 1080p Ultra with an RX 5600 XT and while I do think it's a rather pretty game so far (only about 30 minutes in, not a lot of time to just sit and game for now), that was confounding. Then I checked metrics and saw that I was hardly using any VRAM at all while my system memory was nearing capacity. Disabling SAM bumped things up to a clean 87FPS average with more sensible allocations for RAM and VRAM.

 

My co-worker keeps telling me to get it. I don't really play games much, but I did buy Streets of Rage 4. I have a MadCatz arcade stick, so that is fun.

Can you build a 'guild' of real online friends in BG3? I'd only want to play with real people - all figuring things out together.

 

With an alleged 17,000 possible ending permutations, this really does come across as being a video game tabletop D&D session. I haven't had a proper RP game with friends in a VERY long time but there've been some brilliant memories. The narrator and the on-screen D20 bring a stupidly large smile to my face.

 

@ColtMrFire answering you here instead of the HD800 amp thread.

It looks and plays very well now. I got it at launch and didn't actually run into many bugs, but kind of wish I had waited now that a lot has been added/fixed and I have a much nicer computer. Not that I really have time, but I would like to do a full playthrough with all the new stuff including the DLC (Idris Elba!!!).

For me, it will always be too shallow - too many things that you can only see the surface of. If there is a food stall with dumplings on display, let me buy and eat the damn dumplings. I want to be able to break into people's apartments and see how they live... I want to go up into one of these mega buildings and look at some cityscapes. It's understandable given how hard it would be to completely open up such a large map, but I will always want more. At least they have a functioning metro now. I think it is worth a play through.

I also rather enjoyed the accompanying animated series on Netflix.

 

I recently finished Alan Wake 2. What a fantastic game this turned out to be. It is rare for me to finish a game these days, but this one got the hooks in and kept me playing until the credits.

I don't want to spoil anything for anyone else who hasn't had the opportunity to finish it, so I won't comment on any story bits or sequences. Both story and gameplay go to some very interesting places with surprises throughout.

It's not a perfect game – some of Alan's game mechanics in particular dragged at times – but I thoroughly enjoyed the ending and hope Remedy makes another one.

 

So I saw Cyberpunk 2077 on sale and figured I would give it a try. Have not even started playing yet as I can't easily remap my keyboard and mouse bindings to be the same as I use for all my other FPS games (COD, Far Cry, Battlefield, Doom Eternal, etc). What game company in 2023 makes it hard to customize your controls?

Google tells me I can remap by manually editing the appropriate .xml file. This is going to be tedious to make sure there are no duplicates or overlaps without the programmatic assistance, so I certainly give them a 0 out of 10 for game UI design so far.

 

Following up my own post above. Seems quite a few other people have recognized this deficiency in CP2077 as shipped. Thankfully some of them have already done much of the hard work editing the appropriate files to make the game more user friendly, specifically this one;

https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/4008

It is not perfect, but is a vast improvement. That people need to do this at all still makes me shake my head though.