IlyaP

Gale's also got a fairly important character arc and has very useful AoE spells. I completely agree here: 3 tanks is too much. Get 1 tank to kite and/or take damage, one to two people doing ranged combat, and at least one person does Area of Effect spells. As my main was a wizard, this resulted in me and Gale being absolute bastards who destroyed everything at the horizon line from a distance with our fireball spells while Astarion had his smaller fire spells, ranged archery, mist walk to get in close and bite people (which did a surprising amount of damage, I found!), and Shadowheart or Laezel firing off a few rounds at a distance before adding support (Laezel at later levels can do up to 5 attacks in one turn, which makes her ultra impressive in close-quarter combat). I've never had to rely on or even bother with exploding barrels or any kind of murder hobory to get by. With the matriarch, a bit of grease to screw up its step, some spells to take out the net bridges, and a fireball shitstorm were enough to take her out quite quickly. Was a very easy fight with spell-casters and ranged fighters with good bows. Ditto on this front. Taking everyone out slowly and tactically means there's less back-up that can be called in later on, making combat slightly less tedious than it already is in turn-based games.

Fireballs. Lots of fireballs. I took it out in a few turns without any barrels or anything by just using Gale and Wyll's (and my) fireball spells on it.

And Feanor was still a genocidal maniac. Glad we all agree on that.

Discovered today that I can call someone in my company, like, for example, Takemura, and he'll *pick up the phone* while walking next to me. And sometimes this will cause a weird reverb effect as he and the phone version of himself both talk at me, and sometimes just the phone call version will respond. I wonder how we tell CDPR that this is a weird feature and maybe should be addressed...

Ah ah ah, that's dodging!

I turned it off. A few developers - maybe Josh Sawyer? - explained why they found them to be an issue from a maths perspective. Or maybe it was something to do with the supposed random number generation system in relation to the karmic dice. Either way, I found a better experience with it off.

Unless he makes a dad joke and isn't actually a dad! In which case it's definitely a faux pa! (I'll see myself out...)

He is a cautionary tale against fanaticism and a character who willingly engaged in genocide. It's worrying that you fail to miss those rather pronounced parts of his story and fail to understand he's a horrible, awful person.

Started replaying Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition with some "despecialising" mods and a stone skin mod to make it look and play as close to the original as possible. It's such a wonderfully chill, low stakes game. Chillax, take your time, the weird iron crisis will get sorted over time. Go to a fair, hang with a bard, read some books, rob everyone blind in Beregost, it's cool dawg!

GTX 1060s don't support ray tracing - it's a card from 2016. And I'm not big on intense graphics, so whatever wow factor they produce would definitely be lost on me.

Possibly. I get zero pleasure from playing games on Cosmic Nightmare Mode. Life's already annoying and challenging, why let our games be? As always, it's not my kink, but I won't kink shame.

Having played CP77 for over 400 hours and multiple playthroughs, that too is a bug I've not experienced. And I've been playing it since *day one*. And except when I was experimenting with some mods, the game was always stable, and has, unmodded, crashed on me about 6 times in total, at last count. Perplexing.

Or playing them as cats, because...what the actual fuck. https://www.pcgamer.com/baldurs-gate-3-player-completes-the-game-while-playing-as-a-party-of-cats/

What the hell. After 80+ hours, I've not experienced any bugs like that at all. @Werthead you ever encounter anything like this? Seriously perplexed, especially as I'm running this on a GTX 1060 6GB and i7-8700. Like, if anyone should be having problems, it's me, with my slightly older system specs...

it's not really cheating, as Sven, if not others at Larian, have publicly said "play the game your way - there's no wrong way to play the game". And given how the game occasionally has a large number of opponents that it throws at you, I consider having an extra party member or two to just be evening out the odds. And it also means that as a player, you get to be a bit more involved in combat than you otherwise might have been, which can be a nice dopamine boost during battles with lots of critters.

If there are bugs, I've not encountered a single one. It also means that you get some more diverse and increased amount of banter. And I've been playing the game since it was released, albeit in fits and starts, while I waited for the game to get patched. That, I confess, is one I've not encountered. Haven't had any pathfinding issues so far. The mod does disable Steam achievements, correct, but I don't care about achievements, and view them as artificial nonsense and so much noise and pointless social status symbols. (Ask me how I *really* feel! ) Where have you encountered bugs? If you say Act 2, I won't be surprised. Act 1 is mostly *fairly* clean, but Act 2 has the occasional odd bit of weirdness, and Act 3, well, I'm not yet convinced it's as optimised as it could be... Act 3's bugs/problems seem to be dependent on one's machine configuration, from what I've observed. I've had some graphical oddities that are...comical in a "Roach goes flying as Geralt stares in confusion" level of peculiar, but nothing Earth-shattering or game-breaking. Whereas other people have reported issues of falling through the world map, lock-ups, etc. I've had the game lock up once while I was in the inventory, which made me...twitch unhappily. I'm still not a fan of Act 3. And I'm also aware that content is being touched up/restored/optimised even now, and given that DOS2 didn't really feel fully polished until a year after it's release, I'm giving BG3 a few more months. And hoping some terribly clever modder finds a way to improve Larian's atrocious fucking gear storage system and UI.

They're an annoying fight. Keep Lae'zel with you, as they're not a one-off group, and if kept alive will have a part to play in the game's storyline. Of Lae'zel's with you and you defer to her judgement and let her speak on your behalf, you can avoid a wasteful and overly-long fight. Players can *theoretically* do a pacifist run, but the game really isn't designed for it. The "tactical" combat is part of the game's design, unfortunately. Yes, stories do progress even if you leave party members in your camp and don't include them as active members in your journeys. My recommendation would be to install the Party Limit Begone mod, which also means you don't have to do multiple replays to get everyone's story, and can instead get it all done in one play-through. Theoretically. I haven't tried recruiting Minthara, because life's too short. It also makes the game's combat a little less tedious and gets things over and done with more quickly, so you can get back to the actual story at hand.

When I emerged into the city after leaving Act 2, seemingly none of the dialogue options I tried could get me out of having to surrender everything and go to prison, according to the views of the guards at the castle door in Rivington. So having to go to jail and then reequip everyone, which is slow and tedious, because my player character gets overburdened is just So. Tedious. And to then have the game crash after I've spent nearly an hour on this (because Act 3 still has bugs) was the point at which my patience finally ran out.

Wyrm's Rock Prison. You get arrested when arriving in Baldur's Gate if you can't meet certain criteria. What they might be, frell if I know. When you're in the prison, you get stripped of your gear, and when you pick it up, it's all placed on one person, and if they're over-encumbered, that means they can't move, so the player must go through the process of moving things around to then free up enough weight to be able to travel to outside the jail and thus go to the camp and then dump everything into the main party chest - which means moving between each member of your camp one at a time. It's just goddamn tedious administrative work and at this point, as much as I love Larian's games, they are emphatically not for me, and that's a *me* issue, and what my preferences are, and has nothing to do with them. PC. Yes, I am aware of all this. But when you've got to re-equip your entire party, including everyone in your camp, and when the game decides to crash on you mid-way through, and when Act 3 is already visually frustrating because the camera is *awful* at dealing with indoor spaces... No. Life's too short.

(I'm just so over BG3, I know it's a good game, but dammit HoF, I'm just...so f'n done with this game. It isn't a game made for an Ilya.)

I...what? You can't! The game, as far as I know, doesn't let you! You end up in Wyrm's Whatever, and somehow (SOMEHOW) in your *armor* but sans weapons. AND WITH ALL YOUR SPELLS. Because who cares about logic or reason, right?!

You know how you have to equip everyone after the prison scene? I did that, which took me AN HOUR, because I had to move stuff between my play_char and everyone else, and then move all that into the party chest, to make it easier for everyone to re-equip their stuff... AND THEN THE GAME CRASHED. And I lost an hour of time. At which point I hoped out of BG3 for the foreseeable future. Because fark this nonsense and bad interior camera nonsense in Baldur's Gate.

Unlike BG1/2, there is no proper "pause" in this game. Which, honestly, after 40 hours, is...not something I could say strikes me as a legit grievance, but I can see or can at least imagine how it could annoy or irk someone, especially if player characters happen to be within striking distance of enemies or cut-scene-triggering characters. I honestly don't understand how Larian didn't do some basic market/design research and not implement two different game modes and not have a UI that doesn't *blow literal chunks*. Love me BG3 for the most part (turn-based garbage aside*), but the interface is just awful. *No, I will not be taking any questions at this time. Personal preference and taste is personal preference and taste.

Larian seriously need to fix their inventory management system. I just spent an hour in Act 3 re-equipping everyone after breaking out of prison. The lack of a unified screen which shows me everyone's inventory and the main inventory in this day and age is bewildering. It's like they learned nothing from Pillars of Eternity. And why do obvious stackable items like arrows and bolts not stack? It boggles the mind.

Probably, yes. They'll have, if nothing else, taught you to be patient. Also, much like Act 1 of BG3 functions as a tutorial for the game's systems and mechanics, so to does the Fort Joy opening sequence in DOS2. Also, there's no jumping feature in DOS2. Just stating that outright in advance. There are spells that give jump-like features, but jump as a mechanic is not there. And I wish it was. Think of DOS2 as a rougher, less polished version of BG3, and go in expecting the interface to be overwhelming and over the top. If you can do that, and allow yourself to be patient and learn how the interface works, how the mechanics and systems work, and accept that you have to explore everywhere and look at everything because there's *zero* hand-holding, then chances are you'll enjoy it.