Baldur's Gate 3: On the Highway to the Nine Hells

[Werthead]

Reached the start of Act III, or just before it.

Spoiler

My camp is raided by githyanki and I was fighting them off and suddenly just died instantly. Apparently you're supposed to run through the nearby portal, but the game is really unclear about that.

 

[Luzifer's right hand]

I case anyone feels like messing around spells with attack rolls(not auto hit ones) can now sneak attack which is probably an unexpected side effect of this. (From patch notes:)

Quote

Fixed the Sneak Attack reaction not working if a melee finesse weapon is not equipped.

Edit: You need to have a bow equipped for it the work though. 

Edited August 26, 2023 by Luzifer's right hand

[Heartofice]

I finally recruited Karlach into my party, after going everywhere else on the map except where she is.

Her character highlighted one thing that does actually bother me about the game: the mixed voice acting. 
 

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love some of the performances, I could watch Astarion and Gale all day. It really adds to the immersion having characters who feel real and behave like people. I even like the Goblins! 

However, many of the voice actors have a real ‘out of work drama student from East London’ feel. Karlach embodies that, because her acting certainly doesn’t embody her actual body!

This great hulking barbarian demon has the voice of a 22 year old who hangs out in Shoreditch and grew up in a leafy semi with her accountant dad and head of HR mum. It really doesn’t fit and it’s something that seems to affect a lot of side characters who sound young and middle class. 
 

Where are all the older more experienced voice actors at?

[IlyaP]

45 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Where are all the older more experienced voice actors at?

And why oh why can't we have Keanu Reeves somewhere in this game?

(Apparently Jason Isaacs shows up later, as do a few other actors' voices that you may recognise once you hear them, but which I won't reveal Because Spoilers.)

[Werthead]

I think my biggest problem is the voice actress playing Lae'Zel really selling the gith language, the slightly alien culture, the aggressiveness of almost every interaction, and pretty much every other githyanki voice actor...not really bothering. They should have probably used her performance as a model for the other VAs to follow.

I think most of the VAs are pretty good, but Astarion can definitely go a bit "too much" at times ("daaaaarling, how delightful," yeah calm down mate), and both he and Gale are a bit too "generic posh English accent of the kind Hollywood loves." Not seeing a huge difference between them and Karlach.

I do like the narrator audibly trying not to laugh when describing your interactions with Scratch.

6 hours ago, IlyaP said:

And why oh why can't we have Keanu Reeves somewhere in this game?

(Apparently Jason Isaacs shows up later, as do a few other actors' voices that you may recognise once you hear them, but which I won't reveal Because Spoilers.)

I wasn't massively impressed with Isaacs because he was fairly unrecognisable, and fairly middling as a performance. Not awful by any means but fairly standard. Might have been improved by using his "Yorkshire Zhukov" voice from The Death of Stalin.

[Werthead]

 

Excellent.

[Luzifer's right hand]

Reading up on character builds on the side(I have not even multiclassed once yet ) and people have figured out how to kill enemies by jumping around them. 

It is based around monk actions that removes the need for a bonus action for jumps and a weapon that causes thunder damage when you jump near them. A level 3 thief/2 monk hits 53 jumps per turn with a combination of wood elf plus some early game items and haste... 

Edited August 27, 2023 by Luzifer's right hand

[Relic]

17 minutes ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

Reading up on character builds on the side(I have not even multiclassed once yet ) and people have figured out how to kill enemies by jumping around them. 

It is based around monk actions that removes the need for a bonus action for jumps and a weapon that causes thunder damage when you jump near them. A level 3 thief/2 monk hits 53 jumps per turn with a combination of wood elf plus some early game items and haste... 

Honestly, wtf. So dumb. Jumping in this game is really irritating. As is party pathing, mostly due to jumping. 

[Luzifer's right hand]

3 minutes ago, Relic said:

Honestly, wtf. So dumb. Jumping in this game is really irritating. As is party pathing, mostly due to jumping. 

It does sound incredible tedious but I found the idea behind it really amusing.

I googled it because I just found that weapon for the first time(restarted for the 3rd time...).

[Fez]

46 minutes ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

It does sound incredible tedious but I found the idea behind it really amusing.

I googled it because I just found that weapon for the first time(restarted for the 3rd time...).

It also sounds like an unintended interaction that'll probably eventually get nerfed. It reminds me of a similar tedious interaction in Wrath of the Righteous. Pathfinder 1e has the spell 'cave fangs' which lasts 10 minutes/level; and as a free action (which you have an unliminted number of per turn) you can burn 10 minutes of it to do 3d8 damage (or half of that on a saving throw). So it's a decently powerful spell, which if you cast at level 20 could do 60d8 damage. Which seems high, but is kinda nothing compared to what level 20 casters can do in that system. Anyway, in Wrath you could get get a mythic feat that lets spells that last over 5 minutes actually last 24 hours instead. Which was intended mostly as a QoL feature to cut down on how often you needed to cast buff spells. But it also applied to cave fangs since it was a spell with a duration of over 5 minutes. You could get the spell by level 5 and have the feat by level 9. Meaning at level 9 you could do 432d8 damage. As soon Owlcat had dealt with the game breaking bugs they nerfed the feat to not apply to cave fangs.

 

Anyway, back to BG3, I'm noticing a lot of new gameplay bugs since patch 1. Stuff poison clouds no longer being visible but still causing damage, more dialog lines where the audio bugs out and it's silent, etc. All rather frustrating really. 

Edited August 27, 2023 by Fez

[Luzifer's right hand]

27 minutes ago, Fez said:

It also sounds like an unintended interaction that'll probably eventually get nerfed. It reminds me of a similar tedious interaction in Wrath of the Righteous. Pathfinder 1e has the spell 'cave fangs' which lasts 10 minutes/level; and as a free action (which you have an unliminted number of per turn) you can burn 10 minutes of it to do 3d8 damage (or half of that on a saving throw). So it's a decently powerful spell, which if you cast at level 20 could do 60d8 damage. Which seems high, but is kinda nothing compared to what level 20 casters can do in that system. Anyway, in Wrath you could get get a mythic feat that lets spells that last over 5 minutes actually last 24 hours instead. Which was intended mostly as a QoL feature to cut down on how often you needed to cast buff spells. But it also applied to cave fangs since it was a spell with a duration of over 5 minutes. You could get the spell by level 5 and have the feat by level 9. Meaning at level 9 you could do 432d8 damage. As soon Owlcat had dealt with the game breaking bugs they nerfed the feat to not apply to cave fangs.

 

Anyway, back to BG3, I'm noticing a lot of new gameplay bugs since patch 1. Stuff poison clouds no longer being visible but still causing damage, more dialog lines where the audio bugs out and it's silent, etc. All rather frustrating really. 

The game clearly has a lot of weird interactions some people enjoy exploiting. Not that relevant for normal gameplay though. They game is probably way to easy to get much fun out of these interactions unless you try playing solo or so.

Edited August 27, 2023 by Luzifer's right hand

[Werthead]

Ran headlong into a fresh bug introduced by the hotfix for Patch 1.0 (that's always a bad sign). 

Deep in Act III and I fought and defeated 

Spoiler

Lorroakan, the arsehole mage in the big tower in BG that wants to imprison Nightsong, who's now my buddy.

We kicked his arse but afterwards none of my characters could talk to anyone. I'd click on people but nothing would happen. I tried a reload and this allowed my companion characters to talk to people but not my MC. After trying various combinations of quit right out, reload etc, I reloaded to right before the fight and that seemed to fix the problem.

However, it's a widespread issue, with quite a few Reddit and Steam threads on it. It seems to be far worse for some people, as they found they could not talk to anyone at all even after loading a save from many hours earlier. There also seems to be no main cause: my problem started, as it did for a few, after being caught in a Silence spell, but others reported it after other spells, after transitioning from combat mode to realtime mode, or sometimes it just spontaneously started without warning.

That makes me wary of going through what was a pretty tough fight (even for four characters at Level 10) again, with the possibility of the bug happening again afterwards. I might hold fire to see if a hotfix is issued.

Frustrating because it feels like I could polish the game off in 5-10 hours, depending on how much side-stuff I want to do at this point (I'm at 66 hours in total).

[karaddin]

I think there's probably still more to the main quest than you're thinking if you're still only level 10, but I guess that really depends on how strict you are about it being main quest and how good you are at finding some things.

I've also had the bug but only a couple of times and full quit out has fixed it.

I agree Isaac's performance was less noteworthy, but I didn't feel like his character got much room to impress to start with so it's hard to put much on him.

[Werthead]

Ridiculously funny.

 

[Luzifer's right hand]

I'm suffering from my usual restartitis. That usually happens when I'm still discovering new mechanics in a game.

Nothing new I never reached the endgame in Pillars of Eternity despite playing the game for more than a hundred hours and my Baldur's Gate 1+2 replays usually end before Throne of Bhaal.

I have been thinking about a future evil playthrough. I guess the standard approach is to play The Dark Urge when you play evil.  I find the idea of playing as an evil Karlach amusing though that will probably lock me out of romances.

Edited August 28, 2023 by Luzifer's right hand

[Fez]

3 hours ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

I'm suffering from my usual restartitis. That usually happens when I'm still discovering new mechanics in a game.

Nothing new I never reached the endgame in Pillars of Eternity despite playing the game for more than a hundred hours and my Baldur's Gate 1+2 replays usually end before Throne of Bhaal.

I have been thinking about a future evil playthrough. I guess the standard approach is to play The Dark Urge when you play evil.  I find the idea of playing as an evil Karlach amusing though that will probably lock me out of romances.

The dark urge can be played as either evil (giving in to the urge) or good (resisting the urge). And I think both are way more interesting than a baseline custom character. There are two evil things that you have no choice about in the game (and one you actually can avoid if you have 'speak with animals' up), but besides them you can resist the urge the entire time. And since you aren't in control of yourself for those two evil things, and have dialog options to express deep remorse over them, arguably you are still 'good' despite doing them.

I like the idea I saw of manually rolling a d20 when dark urge options come up, with a DC of whatever you feel is appropriate, to decide if you resist or give in. That basically lets you play a third way, of being a dark urge who doesn't want to give in but doesn't have enough self-control to always resist.

[Luzifer's right hand]

30 minutes ago, Fez said:

The dark urge can be played as either evil (giving in to the urge) or good (resisting the urge). And I think both are way more interesting than a baseline custom character. There are two evil things that you have no choice about in the game (and one you actually can avoid if you have 'speak with animals' up), but besides them you can resist the urge the entire time. And since you aren't in control of yourself for those two evil things, and have dialog options to express deep remorse over them, arguably you are still 'good' despite doing them.

I like the idea I saw of manually rolling a d20 when dark urge options come up, with a DC of whatever you feel is appropriate, to decide if you resist or give in. That basically lets you play a third way, of being a dark urge who doesn't want to give in but doesn't have enough self-control to always resist.

It does look intriguing even if playing the most good character as evil would amuse me.

[Werthead]

Enjoying the sub-10fps drops incurred by just walking around the city in Act III. Jesus actual Christ.

It's really not helped by everyone and their aunt just attacking you walking down the street, throwing the game into combat where each battle takes half an hour not due to difficulty but due to the performance going haywire (bonus points if either side manages to blast off some magic or something that aggros 30 Flaming Fist into joining the fight, in which case you're going to be in for a very long haul).

[Relic]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

Enjoying the sub-10fps drops incurred by just walking around the city in Act III. Jesus actual Christ.

It's really not helped by everyone and their aunt just attacking you walking down the street, throwing the game into combat where each battle takes half an hour not due to difficulty but due to the performance going haywire (bonus points if either side manages to blast off some magic or something that aggros 30 Flaming Fist into joining the fight, in which case you're going to be in for a very long haul).

after reading about the act 3 issues i stopped playing. i like the game a lot, but ill wait for a patch that fixes this stuff. what you just described sounds awful. 

[IlyaP]

1 hour ago, Relic said:

after reading about the act 3 issues i stopped playing. i like the game a lot, but ill wait for a patch that fixes this stuff. what you just described sounds awful. 

This is pretty much what I did, and turned my attention to Solasta: Crown of the Magister instead, which at least doesn't have a camera that seems to have been designed by Michael Bay after a serious bender of coke and whippits.