Pretty striking - of course Jaheira would look excellent in black!
hehe
Predictably when I hit Act III my interest started waning a bit. Soon as I come out the other side of Wyrm's crossing into Rivington, always seems to happen the same way. I think it's partially the overall pacing of the campaign. Also in this case because playing as a Ranger, with a Bow and a Crow, things starts to feel a bit repetitive after a while.
Act II just has a really nice crescendo with the Mrykul fight that keeps everything humming and then a nice little anticlimax with the transition interlude into Act III. Were we given the option to detonate with Gale immediately after the battle in the Illithid Colony (instead of right before), I'd probably just do that every time lol.
We grabbed Minthara ASAP and slotted her into the mix, confident that she would look boss in black. We also brought Halsin on board, briefly, too to check his look. We took him along for what would probably be his only adventure, to face down Oliver and kill a couple Needles. He got in a few lines here and there.
First two Acts have a nice flow throughout, but for the third I have to be really vibing on things I think to press forward and get over that initial hump. Then when I saw that I had half a dozen mods already awaiting updates I figured to just restart again hehe. This time with a Mod to prevent the Half-Illithid visuals, since I forgot that one, and of course ended up failing the wisdom check.
This time I also downloaded several mods to remove some Perma VFX, to see how that feels.
I kept the Faerun Colors Dye mod, though it's very similar to standard dyes, in that there's really no way to tell how things look before experimenting. Like they all have names, but not the sort of names that make it simple to parse. In the case of the Faerun Colors mod, most of the dyes are named after gods in various pantheons, with the FR gods being the first tier. While somewhat intriguing, I think it almost works against the RP aspect, where the naming conventions just hit a bit too close to home. I find myself not wanting to cross the wrong god with my color choices or whatever, even though they're mostly arbitrary lol. I find the whole concept of dying armor to be kinda meh honestly. I'd much prefer a palette similar to all the other palettes, as the name game just feels like a layer of obfuscation to make the options feel more numerous or various that they really are. Granted there are only so many ways one can color/skin the same equipment models, but I feel like it would more fun to have situation where we're building towards a color ideal over time, instead of one and done. It did give the game a bit of a new lease on life, having access to a few more color combinations, but like many things in BG3 the process is overly cumbersome.
Scratch Mod I also held onto, since that one worked well (basically makes him more like a Ranger's Animal companion, scales in a similar way) but I removed the other specialty summons since they felt a bit overpowered to me with the larger party.
Adjustable party limit is a keeper for sure. On the whole I think Party of 6 plays quite nicely. It makes the campaign somewhat easier to manage sure, so probably encouraging players to try the game at a higher difficulty setting like Tactician, Honour Mode, or some Custom Riff on those. For Honour I'd say there were a similar number of 'oh shit' moments where I felt like I might lose the run to random goings on. Like where some Legendary Boss ability hits everyone with a necrotic boom. All the summons die, with a couple party members downed and everyone at half health. Definitely more casual than party of 4 or party of 3, but I think it's still a more satisfying for the gameflow to have a larger party. When the player characters are up more frequently, the combats just feel as though everything moves at a much steadier clip, and I don't have that sense of the big lulls. Like waiting for a dozen computer opponents to make their moves. The downside is extra click click on the backend to mange the party for resting. The click tedium of dismissing companions there can get to be a bit much. It makes one pine for a dropdown menu where we can call up and dismiss our companions from a list, and only enter conversation cutscene at the player's discretion, but still it's better than nothing. So far it's my favorite mod, for actually making the game feel more Baldur's Gate to me, which is no small feat hehe.
So far I've kind of avoided most of the cosmetic mods. I checked out several mods that added heads, but they are primarily for like elves and humans, really only about a dozen or so, least that I could find. Still haven't seen anything that adds bunch of grizzled dwarves with ornate beards or gruff voices and such, or extra Halflings or whatever. There seem to be many more some options for female Tavs which is nice, but it's not really like closing out the gaps. The fantasy races that were underserved in the vanilla game still feel underserved, and a lot of the cooler accessorizing mods have to make use of the dragonborn chin slots which unlock to attach different things depending on the mod. Right now hotshit Elves and Tiefs are pretty well served, as one would expect there are many cosmetic mods to spruce up the haircuts and such, but I find myself kinda wishing I could just grab a big package with a couple dozen or even hundreds of head models, rather than going ala carte 1 by 1. It will probably take forever to build out the kind of library of heads I wanted to see, but there are some standouts there for sure, so hopefully more get added in the future.
I'll be keeping my eyes peeled for anything that unlocks the camera or gives us pitch control, WASD etc. cause right now haven't seen any of those. I'm pretty happy with most of the 'Better UI' mods I downloaded with. Though I did run into an issue where I couldn't multi-select for trading at merchants, which I couldn't figure out.
The Better Hotbar mod I liked a lot, though for that one I had to activate the Shudders by dragging them all to the left, which unlocks the 5th hotbar. Took me a while to figure out how that worked, since it has to be done for each character so the passives and such will get added later on.
Better Inventory mod I ended up removing. It worked fine, but I didn't really like the Item background color gradient which seemed too Low Contrast to me (it adds a little bit of white to the background of most items.) The mini icons I thought were nice, just the white that was too much for my eyes. I spend so much time with those inventory screens up, and then when items are added to the hotbar that little bit of white around the icons just made my screen too muted. Otherwise though felt pretty solid. I like the ones for the Combine widgets, like Better Dying, since it removes the need to drag items with the extra clicks.
So far there's nothing really for Transmog, and I still can't hide the Capes. It's hard to tell also which things might be coming down the pike, or whether someone has already begun work on stuff like that. It's easy to imagine a little button similar to the Hide Helmet button, but who knows how hard it is to actually pull off something like that. Transmog has a similar downside for me to the dyes, unless it's progressive somehow I feel like getting spoiled for choice up front can diminish the sense of accomplishment somehow. But for QoL I would definitely like to make a few adjustments, especially for anything that still has clipping. Usually the shorter races or large bodied races, but even on the humans and elves sometimes it would be nice to hide or mix something to get a different fit. Sleeves no sleeves, that sort of stuff. I still want Modsville, and a way to somehow bring it into the game in a more narratively coherent way, even if it busts a bit of the 4th wall. Just to have a thematic presentation with NPCs that have goofy names. Like Mod the fisherman who takes us on his rafter across the river, and then we meet a bunch of Modshop type characters who could tutorialize in a more discrete environment that's less intrusive to the main campaign. Alternatively just a full overhaul that stitches everything into place, but again probably takes forever, plus quality control. I like the idea of the eternal return, and time travel to feed in with the stuff that's already going on with dream guardians and doppelgangers, just lean way in.
I wonder if the toolset will ever really be full service enough to get me from what we have now, which is more like Caricatures of D&D characters, into actual D&D characters, with all the various bells and whistles, and the full scope HD on that for avatar visualization? I just feel like it's never going to be quite on the NWN level for customized specs, but it's interesting to see what all is cooking now that's more click ready in-game. Fewer options than on nexus probably, but also just a lot easier to use for me right now.
Next run, another witch!
I got Rizzmeralda the Half-Elf coming out the oven. Cause, despite all the updated mods, I find myself still wanting to rep the canonical Durge-y robes hehe
