No chance to play yet, how's it feel???

Black Elk

Habitué
Messages
86
I had a really hard time choosing feats other than the obvious one to increase ability score and rush 20 in the prime stat. Where I could tell it felt a bit off, is that after hitting 20 I still wanted to raise my ability score again at lvl 8 rather than exploring the flavor feats hehe. It's mechanically so useful even getting those +1s, cause we're rolling constantly for all the things in dialogue too, that I did the same for all the companions. STR is somewhat more useful here too because of how jump/push/throw/carry are so relevant, such that even pushing a secondary or tertiary ability can feel worth it over a lot of these feats. I think you really have to want to see your character doing that thing to justify a lot of them. It might have made sense for them to tweak ability progression to be more automatic, or just giving all characters a free feat as some sort of campaign special or whatever, you know cause it's a computer game with different needs or whatever. Having to choose, it's hard not to go with the one at the top that provides such a clear long haul advantage.

Unrelated, but just to say, I absolute love the vibe they created with the environment artwork! It really does look like that occult satanic panic call-back that I adore from the AD&D 2e art direction. For a Forgotten Realms CRPG they nailed that part. I feel like even though the game is sort of Arcade style, that it's nevertheless a really good primer for some of the lore. So even if something like Solasta is more satisfying for by the books mechanics, or Pathfinder is more satisfying for build minutia, what BG3 does quite well is the FR tableau. Like if the goal is to introduce Faerun to players who haven't played in that setting, this one does a lot of heavy lifting. It does some great horror angles that I appreciated, even if it's sometimes goes off the rails into schlock, I still think they get some kudos for nailing the look of a lot of this stuff. I feel like I'm thumbing through a Keith Parkinson illustration sometimes, when battling the skeletor hellraisers and dead gods and such. I kinda love it hehe
 

Antimatter

Administrator
Staff member
Messages
1,120
For lvl 4, I basically picked +2 stats for every companion and the main character. Later on, it was mix & match. E.g. taking dual-wielder for Astarion (Assassin in my case), Martial Adept for Karlach (especially Disarming Attack), Sentinel for Lae'zel, War Caster for my MC Warlock, Shadowheart, and Gale (absolutely essential imho).

Yesterday in one Act 2 fight, I disarmed a humanoid enemy and made them flee in horror. They fell under the Dark Curse, and came back a few rounds... as a shade. This is some really great reactivity there.

I stopped mid-Act 2 doing the Shar challenges and having only areas close to the Moonrise Towers left on the surface to explore. Getting there took 160 hours. That's more than was required to finish and explore the whole of CP2077, Death Stranding, or DOS2.
 

Black Elk

Habitué
Messages
86
Yeah I haven't made it that far yet with team Good, who are all a bit behind the curve still at lvl 6. My villainous sorcerer is at 8 already at pretty much the same point, and she has the psionic interrupts Ethels boon so that works pretty well, but Gale has felt kinda worthless thus far. Like always the first dude down for sure, but at least now he's got Counterspell and Fireball so he's starting to pull his weight, probably would do war casting for him since he's already juiced in his prime.

Main difference I felt was that Minthara joins up almost immediately in the second Act if you go that route, and she was already ahead of the curve (she hit level 6 right away, before my main) so she's already crushing like soon as you hit the Towers. She has good strength to mule, can make good use of the heavier equipment you pick up.

Meanwhile Halsin's over here just looking at the stars, and twiddling his thumbs lol.

Like come on dude, what are we waiting for? But of course soon as Jaheira shows up, seems like some of the Druid intrigue there with Halsin is lost. Like now I just want to Jaheira to mount up and regulate haha. I think they should have had Papa Bear join the party sooner, like for the quest to lift the shadow curse, cause he's the one all invested in it anyway. I detoured back to some earlier areas instead cause I had shadow fatigue from spending so much time in that zone hehe, (fought the Gnolls cause that one kept crashing on me during the first hotfix that rolled back and a few other things we neglected) but now we're back on that shadowcurse.

Ps. now that we got Halsin in the party...

I immediately respec'd hehe



To me his stat distribution is tough. I feel like either his Dex or Charisma needs to get lowered down to a sensible 10, so that his STR and CON can get a big boost up, but probably he needs that +1 in CHA that he has from the default. Instead I think it makes sense to lower his Dex (also because the Large body animation is sorta lumbering anyway this fit to me hehe.) This would allow something like 13 STR and 15 CON as the base which to me makes more sense for the Avatar's physique (leaning more on CON there I guess, but still with an above average STR). He recruits into the party at a point where he's bound to be lvl 5/6 already, so the attribute feat there I think, just to get something that matches his overall presentation. With a choice there between juicing CON or STR and Wisdom to round him out. Hard call. I think with the right gloves though (available by ACT 2) a build like that would make a lot of sense. Even if Moon druids are all about the shapes, it still feels like he should be a more STR/CON based build for overall versatility and to at least sorta match what Minthara brings on team villainy. Like a choice there between 14/16 split in the secondary STR/CON, with an 18 in the prime Wis. Or maybe one of the feats that grants a boost up to either or those. I don't know I think I might go STR and push it. He's like the most jacked Elf we've ever seen, so it only seems right. He can have the gloves lol.





To me that seems alright. Sorta like the Dex gloves in BG1 or Viconia being built around the Ankheg armor. Secondary dilemma is that the druid robes clip at the back while running. I thought about taking an armor feat, but even then, putting him in regular armor without the guns on full display seems somehow out of character lol. So I think a build based on the gloves that just shoot his Dex through the roof, and then he starts to look a bit more like what I'd expect from an OP BG1 style character with heavy hitting stats. Like regardless of the armor, cause he probably needs to rock the Druid default there for the look. STR seems like you'd want to crank it a bit though right? like to mule around more of the loot, and also hitting heavier even when out of wildshape. I guess I should try him with his defaults for a while just to see how he plays, cause I'm indecisive here hehe.
 
Last edited:

Juk0

Habitué
Messages
12
I had a really hard time choosing feats other than the obvious one to increase ability score and rush 20 in the prime stat. Where I could tell it felt a bit off, is that after hitting 20 I still wanted to raise my ability score again at lvl 8 rather than exploring the flavor feats hehe. It's mechanically so useful even getting those +1s, cause we're rolling constantly for all the things in dialogue too, that I did the same for all the companions. STR is somewhat more useful here too because of how jump/push/throw/carry are so relevant, such that even pushing a secondary or tertiary ability can feel worth it over a lot of these feats. I think you really have to want to see your character doing that thing to justify a lot of them. It might have made sense for them to tweak ability progression to be more automatic, or just giving all characters a free feat as some sort of campaign special or whatever, you know cause it's a computer game with different needs or whatever. Having to choose, it's hard not to go with the one at the top that provides such a clear long haul advantage.

Unrelated, but just to say, I absolute love the vibe they created with the environment artwork! It really does look like that occult satanic panic call-back that I adore from the AD&D 2e art direction. For a Forgotten Realms CRPG they nailed that part. I feel like even though the game is sort of Arcade style, that it's nevertheless a really good primer for some of the lore. So even if something like Solasta is more satisfying for by the books mechanics, or Pathfinder is more satisfying for build minutia, what BG3 does quite well is the FR tableau. Like if the goal is to introduce Faerun to players who haven't played in that setting, this one does a lot of heavy lifting. It does some great horror angles that I appreciated, even if it's sometimes goes off the rails into schlock, I still think they get some kudos for nailing the look of a lot of this stuff. I feel like I'm thumbing through a Keith Parkinson illustration sometimes, when battling the skeletor hellraisers and dead gods and such. I kinda love it hehe
@ the artwork, i agree! I personally don't play the game but i do enjoy watching gameplay from youtube or from friends. I really enjoy the cinematics and the dialog scenes but the combat gameplay just isnt for me :')
 

Black Elk

Habitué
Messages
86
Yeah I mean it almost works as it's own thing just on that level, which is no small feat. The visual art and ambiance is very strong, the sound and music is pretty strong, but I think it would have benefitted from more themes there, still it managed to get a hook in.

In my current game, the Halsin one, the synergy with double druids was alright. I was going to respec my main character from Druid to Ranger though, since I figured that's not too far afield, but I really don't like the look of their higher lvl animal companions with the helmets.

My wolf went from looking like this at lvl 3...



to this at lvl 7



I just don't like the look. It's lame to me. I wouldn't mind something more spirit animal looking, or maybe armoring just the body of the beast, but covering up the face and the Animal companions just lose all their personality. Like I'm pretty sure I don't want to play as a Ranger until someone makes a mod for that lol. OK now I gotta post that feedback too hehe

ps. alright tossed that one into the feedback whirl. My threads sink like lead balloons over there, but maybe someone will see it or someone cooking up mods. It's like it wouldn't be as bad if they went for an all metal Animal guardian sort of look, like Voltron Lions or something. But just doing it for for the head alone is weird. Also the Animal faces are where we get the quick read and all the disarming cuteness and likeability. That wolf mask looks like it could be a bear or a boar or a lion or just about anything, whereas the Wolf face always looks like a wolf. I mean just make the wolf a different color or something right? Would have been cooler to me. I would probably try Gloomstalker rather than Beast Master, though it's mainly down to that, cause otherwise I like having the wolf tag along. I think I'll just keep with my Druid.
 
Last edited:

Black Elk

Habitué
Messages
86
OK so for Halsin, gotta rock the cape!

In a strange twist, the cape actually takes care of the clipping issue with the lower druid robes, least on the large body phenotype, when running. Well a little on the right side, but not as noticeable. Looks pretty good with clubs and staves too. Swords hover a little but they don't clip into the cape like they do for my regular sized body PC. That's a plus!



We ended up just moving his 12 from CHA to STR, and kept the DEX gloves for my main. Going to try for a 3 druids on the team and then convert Shadowheart to the Druidic faith too maybe hehe. We'll have to see what happens. We're still in the Shadowlands over here.

ps. you can still see the clip on his left knee for the lower robe when facing forward. I dyed it green which made it a little less noticeable. Looks sorta more like the embossing on the robes that way. For the Gloves on my main had to go matchy with the black green dye. Gave Shadowheart the poisoners gloves for now, just cause they look pretty cool too. I think just about all our gloves are accounted for. Watch me find a new pair now and throw another wrench in there lol.

 
Last edited:

Antimatter

Administrator
Staff member
Messages
1,120
I have become increasingly frustrated with the story-thread of this game. Too much shit thrown at the wall to see what sticks. Should have either a) ditched the mindflayer thing and gone with the "classic baldurs gate" story, or b) gone all in on the mind flayer thing. This hybrid just feels like too much. Its just the story is actually 2 or even 3 stories botched together in a really ham-fisted way. I have actually lost track of all the mcguffins in this.
The name of the game over the last few days in the community is "cut content". I won't post it as it's very spoilery and would seriously recommend AGAINST reading that, but, in short, your frustration might be related to the fact a lot of things were compromised, re-written, or outright broken during the last few months of the game development.

I still haven't played the game since the last time I posted, and I am very much looking forward to returning to BG3 and finding out where the story and companions' stories lead, but this is very sad and disappointing.

Game development is full of compromises, but even knowing that can't cheer me up when I realize just how much was changed/broken so that the game could be released 1 month earlier not to compete with Starfield.
 

Black Elk

Habitué
Messages
86
Yeah, although I'm not sure we'd have gotten all that stuff even if it the game came out at Christmas rather than last month. The whole process of the EA felt sorta drawn out. I think they launched it too early, but then again they may have made the right call there, cause of the world ending plague. Could have been a total miss. Perhaps the launch window for the full release would have been similarly down to lucky timing? I mean it sold pretty well and generated the buzz. Maybe this will create pressure to release the director's cut or whatever. I feel like the game needs many things which are still not present, mainly in the UI and char creation. The way their studio releases games is sorta unfamiliar to me, but it seems like some sort of ultimate box edition would have good place to start with those dvd bonus featured back in and basically just more voices and art assets. The game needs an extended dungeon crawl Tower type campaign for the anticlimax, similar to how the old games also kinda needed that. You need that sorta satisfying nightcap I think, where you push the last lvl at the cap limit and have the character progress mainly through itemization. For inventory management I want a pack animal at the camp and a goat who eats rotten camp supplies. Also a portrait suite where we can play with the mini portrait and control the view there and the colors. Dye system works alright for the avatar but I want more there. Lots of things I want more of I guess hehe
 

Antimatter

Administrator
Staff member
Messages
1,120
Back when I played the Early Access version, I came to the realization rolling dice in the dialogue doesn't really work for me. The best (yet) example was a tiefling child whom you should save from the bad druid. When the game just released, there were not many bonuses available you could stack during the dialogue for a better roll. Essentially, you had to roll 1D20+your CHA modifier to make it ~20 (or so) to save the child, or she'll just die.

There were many other similar examples, and ofc, I would reload to get the result. I can't accept the dice. I can, in combat, but not when I make a decision as a player, especially a decision so important. It would make the game absolutely impossible for me to continue if I could just accept "Person X dies here because you didn't convince in the dialogue, roll with it". Too much chaos and no RPing this way, unless you're RPing Sheogorath.

Yesterday I concluded the The Gauntlet of Shar questline, at the final of which I had the culmination moment with Shadowheart. The game makes you roll DC 30 to convince her to do something that is of the BIGGEST importance to my character. Basically, it's a make-or-break moment for my approach towards her personality. No way I could accept anything other than success there. Even with Advantage, with all possible bonuses I could stack, using all 4 inspiration points to reroll, I had to reload 7 times to get the result. And my MC being in the romance with Shadowheart, having the highest possible approval rating - it all didn't matter. Only DC 30, that's it.

It's not only "save-scumming", it also breaks all the immersion of the cutscene. Imagine that scene from Mass Effect with Dr Mordin on Tuchanka, or The Pickup mission from Cyberpunk 2077 where you need to depend on the dice in the dialogue about the Militech bot, or convincing Alistair to do something at the end of Dragon Age: Origins not to die. They all worked nicely and provided almost a cinematic moment exactly because it was a flow, and in all those cases it felt natural that you could affect others and act at will.

The fact your MC is not voiced in dialogues in BG3 makes it even worse. Basically, I observed Shadowheart saying something very important to her 7 times (over and over again, so the words started to mean less), with rolling dice and rerolling in-between, with no text by my character, and then finally, 20 minutes later, the scene continued. At that point, I was already "not there", I was upset by the whole unlucky experience and just the whole dumbness level of this.

And no, I couldn't accept a failure in that dialogue roll. For the previous 170 hours, I played and built my relationship with her, tried to know her personality and solve her mystery, and help her, so no, absolutely impossible.

What could be one of the most sincere and touching moments in gaming (for me) turned into a save-scumming fest. A pity.

And it happens all the time in this game. I guess I expected that at least in a situation where the personality and story of my romance partner is being decided, the game would just allow me to convince her without rolling the dice. The same way as when you first flirt with someone in this game, you don't need to roll the dice to impress them, or decide whether you accept or deny romantic dialogue by another NPC.
 

Black Elk

Habitué
Messages
86
We will have to have a conversation when you get to the end of this questline, like for real. I have so much to unpack! lol
I was trying to feedback it a bit, but the larian boards are just always in 504 limbo for me, so it's kinda tough, and anyway plot reveals, so I won't say much more.

I agree with you about the sorts of things which are blocked off behind skill check rolls though, which should really just be down to the player's choices. I feel much the same, that if it's the result of a combat type thing I really don't care and am happy to push along, but conversation reloads are a near constant. Often these are dropped in the middle of a cut scene so it sorta ruins the flow in exactly the way you mentioned. Like pausing and rewinding the same shot repeating it until you forget where it falls in the sequence. Strange approach for anything that would have an effect on the interparty/character relationships. I think they maybe didn't grasp what I would have actually wanted from a story mode, which isn't a super easy difficulty scale, but something which basically makes the story-telling part much more forgiving and cuts down on all those pointless immersion destroying reloads. You know, like an autosave prior to all that stuff which is consequential, autosaves when fights start, gives the player some more money and some healing potions, and a way to go back to the previous dialog prompt hehe, but that's not really the deal there. Anyhow, yeah, I'll keep an eye for when you hit the last leg of it.
 
Last edited:

Cahir

Innkeeper
Staff member
Messages
298
We will have to have a conversation when you get to the end of this questline, like for real. I have so much to unpack! lol
I was trying to feedback it a bit, but the larian boards are just always in 504 limbo for me, so it's kinda tough, and anyway plot reveals, so I won't say much more.

I agree with you about the sorta of things which are blocked off behind skill check rolls though, which should really just be down to the player's choices. I feel much the same, that if it's the result of a combat type thing I really don't care and am happy to push along, but conversation reloads are a near constant. Often these are dropped in the middle of a cut scene so it sorta ruins the flow. I think they maybe didn't grasp what I would have actually wanted from a story mode, which isn't a super easy difficulty scale, but something which basically makes the story-telling part more forgiving. You know, like an autosave prior to all that stuff which is consequential, autosaves when fights start, gives the player some more money and some healing potions, and a way to go back to the previous dialog prompt hehe, but that's not really the deal there. Anyhow, yeah, I'll keep an eye for when you hit the last leg of it.
It would be really great if Larian introduced sort of two parallel difficulty settings, one for the combat and second for non-combat dice rolls. This way you could play on Tactician and benefit from challenging combat and Story mode difficulty for non-combat rolls, for more smoother story experience, without constant reloads. You could mix and match both difficulty settings for hand-crafted experience.
 

Black Elk

Habitué
Messages
86
I would love that! I think a really simple handling would basically be a mode where you are always inspired outside of combat. Effectively an infinite reroll of that D20, but only in conversation. Even if you have to watch the dice rolling animation a couple dozen times to get your desired result, this would still be much better than a save/reload just for that. Watering down the combat or blowing out CHA to achieve the same makes it feel like a lesser experience. Even if Tactician has it flaws (enemies seem to magically stick around for their last turn at 1 hp no matter how well you were guiding your guiding bolts hehe) combat is still more fun that way for me on Tactician. But yeah reloading convo, there's no thrill in that for me. Everyone should just be inspired at all times, and the protagonist should get Tides of Chaos (like a wild magic Sorcerer) so they can roll the double d20 in convo to speed things up. A different setting from combat difficulty, as suggested. I'd be totally on board with that!

Untelated, but this Mod has me very intrigued! I just saw it right now... It's billed as a hybrid WASD movement scheme for M&K using the CNTL key to switch modes. And critically an unlock for Camera pitch!!!


I have not tried it yet, or any Mod for that matter, at least not since Full release, so hard to know how well they pulled it off, but a Mod like this is something I've been wanting for 3 years now.



ps. gotta say scanning nexus today makes me hopeful that mods will carry this game over the finish line. Like I think I need to just give in and go for it. I'm nervous cause they pushed out those first few patches with a quickness and I worry hotfixes and such will make me need to reinstall, cause it's a pretty beefy game and verifying the files takes a while. I get Weidu flashbacks here of trying to set up TuTu in BG1/2 and worrying that I messed something up with an installation order type goof heheh. But then I just look around the Nexus and there's quite a bit of stuff and a lot of convenient sounding options. Like I almost don't know where to begin here. Better cam controls, UI and inventory tweaks, party limit be gone, more heads and hairstyles, dyes and clothing and bags of starting equipment, containers, a bunch of unleashed classes, tactician plus etc etc. This is probably going to take me like a week just to sort through lol. Seems like there's already somehow a mod for like every little thing, which I guess is rad but now I find myself overwhelmed. Like I guess I want it all? hehe. I think I will probably just try to start with the stuff that mostly UI/controls, though there is a lot for the cosmetic type stuff that seems cool too. Seems like the two simplest ways are mod manager and vortex, but I think vortex looks like it might be easier for me. I was following this vid


pps. couple hours later, and I was not able to achieve really anything I set out to achieve this afternoon, since I've been focused on the WASD and the Cam unlock mods using the supposedly simpler Vortex method to install these things. I did not find that to be the case for me lol. Managed to bust my install so it wouldn't load like a true luddite, then did a clean BG3 reinstall, and lost an hour just to that. Probably completely unnecessary and just me not knowing what I was doing there. I had to dig up my old nexus login info since it'd been a while. The main BG3 mod which the other two use, the NativeModLoader, confused the hell out of me. Nothing deployed properly and the only mod that showed in the loader was the one I'm not sure I actually need anymore, which is the Mod fixer one. Anyhow that was all very annoying and soured me on the process somewhat, although I haven't thrown in the towel just yet. I'm sure the haircut mods are not this involved, cause I remember getting one of those to work, but since this was related to Camera UI type stuff I was trying to do the step by step there. On the whole, not particularly convenient or plug and play like some of these videos make it seem, maybe vortex is easy breezy for the appearance type mods, but the cam/wasd combo has been giving me grief. Then I saw this video which explains how to do it manually, so now I'm on that. I find it frustrating how much extra work I have to do just to try and get the game to do what I thought it should have been allowing me to do by default, like just in the regular old game settings ya know. I guess we'll see how far I get here if the manual attempt works before the night is through. Like all I really want at this point is to be able to look up and control my character's movement with WASD, and to get that feature which would unbind the interact click from the RMB for rotation. Now that I've seen it in the videos I know that is the thing I need!!! Fingers crossed lol

 
Last edited:

Black Elk

Habitué
Messages
86
Success!!! Finally hehe

Look! It's the roof of the Elfsong Tavern!



And what's more.... the floor!
Now we can see our shoes lol



Right on! And like all I really had to do was move a couple files to the bin. Predictably I spent hours doing unnecessary stuff. Manually took like 5 minutes lol

It works pretty well. Basically the orbital cam everyone has been wishing we had all along. Movement with WASD feels clean. You can pan out quite a bit and still do the normal jog about.



Caps lock to toggle between PC and Camera movement, insert to change walking speed and such. Pretty much exactly what I wanted! So stoked!

Also if like me, you need to invert your Y axis, the way to do it is open the file in the native cam bin called "BG3NativeCameraTweaks.toml" I opened it in notepad. This will bring up all the settings. Change the fields under mouse or controller from false to true for pitch inversion.

Gives you options like so...



Here's the one for the RMB thing from many pages ago, for the right click interact/rotation stuff. Similar file in the WASD mod to get us what we wanted.




Or you can do the same stuff for rotation speed, or the same for the other Cam/WASD control type settings. Works like a charm!
Anyhow, just thought it might be helpful for others. It's much more comfortable for me.

Renting a room there still feels like Last Summer at Marienbad with the automatons, but hey, I'll take what I can get! haha

Have fun out there gang!


ps. also, in case anyone else has encountered an issue with portraits going dark when you level up (in the unmodded regular game I mean) I also messed around with that for like an hour earlier. I feel pretty sure that our portraits are keying off the environmental lighting of wherever we happen to be standing when we level up. So if it happens to you try leveling via the Withers respec at camp when its light out, or cast light before you level. That was my workaround, after running a bunch of experiments. I was able to get the portrait of Lae'zel back, which had gone nearly completely black at some point. Maybe in the Underdark? Who can say. Anyhow that seemed to work. I think you might be able to control the look of the portrait by messing with the lighting. So far I haven't found a mod for that, which is sorta the main one I'm looking forward to, if it ever happens. I think for now I will hold off on going too mod crazy. I thought about grabbing some of those equipment basket and faces mods or the stuff with the spells and difficulty level/no party limit etc, but I still haven't seen everything in the vanilla game, so I want to check that out first before modding items or digging around in the models. For right now just having a camera and moving around smoothly is making my day!
 
Last edited:

Antimatter

Administrator
Staff member
Messages
1,120
Thanks for sharing, amazing results with the camera movement. Sounds like the whole process could be a little easier though, maybe in the future with the release of modding tools.
 

Black Elk

Habitué
Messages
86
Good to know! I'm sure they'll get it sorted eventually. For me the manual method was like oh, ok that's pretty easy, but I thought I needed the loader for it to work smoothly, which I guess you don't need for this. Amusingly a hotfix for BG3 would drop mere hours after I set all this up, and of course I'd forget the final step of telling steam not to auto-update the game hehe. Anyhow, no biggie, another clean reinstall again just now to be on the safe side. I was probably being a bit hyperbolic there about losing an hour, it takes more like 25 minutes for me to redownload and reverify the game, except that the first time I did that I forget to actually delete the extra mod files in the Larian folder afterwards, so I had to do it twice yesterday lol. It's a little annoying cause you have to log into the launcher again and click yes to all that stuff, but not too bad. This hotfix they said they fixed the Minthara content though, and I want that, so I will probably just wipe that earlier playthrough and restart. Once I downloaded the WASD and Camera mods, I'd say it probably took about 30 minutes all told to get back in the saddle. I'd probably hold off on modding a game that feels like it's still being cooked, but for me having controls that are comfortable for a game like this is important, and it doesn't effect the gamesaves or the native UI really, beyond unlocking the camera and giving you more keybind type options. For the other mods, many of these seemed to require an unlock for the UI to allow extended scrollers and such during character creation to make those models appear, or had notes about needing other stuff, which I just figured is probably more likely to effect the save or bust during an update, so I'm just sticking with those too cam/control mods for now. The RMB bind thing is great though! It's saving my clicker finger for sure haha

ps. gah both the Cam pitch and WASD mods are not yet compatible with hotfix 5 that dropped today. I guess I'll have to wait till they get all this stuff updated. Too bad, I was just really getting into that style of exploration which was much more my speed. The perils of modding I guess. You know where it's like down to one dude somewhere, and when they wake up and get the news, that they have to fix the thing that was working fine yesterday heheh


haha seems they just got up. On nexus saw em post that the "update modified the input code, because they fixed some Controller bug" so guess that must be why. Maybe I'll get my cam and controls back after dinner after all! lol Mods are like a many headed hydra though, I wish they'd just include these features in the base game.

also for the darkened portrait thing, I had it happen again so wasn't the lighting. I think it only occurs if you try to level a character but that character isn't currently selected. So I guess just make sure you have your character as the selected character with the larger round status portrait and their hotbar before you click the lvl up arrow when you respec. Must have been what I did before at camp, but without realizing, seemed to do the trick when it happened again.
 
Last edited:

Black Elk

Habitué
Messages
86
Just when she thought she was out, they pulled her back in! I restarted my Witch PC run, this time as a Drow Durge.

I gotta say, I fucking love it! hehe I don't know if that makes me a miserable human or what, but this has been pretty damned entertaining! Talk about a rippin' start! lol

Ever since the full release, I've found myself rolling up characters with voice set 8 pretty much every single time. Like at first I didn't realize why, but now I understand, it's because that voice plays flawlessly with the narrator's (same voice), which allows you to basically make the DM the voice in your head, and everything matches up cleanly. I imagine right before they wrapped must have been like "OK so now we're thinking about adding another Origin into the mix. What sort of stuff do you like?" and our Narrator gal was like 'oh fuck, hold my drink!' tehehe Full on dark passenger with Stella on the case. It's so over the top, but fully I'm into it!

It's not that the other voices don't grab me, I think they're all pretty great, although there still aren't enough options there for me to pull off many of the character concepts I have backburnered. Part of this may be down to just needing a couple North American or maybe some Indo-Pacific accent options for voices, or a couple that lean a bit more ESL. You know for your Hollywood Mad Martigans and such, or so we can have our Yoshimos or Jaheiras and such too, for custom PC variety. Like I'm a California kid over here. In BG1 everyone had basically avCanadian sound to me and Canadians doing their best ren-fair impressions, and you really didn't have all that much to go on anyway- a couple bark snippets here and there was pretty much the whole deal - so I was able to just sorta slide right in on that.

Far as I'm concerned BG3 wins every single BAFTA and it's genius, like I can just pretend I'm in I Claudius and everything works, but I do miss a few options. Obviously every couple weeks there's a request for a gruff dwarf voice, but even if they gave me Uncle Argyle for that, it would still feel like I'm missing something.

For me Sarevok = Clancy Brown, and I think I need a little of that to help make it feel fully Faerun. If I had that voice set I could probably roll up some brawler half-orcsy archetypes, but for now BG3 is basically the Witches running the show. Which is fine for me honestly, least for the time being, it's scratching the itch for sure.

I think a real test of this game will be, can they open it up so that amateurs and mods can fill in some of those Char creation type gaps? Cause there's probably a small army of budding theater peeps, or modelling masters, or mocap marionette wizards, who could take this beyond Beyond ya know. I mean with a little quality control and editorial discretion in the customizer collections sure, but it's almost a quantity=quality thing there in some respects. Like to really get us to that character creator which can cover all the bases.

I think for a sequel, if we get one, which I definitely hope we do, that they should bring back the Narrator for that (Absolutely!) but also to staff up at all those 'round-the-world satelitte studios they established, and globe trot it a bit for our next fab 5 (or magnificent 7), so we can get all those extra voice sets on the back end. Makes such a difference to the experience. Also a Chaplin mode where we can go silent, and choose our own nods and idle animations and such while we wait for the custom content train to arrive. I'm hopeful though. I think this might be our best shot yet on that, it's towering achievement in VA. They just need to do the same for the custom PC and I think it could live for quite a while. Provided it gets a sequel or two to maintain engagement.

Anyhow, just a quick impression there on the Dark Urge. I'm certain it is probably the best execution of whatever they'd hoped the Origin concept might produce. I think this is because it allows a level of customization there. Maybe it all goes to hell in the 3rd Act, but it's had me in stitches here a few times, so I'm glad they tossed that in the mix at the last second. Just for the ridiculous players like me. I should have hopped in on it sooner, cause watch me lose another month here, now that I got that and the look up for my cam.

I can say, for that stuff, you can sort of tell they wanted to restrict our ability to look above the Horizon line. In most spots it feels complete and comparable to many other games. Every now and again though you can see where it could use some touch up. It's not like Skyrim where you'd just stop anywhere and look up at the stars like "wow, this is majestic!" Sometimes in BG3 with that cam mod you'll catch a little of the black void scaffolding, but on the whole it's worth it. The environments still look quite beautiful, and I don't feel like I'm losing all that much ambiance in the art direction or the scene staging by freeing my cam. Or at least, for me it's completely worth the trade off, just to be more comfortable and better oriented while targeting in Z space (which is really the only place where I have issues.) Otherwise pitch=zoom basically works. It's not comfortable, and sorta natively backwards if you're an invert like me. Something simple like shooting an arrow becomes this complex push and pull against my instincts, but once I'm in Iso I can just sorta stay there for a while until I have to target something from a more FPS style view. This happens sometimes due to environmental constraints or elevation where it becomes unavoidable. But even there, if mods can make it do what needs doing, I'll stick around, no doubt! Fingers crossed they just keep pushing stuff out here!

ps. one bonus of digging around with the mods, I realized I have that pdf of the artbook that they hooked up if you did the EA. It was right there just chilling in a folder I forgot about entirely. It's pretty nicely done. Spoiler-y for sure, cause it shows a lot of area and character designs, but they warn you on the title page. Fun to check out after you've been around the block though. The weapons pages at the very end gave me flashbacks of the oldschool tomes! hehe. I think I'd probably swoop the art book at like a comic con for sure, just to have something that could maybe get signed or whatever. I don't think I can bite off like 3 bills to grab a collector's edition of this game cause it's quite a chunk of change, but a well bound artbook just by itself - I could get into that! For me it was in steamapps in a folder called BG3 DigitalDeluxe/BG3_Artbook_High_Res.pdf
 
Last edited:

Antimatter

Administrator
Staff member
Messages
1,120
A neat fact about Voice 8, I didn't try female voices there as I play with a male character. Have you checked out her Narrator outtakes? They are just awesome. https://www.youtube.com/@AmeliaTyler/videos

I wonder, why do you restart instead of continuing? I guess it would be hard to tell exactly, just curious about possible reasons? Act 3 bugs/performance issues/unfinished status? Content missed during your previous playthroughs? Not being comfortable with choices you've made regarding NPCs in the party / romances?
 
Top Bottom