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I was already very hype for Larian Baldur's Gate but the fact that Jan would still be kicking around makes me even more excited. He fits with Larian's sense of humor, so I expect him to get a name drop sooner than snoozers like Aerie. They are in kind of a rough position, though, because literally nothing will appease the die-hards.
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Jun 6, 2019 23:48
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Playing and enjoying Seige of Dragonspear taught me a valuable lesson about people with very strong opinions about Baldur's Gate.
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Jun 6, 2019 23:59
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ubachung posted:I know nothing about this. At the risk of opening a can of worms, could you elaborate? There's a merchant NPC at one point in the game, and if you go through her dialogue tree, she reveals that she is a transwoman. It's literally one line of flavor text about a lady who sells you some potions once. Gamers lost their drat minds.
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Jun 7, 2019 00:19
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Credit where credit's due, "ThacoBell" is a pretty solid user name.
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Jun 7, 2019 00:32
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Freaking Crumbum posted:100 year time-skip isn't significant in the context of D&D fiction. all of the elves, half-elves and dwarf characters from the first trilogy could easily still be around. any of the mages/wizards could have easily lived up to the new game. any of the characters that had divine essence or otherwise had some special mary-sue powers would still be around. I think Keldorn's epilogue in Throne of Bhaal mentioned him dying heroically, but it's been a while. Anomen is kind of a nonissue because who the gently caress wants to see Anomen again? There were a lot of party members that I doubt have enough of a fanbase to bother with bringing back, timeskip or no. Sarevok still kicking around swinging big swords at poo poo would be cool. Minsc and Imoen seem to generally be the most fondly remembered, so I'd expect a nod to either of them in some form. Jan rules, should be in. People liked Viconia, too.
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Jun 7, 2019 17:36
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:Arent Sarevok and Imoen human, though? I know Sarevok lost his Bhallspark or whatever was but didnt Imoen get her soul back? Yeah but it's DnD. If Larian wants them to show up, they can just toss out some dialogue about kooky potion or spell they found in an ancient tomb or something.
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Jun 7, 2019 18:00
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Does 5th Edition still have those dumbass alignment rules? I still think alignment is even more archaic and useless than THAC0 and actively gets in the way of experimenting with party members and classes.
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Jun 7, 2019 18:20
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Megazver posted:Yes, but it's more flexible these days. You can be a paladin of any alignment, for instance. Flexible is good. I don't mind alignment as a starting point, but it did often feel like it limited characters from being more than two dimensional cut-outs.
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Jun 7, 2019 18:28
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The placement of potential party members in BG1 was pretty weird anyway. It makes sense to assume most players just stuck with the goobers hanging out on the beaten path, since there were tons of dudes just lurking in the corners of the multitude of forest maps or waiting for the PC to pick them up in the final act. And the harder to find party members weren't any better mechanically than the more obvious ones, so the only incentive to bring them along was maybe liking their brief intro dialogue. Why would I want to tag in a brand new thief once I get to Baldur's Gate itself when I've had Imoen tagging along from jumpstreet and built up in exactly the way I want her?
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Jun 7, 2019 19:05
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Pattonesque posted:I always wondered if the assumption was that you wouldn't get through the entire game without some of your party permadying, so they stuck replacements everywhere Dang that didn't occur to me. I always played BG1 on Easy because I was a child and PC games were different from my Nintendo and thus scary
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Jun 7, 2019 19:13
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This probably slightly off topic, but the news does have me wanting to dip back into the setting. I have the Neverwinter Nights EE, so I thought about trying that out. Played the standard campaign once through like 10 years ago or something. But are there any good cosmetic mods? I don't usually sweat the visuals on older games, but NWN just hits that perfect axis ugliness that bugs me.
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Jun 7, 2019 20:19
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MonsterEnvy posted:Elves can't grow facial hair. Half Elves can. An entire race without Bears. Elves are the worst.
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Jun 7, 2019 20:54
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Savegame editors are the only way to make Mazzy into the paladin she deserves to be, so they're mandatory imo
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Jun 7, 2019 20:58
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Basic Chunnel posted:Iirc the tweak pack has an option for it now Is the tweak pack compatible with the EE or just the old school one? Either way, might be a good excuse for another run.
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Jun 7, 2019 21:07
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These days Avellone is usually the worst part of any game he works on, to me, so the fact that his contribution to D:OS2 was minimal was a selling point in my case. I get how the dude got his reputation, but I just don't understand why people like his more recent stuff.
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Jun 9, 2019 20:47
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Actually, Larian already posted the map they're using for reference on twitter: 
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Jun 10, 2019 04:43
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 It's a map from the infamous/legendary good project The Zyborne Clock 
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Jun 10, 2019 07:31
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Hey, I got an Illithid question for you lore guys. When someone gets Lovecrafted into a Mind Flayer, do they retain any memories or traits from their former life? Is there a chance that Larian could bring back an old friend but now they're a hosed-up squid head monster?
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Jun 10, 2019 23:36
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So there probably won't be a part in the beginning where like...Jahiera or someone shows up and tells you that they used to be homies with The Hero of Baldur's Gate and they're gonna help you out. Until a few hours later when they drop the illusion and just start throwing Hold Person spells everywhere.
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Jun 10, 2019 23:45
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Super No Vacancy posted:how old is aerie’s inventory baby Got ate by a gnoll. RIP.
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Jun 10, 2019 23:54
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If the player character doesn't become The Adversary, then Larian are class-A dinguses.
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Jun 11, 2019 00:04
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poo poo, I just realized something. If Illithid is the actual term for the species, is Mind Flayer a slur?
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Jun 11, 2019 22:49
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That kind of makes sense. I mean, there are a lot of people who played BG1&2 and never played actual DnD. If they're trying to bring in new players, a playtest of possible changes in an easy to consume package is pretty clever.
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Jun 12, 2019 01:08
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Six bards, all half-orcs. The only true IWD party.
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Jun 12, 2019 22:04
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Evil Canadian posted:I got a few friends losing their goddamn minds over this. They don't care its not Bioware, they don't care its not 2e. Its def reeling in the old fans. Yeah, that's the boat I'm in. I love the old games and am super stoked to be getting a new game in the setting by devs I like. The timeskip is a big plus to me, too, because the Bhaalspawn story wrapped up pretty definitively and I want to see new poo poo go down.
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Jun 13, 2019 23:48
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Everybody shut up about edition wars and focus on the real burning question: Will Larian let me kiss a kobold?
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Jun 15, 2019 03:20
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Can I still go Ranger to get a big dog to attack people while I also swing a big sword around in 5E? Cuz, prob that.
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Jun 16, 2019 03:11
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Zore posted:No, you can have your dog attack or swing a sword not both. Bad game, preorder cancelled.
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Jun 16, 2019 03:14
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I like Pillars 1 a lot, but it definitely had issues with brevity and the lack of it. Part of that I think was Obsidian overthinking the setting and trying to exposit about every little nugget of lore they could, and inversely there were several bits that felt like they didn't think through enough but still kept talking about. And also the fact that one of the biggest sources of info on the Gods (which turn out to be pretty important at the end there) is an NPC written by Avellone, who is sexually fascinated by bigger and bigger paragraphs. Deadfire fixes a lot of this by cutting down on the unskippable infodumps and focusing on the adventure parts. Also, sometime between games Obsidian remembered that video games are primarily about having fun, so they let themselves actually write jokes in. I will say though that I don't understand the complaint that PoE1 didn't give you an ending option to somehow "get rid of" the gods. The reveal about the gods isn't the end point of the PC's journey in that game, it's a twist to set up future conflicts. Thaos is the big problem and the one that the PC has a personal beef with, so he takes priority over a battle against existentialism. Plus, he's like a physical dude and he's standing right there and he sure looks like a problem you can solve with your big sword. Sure, neither PoE games have what I would call a good final boss fight, but neither did the Baldur's Gate games, so whatever.
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Jun 18, 2019 19:50
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Reveilled posted:For me it wasn't that I wanted an ending option to get rid of the gods, from what I remember all I wanted was a way to get down a well that didn't involve me begging a favour from a bunch of frauds. I didn't hate the game but I remember it left a sour taste in my mouth. For a game that was pitched to me as being one with deep dialogue and interesting choices, I remember thinking that it sure would have been nice if I had literally any choice at this juncture on how to solve the problem other than "get a god's favour" or "quit game". I could've sworn the reveal about the nature of the gods came after you had to get their favor, but I could be wrong. Either way, yeah, I get being disappointed if the sequel hook was more interesting to you than the whole Thaos and souls plot. It was to me, too. Deadfire also stumbles a bit in that department. You're walking around with this huge revelation in your hands and you almost never even get to bring it up. Even your pals who were there for the reveal don't seem too interested in talking about it. And it again pushes the resolution of the metaphysical crisis off onto the promise of "Next time, we'll deal with this". And Xoti spends the whole game going off on unhinged rants about her patron gods and for some reason I never had the option to rub her weird, serial killer face in the harsh truth. But the plotline of the crisis in the archipelago is much more interesting and involved than the Hollowborn thing, so there's that. And you get to mouth off to the gods this time around which is fun.
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Jun 18, 2019 20:34
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I wouldn't want them to stick as close as possible to the DnD rules as written for the same reasons I wouldn't want to play with a DM who uses the rules as gospel: the second the rules get in the way of doing something fun or cool, they're bullshit and should be disregarded.
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Jun 19, 2019 11:25
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:How do you model throwing rules out in unique situations where they will get in the way in a videogame, though? I would like them to stick close enough to the rules so that I can reasonably expect to be able to build a character in the videogame that I could build for tabletop. Obviously a video game can't react to rules problems as they crop up the way a tabletop group can, so the devs have to really pour over the rules at the very start and decide what will add to the experience they are trying to create and what will detract. Taking the source rules as gospel when adapting a system is never a good idea, because the change in medium is much bigger than people might think. Granted, I haven't played 5E, but 3.5 and its spinoffs all have tons of busywork bullshit that no one actually likes but they're there in the rules. Spell components and alignment restrictions and stuff like that are generally tedious nonsense that get in the way of having a big dumb adventure with your friends. There are tons of rules that make sense and things like statistics and stuff are generally fine unless the math is really hosed. But if I sit down at the table and get told I can't make a Gnoll wizard or whatever for no reason other than "the rulebook says no", then it's probably gonna be a pretty dull game.
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Jun 19, 2019 14:06
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:Yeah 5E is waaaaaay more flexible so there should not be any restrictions like that. For example, you can make Paladins of any race and any alignment. There are no arbitrary multiclassing restrictions or experience penalties. Skills are way simpler to manage compared to 3/3.5. I should really pick up 5E. I dipped into Pathfinder: Kingmaker a little while ago and it kinda opened up some old 3.5 woes so I might have jumped the gun a bit. I still think Larian making off-hand comments about rules changes is nothing to be worried about, tho
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Jun 19, 2019 14:46
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A lot of people who bought Pillars 1 ended up not liking it, though. Every time the series comes up in these very forums, there's a bunch of people who say they got bored or frustrated of the first game and thus never bothered with Deadfire. It's kind of the same reason that Devil May Cry 2 sold a lot better than Devil May Cry 3 for a long time, despite 3 being a huge improvement in every way. For a lot of people, 60 bucks is too much to ask for a second chance.
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Jun 20, 2019 16:22
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Vargs posted:I'm playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker right now and this is driving me crazy. I sure am in a temperate medieval fantasy forest fighting wolves, bandits, and giant spiders, alright. Maybe they'll really spice it up with some trolls and skeletons eventually. Just fuckin kill me. I am so tired of it. There's a reason BG2 spends most of its time sending you off to the Underdark and pocket dimensions and space orbs and poo poo.
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Jun 20, 2019 23:27
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CDPR doing Baldur's Gate would be great news for the Steam forums users still angry about Seige of Dragonspear and horrible news for basically everyone else.
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Jun 21, 2019 17:40
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Funso Banjo posted:You needn’t worry, they’re using 5e rules. Fighters are a blast. Thieves and monks too. How are Barbarians in 5e? I'm replaying the Pillars of Eternity games and I forgot how fun it is to have a character with a designated "Go Apeshit" button. I remember barbs being a little trickier to keep alive than fighters in the BG games, but still pretty fun.
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Jun 28, 2019 21:00
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The only thing I remember about the canon Bhaalspawn is that he had sex with Bohdi but morphed into Slayer form in the middle of it and ate her boob. I read that book when I was a kid devouring every Forgotten Realms novel I could get my hands on, and even when I thought Drizzt was the pinnacle of writing, I knew that poo poo was garbage.
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Jul 2, 2019 01:54
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Wizard Styles posted:Don't tell me Jan Jansen isn't canon. Jan will almost one hundo percent show up in BG3 peddling turnips as a ward against psionic attacks. He's already so close to Larian's sense of humor, I imagine the dude is like catnip to their writers.
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Jul 3, 2019 10:04
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| # ¿ Apr 23, 2024 14:06 |
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:Yeah I really hope that Larian will be able to take their sweet time and release a stable, playable, and major bug free game. I had been tempted to get Pathfinder: Kingmaker because I've been itching for a new dungeoncrawler kinda game but I heard P:K was super buggy on release and still isnt in great shape. Kingmaker is still pretty rough because even when it works exactly as intended, it's dry as all hell. The writing is bog standard 2-dimensional characters wandering around the woods for most of the game with none of the weird charm of Baldur's Gate 1.
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Jul 4, 2019 05:16
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