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The discourse surrounding Baldur's Gate 3 has been very frustrating to me.

NecrosaroIII

Ultimate DQ Fan
100% net negative. Theatre geeks are bottom of the barrel people.
Probably. My concern is that there has been a definite shift away from "simulation" style play towards narrative play. Everyone wants their characters to be some special unicorn that can do anything, so they're walking back gameplay mechanics so that everything is flavor. Based on One DND play test material, there is a sort of "flattening" occuring for the classes.
 

IntentionalPun

Ask me about my wife's perfect butthole
It's just a couple of dumb click-bait articles. All of the same sites gave the game glowing reviews, and having articles written after that only brings more attention to the game.

It is also kinda.. fair? Romance is one of the jarringly in your face things that happens when you play the game lol
 

bender

What time is it?
The relationship aspect is why I've delayed playing the game. The relationship mechanics that were popularized in BioWare's later efforts always come off as hollow and not something I find terribly interesting.
 

ResurrectedContrarian

Suffers with mild autism
Probably. My concern is that there has been a definite shift away from "simulation" style play towards narrative play. Everyone wants their characters to be some special unicorn that can do anything, so they're walking back gameplay mechanics so that everything is flavor. Based on One DND play test material, there is a sort of "flattening" occuring for the classes.
100%

Classic AD&D had a troop or squad-like combat simulation--guard your front line, stake your front-line weapons against a charge, protect your weak magic users who can be flattened in one strike, no missiles can be fired into melee (unless you want high risk of hitting an ally), carefully manage healing / buff spells and clerics, etc. The classes reinforced that by each having major disadvantages that affect your play.

Now every character is an eye-rolling badass of some sort flying around the field taking out enemies. That style is so damn boring. Nothing is more tiring than every character taking the floor to narrate how they leap gracefully to strike the orc with a sassy quip or whatever, because everyone is amazing and badass and confident and i just nodded off mid sentence in boredom remembering the kind of people who think like this.

Plus in old-school AD&D you would declare all your actions up front before rolling initiative to see how it would all play out in order against your foes, which created a risk-reward mechanic for things like trying to get a spell off before an attacker reaches you, etc. I understand why the video game adaptations often had to go with one-by-one turn movement to make it work in the computer, but back-porting that concept into the tabletop rules video-game-ified everything and made it so much worse as a system.
 
The way I see it, it doesn’t matter where the hype comes from as long as it helps the game sell and be successful.

Larian’s success is going to help turn-based games all over the world get bigger budgets from studios and will have dramatically positive impacts on the entire CRPG genre.

Horny journalists and arctophiles have been doing a pretty good job so far.
All RPGs really. BG3 really highlights how a lot of so called RPGs, like Starfield, Cyberpunk, Final Fantasy XVI, and Fallout 4 barely qualify as RPGs if they are ones at all and having a simplistic character creator (if one at all) and a skill tree isn't enough to be a good RPG.

You need good writing, player agency in player characterization, narrative choice and consequence, and significant reactivity in game systems, characters, and narrative.
 
Baldur's Gate 3 is a masterpiece of game design. You could probably play the game at least 10 times and have unique experiences each time. It has the best implementation of DND mechanics I've ever seen in a game. The story is great. The characters are great. It looks pretty decent. Yet the only thing the media keeps pushing is the sexual stuff.

Most of the articles since launch have been stuff like Kotaku's "I only play Baldur's Gate 3 for the Romance" or IGN's "Shadowheart reacts to IGN Reader's Horny Comments" or Polygon's "I'll Miss Gale being such a horny disaster man."

This is such a small part of the BG3 experience, yet it's been front and center ever since the bear fucking was revealed. So when I talk about the game with people who haven't played it, that's all they know about it. I kind of wish they hadn't implemented that stuff, since its distracting from everything else that makes the game great.
I haven't played the game myself, but that's so fucking ironic that Kotaku talks about the sexual aspect of the game. You would think that they'd be fucking prudes like they are with Japanese games, but apparently not, if you include bear sex in your game!

Prudes... More like degenerates.
 
Op, you just have to understand the world we currently live in. It's 2023...the journalist class is broken.

They are no longer competing against each other to serve you better by providing you the most accurate/interesting information. They're not even primarily serving corpos to shill for them. They're a club of like minded political activists competing together against....well, you. Gamers. The masses. Anyone who might be resistant to radical progress. That's why instead of interviewing designers about gameplay features they interview them about trans characters. That's why they're so bad at games, that's why they're so uninterested in games. Journalism is really more of a front, or they would say "platform" to bring about change. And it's been that way for a long time, things like gamergate and the neogaf split don't go down the way they did if journalism is functional.

TLDR; vidyagame journos are ursineophiles who had their sexual awakening watching "The Gummi Bears" as a kid and now they want to validate their depraved perversions
 

NecrosaroIII

Ultimate DQ Fan
Op, you just have to understand the world we currently live in. It's 2023...the journalist class is broken.

They are no longer competing against each other to serve you better by providing you the most accurate/interesting information. They're not even primarily serving corpos to shill for them. They're a club of like minded political activists competing together against....well, you. Gamers. The masses. Anyone who might be resistant to radical progress. That's why instead of interviewing designers about gameplay features they interview them about trans characters. That's why they're so bad at games, that's why they're so uninterested in games. Journalism is really more of a front, or they would say "platform" to bring about change. And it's been that way for a long time, things like gamergate and the neogaf split don't go down the way they did if journalism is functional.

TLDR; vidyagame journos are ursineophiles who had their sexual awakening watching "The Gummi Bears" as a kid and now they want to validate their depraved perversions
I don't think journalists necessarily need to be good at games, but they should be knowledgeable. For example, I don't expect a journalist to be able to a 0 to death wombo combo or something in Smash. But they should at least be have a working knowledge of the meta of Smash if they cover Smash.

I don't know what I expect from the gaming media tbh. I expect an enthusiast press to at least enjoy the medium they're covering I suppose (something that seems to be in short supply). But I don't want them to be corporate shills either. There is a lot of negativity in the gaming space these days, but I don't want that to be replaced with fake positivity.
 

ResurrectedContrarian

Suffers with mild autism
I also think it's a criminal shame (screw Larian for this) that the game has these sexual elements at all, when it otherwise could have been an excellent little introduction to role-playing for audiences of all ages. But I'll never buy this junk for my kids, and that's not just due to the one bear part. And I wouldn't trust parents who give it to their kids.


Flash backwards to the 90s, and the Gold Box AD&D games were perfectly acceptable for kids--they had some bits of violence but the simplified graphics kept it from being too indulgent, and maybe some bar wenches rendered super pixellated in a tavern splash screen or something but that's quite tame. Instead, BG3 gives you the degenerate / born-yesterday Larian's idea of "adult relationships" everywhere. Totally unnecessary.
 

Drizzlehell

Banned
The only opinion on this game that matters to me is from SsethTzeentach, and he didn't release a video on it yet. I'll be sure to check out the game once he gives it a glowing review that will no doubt touch upon all the animal sex that you can have in it.
 

Xenon

Member
Yeah I've always seen sex and romance playing out in games as cringe and creepy. Between that and huge focus on cut scenes I don't have any interest in the game. I will definitely play It at some point but not really rushing to do it anytime soon.
 

DrFigs

Member
The thing that gets me is that it's such a lie :/
there's really not that much sex in it and the romance is extremely limited.
The witcher 3 and probably cyberpunk had more romance and sex.
 
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