Stepos Venzny

My understanding of Baldur’s Gate 3 is that everybody is romantically interested in the player character.

Maybe I’m just a catch?

!;!;!;!;!

I can’t think of another game that I like so much and enjoy playing so little. I will spend countless hours creating families and houses and then five minutes playing the actual game before I’m like “oh, right, I hate this” and then I start making another family.

I think this disparity in votes and comments is also hugely affected by how the UI has been changing over the years as well as the destruction of third party apps. The site is now designed in a way where active participation is less encouraged than ever before unless you’re running old reddit on a traditional computer with an ad blocker.

Not in the sense where they failed to make it interesting, more in the Breath of the Wild type philosophy where any side-content you do is indirectly progress toward the main goal so there’s a mix of things of varying levels of interestingness in all directions. You have an organization that raises in “power” or whatever they call those points whenever you do a side quest and you need to bank up certain amounts of those power points to do the next story mission or unlock the next region. That progression is paced in such a way that you simply don’t need to do most things.

Many quests are genuinely interesting but other ones are just filler. And some filler between good quests is inoffensive, maybe even a refreshing little diversion. One generic filler side quest is essentially “stand next to this portal and kill all the ghosts that come out of it”. Doing that once in a while is okay, doing it as many times as there are portals to find is torture.

I still haven’t played the sequels, would you say they’re still worthwhile or is it for the best to leave the story at the end of Origins?

The short version of that answer is that the sequels do not have what you love about the original but you might also like them for the different things that they are.

Awakening feels less like a sequel (technically an optionally standalone expansion but I’m counting it) and more like a fan mod. It’s nerdier, sillier, edgier, and has that high-effort mod habit of adding concepts that should logically be new mechanics but are executed by old ones because you’re doing it on minimal skill and zero budget. I think that’s a pretty cute vibe but it’s fundamentally just Origins again but worse.

2 has high highs and low lows and, while I personally love it, it’s negative general reception is very fairly earned. The thing that it was trying to do in the first place, story-wise, is something that would already have been divisive even if the rest of the game were flawlessly executed and it was emphatically not flawlessly executed. The simplest way I can describe it is that it is not a story about an adventure, it’s a story about a place. You do not leave that place, you just stay there over the course of several years and experience the historically significant events that are happening there. So the narrative focus for you as a protagonist is on how you feel about things rather than what you’re accomplishing.

Inquisition, conversely, is the least interesting one from a conceptual standpoint but, like, it’s competent from a technical standpoint and the harsh criticisms you tend to hear usually stem from misunderstandings about its design rather than the lack of creative ambition. There’s another new evil horde and you’re another special dude who’s the only one who can stop them and now you’ve got a personal army instead of being an underdog. There’s more political conflict than the first game but the politics are less complex. Ultimately, though, I think the most important factor of any open world game is simply the degree to which you want to spend time in that world regardless of what it is you’re actually doing and it’s an interesting enough world to spend some time in. Certainly, it’s worth trying for free.

For anybody playing this for the first time, an important piece of advice:

Don’t be a completionist. Leave areas before you’ve done everything in them and don’t do any side quests you’re not interested in.

It’s my least favorite Dragon Age but it got a lot more hate than it deserved because other open world games trained people to play it the boringest way possible.

So my can of breadcrumbs is full of sandwiches.

How cheap is an adequate VR set these days? Probably still not cheap enough for this one game to justify the purchase, right?

Too much new stuff. I think the fact that Xen existing was the difference between the free version and the paid version pushed them to pad Xen out way too far for fear that snappier pacing would feel like a ripoff.

Blurry looks more realistic than blocky, especially on the low-resolution CRT monitors old games were designed for.

Now that we’ve got better screens and games with better graphics, we see early 3D as a stylized aesthetic and a lack of texture filtering fits that aesthetic better but these games’ actual goal they were made with was realism.

So, underneath all the dramatic and flowery language, the argument being made seems to be “if the purpose of our biology is to make its own DNA persist, it wouldn’t make sense for biological chimeras to exist; based on the ability of cells to coordinate even with different DNA, the main goal seems to be human cells cooperating to make a general human form.”

This anthropomorphizing of biological building blocks is ridiculous. Cells and DNA are not in competition over who runs the show because they aren’t sapient. And I fully understand that the scientist making this claim understands that on an intellectual level but I mention it because the backbone of this argument is to conflate the literal and the figurative. The only inconsistency in cells being compatible despite having different “bosses” would be an ideological one and, because there isn’t any actual ideology at play, it doesn’t matter whether it’s consistent when attempting to describe it. You’ve proven a metaphor wasn’t literally true, congratulations.

But setting all that aside, this still doesn’t actually function as a counter argument. If we are to accept the premise of DNA’s authority as literal truth, is this function of unrelated cells to be compatible with each other not a logical extension of the DNA’s will? It more benefits the DNA for the organism to be viable even if that means other DNA also persists. It has a greater chance of reproducing itself if it’s not in a corpse.

Not only does the argument hinge on anthropomorphism, it also hinges on this metaphorical entity being self-destructively spiteful.

Lastly, it is downright comical to mention things like “cells know on their own that the heart goes on the left” when making an argument that a different characterization of biology is wrong based on the existence of rare biological edge cases. Some people’s hearts aren’t where hearts normally go. I’d let this kind of thing slide as a simplification of the truth were this not part of calling out exactly the same degree of simplification from someone else as being invalid.

It’s not gaslighting when they tell you what they’re doing.

That last paragraph is wild. Why would you even try to apply social dynamics to drug compatibility?

Touch screens don’t lend themselves to Snake the way buttons did, so the only good mobile game is now functionally unplayable.

My point is that I described the same distress you’re describing using the same terminology you did. I didn’t accuse you of anything, I just strongly disagreed with your takeaway that this story describes something positive.

These are your words, quoted from your post:

One of his most recent meltdowns was so traumatic for him,

From what I saw in 4 and what I hear of 76, it’s hard to imagine Todd Howard is averse to missing the point.

“It’s okay to fail” seems like it would have been a more valuable life lesson than “it feels good to beat a really hard video game” and it concerns me that you’re so okay with the amount of trauma this entertainment product caused him.

The fact that you’re sharing this story of years of repeated meltdowns caused by a video game and calling it an example of games being beneficial is pretty surreal.

My favorite ME1 build is Infiltrator. The damage output of a properly modded sniper rifle can get truly depraved late in the game.

Andromeda has the biggest difference I’ve ever seen between low graphics settings and high ones. I wonder if the lack of recognition for its beautiful environments isn’t mainly that they just weren’t beautiful on most people’s systems.