Frustrating UI, enough bugs that it should still be considered early access, but very pretty and immersive and I’m impressed by how much your character’s race, class and origin influence your dialogue options and how many ways there are to approach everything.

I’m still in Act One, but so far I’d say it will be worth its price when fully baked; I’m just not as amazed as all the hype suggests, and it feels more like "D:OS in Faerûn" than "Baldur’s Gate 3". A bit weirded out that every companion wants to get in the MC’s pants almost immediately as well. I’ve seen sex games where the relationships felt more mature and natural.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

What a piece to wake up to while listening to Wind Rose.
We'll arise (Rise!) and we'll mine (Mine!) to the heart of the world!

Good little joke on Valve's part as well :)

I’ve been thinking of giving The Dwarves a chance the next time I get in the mood for CRPGs... but with both BG3 and PoE2 playthroughs in progress, that will probably take a few years.

Quoting: pbThere's more kinds, for example Prologues (a.k.a. the new demos). For me they're all free to play, because I didn't pay to play them. What you're describing as free to play is (for me) freemium. But ok, maybe just add a "free" tag to everything that is free, or add "free" to filters. Fine by me.

You can already filter by free, I do it often to look for demos and tiny games to wind down without getting into a full game.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: KROM

Quoting: drjomsGot first one and did not like it.

Monotonous, did not find char skill/progression interesting.

Speaking for me, it made me buy my first console ever, a PS4 Pro, just to be able to play this gem. I absolutely love it and was pretty much blown away by the story behind it. Admittedly I'm a sucker for such settings. :)

I had to buy both a (second-hand) console AND TV to play it. Then I gave them to a friend for his birthday :P

I don't think my current machine can run this one well, but it's definitely on the list for my next upgrade.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Oh, oh, I hope they do the same thing for PoE 2, I just started it after *finally* completing The White March expansions during the holidays. I dig the system changes they implemented there, though I fear some of them will make an eventual solo run extremely challenging (i.e. skill checks use the whole party’s combined skill bonuses, which is pretty nice, but I assume most will be impossible to beat with a single character past the first few levels).

Quoting: pbI wholly enjoyed PoE up until the point where there was some massive battle and I haven't secured enough allies so I kept losing and apparently it was necessary to progress so I just dumped it. Maybe I'll revisit with this new patch.

If you mean the battle for Caed Nua, I finished the game without doing it, then started the expansions and only went back to dealing with Caed Nua missions well into the White March P. I, so you really don’t have to bother with it (unless you painted yourself into a corner with no saves prior to starting the event).

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Working in translation, another worrisome trend I’ve noticed is content farms not just using AI to write articles, but to translate them, so we’re seeing tons of poorly translated content filling up search engine results in content farms with country-specific domains (e.g. "english-sounding-name.fr"). Logically, the AI is going to continue to get trained on junk content that it (or another AI) wrote or translated itself and perpetuate, if not amplify, the errors in it by seeing them as commonly used. A race to the bottom indeed.

It would be bad enough if it only meant more trash on the Internet, but you just know this widespread corruption of language is also going to influence people, especially language learners, who will be much more frequently exposed to mistranslations and unnatural expressions and adopt them naively. The effect on English speakers will likely be lesser or slower to manifest (English being the "native" tongue of most AI and being a simple language to begin with), but I weep for just about every other language.

Quoting: NathanaelKStottlemyer...it's not hard to write anybody can do it, and it's the pennical of laziness to...

*Pinnacle ;)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Started playing this with friends recently and have been enjoying it. Controller support is a little finicky (it forgets you’re using a controller at the start of each level until you press a specific button for some reason) and we’ve had a couple hangups that forced me to hard-reboot, but not too bad overall.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

BG3 isn’t showing a sale on my end, is it regional?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: ObscureThe stats they show only add up to 95.43% so is it safe to say the other 4.57% were from Linux users across all the various distros?

They also only show Windows 10 and 11, I would assume they have many players on earlier editions.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Purple Library GuyI've considered getting a cell phone just to use where there's wi-fi.

That’s what I do. It’s my e-mail-on-the-go/mp3 player/calculator/watch/camera micro-computer. Occasionally I’ll buy a plan for a month or two over summer holidays if I expect to be on the move a lot and need/want to be reachable. As a non-obvious upside, once you have a SIM card in there, even if you cancel your plan, you can still make emergency calls as long as there’s a signal, which is good for peace of mind in the countryside where you can’t always count on borrowing someone’s phone at the drop of a hat.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: 1xokThe colors on the OLED always seem oversaturated to me.

I was wondering about that too. The LCD unit just seems sharper and cleaner to me, versus the red blur bleeding through everything on the OLED unit. Tough to judge image quality through a picture, but sharpness is sharpness, and the OLED screen just seems to lose a lot of detail and its gradients are way less subtle.

View this comment - View article - View full comments