Baldur's Gate 3

[Woomack]

I call this video a BS because of multiple cases where you need to do something, and it's skipped in the video. I can start from the "landing" of the ship, which takes a couple of turns and a fight. It's at the beginning, and it's missing. To have Shadowheart, you need to save her first, it's missing too. To have Withers in the camp without a delay, you need to pass the Crypt in Act 1 - you meet him there, and next, he appears in the camp. You can't just jump around as there are at least two dialogues, locked doors, and one fight. Then to "port" the box, you actually need to have explored part of the map - it shows there is an explored mountain pass location and next another one. It's at the end of the map in Act 1. You can't move with your camera so far - I mean from one side of the map to another. The game won't let you enter the mountain pass unless you finish some activities. Literally, when you run to the mountain pass and try to enter, then the game tells you, you need to do something first.
On the way are multiple cut scenes that take time, and on the video, everything is edited or sped up. I also wish my game, at any point, was loading in 1-2 seconds.
At the end of the video, as I already said, Gale blows up, and you see the credits. This is Act 2 out of 3. You can blow up Gale at any point using his skill. Then you kill everyone, and the game ends. The shorter version would be you start the game and use the skill, the end.

Maybe I'm missing something, but this is how I see it after passing the game a couple of times.
I don't know if it's from beta or just overusing game bugs, but it's hard to call it "speedrun," as they say.

 

[Janus67]

They made an explanation video:

 

[rainless]

You know... I didn't really have anything against the goblins at first.

Because my character is a Drow... They just let me walk right into their camp. Hell... They were TERRIFIED of me.

But once... ****SPOILER ALERT******


*********

******************


Even after I killed True Gut... "Hey! No hard feelings!"

But once I killed their LAST two leaders... Suddenly they began harboring a grudge.

This led to MULTIPLE, multiple deaths...

Until I finally managed to escape the camp and plan my revenge.

A revenge which consisted of a LOT of arrows.

From loooooong range.

And me decimating the entire goblin army.

 

[Kenrou]

Well, in DnD lore the Drow are widely considered to be some of the most evil sadistic bastards in the plane (especially the women that rule Drow society). It's normal for other races (yes, even evil ones) to be afraid of you when it's a known fact that it's best to kill yourself when in risk of being captured by them - glad you managed to maintain the status quo

 

[rainless]

Well, in DnD lore the Drow are widely considered to be some of the most evil sadistic bastards in the plane (especially the women that rule Drow society). It's normal for other races (yes, even evil ones) to be afraid of you when it's a known fact that it's best to kill yourself when in risk of being captured by them - glad you managed to maintain the status quo

Yeah my character is not a follower of... whoever the evil Drow god is. She's a follower of the other one. But nobody knows this because she looks like any other Drow. So she can PRETEND to be a follower of the evil one.

I can't even remember who I AM a follower of. I suppose that knowledge would be useful now that I'm in the underdark.

Honestly it's getting hard keeping up with it all. I've got like 50 savegames going. One I'm hunting the Nightsong in the underdark (for no apparent reason).

Another I've already wiped out all the Goblins and returned to the Emerald Grove. I've got saves going all the way back to the beginning just in case I want to change some of my choices...

Sigh... I'll never get through this game.

 

[Kenrou]

Lolth is the evil spider goddess, Eilistraee is the goddess of redemption for the extremely rare drow that came out... not evil (?)...

The burden of choices, you'll get used to it don't worry, at one point (back during 3.5e) I was running a monk with a vow of non-violence and poverty, the DM spent the entire 3h session actively trying to kill me at every opportunity because I had insanely high AC and an extremely limited amount of choices I could make, made for an interesting game, I'll tell you

 

[rainless]

Tales From the Underdark

I went to the Underdark... discovered the Underdark sucked... I left the underdark. (It kind of reminded me of space... and to me NOTHING is more boring than space... unless Star Trek... which we already did at the beginning of the game.)

So I decided to take The Mountain Pass instead... which was cool... except for the fact that you need to know how to JUMP in order to get there... and nowhere in the game is jumping explained. Not even when you get to the part where you REALLY NEED to jump.

That was not so cool.

Nor was the fact that... when I finally made it to the mountain pass... I was given a VERY STERN WARNING that I needed to finish up whatever I was working on up until now and that I would most-likely die at my current level if I continued on to the Mountain Pass.

There are still plenty of side-quests to wrap up and I'm also using an earlier save from before I wiped-out the entire Goblin Camp. Which leaves me at a crossroads:

The entire Goblin Camp (minus its leaders) is still alive... Do I go back to my save where I've killed them all (BUT it's three days later because of all the full rests and whatnot and the character development has rapidly accelerated)? Or do I go back to just after I killed the Goblin leaders and run down to the Underdark right quick to at least unlock the waypoints so that... if I really NEED to travel through the Underdark, I can just press a button?

I'm kind of leaning in that direction because I feel like I should've rolled with that in the first place.

Killing the Goblins turned out to not even be necessary because the guy I was trying to rescue was already gone... but there's no reason why I shouldn't have run down and activated the waypoints in the Underdark (in fact... I already have a savegame where I did that... I just have to teleport back to the Emerald grove and skip through a lotttttttt of text and pass a lotttttt of skill checks and bang a couple of my companions...)

Bother...

I've only made it to the shore of the Underdark but I can already tell I'm not going to like it. The Nightsong is probably going to turn out to be a big deal though... Ohhhhh bother.

 

[Woomack]

I have weird bugs from time to time after last updates. My characters are skipping the whole turns or freeze during their turn. Like yesterday, I started a fight and before I could use any of my characters, then two of them already lost 200hp (my paladin has 298hp max right now). There was no sleep/hold or anything else that makes me lose turns. There were only 3 attackers and pretty weak, dealing 5-10hp each attack. The same happened in some other places. I loaded the game from the last save, and killed them in the first round. It's good to save the game often.

I went through the Underdark the first time I was playing the game. Later I noticed you can go through the mountain pass and back to the Underdark, and finish all remaining quests there. In general, I like dark places, but for some reason I didn't like the Underdark much. Lights and everything else look great, but for some reason quests and the part of the story there, wasn't much fun.

As I remember from previous BG games, it was possible to reach a higher level, like around 20. In BG3 I end the story at about 12 level. I finished it one more time yesterday. I made all the main and all side quests I found on the way (some take much less time when you already know how you have to pass them). I couldn't start all the Minsc part for some reason, but it's not so long and doesn't give a lot of exp. I count that with quests I know that I missed, I would have 13lvl.

 

[rainless]

I have weird bugs from time to time after last updates. My characters are skipping the whole turns or freeze during their turn. Like yesterday, I started a fight and before I could use any of my characters, then two of them already lost 200hp (my paladin has 298hp max right now). There was no sleep/hold or anything else that makes me lose turns. There were only 3 attackers and pretty weak, dealing 5-10hp each attack. The same happened in some other places. I loaded the game from the last save, and killed them in the first round. It's good to save the game often.

I went through the Underdark the first time I was playing the game. Later I noticed you can go through the mountain pass and back to the Underdark, and finish all remaining quests there. In general, I like dark places, but for some reason I didn't like the Underdark much. Lights and everything else look great, but for some reason quests and the part of the story there, wasn't much fun.

As I remember from previous BG games, it was possible to reach a higher level, like around 20. In BG3 I end the story at about 12 level. I finished it one more time yesterday. I made all the main and all side quests I found on the way (some take much less time when you already know how you have to pass them). I couldn't start all the Minsc part for some reason, but it's not so long and doesn't give a lot of exp. I count that with quests I know that I missed, I would have 13lvl.

I guess I'll go back to the game save that I have in the Underdark and just teleport from there to the Emerald Grove. There isn't a single fight between where I am there and where I am now. Just a lotttttttt of dialogue and rolls.

So it's not like it's costing me anything. Then I'll be able to teleport around a little easier after I get to the Underdark later. (And you're right... as cool as it looks, the Underdark is boring as hell.)

 

[rainless]

Week 2 now... (week 3?) I've made NO progress in this game whatsoever. I just keep changing classes and going back and murdering the Goblin Camp over and over again.

This is my new Hitman.

Somewhere out there there's a world that needs saving... and something about parasites...

...but the Goblins MUST DIE!

 

[Kenrou]

 

[rainless]

There's WAY too many factions out there. I'd completely forgotten that I was a follower of Seline. I guess they're at war with the Shar (as opposed with the other Drow... who are at way with EVERYBODY). Then this group of merchants I saved were really with the Zephyr or Zertans or something with a "Z"... which led to instant confusion because I wasn't sure if I should kill them or not. (I mean... why kill them when I'd just saved them?) I sure as hell killed all the Paladins though!

Everybody in this game is pretending to be someone else... and there's like 37 different races of people to pretend to be!

Sigh... guess I'll just have to murder my way through Baldurs Gate and sort out who I shouldn't have murdered later...

 

[Kenrou]

Baldur's Gate 3 GPU Benchmarks: Ultra Optimized & Bottlenecking Tests (GPU Busy)

We're benchmarking a ton of GPUs in Baldur's Gate 3, the smash hit from Larian. Although the game is overall highly playable on most cards of the last 5+ years, it serves as an interesting test candidate for GPU Busy. It's also so wildly popular that we want to integrate it into either our GPU test suite for reviews, CPU test suite, or maybe both -- but to figure that out, we need to do some research. That's what this is, we just decided to package it all into a GPU benchmark and publish it for you all. The game runs so well on modern cards (and doesn't require a particularly high framerate to begin with) that we went back to the GTX 10 series, including the GTX 1060, and the RX 580 cards to look at some older hardware. We also found this to be an interesting test case for handheld gaming devices, for which we have tests coming up soon in our next handheld review.

One particularly interesting discovery related to Intel Arc GPUs, which we found to perform far differently between Vulkan and Dx11.

 

[rainless]

Is ANYONE's GPU quiet while playing this game?

 

[Kenrou]

Is ANYONE's GPU quiet while playing this game?

Whisper quiet, GPU modding ftw

 

[Woomack]

Only coil whine is audible on my RTX 3070 ... I guess I could enable v-sync, but I'm not playing BG3 anymore. I'm unsure if it's a break or I'm done, but I passed the game 4.5 times / ~270 hours (weirdly a lot but Steam says that).

 

[rainless]

Only coil whine is audible on my RTX 3070 ... I guess I could enable v-sync, but I'm not playing BG3 anymore. I'm unsure if it's a break or I'm done, but I passed the game 4.5 times / ~270 hours (weirdly a lot but Steam says that).

I think they over-estimate. I might have 970 hours!

EDIT:

Yeah... even THIS is a gross exaggeration... I've really barely played this game at all. Maybe, seriously, about half what they say.

 

[Woomack]

Each pass is about 50 hours, so maybe they're correct with my total hours. It still feels a lot, but I usually do other things while playing, especially when a game is turn-based.

 

[rainless]

Each pass is about 50 hours, so maybe they're correct with my total hours. It still feels a lot, but I usually do other things while playing, especially when a game is turn-based.

You could be right about that... I haven't played since October 3rd I think... I've been stripping and sanding my guitar.

But when I do play I usually have a hundred other things going on. I'm cooking, feeding the dogs, eating... I could easily pass 12 hours doing that if I leave the thing running.

Which I WOULD if my video card didn't make so much noise whenever I played.

Right now I just went through the whooooole... CRECHE storyline... only to find out it was just as SPOILER ALERT

..
..




..


...pointless as all the other side missions to get the tadpole out of your head.

So I have to revert to an earlier save before I got locked into that whole fiasco.

Resulting in negative progress in the past month or so.

 

[freakdiablo]

Coming back to ask...Is anyone else having issues with a saved game that spans multiple updates? Just dropped into my first game, and things are wonky. Quest marker issues are still there - markers are still on the map for quests not in the log. And it's still in Act 2, so I went back to the Last Light Inn and...everyone's dead and there are just a bunch of "loot bags" scattered around where their bodies should be...?