Baldur's Gate III

I thought they did! Not the final dialogue scenes by the dock so much, but the final battles felt appropriately epic.

I'm trying to tackle the gith on the Risen Road in tactician and getting nowhere. Maybe I need to wait until my characters are level 6? or do I need to get good?

Beat it, I'm not sure that they stuck the landing but oh well.

I pickpocketed Astarion's underwear from under his clothes in the epilogue, so I stand corrected.

I'm trying to tackle the gith on the Risen Road in tactician and getting nowhere.

I skill-checked to avoid this fight hehe

the ones with the dragons? I think they're kinda there to teach you "sometimes enemies are too powerful and you should avoid a battle".

Had a lot of fun fighting Ethel Hag for the second time tonight. A real challenge. Died on the first attempt, so I made special preparations on second go

Okay got the gith after three or four reloads and a couple satisfying kills from Wyll eldritch blasting people off the top of the ramparts. Come to think of it laying siege from up there would have been viable.

Top secret information obviously

the gith are just such devastating assholes I avoid fighting them whenever possible which makes recruiting Orpheus kind of funny because he kind of sucks, like, why am I worried about escorting the savior of the githyanki thru the final battle he should be the baddest dude in the universe

So I thought I was going to have time to play other games now that I've beaten it but last night I put 90 minutes into my second campaign.

second playthrough is more fun imo

Yeah I can imagine. Well into Act 3 and somehow it's finally all starting to come together; as in, I'm thinking much more tactically about how I'm going to approach certain encounters, making more use of my inventory and spells, getting to know what I'm working with.

I heard you can't start new romances after a certain point, which is a shame as none of my characters were interested in the first part of the game and I spent a long time getting my approval ratings high so I could see what happens in at least one romance scene. But apparently I am doomed to die alone, despite everyone loving me to bits.

It's also a bit of a shame that leveling up finishes at 12. Kind if defeats the point of getting involved in anything but necessary battles

Preferable to being like level 20 and finishing off the entire end fight like it's a single goblin, surely? Also you still get to loot afterwards.

I'm romancing Karlach in this second playthrough, she's just become able to touch ppl and is like "hell yeah let's fuck" but so far...no follow through.

yep, every character has been like this, and just not followed up on the promise. I gave Shadowheart an orchid and she's all "Hmm, I'll find a way to repay you", then she forgot or something. Karlach, similar story. Lae'zel and Gale tried to jump my bones really really early on and I was a bit "Hold on, let's have a drink first", then they lost interest.

Question: I respecced Wyll into a Paladin (I think Oath of Devotion), and because I've never played the class, I'm not sure how maintaining your oath works. If he's in my active party but *not* the one initiating dialogue or making the oath-breaking action, does his oath still get broken? Similarly, if I leave him at camp, do the actions of my active party have any bearing on his oath status?

Went to Cazador's Palace yesterday. Gosh this game is gigantic isn't it? You think you've got to where you're going and then it's like "nope, there's a whole underground prison network to explore"

The act 3 overworld map alone is big, but it also contains an enormous sewer network, many multi-level buildings, a basement with hidden rooms in even the smallest townhouses, and several interdimensional areas like Cazadore's prison, Lorroakan's tower etc etc. Mindboggling

Oops, don't know why it posted my name just there, pasted it from a WhatsApp chat fff

I will say Act 2 is less fun to replay than Act 1...maybe because I'd gotten a bit better by then and so have less stuff that I neglected to do.

Act 2 feels more linear, more top-to-bottom and is easily the smallest area I think? Also the fact you do the whole Underdark and then get thrown into another weird, bleak underworld in Act 2 is a strange'un. I'm almost certain I saw everything there was to see in Act 2

Curious if other people got this in the epilogue: when I caught up with Shadowheart and gave her a hug, I got a "Halsin disproves" notification.

No - tbf, I arrived with Shadowheart as my girl. He'd already been creepily asking us for threesomes ("swimming") in previous dialogues tho.

Damn, the Underdark goes on for a while

Boredom with Act 2 has been relieved by just going on a murder spree around Moonrise Towers, got the ogre, the mage and the orc woman. Made my way into Thorn's inner sanctum even, at which point of course it turns out he's invulnerable so I still have to do all the shit underneath the masuleum. Will be fun to have the big act 2 battle with all of Thorn's heavy hitters missing at least.

Me approaching the end of BG3: Finally I'll be able to play stuff on my backlog.
Me after beating BH3: But why would I want to?

welp, my atheist run got to the inevitable - Shadowheart turned on me and I had to kill her. I even tried setting everyone to non lethal attacks but the system wasn't having it.

no great loss in objective terms - I'd done pretty much all her storyline in the first run - but it did not feel good

kinda feel like giving the game a rest now but then I've thought that like four times so far in this run and I'm still at it lol

Maybe Tactician isn't such a reach for me now that I understand combat better, because in my second playthrough, I finished Ethel in less than a full round with two characters. (Granted, my team was level 5.)

Super annoyed that I can'5 save wubren because I completed the nightsong thing first. How was that supposed to be obvious to me?

Yes very annoying. I only did it first because someone told me to.

Almost as good as playing BG3: looking at the class spell list and thinking about what you'll pick when you level up.

So Minthara was flirting with me and since I'm doing this second run to experience as much of the game that I haven't as possible, I wanted to go for it, but I knew Karlach would not be amused - so I had her jump off a cliff, got with Minthara and am now going to resurect her and see if I've gotten away with it. I'm going to hell (more than I already did).

hahaah yeah let us know.

i'm STILL in my first playthrough. I swear I'm playing several hours a night too. Maybe I'll regret this as I'm pretty much doing all the quests on my list. Hoping it doens't make subsequent playthroughs boring

Having reached the Underdark in my second playthrough, I can confirm that it's not boring, especially because I didn't come close to doing everything my first time even though the quests in my journal all showed completion.

It worked! Now I just have to live with myself.

Haha that's amazing, daniel

I got to the Raphael fight last night and LOOOOOOOOOL what in the Evanescence Christ Superstar is happening with the music?

I liked it unironically!

yeah it's pretty inspired I think, and suits the character, maybe not as appropriate but would have loved a doomy metal song sung by jk simmons about how he is going to murder me

attempted an honor mode run a few times and yeah, no way lol, am so much not good enough at videogames to pull that off, fun to try but I can't keep playing the first few hours before getting absolutely destroyed by gnolls or the fake paladins or whatever

Florin, have you tried Tactician before? If so, how did that compare with your Honor Mode attempts?

I did try tactician yes, mostly just to do all the evil stuff and it was cool, but there were a dozen times at least I made a grave error, got very murdered and had to reload

Meanwhile on youtube it's like "SOLO HONOR MODE SPEEDRUN JUST SALAMI"

the. Raphael music is fun, it's true. It's just completley unexpected because none of the other boss fights have big campy Tim Rice musical numbers ostensibly sung by the boss themsleves

PSA: you can lose your Honour Mode run in the epilogue!

I definitely think I'm ready for Tactician now because I basically did the Grym fight without taking any damage from it (SH was the only casualty because she walked through lava) and did the Death Shepherd fight in the Mountain Pass in just over a round of combat.

Finally beat the Netherbrain tonight but I stopped playing during the afterparty. 300+ hours that's taken me!

After 320 hours, I finally completed it, and they saved the funniest glitch till last

https://www.reddit.com/u/doglatin80/s/NJuEdov1id

I found out that I often leave my xbox on the character sheet screen, which counts as gameplay time so sadly I do not know how many hours I am really in!

tbf I do go away and come back a lot, it's not constant gameplay

Upgraded my video card so’s to play this even smoother

I'm mostly making roughly the same decisions as I did in my first playthrough, but I did get two new interactions:

Rescued and recruited Minthara.
Got my second visit from the urgent butler.

~40 hours into an honor mode run and terrified

had to watch some youtubes about how to actually play this game because it never occurred to me to throw things or be a monk, pretty clutch

really like Minthara, went through all the trouble to save Halsin only for a shade or whatever to destroy his portal and trap him in shadow hell forever, whoops sorry Halsin

Tavern Brawler breaks the game on normal, especially on a monk. Once I try Tactician or HM, I might consider it again if I find I need to cheese to survive, but just punching everything loses its novelty after 10 hours.