Basic Chunnel posted:Not looking promising, OP Welcome to the Baldur’s Gate 3 thread! WINNER OF THE SA 2023 GAME AWARDS Baldur’s Gate 3 Community Wiki (Do not use the Fextralife BG3 wiki. It’s poo poo.) Current Patch: Patch #6 Mac users are currently on Patch #5, Hotfix #17. MODS ARE CURRENTLY BROKEN DUE TO NEW PATCH, WAIT A FEW DAYS IF YOU'RE PLAYING MODDED _____________________________________ Alright, give me the pitch. Released in Early Access in October 2020 and fully launching for PC in August 2023, Baldur’s Gate 3 is the revival of the widely beloved old-school CRPG franchise of the same name(the last numbered entry having come out more than twenty years prior) developed by Larian Studios, the team behind Divinity: Original Sin. Based in the Dungeons & Dragons setting of the Forgotten Realms (aka Faerûn), you are an escaped prisoner of the Illithids - tentacle-faced psychics hell-bent on interplanar conquest. Accompanied by both an unwelcome passenger in your skull and a colorful cast of characters, you hope to expunge yourself of your tadpoles before you succumb to the rather gruesomely-described ‘ceremorphosis’, and in the process uncover a much wider and alarming conspiracy in the making. As of December 8th, 2023, BG3 has been released for Windows, MacOS, GeForce Now, Playstation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. Please note Mac users tend to lag behind slightly on patches. So the system is based off the Dungeons and Dragons ruleset, then? Yes, for the most part. Baldur’s Gate 3 uses the Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition Ruleset. If you’re unfamiliar (or coming from a different system/edition), what you need to know is that just about everything worth doing is done by rolling a 20-sided dice (Commonly referred to as a ‘d20’), adding one of six Ability Scores (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma) and usually adding a static value that increases as you level (‘Proficiency’). In some circumstances you’ll roll two d20 and take either the higher value (‘Advantage’) or the lower value (‘Disadvantage’). You have a pool of rerolls ('Inspiration') that you get for achieving miscellaneous objectives that align with character backgrounds. You don’t really need to know more than that, the game does a good job generally of keeping the math behind the curtain, and onboarding you to the more complex concepts. For those familiar with the 5e Ruleset, Larian has made an exhaustive number of changes for the sake of balance, speed, ease of play, or making the game more engaging overall: Jumping and quaffing potions is a bonus action, almost all weapons have a 1/Rest special ability, Short Rests are limited, and various other tweaks. A full list is available here. So who/what can I play as? There are 8 Origins you can play as. The default is "Custom Origin", which lets you create a character from scratch (usually referred to in-community as ‘Tav’, after the default name for the Custom Origin). You can also play through the game as any one of the six "main" companions you'll find through the base game:
Both Custom Origin and Dark Urge can be completely customized, including Starting Race and Starting Class. Do people recommend a starting class/race? Play whatever race speaks to you most, but if you're looking for recommendations for a first time playthrough, the thread inevitably will circle back around to the fact that as a CRPG the game has a lot of dialogue options, and as such classes that have at least some focus on Charisma (Bard, Paladin, Sorcerer, Warlock) tend to have more options for dealing with things in a non-murderous way. All classes will have unique options so if you play a non-Charisma class you aren't entirely out of luck, but if you're looking for a 'first-time' experience it's hard to go wrong with one of those four. Bard in particular comes highly recommended by goons for this. _____________________________________ What difficulties are available? The three standard difficulties are Explorer, Balanced, and Tactician, which are Easy/Medium/Hard respectively. You can change between these three difficulties at any time during the game. As of Patch #5, there is now also a 'Custom' difficulty, allowing you to more finely tailor your gameplay experience, and 'Honor Mode', a Very Hard difficulty which locks you to a single save file similar to XCOM's Ironman Mode. Enemies are even more lethal than Tactician, and many base assumptions of the game change drastically. Note that Custom Difficulty cannot be changed to after the game starts. Typical recommendation is that those who are more deeply familiar with 5e's rules (or other CRPGs) should start on Tactician, or switch to it shortly after 5th level. Balanced is tuned slightly towards the "easy" side. I heard there was multiplayer? Baldur's Gate 3 supports up to 4-player co-op. This co-op is not drop-in drop-out, and the Host can puppet any co-op characters' in players' absence (or store them at camp). Multiplayer is a valid way to experience the game but opinions are split on whether you should commit to it before playing the game solo first. How long is the game? The game is astoundingly massive, depending on how much you're willing to do, and as such playtimes run the gamut, but HowLongToBeat has it marked down at somewhere between 100 and 140 hours if you're doing most everything available to you in a single run, which sounds about right. I'm playing on PC, what mods do people recommend? There is an absolute glut of official 5e content that didn't make it into the game, so I'm only going to list what I (or others in the previous thread) consider either essential or massive QoL upgrades:
Hotfixes break things on a case-by-case basis but usually mod updates for hotfixes are pretty quick since they're usually pretty small. The big numbered patches consistently break everything across the board. If you're playing modded on PC you might want to wait a few days for modders to catch up if a big patch has just hit. Monathin fucked around with this message at 10:31 on Feb 17, 2024 |
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 16:11 |
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# ? May 13, 2024 11:41 |
Tips, Tricks, and FAQs #1 PRO TIP: Save early, save often. Baldur’s Gate 3 is extremely stingy with autosaves and relying on them can mean you lose hours of progress. Quicksave is F5 in the menu (so ESC+F5). If you haven’t cultivated aggressive quicksave habits before, you will here. I just started and the game seems to imply I’m under some sort of time crunch. Am I? No. Neither the main objective (getting de-tadpoled) nor the first major quest (Resolving the Druid’s Grove) will fail after a certain amount of time has passed. In general the things that will auto-complete after taking a Long Rest are few and far between, and the time crunch will only start after you discover it (and you’ll typically know ahead of time because the game will autosave when you get close). If you want to be spoilered for some Act 1 points where Long Resting matters: Waukeem’s Rest, the smugglers in the cave, and the Absolute member trapped in a cave-in in Grymforge are all timed. The first two of those resolve after a single Long Rest. Hey, using my Illithid stuff makes it sound like I’m being corrupted and that if I use them I’ll get a bad ending. Nope! Illithid Powers and using Illithid options in dialogue is totally safe. The latter is also required to do twice in order to unlock more Illithid powers. If you want to use those powers, feel free. They certainly make the game easier, and you can get any ending regardless of how many worms you plug into your brain. The only consequence of Illithid Powers is to change the difficulty of some checks later in the game. People are mentioning XYZ cutscene but I haven’t gotten that, is my game broken!? No. A lot of cutscene events, especially early on, are linked to Long Resting for the evening. There’s a reason why the previous thread title said to make sure you Long Rest often - the sooner you clear those out, the better. A popup is telling me the story will progress if I venture into this new area! What do I do!? In general, heed these warnings. They’re there for a reason. That said, the first one (which pops up when you advance to either Grymforge or the Mountain Pass) is extremely lax - the only thing it will auto-advance is the Druid’s Grove plot. There is one in Act 2 (inside the Gauntlet of Shar) that is much more strict and you should not activate unless you are 100% sure you’re done with Act 2. The inventory seems uh… unintuitive. A little. There’s a lot of QoL baked into it but it’s hard to navigate, never tells you most of these tips, and people learn new things about it all the time, so here’s some helpful ways to wrangle it.
I have no idea what feats are good and what feats are bad, has anyone written a guide? In fact I wrote a guide in the last thread! Below is an updated version of it so people have easy access to it. quote:In -general-, you should use Ability Score Increase to get your primary stat for your class (Strength for most martials, Dex for Rogues/non-Strength Monks/Finesse weapon users, Wis for Clerics/Druids, Int for Wizards, Cha for Sorcs/Warlocks/Bards) to 18 at minimum before you branch out unless a specific feat is build-defining. Some classes may want 20 in their primary stat due to a lack of useful magic items that give bonuses to hit (Monks, most spellcasters), but in general 18 is fine. Hey, the thread is talking about multiclassing, how do I multiclass? Should I multiclass? To be explicit about it, you never ever need to multiclass to beat the game. Explorer difficulty straight up forbids you from multiclassing, and it’s very easy to screw up your build without meaning to if you don’t know how things interact with each other. I had a big guide for it in the previous thread but the BG3 Community Wiki has a decent guide to the ins and outs of multiclassing here. The guide is somewhat out of date but is still good for understanding best practices. Read that before multiclassing, and follow the following tips:
Okay, is there any other tips I should know? Tons, but a non-exhaustive list:
Monathin fucked around with this message at 23:50 on Feb 16, 2024 |
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 16:15 |
3rd post reserved for funny bits or other miscellanea.
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 16:16 |
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Are we wanting to use this thread for console talk? Cause there is already a Baldur's Gate 3 thread.
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 16:16 |
I said come in! posted:Are we wanting to use this thread for console talk? Cause there is already a Baldur's Gate 3 thread. Starting a new thread for folks since the old thread is encroaching 1400 pages and the OP is pretty outdated.
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 16:17 |
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At the end of Divinity Original Sin 2 Tarquin makes a whole deal about going to another reality with mind flayers considering the portraits of the original cast you can find does this guy ever show up?
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 16:31 |
Black Noise posted:At the end of Divinity Original Sin 2 Tarquin makes a whole deal about going to another reality with mind flayers considering the portraits of the original cast you can find does this guy ever show up? Doesn't seem like it but there's apparently a note in the Sorcerous Sundries vault that references him.
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 16:40 |
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Link to the previous thread in case it's handy to have a reference to it on the first page of this one at some point. I'm playing through the game now and reading some of the backlog. Nice new OP
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 16:47 |
quote:I just started and the game seems to imply I’m under some sort of time crunch. Am I? This makes me less anxious, tbh. Thank you for this info.
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 16:48 |
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fwiw way back I read somewhere that the game's AI will prioritize low AC allies and breaking Concentration. This seems to play out in practice, especially on higher difficulties. Among other things it's a point in favor of War Caster as a feat imo, since the AI seems to recognize it's less likely to break Concentration on a character that has advantage from War Caster and picks other targets. If you have high-priority Concentration spells on a caster then War Caster is very worth it as it makes them less likely to drop the spell and also the AI is less likely to target them. In a current multiplayer game I'm running a Tempest Cleric with heavy armor, shield, and War Caster and the AI basically ignores me and lets me do whatever (Tactician difficulty). So I end up using Warding Bond on a buddy to soak damage because the AI doesn't target my cleric directly most of the time. edit: Tempest Cleric is so, so much fun. There are a pair of gloves toward the end of Act 1 (Mountain Pass subzone) that are basically custom made for them. The gloves allow you to inflict Reverberation whenever you deal Thunder, Lightning, or Radiant damage (almost all your damage). Reverberation reduces enemy physical (strength/dex/con) saving throws by 1 per each stack. So you can nuke as well or better than any other caster, debuff, heal, buff. It's a very well-rounded and powerful build. I really like the itemization Larian's done and I hope they take it further in DLC. Pellisworth fucked around with this message at 17:42 on Dec 9, 2023 |
# ? Dec 9, 2023 17:36 |
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I guess we should be careful about spoilers again in the new thread. Xbox players will never know about the relatively poor ending at launch! I'm already itching for a new honor run but forcing myself to fight all the bosses. I think I'll load some quality of life mods this time though.
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 17:53 |
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I've been slowly working on an Honour mode playthrough and I strongly recommend you keep up a backup save in case something stupid happens with NPCs randomly aggro'ing you in town. I had this happen basically immediately after stepping into the Druid Grove. Talked to Zevlor and then he took a few steps, turned and started doing the "search for a thief" script and the whole town aggro'd on me. I had not stolen anything. Also had Kagha and the druids aggro after the first time you meet with them. Might be related to Shadowheart as she reacts to the wolf.
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 17:57 |
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*sniff* I love the new thread smell. Been continuing my honor mode Wyll origin run, just picked up karlach and kicked the paladins butts. Thinking about tackling the owlbear cave next. Edit: are the honor mode saves marked?
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 18:00 |
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Good OP. I'm just glad the Basic Chunnel post was preserved for posterity
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 18:09 |
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Console players if you worm up your character turns gross. PC players have been living in a world of instagram filters.
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 18:11 |
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Game good
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 18:14 |
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Good OP, good game. Currently honor running through Act I trying to vacuum up as much XP as I can without hitting any of the tough fights, the ironman mode really changes the approach to things. For anyone else thinking about doing an honor mode run I will say that it's worth it to put the effort into cheesing the first commander fight to kill him and the mindflayer and get the everburn blade, you can hit level 2 at the nautiliod crash and it smooths out the early game tremendously. Network42 fucked around with this message at 18:18 on Dec 9, 2023 |
# ? Dec 9, 2023 18:15 |
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Looking promising, OP.
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 18:16 |
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game is indeed good, like the thread shall be
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 18:18 |
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Network42 posted:Good OP, good game. Some people recommend going around the intellect devourers you meet early on with only two party members because that's a common early TPK in honor mode.
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 18:22 |
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Amazing OP, thank you!
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 18:29 |
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I asked this last thread but am still wondering. Is say tempest cleric 5 vengeance paladin 7 okay for multi? Not planning to use wisdom. More wanting to supplement paladin melee with cool lightning abilities. But didn't know if lower wisdom would hobble it or not.
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 18:36 |
unattended spaghetti posted:I asked this last thread but am still wondering. Is say tempest cleric 5 vengeance paladin 7 okay for multi? Not planning to use wisdom. More wanting to supplement paladin melee with cool lightning abilities. But didn't know if lower wisdom would hobble it or not. If you're only in it for cool lightning abilities that don't scale off Wisdom, 5 seems like a steep overinvestment. You can probably make it work but a significant amount of your spells are going to be less useful due to having subpar Wisdom, unless you specifically pick spells that don't scale off it (so buff/utility spells). that said, Tempest Cleric + Smite does sound kind of hilarious, so I really wanna see if it works. Maybe Cleric 2 / Paladin 10? Unless there's something you're very specifically shooting for at Level 5.
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 18:41 |
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unattended spaghetti posted:I asked this last thread but am still wondering. Is say tempest cleric 5 vengeance paladin 7 okay for multi? Not planning to use wisdom. More wanting to supplement paladin melee with cool lightning abilities. But didn't know if lower wisdom would hobble it or not. If you don't care about the cleric flavor, bard or warlock would be way better spellcasting multi classes as they allow you to largely focus on Chariama without needing too many other stats. Warlock/paladin is a strong melee machine and literally only needs charisma in fact.
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 18:42 |
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Is this where we complain about Astarion's name not being lore-correct for an elf?
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 18:43 |
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Monathin posted:If you're only in it for cool lightning abilities that don't scale off Wisdom, 5 seems like a steep overinvestment. You can probably make it work but a significant amount of your spells are going to be less useful due to having subpar Wisdom, unless you specifically pick spells that don't scale off it (so buff/utility spells). Yeah having more slots for smite, plus the retaliation and Max lightning damage just seemed pretty cool to me. It sounds like it would be functional if not strictly optimal. I just like the theme of it. Network42 posted:If you don't care about the cleric flavor, bard or warlock would be way better spellcasting multi classes as they allow you to largely focus on Chariama without needing too many other stats. The flavor is the main reason I'm interested in it. You can get paladin of x tags for doing it. Also cool lightning abilities, some of which seem to supplement melee pretty well.
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 18:48 |
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On my dick around with durge paladin tactician run [backup for when I die horribly in honor mode] I respecced to life cleric 1 since that seems to have synergy with oath of the ancients. Primarily I'm doing it to troll shadowheart constantly since I haven't seen those interactions yet. Not romancing her though, since I have lae'zel scheduled for this run and enemies to lovers is cringeworthy. Lawman 0 fucked around with this message at 19:17 on Dec 9, 2023 |
# ? Dec 9, 2023 18:53 |
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re: tempest cleric, I should mention the slightly cheesy way to inflict Wet with a bonus action In Larian's homebrew, the Wet condition doubles Lightning and Cold damage (but halves Fire). With tempest's ability to maximize their lightning damage this lets you chaos dunk small areas with 30-60+ damage Call Lightning starting at level 5 and things get even sillier with Chain Lightning in the late game. Dual wield hand crossbows. Hoard bottles of water (Auntie Ethel sells a stack of 5 in the druid grove, they restock on party member level up or long rest so buy a bunch). Drag a bottle of water from your inventory and drop it at the feet of an enemy which doesn't require an action. Then, use your offhand crossbow to break the bottle (bonus action) and inflict Wet. Now drop your Lightning nukes with Channel Divinity and you get maximized, double-damage spells. You can also combo Wet + Cold damage to inflict Freeze on an enemy which is a hard CC. Blunt, Force, or Thunder damage is doubled against Frozen targets but it removes the Frozen condition. Frozen is a constitution saving throw and it's kinda rare to see it actually land on Tactician in my experience.
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 19:03 |
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Monathin posted:If you're only in it for cool lightning abilities that don't scale off Wisdom, 5 seems like a steep overinvestment. You can probably make it work but a significant amount of your spells are going to be less useful due to having subpar Wisdom, unless you specifically pick spells that don't scale off it (so buff/utility spells). I forget the class break but you can do a lighting smite/radiant smite combo using destructive wrath and the guaranteed crit from luck of the far realms and get over 200+ damage in a single turn
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 19:04 |
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Has larian ever stated how many copies they expected to sell? It must be loving wild to sell 22 million plus copies and counting in a few months when your previous game sold 7.5 million over 6 years and was considered a huge success.
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 19:05 |
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veni veni veni posted:Has larian ever stated how many copies they planned to sell? It must be loving wild to sell 22 million plus copies and counting in a few months when your previous game sold 7.5 million over 6 years and was considered a huge success. They don't even have a physical version out yet lmao
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 19:05 |
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rojay posted:Is this where we complain about Astarion's name not being lore-correct for an elf? Hmm, what would his name be if it were lore-correct?
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 19:06 |
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Nice reboot kid
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 19:06 |
All we really know about in that vein is that Larian did not intend to do Epilogues or DLC and BG3 was going to be a one-and-done release, but they pretty quickly pivoted once the money started rolling in, so I have to assume it widely outpaced even their most pie-in-the-sky expectations.MacheteZombie posted:Nice reboot kid Thanks, MZ, see you in a couple hours.
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 19:07 |
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jaete posted:Hmm, what would his name be if it were lore-correct? Bobby Keebler
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 19:09 |
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Monathin posted:All we really know about in that vein is that Larian did not intend to do Epilogues or DLC and BG3 was going to be a one-and-done release, but they pretty quickly pivoted once the money started rolling in, so I have to assume it widely outpaced even their most pie-in-the-sky expectations. The current peak is almost 900k concurrent players. So yeah, seems like it's been almost 10 times as popular as they expected.
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 19:10 |
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Today, several months after release, there's 150k steam players right now and they expected max 100k.
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 19:12 |
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Tbh no elves in this game are lore-correct for elves. They all just feel like regular humans with pointy ears. vv
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 19:12 |
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BrianWilly posted:Tbh no elves in this game are lore-correct for elves. They all just feel like regular humans with pointy ears. FWIW I think part of that is the melting pot nature of Baldur's Gate the city and likely its surrounding area. If you were to go to an Elven city you'd probably have a lot more elfy elves.
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 19:14 |
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# ? May 13, 2024 11:41 |
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BrianWilly posted:Tbh no elves in this game are lore-correct for elves. They all just feel like regular humans with pointy ears. Actually, my high elf wizard is completely lore-correct
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# ? Dec 9, 2023 19:16 |