Hello everyone, hope everyone is having a good weekend. I have been marching through my Dark Urge Baldur’s Gate 3 run on tactician difficulty. I have arrived at Act 2. Hope everyone has a good week

  • Inui [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    2·
    3 months ago

    Just clocked 20 hours in Pillars of Eternity. My desire for narrative decisions clashes so hard with CRPG gameplay. I will forever feel that real-time with pause is one of the worst control schemes in video games. Closely followed by and related to click to move in ARPGs. Endlessly frustrating micro, pausing to re-adjust party members (hmm almost like I’m taking TURNS with the enemy anyway), terrible pathfinding, dumb AI when it’s even available. I’m so glad Baldur’s Gate 3 blew everyone out of the water to the point it started an argument about whether it makes sense to expect that kind of quality from developers going forward (the answer is yes, sorry).

    That said, I knew I would hate it for those reasons. The narrative is so far more interesting in some ways than something like BG3, because it talks about ideas a lot more rather than just individual situations. Like:

    spoiler

    Is it ethical to treat people differently based on their past lives in a world where soul migration is a real and somewhat understood phenomenon? It’s understood that at least some part of a person’s personality is influenced by their actions in their past lives, plus whatever bits and pieces of other souls they pick up. Does that make it okay for the Crucible Knights to deny entry to people who have ‘subversive’ souls even if they haven’t done anything bad in their current life? In general, how does criminal justice work in that kind of universe? What level of responsibility should people bear for their past life actions? Should they forced to remember them, or allowed to forget them and move on?

    The questions aren’t as interesting as those of identity in something like Planescape: Torment, but they get to some fundamental concerns that BG3 doesn’t really. There’s a theme that leads to ambiguous questions even if the presentation itself isn’t always the best.

    I’m going to finish it for sure but it’ll probably be a while before I try to get into Deadfire. Might jump to something like Underrail since that’s turn-based instead.