Baldur's Gate III: Pedz Meal Deals [PC/PlayStation 5/Xbox]

Zilnad wrote:Been up since 3am so that's Cazador down and also just finished Jaheira's quest.

So I think I'm ready to go after Orin now

Also, doesn't really matter but does anyone else think their Steam playtime is completely wrong? Mine says I've been playing for 96 hours but sometimes, like just now, I'll come out of a session and the time it adds seems less than I actually played.

I am in no way an expert on Steam, but when playing on my Deck I have noticed that the playtime adjusts between having a game suspended and when you actually close it. Maybe it's that?

kazanova_Frankenstein wrote:

Zilnad wrote:Been up since 3am so that's Cazador down and also just finished Jaheira's quest.

So I think I'm ready to go after Orin now

Also, doesn't really matter but does anyone else think their Steam playtime is completely wrong? Mine says I've been playing for 96 hours but sometimes, like just now, I'll come out of a session and the time it adds seems less than I actually played.

I am in no way an expert on Steam, but when playing on my Deck I have noticed that the playtime adjusts between having a game suspended and when you actually close it. Maybe it's that?

Ah maybe. There have been instances where I've left my PC running for half an hour or so, so maybe it's taking "away" time into account. No big deal, I just like my stats to be accurate as I'm a geek.

I have a friend who just leaves his PC on constantly so his account says he's played stuff for 1000s of hours and I can't imagine anything worse because I actually care about that stuff tracking correctly

Zilnad wrote:

kazanova_Frankenstein wrote:

Zilnad wrote:Been up since 3am so that's Cazador down and also just finished Jaheira's quest.

So I think I'm ready to go after Orin now

Also, doesn't really matter but does anyone else think their Steam playtime is completely wrong? Mine says I've been playing for 96 hours but sometimes, like just now, I'll come out of a session and the time it adds seems less than I actually played.

I am in no way an expert on Steam, but when playing on my Deck I have noticed that the playtime adjusts between having a game suspended and when you actually close it. Maybe it's that?

Ah maybe. There have been instances where I've left my PC running for half an hour or so, so maybe it's taking "away" time into account. No big deal, I just like my stats to be accurate as I'm a geek.

I feel the same - i'm still lobbying for an activity tracker like the 3DS had. That was a thing of beauty.

rinks wrote:We know Philbert was already in talks with Larian to get it released, even if it meant a compromise on the Series S feature parity. Maybe his keenness extended to GP. And 8th December is pretty late to be announcing a 2024 release date. Holding it until then for a huge immediate-release GP announcement would make sense.

https://metro.co.uk/2024/01/17/baldurs- ... aic_gaming

rinks' insider knowledge really shone through on this one.

Shut your face.

Passed the point of no return this morning. Hoping to finish it tonight. It's been a ride.

Absolutely will be playing it again but might like to go back and play the old ones before that.

Will be dipping back in for a bigger session today. Hoping to mop up some act 3 quests.

The latest hotfix strawberry floated up the House of Hope so I'll be leaving that quest for a little bit!

I started this last week, at first on PC but tried it on Deck and other than controller over keyboard & mouse (which I prefer for BG3) it plays lot smoother so I'll do it on my Steam Deck. I'm being gay for my dragonborn but also Halsan lmao I was like "oh no he's even hotter in motion" as I met him for first time.

My current party is me (Fighter/Battlemaster), Karlach, Wyll and Shadowheart and I think I've hit point where I can move to Act 2, but I'll hold off and try to mop up anything I might've missed in Act 1. I usually play rogue or mage but wanted to be tank-y for once. Not sure if I'm doing it right, but oh well! Learn as I play along really.

Has the latest hotfix made light sources go a bit fucky for anyone else? Like fireplaces and candles, reflections off weapons/armour etc all have dirty great streaks coming off them, in big diagonal lines of dots. It's very distracting!

Zilnad wrote:

Drej wrote:

FatDaz wrote:No such thing as cheesing. It’s how D&D is played. Sneaky preparation and controlling the battlefield!

Well It definitely felt like I cheated my way out of it, as it glitched Cazador a bit, but I hold no regrets

Finished Shadowhearts storyline yesterday... Is till went for a bit of a preemptive attack but I must say that Im pretty proud on how I used the battlefield to my advantage

Sbstituted Astarion for Wyll, and cast Plague spell on a large chunk of thebattlefield with shadowheart and then firewall from side to side on the successive part, Then cast mind sanctuary to take some extra ranged shots at the enemies who were stuck taking damage form the AOE Spells

It did take a couple of tries, but I think it was the first time I had a proper battleplan.

That does sound like a great battle plan! That was the fight I cheesed though Started a conversation with the lead baddie and got Astarion to stab her to death while locked in the conversation!

I did kill everyone else on the way back out though!

that cheese is basically astarion's reason for existing!

The house of hope is epic form start to finish
The fight and the music for the fight with Raphael!!

had to put it on explorer mode though and even then I struggled, that is just too tough for me.

This game is just meant to be replayed over and over, so many decisions to make that will upset your characters... Got the orpheus hammer and now need to decide between the emperor and lazael, gonna leave that till the very end and opt for siding with lazael on my first run through

aayl1 wrote:Will be dipping back in for a bigger session today. Hoping to mop up some act 3 quests.

The latest hotfix strawberry floated up the House of Hope so I'll be leaving that quest for a little bit!

How so? I don't think I experienced any issues with the house of hope.

The game does feel buggier in Act 3 though

At the end now. Assuming this camp site is a final epilogue of sorts.

105 hours and yet I know I've still missed a lot and the game will be endlessly replayable.

I almost want to jump right back in from the start but I definitely want to play some other games first. And like I say, I may go back and try Baldur's Gate 1 first.

Drej wrote:

aayl1 wrote:Will be dipping back in for a bigger session today. Hoping to mop up some act 3 quests.

The latest hotfix strawberry floated up the House of Hope so I'll be leaving that quest for a little bit!

How so? I don't think I experienced any issues with the house of hope.

The game does feel buggier in Act 3 though

.

The Invitation does not get rid of the barrier! Maybe only affects some people.

This runs well on Steam Deck? Seeing it all over the BAFTA’s has made me want to give it a shot but I’d only be able to play a game like this portably

ITSMILNER wrote:This runs well on Steam Deck? Seeing it all over the BAFTA’s has made me want to give it a shot but I’d only be able to play a game like this portably

You'll need to drop the graphic settings right down, or it chugs like a mummy strawberry floater. It looks pretty ugly on low, but FSR smooths it out a bit so it's at least passable.

I'd keep in mind though that the battery life is terrible while running this, 80-90 mins on a full charge if you're lucky.

All in all it's serviceable but I wouldn't want to play a whole playthrough like that.

Choclet-Milk wrote:

ITSMILNER wrote:This runs well on Steam Deck? Seeing it all over the BAFTA’s has made me want to give it a shot but I’d only be able to play a game like this portably

You'll need to drop the graphic settings right down, or it chugs like a mummy strawberry floater. It looks pretty ugly on low, but FSR smooths it out a bit so it's at least passable.

I'd keep in mind though that the battery life is terrible while running this, 80-90 mins on a full charge if you're lucky.

All in all it's serviceable but I wouldn't want to play a whole playthrough like that.

Ahh ok, it will be a while before I get to it realistically so may just wait until the next Steam Deck arrives and play it on that instead. Cheers!

Getting into Dimension 20 via Dropout in the last month or so has made me jump back into this. I’m picking it back up nine hours into the game and have just made it to the Goblin Camp after meeting the Githyanki crew. As much as I still really like the overall story and setting so far, I absolutely freeze like a deer in headlights when it comes to the combat system and levelling up. The restrictiveness of spell slots unfortunately makes me treat them like special items in other RPGs where I insist I have to save them for a harder fight than the one I’m struggling with, so I end up just going down a more conservative route with physical attacks. Same with the choices when levelling up, where I have a general fear that I’ll trick myself with a choice around classes and multiclassing that seems neat but is secretly an absolutely stupid decision that will set me up for failure fifty hours later.

I’m not sure how to get passed that feeling to be honest. I suppose attacking the group of goblins guarding the camp (which I know now was completely unnecessary ) did lead me to realise I should be looking at using the environment more generally during combat, when one of them rolled a boulder trap towards my group.

By the way am I supposed to be able to use Detect Thoughts on every single goblin in the camp or is that a consequence of accidentally stealing the Artifact off Shadowheart really early on? Something doesn’t seem quite right there.

Cuttooth wrote:The restrictiveness of spell slots unfortunately makes me treat them like special items in other RPGs where I insist I have to save them for a harder fight than the one I’m struggling with, so I end up just going down a more conservative route with physical attacks.

On the normal difficulty, the game is balanced such that you can Long Rest whenever you run out of spells. In fact, you'll miss a lot of interesting character interactions if you don't Long Rest regularly.

But if you still find the resource management stressful, Wyll is a spellcaster whose Spell Slots come back after a Short Rest rather than a Long Rest.

By the way, there are a couple of points in the game where leaving an ongoing situation to go Long Rest will cause you to fail at that situation, but those are made fairly obvious -- like "this person is being attacked by a monster right now" (they will be dead after a Long Rest), or "these people are trapped and have run out of water" (they will die in two Long Rests), or "this person will be executed in five days" (they're dead and gone if you ignore them for, you guessed it, five Long Rests!).

Cuttooth wrote:Same with the choices when levelling up, where I have a general fear that I’ll trick myself with a choice around classes and multiclassing that seems neat but is secretly an absolutely stupid decision that will set me up for failure fifty hours later. I’m not sure how to get passed that feeling to be honest.

Do you have a companion called Withers at your camp? If you don't, you really ought to go back to the crash site and make sure you've thoroughly explored nearby.

He can re-spec any character at any time, including both their stats and their class choices. If you regret how you chose to set a character up, Withers can help you change it.

To be clear, that applies to all the characters -- if you like an NPC character but they don't fit into your party or playstyle, you can change their stats, class, and level-ups as many times as you like.

Cuttooth wrote:By the way am I supposed to be able to use Detect Thoughts on every single goblin in the camp [...] Something doesn’t seem quite right there.

Detect Thoughts is a Ritual Spell, which means you can cast it as many times as you like without expending a spell slot, as long as you aren't in a combat encounter.

What does the spell do? Mechanically, the spell grants the Detect Thoughts Condition, which lasts until the next day or until your Concentration ends. (You can only Concentrate on one spell at a time. Also, Concentration has a chance to be be broken whenever you take damage.)

Anyway, I think that explains why you can Detect Thoughts all the time after you learn the spell, and/or why you can Detect Thoughts for the whole rest of the day after you cast the spell (even via a Magic Item, Scroll, or Potion).

Cuttooth wrote:Getting into Dimension 20 via Dropout in the last month or so has made me jump back into this. I’m picking it back up nine hours into the game and have just made it to the Goblin Camp after meeting the Githyanki crew. As much as I still really like the overall story and setting so far, I absolutely freeze like a deer in headlights when it comes to the combat system and levelling up. The restrictiveness of spell slots unfortunately makes me treat them like special items in other RPGs where I insist I have to save them for a harder fight than the one I’m struggling with, so I end up just going down a more conservative route with physical attacks. Same with the choices when levelling up, where I have a general fear that I’ll trick myself with a choice around classes and multiclassing that seems neat but is secretly an absolutely stupid decision that will set me up for failure fifty hours later.

I’m not sure how to get passed that feeling to be honest. I suppose attacking the group of goblins guarding the camp (which I know now was completely unnecessary ) did lead me to realise I should be looking at using the environment more generally during combat, when one of them rolled a boulder trap towards my group.

By the way am I supposed to be able to use Detect Thoughts on every single goblin in the camp or is that a consequence of accidentally stealing the Artifact off Shadowheart really early on? Something doesn’t seem quite right there.

What I would recommend is having Karlprof in your twitch chat to explain it all, very handy.

No I don't remember anything.

site23 wrote:

Cuttooth wrote:The restrictiveness of spell slots unfortunately makes me treat them like special items in other RPGs where I insist I have to save them for a harder fight than the one I’m struggling with, so I end up just going down a more conservative route with physical attacks.

On the normal difficulty, the game is balanced such that you can Long Rest whenever you run out of spells. In fact, you'll miss a lot of interesting character interactions if you don't Long Rest regularly.

But if you still find the resource management stressful, Wyll is a spellcaster whose Spell Slots come back after a Short Rest rather than a Long Rest.

By the way, there are a couple of points in the game where leaving an ongoing situation to go Long Rest will cause you to fail at that situation, but those are made fairly obvious -- like "this person is being attacked by a monster right now" (they will be dead after a Long Rest), or "these people are trapped and have run out of water" (they will die in two Long Rests), or "this person will be executed in five days" (they're dead and gone if you ignore them for, you guessed it, five Long Rests!).

Yep, I am definitely taking advantage of Long Rests after most combat encounters after using up Short Rests (Wyll is currently in my squad as well to take advantage of Warlock spell slots) but it almost turns it into a survival horror to me, if you can imagine that having a couple of hundred points worth of supplies sort of amounts to having five ink ribbons in Resident Evil, if in that game a shotgun could only be reloaded in a save room. I know realistically there is basically no chance of actually running out of camp supplies, especially at a normal difficulty, but I guess it's still something I just need to get over. I didn't actually know that about instances where Long Resting will negatively resolve a situation (I don't think it can have come up yet) so I'll look out for that!

Cuttooth wrote:Same with the choices when levelling up, where I have a general fear that I’ll trick myself with a choice around classes and multiclassing that seems neat but is secretly an absolutely stupid decision that will set me up for failure fifty hours later. I’m not sure how to get passed that feeling to be honest.

Do you have a companion called Withers at your camp? If you don't, you really ought to go back to the crash site and make sure you've thoroughly explored nearby.

He can re-spec any character at any time, including both their stats and their class choices. If you regret how you chose to set a character up, Withers can help you change it.

To be clear, that applies to all the characters -- if you like an NPC character but they don't fit into your party or playstyle, you can change their stats, class, and level-ups as many times as you like.

Yeah Withers is in my camp and I know I can respec for a price but I guess that paralysis at trying to work out the best choices, without a deep enough grasp of how D&D functions still creeps in. Again I realise a lot of this is really just a bit of a mental block!

Cuttooth wrote:By the way am I supposed to be able to use Detect Thoughts on every single goblin in the camp [...] Something doesn’t seem quite right there.

Detect Thoughts is a Ritual Spell, which means you can cast it as many times as you like without expending a spell slot, as long as you aren't in a combat encounter.

What does the spell do? Mechanically, the spell grants the Detect Thoughts Condition, which lasts until the next day or until your Concentration ends. (You can only Concentrate on one spell at a time. Also, Concentration has a chance to be be broken whenever you take damage.)

Anyway, I think that explains why you can Detect Thoughts all the time after you learn the spell, and/or why you can Detect Thoughts for the whole rest of the day after you cast the spell (even via a Magic Item, Scroll, or Potion).

You know, I think I've got confused and assumed the constant messages of being an authority was linked to being able to use Detect Thoughts. But thanks anyway for the tips!