Comment by jncfhnb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jncfhnb | Hacker News Reader

I feel… mixed about BG3. Mostly it’s 5e’s fault. The combat is bad. The stats used in game are really stupidly balanced. The game is very easy and full of cluttersome mechanics that don’t matter much. Divinity 2 was way better as an rpg.

The romance has basically no agency and it’s weird that multiple side characters want to fuck you out of nowhere before the person people are identifying as your partner. Frankly the sexual tone of the game is super weird. It’s very tame despite how horny everyone at least for the characters I chose.

The story doesn’t offer you many forks to branch off of. Act 2 is particularly disappointing in this regard.

Act 3 is kind of slog of ticking off boxes and losses the appeal that Act 1 offered imo.

Stopping leveling up at level 12 near the beginning of Act 3 was super lame.

Several character arcs felt extremely underdeveloped (mol, Arabella, zevlor, karlach).

It’s still pretty good though. Good writing and good production values can carry it. Divinity 2 with BG3 production values would have been much better though imo.

It's funny that lots of folks complain about the game being oversexualized while me and my partner - 120 hours in, in Act 3 now - somehow managed to completely fail triggering any romance subplots despite actually trying to raise approval of all the companions (okay maybe we gave up on Astarion). Not sure if it's a somewhat clunky split-screen handling of approval mechanics or just bad luck.

One of the early patches actually fixed some issues with how eligibility for the sexual cutscenes is computed - they were way too aggressive and fast.

Which is probably why you and the OP had such different experience.

I played it a second time after the patch and still found the characters too sexual. Sure, at the beginning everyone was awkwardly horny, but even afterward, I still I got quite some unwanted attention from most companions. It felt a bit like taking the worst parts of owlcat’s romances in WotR where you accidentally romance some of them, and apply it to everyone.

i had to backtrack about three hours when i started act 3 since for some reason Karlach was saying our relationship had fizzled out. i had missed a lot of interactions from not visiting camp enough.

other than that i do remember the companions being really horny for me at the big camp party in act 1. i did find it jarring but one perspective that i liked was that you could look at it as casual sex - games usually treat sex as an end goal for relationship mechanics. its still hard to square it up with almost everyone wanting to get in your pants - but i think that's a by-product of making sure players have choice and i can live with that. it also only happened to me once and once i turned everyone down i wasn't interested in they left the matter alone ( except Gale lol )

I thought the fact that some characters seemed down for casual sex not as a relationship end goal was good too.

I found it outrageous that shadowheart was so reticent, while simultaneously encouraging polyamory and saying she was down for a hooker foursome. Three side characters offered to fuck before shadowheart. Felt like those narratives either should have been much longer and deeper or not there at all.

I’m pretty sure it’s just glitches then. These things are nigh unavoidable with at least some party members. I tried to be as rude to gale as possible at every dialogue but he still liked me.

Split screen did seem to have some bugginess whereby side characters would randomly decide they wanted to fuck whichever player talked to them first, regardless of past interactions.

To me, Divinity 2 felt like the "every fight devolves into a sea of necrofire" game. There are people online who make ridiculous builds and seemingly do 100x the damage I'm able to, but I found the combat to be inscrutable.

Eh. Both games have many exploits that make the game busted. BG3 is honestly way worse because of its consumables systems. But ignoring it and playing a fairly vanilla strategy is probably better.

Divinity 2’s fighting was very unusual but I think it was great in retrospect.

Ah, there is still a lot of room for improvement. People talk a lot about a definitive edition, which should fix the plot holes. They did this before with Divinity 2. And they are definitely already doing it for BG3 on the patches. Mol has more space on the latest patch, and the whole added Epilogue chapter signals that Larian is still up to adding more content to the game. Let's wait for the extra content. I expect some DLCs in the future as well.

> I expect some DLCs in the future as well.

I wonder if that will happen - Larian never released any DLCs for their games, even for successful ones like D:OS2.

I hope they can figure out a way to extend the game to level 20 and make it work as a video game while still allowing high level hijinks.

Probably not. Characters are too busted at 12 already

I'm with you on Divinity 2 having better combat. I loved BG3 but I'm definitely looking forward to Divinity 3. The 5e system just isn't well suited for a video game.

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who finds the game's romantic elements peculiar. I'm fully anticipating backlash for expressing this view, but to me it appears the romance plot was crafted to mainly accommodate various minority groups. This strategy, combined with attempts to make the game entirely non-offensive, appears to have compromised its authenticity and indeed, significantly lessened its believability.

It's a Dungeons & Dragons game, which is one of the least realistic story genres ever created. This is a game world that officially includes monsters like Gelatinous Cube.

Are you serious that the "authenticity and believability" of a fantasy RPG have been compromised by some gay romance?

No, I don't think "some gay romance" is a problem. Being gay is nothing new and you can totally make believeable gay romances. I do think that "being a 2023 san francisco gay in faerun" is making the game feel less authentic, the same way as adding adding flying mindflayer vehicules doesn't make it less authentic but adding a boeing 737 would. And FWIF Gelatinous Cubes also make the game less believable.

Huh. Thanks for being brave enough to articulate that. You're not the only one tired of twinks being the face of gayness.

It's a fucking RPG in a medieval setting about a sadistic world full of actual dungeons. Where are the leathermen? Why are wisened bosses of dungeons not called...Masters?

(I'm jello-sexual. Don't knock the Cube.)

Act 3 mostly

Nautiloids are canonical although smaller usually

I don’t know what you mean by your gay comment. Appearance of the character creator??

they should probably have an off switch somewhere, but I found them hilarious and cheesy like a bad romance novel.

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