Counterpoint: development of Physint was dropped because it missed multiple development milestones and kept going over budget, something Kojima (a noted perfectionist) has a long history of doing. While Kojima’s games are amazing, I can easily understand why a publisher wouldn’t want to work with him.
Yeah, that was a large part of the reason why none of them worked out. You’d need to redesign every encounter to fit with and be balanced for the new rules, and at that point anyone with the required skillset might as well make their own game.
I’d end up changing like every piece of the rules system if I tried to make it more to my taste.
Fortunately someone already did a lot of the work for you. That’s one of the mods I consider mandatory for every playthrough and lets you freely tweak a tons of rules.
(@mcforest@feddit.org: this site and its mods might be worth checking out when you move on to BG2, though the big one (the fixpack) is already integrated into the Enhanced Editions and there’s a separate mod fixing the remaining bugs.)
Yeah, you’re thinking of Icewind Dale 2, which switched to the Third Edition (pre-3.5) ruleset.
There have been multiple fan projects to port the Baldur’s Gate saga to a newer edition or engine. I think every single port attempt stalled out without releasing anything, though there is a mod floating around out there that changes the Infinity Engine to use a (very limited and buggy) version of the 3.0 ruleset.
A full playthrough of the trilogy (BG1+ToSC*+BG2+TOB) is usually stated as 200-300 hours, for the record. That was before Beamdog’s additions so it might actually be much higher now.
* Tales of the Sword Coast, an expansion for the first game that isn’t considered a full title like BG2’s Throne of Bhaal expansion is.
Right, but I feel it’s still important when recommending NWN to note that it plays differently to every other game on that list. Not bad, it just might not be what people expect going by other D&D games of the era.
(I think Deekin has popped up in a few other D&D products and storylines, which makes me happy. Party on, little Dragon.)
Neverwinter Nights has one massive caveat though - it’s not party-based like the Infinity Engine games. IIRC in the original campaign you can only have one other party member at a time and they’re entirely AI-controlled. I think you can have two AI companions in the DLCs, which still pales compared to BG’s parties of six fully controllable characters.
The DLCs are great though. Hordes of the Underdark is a top-ten RPG.
The biggest mental shift is how in 2e lower defenses are better than higher ones, a completely unintuitive system that they dropped for later editions. Everything else is, while not the same, at least similar enough that you shouldn’t get confused.
The lack of cantrips is another, making low level casters miserable to play due to how carefully you need to ration their handful of spells. The lack of bounded accuracy and class-based weapon proficiencies means they won’t be any use in melee, so they’ll mainly spend their time in combat dealing a few points of damage from a distance using weak slings.
(Though higher-level casters are absurd and can basically solo carry your party, as is tradition for old-school tabletop RPGs.)
2e follows an old-school power curve where you’re pathetically weak at the start and overwhelmingly powerful at the end, but it takes it to extremes. A single bad roll can be a game over in the first game (especially since this edition loves save-or-die effects), while Throne of Bhaal, the final entry in the trilogy, gives every common enemy a +3 or higher magic weapon just to give them a chance against your party and you still mow them down by the dozens.
The sweet spot in 2e is around levels 7-13, which just so happens to be where BG2’s first act sticks you at.
If you loved BG1, the second game will blow you away. It’s a massive step up in quality in every way from the first game.
Second Edition. It’s… not great, especially at the low levels the first game starts you at.
Rockstar claiming that the (vetted for employment) Discord could be infiltrated and become a source of leaks, and stating their own mole is evidence it could happen, would be hilarious if it wasn’t so disgustingly disingenuous.
I still hate FOMO content like this even if they (very rarely) do reruns to let new players grab the old rewards. This kind of thing should be permanent, not something that will vanish after an arbitrary amount of time.
The last I saw, the output of DLSS 5 could barely be tweaked at all by devs (only two variables exposed IIRC?). So it’s not so much optimizing assets as needing to use ones that already look realistic in the first place and hoping the algorithm doesn’t mangle them anyway.
all the screenshots in that article look amazing
The problem isn’t that they don’t look good, it’s that they don’t look right. Modders extracted the DLSS 5 library from this game and tried using it with a bunch of other games, and it completely changes how characters look (down to altering facial structure).
Combine that with DLSS 5 decimating performance even on the highest end machines, while also coming out when nobody can afford to upgrade their GPU, and it’s just a bizarre choice of technology to push right now. It feels like it’s being pushed to keep the AI hype train moving despite there being virtually no market for this tech.
Settings - General - Backup and Restore. Tags and votes seem to be included in the backup, so you should only need to make a backup on the old phone and restore it on the new one.
[…] as we approach Version 1.0, our priority is not simply adding as much new content as possible. Instead, much of our focus is on cleaning up and refining the existing experience, addressing outstanding issues, and making Craftopia as enjoyable and polished as possible for its full release. That means the 1.0 update may not be as focused on sheer content volume as some players might expect.
Meanwhile Palworld’s 1.0 changelog was like thirty pages long. They’re really not beating the allegations that this is just them shoving Craftopia out the door to get rid of a lodestone around their neck.
Whether he helps or not, that kid is probably toast.
I loved StarCraft and Brood War. The sequel felt like poorly-written fanfiction and killed any interest I had in the series.
(You’d think I’d have learned after what they did to Warcraft.)
I’ve played on Linux and I only remember having issues with case sensitivity when compiling mods with WeiDU, which that tutorial covers. There’s also the GemRB project for an open source recreation of the engine, though I don’t know if that continued development after the Enhanced Editions came out.
Ah, the dreaded late-game martial falloff. I had an Archer (a class that can just barely afford grandmastery in one type of bow at the start of the game, making them sniper-accurate when your other party members hit less than half their attacks) that absolutely dominated the first few acts, but became completely useless long before we hit epic levels. It sucks that some builds just aren’t viable long-term.
The NPC party members get hardcoded bonuses attached to unremovable items on their character sheet to keep them competitive - even the casters who really didn’t need any buffs.
I think Edwin’s is the most broken. He has a ring that straight-up gives him 2-3 extra spell slots per spell level, making him far better than any legitimate wizard you can build.