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The reasoning is that I have a specific hypothesis why the game is how it is, and I want to confirm it for myself. baldur’s gate 3 seemed to have a very troubled development, with nearly every beta promise going unfulfilled in the release for the sake of strange “sexual” content added into every corner instead. those who follow “need news” or finance would be aware that wizards of the coast has been hit with some hard times, with their parent company hasbro almost going bankrupt before bg3 was released. hasbro/wotc was able to pull out of it just barely after bg3’s release by shutting entire divisions and firing thousands of employees. Add in the most astroturfed media and community reaction to a game since legend of zelda breath of the wild, and it all paints a very specific picture of the happenings.
It’s clear corporate issues made larian money-concious, and with no money left to fulfill their original roadmap they therefore searched for “alternative funding” which required inserting specific ideologies into the game’s forefront. Game was then rushed out the door unfinished with said ideological material graffitied over the top to secure the aforementioned “alternate funding.” My hypothesis is therefore:
The game has a somewhat promising rpg core that was never finished, and when you disregard all of the ideological trappings what you will be left with is an interesting idea with wires and tool marks sticking out of every corner.
That said, I in no way believe the game ONLY added in said ideological trappings just to get the world bank to spot them a few million fivers. While the beliefs of larian's management have been known for years just by observing their games' stories, not to mention the management's affinity for affectionately mentioning "cuckolding" on twitter, it's clear larian wanted to do more. Just a few months before release, larian's head was going on their official forums promising lack of hair and face customization would be fixed in the release. Come release, no meaningful promise was kept but apparently pubic hair and floppy penises (I wish just matter-of-factly describing this game didn't sound like such an absurdist parody) were more important than even making sure the game worked at all on amd cards. Clearly something or someone got to larian in those last few months, and it would be nice if one facet of today's world would even be believed of as possible to someone just 10 years ago. As an aside I watched some old gameshows from as recent as 2008 and it's like looking at another planet, with some videos from 1999 appearing like something out of a storybook compared to now.
So before I drive myself mad on a tangent, I believe the caveats to the "larian is just inserting their views because they truly believe the state religion" rhetoric:
1 wotc has been having some financial issues for quite a while now.
2 all the worst parts of the game’s narrative trappings have been a problem with dnd itself for over two decades now.
The first one is simple, and it’s a direct result of the second one. The first is simply that years of mounting hostility between wotc and their old guard “white male nerd” fanbase, lead to a breaking point when the release of 5th edition dnd met the pandemic, although this problem has been mounting since the 1990's culminating in the mess that was 3e in 2000. Something so horrible that even the horndogs and their "goth gfs" were taken aback by the decline in quality for years on end, before an even more degenerate subculture took their place in the late 2000's. But what of that grognard vs. wotc shadow war?
Basically multiple groups of grognards alongside some (now very rich) lone wolves created worldwide piracy and intellectual property infringement rings to get revenge at wotc’s putting ideology and greed before making quality games.
Some of said grognards had contact with disgruntled employees who would feed the groups raw files and even unreleased material, others would make their own homebrew wdnd books and magic cards and sell them printed to look like official materials. Either way, grognards were making, selling, and buying counterfeit wotc products for YEARS and wotc got nothing in return. One may not personally know about or take part in this, but my clear point is that *the old guard did and does*. The brOSR (and some of the more "edgy" parts of OSR overall) community, for example. doesn't just play on old 2e sourcebooks or use multi-thousand dollar richard garield magic cards, they play the new stuff just like you do: they just don't pay for it. As Alexander Macris says, the "renaissance of old school dnd" that started in 2008 has been going on for longer than old school dnd has (kind of like how the world's most famous beatles tribute band "the fab faux" has been in commission for longer than the beatles).
All of the grognards in question used the same tricks of starting shell corporations in various countries around the world (focusing on countries that were tax free and intellectual property non-respecting); usually the home office would be a llc in a tax free place like ireland, run by a holdings company in china who does not respect western copyright and trademark, and all “owned” by a po box in a non-extradition, tax-free tropical country.
How do they escape prosecution or being sued? Because no government nor wotc can do anything about this. Why? This same shell game is used by every corporation and billionaire on the planet to steal the ideas of smaller companies and to protect their wealth from ever being truly calculated. In other words, to sue these men wotc would shoot themselves and every other corporation in the foot because they do the same dirty tricks and would therefore set precedent for them to be sued as well. If the us or eu governments were dumb enough to prosecute these men, then they would not only have to arrest the management of every corporation worldwide, every politician, and every unelected bureaucrat including themselves.
In other words, it was not worth killing global capitalism just to go after a ring of very intelligent nerds with a lot of time on their hands; and so wotc/hasbro/the entire nerd industry at this point was named an acceptable sacrifice to keep the whole machine going. Needless to say, wotc has been petty in life so in death they would be no different, so as they have been collapsing these past few years they have been quite eager to spit on their former “chud” fans who gave them a mortal wound.
But is that the extent of #2? No. Despite all this, the rot goes even deeper than wotc biting off their own nose to spite the people who justifiably killed them (though hasbro has restructured just since August to be almost exclusively wotc focused just to keep both afloat). The spite just accelerated something that has been going on since at least the late 1980’s.
Anyone who played dnd in the early 90’s remembers a shift in the nerd culture. Gone were the days of a mathematician, architect, engineer, doctor, and patent attorney who met in freshman calculus in university, and bonded over communal games like dnd and so played these games well into their adult Married lives just to keep in touch with friends. Eventually this was not a sustainable community, which caused Richard Garfield to create magic the gathering in 1993 as a side-game of dnd to be played by these aging nerds who didn't have time to play offical dnd anymore This eventualy revitalized the community by normalizing random meetups and pickup games in comic shops and the like in the 1990's. That magic released as a game not affiliated with dnd is a result of a wotc marketer named mark rosewater (who was later promoted to lead designer), who also came up with the idea of selling cards in booster packs like baseball cards. Garfield wanted every card to be released in the starter set/expansions like dnd did with sourcebooks, and like Garfield would eventually do with Netrunner before wotc shut it down with lawsuits TWICE.
This revitalization seemed to work for a time, even bringing in new blood. Unfortunately, much of the new blood was not to the standard of the grognards of yore. The professional class nerd ran for the hills when lonely women (who were rapidly "increasing" in their own way) suddenly became interested in “nerd culture” after the proliferation of “dark fantasy” novels with vampire/werewolf/“gothic” themes in the 1980’s. By the early 1990's that was left were the young, single “loser nerds” who welcomed their new queen bees in the off chance one it would be their turn to have sex. The magic the gathering boom to the dnd community only made this worse.
People these days do not remember just how popular “live action role playing” stuff like vampire the masquerade was then; it was basically the socially clueless version of modern hookup culture. dnd groups with a female in them were just speedruns to find out which of the girl’s harlequin romance books would be acted out first on the table and then outside of the game by wahtever "mallrats"-style teen nerd was in attendance. the entire reason figures like kevin smith and his friends are apparently all sex addicts is because of this very subculture.
By the early 2000s, the mass influx of millennial livejournal and deviant art kids into nerddom just about ruined any place “chuds” had left in the dnd scene. Over two decades of this coalesced with a top dnd content creator making an essay a few years ago about the major flaws of the dnd scene: the people you want to play dnd with are turned off the game for good, the people you don’t want playing dnd are desperate to play. Not to mention that she feels unsafe playing public games due to leery, hypersexualized nerds who clearly think the table is a swinger’s party, apparently the reason kevin smith now takes pictures of himself every time he cries is precisely because his nerd hookup community isn't what it used to be!
All the young and old professionals who can easily split the difference between the analytical and the creative. All who understand social cues and can use them to weave compelling narratives that show and don’t tell. All who are just genuinely interesting and well-adjusted people. All the people you want to have around you. All are gone and not coming back. Oh, sure some still play, but they are off playing closed, invite-only games in increasingly traditionalist and right wing circles. Not to mention while making millions off of counterfeiting “dewoked” versions of wotc’s intellectual property on the black market.
Who’s left? People who can’t understand social cues at best, and who actively transgress them on purpose at worst. Who are neither analytical nor creative, and instead base to the point of being debased into the bestial. Who are severely depressed and often dangerous. Who are in a race to make everything hyper-violent, hyper-sexualized, and drenched in hyper-sadomasochistic violent sex. Who are incapable of doing any role play that does not involve “modern person with visible “kinks’ dresses like a Middle Ages clown and tries to reenact self-insert, erotic-fan-fiction of the marvel cinematic universe.”
In that way, this game is very much just a modern dnd campaign grafted onto a tactical crpg husk.
Instead of thinking that each of the characters here are meant to be believable parts of a unified story, think of each character as being the "mary sue" “oc” of a half dozen heavyset nerds with sherbet-colored hair all huddled around a table in some unspeakable room of horrors, trying to each "main character" themselves through hours of "mcu meets medieval" before "yiffing" each other into the vile depths of hell itself.
I remember getting into an argument on twitter some time ago with this 30+ year-old, comissioned-furry-avatar “pansexual” who claimed to having “two wives”: one was “Christian” and the other “satanist” and she was a “witch” trying to "live" between “light and dark.” If you can imagine this game is tailor made for that trio who has been trying to live out their old twilight/sonic-mashup-fanfiction in real life, and that each of your party members are actually being piloted by one of them, you can understand this game and have it all make sense even if you are viscerally repulsed by what you see here. I will therefore not look at them as anything but this and will not judge them by the same standards I would everyone else in any other context.
I know the people who wrote this game hate me and want me dead. I don't care, not just about what they come pre-programmed to believe but about them in general. Henceforth I will leave any "revenge" to be the sad misery of their lives that they already must contend with day in and day out, and simply focus on the game itself.
Thank God, I was worried I would have to co-op this with you!
Two words: Tom Bombadil.
Talk about boring.
"Do you think it might help to learn the difference between 'being silenced' and people just not wanting to hear you talk any more?"
For example, I did something similar for the mag'har heritage questline and "I am my scars" cinematics in wow, because I wanted to see if the community perception of those scenes were accurate or just fiction. I determined the community perception was wrong, noting subtext and things people just glossed over, and had a blast combing through an entire game chapter inch by inch, talking to every npc, and reading everything I could.
So when I say "analyze" I mean an actual analysis down to the most asinine detail I can muster myself to notice. Never did something like that for a 100 hour rpg but I'm ready, just don't expect this to be done at a quick pace.
I do too, I think a good conversation trumps action, though action is second in line for my favorite.
Some people like long, descriptive scenes of landscapes or body language and my eyes glaze over.
Wall of Text Crits for MEGA Damage!
World Bank head:
So, what project should we fund today? A dam in Brazil? A farmer's market in Indonesia?
World Bank staff: No sir. But this dude named Sven is making a video game.
World Bank Head: send that guy some millions!
And people say RPers aren't imaginative.
BTW, Sven doesn't want you dead. You flatter yourself. He probably never thinks of you at all. Sorry to burst your bubble. He will take your money, though, "LOL".
Do any of you remember totalbiscuit? A law student / lawyer turned hardcore wow raider, turned world's biggest wow youtuber during its pinnacle, turned wow hater, turned youtube's biggest gaming channel, turned sportscaster for league of legends / starcraft, turned gamergate figurehead? Remember how he used to anal-retentively look at settings options in pc games (a perhaps unwise decision considering his untimely passing)? Yes, I am going to do that now... scruinize the settings menu, not get colon cancer.
Firstly I will note the game's launcher seems quite ambitious for something whose only use is to select dx11 for nvidia graphics cards and vulkan for amd cards. There also appears to be a setting for allowing larian to "observe" me in game, obscenely breathing just behind my ears as astarion propositions me if I want "the D" or not. I naturally turned this off. I know there is a launch code I could use to just skip straight to the game and skip the launcher, but I don't trust larian to just take that as an excuse to stalk me. I will therefore leave the launcher there to annoy me until I eventually stop playing this game.
Clicking on play leads to an exciting "hero" banner with the phrase "the dead have a lot to say but will not speak to their killers." This same message pops up every time I open the game, so adding some sort of randomness to these messages was a bigger job than adding floppy penises to the character creator.
Once in game there is one thing I have noticed no matter what settings: this game runs my cpu HOT while my laptop's fan blows like crazy. I currently have a little under 2 hours of playtime in the game exclusively used to dial in the best graphics settings. I capped the framerate at 30, turned the resolution down to a windowed 1200x800, and minimized each graphics settings and my cpu was 70 degrees Celcius. I tried again at 2k, uncapped frames, with graphics maxed, and my intel i9-13900k was a little bit hotter. This tells me the graphics don't exactly mean much in regards to cpu temps here, so I will just go for lower settings with superscaling just to keep my gpu temps a frosty 45 degrees Celcius. If someone can tell me what will make the cpu less taxed, I'm all ears.
I log into the game and notice a very nice and idyllic landscape. Nothing out of order. A statue of a Teutonic looking man is peering over this city that reminds me of Cardiff or some other Norman settlement. Click on anything however and you will be pulled down into some deep cavern as a man who clearly needs medical attention wails right into your ears "UUUUUUuuuuuuuuHHHHHhhhhhhh-AAAhhhhhhhhhh" repeatedly until he decides to start singing in some language that sounds Latin but I Hope isn't. In this cavern is a multi-racial party of adventurers who seem to be on some quest, or at least would be if the artists thought to add a path for them to walk on instead of a straight drop into a glowing, smoking, red pit. There is a giant human skull standing over the stairs that lead to said pit, but little of sense is occuring.
I click on the "credits" option and am instatnly met with a piano melody and a powerpoint text scroll that clearly took a larian intern a very heartfelt five minutes to make. "In Loving Memory Of Jim Southworth, Cinematic Animation Lead" is the first name that appears after the studio's name. Apparently we now know what astarion was been up to before the game started, and I can only Hope it had nothing to do with "the D" I was hearing about from him earlier.
The "options" menu is nothing special, but it has a lot of rendering options that I just turn off to save resources. The audio section has every sound at 100% which is always a pet peeve of mine. I spend a bit of time fine-tuning my audio settings and the man singing must have had another bite of his taco bell because he's "UUUUUUUUuuuuuuuuhHHHHHHHHHH"-ing again, but this time a woman wailing with a celtic accent (I just know it when I hear it) starts in, and I just can't take it anymore.
For some reason, almost all options in the "accesibility" tab are just options from the other 5 menus, and so I have less than no idea what purpose this serves other than to show someone "hey, we have an accesibility tab!"
For some reason larian had the brilliant idea to replace my razer tartarus rgb to a revolving red radar during startup, but yet I can't have it register joystick movement from the tartarus. Another victim of floppy penises, I assume.
Other than that I don't see anything of note in these settings.
I wouldn't have it any other way.
Oh riiiight, it is just another of "its woke / oversexualized" thread.
/ignore,report, mopve on with my day.
PSA: this game has less sex than a 90s action movie.
Nevertheless interesting, as a non-DnD player, to hear about the origins of DnD and it's further fate (but I'm not sure wether it's trustworthy, my bias-radar went on beeping during reading).
Also literally everything about the 'history of D&D' is suggests an absolutely horrfying world view.