Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of August 20th

Chloyster [she/her]@beehaw.orgmod to Gaming@beehaw.org – 65 points –

Another week another thread. Whatcha y'all playing? And why is it Baldur's gate 3?

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While everyone has been talking about Baldur's Gate 3, I decided to cave in and started a replay of Divinity: Original Sin 2. Well, yea, I got a ten years old PC and a Ps4!

Still, what an excellent game. The easy mode goes well since the battlefields are chaotic, there's not a single combat that I go through that doesn't involve 1)Setting everything on fire 2)Shocking a large portion of the characters 3)Poisoning a large portion of the characters 4)Mixing all that because elemental interaction exists (Poison + Fire makes NECROFIRE which is a harsh and often deadly punishment)

But the questing and adventuring still stands out well. This is a game that has a somewhat large map, but unlike most open world fillers its a dense map. Every corner has a named NPC with a little trouble to solve, and there's no "random cave with nameless mobs" to venture into; Every single place you can go has a little lore, a little story, something important that makes the world feel alive.

Its no surprise Larian has been taking the world by storm lately, and I'm glad this has aged so well so folks can try an original setting whenever the BG3 hype cools down.

While everyone has been talking about Baldur’s Gate 3, I decided to cave in and started a replay of Divinity: Original Sin 2. Well, yea, I got a ten years old PC and a Ps4!

I'm sure your PC could run Baldur's Gate 1 and 2... 😉

I would not wish Advanced D&D THAC0 mechanics on my worst enemy

all these years later and i still cant fathom why they went with an inverted dc scale

Inherited from naval wargaming, where it came about because first rate ships of the line had better armor than second rate etc. so armor class scaled inversely. That meant THAC0 was the best way to figure out what you needed to roll to get a hit.

It's also not functionally that complicated (your THAC0 minus target AC), just weird and confusing if you try to understand why it works that way.

I can kind of get that, if they kept 1 as the hard cap on AC. But they have 0th rate as the reference point, and then bizarre instances of negative AC. A minus third rate ship reads like a dingier third rate ship, not better than a first class ship.

I'm playing BG3 right now, and am thinking about giving D:OS2 another shot. I played it around release and got off the first island, but stopped after that. Although, maybe I should wait a bit more, so I don't get burned out so soon on this type of game.