Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General What games are you playing while waiting for BG3?/No Politics version.

Oh, and since it was mentioned before, Armored Core VI looks like a potential instant classic.



Then again From Software didn't really had a single miss since Demon's Souls.
Even at their worst (*aheam* Dark Souls 2) their output generally remains stuff well worth spending time on.

Kind of annoying how this almost overlaps with BG3 and Starfield, though. August-to-September is getting busy.

Despite me not being a fan of Sekiro, From really doesn't miss. I'm not even a big AC fan, but I'll be picking this up on PS5 for sure. Starfield on the other hand..as long as they have creation kit for it, I have faith, but if they don't, oof, that could get nasty.

I wouldn't probably call Sekiro my favorite FromSoft game, overall, but it has by far the best combat mechanics and boss battles in one of their games.
And arguably one of the absolute best in action games, more in general.

Recently I've been playing Path of Exile, Hogwarts Legacy, Pillars of Eternity, Diablo 4 betas and the last one-STAR WARS Jedi Survivor. Yet to finish any of them.

If you're looking for turn-based party strategy - take a look at 'last spell'. It's rogue-like indie though, the graphics are close to 'none' there.

P.S.A. we are barely days away from the release of Age of Wonders 4.


The previews going around are making me think this will be one I'll spend a lot of time with.

Smokescale is next on my list. I made a detour to get the Jacaranda and now it is more HoT. My necro Asura meanwhile is doing Tequatl with avreally fun group.

I played a lot of GW2 back in the day (it’s crazy that the game has been out long enough to say I played it “back in the day”). It’s very fun and well made.

At this point in my life I no longer have the time or inclination to play any live service forever games, but that one will always have a special place in my heart. Good times.

Ranger was my second most played character after my Mesmer. It’s a fun time. Good choice.

Yeah, it is a nice game. I have a Mesmer too, but she is currently on hold.
I don't know, how long I will play, but I want to do the story at least once. And get the Skyscale. But everything in my own time and without pressure.
The world is really beautiful and unique.

I recently added Conan Exiles to my Steam wishlist. Will be the next game I pick up.

Because I don't have a lot of time to play games I have a long game-playing backlog. Once I finish my current P:WotR playthrough, it will be Black Geyser, then the final Solasta DLC, then Conan Exiles, then Starfield.

Played through Demon's Souls on PS5 over the past 4 days. 5 worlds split into different levels, 1-1, 1-2, 2-1, etc up to 5. So around 16 levels total. The x-3 levels are mostly boss levels. Oddly enough, I had the most difficulty with the level 1s. Once I remembered how to play and got a decent sword, I sailed through the 2nd half of the game, and didn't die on the last 5 bosses or so. Was fun though, the remake looks ridiculously good.

Also tried game pass for a month to check out a couple of titles like Redfall, Forza 5, and the Anthem campaign. Redfall was..well, it was a game I guess. I won't be continuing to play it.

Just finished Jedi Survivor ...
And even tho all those technical dificiulties, and lots of problems with powers of protagonist ...
... it was really great game to kill few dozen hours!

Kinda basic story, hardly anything surprising there ... but still, quite fine.
If you liked Fallen Order, you will like this aswell ... if you didnt, well, its the same thing in many ways.

Yay for Storm Midnight Suns dlc coming out next week!

Speaking of Firaxis I started Ironman playthrough of lightly modded XCOM2:WotC. Never done Ironman for that game - felt it was a big too buggy for that. We will see how this one will go. So far so good. One casualty already, when I tried to abuse AI behaviour forgetting that I installed AI mod

edit. I have also been playing some Hitman3 Freelance mode. It's better than I thought it would be. A nice procedural generator of targets and optional objectives making me play maps I know so well in ways I haven't played yet. Definitely the best side content Hitman trilogy got.

I played 600 hours of Elden Ring when it came out. Then I took an 8 month break and now I am playing again and it is still amazing. I don't see playing anything else until BG3 comes out.

Control and Alan Wake was a nice diversion though. Alan Wake wasn't quite as good as Control, and was more survival horror which I am not a huge fan of - but it was cool being inside an AWE from Control.

Can't wait for the Elden Ring DLC - wish we could get a timeframe on it.

I have tried to play Dark Souls 1 but it's frustrating to play after Elden Ring. Its too slow. Dark Souls III was great though but it feels like a sketch of ER. I was warned away from DS2.

Haha. That a reason I am kinda afraid to dip back into DS1. I remember disliked immensly faster combat of Dark Souls2 after playing DS1. The series did become better action games, though I feel DS1 was better action-RPG. I wonder how I will respond to the original combat now.

I didn't spent nearly as much time in Elden Ring as you did (one full playtrhough took me 150hours), but I prefered DS3 combat for the most part. I thought jump attack broke a lot of the combat in Elden Ring. Still, a kickass game, can't wait for the DLC.

Did you try Sekiro?

Read this article about the combat balancing philosophy in Midnight Suns, and it is a design choice I like a lot! Everything is fun but not perfectly balanced. Seems like it might be BG3's philosophy as well!

Here's a bit from the article:
"That's why a game like Midnight's Suns - also XCOM - in their current iteration couldn't be like a 'play forever' [game] like Diablo, for example, which is such a finely tuned game," he continues. "All the stats are so finely tuned and they're brilliant at that. Destiny, too - brilliant! But they have less leeway in terms of their design. I don't care if you said somebody could matrix out all the [Midnight Suns] heroes and their DPS and how powerful they are. They could score the heroes, and I guarantee they'd be way all over the place."

For Solomon, he's absolutely certain "there's clearly a best hero, and there's clearly a worst hero" in Midnight Suns, but levelling them out to make them more Diablo or Destiny-like wasn't ever a concern for him. "That's not our focus," he says. "We focused on the moment to moment of every time you get something, you go, 'Yeah, that's awesome.' I don't care how it matches up on a very, very fine level. We view it from more of a holistic level, they all feel generally equal, as opposed to something that's really finely tuned, like League Of Legends design or Diablo design."

It worked, too. In my Midnight Suns review, I wrote that it wasn't just the best Marvel game I've played, but one of the best superhero games full stop, precisely because it does such a fantastic job of selling you on that superhero fantasy. It's not a total pushover, of course - the sheer number of enemies you have to face with each passing turn does a great job of always keeping the pressure level nice and high. But yes, I must admit that I also probably didn't actually care too much if Iron Man ended up wiping the floor with everyone thanks to his brilliant missile strike cards, or if Magic was able to set up delicious, ricocheting portal grabs so I could drop a massive crane on top of my perfectly placed goon pile at the end of it. It just felt good in the moment, which is what Solomon and his team were striving for.

"The meta isn't as important in a single player game," he concludes. "I think that's the thing. We sacrifice the meta sometimes to make sure that the player's first experience of the game really feels awesome."

Yeah, I saw the article. Solomon games are still balanced well enough for the first playthrough and maybe 2nd playthrough to hold well, while BG3 is more on the broken side. It has more fundamental problem than having "a meta".

To quote the article:
"If you're never going to take this ability, it feels like it breaks the entire hero. You really want the player to say these are all so good, I want to use this ability, I want to use that ability…"

That's where BG3 falls short to me. Too many potential choices just feel underwhelming. The EA has gotten better, so I still hope for a major rebalance for 1.0.

Edit. On further point, BG3 has additional challenge of using same mechanic for players and the enemies. Both XCOMs and Midnight Suns are highly asymmetrical with player character and enemies working of a different ruleset. It is not quite so in BG3, and unbalanced abilities are significantly less fun if one is on a receiving end of one.

Midnight suns is a weird one. It's like Titanfall 2, gets crazy critical reception, but it's just not popular for one reason or another.

I didn't buy it right off, either, and by the time I did, it was already considered a commercial failure! I couldn't tell if I would like the game because I had never played a card-based video game before and also I wasn't sure if it would be story- and character-based enough for me (it was!). When it went on sale, I tried it out and thought it was great!