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

Thanks. I know the game has some rough patches, so I am not expecting a flawless experience.

It’s definitely janky, but the things it does well, it does really well. I’ve purchased it three times. PS3, PC, and Switch.

When you get some portcrystals (those allow fast travel), I would advise looking up a suggested location list to put them, they make one of the worst part of the game, the back tracking across the same terrain over and over again, much more bearable. Unless they've changed something in the newest versions that is.

Sadly, I agree. I found the game a bit too easy and bit too light on story. It wasn't a bad story but it wasn't very memorable either. I did like the final boss fight.

I think Solasta hampered it's own success when it make the decision to remain small. When it first came out I thought "wow, a group of 12 people did *this*?!" But I took that a promising start - I wanted them to expand, hire some additional writers and someone who is good at modeling faces. But that didn't happen. Still got my money's worth but I was hoping for more.

This is good advice. I’d recommend always have at least one portcrystal in your pawn’s inventory. Whenever a quest takes you out somewhere in the field, place it down outside the entrance to whatever dungeon or location it is so you can come back later. These carry over into NG+, which is very convenient. You can buy these at the shop The Black Cat in the main city.

One of the issues with the game is the stamina recharge can make travel slow. Stamina recharges at a rate that feels balanced for combat, but means you will constantly need to alternate between running and walking while traveling, and this can be annoying at low levels. This is mitigated in the Bitterblack Isle, which is a massive, dark, dangerous super dungeon, so you generally want to be walking anyway. But in the over world, use those portcrystals.

Another bit of advice: playing certain classes will make you weaker in the long run. Your stats increase based on what class you are at the time you level up, and certain classes have objectively better growths than others. So if you are playing an Assassin or Ranger, your character will end up much more powerful than if you play as a Mystic Knight or Arcane Archer. This is a shame, as those classes are really fun. This only matters if you are trying to min/max though, and you can still get through all content just fine even if you aren’t perfectly optimized.

If you play into the late game, upgrading equipment can require finding some very rare drops from stronger enemies. You can duplicate these at The Black Cat for gold, though. It’s good to make use of this feature. Saves a lot of time.

Don’t get too hung up on side quests by the way. There are a lot of them, but it’s easy to burn out if you try do them all. The game was designed with NG+ in mind, so you can never truly miss anything.

And finally, keep an eye on the AI of your pawn and the pawns you hire. Lots of people say the pawns don’t do anything in this game, but that is because many new players don’t understand how to train their pawns and mess them up by spamming the defend me command. This sets the primary AI priority to Guardian, causing the pawn to just hover close to you and only attack something that attacks you.

Never hire any pawn with Guardian (and you’ll notice most pawns are guardians, unfortunately) and if your own pawn becomes a Guardian, make sure to change it. You can do this at the inn in the main city or, even better, by buying special potions from a vendor at the fort a short distance outside the starting town. He will be in the tent where you first get your pawn but doesn’t show up until you’ve progressed a bit further in the story. Look for pawns with the Scather, Challenger, or Mitigator behaviors.

Ya, it was a toss up between Bard or shaman. Didn't know there was a comic, ill have to do some googling later, thanks. I've only gotten a couple hours into the game previously, so I don't really know half those names. But seems well prepped more so than I, have fun.

I just bought Heroes® of Might & Magic® III - HD Edition for 3,74 € on Steam to bridge the last weeks until BG 3 release. The newer sequels never interested me, but part 3 is pure nostalgia.

Ooh, your first full playthrough? It’s totally up to you of course, but I don’t know that I’d choose either bard or shaman for that, as both classes have signature abilities that basically involve them standing around doing nothing if they’re going to use them. I think both can be fun despite that, though I’ve never tried shaman on a BG MC given it’s a more recent addition, but for a first run I suspect something that’s suited to being more active might be more engaging as a protagonist.

And yes, there’s a series of six comics written by Jim Zub and starring Minsc along with his new adventuring party that includes Krydle, the son of Coran who is a potential Fighter/Thief companion in BG1. I think they’re all good fun, admittedly in a fairly quick and disposable way, but from a BG3 perspective I’d definitely recommend the first, Legends of Baldur’s Gate, which shows how Minsc came to be around a hundred years after the Bhaalspawn crisis, the fifth, Infernal Tides, which I believe is a take on the Descent to Avernus campaign which is an immediate precursor to BG3 and is clearly still having repercussions, and the sixth, Mindbreaker, in we discover a strange new cult implanting mindflayer tadpoles into key characters in Baldur’s Gate . I don’t know how canon they’ll be considered for BG3, given WotC seem pretty happy for even official material to exist in slightly different possible versions of the Realms, but the fact that Minsc is in BG3 and Mindbreaker ties so closely into the BG3 story suggest the game will at the very least be taking elements of them.

EDIT: BTW, regarding some of those other names I mentioned, and one thing to be aware of in BG1 if you’ve not played far through it before, is that a few of the companions come in pairs that need to be recruited or dismissed together, unless you find a creative way to get rid of one of them. You may have come across Xzar and Montaron, who are one such pair and likely the first companions you’ll meet other than Imoen. Jaheira and Khalid are another, and while Minsc is first encountered alone I think he’ll abandon you if you don’t help him rescue his witch Dynaheir in a reasonable timeframe. I think Skie and Eldoth are the only other pair, but though chances are you’ll meet Eldoth long before Skie and I don’t recall him being in a massive rush, I personally don’t know why anyone would want him without her and in fact I find their dynamic so perfectly dreadful (and I mean that as a compliment) that I’d not want her without him either.

Thanks for sharing, Icelyn! I'm quite intrigued by Chants of Sennaar which I'd not heard of before. I'll keep my eyes out for reviews of it when it comes out September. Well ... perhaps not immediately in September as I expect to mainly be playing BG3 then .

You said it perfectly here re. Solasta and TA. So very unfortunate. Many of us even tried to make this case for them on their website forum, but I think they stopped reading their own forum a while ago and now only interact with their Discord channel.

While dithering about my next BG1/BG2 run, I've just played through Immortality ... if "played" is the right verb for a game that has you watching and jumping through ostensible footage of the three unreleased films of a vanished actress for clues about what went wrong. If "game" is the right word for what Immortality is! I'd bought it on the strength of a review some time back but not opened it until I was reminded of it by some of the recent chat here about Elden Ring and the potential for video games to take innovative approaches to storytelling. Immortality definitely leverages that to great effect. It's hard to say more without spoiling it. It's a game I'd recommend coming to as cold as possible, and definitely don't read the IMDB page until you've spent some time with it (thankfully I didn't). But I thought it was fantastically acted and it gave me a real sense of discovery and some genuine chills. It's not perfect: while I can't comment on the story for spoiler reasons, I will say that the interface really could have been much slicker given there are so few controls. But I was still very impressed and though I've "finished" the game in the sense I've seen the credits roll, I'm going to take full advantage of the fact that it lets us carry on rummaging through the scenes for things we missed. I still have many questions!

A highly recommended way to spend a few hours (according to Steam my "playthrough" took 14.7 but I'm not sure whether that counts time when it was open running in the background while I did other stuff).

Well, tons of games were announced for september in the xbox game show. Now I fear that many of my friends will disregard BG3 for any of the other games (myself included?). What an unfortunate release time frame...

Currently I am actually playing a newly released game called Mask of the Rose. I believe I mentioned that I backed it on Kickstarter and it finally came out last week. Let me tell you, it was worth the wait. The breadth of options and storylines is so impressive. I heartily recommend it.

What's tempting you that you weren't already aware of, if you don't mind me asking? Not being a console owner I've not bothered following what's coming to XBox.

I only saw 2 Sept releases - Starfield and the Cyberpunk expansion. But Starfield alone is probably enough to be a problem for BG3.

Star Wars Outlaws looks great so far! Will be interested to see more details. 😊

It looks like something that will burn my coputato (or potater?), if i try to run it.
But other than that ... interesting indeed!

Yes, I was aware that Starfield was coming soon, but was wondering if there'd been anything newly announced for September or that was coming but looked much better than folk had thought, ie any new unexpected competition. I wasn't aware of the Cyberpunk expansion but as I've not played that yet I haven't been following it so don't know if that was new news?

There should be actual game footage on Ubi showcase today


The release date for Phantom Liberty is new. That said it is almost month after BG3 so I don't think it should be that much of a compeition. I think Starfield is the biggest black hole here, potentially eating up any coverage BG3 might get - no matter if Starfield ends up good or bad.

edit. Oh, Shadow Gambit releases mid august! Now, that's a big one


Edit2. Ah, Armoroed Core6, August 25th. I knew there was something big I was missing.

I hope so, because cinematics don't really do much for me.