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Aye.

But sadly, that doesn't work out well. As in order to free Halsin, you need to kill all the leaders (Or at the very least, incapacitate Minthara).

Which is part of why "Evil route sucks" is a thing.

Had you been able to infiltrate the goblin camp and free Halsin, he could give you the information about the tadpole and direct you to Moonrise.

With then the choice being about killing the Goblin leaders and getting Halsin as a guide through the Shadow-cursed Lands. Or killing the Tieflings and getting Minthara plus a fancy pixie lantern to take you directly to Moonrise.

Throw in the tadpoles themselves being exclusive to the Evil path and now you have a situation where both good and evil characters rescue Halsin because that's the primary thing you're told to do and the best source of information at the time. But then a choice is made. One is a good path that gets the Grove and Tieflings as allies (And will lead to Last Light Inn as a friendly hub). The other is an evil path that will get you more power and take you directly to the source you want to investigate (Plus it could set you up to obtain more tadpoles by doing errands for people in Moonrise enabling more power)

This could, in theory, also open up additional avenues of how the routes play out.

An evil character could still side with Halsin because remaining allies with the people who seem to actually know about the existence of the tadpoles can be a solid strategy.

While a good character could try and convince Minthara to not attack the Grove and do something else to ally with her as getting direct passage to Moonrise is a logical plan.

Thus creating some depth to choices, where you think about how you deal with the information you're provided. As opposed to walking a specific one-dimensional path.

I fixed the problem.
I uninstalled the GOG software and then reinstalled it.
It didn't recognize BG3. Before manually specifying the game folder, I deleted the contents of the “Launcher” folder in BG3.
I went back to the GOG Launcher and manually located the game folder.
It automatically started the update/verification process, and after that, everything worked normally.
Previous attempts to “Check/Repair” were unsuccessful.
It’s probably enough to just delete the contents of the “Launcher” folder and run verify/ repair.

VSync problem is under bg3.exe which is Vulkan.
DX_11 works normal.

Why do the users need to give their phone number to verify the identity?

Firstly, it's a little disappointing from a privacy point of view. I have no idea who's going to have access to that information, nor how it might be used. Privacy in the US isn't much of a concern most of the time.

Secondly, it doesn't allow to verify the identity, as it claims to do, so I'm not sure what the point is. The only possibility it offers is preventing people from using two different accounts, I suppose, although I'm not sure it actually does (I don't have two accounts nor the motivation to try).

Has this requirement been enabled by mistake, and would it be possible to remove it?

I see what you're saying here and agree it can use some work. I had the issue in BG3 where Gale was trying to "teach magic" to me and the moment I said yes things got 1000% gay. I mean that's cool if that's what you're going for and I'm glad it's there for people that want it, but for me it went from 0mph to 1000mph and from straight to gay very very quickly. One second I'm asking him about the girl he's in love with, the next second he's standing uncomfortably close to me and looking deep into my eyes.

That whole scene always bothered me because of how jarring it felt. I suppose the kind of lame way Bioware used to do it with a heart next to the message would at least warn you not to click it. But I'm not so sure I want icons displaying next to dialog choices. But yea, either way relationships both platonic and not can always use more time to simmer, more options to lead it, and more options to back off or put the petal to the metal.


Agreed. Unfortunately I don't think there's a right or wrong answer here.

I think it's mostly in the hands of the devs on how they want to handle it and it definitely has an effect on the way the relationships feel to the player but I guess it comes down to choosing the right design for the right game.

Update: Part 4, Chapter 38 is now published. Bye Bye, Castle Greyhawk. Hope you enjoy it!

BG3.5 - Hellraisers (Fanfiction)
Baldur's Gate 3.5: Hellraisers - an original fanfic story that is a sequel to Baldur's Gate 3 Fanfic: The Afflicted. It picks up immediately after the events of Baldur's Gate 3 as characters from the previous fanfic - Fiovay, Kai, Aelun, Vlyn, and the other members of their party - travel to Avernus. Their quest is to save Karlach but also to hopefully find and rescue Darson, Aelun's father, from the clutches of Demogorgon.

Here is the link to the blog site: https://baldursgate3hellraisers.blogspot.com/2025/10/baldurs-gate-35-hellraisers.html

I saw a comment somewhere that it was funny to give him a giant weapon looted (well, weapon-dropped) from an ogre or minotaur, so that's what I was trying to do. Evidently he's perfectly capable of picking up things like that, forbidden from PCs by code.

The problem was it's apparently too big to toss to him through the bars. You keep getting a no path warning. This is a change from one other time I did it long ago.

I don't know if this was just a side effect of design, or they wanted to disallow him from ever holding that weapon, which would be bad, because it's funny. He'll hold a full-sized maul no problem, and whack the walls down in one go.


Anyway, for that special case, he will take it in barter mode, after you approve the warning he ain't paying you squat for it.

My favorite was the line in the old INT table that said something like 5 -- Here or lower, character can only be a fighter.


Then there's this fun with Google.

Which is reasonable since it is objectively not "Artificial Intelligence"

It's literally just a bot that runs pre-scripted code.

That's all current "AI" is, in its various forms.

It's only being called "AI" because it tricks people (Notably, investors) into thinking it's actual AI, but it's not.

This isn't bad in of itself (Outside the economic concerns of this investor hype, with it massively impacting prices of computer components and causing lots of Data Centres to get built which suck up all the water and use tons of electricity)

The main controversy surrounding "AI" comes from the way that the current fad iterations function. Which is by training a dataset to regurgitate to users.

For LLMs this means that it will often confidently state wrong information making it a terrible source of data. With the worst aspect being its programmed "Agreableness" where it reinforces particularly dangerous ideas (Like pushing someone towards terrorism or self-deletion - Things that have literally happened)

For Gen-AI this means it goes around and steals tons of real artists work in order to copy/paste it into the stuff it "Produces". Thus not only is its usage tied directly to replacing artists, it's also outright plagiarising them to do so.

As one of them 90's kids, the earliest I can remember is a simple DOS based racing game.
A little bit later, mostly settled on RTS as a genre, having spent time with the more classic RTSs (like Dune 2 or Red Alert 2), but ended up spending years with a more obscure game known as Outpost 2. To the point where I had a whole high-school project centered around making a map mod for it where I implemented the board game of monopoly using the in-game chat to hook into to supplement the player input that would need to go into the code in an easy enough format. All with the help of the small community that kept that title alive through the 2000s.
Never was a genre purist, as some other titles of the time caught my attention, like the Descent games, Hellbender, can't deny having played Doom 2 and some other of those early titles where so many more things could fly in terms of games as they do today. BG1 and 2 were also in there somewhere.

So, factually, I can't actually name a title that made me a gamer. It was more the exposure to games as a whole. In fact, to even list my whole repertoire of games played to date would be largely impossible, as I'd have to count the titles from before I had access to legally purchasing games. A short teaser would include stuff like The Incredible Machine (3, maybe), Empire Earth, Fire Emblem titles (5 through 7, really), even the Sims 2 and 3, diablo 1 and 2, emperor: battle for dune, C&C games down to Generals, the aforementioned titles in this post and on and on. Admittedly, my young adult life was vastly spent with an inordinate amount of play time in Path of Exile, but by this point in time, I have a steam history can rely on for a recap. Prior to that is purely memory-based and we all know how reliable that can be.

I'm not sure how much of a stretch it would be to say that if my Steam library consists of some 200 games from about 2010 onwards, there could easily be another 1-2 hundred titles that I've spent *some* time with at some point prior.

To be fair, I do have clinical ADHD and each game can only hold my attention for *so* long, depending on how much of said game there is to learn and toy around with. I will also not hide from the fact that I had ample time to spend on playing games during a decade-long depression cycle where vegetable wasting daylight playing vidja games would not be a stretch to describe my functionality back then.

It's a little difficult to convey that notion that "even the greatest heroes can end up adventuring with mismatched socks", when the socks may be mentioned once, but the focus will remain on the heroic deeds anyway.

Highlighting hubris is indeed a theme we could do more with, especially given nowadays. Grew kind of attached to a simple quote "The road to hell is paved with good intentions", as it is a simple form for many meanings, ranging from faking good intentions to actual good intentions that went too far and still got one to the same destination. It also includes good intentions that were only perceived as being good, when ,in fact, they were kind of destructive. Like overbearing.
I remember Kreia from Kotor 2, who was mostly lecturing on how both good and evil are largely misguided and their intent can end up causing the opposite they set out for. Of course, this does involve the temporization factor.

But overall, actually making a game where a certain decision earlier on in the story actually leads to a cascading effect where the characters will not even end up in the same locations due to the stuff set in motion by said decision presents the conundrum: how do you make alternate routes that reflect something that happened earlier on whilst also somehow guaranteeing the main plot is followed and the character(s) still feel like they had freedom of choice. But it tends to just be that all roads lead to plot (and Rome).

All we have thus far is the reveal trailer. All the temporization we have is of the TBD, TBA, whenever time frame.
I would hazard at least a couple of years to release and dev diaries in Larian style were more a near-release kind of thing, IIRC.

Whilst the argument is ongoing, my 2 cents:

Just about any long-lasting game series will suffer from human lifespan, exponential growth and the general lack of discussion withing the frame of time relevant to each entry.
To sum up: Within 30 years, we've gone from CRT monitors to LED-based monitors, pixels that you could see with the naked eye to pixels that you might see with a magnifier glass, etc, etc, since that's just how fast the hardware technology has evolved.
Now speaking of the Divinity series, I have personally played them all. Even if the order was more: Divinity 2: Dragon Knight Saga -> Divine Divinity -> Beyond Divinity -> Divinity: Dragon Commander -> D:OS 1 -> D:OS2. The catch would be that Dragon Commander was not even out yet by the time I went through the first 3 titles. Nowadays, I would find it hard to go back to the originals, even if simply because my eyes can only take so much strain nowadays. But if we're to talk about Divinity (series) as a whole, ignoring the early titles that are still cannon to the universe may be unwise.

But then think of each of the titles within their own time frame. Larian has always gone as far they they could push given the technical limitations (as well as studio size and costs) of the times each of those entries were released.
Casual reminder that both D:OS titles were quite literally all-in bargains for Larian.

What remained consistent throughout was the good old Larian flavor. Talking with an immortal lich you're about to fight? Sneak in a quip or two, get a matching retort from the lich, making the dialogue feel way less stiff. Because the more notable characters, at least, have some dimension to them. Bellegar, the mad mage who speaks only in rhymes? Still shows some method to his madness when he actually helps the player character. Whatever the form their titles took, I could never fail to appreciate the Larian...ness(?) sprinkled here and there.
The other aspect that always drew my attention is the art direction. While I am auditory and typically fail to grasp visuals that easily, the sound design and the music kept stirring me onwards as I played each title. RIP sir Kirill, your work will be remembered, but that is not to belittle sir Borislav's work.

All in all, words alone will hardly do justice to Larian's own legacy and it's that very legacy that keeps me coming back. Now, if only the creature mechanic from Divinity 2 (not D:OS2) would sneak its way back into the series. And on that note, what wizards of the universe will grace us this time? :p