#Caitlin Plays BG3

[motheatenscarf]

I'm a notoriously slow RPG player and have had kind of a busy day besides, but I have made it as far as the Grove and doing most of the side quests there, and man, they've changed a LOT from early access!

I like Gale a LOT more this time around, they really toned down his superiority complex, he seems more excited to explain things because he's special interest infodumping, rather than like, lecturing you because you're stupid and you need someone to explain these very simple things to you.

I also like that they shortened up the Nautoloid section in the tutorial, they messed up the ship a lot more and cut out the thralls running the cannons. Really added to the stakes that you had to RUN to the bridge.

The camp clothes are adorable and apparently because I was an Early Access player, I got the digital deluxe version for free! So I got lots of fun DOS2 themed clothes and gear and whatnot. Look how cute Rose looks in it!

Things I'm less sure on are Wyll's recast and retooled story. I think it's very compelling to make his goal a conflicting one with one of the other origin characters/companions, but it makes him less personally endearing for him not to care as much about the tieflings in the Grove. The new VA is great, he does sound like nobility this time around, less cocky and self aggrandizing, but I also liked how forced and put-on his bluster felt. You really got the impression before that nobody bought his hype, least of all himself as the man selling it. Idk. I guess I have to put that version of Wyll out of my mind because he seems like a VERY different character now.

I googled why the VA was recast, wondering if he'd gotten canceled for something or other, but apparently they completely reworked Wyll because he just "wasn't connecting with players." Which... is disappointing for a number of reasons.

I'm not very far in, but I'm already wishing they'd just stuck to their guns because we all

KNOW

WHY

players were having a "hard time" """"connecting"""" to Wyll over any of the other characters, and it had nothing to do with his story or his VA. He worked fine as a character, he was internally consistent with plenty of plot hooks into the main narrative with an overarching mystery that would be solved by progressing his story. I'm sure this new version will work too, and he's far from the only character they've retooled personality-wise.

Shadowheart was kinda snide and hostile at first, now she's almost playful if still secretive. Gale was arrogant and condescending, now he's eccentric and excitable. Even Astarian who started out much more overtly salacious and cruel has been toned down to just, general hedonism and selfishness. Lae'zel has always been Lae'zel tho lol.

So like. Idk, I want to take it in good faith that Wyll's actual story has been the most noticeably retooled since his was the most complete narrative we got out of Act 1 from early access, but also, I can't NOT be suspicious when I've seen it happen so many times where devs will "rework" a black character who isn't "connecting" with fans.

[ghoulpepperv]

I was going to hold off until I owned my own copy of BG3 but I couldn't help it lmao. (I still am unable to do screenshots.)

Tiffany Coffindaffer

High Elf - Druid of the Spores

I made Tiffany from @thesoftboileddetectivepodcast. I thought she was going to be a wizard, but druid of the spores made more sense for her in the end.

I really wanted her to eventually raise the dead since Tiffany is very death conscious, but she's also in tune with the very nature of death. So I played a druid for the first time ever and I'm loving it!

She's not death obsessed in the way that she's morbid or depressing. She finds death to be a fascinating part of life that so many people turn away from or are alienated from the grieving process.

I also realize how much this plays with the Tiffany Problem. People don't see Tiffany as an acceptable fantasy name because it feels "too modern," yet it dates back to the medieval period. Long story short, it's derived from theophania, or epiphany.

Tiffany is sardonic, intelligent, and a little aloof. She could be likened to a cat. She's also loyal and kind-hearted. She sees beauty in death and decay in ways most don't.

Life is nothing without death. Our lives meaningless without the ticking clock of mortality to chase us. At least, that's life according to Tiffany.

"Death in its natural state can be very beautiful. When you think about a body that's died of natural causes - family taking care of it - all of that is very beautiful." - Caitlin Doughty

[motheatenscarf]

Okay, the tags to blacklist are the usual;

Caitlin Plays BG3

Caitlin Plays Baldur's Gate 3

BG3 spoilers

I've got a minimum of 3 playthroughs planned for this game, I'm not sure right now if I'm just gonna devour all of them one right after the other or if I'm gonna space them out, but I'm gonna be starting with my tiefling bard, Rose!

[motheatenscarf]

UHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Watching panel from hell, there's a confirmed Halsin romance, congratulations to people who wanted that, but also,

UHHHHH??

bestiality...?? warning??

maybe??

I

i DO NOT know how to classify consensual wildshape fucking, it's not a BEAR-bear, but it's not exactly monsterfucking like a werewolf/werebear where it's vaguely humanoid

like, it passes the Jack Harkness test by EVERY metric, it's just Halsin, still with his personality and intelligence and capable of giving informed consent, but fully transformed into an actual literal bear like one might see digging through their trash, and...??

better safe than SORRY for people who might... need?? to know?? or for those who might be into that?? i don't... know

[motheatenscarf]

Oh, I was so sure Rose my good little bard was gonna be my first real playthrough, but they've introduced The Dark Urge, a fully customizable origin with its own unique story, and that is FAR more rewarding than the blank slate

and it's all about "resist the monster within" and boy oh boy

is that up

MY alley

so I guess I know what I'm playing my first full run of BG3

[motheatenscarf]

I've gone on the record here and elsewhere that I don't especially want any more companions than the ones we already have in BG3, and have especially mentioned that I don't really care about Minsc. I'm kind of annoyed by association because everyone makes reference to his hamster in every Bioware game and like, yes, we get it, people like this character. Even if I had played the first 2 BG games (which I haven't, enormous casts of characters intimidate me, there's a reason I love ff6 but am NEVER replaying it), I'm a fan of letting characters rest and not needlessly shoe-horning in fan favorites just to drum up attention for a game.

Like, I love Varric, he's maybe my favorite character in DA2 (they're all great, it's hard to pick), and I know he's a lot of other peoples' too! Which is why they brought him into Inquisition, even if you could feel his frustration for the entire first act because why the hell was he here? What was there for him even to do? And I'm worried he'll have even LESS to do in Dreadwolf, so I'm kinda conflicted.

And then when BG3 announce Paladins, they announce that Matt Mercer is gonna be voicing Minsc. ...

Well played, Sven.

Well played.

[motheatenscarf]

Playing BG3, finally got through the Goblin camp again as Rose this time, I have a weird bug where apparently the first time whenever I camp in a different area other than the Wilderness, like caves or the underdark, that becomes “True Camp” where companions return to. So, whoever I had in my party at the time was who got to go to the tiefling celebration afterward.

So, sadly, I didn’t have Lae’zel in the party, so I won’t know who she hooks up with if you romance Gale, which is honestly devastating, I was hoping it would be Astarion so I could see if literally all of the men disappointed her. But I did see the Gale romance, he’s a good fit for Rose, except for the part where he’s WORSE THAN ASTARION about setting the right mood.

HOW COULD IT BE WORSE, you ask? He doesn’t strand your character buck ass naked on the bare forest floor, literally anything would have to be better than that, right?

Right?

No.

At least Astarion took Aashi the FUCK AWAY FROM CAMP, oh my god!

Scene fades in, Rose is sitting on the little bedroll around the camp fire with Wyll and Shadowheart asleep on the other bedrolls nearby. 

Huh, weird place to start.

Oh, Gale’s... sitting down.

Wait. No. Here? NO!

Cut to under construction mindflayer. 

Okay, maybe they moved. Maybe it’ll cut to a different part of cam-

Nope, he’s gonna tell her about Mystra now and we are still... in camp... same spot where they left off...

I’m so sorry, Wyll and Shadowheart. Rose is officially your terrible college roommate. 

[motheatenscarf]

It’s been a couple weeks since I finished my bard run of BG3, and I def don’t want to burn out on the game before full release so I’m not gonna replay it again yet, but MAN.

I cannot overstate just how much of an investment and buy-in effect it has on the narrative to just be able to stop anywhere and play music.

I know mechanically it didn’t add anything, but I loved getting to play the bard dance tune for the happy myconids who were swaying with joy after I helped them. I loved stopping and playing the power ballad as an NPC grieved the death of his wife. I love that Bard NPCs nearby will always join you when you stop to play. 

I know I’m just a big sap but this just.. really adds something to the world for me, to see even out of cutscenes, even without dialogue, actual human characterization and bonding and getting to make the world feel real and connected just by playing music together and for others. 

That’s fucking special, man. It makes me feel things or some shit.

The score was already one of the strongest aspects of this game, but goddamn, if they don’t keep finding ways of making it better.

As much as I love Aashi, I already know my first playthrough is gonna be with Rose. Bard just hits different.

[motheatenscarf]

DEVASTING BG3 news, the game no longer rewards opportunistic cannibalism,  since eating food no longer heals you, everything counts towards “camp supplies” to help you get a Long Rest in, and the roasted dwarf does NOT count toward Camp Supplies

I repeat, we no longer gain nutrition from eating the cooked dwarf meat the goblins had already slaughtered and cooked before we even arrived.

I feel cheated. I feel robbed! My bard would NEVER, but BY GOD, my ranger knows that beggars can’t be choosers and everyone is made of meat in survival situations! 

[motheatenscarf]

Further differences since the last time I played, they’ve really rounded off the edges to Shadowheart’s personality. Idk how I feel about this.

On the one hand, I was kinda frustrated by how standoffish she was, it made getting to know her and care about her difficult, but it also made it feel earned when she opened up a bit. She’s... legit almost friendly now? Where is my snarky Shar worshipper who can’t muster a single kind thing to say without it being a backhanded compliment?

She’s so reassuring now that she doesn’t actually hate you and is almost playful. It’s weird. And she’s quieter too, she was the companion I got the most comments out of before on choices I made, I’m hearing a lot more from Astarion, Gale, and Wyll.

Maybe it’s just because Rose is a lot more voluntarily helpful than Aashi, but I worry if this is the result of feedback from people demanding they soften her up. Which just... unsettles me. 

[motheatenscarf]

Further Patch 8 BG3 thoughts, mostly Gale related!

I think they changed his appearance? I don’t remember him having earings or the big black mark on his chest before. His face also seems more like his artwork and the animations are more fluid- his mouth still looks off to me, not like, horse-teeth off like he was before, but just off. 

Rose is also a lot more eager to help out her fellow tieflings than Aashi who mostly minds her own business, and they seem to have made it such that companions who aren’t present neither gain nor lose approval (thank FUCKING GOD for that, I can now game the system) so I’m leaving Astarion back at camp a lot more and running around more with Gale.

I don’t know how, but I did finally get a character who got the scenes beforehand where Gale explains how he fell out with Mystra and his frustrations with losing his magic and channeling the weave. It definitely helped paint a more sympathetic picture of him for me, which is good, and Rose is getting along well with him.

It was actually funny to me that he kept describing the weave as being like music or poetry and Rose, a bard, had the option to be like, yeah, that’s literally true for me. I also liked all the bard specific responses there to acknowledge that yeah, this is not a new experience for your character, but it is nice to find someone who also appreciates magic in a similar function. 

So Rose is probably gonna romance Gale this time around just because Jesus H. Christ, I don’t know if they just fixed it so that you don’t have to do this meticulous approval balancing ritual to get these cutscenes with Gale or if Rose just performed the right components in the right order, but it’s probably not gonna happen again so this is gonna be my only shot at it to see what that’s like, so may as well!

[motheatenscarf]

I’ve been playing BG3 again as my bard, and man, apparently I hadn’t played any BG3 in like... over a year?

Linear time is the pits. 

So, that said, I don’t know how many of these changes were implemented in previous patches that I just didn’t bother to check out, but I’m really loving this game as a bard specifically.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved playing my ranger, but rangers aren’t really known for social interactions lol.

The ability to just stop and play music anywhere is great, and I love that you can jam with other NPCs who are also playing- Rose and the other tiefling bard in the Grove had a jam session, Rose plays Violin (because she’s a tiefling and a fiddling devil is a thing) and Alfira, I think that’s her name, plays a Lute and GODDAMN, it was beautiful. If running Bandicam didn’t make BG3 crash for some reason, I’d have recorded it. 

I’m also loving how every spell you cast is accompanied by music, and the uses of Vicious Mockery and Cutting Words. This is also my first time playing a tiefling in BG3 and I’m LOVING all the tiefling-specific dialogue, as well as wow, there’s a LOT of bard-specific dialogue!

Rangers had a few options unique to them, but not much tbh. But there’s SO MANY bard specific lines! It’s great! Also, god, I love what good little skill monkeys bards are. I think Rose has only failed one skill check so far, and only because she rolled a natural 1, and even then, I had like 4 inspiration points saved up, so I just used one, rerolled, and passed.

Ha-ha, BARDS!

[motheatenscarf]

Oh shit, bards are in BG3 now!!!

WELP, guess I’m reinstalling that!

[motheatenscarf]

Apparently sometime between when I last played after they released like... patch 3 I think, like almost 2 years ago, and this most recent patch 8, they released a whole new area, the Grymforge, which I hadn’t played through before! I’ll post my thoughts on that another time, this is an overview tho, because now that I’ve gotten past Grymforge, I’ve apparently completed early access again. For the ... 3rd time.

Oof. 

BG3. Love this game. Would love to finish it some day.

BUT UNTIL THEN!

The good news is, it’s looking a LOT more polished now! And my god EVERYTHING is so beautiful. There’s honestly too many things to count and be thorough about but I’ve liked almost every change. Could do without the weird bugs regarding camping in different locations, but apparently those were new with this patch, so they’ll probably fix those soon.

They’ve also added in a lot of new cutscenes or added them where the narrator would just describe visions (now they actually SHOW you those visions!) and have changed a lot of character models around and my GOD! All the changes are so good! Gale looks less boring and generic now, my fluffy boy Scratch is a beautiful long haired pup instead of the short hair lab-lookin dog he was (labs are good, and short hair dogs are perfect, i just personally have always loved long haired dogs and cats even if they’re a nightmare to keep groomed), Karlach looks AMAZING, holy shit, and my god the MYCONIDS! I took TOO many screenshots of everything, but god, the Myconid Sovereign is too beautiful not to show you;

Like, look, I don’t really think “pretty privilege” is a thing (and I say that as someone NOT pretty, like, i’ve seen beauty paint a target on too many people to call it fucking “privilege” like do you people know how bitter and weird you sound when you call it that, you sound like those incel creeps who say women “have it easier” because they get free drinks, ignoring the fact that it’s fucking rape culture that incentivizes bars to do this, GOD, sorry, i made myself angry) but the actual thought that popped through my head when the option to betray the sovereign so another asshole could take over was, “UH, no thank you, you’re way less interesting to look at,” so I guess even mushrooms aren’t exempt from it.

The cutscenes are still kinda janky in a couple places but not many, it’s looking more and more ready. Granted, that’s just what we already have, and it’s been... almost 2 years, lol, but I’m still optimistic about it. Mostly because I’m deliberately not replaying it a lot. Much as I want to provide feedback for them to help make the game better, I don’t want to get burnt out on this game before the final release.

I know I could just make different choices, but like, the problem with games like this is there are really 2 paths you can walk. You can be good or you can be evil. That’s just a staple of the genre without much nuance going into the nature of good and evil in fantasy genres like this. DND is pretty much black and white. For all that they have their “neutral” perspective in the alignment categories, neutral rarely pops up in conflicts. And I’m never going to be able to make an evil playthrough, I’m just gonna be different flavors of “good-ish” characters. Aashi is about as morally gray or neutral as I’m ever gonna go and she still does good she just wants to get paid for her efforts and doesn’t volunteer until shit gets too messy to ignore.

So yeah. I really enjoyed patch 8! I miiiiight make another playthrough as Aashi again just to check out the new content I missed before, but man, I gotta be honest, I REALLY love bard in this game. I love my dumb ranger, but Goblin Squad is pseudo-back for now, so I’m getting my Aashi time out of my system in the way she was intended. Rose is the character I’m missing the most now, so I think she’s the new protagonist for me for now. I’m sad because god, Aashi was a fucking disaster, it was amazing, everything is too EASY on Rose, that high charisma takes her far and makes her TOO POWERFUL, she avoided almost every fight and talked people into and out of crazy shit.

[motheatenscarf]

God, I am loving the musical additions for bard in this game. 

I’m well aware most of my favorite movies and games would not be as memorable without the score, and that good sound design for abilities and effects and whatnot is what mostly sticks in my head. So the fact that spells and effects have unique musical accompaniments is for whatever instrument your bard has on them is just so fucking NEAT and personal to that character and will stick in my head forever. I’m also loving testing out different instruments with spellcasting. 

Also, every time I find a new instrument, I go SPRINTING back to the grove to play with Alfira, holy shit, I want to do a coop run of all bards just to see what all the instruments sound like together, just get a whole band going.

So far my favorites are definitely the violin and the lyre.

[motheatenscarf]

Uh. Whoops?

So me being chronically addicted to melee dps is both the cause of and solution to all of my BG3 problems.

You know the goblins at the Windmill? Well, I had Wyll with me this time, and he picked a fight with the goblin he needed to interrogate, but first made sure to say to leave the little bastard alive.

And I.... you know, I TRIED to do that, but Astarion was up first and he’s, frankly, busted, so I accidentally killed the fucker in one turn.

Except that meant the giant impossible mob wasn’t going to surrender so now it was a no holds barred fight to the death against 2 enemy clerics, a shit ton of archers with the high ground, and TWO wargs. 

And it was damn near a tpk. 

But then it wasn’t because Astarion’s busted build got me into this mess and goddamn if it wasn’t gonna get me out of it. God fucking bless Arcane Trickster. Two haste potions and one sleep spell later and my ranger and Astarion just shanked like 5 motherfuckers to death in 2 rounds.

(apologies for the weird gap, dogs were barking, had to investigate why and paused recording, barely remembered in time to restart it when I finally got back)