With the release of Baldur’s Gate 3, many gamers are wondering if they need to play the first two games before diving into the third. Here’s a breakdown of the plot of the previous 2 games.
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Thanks. Just picked up 1 & 2, and playing the first starting tonight. Do you think I can get through the whole story of both in 4 days?
Maybe. If you know them inside and out, and are willing to no-life it, I’d say probably yes. 1 can be Speedrun pretty quickly and if you know what you’re doing, 2 can be really optimized, though the critical path is pretty long itself.
ToB can be trivialized if you do the right stuff in BG1/2, so BG2 is going to be the sticking point.
Id be tempted to do this if I’d heard this idea a week ago. Act 1 of BG3 drops tomorrow tho so idk
Now that’s a funny proposition: to speed run the game in order to get the story before the 3 comes? :D
BG 2 is my favorite game of all time. I have most of it memorized by this point. Very long game tho.
To say I’m excited for BG 3 is a massive understatement.
The PC isn’t getting the 3 days early access. We are just getting it a month early. The PS5 can get 3 days early if they buy the digital deluxe edition.
Yeah I found out late last night. Broke my heart a little
You don’t need to have played them, but they’re the first and second best RPGs ever made so you definitely should, for that reason.
I keep hearing this, but i cannot get into Real time with Pause. Ive tried Tyranny for 8h, pillars 1 for close to 4h and im currently only getting through pillars 2 because it allows a turn based Mode.
I habe the feeling because RTWP was the norm back then, no game wasted time to explain the System so someone who is New. This makes it incredibly Hard for me to get into the System, and currently heavily discourages me to try Baldurs gate 1 and 2
Not a popular opinion, but I love RTWP, and was sad that BG3 didn’t offer the option. But I still struggle with the D&D action economy, and am forced to get better with it.
Same, I love RTWP and can’t stand slow turn based anymore, looking at each individual skeleton slowly take their action only for them to get oneshot in the next round drives me insane.
The pathfinder games do it best, you can toggle seamlessly between RTWP and turn based, meaning I can go through 80% of combat encounters easily in real time and then pause on tough fights if needed. Best of both worlds.
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Did you try… pausing…? Never understood people who complain about real time with pause when the power to stop the game completely is just part of combat and the name.
They’re fundamentally different systems. RTWP tends to be faster and more reactionary because everything happens at once. Turn-based is more strategic, because you can only react to things after they happen, but it is a lot slower.
RTWP games do tend to have auto-pause options that can be set up to simulate turn-based systems, but no amount of pausing will change the way the game plays when not paused.
I’m well aware of how the systems work. The point is that you have more fine grained control over everything in rtwp even without automation.
Yeah i did but the true skill with RTWP is understanding when party members need to be moved. In my Limited experience its really Hard to Spot, when your in a disadvantageous Situation and youre losing the dps battle. In my case the difference in dps is often only spotted when the combat Has been going for a while, which in return means that a lot of the avoidable damage Has already been dealt
Sorry I’m coming in late, but one example I can give you is I absolutely hated having to lead my Fireballs because of casting time and the enemy running towards me with Haste and different movement speeds. No amount of Pause will change the imprecision.
(Liberal application of Web or Grease helped though, but I cannot stand RTWP for that reason).
Don’t lead your fireballs. Just wait to use fireball until the fight is setup and your tank(s) is in position. I guarantee this isn’t a RTWP issue. Most people complaining about RTWP just aren’t good at the game and refuse to understand more.
Source: played lots RTWP games when I was a literal child and made it work just fine on harder difficulties because I learned how to play the game and didn’t simmer about the combat system being one way or another.
I literally don’t care if yall want to mod your RTWP games to be turn-based or whatever, but don’t act like RTWP is the issue and not your own inability to learn.
Also I’ll add here that not every single fight in these games needs to be a masterpiece of strategy. RTWP allows you to blow through boring grindy combat that doesn’t require strategy if you’re over leveling an area or something. I’ll be doing quests and finding loot while you’re stuck grinding the same turn based combat over and over again.
If I’m used to playing tabletop and wanted to play digital D&D, I don’t really want to have to play completely differently than on tabletop. Having ranged characters being unable to utilise their maximum range increments because of RTwP is something that annoys me.
And it’s not like I can’t, it’s just incredibly fiddly. Blaming players for not “wanting to learn” an experience that is less enjoyable for them is disingenuous. You wondered why people don’t like RTwP, and I shared why: it’s nothing to do with not being able to deal with the speed (your “just pause!” remark meant this, I assume), it’s just a less optimisable experience when solutions like “waiting until the fight is set up” can take literal actions.
(Also syncing attacks is such a pain when everyone can have offset internal timers just because someone had to move one step further to get into position before taking their queued action.)
It’s what makes spells like Web and Grease so important, like I said in my original reply, so I already had my own solution, but it’s a fundamentally different game.
Rtwp wasn’t the norm as far as I remember, but manuals were. So the systems are explained in the manual, but not too well so there were a lot of online guides.
Anyway you are hardly the only person who dislikes rtwp, it’s a crutch system that tries to give you some control over a full party but ends up in a chaotic mess which is slower than a turn based game would be because you have to pause quite a lot.
I loved BG1/2 in spite of its systems, but I can’t play them today.
If you want to play them, I would suggest a low difficulty, and a lower game speed which both lessen the need to pause all the time. Also most of the party should be melee and archers, assign them the basic combat script so they can fight without too much babysitting.
You don’t have to play them for BG3. They are also from a time where you have to read all the text and that could put some people off.
But BG3 will have full acting and cinematics–Big step up. And BG3 is released this week. Yeah!
Because the story was so deep and different.
Thursday is very close. Hope you didn’t plan vacation from work for tomorrow?
