Where do I begin with this hot piece of trash? It's been lauded as the second coming of Christ when it's the second cumming of Chris. I hate this game so much for so many reasons that it'll take a longpost to fully explain exactly why this garbage should be avoided at all costs. Sorry for the lack of new Hollys. I'm writing this in a bit of a hurry.

The Game is a Technical Nightmare

When the game launched, it was full of bugs and this is something reviewers were too scared to report on. The game started off iffy and only got worse with every Act. It's months later and things haven't gotten much better despite what Larian Studios might tell you. I'm still in the first Act and I am encountering annoying bugs and glitches that force me to reload an autosave. The game is too big and complex for its own good and there are too many ways for things to go wrong.

The problem isn't my machine (I'm playing on the Steam Deck). Even high-end systems have struggled to maintain stable frame rates, leading to frustration among players. The demanding system requirements and lack of optimization further alienate a portion of the gaming community who may not have the latest hardware.

Exploration is Shit

I hate exploring in Baldurs Gate. Having to do that stupid jump move just to get to a chest the burns me when I try to open it. It is always apparent where you should be going, making it possible to walk around for hours, going in circles, talking to everyone and stealing everything without feeling like you're making any progress.

There are environmental puzzles, but they are some of the worst aspects of the game. BG3 frequently fails to provide clear clues or context for solving puzzles, leading to frustration and trial-and-error gameplay. This lack of thoughtful design and guidance detracts from the enjoyment of exploration and disrupts the pacing. I'm stuck trying to figure out how to open a door while the wall shoots fire arrows my way and I don't like it one bit.

Perhaps worst of all, there isn't much reward for exploration. BG3 often fails to reward thorough exploration adequately. Hidden areas and secrets are scarce, and when they do exist, the rewards are often underwhelming. This lack of meaningful incentives makes me want to not go off the beaten path. It's just going to lead to a place where I'll be stuck in a long combat sequence or have to talk to another annoying xenophobic Tiefling or some shit.

This leads to one of the biggest issues...

Lack of Cohesion

One of the most glaring issues with Baldur's Gate 3's quest design is its lack of cohesion. The game offers a plethora of quests, ranging from main story arcs to minor side missions. However, these quests often feel disjointed and poorly integrated into the overall narrative. Instead of weaving a seamless story, the game presents a series of isolated tasks that fail to create a unified experience.

The inconsistency extends to the quality of the quests themselves. Some are well-crafted and engaging, with compelling storylines and interesting characters. Others, however, are mundane and repetitive, reducing quests to simple fetch tasks or combat encounters with little narrative depth.

It's not even obvious when you're on a quest, it all feels like a random loosely related events intercepted by annoying battles and rude characters. I find myself lost so many times, not knowing where to go next to continue my quest, whatever my quest is. There is no consistent storyline, just a series of random things happening that I'm supposed to keep track of. I don't like this at all. The system could be improved by having more defined questlines with clear explanations of what needs to be done next to progress. I may be an unemployed bum but I don't want to waste my time either, and BG3 is king at time-wasting.

Terrible Combat

I hate the combat so much. The problem isn't even that it's turn-based (although I don't like that). The problem is much deeper. Everything is so slow, and it takes multiple turns to set anything interesting up or else it's just a matter of wearing down foes with fireballs. Don't get me started on the magic items that require a specific build to take full advantage of. The magic aspect of combat is so complicated it feels easier to just ignore it entirely and just grab a club to melee anyone and everyone.

Battles can drag on for an extended period, breaking the game's pacing and leading to fatigue. It's easy to just get stuck in a battle that in hindsight is unwinnable, forcing you to load an old save. The difficulty spikes can be unforgiving, with certain encounters feeling overly punishing. This lack of balance in combat difficulty is frustrating. Lastly, the game's reliance on dice rolls for crucial outcomes can also feel unfair, leading to moments where success or failure hinges on luck rather than skill.

I loathe every combat encounter and attempt to avoid them as much as possible.

Conclusion

I would not reccommend Baldur's Gate 3. It is bloated garbage with a false appearance of being a great game. There's no reason to git gud when the characters are so boring, the pacing is all over the place, and the game leaves you so lost at times. It's so easy to run into dead ends, kill the wrong people, or lose companions. It's like the game lacks any proper structure and is proud of that.

I will now play Ghost of Tsushima, a much better game, especially on Lethal mode.

It's annoying that most the people doing this is white men.Self loathing white men trying to be allies to get some love be from the feminists

That's some pot and kettle shit if I ever saw it aside from the feminist part.

Helldivers2 was a massive hit earlier this year where you play as the natural conclusion of the USA after it has dominated the globe and is looking to dominate the galaxy. It's a PvE horde extraction shooter where you play with a squad of 4 dropping in behind enemy lines completing objectives and then getting out of there.

Recently they had a major update adding new enemies and a higher difficulty tier.

They also made some balance changes

They nerfed 2 of the most popular weapons and the community is in an uproar. /r/Helldivers/ is almost entirely people complaining about the nerfs and /r/Helldivers2/ is full of people complaining about people complaining about the nerfs.

People are review bombing on steam.

What were the nerfs?

SG-225IE Breaker Incendiary

• Decreased number of magazines from 6 to 4

• Increased recoil from 28 to 41

A minor ammo and recoil nerf to the most op primary weapon in the game. This baby is like a flak cannon you can just point in a direction and delete things. It will likely remain the most op primary weapon in the game after this change.

Adjusted flame effects to work more realistically.

• It doesn't go through various bodies/objects where bounce off would be the expected behavior, like on armors and static objects.

This is a bigger deal as people were using the flamethrower to completely bypass one heavy enemy type's armor and nuke it. It also comes as they are releasing a fire themed premium pack which is a bold move.

This is a major nerf to the flamethrower, but they had already announced it was a known bug a long time ago and everyone should have seen this coming. But no people are rioting and saying nerfing in a PvE game is always bad. Even if some weapons are so OP no one bother's to bring anything else.

Real talk though why are g*mer's such babies? The game has 10 difficulty tiers and you only have to go up to difficulty 6 to be able to unlock everything in the game. And people are furious over nerfing obviously broken or op weapons. Like no bro they don't need to bring all weapons up to the point that they trivialize content. It is fine if they nerf op stuff. They also buffed several things this patch but no one cares because the cookie cutter loadout they were running isn't as op anymore.

A new "Sonic" Manga Series titled "Shadow The Hedgehog" will start in Corocoro Comic issue 10/2024!

More details will be revealed at a later date.

Please note that the image below is not from the upcoming manga but is an older IDW comic cover. pic.twitter.com/2qq0A2gInH

— Manga Mogura RE (Manga & Anime News) (@MangaMoguraRE) August 6, 2024

Ping edgy idk what they're ping is fricking let me post in edgy

https://old.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/1el0nrw/ubisoft_and_disney_are_bribing/lgoyqua/?context=8

I zeroed in on this when i heard KIA chuds cancel him.

like holy shit this is the most aggressive backlash ive ever seen from him

looks to be more anti-Ubisoft hate than anti-Woke fatigue

It goes on and on, but it appears the general consensus is that Ubisoft is bribing a heap of Youtube reviewers, which has caused a chain reaction in the Youtube comment "community", to be extra aggressive towards positive views on the new game

How many of them are trains.

Wowhead comments are always gigar-slurred so they event preemptively locked the comments section on the post lol.

i am installing a ps1 emulator on my switch to play silent hill 1. i never really played any ps1 games before. does anyone have any recommendations for other ps1 games i should check out?

!g*mers

What are you playing currently?

!g*mers

Previous Iterations:

2024

2023

Other rDrama vidya content

Last week's game: Lobotomy Corporation

Final Score: (10*1+9*2+8*3+7*4+6*1+5*2+4*0+3*2+2*0+1*3)/(1+2+3+4+1+2+0+2+0+3) = 6.05

All Previous Games:

Game to Discuss?

This week, let's discuss Elite: Dangerous the latest (and greatest?) sequel to the progenitor of all vidya starshit: No Mans Sky, notably (@MAGAShill), as well as Starfield (I think, haven't played it), Starsector (probably the best successor), and probably in some sense, every single game where you fly a spaceship. I won't go into the whole gory history of Elite, though features in it have made it to most every other space game: shitty procedural generation, the trade of goods of varying and dubious legality, and the seemingly ubiquitous engines - shields - guns power distribution system.

Unfortunately, Elite: Dangerous is hardly what I'd call innovative. While it did have the incredibly large randomly generated universe in common with, and prior to, No Mans Sky, for much of its existence planets were nought but pretty orbs to glance at from the comfort of your spaceship, which admittedly cut down on dev costs. The latest expansion supposedly makes planets into places you can visit, but I haven't, and probably won't purchase it, as it's apparently pretty dogshit. The game also has cosmetics purchasable with real world currency for some bizarre reason, which is pretty offputting. Beyond this, the vast majority of the gameplay loop resembles a simplified take on European Truck Simulator. You mostly travel from station to station, with various cargos, the specifics of which don't matter much. This gets boring real fast, tbh.

Despite all these flaws, this game isn't irredeemable, simply because it has the most detailed model of what a spaceship might look like/function. The asthetics are on point, and it feels properly futuristic in a way that similar games fail at. It even has a diegetic interface, which does a lot towards making you feel immersed. Too bad the core gameplay's shit though. Leave your opinions/thoughts below, and vote in the pinned comment.

Future game discussions:

August 11: Enter the Gungeon

August 18: Fortnite

August 25: Devil Daggers

September 1: Hollow Knight

carp, capy, geto, donger pin please

When I was a wee lad, I had a dream that I would one day be a famous writer. Reality set those dreams upon the jagged rocks of life, destroying them completely. Though my novels will not be read by anyone, I figured I could transition into journ*lism. More specifically, gaming journ*lism. I slaved away for years, at first writing for free before eventually making it onto a paid site. I learned a lot there and eventually moved onto other gaming sites where I gained more experience. Today, I have written for plenty of big sites with bylines in most of the popular sites.

I am sad to say my time in the industry has come to an end. I now realize that it is a path that cannot be taken without severe exploitation. Hence I have decided to transition into academia. However, I would like to share a bit about a company I used to work for, GAMURS, and how it is collapsing from the inside-out. What is going on here isn't different from the other gaming site companies such as G/O Media, Static Media, and Valnet. They've all gone down the path of being content mills with little regard for quality or caring about their staff.

The Fall of The Escapist

The Escapist is a popular gaming site that hosted Zero Punctuation, an animated review series that drew in the bulk of the site's traffic. It was hit with layoffs that reached the Editor-in-Chief Nick Calandra who claims he was let go because he failed to meet goals set in place by GAMURS. Upon Nick's termination, 17 staff members left including Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw of Zero Punctuation. The Escapist still exists today, but it is a shell of its former self. Writers such as Brad Lang have left, and it doesn't produce nearly the amount of content it used to. I predict it will be shut down soon.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/the-escapist-staff-resign-following-termination-of-editor-in-chief-nick-calandra

The Fall of Gaming Journ*lism

So why are these changes happening? AI! GAMURS, like other sites, is pushing for more AI content which is cheaper to create. In 2023, it posted an ad for an AI Editor shortly after mass layoffs, leading to an outcry within GAMURS.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230613212914/https://gamurs.breezy.hr/p/3a291acf07ac-ai-editor

This hasn't been enough to stop the wave, and more layoffs have taken place since. The latest wave took place in July and it triggered several articles being written about it as disgruntled ex-journ*lists spoke to news sites. GAMURS is now focused on beating the Google search algorithm which demands high output. This fell on the writers who could no longer take their time crafting articles and instead had to push themselves to meet ridiculous quotas asking for 3-5 articles daily. Mind you, writers do more than just write. They research, do image editing, and sometimes have to respond to editor requests. Nobody can produce at that level and still be effective. And that there is the reason gaming journ*lism is so shit right now and every site just pumps out guides that take less than an hour to write.

The stringent quotas also make it impossible to spend time with a game before reviewing it, leading to lackluster reviews that fail to go in-depth with any game. If you feel like video game reviews have declined in quality over the years, blame Google. Writers don't have time to play games from start to finish AND write for 8 hours a day. Furthermore, not all days are rife with gaming news. Consequently, writers are forced to shit out """news""" pieces and opinion pieces that's nothing but words for the sake of it with enough SEO tags sprinkled in to please the Google algorithm.

"From what I hear of other sites on the network it was similar", they said. "Our staff writers had to do 85 articles a month, so just over four every work day, and they had traffic goals too, so they were basically encouraged to write about stuff they knew would do well and ignore important stuff like updating older guides, which wouldn't count toward their overall goals."

Another former writer said their quota was "four articles a day". This was "expected across the network for full-time employees, as far I was aware. I know there are bigger quotas at other networks and sites, but I do not care. A quota system never works. It is mandatory crunch that creates a sink or swim environment. Journ*lists should not have to work in such an environment."

"Prior to our acquisition, there was a balance between guides, news stories, and feature pieces", they added. "Under the Gamurs banner, I would say that 95% of articles that went out were guides of this nature. Time and time again, I would see pitches for fun opinion pieces get shot down by the SEO team, with the explanation that 'we won't rank well for that'".

https://aftermath.site/the-gamurs-group-games-journ*lism-escapist-dot-esports

The terminations are brutal and swift, and they come without warning. This happened, for example, with Destructoid's Chris Moyse who has kicked off the site without a day's notice. For those unfamiliar, Destructoid is a popular gaming site that gave rise to a few big names in the industry including Ashly Burch and her Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin'? webseries. Chris was a prominent writer specializing in fighting games and had a Watchya Playin weekly thread that was very popular.

https://www.destructoid.com/whatcha-been-playing-this-week-destructoid-249/

https://x.com/ChrisxMoyse/status/1673367012037345280

It's Joever now. You can't find full-time jobs in gaming journ*lism anymore. It's over for the consumer as well. Everything they consume is going to be written by AI designed to appease search algorithms and maximize SEO. It's a pity, but that's the way it goes.

I'm not posting any comments because I'm too lazy

@DeforesterCarpathian @Soren @Frank_Williams @Governor @mithrandir @Kang-PrimeTimeline @Bridge

This is a statistical analysis on our fellow dramatards, how many games have you purchased and how many are currently unplayed.

Gonna play revolver first but when I play redemption should I play as released or canon chronological?

I had a really shitty week and i just want something to distract myself

Any Piranha Bytes enjoyers around here?

Looking pretty good so far

The Final Level: Farewell from Game Informer 🕹️ pic.twitter.com/tmrEB2TE7U

— Game Informer (@gameinformer) August 2, 2024

It's over

/r/games thread

https://og.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1eido2f/the_final_level_farewell_from_game_informer

/r/KiA thread

https://old.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/1eidvtd/game_informer_is_closing_down/

!g*mers

how hard is it to make a fictional character attractive

just stop letting random uggos self insert themselves into games lmao

Even without the AI this is sovl vs soulless. Remake looks like a mobile game.

https://old.reddit.com/r/AgeofMythology/comments/1c13ot2/yep_it_is_ai_generated_crap/

this loooks like our own AI generated marseys. the line is going over the Sistrum. patters with no symmetry.

https://old.reddit.com/r/AgeofMythology/comments/1e3mhzg/they_are_lying_about_using_ai/ full list of inconsistencies.

6 knuckles https://old.reddit.com/r/AgeofMythology/comments/1e35rbw/usually_ive_been_quick_to_shoot_down_the_ai/

where is this addidas strip pattern coming from? the cape also loses all color and texture bottom right

he is drawing the string and holding the arrow with different fingers

this one is just funny Guess its a mix of AI and stock photos