Since we’re dealing with very small niches still, I also recommend participating in genre communities. I’m not really seeing an active one for RPGs but something like Dragon Age would get some run on !pcgaming@lemmy.ca and !pcgaming@kbin.social (with the usual caveat that kbin currently isn’t always great about getting all their content out to federated instances).

Grow the genre/archetype communities enough and eventually they will naturally break out into individual property niches for sure.

I was fortunate enough to not run into any of the quest-breaking bugs. Had no issues doing what I wanted to do. What I did run into a lot was buggy scripting where dialogues assumed I had information I didn’t, so I wouldn’t know what my companions were talking about some of the time.

The bigger problem in my eyes is spells/items/class abilities/feats not working correctly and being outright non-functional in some cases. That’s going to be an enduring problem for replays, and it’s not encouraging to me that very little has been done on this since release.

I do think this game wouldn’t have scored as well as it did if so many publications didn’t rush to press with half a playthrough. In this particular case, I think the game–bugs and all–is still a strong GotY contender, but I really hope there’s a conversation being had in the professional games criticism sphere about how this practice could cause a scandal in the future.

As it is, I’m genuinely surprised the reviewers aren’t coming under fire more than they have for this. I come from an era where publishing a review without completing a game would have been unconscionable.

44 in one swing with a one-hander at level 6. Phalar Aluve is busted.

https://i.imgur.com/o6Z1RA5.png

I’m currently level 7 in my Tactician run, and much like Balanced, everything gets a lot easier when you hit level 5. Tav is one of the best starters (Bard) even if the rest of my party was kinda meh at low levels (Champion Fighter, Monk, CotL Druid). The martials are starting to take off now–especially the Monk–though I’m still not thrilled with the Druid. It’s possible it would have been a little too punishing if I had a weaker party.

Now I still have 5k gold and probably still more food than I’ll ever need (even with the 2x food penalty). I think ultimately food is what would have made the difficulty masochist level, but there’s more than enough if you actually loot the scraps you come across. At that point it’s all about whether you can handle a single fight with full resources or not, and I haven’t come across one that’s been too much (although maybe doing the hag at level 4 without Magic Missile was ambitious and I got a bit lucky). Hell, I just breezed through the fight against

and that’s one of the more difficult fights in the game. Smart tactics still matter, though. I just had that fight go spectacularly wrong in my Explorer difficulty multiplayer run with a friend where we decided to just range them from above. I tossed the Runepowder Vial without lighting it, figuring I’d have time, and they threw it right back and hit it with a fire arrow, killing one of my party on the spot and knocking the other into the lava.

So if you’re in the Underdark, you’re not actually in Act 2 yet. If you need the main story to drive you forward, you have a little further to go. The Underdark doesn’t advance any personal quests, at least not in a major way, even though there’s plenty to do.

The difference between this and D:OS2 is that while Reaper’s Coast felt open, the level scaling still had the zone on rails, more or less. Here, you have a couple different ways to go. If you want to move on (I suggest level 5 if you aren’t already first), there is a way forward to find. If you want a more straightforward road, try the path on the surface.

Is that one in

“It’s a faaake!”

Katharine’s review today steps back from that flash-in-the-pan take (and it wasn’t a good one).

No doubt there’s some empty calories here, though.

Thief is the only one that comes to mind from that era that holds a candle to Deus Ex’s open-ended level design. Lots of different approaches to take on many of the stages. Well, as long as you didn’t play on high difficulties, anyway.

There still aren’t many games that go quite that hard on it. Open world games have a tendency to keep their set pieces much more simple. Maybe we’ll see more of it now that Baldur’s Gate 3 has made a big splash with the concept.

I always run this build on Shadowheart, heh. Half-orc helps, but it’s one or two extra smaller dice in a big pile when all is said and done. It’s not like a 2H crit build with the extra d12’s.

I haven’t dabbled with this build in Honour yet. The wiki says damage riders aren’t as generous there (meaning no double/triple dips on Hex, etc.). It won’t do as well as it does on Tactician.