Ucinorn

joined 1 year ago
[–] Ucinorn@aussie.zone 3 points 10 months ago

You only get to see their conversation if you choose Gale as your origin character.

There is a surprising number of options for what he does. You can find them all on YouTube, I couldn't be bother playing through as him.

[–] Ucinorn@aussie.zone 5 points 10 months ago

Gitlab has a great set of CI tools for deploying docker images, and includes an internal registry of images automatically tied to your repo and available in CI.

[–] Ucinorn@aussie.zone 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I feel like he's a well written character, and people underestimate how much he changes based on player choices.

When you first meet him he's desperate and clearly hiding something, but a nice enough fellow. Then you learn he used to be a REALLY big deal (ie. Level 20 Wizard) but flew too close to the sun. Fair enough, a megalomaniac who has learned his lesson.

Then he's offered a deal: sacrifice yourself to save the world, absolve yourself of your sins, die a hero. The the thing is at first he's ON BOARD with this. The first time this solution is proposed, he can totally see the logic of it. And on face value, blowing up the Absolute right there in act 2 is the best case scenario for everyone. The enemy and all their army wiped out in one hit, without risking it all trying to fight them one by one. He has a chance to die a hero and save literally thousands of lives with his own.

But what happens is that players want to play the game. They want to see Baldur's Gate. So they convince Gale not to sacrifice himself, to make the selfish choice and choose to live. So they miss their chance to kill all three and the brain in one spot, and have to traipse around the city gathering allies for a super risky final battle.

In the process, the players turn Gale BACK into the megalomaniac he started as. Because we coached him into ignore the advice of his (very wise) peers like Mystra and Elminster, he starts thinking he's God's gift all over again. Starts coveting power, first to save his own skin, but then just for power's sake. And in the end, if you let him, he learns absolutely nothing from his whole saga: he's the same power tripping manchild he started as.

I think if theres poor writing, it's having the choice of blowing himself up in act 2. That's way too soon: if you want to see a third of the game, you HAVE to convince him to ignore him most treasured mentors and be selfish. It feels very railroady and the only version of Gale you can play as/with in act 3 is someone who has turned completely away from the path to redemption

 

While I appreciate that Larian are trying to emulate the feeling of real dice rolls here, the animations for rolls, adding modifiers and showing the continue button are a masterclass in poor UI design. It somehow manages to be god awfully slow AND inconsistent in how I can skip it.

Currently this is how it works:

  • I select my option in dialogue, without any idea of the DC of the check or how having multiple modifiers effects the DC
  • I get booted to a whole new full screen view, with it's own unskippable entrance animation.
  • I select my modifiers, which are hidden behind a button click for no discernible reason, then roll by clicking another tiny button.
  • I need to wait for a lengthy roll animation, UNLESS I get lucky by clicking at the right time to skip. Performing this skip seems neither consistent nor clear: I just need to hammer my mouse in the general vicinity of the rolling area and hope.
  • If I am UNLUCKY I'm forced to sit through an incredible floaty dice roll animation that apparently takes place in Mars gravity. I have played TTRPGs, I know how long it takes to roll and read dice: half a second, unless you fling your dice across the table like a barbarian.
  • I then have to sit through MORE animations as bonuses are applied, penalizing me for being good at the game and stacking them. I groan as they float towards the dice like they are taking a Sunday stroll through a park.
  • Then I sit through MORE animations as the final tally clobbers the DC dice at the pace of a large glacier, before the continue button finally fades in at what seems to be a totally random time frame.
  • And we get MORE animations as the full screen fades away

The result is a tedious process that takes me out of the game totally: we have these beautifully rendered characters, with emotion and voice acted dialogue, and stunning backgrounds: and Larian choose to hide all that with a full screen animation for dice rolling.

All this in contrast to how classic CRPGs used to do things: you click the dialogue button and instantly get a success or failure. You can barrel through heaps of them, limited only by your reading speed. AND they don't take up the whole screen while doing so.

Instead with BG3 I have to sit through a minimum five second animation that's the same every damn time. It could end up ten or fifteen seconds if you fail to skip animations. You might perform four or five of these within a single conversation: at the end you could have spent more time waiting for UI animations than reading and thinking about dialogue choices.

Larian, please please reconsider the dice rolling experience, it's one of the only blemishes on an otherwise perfect game.

 

I'm not sure what Larian are trying to do with this character: he's clearly a whiny, creepy rapist character with the way he creeps up on you in camp.

I understand wanting to include evil characters for variety, but I'm struggling to see how he fits into any party. A good player will boot him as soon as he tries to attack them and shows no remorse. An evil player will boot him for being a leech.

Does he get better later in the game to justify his existence?

[–] Ucinorn@aussie.zone 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Correction: at least one of you wins.

It's possible to buy a lottery ticket where ALL of the alternative universes wins the lottery EXEPT you

[–] Ucinorn@aussie.zone 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Not just OSX: anyone using WSL on windows is an offender too

But as a WSL user, dockerised Dev environments are pretty incredible to have running on a windows machine.

Does it required 64 gig of ram to run all my projects? Yes. Was it worth it? Also yes