Bertsimpson

@mvhess the makers of the lion king snes are not the whole gaming market or games in general. Many games were made easier for North American release as well. Sure, this occurred in some cases. Some games also started as arcade games and were designed to be tough to get more quarters from you. This was not an industry wide occurrence and blockbuster was at its biggest in the early 2000s, it was founded in 1985.
https://www.destructoid.com/a-look-at-the-early-days-of-regional-difficulty-changes/

@Accipitridae 100% agree. We have SO MANY horrible, bland, generic games that are designed that way intentionally to appeal to literally everyone. No one needs celebrated indie developers to start trying to make games that appeal to the widest audience possible, we have big corporations who care about profits more than products for that already.

“ Instead of wasting my time on battles, enemy encounters and boss fights became a minor speed bump where I just spammed my attack until I came out on top.
I spent countless hours in this game, completely lost on where to go next. Just leaving the town in the beginning was challenging because I had never seen this area before and had no idea how to avoid the debris lying about in the beginning portions and reach where I needed to go.”

This is so sad to me and also makes the score make sense. First off, if you don’t want to actually have to try in boss fights then this game isn’t for you. Second, the whole point of this game is to play like a retro game with modern twists. An NPC to point you in the right direction would have been an absolutely horrible decision. It sounds to me like a 10/10 for this reviewer would be another braindead easy and boring game that holds your hand throughout the experience.

@mvhess what? You think blockbuster had that much influence? This is a crazy take. Around 1990 Nintendo sued blockbuster to try to prevent them from renting out games. The truth of the matter is closer to games being made easier because corporations wanted them to appeal to non gamers and increase the size of their audiences and that trend kept going and going until most games had little to no difficulty at all and there were big markers or arrows pointing you in the right direction at all times.

@get2sammyb I find trophies/achievements more problematic than otherwise in the first place. I’m a completionist and I love getting achievements and feeling that extra sense of gratification and accomplishment from them, but more often than not hunting them out makes me enjoy the game less. The older I get the more I try to ignore them and just play the game for what it is (and without guides) and the more I play that way the more I enjoy the games I play.

I don’t mind whether assistance or cheats disable trophies or whether they do not, but I do find it crazy that we have gotten to a point where the enjoyment of the game itself can be hampered by stupid trophies. I’ve seen people talking about enjoying the game using these features, but wanting to refund it due to it disabling trophies. It’s very sad that trophies feel as important as the game itself to people or that they can ruin an otherwise good experience.

@Jrs1 the issue here is not an “elitist 80s attitude toward difficulty”, it is that this is a franchise that is kind of built around difficult gameplay so if this game is “easy” then they would be drifting away from part of the game’s identity. Your comment about the souls genre existing for people who like difficult games could have easily applied to the ninja gaiden franchise in the past as well, so it doesn’t fit as a counterpoint here.

Having games that have difficulty options and appeal to many levels of player skill is great, but not every game needs to be that. Taking a franchise that is known for difficult and challenging gameplay and neutering it is a good way to lose your most loyal and long term audience.

@ear_wig came here to say this. DotEmu isn’t the developer and this article kind of leads you to believe that they are.

@UltimateOtaku91 I wouldn’t call BG3 unfinished at launch. The epilogue was basically free DLC, it was an added bonus that didn’t need to be there but rounded out some stories nicely. They also added thousands of lines of dialogue for it. They did it because they wanted to and because they thought people would like it, not because the game was unfinished.

Did it have bugs on launch? Yes, most of them were in Act 3 and were fixed before the majority of the player base ever got there. Many of the fixes have been continued performance improvements and optimizations. I got BG3 on launch, I have a 4 year old PC and ran it on high settings, I played 100 hours in the first 2 weeks and I experienced a little bit of what I would call “jank” at certain times, but no bugs that stuck out to me in any way.

Again, yes there were bugs and I know that there was one act 3 bug that basically prevented you from progressing if you played things a certain way (keep in mind there are thousands of ways to progress things in this game and most quests are optional so this wasn’t a universally game breaking thing). But you are trying to paint this picture and calling a studio that is giving their game some of the better and faster immediate post launch support that we have seen in recent years and instead saying that the game was unfinished/broken because the patches improved a significant numbers of things each time.

@MightyDemon82 it’s a very long game, but even if you just play through act 1 it’s worth playing. I’ve never played anything before with so much interesting and fun content so packed into the map. It’s so dense with interesting interactions. My playthrough took around 130 hours, I scoured every corner of every map and completed all of the quests and side quests that I was able to, and I never once felt bored. All of the content was engaging and rewarding for me. I’ve never felt that way about such a big game.

@CJD87 plus the same year as AC6, the Cyberpunk revival and expansion, AW2, Mario Wonder. It’s been such an insane year for games and we are all benefiting from it (though maybe suffering with excessive backlogs lol).

@Korgon the combat is unforgiving early in the game if you haven’t played other games like it and don’t know the D&D rules and whatnot. Misses can feel unfair and punishing. That being said, the game encourages experimentation and creativity. Best advice early on is read all of the descriptions for abilities and items thoroughly and learn to understand actions vs bonus actions. Don’t be afraid to use consumables or one time use items. You get a lot of them and will have a huge surplus by the end if you don’t use them for most of the game. Once you get a good sense for how the basics of the game work it might be helpful to watch a video explaining a bit more of the in depth side of combat, but until then just don’t get discouraged if you miss an attack or a dialogue check. There really are no wrong ways to play the game and even unfavorable dialogue results often lead to interesting things in the game. I absolutely love the combat, but it’s definitely a lot to learn and understand early on and some of the early fights can be tough.

@LiamCroft thanks for sharing the details!

@UltimateOtaku91 I definitely think BG3 deserved the win here for a lot of reasons, but at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter tbh. Just seems kind of weird because seemingly none of the staff thought it was the best GoTY either. The only reason that I can see it winning the vote is the community vote or the staff voting differently from their personal lists and putting it ahead due to mass appeal I suppose. BG3 and AW2 are both fantastic games with more interesting and/or innovative aspects throughout (compared to spider man 2 that is), but at the same time they are definitely both more niche games that not everyone will love just due to their genres and combat among other things.

That being said BG3 is #1 for me and AW2 is #2 for the year. BG3 is in the discussion for the top rpgs ever made imo, and might have the biggest impact on RPGs in the future.

@Fiendish-Beaver hahah our timing is impeccable. Love it.

@UltimateOtaku91 you mentioned that more editors had Spider-Man 2 on their top lists than BG3, but it’s worth noting that not a single editor has placed Spider-Man as #1 on their personal lists. The highest it has placed for anyone individually whose list has been posted so far is #2. Whatever the actual intricacies of their voting system are, this seems like a very strange outcome unless the community vote is weighted much more heavily than implied. Or unless their personal lists have nothing to do with their actual GoTY votes in which case the Spider-Man 2 #1 selection might be even more strange.