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Tag Archives: game review

Down the Rabbit Hole: Lost in Faerûn

I love Baldur’s Gate 3.

I’ve been playing it almost exclusively for the last two months, and have somehow lost over 150 hours (according to Steam, though the game itself says it’s more like 120).

I have never gotten this into an RPG before that wasn’t pencil and paper, and I can think of only a handful of games I’ve spent this much time and energy on, especially in such a short timeframe.

I first started playing tabletop D&D as a freshman in college. Some of my floormates were getting a 3.5 edition game going, and I was invited to join. There’d never been a big enough group of people in my hometown who knew how to play, so I never got to play before college. Needless to say, I leapt at the opportunity to play this fabled game, and I’ve been hooked ever since. We switched to 3.5/Pathfinder stuff when 4E came out, but since 2014, I’ve been playing 5th Edition almost exclusively. Despite this long relationship, I never got into any of the D&D video game properties like Neverwinter Nights or Baldur’s Gate. That all changed this year, when Larian Studios released Baldur’s Gate 3.

Based on the 5th Edition ruleset, BG3 is an incredibly immersive experience. In case you’ve somehow missed this cultural juggernaut thus far, the premise is this. One hundred years (roughly) after the events of the first two games in the franchise, a new threat has arisen in Faerûn. You play as one of a group of adventurers who have been captured by illithids, more commonly known as Mind Flayers. These creatures have infected you and your fellow prisoners with parasites that have taken up residence in your brain. The process that follows will inevitably (and painfully) transform you into a Mind Flayer as well. Before the horror can fully set in, the Mind Flayer ship you’re travelling on is attacked by a group of githyanki, a race of psionic warriors dedicated to combatting illithids anywhere they appear. When the ship crash lands along the Sword Coast, you’re lucky to survive. You’re quickly embroiled in local events as a battle looms between a druid grove sheltering tiefling refugees and a nearby camp of goblins. From here, you’re able to recruit your fellow infected in order to build your adventuring party, seeking a cure for the parasites in your heads as you make your way back to your home city, Baldur’s Gate.

The game boasts an immersive character builder, but also includes numerous pre-built characters that can be selected. Astarion, the elf rogue; Karlach, the tiefling barbarian; Lae’zel, the githyanki fighter; Shadowheart, the half-elf cleric; Gale, the human wizard; and Wyll, the human warlock are all available as Origins characters. If you choose to play as an original character, you can add all of the Origins characters to your adventuring party (though only up to three of them can accompany you at any given time). The final option for a player character is The Dark Urge, an evil-leaning character (that has a default race and class, but those can be changed in creation if you like) with ties to the previous games in the series. Whomever you choose to play as, you’re faced with an escalating series of challenges as you search for answers. The illithid tadpoles in your brain aren’t acting the way they normally would, and a conspiracy stretches all the way to the top of the Upper City of Baldur’s Gate, ensnaring you and your companions.

The gameplay, again, based on D&D’s 5th Edition ruleset is pretty straightforward, and Larian studios included three different difficulty settings so that players who are less familiar with D&D can still enjoy the depth of the story. As a veteran D&D player, but not used to the video game format, I opted for the middle road of Normal difficulty. I quickly acclimated to the controls (once I replaced my dying mouse, which had a tendency to double-click on its own, much to poor Astarion’s frustration). Now my first party, based around a gnome bard, is approaching the end of their journey, and my second playthrough with a half-orc monk is making solid progress in the first act of the game. Because there are so many possibilities for your journey to take, it’s absolutely worth the time to play at least twice. You’ll see that different character types will be offered different approaches to situations, and start to see things that you might have missed the first time around. Regardless, it’s going to be a good time.

I’m not in the business of doing video game reviews, but every once in a while, I just have to let y’all know that I’m enjoying something new. I hope you are too.

Overwatch, or Why I Haven’t Written You a New Story This Month

So. Overwatch.

It kind of snuck up on me, not going to lie. I remember seeing a few bits and blurbs about it a while back, and getting pretty excited by the sheer variety of the characters (an article about Zarya’s addition to the game really pulled me in). The last new video game I bought for myself (not as a gift for someone else) was Minecraft last summer. Every other game I’ve purchased within recent memory was a used Wii game or a “new” game for my NES or Super Nintendo. My playthroughs of the Arkham Asylum games and Injustice were facilitated by my local library rather than dropping money I didn’t have on a game I didn’t need. But there was something about Overwatch that just called to me. Maybe it was the comparisons to things like Team Fortress 2. Maybe it was the promise of something so drastically different coming from the folks at Blizzard.

So yeah, I’ve been playing a lot. Not so much as some of my friends, but I waited almost two weeks after it came out to start. It arrived as a belated birthday gift, and I’ve been loving it. There’s not a lot of change from one gametype to another. You’re attempting to capture or defend a series of points on the map or escorting/defending a moving payload or capturing/defending a point and then escorting/defending a payload. It’s fairly straightforward, but with each player on either side being able to choose from any one of 21 unique heroes, it’s never the same match twice.

A lot of the joy is in that variety. You can change heroes any time you choose, so long as you’re willing to return to a spawn point (you can also switch at respawn), and so you’re never lacking a character who can counter an enemy’s strengths or offset an ally’s weaknesses. Because of this, it’s really in your benefit to learn to play as many of the different heroes as possible, or at least one for each category (offense, defense, tanks, and supports).

Lucio’s great fun for me. Speed, healing, and a knockback effect let him excel at holding a point when you’re near ledges. Being able to self-heal puts him at the top of the support list for me, even though he lacks Mercy’s oomph as a healer. He’s agile, and in the right hands can harass an enemy team just as well as Tracer. His speed boost can be used from the beginning of the round to get your entire team to the objective sooner, too.

Hanzo. You’ve got to love a sniper with a bow and the ability to climb over a lot of the obstacles in his way. His mobility is second really only to Genji. His ultimate is devestating to anyone who can’t get out of the way. I know that he’s a defensive character, but he’s mobile enough to be valuable to attacking teams as well, depending on the map, especially since his sonic arrow provides enemy recon faster than Widowmaker’s ultimate (albeit for a shorter time and over a smaller area).

Pharah is my go-to offense hero. I’m learning Tracer, and Soldier 76 is ridiculously straightforward for anyone who has ever played an FPS, but Pharah’s range and power maker her one of my favorites. On an open map, she can rain down rockets on an enemy team, with her hover ability rendering her very difficult for most heroes to accurately hit. She can also make good use of her rocket launcher from the ground, saving her jump jet for an emergency escape.

I’ve never been big into MMOs, and so my experience with tanking is rather lacking. Still, Winston makes for a great introductory character to the role. He lacks range with his weapon, but it auto-hits anything in range. Combine that with his leaping, and you can catch a lot of squishier heroes off guard. He can easily be used to clear of room of Symmetra’s turrets by combining his cannon and shield.

And then there’s Junkrat. Stupid fun. I love TF2’s Demoman, and Junkrat takes all of the grendade launcher goodness and adds a pseudo-stun with his steel trap. If I’m on defense, and there’s not already a Junkrat on the team, he’s a sure pick at some point in the match.

So, yeah. I’m learning more of the heroes, because everyone has a place somewhere in the game. Finding which hereos work best together is a lot of fun, and Blizzard is already talking about DLC heroes, maps, and gametypes in the future.

Now I’m going to try to get some actual story writing done. Until then!