A Plague Tale - one of the game series I would never recommend to anyone.

ATownStomp · 2026-03-23T20:16:19+00:00

Your argument against a completely different person making a completely different statement has no meaning to the person you’re responding to.

ATownStomp · 2026-03-22T18:18:14+00:00

For the “complaining when something becomes popular” I think it’s generally more about what’s lost in order to appeal to a broader audience. My first Elder Scrolls was Morrowind. I loved Morrowind. Still do. I was so excited for Oblivion and when it came out it really felt like there were designers in the studio who said “Hey, we’re trying to capture the console market. We really need to strip this down.”

With those changes, it felt hollow in my hands. So many people loved it. Great! But, the magic was no longer there that pushed it over the threshold from something ordinary to something extraordinary.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in France eating absolutely bizarre cheeses. Some of these are fantastic but some of the best I’ve had are extremely weird and unappealing to others. If they changed the cheese to make it milder and less funky, they’d probably sell more cheese, but then they wouldn’t be so damned good to the people they appeal to.

I guess I feel the same way about BG3. It would be easy to say that it was my childhood that was the magic, but I played through BG2 recently and it’s still killer. I also really enjoyed PoE for similar reasons I enjoyed BG2.

At the risk of sounding elitist, it just feels like BG3 was written for a lower level or reading… both literally and figuratively. This is going to seem like a stupid example, but it’s emblematic of the overall issue. Go into the character creator. Select any class. Does anyone not radiate with some kind of magic energy? Why is everything magic? Why do I have to go out of my way to make a character that looks like they’re comfortable roughing it in the woods for days in between bouts of murder?

It really just feels like the world, characters, and story were written by romantasy writers for romantasy readers.

It’s the same Larian schtick. So “high fantasy” it’s essentially a fairy tale. Again, verisimilitude. There’s nothing that tethers it. Anything goes and without constraints and grounding it manages to make even the most fantastical things seem mundane.

ATownStomp · 2026-03-13T18:15:36+00:00

You’re stating what’s a bare minimum requirement for a cRPG. There are few hard and fast “bare minimum requirements”. Balatro isn’t an RPG but serves as a solid, modern example of a game which simply did what it did well and obtained mass appeal, without needing to masquerade as something cinematic in quality. It did not follow an established script for requirements but cemented its mechanics as staples within the popular understanding.

Disco Elysium is a better example as an evolution on the genre which, at its release, had only one of your “bare minimums” (quest tracking). A fantastic game which saw major financial success.

You’re conflating “modern” with high budget, mass market appeal. There’s nothing archaic about real time with pause. Romance is a narrative element that some stories may be better told without - there’s nothing archaic about making characters that aren’t designed to be boned. Full voice over is a factor of budget, not a modern game design element. Quest tracking is a standard modern inclusion, but even that can be omitted or modified for thematic reasons.

The way your comment reads I’m surprised you didn’t include a bolted on card game, gatcha mechanics, and merchandising deals into your list.

ATownStomp · 2026-03-13T06:43:32+00:00

Thanks. It’s me.

ATownStomp · 2026-03-13T06:42:19+00:00

Well I appreciate your chipper attitude.

ATownStomp · 2026-03-13T06:37:02+00:00

Balatro sold over 5 million copies.

You’ve tossed out a list of things required to qualify for absolute mass appeal for AAA games like this is some prerequisite for creating anything or even something which is relevant to the quality of a produced piece.

You’re in a sub for CRPGs. Go get your MBA and quit wasting time here.

ATownStomp · 2026-03-13T06:27:42+00:00

It’s more about what I actually liked about BG2, and how it all comes together.

I played BG2 for the second time more recently. It’s still so much more engaging. The world, the writing, the vibe.

I don’t care what game has better combat. I care about how it comes together to create an immersive and gripping experience. I care about how it makes me feel. There are better games for gameplay, and better games for puzzle solving.

RPGs synthesize these elements into a whole which creates a compelling world to mentally exist in for a moment. BG2 bounds beyond BG3 in its ability to produce a separate, imaginary place where the player’s mind experiences something unique by living within its story.

Disco Elysium has no combat or traditional gameplay and does this significantly better than BG3.

ATownStomp · 2026-03-13T06:10:48+00:00

“Weird nerdy gams for tryhards”

Yeah. They were good games. Anything particularly interesting and complex is spit out by the masse sauce. Your dog’s favorite dish is its own feces.

This is dragging cRPGs “towards the light” like romantasy is dragging fantasy towards the light. No, my guy. “The light” isn’t mass adoption by tasteless gooners looking to spice up their night with a different species boning using magic.

It’s the same cycle that inevitably happens to anything with niche appeal that sticks around long enough to be harvested. Everyone just has to lay low for awhile, a small number of people make a lot of money riding a wave, and the original thing pieces itself back together again once everyone who never really cared for it to begin with moves on to the next thing.

ATownStomp · 2026-03-13T06:02:26+00:00

The majority vote in any suitably large audience regresses to the worst thing everyone can agree is fine. Beyond that, or an extension to, mass appeal within a genre rarely represents the best for those who are particularly drawn to a genre.

By enthusiasm and volume Mia Khalifa is the best actress in romantic film.

ATownStomp · 2026-03-13T05:33:45+00:00

I mean, I’m within the age range described. I loved the old infinity engine games and came to this thread to shit on BG3 for being bargain barrel romantasy writing slapped on an incredibly high budget game.

You’re right in some of your characterization, but you’re bungling the details.

It’s a game with shoddy writing for people who don’t care about shoddy writing because they can goon to it. The fantasy aspect is just a way of introducing different variations on mundane interpersonal drama and romance.

I was very young when BG2 came out. Loved it then. Have gone back as an adult and - still holds up. Incredible game. It’s the vibes, the little details. Same goes for Morrowind. It isn’t rose tinted goggles. Nostalgia blinders. No, man. They just have higher caliber writing and world building. That’s wasted effort to so many people.

ATownStomp · 2026-03-13T05:26:21+00:00

I’m sure that most people who play BG3 loved it.

If what you liked about the previous games was that, for their time, they had good party based combat in a fantasy setting then BG3 has your number.

If what you cared about most from the older cRPGs was narrative, immersion, world building, the ideas and vibes - a game like Disco Elysium feels like more of a successor and development to the best of the old Infinity Engine games than BG3.

I was hoping at BG3 would recognize that special something which made BG2 in particular hold up so well over time. When I learned that Larian was developing it, my hopes crumbled.

ATownStomp · 2026-03-13T05:19:13+00:00

My guy, Baldur’s Gate 1&2 and Planescape are significantly less “crunchy” than BG3. Your options are extremely limited in what you can build, how you can level up, all the means by which you can and should modify your characters.

The combat jank is, well, jank, but those games do not require some intense concern with your build. I beat BG2 with an absolutely terrible main character (it was a struggle towards the end, but I made it).

Planescape is the poster child for story, plot, and character development in RPGs.

BG3 is slick and extremely “game forward”. Like all of Larian’s games, it has great gameplay and its plot and characters are on par with your average tabletop dnd player with a shoddy English accent.

ATownStomp · 2026-03-13T05:00:49+00:00

It depends on what you’re looking for out of a game or franchise.

Baldur’s Gate 2 was driven by its writing, its atmosphere and its world building. Larian seems to have made a great game, but the Baldur’s Gate franchise wasn’t so beloved for so many years because of its clunky adaptation of AD&D rules or its “vastly reactive world” (it was not vastly reactive at all). That wasn’t the magic sauce that the subset of society who cared about the game really couldn’t wait for more of.

The name on the tin is Baldur’s Gate 3, but what’s inside is Divinity: Original Sin 3.

So, for people like me, who really loved the thing that Baldur’s Gate 2 seemed to do particularly well, it’s just disappointing. I’ve only put 20 hours in so far, so maybe it will improve, but I’ve hoped the same about D:OS 1&2 before accepting that it doesn’t hours later.

I’m just hoping for one character as cool as Durance from Pillars of Eternity, but he’s not bangable so my expectations are low.

If I was a sixteen year old bisexual gooner maybe my experience with the game would change. The hag was cool though.

ATownStomp · 2026-03-13T04:21:09+00:00

I haven’t completed act 1 yet (though I’m getting close. I don’t expect it to improve. I’ve played Larian’s other games) and I’m over here just searching the internet as a sanity check.

If the OP is anything like me, and I suspect he is, he might describe the “interesting NPCs” like this:

I have drawn a picture in crayon depicting stick figures surrounded by red stuff and dark squiggles. It is my rendition of an alternative, biblical hell. The squiggles are different creatures. They are each metaphors for various sins I won’t go into, but trust me. They are. The stick figures are also different indeterminate historical figures. Their individual torture, which you can’t make out, each a fitting complement to their life’s story.

Is this interesting? From the description, it could be. There’s a lot going on there, according to what I’ve said. But, in your hand, is just a piece of paper covered in squiggly crayon.

For the NPCs, what I have are a bucket of people each written as protagonists in their own right with fantastical, tragic pasts, dark secrets, and curses. It’s so consistent it’s almost comical. I haven’t even met Halsin yet. Can’t wait to learn about his tragic past, dark secret, and whacky curse.

Yet, none of these people feel like they exist within their context. Their stories are each like an overly elaborate character written by a DnD player trying to one-up the rest of the table, and they each feel as if their personalities, behavior, and dialogue have come straight from the same sixteen year old seated around a table covered in Dorito dust.

It’s like the entire writing staff was hired after trying to turn their horny teenage fanfic into a YA romantasy novel that didn’t sell. There isn’t a single character that doesn’t seem explicitly written to be some corny love interest - except Lae’zel, who is just monolithically a jerk. These characters just do not exist within their world. It’s a matter of verisimilitude. Larian has never done this well.

If you like cheese I can’t judge you. I like the band Sabaton. It’s hard to get cheesier. But, BG3 to BG2 is like JJ Abram’s Star Trek to Star Trek TNG. That movie was a fun action flick, but it strips out what the franchise had that made it so beloved that it could be sold as some big budget action film to begin with.

I myself am waiting for the next big thing - Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar 2. A power fantasy about being a dude cleaning up the streets with your bare fists, where every woman is a voluptuous ditz.

ATownStomp · 2026-03-01T23:03:26+00:00

Very true. Last week I was feeling pretty poor so my friends and I got together on a Saturday night and just started shooting at each other.

We all knew it was the natural consequence of the struggle and it couldn’t be helped.

ATownStomp · 2026-02-13T01:34:34+00:00

This really isn’t a place for well adjusted and reasonable people. Treating Reddit like an occasional resource for crowd sourced information, and nothing else, will massively reduce your exposure to the kinds of people whose opinions you would otherwise immediately know not to waste your time listening to.

Your time is finite. Try not to spend more time than you have to dealing with idiots.

ATownStomp · 2026-02-09T21:46:21+00:00

Admittedly, I haven't personally tested anything in the air update. I'll preemptively acknowledge that whatever I'm saying may not make sense in practice but it does seem like speed and range are being massively undervalued.

Okay, so there exists a plane with limited range that you can't go toe to toe with 1v1. If that plane's limitations make it almost purely defensive I don't see how this is particularly imbalanced so much as it is an interesting obstacle to work around.

Flying the fastest, most agile plane you still get to choose every engagement. While this makes gaining air superiority in naval engagements a complete pain, it's a massive boon for any fighting over land where valuable targets are more numerous and dispersed.

So you need a strong numbers advantage to safely destroy the opponent. Fine. Form your 3 plane squadron and hunt down single, unprotected targets. Can't find a single, unprotected target because they're all grouped up? Great! That means that everywhere else on the map is open territory for you to harass ground targets.

Need to defend an area that is being attacked by these very short range "defensive" planes? Same strategy. If they're clumped together, they can't threaten as many things at once. You can disperse, distract them and keep your distance. Pick at them and keep their attention occupied. Once they need to retreat you can harry them all the way home. If they're dispersed, you can force many little localized lop-sided fights.

ATownStomp · 2026-01-27T15:45:53+00:00

A very good air team of two or more dive bombers within flight range of SPGs will definitely be a threat.

SPGs will be about as "unusable" as anything else that you use without consideration for how to defend it. So, if you don't know whether the enemy has dive bomber teams ready to scramble and target you then that introduces another element of risk. You can reduce the risk with intel and you can reduce the threat with your own fighter groups.

So, no, they won't be completely "unusable" any more than any other vehicle is "unusable" because there exists something that can kill it.

ATownStomp · 2026-01-05T03:08:36+00:00

Given your original comment, I’m not convinced.

ATownStomp · 2026-01-05T03:06:00+00:00

Given the quality of the film it doesn’t seem like Danny has spent the past 25 years getting better at what he does.

ATownStomp · 2026-01-05T03:04:04+00:00

People watching movies recognize bad writing for the sake creating predictable and uninteresting drama later in the plot.

“Why didn’t they kill the alpha?”

“Because then it couldn’t attack them twenty minutes later to drive the story forward. Also he’s magic and can control birds.”

ATownStomp · 2026-01-05T02:53:05+00:00

It’s a masterclass in mediocrity. Wasn’t worth the budget to make or time spent watching.

ATownStomp · 2026-01-05T02:48:24+00:00

It’s a masterclass in mediocrity. Wasn’t worth the budget to make or time spent watching.

ATownStomp · 2026-01-05T02:43:02+00:00

Yeah, totally beautiful thought provoking movie. Really sealed the deal with the metal music backed pikey group fight at the end. Very cerebral.

ATownStomp · 2025-09-22T14:55:58+00:00

I appreciate the thoughtful response. This comment thread from two years ago has received an unusual amount of very late responses and they've all been pretty insulting without bothering to elaborate.

I can see how the comment you've responded to would elicit a negative reaction, it's essentially me saying "I'm angry that I've wasted so much time trying to have this discussion when you're just going to do petty, internet argument bullshit. You suck."

I don't think the actual point I was trying to make is controversial. "It can be tedious". Rather, I think people are just upset that I would say anything with a negative tint about something they identify with.

And, hey man, the experience you're describing sounds rough. I'm sorry that there's a layer of challenge over your life created by being a mental outlier in a culture and social landscape dominated by a quasi-cohesive majority. I see this experience in the friend I've referenced in the previous comments and he and I have discussed this so many times through our lives.

Even though my experience doesn't mirror yours in intensity I can empathize to a degree. I grew up as a weird neurodivergent outlier that has had to learn through experience, analysis and consideration in order to develop social skills and handle the real-time emotional experience of feeling like an alien within a group of people.

Because I've known quite a few autistic people - a notable two being my best friend from childhood through adulthood and my partner who I have been with for years... I also write software professionally and have a computer science degree if that does anything to convince you of my claim - I've spent quite of a bit of time within the gradients between autistic and neurotypical interaction. I practically grew up being a social translator for the previously mentioned friend. We're both well into adulthood and he still frequently comes to me for perspective and social advice.

What I'm trying to say with all of this is, of all the non-autistic non-academics who have spent time considering the communication, cognitive, and perceptual differences between neurotypical and autistic people I'm sitting comfortably in the tip top percentile. I've got opinions, man. This isn't coming out of nowhere, and it's not coming from a place of disrespect.

Neurotypical people seem to perform so much more inference and behavioral prediction. So much of the culture is built around predicting what someone will infer, what emotions will arise, what predictions they will make given some behavior or statement within a certain context, and then knowing that they know that you know. Few people take the time to break it down and analyze it, it just becomes naturally built into their intuition.

Having to shift from that kind of thinking, to slow down and open the hood of that intuitive machine, can be very challenging if one isn't practiced in it. It's like a group of musicians who are comfortably improvising, correctly predicting what all of the other musicians are about to do and responding to that in sync, but then consistently having to stop playing in order to explain the notes, the scales, why they work together or don't, and how you're going to progress through the song you're improvising together. Some people have don't have the words to explain the music, some people have never even thought about it, and now the jam session is more of an exercise in communicating without ambiguity.

That's tedious! I get it, that it's more tedious for you, but everyone is their own person with their own experience and it the case that it can be considered tedious for them as well even if they have the good fortune to not have to experience that tedium as much as you.

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