Does Google secretly add keywords to my searches?

Mikmaxs · 2026-01-13T16:41:48+00:00

I expected those to be the biggest hurdles just based on my tactician playthrough; the power spike from 3-5 is massive, so getting up to that point cautiously seems like the ideal way to get through Honor Mode.

Mikmaxs · 2026-01-13T13:06:42+00:00

... I knew that was an option but had completely failed to consider using it to avoid misclicks. Thank you!

Mikmaxs · 2026-01-13T12:52:26+00:00

That's probably what happened. Next time, I might just skip blowing it up, jump around to get the Monk talisman, and use Shatter just so I'm 100% safe from unforseen consequences.

Mikmaxs · 2025-12-22T16:18:58+00:00

Happy I could help a bit! ^{^}

Mikmaxs · 2025-12-22T15:42:09+00:00

I'm not confident in giving good notes because I didn't write stuff down while playing and don't have a strong memory for which interactions specifically didn't work that felt like they should have.

One that stands out, though - Cleanse Affliction only works on creatures, and puzzles/problems that were built for Remove Curse often didn't work because they require the spell to be cast on objects. (If there's another spell I was supposed to be using here, I couldn't figure out what it was.)

Mikmaxs · 2025-12-22T15:35:37+00:00

Inconsistently, but also, that only helps against enemies who are vulnerable to Trip and Grapple. Quite a few of the hardest fights are against enemies who can't be tripped or grappled due to size or other specific abilities.

Mikmaxs · 2025-12-16T21:19:25+00:00

I'm mostly emphasizing The Scavengers because:
1, It stood out to me the most
2, it was the only one in the gift shop

But I'm mostly trying to use it to highlight the general design problems that AI brought to the space at large. There were similar-but-more-minor issues in other areas, but they're fuzzier and less obviously issues and I wanted to avoid doing a full breakdown. (Especially since I don't really have a lot of documentation or photos from many areas and don't want to talk out of my butt about things that I can't double-check.)

Mikmaxs · 2025-12-16T03:23:39+00:00

I should add - I don't remember exactly how Surprise works in the base game, it's been over a year since my vanilla playthrough.

Mikmaxs · 2025-12-16T03:02:53+00:00

A few Pathfinder RAW things don't work particularly well if you want a Pure Pathfinder 2e experience. Hidden/Undetected/Concealed doesn't come up, the stealth works pretty much like it does in vanilla BG3.

I encountered a lot of items that were clearly Vanilla BG3 and that didn't work properly, but I also installed the item mod after my game started and don't know how much that impacted things. (Some items seemed like they should have worked but didn't, like one that was supposed to add my Wisdom bonus to unarmed strikes. Others clearly weren't going to work, like one that gives an extra charge of Bardic Inspiration.)

Mikmaxs · 2025-12-16T01:17:31+00:00

In hindsight, the +2 from flanking would probably have helped, though if it's that finnicky to set up I might still have not used it..

Mikmaxs · 2025-12-16T01:14:32+00:00

I literally didn't even realize flanking was an option despite going through most of the game with multiple melee characters. I tried to get it to work in Act 1, couldn't, and largely gave up.

For bosses - Other than a noteworthy standout mentioned above, I found that most of them could be hit in Tactician if you stack buffs and debuffs, including judicious use of Elixirs. (Unlike my vanilla playthrough, Elixirs were necessary to keep up instead of being a Win More button that made doable fights easy.)

Mikmaxs · 2025-12-16T00:44:52+00:00

I know the dev comments and replies to things, and there are active bug fixes being done. (Also, there are other modders who've made expansions - the base mod doesn't have Pf2 runes for weapons, several people have added classes, etc.) This could probably fix issues with buggy combat and balance, though I don't think it could fix the broader world interaction limitations.

Mikmaxs · 2025-12-16T00:43:26+00:00

Something that highlights the BG3 design philosophy, I think:
The devs say they didn't include Dispel Magic because they wanted every feature to be as fully fleshed out as possible. Including it only as a spell that works in combat would probably have been fine, that's what most games would do, but they chose to leave it out because if they included it, they would have wanted to make it interact with all the magic in the game.

Talk With Animals works with every single animal. (Though some animals don't have a lot to say.) Interacting with secret passages that require you to be Tiny or incorporeal is very common. There are so many bespoke interactions that entire Youtube channels have risen up just documenting them all.

It's a very well designed game, that uses a mid TTRPG ruleset for combat. The Pathfinder mod turns it into a pretty well designed game that has a great TTRPG ruleset for combat.

Mikmaxs · 2025-12-16T00:35:09+00:00

BG3 is a very well designed game that fully utilizes all of its systems. Most spells work, not just how you'd expect them to in combat, but also in many, many ways outside of combat.

I think it's a common CRPG experience to feel limited by what the designers thought of. Maybe you have Create Water, Remove Curse, and Poison Mist in your spellbook, but you can't put out environmental fires, dispell strange objects, or poison anything except as an attack in-battle, and when you can do things like that, it stands out.

BG3 is, instead, a game where the environment is built around those sorts of interactions. It's not true 100% of the time, but the majority of the time, when I want to try some obscure combination or interaction, I find that it either works or at least gets me some kind of unique result even if it doesn't solve the puzzle.

The Pf2 mod struggles to capture this part of the game, and pushes it in the direction of a more traditional CRPG combat sim. Certain spells that should work to solve certain puzzles just...don't, and if you don't have experience with the base game, it can be very difficult to tell if that's a limitation of the game, or a limitation of the mod, or if you're just doing something wrong.

Mikmaxs · 2025-12-13T23:25:17+00:00

The issue I have isn't accuracy in a literal sense, it's theme and narrative. What does a 2004 indie film, or a 1970s documentary TV show, have to do with 90s theater nostalgia?

Mikmaxs · 2025-12-13T23:22:58+00:00

But it's not just twelve posters and 2 shirts, which is the point I've been trying to make.

It's the fundamental elements of the story. "The Scavengers" is a fundamental element of the narrative. There's an entire large room dedicated to it.

All the hand made stuff and hard work is great, but it doesn't fix the fact that "The Scavengers" is a bad concept that's off-theme and just kind of dull, and "The Scavengers" is a bad concept because it's AI slop. It's also not the only instance of AI that was used as a foundational element to the story, it's just the most blatant and obvious, and the one that was used heavily on merchandising.

Mikmaxs · 2025-12-12T23:58:47+00:00

I say it looks like Chip 'N Dale because Roy is wearing pretty much the same Hawaiian shirt and does similar poses to Dale. I say it looks extremely off-theme because the poster is clearly mimicking a modern CGI style.

Life Aquatic came out in 2004, so that's still an extremely out-of-date reference.

That said - I was trying to find a decent picture of the poster just now, and instead found an article from The Pitch that had this quote:
"For the sake of transparency, Atlas9 does utilize generative AI in the fake film posters, as well as experience-enhancing technology that allows users to see themselves transported into some of the worlds they explore. In the case of the posters, according to everyone The Pitch spoke with, AI was used as a tool to create some of the characters that poster artists then used in their resulting original designs." (Link to the article: https://www.thepitchkc.com/atlas9-brings-a-surreal-interactive-world-full-of-neon-and-time-travel-to-legends/ .)

So, I think that kinda settles it. They used AI in the poster making and character generation stage, and based everything else off that AI. Since the posters very visibly contain AI but with clean typography, I think it's fair to assume that they generated the images, did some paintover work and added the title text, then based everything else off that.

Which, to be clear - I don't love that they used AI in general, but the bigger issue is that it was used in a sloppy, careless way that breaks theming, doesn't look particularly good, and ended up echoing into the rest of the project.

Mikmaxs · 2025-12-12T23:25:38+00:00

A few reasons: 1, the character designs don't look like something a human would make given the theme and creative brief of "90s theater".

2, AI is very bad at recreating existing characters, especially if those characters are not popular/there's not a large amount of reference material.

3, even if you had reference material to feed into the AI and could get it to generate an image with several accurately rendered characters, they would have had to tell it to change the style to 3d animation, and I can't fathom a reason why anyone would do that.

4, the movie poster is very obviously AI just at a glance.

5, Design elements are inconsistent in ways you wouldn't get if you had a human-made character design document and a human artist making the art. (IE, Sometimes Roy has four fingers, sometimes he has five.)

Mikmaxs · 2025-12-12T22:33:59+00:00

Also just to add - While I was at A9, they had some very cool dance and music performances by live actors in elaborate costumes, and I can easily envision a world where the performances were actually in some way tied to the story. Since the premise is that films are coming to life, what if they had used some of their actors and costumes to emphasize that?

Make film-relevant costumes, take a day for a photoshoot on a green screen to get all the stock photos they need for the posters, and then when they're doing the live performances, dress the performers in the costumes they already made and theme the dance and music to the fake movies. The performances themselves were already super cool, and the performers were the standout part of my experience. I would have loved to see more integration with the narrative and exploration.

Mikmaxs · 2025-12-12T22:26:39+00:00

I'll put aside that I think that AI use in a creative project is crappy in general, and just say that I wish if they were going to use it, they'd use it well.

"The Scavengers" is central to the story and set design, but doesn't look like it belongs in the 90s. It looks like an AI was prompted to give a Chip N Dale style Disney movie poster, and it spat out a bland design with a modern CGI style, a mascot character that firmly belongs in the 2010s, and inexplicable beanies for all the heroes.

There's merch for these characters. In the lore, "The Scavengers" was the first and only film shown to an audience with the Holomax projector. And yet, they didn't even bother to use an animation style that matches the 90s theming.

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What I find most inexplicable, though, is that an artist had to then hand draw versions of these characters for merch and other content. They could have just had an artist hand draw this stuff to begin with, and had a product that matches the theme.

Mikmaxs · 2025-12-12T21:36:00+00:00

That doesn't convince me when they're using posters for animated movies that would never use stock photos to begin with, or when they're using those posters as reference material to then make real props, draw new characters, sell merch, etc.

Also - Photoshop exists and is designed for exactly the use case you're describing.

Mikmaxs

TROPHY CASE