:geordi-no: Players Shaming Devs
:geordi-yes: Devs Shaming Players
Funny shit and I hope to see more of it.
Gamers are too shitty towards devs, who are overworked and underpaid. They end up getting blamed for the problems caused by CEOs, shareholders, and executives (rushed development) and it’s really fucking cruel sometimes.
Imagine you hadn’t seen your family in months because some fat cat wanted the game out the door in an unreasonable timeframe, You don’t get the time to fix every bug, but you try and tackle the worst ones. It releases and suddenly there are a bunch of 15-year-olds sending you death threats on Twitter because you didn’t make one of the character’s boobs big enough or maybe there’s a half-second drop in FPS that 20% of people get that’s gone viral. What an awful job that must be.
I always enjoy when gamergaters complain about how “they hate their players” like damn, are you really that much of a baby that you care about what some company thinks about you
>make white human male the default in every CC screen of every game>never question why this is considered the default>people impatient to play click through menus and don't customize their character thinking "I'll do it later" or "I'll do it next time">the analytics system picks up on this
Not in this game. When you select customize character, the default is randomized. When you look at a different species, that is also randomized. The game just has a lot of basic white cishet male gamers playing it I think.
The game just has a lot of basic white cishet male gamers playing
Or those players are the most likely to make a character that matches them. Historically RPGs have the highest percentage of women playing outside of life sims. Also, queer people esp trans people tend toward RPGs over other genres. Cis het white man still might be the biggest demographic though, even if it isn’t the majority like it is for games like Total War or Civ
Yeah, I think what’s happening here is less that gamers are overwhelmingly boring, and more that the small minority of overwhelmingly boring white cishet male gamers are effectively voting as a block, because there’s a zillion ways to be creative, but only one way to be as boring as possible.
That’s probably the most succinct way to put it
Oh yeah good point. That is another possibility. 🤔
wow so it really is their fault
In BG3 it’s completely randomized what you start on
LOL
god what a horrible creature… a white man
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w my hot purple tieflingThis is green-haired SJW Lolth-sworn Drow erasure. She’s an arachno-communist.
Lolth-sworn drow is great. Bullying Dhorn out of what is otherwise a mandatory combat encounter was the highlight of the underdark for me.
Hot purple tiefling gang rise up
purple tiefling twink wizard reporting
If nothing else, this shows that the average gamer is not a min-maxer because humans in BG3 are just fucking trash. So many of the other races come with incredible power and the added benefit of not looking like their name is fucking John.
Yeah Deep Gnome, Halfling, Duergar and Half-Orc are by far the strongest “meta” races for min-maxxers but nobody plays them. Everybody plays dragonborn and human even though both are RP tier and objectively inferior in their abilities and powers.
Gith get free misty step and jump, tho…
jump is a ritual spell that can be prepared by anyone with 1 level in wizard at any time and then unprepared after (no spell slot cost), basically inconsequential once you understand how to wizard dip to gain access to all spells. In BG3 all you need is 1 level wizard and you can scroll learn every wizard spell in the game if you are a pure caster of another type (such as bard, druid, cleric or sorcerer) or every wizard spell up to 4th spell level if you’re a half-caster (paladin/ranger). As long as you have 1 person in your party with 1 level of wizard you have infinite access to all ritual spells for your entire party. That’s 1 level out of 48 total levels.
I would much rather have Halfling’s stealth advantage and lucky, which brings your fail chance from 5% to 0.25% on d20 checks you master (saves, skill checks, attack rolls) - or superior darkvision, stealth advantage + wisdom save advantage from deep gnome.
There’s a million ways in the game to gain 1 use of misty step (like an amulet, for example. Or a scroll). There’s no way to get lucky except to be a halfling and it will be impactful on every d20 roll through the entire game (there’s like a million) and it gets better and better the higher your modifiers are (which get very high due to player power creep and magic items).
Gith are pretty good but a solid A-tier. S-tier is firmly in the hands of halfling, deep gnome and maybe half-orc for certain builds.
Dipping 1 level in wizard is still a major opportunity loss for a lot of builds. Likewise there’s a lot of really op amulets in the game, so dedicating the amulet slot to having that is at times sub-par, depending on the build.
I could not disagree more, 1 level wizard dip is the strongest multi class in the game and practically mandatory if your are min-maxing
Would you rather be a Cleric 12 with 3 feats and 6th level Cleric spells OR a 11 Cleric 1 Wizard with 2 feats and 6th level Cleric spells and 6th level Wizard spells? Doubling your casting capability is very powerful, especially when it’s the wizard spell list and you can swap the spells around any time you’re out of combat.
I’m ashamed to say I played a Dragonborn (for coolness) on my first playthrough. I hated up kinda hating it after a while, though, because her face didn’t emote like the humanoids would.
Tbh I was kinda surprised at how much expression they did manage to give the Dragonborn. It’s not as much as the humanoid faces of course but it’s leagues better than, say, any argonian character in TES.
Yeah but there hasn’t been a TES release in over a decade. From looking at videos of Starfield it seems Bethesda hasn’t made great strides in that department, though.
BG3 also has that massive canyon of difference between the player and the companions since they were mocapped and acted out.
That’s absolutely true, I suppose I should’ve been more specific. Despite the animations being inferior to the origin characters & any face captured animations, I still appreciated that the non human species still had a good deal of expression to them since the standard in most games I’ve played is emotionless jaw-flapping.
Nah, Half elves get shields so they are one of the best for casters, at least for me. It’s also funny that even if you psam crossbows, the game takes the equiped shield AC into account. It doesn’t hurt that they are the best looking race of the “basic looking races” either. Then, it’s stru that an actual min maxer would get a 2llv fighter dip so they would get shields too, but depending on progression that dip will take a while and you feel the weakest in early game so… yeah.
Shields are a noob trap. Better to get dual-wielder feat on casters to dual wield 2 staves (Hag Staff, Sparkler, Rainmaker and other good staffs are available easily in Act 1 and only get better). You end up with much better net stats and similar AC, as well as more unique magic item slots. Melee should be using 2-hand weapons.
Only person that should use a shield is a ranged striker, which will always have a level in either fighter or ranger so will already have shield proficiency.
Human’s shield proficiency is pretty dang good on a whole bunch of classes that can’t use shield (at least until you get high enough level to multi class 1 in fighter for both heavy armor and shield).
thing is you can do half high elf get the shield and also a badass magic cantrip to set peeps on fire, also can’t be put to sleep or charmed
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Ah very true
high-elf cantrip scales off int and is generally pretty bad (if you have high int, you’re a wizard and already have that cantrip and plenty of other options).
Wood-elf gets movement speed
You don’t have to pick firebolt, though. You can pick Friends for advantage on almost every single charisma check in the game. You can pick minor illusion to distract people and make enemies move into spots you’d prefer them to be in, like if you want to push someone off a ledge.
not being able to be charmed is pretty useful in this campaign too…
So take half wood-elf which is better in every single way
I prefer to be a plain jane human because I like my character to be the mundane yardstick to which all fantastical things around me can be judged. This is exactly how most main characters in movies and books are structured, so I imagine a lot of other people do this too.
Tbf that is more in popular fiction than fiction in general, where sometimes there is more artistic interest in the character not being a self-insert.
I always play the weirdest thing I can legally. Treant? yeah. Undead? Hell yeah. Weird tiny bird? Sign me up! Human? No thank you. I’m playing a human IRL, why would I want to do that again?
Playing starfield i accidentally made a guy that basically looks like obi wan kenobi was portrayed by ewan macgregor
It’s okay E Wan Maknobi is scottish
I tried to make a femboy-ish character and this is the best I could do.
I think you did pretty well. Looks kinda like Ally Beardsley from dropout, who is a transmasc enby.
America delenda est.
I mean I always just make myself in the character creator for any RPG, the most adventurous I get is going half-elf, never full elf.
No more half-elf measures
But what about halfling measures?
Are halflings the ones that measure time such they end up with two breakfasts? Cause I’m down with that.
America delenda est.
Hobbits of LotR inspired the Halflings of D&D, so yes they count!
Yeah. I know halflings are characterized a bit differently in the 4e handbooks (the only edition I played with any regularity) but the only halfling character I’ve really seen is Regis from the Drizzt books, and he’s pretty exactly a Middle-earth halfling in Faerun.
yeah never go full elf
I will never understand the people who choose to play a generic human when there are other options in a game.
More immersive because I can relate to a human instead of a red demon furry
Speak for yourself
Macron is a tiefling 🤔
What kind of total fucking weirdo would relate to a human
Yes, this. If I ever play it, I’m gonna play a human peasant, maybe a herbalist/druid if I feel spicy
But there’s a red demon furry inside you and she’s just waiting to be let out.
I guess that’s why I never choose humans. I can be a human anytime I want in real life. I play games to experience imaginative stuff.
I mean, everyone has their preference of course and you should play how you want. No shade.
human is usually a solid choice mechanically, esp in d&d, and as a matter of course tend to have the most varied customization options (sure there may be horns for your tiefling, but maybe only a choice of 3 or they’re locked to hairstyle etc)
not saying that’s the case here mind, but those are some reasons beyond a committment to being boring
Humans in BG3 seem to be bad. Variant Human (the one that let you take a feat at level 1) is the reason 5e Human is strong, and that’s not an option in BG3; instead you just get one extra skill proficiency along with polearms, shields, and light armor (which, lmao). You also miss out on darkvision which may or may not matter (I don’t know as I run a full darkvision party).
Because they want to make themselves or something less crazy? I really don’t understand why everyone has to be a tabaxi, aaracokra, changeling etc nowadays. I like being a human or halfelf
In paper & pen RPGs I tend to design goofy personalities and attach them to boring standard race options. My friend who has been a part of the same group for 20 years loves taking pretty standard personalities and adapting them to fit the most bugshit insane race options he can find. We have had a lot of interactions where I - playing as a character that looks like the white guy from a diversity poster - go off on some rant about how I worship the concept of lies and illusions, and how I have written an entire manifesto about how all titles and human relations are manifestations of the holy concept of the ultimate lie, while my friend - playing as an entire swarm of 3" tall shadow goblins, with each hit point having an individual 1930s gangster name - looks for the most noncommital social democrat answer in the world. It’s a good dynamic.
I still can’t find any excuse to make a human look this boring in a video game though.
Fair enough, that sounds fun
Ah yes, John Baldursgate.
Nah this is James Baldursgate, John Baldursgate was the protag of BG1 & 2.
Acting like this isn’t their fault for not including tabaxi in the base game
Give the furries an option and they will come (double entendre only somewhat intended)
You thought they forgot? They just gonna DLC it
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous had kitsune, complete with neat power options for each of their tails, which is a start.
Human form kitsune is technically a polymorph but without any costs or penalties (except losing pounce and bite), which meant you could play the entire game basically a human and gain buffs from any item that buffed on polymorph (like any clothes/armour made from the altar of the first retriever).
Does it count as picking the furry option if it’s to metagame your monk for optimum stats?
Shit.
I didn’t think of that.
And don’t forget the shortys! None of the companions are little people. Dwarves, gnomes and halflings got no love as party members.
Yeah they added like 12 subraces of tiny folk and there’s like 2 named characters of note in the whole game that are halfling, dwarf or gnome. One of them is a serial killer.
I’m gonna assume the non-serial killer one is either Barcus or Wulbren. Because, I honestly can’t remember any gnome characters that aren’t part of the ironhand gnome questline apart from the evil butler guy from Dark Urge.
Can’t play kobolds or goblins
The only non-human species they had were dragonborn so I played that. They even humanized them somewhat.
But I can’t say I’m surprised after seeing what the helmets looked like.struggle session over whether or not elves and orcs and halflings and gnomes and such are ‘human’
I consider them humans since we call homo sapiens, neanderthals, erectus, habilis, etc. all humans 🤷
i have never considered any of them “human” and a lot of the literature I’ve read (which isn’t much tbh) is super careful about not doing that
it seems like your definition of “human” is a lot like the definition of “white” which is very fluid and made-up and anyways i reject whiteness, do better
Oh really? Weird cause I see the other human species called just that all the time.
scientifically neanderthals are not humans
when they existed so did humans; they were two different species of hominid
a coworker of mine has a masters in anthropology so i could ask her i guess shes the only person i know with real expertise on the subject
Sure why not. I’d be interested to hear what sort of language is used among her field.
At least they gave them tail options.
I’m waiting till warforged are playable. My kink is bonus AC.
Not sure this necessarily means that everyone is just rolling Default 1990s CRPG Character. You could have a bunch of interesting builds that still end up with this as the combination of the most popular choices
Or it could be that this is just a small plurality. 10% of people choose a boring white guy, but then each of the other options gets like 8%, so even though 90% of players are playing something that isn’t just a white guy, technically, the most popular individual choice is white guy.
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I think there’s a pretty clear disconnect between the power levels of the implied background of the PC and the backgrounds for the other party members. Like okay I’m a Paladin/Warlock who was apparently a Guild Artisan and there are occasionally dialogue options based on these, but generally I’m a blank slate normal guy; the perfect example of a level 1 character background.
Then you have the party members (massive spoilers)
- Shadowheart is an evil cleric who was probably kidnapped as a child but had her memories wiped by the memory-wiping faction she serves. She was doing some super important mission and should probably be higher than level 1.
- Lae’zel is a weird alien fascist who should probably be higher than level 1.
- Gale was a prodigy super-wizard who fucked the godess of magic, but now he’s level 1.
- Wyll was a super hero warlock, but now he’s level 1.
- Astarion is a centuries-old vampire spawn before he takes any class levels (Challenge 5 in 5e), but he’s level 1.
- Karlach fought in the blood war, but now she’s level 1.
Every single one of them (except arguably Shadowheart) are way too powerful in-setting to be a level 1 character in D&D.
They kinda explain the party member bit.
spoilers for BG3 and kotor, kinda.
It’s partly explained by Wyll in that he mentions he was incredibly powerful before the Nautiloid. I guess getting a monster fetus drilled into your brain is bad for it.
And they added Dark Urge to give the pc a storyline to discover. It’s clear that the Dark Urge storyline was developed alongside the rest of the game, almost like it was supposed to be the default story. I guess they didn’t want to do a Darth Revan so they made it a separate option.
I hope I didn’t spoil things for you, I’m guessing from your description you haven’t fully finished the game yet?
Not finished, no, I think I’m either at the start of Act 2 or the end of Act 1?
spoiler
Just killed the Inquisitor and stole the Blood of Lathander.
You’re fairly early in act 2, yeah. I personally thought the companion stories were really well written but it’s maybe a little annoying that how certain things play out change depending on who is currently in your party.
slight spoiler about the part you just completed
All the interactions at the creche are obviously very different depending on whether or not you have Lae’zel in the party.
spoiler
Re: Lae’zel, I figured as much. She’s is on the bench because I didn’t get her until I’d finished Act 1, but I would have left her behind for the creche anyway due to conflict of interests. I assume she’d betray me after the lich queen told the entire creche to go aggro.
spoiler
That’s a fair assumption to make considering just how many times the game make the party want to kill eachother.
spoiler
That’s a fair assumption to make considering just how many times the game make the party want to kill eachother.
0 so far
(except for the time I killed Asterion but then went back to an earlier save because he is the only rogue)
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spoiler
I would love to see more stories in the game, whether they’re official or community made. I feel like Larian went for too much fanservice in some points, though,
super duper spoilers for end of the game
Like how the emperor is revealed to be Balduran. There was no real need for that. We’re already saving the world, not everone and everything has to be the most important thing or person in the world.
Everyone of them will tell you they lost considerable amounts of power when they got infected.
I guess I haven’t gotten those dialogues yet. So far the only ones with an explanation had explanations from what they were doing before they got infected.
spoiler
Wyll got his powers removed for breaking his pact, Gale lost some magic when he opened the evil book, Shadowheart could conceivably have had her powers erased along with her memories.
But that was tangential to my point, which is that all of the party members have backgrounds stating that they were operating on a higher level in a way that contrasts with the blank slate of the player character. This is not to mention that a high-level character in D&D should be swimming in magic items, even if they lost their actual character levels.
You think the mindflayers just let their abductees keep powerful magic items on them while incarcerated? Why wouldn’t they just have confiscated them?
Maybe it’s revealed later, but the nautiloid’s tendrils looked like they just grabbed people and put them in the pods with all their stuff. IIRC the PC starts the game with a Revivify scroll, which is a 3rd level spell, so they don’t take all magic items. I know the obvious answer here is “balance reasons”, and I’m mostly just nitpicking, I just have a really fundamental dislike for this style of character backstory in D&D and every one of the main companions suffers from it.
Ah you see, they placed those there so their new Absolute thralls would have a good head start in the world without being powerful enough to overthrow the mind flayers.
Kinda just feels like you are trying to nitpick plotholes which is my least favorite type of media criticism, so I guess we are at an impasse here
The plot explains this away with the magic plot device the plot is centered around doing a “reset” on people’s brains
Solution: Should have made it so that there were no plain white guy options
Certainly. Who needs bipedal anyway?
I want my character to look like Mr. Waternoose
You want your character to look like a filthy child-exploiting capitalist?
I just want to be a centaur but for spiders instead of horses. Unfortunately, spider centaurs are not well represented in media, so I go with what I know 😔
Isn’t that an established D&D thing for Drow? Drivers, I think they’re called?
There is a sort of charm to “bland generic fighter” templates especially in a game trying to go out of its way to not do that on its premade story characters.
That said, the no-selections default is better off showing anything but what the typical
gater would expect from his yet-another-grizzled-cishet-white-man-avenging-fridged-wife-and/or-rescuing/protecting-le-sexy-daughter-figure-from-otherfied-subhumans-totally-nonpolitically slop.Fridged inside a fridge btw
The wife wouldn’t need rescuing if she was outside the fridge.
Fridging is when the character gets unalived so no chance of rescuing.
Fridging refers to when the writer kills usually a partner of the main character to justify the vengeance motivation of the MC, but done in a lazy-writing way basically the partner gets no background nor focus, they are just an object that gets destroyed, like a reverse “McGuffin” if you will. Plus points if the death is done in a crass way, hence the “fridging” (google the origin of the term).
In Fallout 4, the spouse of the MC gets killed gratuitously for no real fucking reason in a crass way “here, you want revenge now”, so it checks all the boxes for being a “fridging”
Now, idk if the writers wanted to be “lol so meta” but the spouse gets fridged while sitting in a cryogenic pod.
Thanks for the detail. I quite enjoy learning about narrative techniques like this. Have you seen the lemmygrad creative writing and related communities? You might fit in well.
Hadn’t checked them, but I’m not a writer
Plus, I’m actually very art/media illiterate, and the little I know I think I learned mostly from fucking breadtube.
For example: I played a lot of FNV and then I was watching an explanation about a failed total conversion mod of FNV which “made Courier=Jesus references ad nauseam as if the original game wasn’t obvious enough” and only then I went “Ooooooh resurrection”
In my defense, I’m christianity iliterate, I never learned the name of twelve apostles despite going to sunday school for a year.
