Sunday Bits: More Baldur's Gate 3

Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

(Potential early-game Baldur’s Gate 3 spoilers below.)

08:14 # Well hell. I wake up to find it pouring down rain, which really makes me regret spending yesterday playing Baldur’s Gate 3 instead of mowing. #homeowner #baldursgate3

09:45 # Yet another UI bug I ran into in Baldur’s Gate 3: I walked into a combat encounter, but for some reason the game thought I was in a cut scene, so all the combat UI was missing and I couldn’t actually do anything (F10 did not toggle it back on). Fortunately I was able to restore the UI by quicksaving and quickloading (something I have attempted more than once to fix weird issues thusfar), otherwise it would have been a game-breaking, load-the-last-save bug. #baldursgate3

10:42 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Huh. So I’ve been wondering why I couldn’t find Lae’zal after the ship crashed in my BG3 game, and it turns out it’s one of those situations where I went left instead of right and completely missed her. There’s a lot of those decision points in this game so far. Go right, it goes to a short dead end with something cool in it. Go left, it’s continuing down the main path to the rest of the game and you forget to go back and check the other way. Not a fan of that in games. The “mostly linear path but with lots of short diversions you could miss” methodology. Either be fully linear or be fully open, I say. #baldursgate3

14:22 # One of the problems with my game recording setup for a long time has been that I can only listen to the games I’m playing by monitoring the OBS output from my recording PC, instead of listening to the game PC, because in Windows you can only send an application’s audio to one device, and I need to send the game audio to the HDMI output so I can capture it on the recording PC. So there’s a slight delay to the game sound that I hear, compared to what I see on the screen. Usually it’s fine but sometimes it gets wildly out of sync. I’m testing Voicemeeter Banana today to output game sound both to monitors and to the HDMI output at the same time. There’s still a 10ms delay. Not sure if it’s better yet. Not sure if I want to change up what’s been working for years. #videos

18:17 # There’s so many little weird bugs in Baldur’s Gate 3 that even my Steam achievements are messed up. Every achievement I get says only 0.1% of players have gotten it. And also I got an achievement for doing 5 attacks in one turn, which none of my characters are capable of doing, and I definitely didn’t do that at the time I got the achievement. #baldursgate3

22:43 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Tavi hired a second Bard because the group really needed a violin to complement her bongos. (Yes, multiple bards play together.) With Lae’Z and Wyll for protection, we made a quick side trip to a cave to deal with an owlbear for some Absolute cultists. The cultists immediately turned on us at the start of the fight and we barely survived the monstrous beast. It turns out the newly hired Bard is a better Bard than my Bard and I’m jealous. #baldursgate3