RoboticBunny's Site

Baldur's Gate 3

Something I've found interesting so far is how compact the world is. It seems there's something big happening around every corner and I'm a bit split on it. On the one hand I feel like it respects my time more than if they built a huge empty world (which was the style at the time), but at the same time one of the things I've enjoyed about my small forrays into irl D&D has been the expanses of normal breaking up the exciting. I sorta feel like it'd be difficult to find a middle-ground between RespectMyTime and GiveMeBigMap without doing the oldskool thing of isolated locations and a 2D world map between them, so I'm not complaining.

In terms of gameplay I've really been enjoying the turn-based battles, I could never get the hang of the realtime/pause combat of the first BG or Icewind Dale (and Neverwinter Nights to a degree). I love the many opportunities to use the Speak With Animals/The Dead spells, they rapidly became my favourite spells in the game. Was upset that I couldn't pair them to speak with a dead ox tho :P

Sailwind

This little sailing game has ruined other sailing games for me :P. It captures the difficulties of sailing and navigating in the age of sail in a way I've never seen before. The gameplay involves picking up cargo and sailing it to its destination (there's also like trading mechanics but I'm bad at it lol), on small jobs this means following a compass heading until you can see the island you're after. Longer voyages require keeping track of your longitude and latitude.

It also goes for a realistic approach to the mechanics of sailing, you gotta keep your sails pointing the right way in relation to the wind, and if you're facing dead into the wind you're basically stuck.

A big downside for me is that it takes a loooong time to get anywhere. Moving between archipeligos will take up a fair chunk of your irl day.