#option. which speaking of orpheus i am so sorry lae'zel i will do you justice next playthrough

[taliaglitch]

I'M DONEEEE with bg3!!!!!! CREDITS ROLLING! almost 110 hours for one playthrough, doing the main + companion storylines and whatever sidequests i stumbled upon in the process. steam says i have 150 hours in the past two weeks, and since i didn't play EA any that shortly before release, those 40 extra hours are i guess from reloads and... does the time played displayed in-game not count loading screens? good lord i hope i didn't spend 20+ hours in loading screens. i think i spent about 30-35 hours in act 1, 30-35 in act 2, and the rest in act 3 (which would be my favorite if my performance in the city was better - but i at least never did have any crashes in it! just the first 2 acts)

some rambling thoughts on the ending/my playthrough in the tags, but tl;dr i'm not as underwhelmed as reddit led me to believe i would be (certainly less than i was by dos2's ending!), but i am frustrated by a great deal of visual bugs (flat textures, missing meshes, etc) i experienced in the ending cutscenes - but i have no idea how much was the game itself and how much was my computer not being up to the task (i'm leaning towards it being my computer, because it has a habit of making textures super fucked up after playing for a while, like they don't decompress properly or something and theyre 5 pixels big & nasty-looking, but also that's different than the bugs i got in the ending). i'm also confused by the lack of ending slides since those have been an rpg staple probably for as long as there have been rpgs. but overall: WOW I REALLY LIKED THIS VIDEO GAME. extremely worth the $60 i spent 3 years ago, and will be worth however much i have to spend to upgrade my computer to do it justice.

#SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS #READ THESE TAGS AT YOUR OWN RISK #so i ended up ditching the two-impulse-playthroughs concept at the start of act 3 #i couldn't commit both to being evil and also to playing the game twice as the same character in such a short span of time #so impulse consolidated into one astarion-romancing tadpole-eating mostly-chaotic-good disaster #they also romanced the emperor. because of course they did #what's that meme. *astarion voice* me my partner and the mind flayer that visits them in their dreams #yknow. the one with the $500 mareep plushie #but they actually faced no consequences for all their tadpole usage other than having a spooky face for act 3 #which no one ever commented on #so either they needed more tadpoles or i specifically had to pick the 'could i become illithid assimilate orpheus and use the stones' #option. which speaking of orpheus i am so sorry lae'zel i will do you justice next playthrough #uhhh what else. i'm not as unhappy with karlach's ending as reddit led me to believe either. but that's probably just because i love sad #endings. and also didn't fully romance her this playthrough. maybe i'd feel different if i did #the actual final boss fight was very very cool. gortash & orin's felt underwhelming compared to ketheric's #raphael's fight was super cool but mostly because of the disney villain song ass music. i managed to crowd him into a corner so it was just #a matter of hitting him over & over until he died. not that difficult #i never had to reload a fight more than once and that happened a single digit number of times. which i appreciate! i was on explorer #after all. the difficulty felt perfect - big fights were challenging and stressful but not frustrating to the point of tears #as they tended to be in EA for me. many an EA playthrough of mine ended against priestess gut #i got an achievement for saving every tiefling refugee i could #and specifically impulse killed the netherbrain & destroyed the tadpoles #i can't think of anything else. i like this game a lot #the companions & their storylines were the absolute highlight for me as they are in every rpg #even if i didn't properly complete lae'zels. or wyll's? i mean i broke his pact. and then found his dad who died anyway. but the quest was #never marked complete in my journal #the ending i got for gale felt strange to me too like bro youre really just gonna repeat the mistakes of your past self and that karsus guy #or whoever. i passed that dc 30 persuasion check and everything #still in awe of shadowheart & astarion's specifically. i'm sure i'll feel the same about lae'zels next playthrough #aaaand i hit the limit on tags! well. off to draw! maybe. i might sleep for 5 million years first. exhausting! 150 hours in 10 days!