Praised so universally that people were talking about it as a repudiation of recent trends in development and monetization practices and a revival of AAA single-player gaming. I say bait.

“Women who could beat my ass” get reactionary dorks upset enough to misgender them.

Like in Aliens: “Hey Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?” “No, have you?”

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No, they aren’t nonbinary. Afaik there’s one nonbinary character in new Dragon Age and that’s all i can remember from the top of my head.

Also in all my playing in rpg’s ever, Yennefer in W3 was the one romance i tried to avoid as far as possible, but i thought it was impossible due to canonical circumstances that they were basically magically bound into it. I was seriously impressed by devs of this game that they really gave player a choice in this through the surprising quest.

Lae’zel is a space babe and Karlach is a demon babe. Karlach is butch, but she is still conventionally attractive.

IIRC, Karlach’s VA is non-binary.

Gender Affirming Incantations

In a lot of ways yea. I’m actually in the middle of replaying it for the first time in years and doing a survival mode play through, trying to engage with mechanics I never did before

And it’s funny bc every single element of it, every mechanic, is totally half baked and yet idk it just has a certain je nais se quoi about it. Idk if it’s just the vibe or I just really like exploring or something but despite every part of the game being pretty weak, as a whole I find it pretty enjoyable in a junk food-y kind of way

I definitely don’t know what kind of drugs I’d have to be on to hold it up as a blueprint for “strong story telling” or “awesome combat” tho lol

Skyrim had gay marriage too. Not that marriage in game was that fleshed out.

D&D does genuinely suck at both being an RPG system in general and also at the specific sort of dungeon crawling resource attrition game it was designed to be, and BG3 does suffer horribly for being D&D. I’d say it being 5e is even worse, but it’s not like 4e was any better. 3.5e was interesting but an absolute mess, and I have limited exposure to earlier editions but what I’ve seen looks even worse and jankier. Like the character building is “this character is [class], number get bigger when level up, no choices, only number go up” and the combat is “you make a basic attack, because this is D&D 5e and that’s what characters do they make a single attack role; magic users can make a basic attack with bigger numbers once per day, in exchange for their normal basic attacks being worse; this is a very serious and respectable system that people play for some reason.”

Pathfinder is the only good version of D&D and even that still has problems from the whole “it’s still D&D, fundamentally speaking” thing no matter how much 2e does to mitigate all that design tech debt and give lots of flavorful build options and things different classes can do other than D&D’s bread and butter of characters either being a basic attack bot or being a worse basic attack bot that sometimes does a special attack.

Damn, imagine if instead of BG3 Larian had made a Pathfinder 2e game that had nothing to do with WotC’s mid setting or bad ruleset. I vaguely remember hearing about a mod project to overhaul BG3 to Pathfinder rules since the underpinning mechanics are the basically same and Pathfinder just has better class and ability design and balancing, is that actually real or did I imagine it?

D&D 5e is quite different from prior versions and in many ways is simplified if not actually simplistic.

As an example, 25 years ago Icewind Dale won several awards for best squad level real time tactics game. 5e isn’t really that kind of game.

I do think this is trolling, though, as others have pointed out that all of those games except Red Dead were panned for clunky at best combat.

Skyrim has the worst story of any game I have played

Some fans were having a meltdown because a recent Mass Effect product listed Liara’s pronouns as she/they. Asari (the species Liara is a apart of) do not actually have gender as humans understand it and applying the label of women to them is a bit inaccurate, Liara says as much in Mass Effect 1. The way Liara describes her gender is very she/they, “I’m a girl who is not a quite girl”. Most Asari we meet present as feminine, but a few present more masculine. We meet Liara’s father who despite appearing outwardly as a women, refers to themselves as father of their child. For context Asari are a monosexual species who are all capable of reproduction and look like human women in most ways other than blue skin and a tentacle crest in lieu of hair. Pronoun discourse wasn’t as much of a thing when Mass Effect came out, but it makes sense that Asari would have a range of gender idenities and pronouns to match despite their monosexual nature. I would not be surprised if Mass Effect 5 explores Asari gender a bit, much to the chagrin of chuds. I think Asari were intended to subvert the ‘blue space babe’ trope, and do in some instances, but adding more gender expression to the Asari would go along to explore that idea.