The Besties - Baldur's Gate 3 is Just Unbelievably Good

Episode Date: August 11, 2023

Baldur's Gate 3 has been a long time coming, and boy howdy, it does not disappoint. How well has Larian Studios adapted the D&D 5E tabletop experience into the digital realm, and how many ways can you mess with your friends in the game's incredibly robust co-op offering? Find out inside!Also discussed: TMNT: Mutant Mayhem, Oppenheimer, THE FIRST SLAM DUNK Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

So I have talked about struggling to find programs to watch with my young child. Yeah. He has since fallen deeply in love with my neighbor Totoro. Oh, good. But we did do a bit of a dice roll because I was looking for a Totoro stuffed animal for him to sleep with. And I, you know, it's his favorite movie. So I got like a decent, like a 15 inch tall totoro big guy yeah and on the picture you know he looked very cute on the picture and then he showed up and he

was like still like 80 as cute as the picture yeah 20 super cursed like what happened well he just has that big smile you know the big smile sucks No one talks about that when they talk about Totoro, but when he makes the big, big smile, it's scary. And that's, like, his thing. Like, he does it a lot. It's a horror movie smile, right? It's like, I'm about to kill you. It's like the, what is it called?

Smile, that horror movie. Basically, it's that smile. Yeah, it is like the movie Smile. So, but it was a dice roll, because was like well you know maybe i don't know he seems into it so i ordered it and it showed up and definitely 20 cursed yeah and we were like how can we do this in a way that it's not going to terrify him so you wanted an advantage like a check right yeah right exactly we needed to do a dice roll to make sure that Totoro's charisma was high enough. So I his Riz. I played the movie for my son and he's watching it.

And then I freeze framed it on one of the moments where he has the big smile. And then I knocked on the door like oh there's someone at the door and then and then i opened the door and i had left him behind the door the toro okay well that's okay and then what happened brief moment where it was like oh this could go very wrong very quickly but no he was fucking into it. It was like a huge success. All right. Well that, yeah,

that definitely, that was on the razor's edge. I hope you understand the tremendous risk that you took because you could, there's a reality in which your son would be like, well, I guess I'm, I guess this character is ruined for me because it can just kind of show up. Yeah.

He just doesn't know that big smiles are scary, is the thing. He thinks they're great. Well, problem, problem. Are you teaching him that you can trust big smiles now? Yeah. Right? I mean... Because now you're really working on making it that anytime he comes across, let's say, like, a scary clown...

Yeah. He's gonna be, like, friend that seems like a cool clown. Yeah. He's going to be like friend. This seems like a cool person to hang out with. I mean, not every big smile is an evil big smile. Just most of them. Mm hmm. Uh huh. My son,

like this reminds me, my son is like really into Akira. And so I found this plushie of blob Tetsuo at the end. Yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah and i was like i'm worried that this blob tetsuo plushie is gonna be scary in some way and that child is not gonna like it but he does he does he loves it he climbs in bed with the blob tetsuo and just kind of kind of like gets into the folds of it and he likes it it's fun for him it's comfortable to be fair

that's an entire room where the toys come alive yes that's true too yeah that's jesus christ what a scary i i jokes aside i think if i showed that movie to my son it would really do some serious damage yeah some real real psychological damage man How have they not made a Totoro bed that you can just climb up on the belly of it? They have one at the museum in Japan. I want one in my home. I don't live in Japan. I can't criticize Cat Bus as well there.

I don't care about a Cat Bus. I want a big bed that breathes, that I sleep on the tummy of it. One more caveat. As I was looking for totoro shit to put in his room i found on like an alibaba page it it was a picture of totoro standing at the bus station classic scene love it directly next to him was a picture of molder from the x files saying aliens oh that's funny. Man, it is unfortunate.

I was holding my monkey paw up to the microphone, Griffin, when you said I want a big bed that breathes. Yeah. And it did not give you a Totoro bed. It just turned the current bed you have into a living being that desperately wishes it had a mouth so it could scream. Oh, okay. Well, that's going to be expensive. Thanks for that.

My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Ross Frusciano, and I know the best game of the week. And this is The Besties. Welcome to it, the show where we talk about the latest and greatest at home interactive entertainment. It's a book club for video games, and just by listening to you, my friend. I remember this week we are talking about Baldur's Gate 3, a game that I am shuddering with anticipation to discuss with my two good friends, Russ and Chris. Justin is not here for this one on vacay.

He doesn't like dice. He doesn't. He's scared of them. Yep. Any shape that's not a circle. He's like, no, thank you. He's fine with any shape that's not a circle. He's like, no thank you. He's fine with 19-sided, but 20 just goes too far.

That's one too many. Chris Plant, what is Baldur's Gate 3, please? It's a return of the PC RPG of immersive sim gaming of D&D brand Baldur's Gate. It's all coming back thanks to the people who made Divinity Original Sin 1 and 2.

And if you played those games, you have a pretty damn good idea of what this game and also might be one of the best games I've played in forever. Absolutely. It rules. It's unbelievable. Wait, just wait! Because we have to go on a quick break and then we're going to talk all about it.

Hell yeah. You mentioned Divinity Original Sin 1 and 2. Larian Studios has done approximately 100 Divinity games. That series existed all the way back in the early aughts. And we should clarify, it's not Larry and Studios. It's Larian Studios. It's not larry and studios it's larry and studios it's larry in and in stands for larry and studios nidio his best friend studios larry and studios uh they are they are very classic style crpgs with like really really fun ways of interacting with the world

and it i loved divinity original sin 2 it's like probably my favorite crpg uh to this point and to see this game evolve what was amazing about that game it is truly truly breathtaking okay and just as heads up we are not going to be covering anything beyond act one so uh you know it's funny because when i say act one you could spend 30 hours and i'm still in act one i've not gotten are you has anyone else progressed beyond act one no no okay great that's what i assumed it's a big old act uh but we're mostly going to be focusing on early stuff that you see in the first five or ten hours you figure uh brass brass tacks this is a crpg compute computer rpg is that all

crpg stands for i guess i think so yeah which is like a genre that that dates back to i mean i guess like fucking ultima or whatever but it's mostly known for the sort of dnd games that spun off of it baldur's life baldur's gate neverwinter Nights. Icewind Dale. Icewind Dale, Planescape Torment, like all of these old games. The original Fallout was that. Yeah, for sure. And this game is that, but modern, and adapting the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition rule set that is sort of the current go-to rules for for the dungeons of dragons tabletop game which is a perfect pairing because the fifth edition rule set to me is the most video gamey of the

bunch oh wow i i disagree with that i think fourth edition yeah i think fourth edition was very gamey very like uh fourth edition is the first one i played because it felt so much like World of Warcraft or any other sort of RPG. Everything was very mechanical. I think that they actually had a much harder job with fifth edition because there's a lot of stuff that is very theater of the mind. It's like mushy stuff. Very mushy stuff that is very improvisational and very interpretive. and very interpretive and that doesn't work in a video game where you have to program that shit uh and to see how they have taken all of these different uh mechanics and then made them uh you know replicatable in a video game has been truly truly impressive um so like for instance there's

a spell a basic cantrip in fifth edition called thaumaturgy oh yeah you can use that to produce like a you know a harmless sort of sensory effect it's basically just like tada magic right like prestidigitation sort of not big damaging spell just grab it out of a hat right in this game it's in there right but like how would you do that like how would you just have that well the answer is that you use it and then it gives you an advantage whenever you do like performance you know or like intimidation intimidate somebody right you can use it to create like a you know a light that makes you seem scarier that's like kind of what i'm talking about like taking these mushy mechanics and then making them make sense in a video game environment and yet the game is still very welcoming to like the mushy stuff

of like i'm gonna stack a bunch of boxes on top of each other and then just go over this wall there's a great video of matt mercer uh building a staircase out of like a hundred crates and climbing it and then shooting an arrow of transposition that uh he like shoots over this wall that you're not supposed to be able to get over and teleports to wherever it lands and skips like a whole chunk of the game it's crazy because like i i'm coming off of playing the last rpg i played was diablo 4 and they're just like i mean they're not the same genre even though they're both called rpgs like obviously diablo 4 is an action rpg but diablo 4's whole hook is like you make a build you figure out what's

effective with that build maybe you make it slightly better because you get a gear drop but broadly speaking you're doing the same thing every 30 seconds or 10 seconds even and this is like as real dnd, a constantly thinking on your feet, figuring out a clever way around a circumstance at every turn of the game. It's, and it does it constantly. There are these like set pieces, I think, where there are, you know,

there's the witch in her, or the cabin in the woods, right? Where you stumble across the anti-ethyl, I think was her name like that is like a little set piece with like its own sort of like little puzzles and different solutions and different ways of navigating the sort of like social interactions uh there's like the whole goblin encampment like that is a set piece where you have like all these different ways of going about like assassinating the leader or whatever. But between those set pieces, it's everything.

It's like navigate, how you navigate the environment. There's one set piece where you come to an inn that is burning and there's people inside of it and you have a very limited amount of time to like get shit done. And I cannot even fathom how many different ways around those problems, how many different like results of

your actions there could possibly be just in that one thing and the way they build off each other is also incredible well let me talk about the end for a second yeah yeah actually actually actually before we before we go into that because i want to i want to give something for people to kind of ground themselves in here how about can each of us talk about our characters first? Sure. And then we can go into that, because I think that'll help people picture something. Yeah, well, we should mention

you roll around with four characters. Your main character who you can either create yourself, which is what I think all of us did, or you can play what's called an origin character, which is basically where you take control and ownership of one of the companion characters in the game and get to kind of like live out their story. I would recommend if it's your first time through not doing that. Yeah, you will get all those stories just by recruiting those companions.

So you won't miss out on anything. There is, let me also say, one of the origin stories is called the dark urge which we'll talk about in a second fucking great but basically it makes you a little bit murdery uh and you don't know why and in that case you can be as any class in any character if it's your first time through do not pick the dark urge as i did because it went oh wow so quickly that I actually restarted the game and made a new character. Yeah. I should also say I spent literal hours making characters and the character creator restarting, trying something else, trying something new. I genuinely probably made like seven or eight characters before I found one that I genuinely was like, OK, I can roll with this dude for hundreds of hours.

genuinely was like okay i can roll with this dude for hundreds of hours so i made a half elf bard uh who is very i wanted him to be good at like a lot of different kinds of skills bards have something called jack of all trades um there are dice rolls in this game constantly yeah uh for for the skills in fifth edition which again if you're not familiar things like sleight of hand persuasion uh acrobatics um arcana checks, stuff like that. I wanted him to be pretty good at that stuff, and he is, and he's not that great at combat. So he kind of just hangs out on the back lines. He also kind of looks like an evil prince.

He does look like an evil prince. I like making a shithead-looking dude. He's a College of Swords bard now, so he actually can kind of get up in the thick of it and do a little bit of uh you know swashbuckling i've heard the bard is also very overpowered the later it is yeah no i mean i i definitely wanted a a smooth talk i like playing a face character when we uh in our current season of adventure zone, like I am playing a slide who is essentially like the face of the party. I genuinely enjoy that role.

And so that is kind of perfect for what the bard is. Yeah, and to give people an example of how powerful even just a bard can be, from what I understand, the bard can just talk to bosses and tell them to kill themselves. And they'll be like- No, I mean mean i haven't

hit anything uh that sort of like wild that's like that's like end of mass effect one level kind of goofy shit that's like outer wilds level shit that this game to its great credit does not do that like i've been able to convince a boss that i've been on its side and so they're like fuck yeah let's go fuck these guys up and i'm like hell yeah evil stuff and as soon as they turn their back on me i like you know fucking push them into a ravine and they die instantly no combat the game you can't well i i don't i would not say anything can't avoid a lot of it but these i would not say anything that definitive about this game. I think there's going to be some wild plays of this one. What was your class?

I was a human warlock with an allegiance to a fae goddess. Do you get to chat with your goddess when you play a warlock? Constantly. That's cool. I'm actually kind of shocked that that is not what constantly but i'm shocked that's not part of the story for everybody because it's so central to the story for me um and so central to my so at the very beginning of the game you um are is it called illithid illithid yeah yeah you are in this ship and you've been captured by Mind Flayers.

Yeah, Mind Flayers. They look like Cthulhu. Yes, and they are putting worms into your nose. And you and all the members of your party have these worms effectively in your head. And they are a ticking time bomb. They will also turn you into Mind Flayers. You'd assume quite soon but that isn't happening so you're the mystery is why are you not instantly turning into these

beasts and also how do you get these brain worms out of your skull um and for me basically anytime my character goes to sleep i wake up in a different realm with my fey goddess where I learn much, much more about what's going on inside my character's brain. That's so fucking cool. Yeah, it rules. That's very interesting. Also, my character rules. She is effectively She-Hulk. She's like seven and a half foot tall.

And she just charms people to come close and then has a kind of like a gaggle of little minions who terrify them. So it's constantly kind of yo-yoing people back and forth to me. I went with the ranger and I started playing the ranger with like summoning pets and bears and various other things like that. I was getting upset because the animals kept dying because I would use them as fodder, which you're kind of supposed to. They're like magical. They're not like real animals.

I think they're... Well, none of them are real animals, Russ. It's a virtual sort of simulate group. They kept dying. And so I used the very convenient respec option that is available in the game relatively early you can essentially change every aspect of your character so if you feel like you've made a mistake with a level up or even your class you can restart so i didn't make a huge change but i did shift over to making

my character more uh like a sniper type ranger and less with pets but uh he's a gnome a forest gnome and uh very grumpy and not very good at talking but i basically made one of my other party members the like go-to liar of the group yeah so whenever i have to like interact with other people uh i'll just like send gail who's my go-to liar yeah into the into the conversation and he just fucking crushes it's genuinely very interesting to me that you respect one of the major characters so completely right like well it's supposed to be an intellect based wizard right gail is traditionally a um a wizard by default i really just made him a warlock it's's not a huge change. Warlocks, their spells scale off charisma. So it's like, oh, he'll be good at spells

and he'll be good at talking. And that worked out really well. I've been really happy with it. And it doesn't like fuck with, like I think there are other characters, like Will, for example, who's a warlock by default. His whole storyline is about like him sort of struggling with being a warlock.

And I think if you change him it would kind of mess with the story a little bit but i think so long as you're like in the ballpark it's totally fine like shadowheart is a clarity respect shadow you could make shadowhunter wizard you respect shadowheart i did not yeah well so i respect a shadowheart uh we're gonna talk about the characters in this game because they're fucking phenomenal. Some of the best like writing, period. Some of the best like, you know, companion characters in any game like this I've ever played. Shadowheart had a lot of crossover with like what my skills were because my bard was like kind of sneaky, kind of skill based, kind of deception based.

And Shadowheart is kind of like this shadow cleric who can like deceive people and trick people. But I really liked the character shadow heart and i liked the the voice acting uh with with shadow heart and sort of her whole plot so i just respect her and made her a light domain cleric yeah which is kind of the opposite but it's still yeah yeah i didn't you know yeah that's where i was shocked because i was like that i feel like they really want you to keep Shadowheart above every character in the game in your party as often as possible. So I do not use Shadowheart. Yeah, Rust doesn't roll with a healer at all, which I think is great. That is nuts.

One, for not having a new healer. And two, because her story seems extremely, extremely central to the game. Yeah, but they're very smart, actually. So it's worth considering you you'll meet a bunch of these companions they'll you'll say like hey you want to join me and they'll be like oh sorry you're full up i'm gonna hang back in your camp so this is a new feature this was not in divinity and adrenaline sin 2 and basically you have this hub area that you can go back to at any time so long as you're not in combat and all of the folks that

you've met and have joined you will just chill there. And you can swap party members in and out really whenever you want. So I have her back at camp. And when she goes back to camp, she carries a device that's like a very central plot device, like a literal object.

And the object just goes to me, my player character, when she goes back to camp. So you do not have to keep any of the main characters. They're very, very smart about figuring out ways to tell the story without being reliant on a single character, which is awesome because, like, that's not only, like, main story stuff.

They are so smart about figuring out ways to move quests along without going down a single path. Like if you accidentally Merck like a very important character for a quest and they have like information you needed, you could cast speak to the dead and you just like bring them back to life temporarily and ask some, a few questions and you'll get enough to be able to progress the storyline. So like,

it's been very rare where i've like totally boxed myself into oh no there's only one way this can play out or oh i'm locked out of finishing this quest yeah there's a few sort of very very fun powers that i would recommend everyone try to get on their playthrough either through like spells or magic items like being able to speak to the dead speak to animals yeah the animals detect and detect thoughts on people those three spells in unison really make it so that you can solve pretty much any puzzle like any any puzzle at all whether it's like you talk to this rat something is weird about the rat i'm gonna kick the rat oh yeah good call like stuff like that or

uh oh no i found this dead body uh oh where's the treasure buried dead body and it does the thing that is so fun from um i mean it's from classic dnd but also in the dungeons and dragons uh movie where you can ask the dead five questions before they die for good yeah and trying to figure out like which five questions to ask them before they are dead forever is like a fun little uh fun little meta game i used uh speak to animals on a sheep and the sheep just said bah but it didn't bah like a sheep it's like someone saying bah because it turns out the sheep wasn't actually a sheep it was just the goblin hiding as a sheep. Oh, that's great. So fucking funny. And just the writing is like through the roof.

So good. It's so, so good. The characters are all amazing. I mean, we could go down the line because like I haven't met a character that, it is very difficult to pick which characters you want to roll with. I made the decision largely mechanically, right?

Like I wanted a healer. I wanted a straight caster i wanted but you can make those changes to the classes if you like a personality better than another one right yeah just make those changes yourself yeah and but but it also is kind of dovetailed for me now we're like the three people i'm rolling with i'm like okay these are my road dogs and next next playthrough i can't wait like i want to hang with asterion and lyzel uh but but like that's got it that's probably gonna be my next playthrough and that's wild because i again i've played this game probably about 30 hours now and still i'm in the first act and i'm already thinking like oh shit

next time i play through this i'm gonna be i'm gonna be a completely different dude okay let's talk about the kind of story of the first act a little bit i i know we already talked about this the airship where you wake up and you're having the worm put into your brain yeah that ship crashes it's attacked and you land in this wilderness and right away you kind of get thrown into this really intense thorny drama. There's a grove, and inside the grove, there are tieflings living there, and they are being forced out effectively by druids.

And the druids want to force them out because they effectively want to lock down their society. They want to cast some magical spell that's going to make them protected from the outside world, and there is a goblin attack on the way which is what is inciting them to like try to get the tieflings out and get the spell unlocked so they can be safe so you effectively have three parties that have created a power keg and it's very very very easy for you to be the thing that like sets this off. Yeah. Um, which is, it teaches you save scumming very early, uh,

or right here. Um, I'm curious, like, how did you all go about it? Like what, what did you do? So issue one,

the Druids were, were ruled by a woman named Kaga, who is also a Druid, but also kind of awful. Like she basically like almost kills a kid because they're trying to like steal something from the druid grove. And she's clearly like not right. And all the other druids are like, you know, she kind of sucks, but we don't really have a lot of other options. There is some mention about another druid haslan who's uh captured by goblins or something like that but i like kind of set out figuring out

what her deal was yeah snuck into her back room lock picked her uh uh she had a chest back there found out let's not give a full walkthrough okay that's how to beat the game that's fair i mean there are a trillion ways none of this is yeah this is like one of 50 ways to do it but i basically like figure it out a way i figured out what she was up to and why why she was doing what she was doing but i was kind of playing a lot of sides like i found a goblin uh who was in the druid camp and i was like i'm gonna free you and see what happens and the goblin uh who was in the druid camp and i was like i'm gonna free you and see what happens and the goblin led me back to the goblin camp and let me like run around without attacking anyone whoa really yeah oh that's great and um but the druids weren't super happy about me stealing the

goblin so i had to like smooth that over and then you get to a point where you're like okay am i gonna like side with the goblins as they attack the druids or uh you know stick with the druids and like try to help the tieflings in the same process i ended up defending the druids from the goblins and the tieflings were able to escape freely um good job so everyone it was a happy ending but broadly speaking like there were 16 other options that i could have taken at any turn and it would have been awesome like i'm sure there's a ton of content for siding with the goblins that i didn't the sort of propulsive force of like all of this stuff is that you have this worm in your brain that is

going to turn you into a mind flayer in a set amount of time so so you feel like this although i will say i didn't want to like take a long rest because I was worried I would sleep too long and turn into a mind that is not an issue that's not really an issue but but but but you do get to a point where if you take a long rest the grove just gets wiped out

oh really by the goblins yeah if you're not resting near the goblin near the grove near the druid grove you'll just wake up and it'll just say like, you failed this quest because the goblins fucking stomped the druids so hard.

Oh, wow. I wonder what caused that because I've taken a lot of naps, man, and I have not beefed that quest. So that's weird. Well, I think what might've happened is when I helped the goblin free from the druid camp, I went back to like talk to his goblin that's

probably what you did you set that shit off and i might have set it off that's so cool we kind of told them where the druid camp oh yeah that's what did it is that probably did it might be yeah so you have this worm in your brain you want to get it out and there's lots of different groups that are like yeah man i can do that so like that. So like, there's a, uh, uh, anti-ethelon in the woods, mysterious woman living in a cap in a hut in the woods. It's like, yeah, I got you. No problem. Um, just gonna, let me just grab that eye real quick. Let me just grab that eye. Uh, or like the goblins are like, oh, we have a goblin priestess. She's like, awesome. She'll heal you up good. And then there's the Githyanki. Oh, well, yeah, we got some,

we got a special healer there. And the druidsithyanki oh well yeah we got some we got a special healer there and the druids are like oh yeah we have like all kinds of healers man just come over so you have all these different people who are like we can give you exactly what you want and you need to get this taken care of asap and so like you have a reason to kind of like hear out your offers yeah uh my favorite is there is a character named volo who is a a like long running character in in uh balter's gate oh really dragons yeah uh oh i didn't know that and he is a bard who uh russ and i were playing together and and i came across him sort of like uh kidnapped by these goblins sort of having to recite poetry for them and i'm a bard too so

i stepped up and all my conversation options basically turn into like a fucking bard rap battle it's incredible and i fucking smoked him and he gets all embarrassed anyway i free him he goes back to my camp and i'm like yeah i got this worm in my brain it's fucked up and he's like oh okay give me a minute and then the next day he's like okay i think i can get it out surgically uh can i do that and i was like uh yeah sure uh yeah that sounds good to me and he pulls out like an ice pick he's like all right stay very very still and you have all these options like get up and say stop it but i was like you know what i volo's my dude i am curious i might save scum if he like fucking if i get a dead space too bad ending here. And he just does brain surgery on you.

Just raw dog. And the whole time you have like plenty of opportunities to be like, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. He pops my eyeball out. He's like, I could not get it. Could not get the worm. It is really deep in there. Sorry about that.

But I do have this fake eye, and he gives me a magical fake eye that is permanently, you can see it in my character portrait, you can see it constantly. It is this cool looking green magic eye that allows me to see invisible things. Whoa.

Whoa. So cool. So I went through this risk, this gamble of like, do you want this stranger to do brain surgery on you? And was rewarded greatly. That's so funny. That's probably the coolest thing I think that has happened to me so far.

For me, I, so I went to the goblin camp because I, the druids need you to kind of recover a potential alternate leader of the druids. And this person is trapped in the goblin camp far to the west. So I get all the way to the goblin camp. I talk my way through the camp. I sneak through all the drunks goblins in the camp. I break in through the ceiling of the castle. Once I'm in, they're like, well, you must be here for a reason. We didn't see you come through the door.

So they're totally chill, no combat. And then I basically find where I need to go next in the game to get the thing out of my head. And one of the characters is basically like, hey, you could just skip all of this. Like all this drama, you really actually don't need to do it. This is your next step. But I wanted to see, you know, this druid tiefling drama out anyway. And basically, you figured out that the only way to, I think, I have not finished this part of it, to keep the tieflings living in the grove is i needed to kill the

three goblin lords yeah um and i did that and that is where i cybar so fucking fun so like assassin's creed level like a like clever assassination and this is where there are ways to kill at least one of them without combat um at all uh and it also involves brain surgery uh and is great there there's kind of like i felt like they were kind of teaching me how to play the game and honestly how to like that you should not cheat but you know use every advantage possible um so one is a conversational kill. One was using, I think, like the environment as traps. And then the final, there's like a big throne room boss fight

that takes every idea you can come up with. I've seen lots of videos where people just bring like 20 powder kegs into the room. That's what I did. That's what I did. I blew that room to fucking kingdom come. It was so satisfying. One of the other tricks is you can drink a potion

of invisibility, and then there's a giant pit right next to the throne. So the dude, the second he stands up, you just push him into the pit. And he's just dead. There's a giant spider pit that you can try to push them in. What I did is I climbed up into the rafters really high above everything,

and then I just started pelting everyone with arrows, and every time they tried to climb up, I just pushed them off to their death. So to clarify, you guys did not have the insane Helm's Deep defending the grove sequence that I had? No, I think that that is later. I don't think so.

I think if you kill the goblin leaders, I think that just doesn't happen. Yeah, I don't think I will have that. That is literally, just last night, I finally figured out how to kill that dude from the rafters and should have just done a simple push him off, but I was too curious what treasure he'd have and there was a giant room full of treasure behind him yeah that's some dope

treasure and i and i yeah i wanted to make sure to get it i didn't have that cool helms deep thing but when i did again put down like 12 powder kegs in this room and then climb up in the rafters and just like shoot an arrow down at them and nuke it i did set off the whole camp and so then i did have to kill every goblin yeah and your pc did melt as it tried to render all of that explosion really did it's so satisfying when you do shit like that um we we've gone a very long time i think talking about this i think that all of these stories kind of like are what is great about the game when you talk about the immersive sim genre you talk about like a dishonored or a prey or something like that

this is so that like this is that to a degree that is i think more refined and enhanced and clever than any not a joke any game that's ever come out before i feel like the the the options and opportunities available to me at any given moment yeah in this game is just so far outstripped like anything that a game has afforded me before i that is a very very exciting feeling i was really planning for a boring game of the year episode this year with dog being out and i do not know it's a spicy i really don't know in the same way that this is what's so cool right like when we talked about zelda the story around zelda is i don't know how they made this game i do not know how they made this game this game is it seems like it it should be impossible to make this game same thing like i

don't know how you like how you prepare all of these different, like, possibilities and link them together in this chain. When I saw the stories when the game was, like, you know, a few months out of it has 18,000 plus endings. I was like, that is some bullshit PR. But, like, yeah, it would kind of almost have to be. Like, it would kind of almost have to be about that grand. Like, it would kind of almost have to be about that grand. Yeah. Also, if you are listening to this and you like Griffin's Adventure Zone and you've never been able to play D&D, maybe because you don't have friends who like D&D or you haven't been able to find a good DM, this really is a killer entry point into the basics of dnd i mean honestly because it's hard to find a good dm this is better than most dnd experiences you're going to have yeah especially when you get into multiplayer

which we're going to talk about uh after the break but do not sleep on this game even if you are not like a crpg fan even if like it's it's a miraculous thing. And I genuinely think, I think everyone should play it. If you have a passing interest in D&D or this type of thing, it's an incredible, incredible achievement in game development. Let's get into multiplayer stuff, though,

after this break, because I think that there's a piece of the puzzle that we haven't even talked about yet that is also fantastic so griffin and i played multiplayer uh balder's gate 3 for like an hour or so and i actually didn't know what to expect because like obviously with a game like this you know where you jump in matters a whole lot so right you obviously don't want to see spoilers stuff whatever it is but I jumped into Griffin's game we were both level four at the time so I jumped into Griffin's game not knowing how it was going to work but you basically jump in and you can very quickly just make a new character uh essentially from

scratch but it'll be the same level as whatever your host character is right and so i just like hit random and out popped this like pink haired little gnome boy and i guess i made him a rogue and i was suddenly like in griffin's game in griffin's party. Yeah. And Griffin was able to assign me like one of his other party members to control. So I was controlling half of them and Griffin was the other half. Yeah, we were doing the goblin encampment sort of thing, which is a really,

I don't think we could have picked a better place to jump in because like Russ mentioned in the first half, he went about that shit in a completely different way than I did. And so there were a lot of things in my goblin camp that was not like his was case in point i had found this owlbear nest earlier in the game uh that i just kind of stumbled into and got attacked by an owlbear failed my animal handling check and had to kill it and then the baby owlbear was very sad and i felt very bad and the baby owlbear ran off

uh in this goblin encampment there's like a mini game i guess called chicken chasing where you have to like chase this chicken through a gate at the back to win money but in my camp it was that baby owlbear which russ had not seen yeah when i did it it was just a chicken and i and i talked to the chicken using animal speech and was like hey run through those gates and we'll both make a bunch of money yeah and he did it was chill but this time it was the owlbear that was there and the goblins were like that's not a chicken and they're like close enough so what's great is anytime you are playing with another person when they get into a conversation a little bubble appears next to their like player icon you click that and then all of a sudden you are sitting in

on the conversation yeah you're seeing what's being said to them you're seeing what responses they pick and you can also vote on the response that they can pick so like if if you know you have four options i like the first one i click it and then like my little steam player profile picture appears next to the option that i want russ to, which he could pick or not choose. But it is seamless. You can also decide if you're playing with other people, but you don't want them to hear the conversation. You could set the conversation to private

so no one can listen in. Yeah, which, oh, we should probably also mention you're gonna wanna do sometimes because every character in this game wants to bone you hard and instantly and so it's that is a wild thing that i was i did not expect from this game i've had conversations with my teammates where they're like hey man you want you want me to teach you a magic spell i'm like yeah sure and then the magic spell is fucking my here's my wiener uh yeah so you and it starts very quickly usually like mass

effect 3 you have to play for like 30 hours before you get a smooch also it's not like oh well if i do enough good deeds and give you lots of gifts you will give me the sex no not in this one man this one it's like hey i didn't burn down this village you liked that apparently so much um it's much nicer i i find like the the the kind of bioware all the way back to like uh harvest moon era way of like seducing people with uh commerce i don't know it's kind of bumming me out uh what what impressed me about the multiplayer is that it's i thought it would be just kind of a lot of one person sitting around and waiting while the other person does stuff which is not the case like you are moving your character independently from theirs you could be having

two different conversations entirely um and in combat there's you know you do initiative roles which is the usual dnd stuff if you have like a block of characters who are like back to back to back in the initiative order, you can control them in any order you want, which is a great pro tip that they don't really tell you in this game. So if you have like one of your characters goes first, the next one goes second, the next one goes third, you can make, you know, the one in third place go first and then the one in first and then the one in second however whatever order you want when that happens with two player characters you're making your move simultaneously so there was one fight that me and russ got in where both of our characters just ran up to this uh goblin priestess and just both of us just started stabbing her at the same time uh so like combat moves pretty fast like a pretty good clip um i could imagine it being like if you were able to coordinate with like a few other people or even just one other person and say okay we're gonna do this entire campaign together it would be so much fucking fun it would

be very very fun in fact this is the one big knock i have against the game big heads up two big two big knocks against the game one you can't redesign your character's appearance at any point which is like yeah whatever but in a game that is asking you to invest this much time into your thing it's wild that you can respec pretty early on yeah and for pretty cheap as many times as you want to but like you can't change your hair color. So be warned about that. The other thing, and this is a big one, because it was kind of a bummer for me.

Once another player joins your campaign and makes a custom character. Little pink boy. Little pink boy with a fucking huge face like an Easter Island statue. Just this grotesque, you can't remove them from your party and i think that is so that like you know if you're playing a campaign with another person and they're invested in their character you can't just fucking delete them right like i get that but also it really kind of prohibits this kind of drop in drop out idea that i think is very strong and very very cool uh because all

of a sudden like my party was my character russ's pink monster and then two of my companions like this spot was constantly taken up by russ's character which was not optimal for so many reasons one that he sucks to look at two his class is pretty similar to mine so like i wasn't rolling with a rogue anyway fortunately i had a save from like right before we started playing together so unfortunately you know the next morning after russ and i spent the night playing uh i had to go back and reload my save before we started playing and do all that stuff again without did you try to like just is it a bug first of all do we know it's a bug. As far as this is not a self-contained Griffin problem. This is like a huge sort of discussion on the forums of people saying like,

this is very disappointing. This is like, I get, I understand the logic behind it, but there needs to be a, a, a toggle for this where you can have these characters come and go like any other companion that's what's confusing if i could just drop pink boy at camp and then like rock with someone else

like that's one thing i would not have reset i'm not that vain uh but but this this was a this was like if you had two other friends join you would just wouldn't be able to carry companions with you if you had three other friends yeah if you had if you played with three friends and then all of a sudden you're but of course in that instance like if you are playing with four actual players like you probably won't want to do this job right all that said the multiplayer dynamic so well implemented so brilliant so smart i wish this drop in drop out thing was was possible but as i can tell right now it is not so if you're going to do multiplayer have your multiplayer campaign have your multiplayer dedicated and then have your single players yeah and i don't i don't think you'll regret that because again like there's

so many different ways you can solve for these things yeah for every situation in the game um but yeah it's it's man it's fucking cool It really does feel like D and D just Russ immediately spawned in and started to try to pick my pockets. Uh, it's, it's really trying to solve like puzzles. And I'm just like, Oh, I'm going to take this gold. Russ kept saying like, Oh, you need higher intellect. And I was like, but this is a puzzle, like in real life, Russ was like, yeah, no, you Griffin need more intellect to solve this one.

It really, it really feels like, it really feels like D&D, man. That is a miraculous thing. I love this fucking game. Cool. We had some reader mail questions.

I think we will have more to say about Baldur's Gate as time goes on. I want to hear Justin's thoughts about it, honestly, once he is back. Reader mail question. This comes from Ames. You will have multiple consoles and many, as time goes on i want to hear justin's thoughts yeah honestly yeah once he is back uh reading mail question this comes from aims uh you will have multiple consoles and many if not most games are cross console how do you decide which one you play a particular game on what makes the game feel like a deck slash switch game versus a console game i always dither because i'm not

buying multiple copies of every game just a few lol i mean i everything is a deck game so long as it can be played with a controller and it works on the deck for me yeah oh that's your that's your decision yeah and kind of to the point of i want to buy multiple copies well i have a pc and i have a steam deck which obviously not everybody has but for me that makes it very easy and that i know steam's gonna make sure that that file is always working i'm not gonna have a lot of the save file issues with like multiple switches or whatever yeah um and just as powerful enough to run so many things so so you're playing um balder's gate 3 on steam deck i'm actually playing out on a rock ally okay anyway my pc I play most of it on my PC, honestly,

because, Frush, you mentioned playing it with a controller is better. We didn't talk about this. I played the first couple hours on mouse and keyboard and really enjoyed that, but I was like, I should try controller. Frush might be right. And it really changes the game game i like how it changes

it but it makes it feel more like a third person rpg i felt like i was way more zoomed in um way more direct control of the characters rather than just like pointing and clicking yeah yeah yeah and then um i yeah that made it much easier to play on handheld um once I switched over obviously I did I just to be devil's advocate I disagree I prefer the mouse and keyboard I think the controller is functional and it works but like it's for me it is so much easier to like click on the exact shit that you want in in the world um yeah in terms of I'm also mostly playing on Steam Deck, but only because my wife has taken over the gaming PC to play on the gaming PC. Steam Deck is totally playable with this game. I mean, you have to run it at 30 FPS, but mostly it's totally fine.

And you also probably have to run it plugged in because the battery life unplugged is about 45 minutes, maybe. Because the battery life unplugged is about 45 minutes maybe. I was playing. My son was using the USB-C charger we have in the living room to charge something. And so I was playing. And I got the 10% battery life warning. And I was like, oh, shit. I only have a little bit.

Literally, not a joke, like a minute and a half later, I got the 5% battery warning. And then before the five percent battery warning went away i got the three percent battery warning and i was like ah i just had to turn it off and throw it out yeah it's it drains that bad boy real fast it does um my go-to i have like a flow chart i feel like for this decision and it's like if it is on Switch and is like fully featured on Switch and runs good, I will get it on Switch because my preferred, like, I'm very particular about like gaming hand feel. And so like if I can play it on my Switch Lite, that's the dream for me. Like this very, very lightweight, very portable, you know, gaming handheld. Like this very, very lightweight, very portable, you know, gaming handheld that that I will rock with that pretty much every time if I can, if it's fully featured runs that, you know, a good FPS or whatever. And then beyond that, like they said, PC Steam Deck is kind of the. Now, I will say, like, I don't play a lot.

This is like one of the very few 3D games I've played on steam deck, mostly because of the battery thing. Like, yeah, I usually, if I'm playing like an indie game or a 2d game, whatever it is, definitely steam deck. But if it's like a more involved game, it'll either be on the PC or on a console.

Uh, I actually, I know like people feel differently. I, I, the Xbox being as like quiet and quick as it is. I tend to like play a lot of games there but obviously if it's a sony exclusive i'm more than happy to play on that's five yeah that's the rest

of the flow chart is if it's on game pass and it's like a game i'm gonna play with with my son or wife i'll get it on the xbox because it's free yeah and it's like already plugged in in the living room and then if it's a Sony exclusive, I play on PS5. I don't really play my PlayStation 5. I mentioned the ROG Ally. Yeah, how does it work? We have some people who want to get a Steam Deck, and they're not sure if they can get Steam Deck or ROG Ally.

This is the first game where the extra power of the Ally, I felt like made a pretty real difference like it looks gorgeous on on the ally um it doesn't look like it's like visually compromised really at all um but you do similar to the steam deck have to keep it plugged in i still don't know if like is this the beginning of a trend where more and more games that are going to require a little bit more power are going to be noticeably different on the ally i don't know did you play on steam deck as well i did yeah yeah yeah um and i i i don't know the other thing that steam deck still has an advantage is just people do um they what is it not uh not perfect they optimize optimize thank you they optimize for it

so even if it has less power it's you know carefully optimizing the game to run well on it so again i don't think that i still think the steam deck is probably your best bet but you know i'm i'm starting to wonder if there's going to be a piece off to write on polygon kind of following up on the review i did of is ally in any way stepping ahead well let me let me add this caveat and again i don't know if you've read about this apparently apparently uh sd cards have been failing in the rogue ally like there was a major bug where like sd cards would just get nuked and people are like very worried about the software support that they've been seeing from asus so just do your research i'm talking

to the people at home do your research before you make any decisions because i think what you what we have seen is even though unquestionably the steam deck is underpowered compared to the rogue ally the software support from valve has been like every single week they are tweaking and adjusting when issues arise and i think asus is just a little bit slower on the up and if you just want to play games and you don't need any of the tinkering and yeah if you don't want to mess with the power the steam deck is still just always the easiest we We have one more quick question. This comes from Kelly. Would any of you consider getting an Android phone?

I love besties, resties, but your mobile recommendations almost always cater exclusively to iPhone users. As an Android user, I would love to be represented by one of you so that we could get some recommendations too. That's a fair critique. You're right. I think all of us use uh iphone um i i would say outside of like apple arcade stuff if something is a successful um mobile game it's on both invariably it's you you'll see it on android as well it might take a little bit more time to show up on android if it launched on ios as an exclusive but broadly speaking like if you google it it'll frequently show up outside of the apple

stuff which yes is going to be exclusive unfortunately i think i think that's the reason when people are upset that we are only covering iphone games it's that apple is throwing a ton of money to get some of the best mobile games on iphone exclusively yeah so it's that Apple is throwing a ton of money to get some of the best mobile games on iPhone exclusively. So it's not like we're ignoring some Android games that exist. It is that these big interesting games from studios are being funded to be on Apple Arcade. Yeah, I can't think of, and maybe people can write in if this is not true, but I honestly can't think of any that are like exclusive to android games you know what i mean well they exist but that are like exceptionally good yeah i don't

know i i i have had an android phone a couple times i've made the i've been tempted over to the other side honest to god if i message weren't a thing i was gonna say it's drama in the group chat whenever and yeah that's that's all it is it's and that sucks from a sort of you know consumer standpoint um because i like a lot of android phones it's just yeah yeah the the ecosystem is not ideal um honorable mentions i i saw oppenheimer it was very good i didn't see him see it in imax 70 millimeter ridiculousness then you didn't see it bro and i kind of feel like i'm okay with that it was a very good movie but i don't know man a lot of that movie is people in rooms i don't think i needed to see people in rooms the size of a skyscraper i don't know it looks pretty great in a big ol' IMAX.

I really felt like me and Killian were intimate. I didn't realize there's only 30 theaters in the world that can show it in that 70 millimeter thing. That's crazy. Yeah, man. It's a giant roll of film. It's a good flick. It's so big.

The building has to be big to hold it. It's true. You've true you got a big building but uh i went and saw yesterday with uh henry and rachel went and saw uh teenage mutant ninja turtles mutant oh yeah fucking great so good so great i i adore this film uh it is just it is fun front to back it It is, the action is great. The changes that they have sort of made to the TMNT canon is great. The voice acting's all so good. I'm dying to see it.

It's such a good year for animated movies between this and Spider-Verse. Damn, was Puss in Boots this year? Or was that last year? Yeah, I think so. Was it? God dang, man. It's a great year.

I'm going to build on top of that. I went and saw the first Slam Dunk, which is an adaptation of the manga Slam Dunk. And there's been, I believe, a long anime series of it. But if you want to get into Slam Dunk, you can just go see this movie because it requires no prior knowledge and it is is it an old movie no it's brand new movie okay but based off of an older manga right um yeah and it's just about uh i believe high school basketball players

and it's sad it's very sad um it's a very emotional these kids they go through a lot um but it is a delight and it has such a cool moment where the sound goes out and the animation almost regresses into like manga that is like it's unforgettable it's so cool um and yeah griffin i saw tmnt too it's so amazing how animation is going through this moment yeah of like creativity and experimentation after i don't know the pixar dreamworks era which started great with pixar but then just kind of became rote and now people are just doing so many interesting things. Yeah. I don't know what else to add.

It looks, that movie looks very unique. Yeah. Thank you so much for listening, Russ. You want to thank some people for reviewing our show? Happy to. I wanted to thank the following people for writing reviews for the besties on

Apple podcast. We have Apple convert zero, Brendan F. Martin and Nikki Rose 24. Thank you for writing reviews for the besties on Apple Podcasts, we have AppleConvertZero, Brendan F. Martin, and NickyRose24. Thank you for writing reviews for the besties on Apple Podcasts. Plant, what have we talked about this week? What did we talk about? We talked about Baldur's Gate 3 a lot.

We talked about D&D, effectively the fifth edition. We talked about Oppenheimer, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mutant Mayhem, and Slam Dunk. All three movies that I believe are playing in cinemas right now. And that's it. That's it, man. BG3 has a tendency, I think,

and we'll probably continue to suck all the oxygen out of the room, but you know, he's a big boy. He needs that oxygen, you know? Thank you so much for listening next week. Join us. We're going to discuss a game.

I am very excited to dive into hammer watch to the next sort of ARPG from the studio that made heroes of hammer watch. One of my favorite games. Uh, so please play that if you are so inclined and want to be a part of the thing. Also, people should go subscribe to best use dot fan for the newsletter where you can get all the information about what we talked about on this show, plus lots of links, some stuff to video. And we have a merch drop coming that is my favorite thing. It's incredible. I cannot wait. I cannot wait.

I cannot wait for people to see it. And I think we will be able to share a part of it by the time that this episode is out. So go to besties.fan, subscribe, and take a look. It is something special. And join us again next week for The Besties. Because shouldn't the world's best friends play the world's best games? Besties!