Video Game Thread - $70 Zelda Expansion!

[Shooshmoo]

Picked up the BG3 demo and I can't even decide whether to play as a custom or origin player. Any advice for a beginner?

 

[ImTheCaptain]

Picked up the BG3 demo and I can't even decide whether to play as a custom or origin player. Any advice for a beginner?

I'd play as a custom character. Playing as an origin sort of locks you into their specific character story path/interactions.

Playing as custom lets you add all the companions and play out their individual stories.

plus making a character is one of the great joys of RPGs/ D&D

 

[Deac6]

Jesus, I was thinking about playing this game, but didn't know you needed a PhD.

Play for like 5 hours to get the hang of it, then come back and read that and it’ll start to click.

The most basic way I can explain it: It’s poker. You start with a normal deck, and each hand is worth a certain number of points. You get to play a certain number of hands to reach your point goal, and you have a number of discards that you can refresh cards in your hand if you don't like what you see. After each round, you have a store where you can buy cards that impact either your deck by adding, subtracting, or altering cards, or the play situations (multipliers for different situations, etc.). That’s it, no PhD needed.

the best tip I can give for balatro is to think of runs in terms of sustainability, scalability, and economy... you need all three to get to endgame most of the time. so if you're beating blinds on your first hand like plama is saying, that might be great (and it gives you a nice pulse for what your deck is capable of) but you might still need a way to escalate things later (the switch from +mult to xmult that he mentioned, for example).

a deck can go from good to endgame ready just by getting something like a mime (which doubles all held in hand effects, causing steel cards to go batshit), or pivoting into something like a campfire (which requires p good economy or voucher investment to work)

a good rule of thumb for deck economy is to make sure at minimum you're always making max interest/round, and remember that each hand you play is worth $1

if a joker that escalates over time presents itself in the first couple of antes always always always grab it -- the first time I beat gold stake I did it in large part because I had a wee joker (which gains +8 chips for every scored 2) up to something nutty like +500. that's the sort of joker you can build a deck around if it comes early enough

other stuff- never pass up tarot cards. you're almost always looking for chariot/death/justice, in that order (if you already have steel cards in the tarot draw, probs go with death first). I don't usually fuck with suit tarots unless I'm playing into a specific joker (and that strat is a p reliable way to get fucked by a boss blind at some point). hanged man and devil are more situational but can be super strong too

only other tip is to remember to move jokers around whenever relevant. +mults to the left, xmults to the right obviously, but more than that, stuff like blueprint and brainstorm might need to be moved multiple times in a round to clone the effects you care about. I've fucked myself in more than a couple of runs forgetting to double a DNA effect or something, or leaving brainstorm pointing to the wrong joker for my hand

RSF seems cracked at this game, but the last two paragraphs IMO are the most important things you need to know early in the game and will help you get to the paragraphs above it hours down the road. I can't gesture at these two enough and have had this specific message open on a second monitor when playing a few hours back.

It took me 10 hours to beat my first deck (yellow) and it was that run where things finally started to click a bit and I was able to finally wrap my head around some of the deeper concepts. A few hands later I got my first 1,000,000 hand and felt like a genius.

As a new player, watching it and hearing people talk about Balatro makes the game beyond ungraspable, but it's just a slightly altered version of 5-card poker at the end of the day. You can read about it, but it only clicks when you play. The amount of "ohhhhhhhhhhh that's what they meant" I've said over these 10 hours feels like the most per game.

 

[redwing42]

Counterpoint: it isn't poker at all, because you aren't playing against anyone. I suppose you could say it is video poker adjacent. It is just a deck-builder that uses poker hands for scoring.