Any attempt at a Baldur’s Gate 3 companions ranked list is a tough ask, not just because Larian crafted one of the best-written set of companions in any RPG, although that’s part of the challenge. You can so easily miss huge swathes of character development depending on the choices you make, even down to which character you play as, so how your allies develop often depends on how much time you invest in them – except in a few cases. Relationships are only part of the equation, though. Each companion has something to offer in battle and social interactions as well, though some add much more value to your party setup than others.
Everyone’s list of Baldur’s Gate 3 spells ranked will look wildly different thanks to the delicious suite of magic options available. You can explode your foes, throw them in a hole, turn them into a sheep and then throw them into a hole, summon raging thunderstorms, and envelop an area in deep silence while you commit crimes. Unless you stack a party with movement and debuff spells, there’s really no bad spell setup in the PC game. There are, however, some spells that work better than others and should always be a candidate for one or more of your spell slots.
There’s a new Baldur’s Gate 3 speedrun method, and it’s setting records by doing something unusual: putting Shadowheart in a box. BG3 speedrunners call it “Shadowboxing,” and the quirk in the popular RPG lets them skip the entirety of Act 2 and the Shadowlands before reaching an explosive ending. YouTuber ImTaiyl successfully pulled the method off and set a record of completing Baldur’s Gate 3:in 3:57:96 (thanks, IGN).
That’s three minutes – not three hours.
“This was a long time coming and blows my mind that this run has gotten this fast,” they said in the video description. “Its [sic] been a heck of a ride and im not stopping anytime soon.”
Shadowboxing builds on a set of tricks that speedrunners have used since the game launched, and it works best if you play with Gale as your Origin Character. No Dark Urges allowed here.
The idea is to avoid saving Shadowheart on the Nautiloid and then to skip other companions and use Gale’s Enhanced Leap and Feather Fall spells to leap through pretty much all of the Act 1 area, stopping only to hear Elminster’s spiel about Mystra before moving on to the Shadowlands.
The next bit is kind of gruesome and bizarre. Once you regain control of Gale, the trick is setting the ground on fire, killing Shadowheart, and putting her in the box, before setting the box into the fire. You then end up in the middle of Act 3, where Gale has a (bad) option to end the game.
It sounds weird, but ImTaiyl explains in a separate video that there’s a fascinating set of glitches behind the method.
BG3 has a box glitch where if you drag a box to an area that’s too far away, then open the box, and drag it somewhere nearby while the opening animation plays, the box will appear in that original, out-of-bounds area. The reason you need a dead Shadowheart and a blazing box is to trigger that Act 3 scene. Boxes break after catching fire, and ImTaiyl said that a dead companion will trigger the Act 3 cutscene.
The very precise trick is finding a glitched spot in the void at the start of Act 2’s Shadowlands to drop the box, so that when you set it on fire and put Shadowheart inside, it breaks, drops her over the scene trigger point, and lets you switch to her to enter Act 3.
Shadowboxing takes a sizeable amount of time off the older records, but ImTaiyl said they could’ve finished it even faster if it weren’t for an accident with the burning box.
Whether this set of glitches gets patched out in a future update or Larian lets it stay remains to be seen.
A new PS5 update is rolling out in Sony’s beta test system, and it adds some features that fans have requested for years
A new PS5 update is rolling out in Sony’s beta test system, and it adds some features that fans have requested for years. One of them is the option to finally mute the system startup “beep” sound that’s told the entire house you’re playing video games since the PS3 launched in 2007.
The PS5 now (finally) supports Dolby Atmos 3D audio devices as well, including sound bars and compatible speakers, and it’s easier to add friends to parties without having to go through group controls,
On the accessibility side, you can designate a second controller as an “assist controller” and use it in conjunction with the first controller. This feature only works with DualSense controllers, though – not with PS4 DualShocks connected to the system.
Another new feature is support for larger SSDs, up to 8TB. The previous size limit capped out at 4TB, which sounds like a lot until you consider that PS5 game file sizes have been steadily increasing. If you play live-service games such as Genshin Impact or Final Fantasy XIV on the system, those TBs disappear pretty quickly.
You can check out the full list of new changes on the PlayStation Blog. Access to these features is, as always, limited to members selected for the beta program. They may take several months to roll out for everyone.
A set of Spider-Man 2 PS5 plates is rolling out soon, Insomniac announced, alongside a slick Spider-Man 2 DualSense controller and bundle
A set of Spider-Man 2 PS5 plates is rolling out soon, Insomniac announced, alongside a slick Spider-Man 2 DualSense. Both feature the Symbiote slowly absorbing the red-and-white Spider-Man icon on the PS5 console, and best of all, you can get them separately or all together in a bundle that includes console, covers, controller, and a digital copy of the game.
“The design was inspired by the in-game symbiote that’s taking over the console and controller, but you can still see some of the underlying red under the tendrils,” Insomniac senior art director Jacinda Chew said in a PlayStation Blog post. “This represents the various ways players will experience the symbiote takeover in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. It’s a constant push and pull for dominance whether it’s internal or external and the outcome is not certain.”
Pre-orders for the bundle and individual pieces go live on July 28, 2023, and you can get plates for the standard PS5 or the digital-only one.
Insomniac and Sony haven’t announced a price for any of these pieces yet. If previous bundles and accessory listings for limited-edition items, like the LeBron James controller, are anything to go by, you can probably expect something like this:
Plates: $64.99
DualSense: $79.99
Bundle: $559.99
The Symbiote plays a significant role in Spider-Man 2, and you can catch a glimpse of that role in the latest trailer for the upcoming Marvel game.
Insomniac released a new Spider-Man 2 trailer during, and while Peter and Miles are the Marvel game’s focus, Venom who steals the show
Insomniac released a new Spider-Man 2 trailer during SDCC 2023, and while Peter and Miles are the Marvel game’s focus, it’s Venom who steals the show. The trailer highlights Spider-Man 2’s story setup, and compared to the first game and Miles Morales, it’s a bit grim.
Miles is having trouble with his college entrance preparation and uses his work as a Spider-Man to avoid having to deal with it. Peter, meanwhile, is behind on payments for Aunt May’s house and has a psychopathic hunter tracking him through the city, and MJ is at risk of losing her job as the newspaper cleans house.
Basically, no one is happy – except Peter’s best friend. He has a “new lease on life” outlook and wants to change the world with Peter, which is nice, except Peter is kind of in a depressive spiral. That makes him the Symbiote’s perfect target, and when Peter lets his darkness take over, it shatters his friend’s dream of a perfect world built with heroism. All this darkness and misery creates the ideal setting for Venom to appear, and you might not completely recognize him either.
“While the look of [Venom] and several of his powers/abilities should be familiar to fans, this will be a unique Venom story.” Insomniac senior creative director Bryan Intihar said in a new PlayStation Blog post. “When we decided to craft a Venom story, we knew we’d be making a bit of a tone shift. The best symbiote stories serve as an allegory: We all have darkness inside of us– but what would happen if we let it take over?”
“We wanted to see them change, both inside and outside, and feel the effect it has on those around them. And when Venom takes control, they face the real danger that they could lose themselves, and their loved ones, forever.”
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 launches for PS5 on Oct. 20, 2023.
The Steam Summer Sale may be over, but Sony’s PlayStation Summer Sale is just getting underway with discounts on the best PS4 and PS5 games
The Steam Summer Sale may be over, but Sony’s PlayStation Summer Sale is just getting underway. The annual sale cuts prices on some of the best PS4 games and PS5 games, from Sony’s first-party favorites, including The Last of Us Part 1 and Horizon Forbidden West, to third-party stalwarts including Red Dead Redemption 2, and even a selection of new games that haven’t gone on sale much so far in 2023. If you’re itching for something new in the lead-up to Spider-Man 2, now’s a good time to get it.
The PlayStation Summer Sale runs through Aug. 16, 2023, and if you’re a PS Plus subscriber, you can get a few extra discounts as well.
Walmart’s Walmart+ Week video game sales offer discounts on PS5 hits, Switch classics, and fan-favorite Xbox games alike
Prime Day sales are in full swing, but Amazon isn’t the only retail giant slashing prices on video games. Walmart’s Walmart+ Week video game sales offer discounts on PS5 hits, Switch classics, and fan-favorite Xbox games alike. While most of these deals are geared toward members of the Walmart+ program, quite a few are just flat discounts for everyone to take advantage of.
Prime Day PlayStation sales are here, and there’s a pretty impressive selection across most of Sony’s first-party games
Prime Day PlayStation sales are here, and there’s a pretty impressive selection across most of Sony’s first-party games, with some nice third-party offerings, and even a hardware bundle. If you’ve held off diving into some of the PS5’s best games, now’s probably a good time to do it. You can get The Last of Us, Gran Turismo, Horizon: Forbidden West, and more for a fraction of their usual price while Prime Day sales – and supply – last, which is until the end of the day on July 12, 2023.
Larian is pushing the Baldur’s Gate 3 release date on PC forward by almost a month, the RPG maker said in a new community update
Larian is pushing the Baldur’s Gate 3 release date on PC forward by almost a month, the RPG maker said in a new community update. Baldur’s Gate 3 will now launch on Aug. 3, 2023, for PC.
Meanwhile, the PS5 version is delayed every so slightly and will release on Sep. 6, 2023, the same day that Starfield launches for Xbox and PC. Larian didn’t provide an update on plans for Baldur’s Gate 3 on Xbox.
The team did give a few additional tidbits about the game’s depth and breadth, though. Baldur’s Gate 3 has 170 hours of cinematics, which Larian said is twice the length of all Game of Thrones seasons combined, and the script clocks in at over 2 million words. That’s triple the amount of dialogue in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Larian said – rather a lot more than Deep Rock Galactic’s Hobbit-sized script.
Like Divinity: Original Sin 2, you can create your character or play as one of seven pre-built protagonists, each with their own unique skillsets and stories. The character creation system gives you 11 races and 31 subraces to choose between, with 12 classes and 46 subclasses, compared to Divinity: Original Sin 2’s 10 spell schools.
Speaking of comparisons, Larian said Baldur’s Gate 3 has over 600 spells and actions, where Divinity OS 2 had 225.
“We set out to make a game that would reward player creativity and truly bring D&D to life in a cinematic way that explores the breadth and depth RPGs can offer,” Larian creative director Swen Vincke said in a statement. “Baldur’s Gate 3 has become an astronomical game that never fails to surprise, and I’m super proud of the team.”
