But, Sigil didn’t start with me. It wasn’t my brain child, and while I helped tighten the game up around the edges, the design fully belongs to Andy Voellmer.
15 Years in the Making
If you were near Montreal’s Parc LaFontaine in summer 2009, you might have seen a couple of college aged kids playing a game with maple leaf pennies.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any pictures of those first plays – and I’m not sure that those first iterations would even be recognizable to someone introduced to the game as it stands today. The rules were a bit different, spells weren’t even modular, and that’s not even getting into how the game looks.
But, the spark of it was there.
That spark stayed with Andy through a PHD, from Canada to California, and to New York City where we met.
While I don’t have pictures of those first plays, I do have a picture of one of my early plays with Andy.
Baldur’s Gate 3‘s Patch 8 was the game’s last big update, but it’s still getting handly little hotfixes to iron out bugs and issues. The latest, hotfix 31, takes care of plenty of stuff like that, including a pretty wacky-sounding visual glitch, but I do have to take issue with one of its tweaks to photo mode.
You can find the full notes for hotfix 31 here, and they make for refreshingly light reading compared to the great big tomes of tweaks the game’s full updates often dropped with.
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The most eye-catchjing of its fixes, and the one Larian’s led with, aims to stop folks having a “kaleidoscope of colours” appear on sceen when their party switches locations. This Aurora Badrealis is apparently made up of “trippy, high-saturation graphical artefacts”, and was prone to cropping up when you teleported via a waypoint.
Aside from that Larian’s “removed some defunct dialogue that mistakenly made it into Minthara’s Speak with Dead dialogue in Patch 8”, with players reckoning this is the cut chatter Minty had about having a daughter, which never made it into the final game.
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Staying with Patch 8, the new subclasses that added to the game are subject of a whole host of fixes, including one that nixes a bug that let sneak attacks be triggered on activating Dirty Trick: Sand Toss, and another which was causing Shadow Blade to lose properties like bonus damage when you lost conditions like concentration.
But enough of those, which you can read more about in the full notes. One of Larian’s two photo mode tweaks is downright scandalous. The studio’s “fixed wild-shaped boars and cats not paying proper attention to the ‘Look at Camera’ option”. Larian, cats totally ignoring you when you try to get them to look at a camera so you can take a photo of their funny little face is like 2/3 of the whole experience of owning a cat – I assume wild-shape cats are no different.
You can’t just go against nature like this in game that features all kinds of magic, goblins, and shaggable brain-eating tentacle dudes who appear in your dreams. Won’t somebody think of the immersion? What is being exposed to this going to do to our precious realism?
Do you and you cat agree with this fix? Are they looking everywhere but the screen as you hold them you to it in a vain attempt to get them to answer that question? Let us know below while all of us keep on waiting for whatever Larian’s next game is.
