What videogames are you playing in 2026?

[Kaodi]

Last week I started playing Baldur's Gate 3 with my closest friend. But in the other video game thread someone has alluded to "Larian barrel and surface spam" and being a veteran of both Original Sin games... now I am scared.

 

[Gradine]

Last week I started playing Baldur's Gate 3 with my closest friend. But in the other video game thread someone has alluded to "Larian barrel and surface spam" and being a veteran of both Original Sin games... now I am scared.

It's not nearly as bad as it's made out to be. There are a few encounters where you're being set up to exploit barrelmancy but for the most part it's pretty downplayed

 

[Gladius Legis]

Last week I started playing Baldur's Gate 3 with my closest friend. But in the other video game thread someone has alluded to "Larian barrel and surface spam" and being a veteran of both Original Sin games... now I am scared.

BG3 toned that down considerably, both from DOS 1 and 2 and from its own Early Access.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Last week I started playing Baldur's Gate 3 with my closest friend. But in the other video game thread someone has alluded to "Larian barrel and surface spam" and being a veteran of both Original Sin games... now I am scared.

It's not really a big a thing unless you want it to be a big thing. There are only two situations where it's kind of unavoidably significant:

1) If you're playing on Tactician or higher difficulty, there are extra barrels and traps around in places that are inconvenient or problematic for the player (in theory), which is to make your life harder (in theory). In practice the fact that the player is smarter than the AI means that often you can disarm the traps, take the barrels, etc. but even that's forcing you to actually pay attention and actually play the game rather than blundering along.

2) There are a handful (literally, across a massive 100+ hour game) of encounters where exploding barrels or similar are part of the setup, but those are all pretty much situations where it could also be a thing in tabletop. In at least two of them they're more to threaten an NPC and force you to use tactics to prevent them getting blow up more than anything else.

Now, if you want, you can go around carefully collecting every smokepowder, oil, alcohol, and similar barrel, and sending them to your camp to store/recover as needed, but even then, you won't have enough to significantly influence more than a small fraction of encounters, and a lot of bossfights happen in such a way that it's not possible to use them without intentional exploits.

It's not the same as D:OS 1/2 where a significant proportion of the encounters in the game seemed to be designed around barrels, and the game both could be almost seemed to be intended to be trivialized by barrels.

 

[Zardnaar]

It's not really a big a thing unless you want it to be a big thing. There are only two situations where it's kind of unavoidably significant:

1) If you're playing on Tactician or higher difficulty, there are extra barrels and traps around in places that are inconvenient or problematic for the player (in theory), which is to make your life harder (in theory). In practice the fact that the player is smarter than the AI means that often you can disarm the traps, take the barrels, etc. but even that's forcing you to actually pay attention and actually play the game rather than blundering along.

2) There are a handful (literally, across a massive 100+ hour game) of encounters where exploding barrels or similar are part of the setup, but those are all pretty much situations where it could also be a thing in tabletop. In at least two of them they're more to threaten an NPC and force you to use tactics to prevent them getting blow up more than anything else.

Now, if you want, you can go around carefully collecting every smokepowder, oil, alcohol, and similar barrel, and sending them to your camp to store/recover as needed, but even then, you won't have enough to significantly influence more than a small fraction of encounters, and a lot of bossfights happen in such a way that it's not possible to use them without intentional exploits.

It's not the same as D:OS 1/2 where a significant proportion of the encounters in the game seemed to be designed around barrels, and the game both could be almost seemed to be intended to be trivialized by barrels.

You can replace barrels with grenades. 40 odd one shot Grym and Raphael can be cheesed.

Actually takes effort though its not a default way of playing.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

You can replace barrels with grenades. 40 odd one shot Grym and Raphael can be cheesed.

Actually takes effort though its not a default way of playing.

Yeah I was assuming their use was factored in at least work between the barrels. If you don't use them then the barrels don't go anywhere near as far. Like, I once decided to blow up the entire bottom floor of a certain boss' castle, and I'd been collecting barrels for the entire 50% or so the game up until then, and still didn't have nearly enough for full coverage, even using all of them, so had to use grenades to help spread the explosions/fire.

It did work. And then I reloaded because of how boring the results were lol.

 

[Zardnaar]

Yeah I was assuming their use was factored in at least work between the barrels. If you don't use them then the barrels don't go anywhere near as far. Like, I once decided to blow up the entire bottom floor of a certain boss' castle, and I'd been collecting barrels for the entire 50% or so the game up until then, and still didn't have nearly enough for full coverage, even using all of them, so had to use grenades to help spread the explosions/fire.

It did work. And then I reloaded because of how boring the results were lol.

We do it vs oddball runs. Eg all wizards vs Grym or whatever.

Or see if you can clear Raphael and all his minions in 1 shot.

Games so easy it's mostly a waste of time even on honor mode.

500% mod it gets ok.