baldur's gate 4 looking great
Nice that you like the game but really it's more Skyrim by design. If you want another "Baldur's Gate 3" experience, rewind back a few years to play Larian's DOS:2. Otherwise if you want a BG1/2 style experience, try Planescape Torment.
Now on to my playtest notes for the latest build.
I speedran the latest build this weekend and there's definitely more sex in both proper scenes and NPC world animations. That said I didn't get to see all the sex animations because I'm here to do all the quests and take inventory of sex content later.
My short notes: Rejoice, the highest dialogue check in-game now only needs 10 presence instead of 20, that's 2/3 points of a single levelup instead of all 3 points of 4 levelups each. The new climbing system is useful, there's much more essence to collect in the world than before for unlocking physical forms, and the shipwrecked anubites quest extends into an optional dungeon quest with a proper though stereotype stealth section and boss battle that unlocks a sex scene and extra quest later. This team knows plenty about good scene choreography but residual bugs around the anubites proves they're not up to spec with quest programming yet - once again I had to revert to an earlier save because the anubites suddenly vanished and made turning their quest in impossible.
Pro tips for the shipwrecked anubites quest: avoid touching the fishing boats up north at all cost. You may as well skip the anubites' weapon recovery too, because killing the kravenrook is a better option. Your possible results in this quest are: a) evacuate them for the weak-but-okay end that saves theier lives but nothing else, b) give them their weapons for the worst ending that kills them all, or c) beat the kravenrook and give its decapitated head to the captain after informing the priestess so you save them and unlock a sex scene and follow-up quest with the priestess.
The follow up quest currently does not exist yet but dialogue is set for it.
Past that, Pleasure Island is busier now. Knowing the sex game community, it was probably due to their frequent criticism that
the game needs more sex animations. The sex game community tends to derail gameplay development for sex so credit where due, the game got a healthy addition of both this update. I'm not sure if the bad pregnancy-related bugs got fixed (I didn't spare time to test), but odd item-spawning bugs and Damaris' lines did get fixed.
Nifty though unimportant fluff and factoids in my run: a few NPCs wear non-encounterable clothing variations, like red bandages and blue civilian clothes. There appears to be no white anubite armor collar without the helmet, but that's a very easy fix. There's giant humanoid skeletal remains in the abandoned ruins up North-West so lore may talk about giants and even give us one as a boss. Along with the 2-handed sword I also finally found the axe weapon (attacked wagon's corpse lets you loot it) and it's an easy to miss though an often weak choice due to lack of bleed possibility on common and important enemies - stone and bone.
I wish lootable weapons glowed, because the fact that weapons can be unlootable decoration static meshes in the world makes jaded players miss out on cool unlocks.
TL;DR for lazies: Pleasure Island has significantly more sex to see and have now. You can save the anubites by killing the beast that was stalking them in a dungeon and unlock an additional sex scene. Starting area is more fun. No new equipment or forms yet. World showing more locations that will be used later.
What I'm waiting for: either a statement about the starting area finally being finished, or a debug-mode kind of placeholder in which we can keep our old saves and go back to the start area every update to see what has changed. It would significantly speed up playtesting to only come back for newly added content instead of restarting fresh every time. Granted, this game bugs out often so I'm not sure they could manage that without adding more bugs.
