Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Does BG3 deserve Best Community Support award?

That said, I don't get this whole "report / interact" with the community thing. I honestly don't. To me, it's nice to see a few updates there, and yeah, occasionally answering stuff, too.

But all I care about is that any company puts out a good game, that's all. And the more time and money is being allocated to community management, the less is available for the thing that matters, which is that bloody game.

That's also why I still hold reservetations about various crowdfunding models. In particular if they include major input of players over the course of development -- and obligations. One of the reasons is that people demand what they THINK they want rather than what they WANT for far too many reasons to discuss (just think back on the last game that honestly surprised you... anything you didn't think you'd enjoy as much or haven't experienced before, perhaps even the original Baldur's Gate when it was fresh... you may get the idea).

The other is that player feedback is invaluable. However, taking it too strongly can badly interfere with the long-term vision a game is aiming for. Which nobody actually knows, but the game's designers at that point. Hell, some of the stories of public play and focus group testing made public are a complete horror show as is.

This discussion shows well why all those public voting awards are a farce.

Short answer, no. Long answer, also no.

Do you really think that throwing a few bones at us during EA would have cost so much ?
I really don't as that's what all companies with EA games are doing (even for games with smaller and less active early access community).

What's the point of playing an early access if it is not to feel engaged with the game's developmment ?
Sure they patched the game and "listenned" to players feedback, but reaction was in exemple a VERY HOT topic during 3 years.
It wouldn't have hurt them to keep us updated a bit even if it was just by saying something like "we are still thinking about reactions".

Larian clearly listened. Sometimes they agreed. Sometimes they didn't. This could be seen through their actions, even if they didn't spell out their reasoning. And frankly, I don't blame them. There's not a lot to be gained by engaging with certain folks. You might think you're the person who would accept a simple explanation and move on, and that's fine, but there are plenty of people who aren't like that. People who will simply argue and hate and use the comments against Larian in whatever way possible.

It seems like a lot of folks have trouble understanding that it's not design by committee. It's gathering feedback so that decisions can be made by someone who isn't you. "I told them to change this already!!!?!!?" --yeah, you did. We all heard you. Larian heard you also. Thanks for the feedback, but remember, it was just feedback, not a directive.

Take His Majesty as an example. Larian changed the look, listened to feedback, and changed him back. Now, you may be thinking there are bigger things Larian should be focusing on, and *your* feedback was so much more important. But it doesn't change that Larian is clearly listening and responding via action.

Sometimes Larian listened and made a mistake by going along with the feedback. Halsin would be an example of that, in my opinion.

*

Additionally, consider the sharing of so much fan art. Is that not engagement with the community? I'm sure the artists in question were thrilled to have their work seen, shared, and appreciated.

You mean like this? ^^

And if I recall correctly they even said during some PFH around the very end of it that they were working on reactions and playing around with systems, but that it is not ready yet. I think it was around Patch 7 to 8.

But ultimately this award is not about the player keeping track of which company speaks the most, but rather quite simple; how they treat their game and whether us as a player are happy with it.

As I said Larian lacks on the communication part (not for EA to me, but other reasons), but what they lack in communication they make up for in action. They delivered on what they promised and keep giving even more than promised. And the results speak for themselves. It is a massive success, it is overwhelmingly positively accepted and loved by many. So clearly they are doing something right for their community, for us.

Unfortunately cannot please everyone, but that is why other nominees exist if a player is not pleased.

They STILL tippy-toe around or outright don't bother implementing things like:

- customizable hirelings (getting a small bone thrown every patch that doesn't fix the issue doesn't count);

- rolling for abilities (clearly planned and mentioned during EA, and the game is already barely balanced, so that can't be too much of an issue in that regard);

- previews for class progression (which games from 20+ years ago had but this "best RPG ever" doesn't need, apparently);

- properly implemented non-Origin companions (Halsin especially is a dead giveaway of how late and sloppily he was added just to cater to the obviously very sane in their demands part of the fanbase that wants to lay everything that moves);

- fixing Wyll's voicelines (he still has barks from his EA voice actor, who I'd say did a better job, no clue why they'd change him);

- better appearance customization (running into your clones in a "be what you want" RPG is disheartening. Also, bodies - bone weights exist for many years, and even with the existing ones there's armor clipping and mismatched animations in scenes, so it won't be that much of a downgrade at this point...);

- properly working Warlock invocations and pacts (the Tome is an absolute joke);

- fixing the mess that the Ranger was from the very start of EA (at least provide upgraded versions of the perks or something!);

- different personalities for your custom PC (a Dark Urge going "NO ONE AT HOME WILL EVER BELIEVE THIS(c)" when having amnesia is downright stupid. Also, the hirelings, despite having no identity, have the same voicelines);

- different voices for Origin characters as they undergo their storylines (Lae'zel going "heil Vlaakith" after a certain point makes no sense);

- ditching the Origin characters altogether (it was an... "interesting" gimmick for one game, but re-using it and thus limiting what your PC can be is a big mistake, in my opinion);

- allowing the custom PC's tags to be customizable (My half-orc barbarian is NOT a Baldurian, goddammit!);

- and so on...

The cheeky "we're curious if the modders can implement things we've decided not to bother making" as the game was nearing release was also kind of an... ambiguosly readable statement. Ah, right:

- modding tools.

I was something of an avid defender of the game during EA, but seeing so many obvious marks be missed and suddenly chasing a different audience than the game was originally marketed towards can make one question their loyalties. It seemed like a hopeful gem in the sea of trend-chasing mediocrity that even the once "good" companies gave in to (CDPR is the most recent biggest offender here) only to disappoint in the end. Heck, I was more interested in replaying the first act over and over during EA than I am to play the game again after beating it once, and that's with me immediately jumping into another run of Larian's previous title back in the day.

This community is partly poison and Larian cannot and does not have to respond to such players. The fact that they haven't closed their forum like BioWare surprises me, I can at least understand BioWare when I read some comments from "fans".
Larian tries to stick to existing lore and doesn't have to respond to all the feedbac from the "fans" and constantly comment.

Yipie, 2 years after EA launch and you had to find THE message^^


If worse fans than you are hadn't criticized the game you would still jump like a frog during combats (but I guess you haven't played previous EA patch 5).

If Larian had better engaged with the community, maybe with polls in exemple, I'm sure many of the worst things in the game would have been better.
Just check how UI improvement and camera mods are popular... Not like if we (forums, reddit,...) hadn't reported these issues for years.

It seems to me that they listen pretty well to the community.

Cant think of an example for a company that was better in this regard.

Maybe even too much, considering some decisions. Such as making Halsin a romance.

I feel like Larian trapped themselves with the Panel from Hell events. During early access, the only thing that people were able to do is throw their feature into a wishing well and prey that it get mentioned in the next PFH. Larian wanted to aggregate all the new features to serve as a marketing tool but it stopped them from revealing anything between events. The most infamous one was reactions. There was a thread containing dozens of pages asking for the feature and it lasted for months, and then out of nowhere we go the feature shipped with a new patch. I get that they don't want to over promise (and I can understand that after the high city drama), but I wish they would juste promise at all.

Didn’t Swen at some point say they were looking into reactions? I could be misremembering but I’m pretty sure he did.

You're right there. All fan discussion on the internet eventually gets usurped by toxic negativity. By people who are too obsessed with what could/should have been, and don't take enough time to appreciate what is. If even the Beatles can't please the modern internet, no-one can.

Perhaps? iirc some Larian dev said that they were looking into it. But then you had plenty of other cases like party size, classes or BA shove. This led to several 50+ pages threads where the community was at war between each others because Larian didn't comment of the subject once.
Oh and also, there is a feedback section in the official Larian Discord. Out of the thousands of requests, I think I have seen a Larian answer like once or twice. The community support goes very much only one way.

*Icelyn Dissaproves*


You are wrong. You were not part of the early access and you have no idea how frustrating it was.
Some of us played the game for hundreds of hours and took as much of their time to write feedback and suggestions.

Unhappy players would have gone if Larian had simply bothered to answer rather than ignoring the questions, expectations, frustrations of the players on the most important threads.
The negative (or "toxic" as toxic people like to say) players are passionnate about this game for 3 years. Appreciate what it is doesn't prevent to be frustrated because it could have been better... especially because during 3 years most complaints were about things players are now complaining about (unbalanced / broken mechanics leading to a very easy game, camera, buggy chain system, inventory management, lack of informations like class overview in character creation,...)

This for me. I know a lot of people spent a lot of effort giving feedback on the 'evil campaign' in EA, myself included and how it was rather lackluster, and Larian's silence on the matter was rather frustrating, to say the least. They talked up a lot of the aspects of parts outside of Act I, but we never really got any indication what, if anything was being done about the criticisms, or if Larian was even listening.

And it turns out the only feedback to be acted on was to the benefit of people playing good characters. The evil characters were nicened up to be more compatible with good playthroughs, and the tadpole power progression was reworked such to remove one of the only real incentives to play evil.

It seems that they might be doing something *now* but there was a lack of transparency on their goals. They might not be facing much of the backlash they are now in certain respects if they had listened to players more in EA.

There's also the honesty issue. Those parts that I mentioned being talked up in PFH etc? A lot of them turned out to be misleading or outright false, and the gaslighting over 'cut content' after all that came to light didn't help matters If a company doesn't even acknowledge the playerbase except in big PR events once in a while, doesn't seem to act on much of the feedback, and misleads them as to what is going into the game, I don't think it really instills a sense of trust.

I don't know about the other nominations for that award, but I really don't think it would be fair to give Larian that one. Only thing I got is that maybe the entertaining and excitable tone of the Panel From Hell events is holding the line on that one, because I never really saw much of substance to get behind considering them particularly great in that regard.

It looks like they're receptive to community feedback except they haven't listened to numerous people's requests to implement x/y-axis camera inversion and have not said a word about even more numerous complaints regarding perma-split screen

There are numerous old threads on this forum asking about FSR2 that was mentioned prior to the PS5 release and the following radio silence. Here's one of them: https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=913882#Post913882

Community Support is inclusive of game updates and patches. That's why the start of description talks about outstanding transparency. That does not mean updating/patching the game counts as community support all by it's lonesome. There is no such thing as 'making up for it in action' if it means you are literally just hoping you didn't scream into the void with no indication whether or not something gets done eventually. That's not supporting the community. It's a relationship that has to go both ways. Conversely, it also means they can't say 'We Hear You' and then do nothing about it for it to count.

This is the internet, so I can't be baffled by this misinterpretation, but still, this is really telling me that public voting should count for 5% at most.

Right, remembered another thing!

- the grove battle still happens in broad daylight against all sense and logic despite people saying it's dumb and arbitrary for 2+ years straight.

At times it also feels like they'd listen very selectively, what with ignoring people who wanted at least an option for the old racial bonuses, deities for paladins, choice of starting equipment, and so on. The resting mechanics and the way switching the party works feel extremely half-baked (the former seems like it wasn't given much thought past its original "fixing", and the latter heavily implies that having everyone in the party at once was a change decided on very late). And all the changes in the writing have been mostly for the worse, honestly (Wyll, the dream guardian, Minthara).

The pre-release showcase was probably the herald of all the sudden changes coming on release, and then the people who'd only picked the game up then would arrogantly say how the EA crowd is stuck in the past and is barely a part of the audience compared to everyone buying the game then. I guess Larian thought the same.