Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General gameplay criticism today 18.6.20

I miss very strong in the gameplay today 06/18/20 the mystical D&D mood, especially the characters are too colorful for me, it is nice to see that the dialogues are not so far away from the faces and the actors, but this is exactly what I personally have not at all like too rigid facial features and the figures are more in the direction of the marvel scene than in the typical mystical dark mysterious mood yes there is no real mood as well as it shows last of us 2, I don't like this cartoon look, that's too childish for me, who would be nice if you would make changes there, otherwise I can not say much at the moment except that it looks really interesting and I really liked the camera guidance, the proximity where you can zoom in perfectly and even then zoom out in battle very nice, keep it up. Thank you for viewing my comment.

German audio language translation who of course the madness

yes, something else, the story should have funny things too, but mainly it should be serious, take one with you and feel sorry for the characters, again darker bad, we want to be heroes and defeat the bad and see the bad not beautiful or is funny or nice.

What does that mean? What does "too colorful" mean? What is the right amount of colorful? What is a cartoon look? What is a proper, non-cartoon look?

what i mean by that you know the diablo 4 trailer that is the right color that is not too colorful.
or do you know last of us 2 the real faces, that is mood atmosphere and not a cartoon look

and very important is the music, the sound, give it a lot of attention

consider my criticism should only help, i am a fan of you and your games and for the most part you do it very well only optics are just too colorful

Old medievals movies didn't have the technology we have now to display as much colors as our display can reproduce nowadays but I can ensure you, real life was at that time as colorful as real life is now. Purple was a color exclusive to the royalty. The world has to be colorful and interesting to explore and not more blend than real life.

For me everything looked rather awful. Yes the environmental artwork was awfull, such as the rocks and trees and buildings. Games like Solasta, Realms Beyond, and P:WotR which are far from AAA and have a fraction of this game's budget look so much better. But ultimately none of these things matter that much because the main problem is the combat, which was horrendous and gawdawful. As much as I found D:OS combat to be awful, this game's combat may actually be even worse than D:OS. It was painful just to watch someone else play through combat, I can't imagine having even the tiniest bit of fun playing through this game's combat myself.

Combat looked absolutely incredible. Get out of here, you troll.

You must be joking. That's an asthetic that completely doesn't fit Baldur's Gates either. Claiming that Solasta has less cartoonish look then BG3 is laughable.

Overall, I am quite impressed with how BG is shaping up. For a such an early build the game looks incredible. I am not sure if close-ups will make it a better experience for me - historically, I generally found that I prefer my RPGs to leave more to imagination. Stuff like Kotor or Dragon Age Origins only draw attention to what wasn't there, rather then that was.

I am still mostly thrown off by how irrelevant our "protagonist" is. I almost feel that it would be better if BG3 had Icewind Dale approach (play as party) rather then try to mix traditional single protagonist approach with the weird multiplayer origins hybrids.

Also thank you for changing how conversation choices are written. I think D:OS2 had an interesting idea, but this just feels so natural and not distracting.

Edit: Oh, and I am liking music quite a lot!

I understand that you dont like combat. I myself prefer rtwp as well but calling the visuals of BG 3 awful is a little bit too much. And saying that Solasta has better art and visuals is even worse. I dont have anything against Solasta, but it is far from BG 3's visuals and, by just looking at it,you can tell that, as you said, it has fraction of BG 3's budget. BG 3 looks absolutely incredible. Its probably one of the most pretty crpg ever. But graphics are not important. Main thing in this franchise is story and characters and also choises and consequences and in these regards BG 3 is really something special. At least it seems that way from gameplay demos. There are tons of little choises and even from these small demos you can tell that there are a lot of consequences ))) Cinematic dialoges and the number and diversity of dialoge choises are absolutely incredible. Characters seem interesting and the story looks very promising. The only thing I wish for is more potential companions, at least 10.

Seriously the game looks better than some other game's final build.

The icons and UI still looks futuristic, the letters/text in the books you open looks like a pdf document.
Jump is still a bit too much, could be toned down, or if they would give some variation to the animation, depending on the distance you jump would be great.

The game looked great, it was a big improvement since last time. They made interactions better by removing past tense, from it. The coloring is toned down, also it was cool to see the stuff you can explore. Dialogs are also great especially with Shadowhearth and with other companions, they had a serious tone, I liked that.

I really like what I saw. The only things I don't care for have been there from the start.

1. Jump animations and sounds (over the top jump seems a bit exaggerated)
2. Action selection animation and sounds (the kungfu stance for every action). I would prefer more nuance here. The sound effects for selecting characters pulls me out of the scene and the karate stance for every action.
3. I think spell casting is lacking. There is minor chant being made but I miss some of the wordy spell casting. I'd like to see magic rune circles, chants.

Gameplay however seems great. I really look forward to it.

Oh, and the Goblins seem a bit too civilized in their speech and manners. I'm more of a Lord of the Rings-style ORC and Goblin fan. I realize DnD does not necessarily have the backstory to their creation that is the same as LOTR, but it was LOTR that really popularized the races.

You misunderstand what I was trying to say about the visuals. What I was saying is that relative to the budgets of the games, the small budget games are doing a better job of producing something worth the money being spent. Or put another way, given how much bigger BG3's budget is compared to those other games, I would expect the quality to be way better than what it is at present.

But anyway, the main point of my comment was the combat. And yes, for me, there was nothing there that redeems the combat. It was awful. But as you say, the story and the characters are what matter the most, though at present I find all the companions very boring and very dislikeable with the sole exception of the gith fighter. So if:

1) The story and characters of the game end up being awesome (not there yet), and

2) The vast majority of the hours spent in-game are outside of combat, and

3) There are reasonably accessible (meaning the check DCs are not ridiculous) options available for avoiding combat, and

4) Avoiding combat does not result in you getting cheated in terms of XPs and loot relative to engaging in combat, and

5) The difficulty can be freely lowered to something like 'Story Mode' whenever you go into combat,

Then I can see myself being ok with the game. I still won't accept paying full price for the game, but would be willing to try it when it goes on minimum 50% off sale.

I agree about the mood tho the characters and story seems the most interesting right now. The game would really benefit from more realism. I'm afraid that turn based combat will ironically shorten the replayability. I remember that in every D&D based game I was always excited about trying new characters and builds but with those all planned fights and probably no random encounters in wilderness turn based combat will simply be boring and will become something that players want move through asap to progress story more and be done with the game. Not to mention only 10 obtainable levels. What worked with DOS2 will not work in BG. I hope I am wrong.

Everything looks great, but the camera moves too fast when enemies are attacking and sometimes we can't track what they've done, an issue that also bothers me on both
Divinity games

This would get very old very quickly though. In BG1&2ndue to real time action time cast was a thing. In turn based, you want animations to be as snappy as possible to not slow down things further. Add casting to spells and after couple casts you will beg for an opportunity to speed things up. XCOMs got “zip” mode for a reason.

The exp gain is bothering me. Enemies giving 3 exp when CR 1/2 enemies give 50?

Good

1. Music was good.

2. I liked the dialogue!

3. I'm glad the over the top silliness of DOS has been toned down for this game. No sneaking in barrels.

4. The bar at the bottom look more manageable.

5. Aesthetically it looked more like the sword coast than Fort Joy which was a plus.

6. The combat looked fun. I liked the IE games and liked DOS2 . .

Needs improvement

1. Large portraits on the side are a must.

2. Needs a BG2 style skin

3. Need more companions

4. I wish it the aesthetics were more medieval and less renaissance but I know that's 5th ed . . .

5. The 'chaining' method of controlling multiple characters looks it's just as clunky as it was in DOS2. Chaining should be replaced with IE engine style party control.

EXP gain shouldn't bother you as long as it's balanced. Adjusting for the intended length of the game, it may take more or less enemies than traditionally necessary to level up. A DM naturally provides higher challenges to players as they level up; if they have certain enemies they want to present to us for certain parts of the game, there's nothing wrong with slowing down or accelerating level gain. Especially since we can probably assume the game will be very long with a level cap of 10. Absolute by-the-book EXP gain restricts the amount of enemies you can possibly put in the game.

Or not. BG had respawning enemies and interruption, it gave you the option to level up faster if you wanted.
I hope you have that option in BG3, be it from killing more enemies or tons of side quests like in PoE.

Interesting changes: No pure team-initiative, we have reactions at least and the change in the way they word the dialogue,... for me, good news.


The part of the goblin village and the Underdark was amazing.
Good to know you have a lot of RP dialogue options and dialogues with your party members and NPCs.

The use of the environment is going to be really fun ( burning spiderwebs, throwing enemies off the cliffs, blowing up walls, using cages to make stairs... etc)



Almost stop reading here... Seen the same exact comment when we only had the trailer past September...


There I stopped reading.

I do not really think you can compare a fantasy Turn-based D&D game in a different world with an fps game set on a more realistic Earth environment like "Last of us"

The terror-movie gore that is typical of Diablo and Castlevania games also do not fit the Forgotten Realms. It's not a world besieged by evil and full of carnage everywhere, it´s a world with countries of villages and farms and cities where people live, forests where they take wood and hunt... There´s not even a war at the time BG3 happens.
They have bright architecture, magically enhanced towers, fairs, farms, lots of luscious forests, etc.

And after the gameplay footage in the Underdark and the Myconid village still don´t know how much darker people want the color palette to be...

Well, at least it´s more accurate than saying that BG3 looks worse than the (fantastic in other aspects) games Solasta or Realms Beyond. No comment.


Anyway, I`m not interested too much in the graphics/sound part of the game but I think they improved since the last gameplay. the game is still in alpha so they have even more room to improve and refine the graphics and animations.




They`re a level 3 party and the level cap in the game is 10, and they´re fighting CR1/2 creatures, maybe they are using a custom XP progression or it´s just a placeholder





I´m in for more companions. I hoped the elven wiz of was one of them, but it seems it´s a custom character made by Sven.


And yeah, they´re going with the canon design of creatures and armor/weapons of the FR setting of D&D5e, definitely... the good and the bad (mostly bad)