Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General How will shared quests work for large parties?

How will the quest system be organized if there are multiple party members, but not all of them are present for every enemy killed or quest completed?

If you are a member of a party, do you have a chance to complete every quest even if your party members have already done it? Do you have to play alone to finish it? Or, are enemies able to be killed twice to finish quests for all party members?

probably the same way as for Original Sin 2.

Stuff just happens, if one party members not there hes not there, theres usually several ways to progress

Yeah, in one of the earlier demos there was ring that allowed to talk to recently deceased. I would imagine they will still have multiple ways of getting the needed information.

The quest systems in DOS 1 and 2 were messy and confusing. I hope that they significantly improve their method for managing quests for BG3.

I think there is a simple answer:
If party member A has a quest to kill a person, party member B has a quest to help this person and you kill that person, than you finish the quest of A and fail the quest of B.
In extreme cases this could lead to party members fighting each other or leaving the party.
Maybe you can avoid some problems by convincing them to stay, find another way to solve their problem or you lie to them ( When char B was not present when you killed that person there is a deception check "He was already dead when we found him.")

Swen said that it will be impossible to see everything in one playthrough. This is good.
I love this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJJaGSV75y0
Remember these words: FAILURE IS A CONSEQUENCE !

Having a quest and character system with meaningful choices naturally leads to different story and quests being available for different players. Of course. But, the issue of tracking and resolving quests for players in a "party" is different from the issue of having meaningful choices available to the player. You could have a deep choice system and still be able to understand the impact of your choices and have more warning and awareness of them. In the first place, DOS 1&2 both had poorly-tracked, confusing quest systems that did not make it clear to the player what was happening, or even when it was happening. So, it's already hard to know which decisions matter and which ones don't, when they are going to happen, and what you can do about it, when you are the only one playing the game. Second, if your quests and story are now being affected by the decisions other players are making, and the quest tracking system remains horribly disorganized and opaque, this is going to lead to a lot of player confusion and frustration. This might be fine when you are creating your own IP that is supposed to be messy and feel punishing to the player, but this is not appropriate for D&D. The DM is supposed to give players fair warning and awareness of their world, so that they at least know about how they will affect their world and their fellow party members. When all of your XP is tightly controlled and you have no way of fixing your world mistakes, it is very important for the "DM" (in this case the quest system) to make sure that when players make choices, they understand the risks that they are taking. Otherwise, this will the kind of game where everyone just plays four characters solo, instead of giving the feel that real D&D gives where the human element does help make sure that players don't get "left out" or passed by.

I'm not sure what the right solution to this is, but in RPGs where every XP point doesn't have to be rationed out this way, multiple quest completion can be handled in a much safer and clearer way for parties of multiple players. Perhaps there could be duplicate quests with heavy XP penalties, for example. This is something the developers have to be mindful of and include in the game.

It's simple.
As single player you have to chose if you care only for your own goals or if you chose to help your party members to keep them happy.
In multi player the players have to talk to another to decide what to do, like in PnP. In the worst case they literally have to throw a dice to decide what to do.

Even if there are some quest that conflict each other you can still do a lot. I still remember how you could become master of attack and defense in Arcanum. One of the teachers wants to kill the other, but with some deception you can get both.

They should do as the PoE games, where companions that are "stored" get 75% of exp gains or something like that.

Personaly, I liked that in D:OS2 you had to commit to who your companions were. Since KOTOR most RPGs allow you to recruit and finish storylines of every character, which sometimes work, but I feels is a bit too convenient. Let us pick out party and stick with it. One doesn't need to get to know every companion on first playthrough.

Agreed, having to make choices and live with those choices is one of the biggest things missing from a lot of RPGs these days. The fact they want to allow you to experience everything in the first run ends up making the experience a bit more shallow. I'm hoping BG3 goes a similar route of committing to decisions such as who you take with you, which I suspect will be the case.

This is one of the major drawbacks of this style of RPG vs those with randomly or procedurally generated levels. If a party member even misses a single session of leveling or questing, they can no longer access that XP or quest rewards. I realize that they want to tightly control player power, but it is not realistic to expect several players in real life to never play unless all original party members are present. The penalties are so high that it strongly discourages players from partying in real life, which is the opposite intent of the D&D phb.

If it´s like Dos2 All XP is shared except for origin character quests. If you're all playing origin characters then you should all get roughly the same number of these quests and should end up about equal for XP. There's an option that you need to share your journal updates in order to share quests. All players receive the same XP, being a party of 2 or 4.

There are some quests you have to deliver an object or something like that where you have to do it with every player to gain XP, so you can do it later if you´re not in the session but if you are nearby all players receive Xp for completing quests or killing things.
And if you are not nearby, doing the same quest as the others, why are you playing MP? (unless you´re offline).

So far I have not played a good RPG with randomly or procedurally generated levels.
Ages ago I finished Diablo 1 and 2 once. Looking back I have no idea why I wasted that time. You walk through random areas to click random enemies to death to get random items.
One of the early Elder Scrolls games had a random map. I did not play it.
Personally I prefer having great hand crafted content once than having totally random stuff repeatedly.
I do not know how to make good stories and characters in a random environment.
And I do not like grinding, which means repeatedly kill the same enemies to gain levels.

Fortuanatly BG3 seems to be fully hand crafted.

As for exp, please give every char the same exp, even those not in the party.
Else you feel forced to always use the party members you find first for the rest of the game.

Diablo 1 & 2 are some of the best games ever made.