Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback BG3 - Early Access Diary and Feedback Document

Hi fellow adventurers!


Following the request for community and playtesting feedback Swen made at the “Panel From Hell”, I decided to join the Larian Forum community for the release of BG3 in EA to share my experiences within the EA versions with the community and provide feedback to the Larian team in this thread.

I plan to run multiple playthroughs with various characters and builds and a lot of this will happen live on my Twitch @GG_Calyx. Based on the savegame and run I play, the stream will be German or English. German to reach the current majority of my community and gather their impressions from watching the gameplay, too, and English to provide material for the Larian team that is easy to access and progress.

Special moments will be saved as Twitch Clips or short YouTube videos, especially to provide material for bug tracking.

Every day I play BG3 will feature a post that summarizes my thoughts on the gaming experiences I had that day. The post is going to drop in the late evening or the next day in the morning.

If you want to join me on this little adventure, feel free to follow this thread or catch me live on Twitch. It’d be a pleasure to welcome you!


~ Calyx



PS: Please be aware that this threat will feature major spoilers for the story and gameplay, since my focus is to support the Larian team in their EA development and on their way to release version 1.0.

This is probably going to be an unpopular opinion, but I really hope that these dedicated "look at me" posts don't start trending.
As I think that this is the general plan for a lot of people and it kinda goes without saying that people will intend to stream, this really just feels like self-promotion to draw attention to your channel.

This forum layout feels really limited in how things like this could be handled (from a sorting perspective,) but I'd love to see a subsection of the forums made for streamers so that I can completely disregard them instead of having to mentally sort out which "I'm streaming" posts to skip as I look through the general forum topics.

I actually suspect this is a very popular opinion. I really hope they give us a much more structured format to provide our feedback in. It gets really boring seeing people treat forums and social media like their personal diary instead of a platform for discussion and providing feedback, and it often reeks of self-promotion.

There will be some new subforums opened around the time the release goes live, one of which will probably be "feedback" which would be an appropriate home for this type of topic.

I'm shocked to hear that it might be a popular opinion since everyone is streaming these days and there's this underlying expectation of praise for doing it.
I just really don't want to have to skim through topics and end up on page 3 to find anything of substance because 50 people are "live now and (insert clickbait topic here)."

That's fantastic news, thank you!

Nice gatekeeping. "We don't want new people excited enough about the game to make content about it".

This place ...

This makes it seem like people who don't stream or make money from playing games will be less likely to have their feedback listened to.

You're misinterpreting it.

I'd prefer that if people are going to promote their streams that they could do so in a place that wasn't co-mingled alongside other posts, else every other post on the main forum could be a streamer telling people that they're going live.
Vometia clarified that there'll be subforums, so the issue has been resolved.

As a streamer I myself feel that coming onto a developer forum, saying you are a streamer and therefore starting a thread and a series so you can follow me and consider my opinions to be completely unwarranted. Frankly you aren't that important.
If you are a hardcore lover of this game then by all means start threads talking about your experience. I am fairly certain the developer will open a "First Impressions thread". And thats where a lot of general feedback can go. Specific gameplay issues can have their own threads, but a thread about "so and so is going live, so watch/read my chronicles." well that just smacks of..

I hope other streamers consider my pov, if you love this game, you don't need to tell people about your stream, believe me they will find you.

Is it allowed to stream or post images from the alpha in the first place?

I do not know how Larian does it, but for Pathfinder WotR alpha every player had to agree not to post in game stuff so that others do not get a wrong impression. It is still an alpha with tons of placeholders, missing content and bugs.
You should only discuss alpha stuff in the non public alpha forum.

I haven't been informed this is a problem and it wasn't with DOS2, IIRC. I should probably find out, though hopefully it will continue to not be the case as it would be something of a headache to manage!

Don't you mean Early Access Dairy and FeedBack Cheese?

On a more relevant note, I have recently been trying out a different Early Access game where comments and bug reports were all listed in order of arrival. I found this a bit frustrating when trying to find out whether issues I had run into had already been reported. Would it be useful to set up sub-forums with fairly broad categories?

I could start changing things to have more appropriate titles like that, but eventually someone from publishing would tell me off. Pity.

Real streamers know that self-promotion is cringy as hell, especially when the OP thinks it's cleverly hidden behind other reasons (plot twist: it never works).

Ok, after the initial echoes of this post, that kind of hit me like a truck, not gonna lie, I really think I have to change course, after reading the feedback below the initial post.

I talked to a bunch of people after reading the comments, gathering more voices and opinions and yeah, if you would be that gracious to read my response, I would highly appreciate that. I want to take my time to give a quick summary to every one of your replies below the first post.



So here we go:

In General:
Yes, I am from a social media focused background. The classic forum environment is completely new ground to me including the elements of unwritten codex behind it. And as I already mentioned, my reason for joining the forum was the feedback request in the “Panel From Hell” livestream.

I am really sorry for the way the initial post made you feel. Following the points you mention, it is up to you, if you trust my following answers to these. Otherwise I guess there is not much more I can do than hope for your understanding.

Tzelanit:
The post was not meant as a flat “look at me” and following posts were not planned as “hey, I’m live, now!”
I intended to point out where video content will be available this one time, in case I e.g. encounter a crucial bug, but can’t pin down its source. And maybe material like a clip or video might help a person with more insight into the game to get a grasp at bugs etc. The language aspect on the other hand was supposed to point out that material might be different from time to time in language in an extract.
Also, I totally agree with you that a streamer section/subforum would be really helpful, if this is one's way to share feedback. As I said, I plan to use this way, too.
And concerning the “praise” - I will never expect this for streaming. Streaming is open to everyone and there is nothing special about it in general, you are right.

DrunkPunk:
As I mentioned above, I come from a social media background and this is my first dip into the world of classic forum architecture as a member, not just a reader that stumbled upon a forum through googling. Again, I am sorry if the post looked like blunt self-promo. My goal is to combine visual and written feedback at heart. The term “diary” probably missed the spot heavily in general of what it was intended to stand for. It was meant in a way that I don’t flood the forum with a new thread every single time I want to share a part of the general gaming experience.

vometia:
I already reached out to her in a private message and apologized for the chaos I kicked-off here. Furthermore, I want to dip into the probably off-timing for setting up the post. I drafted it, while there was only the General forum up for BG3. I wanted to prep everything I could one day ahead of release day which was a bad decision in hindsight. The thread was moved to the new Feedback section later on by vometia, too. Thx a lot again for that!

tsundokugames:
I guess we kind of had a similar first reaction to the upper replies on an emotional level. But after giving it some time and proper thought, I think they got their points and I really could have done better, no doubt. But yes, I also stand with you when it comes to things like REAL gatekeeping. Everyone shall enjoy their way of playing the game, sharing thoughts and getting in touch with others.

DumbleDorf:
I don’t earn anything from streaming to this day either. And I think it is more about getting active in any form. You don’t have to be a high ranked influencer or content creator. If you are passionate about something, get your voice out in any form, be visible. That was my central intention, although as I pointed out, I really didn’t manage to communicate, well.

Propheto:
Again, yes, I know that I’m not important as a person on the internet at all. And once more: I never intended to post flat out “live, now” messages on the forum.
Also, I thought about your point of crunching everything into one thread being a bad concept. So I thought of shifting gears and only posting after major chunks of gameplay, like at least like 50+ hours, 100+ hours etc., before publishing any feedback on the forum. I am still unsure though, if I would open a new thread for every subcategory of feedback for balancing, narrative elements and so on. I kind of feel like I’d prefer summaries of general events in a chunk of testing, divided into subsections for e.g. overall topics and bugs. In case of bugs, a separate sub-forum would be awesome though, so you can check which bugs were found, reported, and fixed already. Feedback on this is welcome and highly appreciated.

Madscientist:
Usually an embargo is set until the EA release. I never heard of an EA release that was banned from streaming/recording, yet.

mfr:
Yes, I’d also love a sub-forum for bug tracking!

JakiStow:
Well, if you made up your mind, I guess I can’t change it unfortunately, no matter what I say after. If I tell you that there is nothing I want to hide, nor have to hide, you probably wouldn’t believe it anyway. All I can do is learn from this incident and improve.



So, here we are. If any of you read to this point, I want to thank you first.
And second: If you have any suggestions how I could do better here in the forum community and improve in connecting written and visual feedback here on this platform, to provide help to the dev team, please let me know!

Seperate posts for any bigger chunk of gameplay, which parts to separate for the most comfortable way of filtering different information and topics. I am a rookie, or as the tag currently states a “stranger” here. I am always open to feedback.

And at last, I just ask for one more little favour: Keep the feedback constructive, don’t let it drift into a frame-shame show, please. I will keep this thread up and learn from it and approach handing in feedback from a new angle and possibly a new and improved thread.



Thanks a lot.

~ Calyx

Good news ; I specifically subscribed to this forum mainly to provide feedback