I was disappointed.

I know this discussion is happening in multiple threads but I wanted to give my own impressions because my feelings don't exactly mirror those expressed in the other threads. I'm not declaring myself out. I don't feel betrayed. I don't want a refund and I still have hope but, again, I'm disappointed.

The bad

* Lighting improvements are not good because it's is a sign that the devs are focusing on honing their strengths instead of dealing with their weaknesses. The game is already beautiful. The problems are with the mechanics and rule implementation. Get the fundamentals right and then polish

* The gameplay seemed cheesy -- running to the fairy ring to bring the rest of the party to the fight seemed like an exploit of engine limitations. That was a missed opportunity because the hag fight can be won without cheese

* I was hoping for more content. I knew a new area was a long shot but at the bare minimum I was expecting to see both the druid and paladin classes introduced. Announcing the druid class didn't feel like a "big thing" at all. It's a core class, of course it's going to show up eventually.

* I didn't hear any mention of the issues most important to this community: movement mechanics, rule implementation and party size

* Hard to separate from ^ but I was annoyed that they brought in WotC to okay their rule changes. Another missed opportunity, was hoping for another "we listened to you on ___" statement. Like they did with cantrip surfaces

* The "this game has to ship sometime" comment worries me

The good

* Bug fixes

* Smaller downloads

* Attention to realms lore -- the flaming fist now has the correct coat of arms

* More staff means more people getting paychecks and, hopefully, less wait time between patches

* I'm glad loaded dice is being implemented as an optional feature

* I liked seeing the cow getting scratched and petted.

Jeremy Crawford is always so diplomatic, it sure felt cheap to use him that way to validate the changes Larian are making to core rules. Swen asking if it was alright. What was he going to say when he’s on the spot like that? “Well, actually… you’re in for a lot of balancing trouble if you go down this path…”

When you say most important to this community, what you mean is most important to you.

This is a diverse community who have different likes and dislikes.

You gotta admit that complaning about the lack of D&D mechanics in a D&D game is not unresonable right?

Well you seem to be pretty well informed Could you share what are the main concerns on this forum ?

Judging by the size of the most active threads I would say those are the most important to community.


Larian likes its numbers -- set up an sentiment analysis engine on the forum and I feel confident that it would produce the same results.

Yet again, as many will come here accusing the OP of "demanding from the devs to obey" or any other black-or-white line of thinking, I would like to add to these points, that all of this could have been alleviated by openly addressing some of the hottest topics of the forums. Saying whatever they would like to say, just addressing it. Instead of giving us a cop-out by leaving it to the guest of the show to talk around these points.
If you would like to tell us, Larian, that this will never be the game for DnD enthusiasts - sorry about that folks - than it's fine. Just be open about it.
If you would like to tell us however, that you yourselves are still not 100% certain in which direction you would like to go, than this is fine as well. Just tell us.
Please let us know what kind of discussions featuring which bullet points you would like to see on the forums and we will happily provide it. Just a tiny bit of direction would be nice, because discussing and talking for months being just a waste of time, falling on deaf ears, isn't helpful for anyone. It's a waste of your time and ours.

did you think they would say the release date? I'll say it again, the year has just begun, it's too early. I mean yea... sometime. So why worries?

+1

You should probably look at the MEGA THREAD forum.

Just a question about something in the Panel.

EN is not my native language and with the sounds issues at the beginning I'm not sure I understood this one.
The guy talking about lighting and so on at the beginning talked about mushrooms ? I understood than now we'll be able to eat mushroom for free (no bonus action). Is that really what he said ?

I would be very surprised because food and the multiplication of healing items/devaluation of healing potions is another issue related by a lot of players...

You gotta admit that expecting a triple AAA computer game based on the paper and pencil 5E rule-set to not have changes is pretty unreasonable right?

I think it would have been entirely reasonable for them to at least mention SOME of the points on the megathreads, considering the collective hundreds if not thousands of hours users here have put into testing and feedback.

The MEGA THREAD forum is also not the community. (It's an echo chamber of the same folks posting the same things over and over)
It is a subset of the community.

No person or small group of people speaks for the BG3 community.
If there are issues that are important to individuals it is fantastic if they post them in the forums but claiming to speak for the community is both false and disingenuous.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IgN2IAZi8Hho6X_7XpiW-0N_cUYEJvX8/view

Poll from back in October, I would like to see a more updated one. Arguably none of the issues are considered important by most.

Necessary changes? What about changing those things that can be implemented according to pnp?

I would like to see a more updated one too – but even looking at that there are areas I’d love to have some feedback from Larian on. Particularly the bonus action disengage.

"On a scale from 0 to 10 how accurate would you like BG3 to be in regard of
DnD5e?"
The distribution is clearly concentrated on the right tail. At least whithin the sample, the majority wants the game to be close to the rules.

I would never speak for anyone but myself.

That poll has 500 respondents.
Over 1,000,000 folks have participated in EA.
It represents the thoughts of less than 0.05 % of the community.

You are correct in that a clear majority wants accurate implementation of D&D rules, but simultaneously most people expressed they were happy with both the D&D rules interpretation and Larian's homebrew. And this was BEFORE Larian actually removed some of their homebrew (like elemental surfaces on most wizard attack cantrips). So there are seemingly some...shall we say logical inconsistencies afoot.

Yup. Clearly insufficient numbers and yet the best numbers available to us.

I don't think so, because if you go back to the questions, the one that asks what players think of the current implementation mentions EA, and the one asking about rule implementation does not, so I think its making a statement about the full release.

Best for what exactly?

Well perhaps the silent majority disagree with this community but there's no way know, right? You've been handed multiple forms of evidence -- the popularity of threads, polls and community members making it clear that these issues are important to them -- and you've tried to poke holes in each form of evidence. But if we cannot gauge sentiment from forums and polls how are you able to divine secrets from the silent?

Wait, you don't have a tadpole, do you?

I think that Larian is not supposed to deal with individual feedbacks, and unanimous feedback do not exist. I think they should take into consideration feedbacks when they are made by a bunch of people, particularly if there are no contradictory feedbacks from another bunch of people.

By the way, I would like also to see an update of the survey, which is VERY interesting (I wish I had seen this poll, because I did not answer it).
Plus, when people say that are not happy with a homebrew rule, it does not necessarily mean that the people satisfied with it would not be satisfied with the implementation of the RAW rule. So, I think that when you get around 40/50% of unsatisfaction with a homebrew rule, it is a very bad sign, and that with the implementation of the RAW rule the overall percentage of satisfaction would be clearly higher on many items.

I think I was most surprised by the plug for the DOS board game. Am I alone in thinking that had no place in a BG3 live stream? Or did I completely misread the narrative?

I was also disappointed with the grand reveal, happy to see the druid class revealed but sorry to see they basically doubled down on the game mechanics as it currently is. It’s still early days but I don’t hold much hope the party control, inventory, UI or combat issues will be addressed or even acknowledged.

It feels like they have taken a classic car and turned the next iteration into a muscle car.

All homebrews are either concentrated on the left tail (most dislike it) or the distribution is a mess with many bars around the same size (people have no idea if they like it or not). There is none that has fat right tails.

In the context of this thread, determining the OP's rather bold claim as to what constitutes the consensus of what the most important issues are.

Nobody is arguing that there should absolutely under no conditions be any changes made from 5e. People are arguing against specific changes because they make the game less good.

Please stop strawmanning people.

Multiple examples of small sample sizes from biased sampling does not magically transform those small samples into a representative opinion.
I do not debate that these issues are important to these individuals, but I am not convinced they represent the community as a whole.



We are us.

Most polls supposed to approximate global reality have a seamless percentage, or even inferior.

Less good in your opinion.
To some they might make the game better.

A representative sample size, by it's very nature, must be representative of the overall population.

Sure, no one would argue the forums of evidence we have are perfect but they are what we have available to us and making conclusions on the basis of evidence is better than coming to conclusions without evidence.

How are conclusions based on bad evidence better than conclusions based on no evidence?

So why would Larian even care about doing polls if it is to ignore the results afterwards ?

I don't think it's bad evidence. It's a sample of the people who care enough about the game to voice an opinion.

Yeah but don't you know Larian is designing for the silent millions? The ones who don't express an opinion?

Yeah them.

Is that you Sven?

All kidding aside. Look the OP was just giving his impressions. And yes, people with issues tend to post more on forums. It's like that everywhere.

You got all wound up because you think the OP was speaking for everyone and was concerned Larian would act towards it. As if Larisn lacks the critical thinking and internal metrics to determine what direction they want to go.

Argue his points. Debate for or against it. That's what these forums are here for. But to call him out that "he doesn't speak for the community" is pretty silly to me. Ultimately we all speak for ourselves and nothing more.

Let the OP vent. You can also make a thread listing how wonderful BG3 is and how you wouldn't change a thing.

Getting this thread back on topic.

Lighting improvements are a separate team, I've been expecting graphics to change since some moments have clearly been placeholders. We haven't seen what is in patch 4, but the group that would control mechanics and rule implementation were probably busy with all the bugs that were reported. Especially since several bugs were about rule implementation.

The gameplay avoided showing any hot topic discussions. I agree I'm a little disappointed, It would be cool if they would at least let us playtest combat if higher ground only provided disadvantage to enemies at least 6 feet lower. Or, the vice versa only providing advantage on attacks. Or even playing with them both removed.

I think the lack of mentions was deliberate. It felt like they wanted to avoid getting our hopes up for something that would not be in the patch.

Jeremy Crawford, always supports the DM's choice. He does provide great insight to how rules should play out, but the DM is the DM.


I hope loaded dice will quell the comments about misses. It's worth noting that they were a smaller group of the community than anything in the mega-threads. I'm not losing hope yet on playing ranged casters without restrictions.

Thanks



Agreed. I'm glad the people upset by misses will get what they want but, like you, I think the people asking for this change were a pretty small group.


I am hoping that they will address these issues that come up time and time again in forums in the near future.

They clearly underdelivered for the hype they created.

And they still look amateurs when handling streams.

We are approaching the 6 months mark and they addressed almost nothing of the feedback from the forums.

There are plenty of really amazing ideas here that have been actively ignored and the game is going to a very worrisome direction.

EA media reviews were pretty mediocre and I don't see it improving with the current changes.

You should really count the number of players in those topics and the number of individual "+1".

You'll probably be surprised, even if obviously, a few players keep those threads alive even when there's nothing more to say.

Well I’m still a fan - it’s d&d and to me that’s all that really matters. I would like to see some of the major gripes addressed or changes ruled out. I don’t think they will address some of the majors until they get the game along the development path further & work out how much cash they have to spend & then decide which are the best bang for the buck.
This is a huge project & Larian are clearly growing in size - so hopefully they have the horsepower & the dollars in the business to finish the project to the standards the majority want.

I still think it’s early days & we will be in for some surprises - hopefully the right ones - I think we are still a year away from release depending on how much time they are getting back with the new studios - it sounds like quite a lot by the way Sven was talking.

+1 to all your points, @KillerRabbit!!

Thank you for saying it ! At last someone has a clear mind here !

Of course you can always argue about sample sizes. I don't know how experienced you are with conducting polls but taking a margin of error of 4% with a confidence level of 95% into account, a sample size of 500-600 is actually quite good to represent a population size of 1 million.

That alone probably doesn't mean the results can be dismissed, in fact it is very much the contrary (and I'm speaking as someone who doesn't know what the poll is about).

When doing a poll to get an estimate of the percentage of the population who thinks A (and the percentage that think not-A), you want to sample, uniformly from the population and without replacement, a number of people that is large enough, and you generally want this number to be a small fraction of the population. This is because, if you want to do your poll right and deliver confidence intervals (i.e. do the poll right), the computations are way easier this way. It's not super intuitive, but it has to do with whether the % you are measuring changes as you sample people. So you can certainly criticise the poll :
- For not having a large enough sample. 1 000, 5 000, or even 10 000 participants would be better.
- For having a non-uniform sample. Here, people are self-sampled, among a crowd that is probably different from the all-players crowd, which introduces a bias in the data.

But dismissing a poll, because the sampled population is a small fraction of the general population, is wrong. If you want to measure the % of the population of a country that has long hair, you want to sample a number which is simultaneously large, and small compared to the country's population (which means you want a large population).

And that mega thread does not even take into account forum posters with multiple accounts. They would have a better luck proving that there are aliens on earth than proving they have some sort of majority agreement that represents the bulk of forum posters. There are too many variables to skew that information.

I'm going to wait until the patch notes have been released, until I make any judgements. But it seems they may of fixed Arcane Ward. It was stated that the HP bonus will be 2x level + Intelligence bonus. That's a definite improvement for the Abjurer subclass. Hopefully the Ward stacks with temp HP as well. The handling of the Abjurer was my #1 concern. So yeah ... maybe.

Now if they would change height high/ low to a +2/ -2 bonus, backstab to a flanking bonus (maybe +1), implement Dodge, separate Jump and Disengage, and add my preferred subclasses; I would be very happy with this game.

I'm sort-of coming to term with the realization that when it comes to "make the best Baldur's Gate game ever made" it may not even be an issue of Larian having the talent or not. It's that they are not even trying.

Just ot be clear: I'm not joking, not whining, nor asking for my money back. I'm just commenting on the realization that the tells are fairly clear.
They are already setting their mind from the get go on some massive compromise as their final goal, before deciding if they'll have to cut something else along the way.

"Day/Night cycle and notion of passing time? A LARGE cast of unique character that can join you in your adventure? A party of six adventures AND a control system simple and intuitive enough to make it effortless to manage?
All things the previous games had, but I'm sure we can do without most of them because we need to cut corners somewhere".

Well, I'm sure the end result will be a somewhat enjoyable game, probably even with some GREAT setpieces and moments.
But my confidence that it will be the best possible Baldur's Gate that Larian could make? How could I have it, when they are giving up on it from the starting line?

Completely agree. The disappointment is strong and the lack of hope only makes it worse.

I would never imagined that a sequel 20 years later would have dropped so many concepts that are universal in cRPGs and many other games nowadays for no apparent reason other than stubbornness.

It was not for lack of feedback. And that will be remembered.

Do you have any evidence that there are users with multiple accounts? Most forums have checks in place for multiple accounts.

Ah yes of course. Dissent is due to bot accounts, but game design is due to the silently approving million players...*nods sagely*

Voter fraud. Of course! Barrelmancy won in a landslide!

People can't be dismissive of the polls just because the responses don't please them. Yes, 500 is a small sample (it might be able to represent 100000 players though, depending on confidence interval and error margin) and I'm all for updates of this poll with larger samples.
But it is the ONLY evidence up to now, and according to this evidence the majority does not like the homebrews and prefers a more faithful adaptation. Another interesting result is that the overwhelming majority also prefers turn-based, which is surprising to me.

These people seem to live under the delusion that if you leave this forum the love is universal and unconditional.

I can get on pretty much any internet board someone could think of, voice my complaints about the game and I can tell you before even doing it that there will be a certain numbers of users willing to agree with me, some of which didn't even think about the issue until it was pointed to them.
There will also be people with other grievances on their own and different priorities.

And then of course there will be a large portion of people that are pretty much "the ground zero of expectations" and that they will always be basically fine with anything that looks sufficiently nice and doesn't explicitly BREAK APART during a gameplay session.

If anyone wants them to be their target audience, be my guest. Just don't be surprised when everyone else will comment that the result blows asses as if blowing ass was no one else's business.

A fairly realistic complaint about the poll is that there probably is a fair amount of selection bias in who chooses to respond. Most people aren't going to bother with a survey like that (I didn't). Note that if I *had* it would have been one more vote on the complaint side, since I am rather unhappy with the current state of afairs.

In any case, it is probably wise to take the poll with a grain of salt. Do keep in mind however that it does provide at least a small amount of evidence in favor of the proposition that many people are unhappy about the way some of the rules are being handled.

I tend to agree with you. But I have to wonder if Larian is making the right decision to basically cater to the masses with "ground zero of expectations"? It's the easy way out and probably the most profitable. I mean, can the vocal complainers, who may very well be in the minority, truly change the direction of a game? Has there ever been a case?

At that new office they just opened they really need to hire someone who's whole job is just communications, or some kind of dedicated dev to EA community liaison. I'm sure the pandemic has created many unforseen challenges that are contributing to delays and managed expectations. I'd almost rather watch an hour long stream of some random rank and file dev discussing that sort of stuff than watch the CEO play lol. I'm not sure putting the chief up front is really the best approach, since it just kind of turns him into a lightning rod for whatever ire is sweeping through the halls at the moment. These forums could also use a revamp for sure, (the load time is very slow and it lacks the functionality of other similar spots). Even if things are moving away from forums to stuff like discord these days, their home turf feels a bit neglected.

Usually the house forums are more for boosters and keeping a generally upbeat tone, but they've kind of allowed this place to get mired in negativity by not attending to it. Maybe that was a given, cause we're all old d&d curmudgeons who will gripe and dive off the deep end at the first opportunity hehe. But I think they could have shored that up a bit more, even if just by providing something else to concentrate on the daily. My disappointment was pretty foreseeable since they're trying to make a follow up to my favorite game ever, playing around with the limited wish on that one. But still they could be doing more to take stock of their returning fanbase. I'd have thrown 60 bucks at just about anybody based purely on the tease of a BG3 possibility. But now that its real, the next 60 is a tougher sell. I don't think I'd be hopping into another EA anytime soon. Its like all the wait and see downsides of a kickstarter campaign, but without the upside of feeling particularly special or involved for jumping in early lol.

I still hope for the best and a long long period of development before its released, but that's mainly because my sunk costs on this one are strenching put into decades now. I want it to be glorious in part to help justify how big a deal I've made it in my head hehe

Hey @Tuco, we've had our differences in the past, but right now you are saying exactly the same things that are on my mind. Ditto @IrenicusBG3. Thanks for keeping up the good fight.

Depends what you mean by right. Right for profit? Yeah, it probably is. Nowadays the target is probs BW's following, and as we can see from BG3 itself Larian already seemingly finds it easier to follow the Dragon Age format than the OGs'. So yeah, they don't really need to make a good Baldur's Gate, or indeed a Bladur's Gate, out of BG3 to sell well.

@KillerRabbit what bug fixes as I heard very few bug fixes mentioned at all. especially nothing in regards to the Feats or the weapon bugs that have been prevalent since early on which they know about