Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Predictions for EA's 2nd anniversary

One month from today will mark two years of early access.

I could see Larian making a big show of it. The community managers are adamant that Larian are interested in active communication; the anniversary might be a good time to start, maybe with an AMA? I also assume they'll mention the release date and/or a timeline of upcoming patches.

What do you think will happen for the occasion?

Paladin?

Next public appearance of Larian will surely bring with it the release date of the game. All the signs point to it since they hinted that the game was mostly feature complete at the previous PFH.

There is much i would wish to happen ...
But if you ask what i honestly believe will happen ... then my money go for nothing ... maybe i get to some odd sceptical phase of moon, but somehow i just cant believe it. :-/

I wish to be wrong tho.

Larian are interested in active communication after 2 years of basically silence? Personally I would find an AMA session would be a bit of a damp squib because at this stage I think it's safe to say some of the most requested changes are not likely to be implemented. I guess it could be of use to people who want to ask questions about things that are already in game though.

I'd be surprised if there was any kind of event planned; the game Is still being made, why celebrate 2 years of development? Seems a rather strange event to mark. It's a bit like celebrating a year of making a film when it isn't finished yet.

I may have overstated a bit with “Larian are interested in active communication.” Here’s the closest quote I could find supporting that assertion:

An ideas basket suggests some sort of intent, even if it’s two years into EA. Also, Larian were just at PAXWest and have apparently started a tiktok channel. While they can’t be accused of being overly transparent with the EA community, they’re not exactly hiding either.

I wouldnt expect another AMA ...
People would have too prepared questions now. And since more than half answers would some tomething like "we cant tell you right now" whats the point?

I'm really just expecting a big nothing burger honestly. Maybe a cringe stream since they like wasting time on that stuff than actually communicating with the community about actual development, design decisions and feedback.

Just don't get your hopes up.

So they have the resources/time to start a TikTok channel but can't be arsed to communicate with the passionate fans in their own forums? Wonderful, now we can look forward to exclusive BG3 TikTok dances with Astarion gyrating in a pair of speedos while half the BG3 fans salivate themselves.

I thought TikTok was aimed at young teens? Isn't this game rated Mature so why on earth are they doing that? Or am I missing something?

Apologies for the overtly pessimistic tone but I just don't 'get' Larian sometimes, their decision making just seems so bizarre.

I am curious to know what "actually communicating with the community about actual development, design decisions and feedback" is for you, care to elaborate?

I literally state it in the comment. I don't know how I can really elaborate on design decisions and communication on general development. Community managers in other early access titles as well as other games will normally post blog updates or articles in which they discuss, say, a certain feature, the design decisions made and why, etc. This allows the community to fundamentally understand why certain things are the way they are. So, for example, they could do one about reactions in which they acknowledge that there has been feedback about the feature as it currently stands, explain the original design goal and decision process behind why they chose the current reaction system, and so on.

To be honest, I'm actually expecting they'll do another panel, to celebrate 'how far they've come', and spend most of it reflecting on the various patches and the way the game has changed, but will overall give us very little information that we don't already have.

Yeah, it's really a trip for an EA title to be handled this way. I think for the first year I thought 'well, world-ending-plague maybe, and they're just keeping their heads down?' but a couple years in and still feels a lot like Nov 2020. Not to diminish the work that's been done, but the whole fostering community element is still pretty non-existent. I thought there'd be weekly blogposts and art galleries and boards with all the bells and whistles. I thought the EA would present almost like a TT campaign unto itself, with way more behind the screens. You know, where we accompany the Devs on the adventure a bit, get to see some clutch bug slayings and sort of observe the every changing thing being built out. What they'll do, who can say, but what they should do is launch an entirely new website for the EA experience, and just start doing now what they should have been doing all along for like 2 years now hehe. I'd forgive the delay, if they just started banging out the blogposts and the features and art previews, to finish strong.

I’ve been warned so many times against optimism on this forum, I may actually grow up.

Also, Ragnarok’s a werewolf. Can’t believe I missed that before.

+1
I assume that was the original aim of the Larian Gazette. BG3’s website could use some updating, too. The featured video is still about the barbarian class.

😮

Close, but not quite.
Personaly i concider Gangrels to be much closer to my heart than Wolfies. :3

And i wouldnt call it negative, its just scepticism ...
If Larian hints some action in next few weeks, i would be between first to jump on hype train.

Maybe they are keeping the best turnips for last!

During EA nice little weekly RP updates would be great though(^.^) This is quite a big turnip that Baldurs gate franchise…quite surprising more isn’t done ? I am not a particular fan of the Larian <fan art> posts either, not my taste.
It feels they want us to buze off to WotC D&D lore; plenty of stuff there so why bother.

Here is a great read from an article in 2001 regarding the development strategies into making Baldurs gate 2!
Lots of great points I believe still is revelant today.
I really hope Larian could give us more detail insites on their strategies and vision for the game!


https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/-i-baldur-s-gate-ii-i-the-anatomy-of-a-sequel

During the last panel they mentioned being almost 'feature complete', someone with more knowledge about game development could weigh in, but to me that sounds like the window to change most of the major issues that have come up on these forums is mostly closed. A Day/Night Cycle or changing how long rests work, doesn't seem like an aspect of polishing.

What that might mean for the next patch or for the two-year anniversary is a release that has many more of the changes we haven't seen that they've finally settled on or it could mean very little as we go into the pre-release era.
There might be more aspects of the story that they open up as they want more people to try and break the game, but that sounds really optimistic.

Since there isn't any governing bodies or real standardization for product/software life cycle development, unfortunately the term can be somewhat nebulous. Though my experience with software is outside of videogames - so maybe there's more standardization there.

In my experience - it varies by company. Feature complete can literally mean the features are exactly going to be what they are now, and all updates are just bug fixes. OR, it could mean while the list of feature is locked, for each feature, the UI, the specific integration and implementation within the feature is still being worked on. And depending on the company and their process, you can have feature complete even prior to the Alpha release - though in my experience feature complete usually leads to the beta.

To be extra confusing, how features are actually categorized can be completely up to the company too. I.e. some of us might deem the "5e reaction system" a feature. Whereas for Larian's feature list, reactions might fall under a much broader category like "combat" that has been accounted for since day 1. For all we know, the feature list that Larian has is a ton of back-end stuff the average player doesn't even think about. As much as we like to nitpick over specific D&D rule and mechanics in the game, in the grand scheme of a fully functional video game with millions of lines of codes and interaction, these things are actually pretty small.

Remember though, what we see in the EA is not the most current internal-build, but basically an outdated mirror of the game that has been stripped down and updated at a far slower pace. So unless someone has access to the internal Larian build you can't really determine what is feature complete includes.

Now I don't want to give the impression that means I expect a lot of things are still coming - my point is that we basically have absolutely no idea and terms like "feature complete" doesn't mean much for outsiders since we don't have any proper points of references.


If I had to guess, I personally wouldn't bet on a Day/Night cycle. I'm not too sure if we'll even get an anniversary updates because the last update was actually relatively recent.

Patch 6 was October 14, 2021
Patch 7 was February 15, 2022 (124 days later)
Patch 8 was July 7, 2022 (142 days later)

We are currently only 65 days since Patch 8. October 6 would be 91 days since Patch 8.

If we take the average of the last 2 gaps in patches, the next update would come Nov 17.