Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback 180 hours of cutscenes! Awesome work team! Thank you! How about an ability to pause?

As a player that gets frequently and urgently called away from the computer, I'd absolutely love to have a real pausing option available, please. Without having a real pause option available, I'm going to be a player that ends up having to spend as much time reloading and backtracking from older saves, as I will actually viewing the cutscenes. Some consideration for your single players would be nice. Thank you.

"cutscenes"

My thoughts aswell ...

Larian was talking about 1000 NPCs in city of Baldur's Gate ...
Concidering that even NPCs in Emerald Groove, that have nothing to say, have 5-10sec "cutscene" telling you basicaly just "hello" ...
That would mean up to 10.000seconds ... meaning almost 3hours of, well basicaly nothing.

Sure 177 still seems like a lot, and i want to believe it will feel like a lot ...
But still, concidering it all the same level of quality would be a bit stretch. :-/

Yes, the update talks about "cinematic dialogue" and then "cinematics" so I wouldn't read that as 180 hours of cutscenes. In fact, that would sound like a fairly tedious amount of cutscene to sit through to me, even if not all of it was encountered in one playthrough! Whereas I'm a fan of short snatches of cinematics and even have hopes for cinematic dialogue which for good reason folks have been critical of in EA and think if it's fine-tuned can help bring the characters and world to life.

It doesn't negate the OP's point about pausing, of course, but I personally am not expecting lots of long cutscenes, but rather lots and lots and lots of short cinematic moments that are quickly interrupted by opportunities for player interaction so we're unlikely ... usually ... to miss much if we get called away. But I'll bet that there are some longer key scenes that it would be really frustrating to miss. I know I've come across that in other games.

I wonder if they'll keep any dialogue without cinematics. If we'll get a cutscenes for every! NPC in the game then it'll be massive. I also don't like the way non-origin characters interact with each other during dialogues - no cinematics there as well. If they want to keep their word on making custom character experience as interesting as the origin one, they might consider adding some cinematic dialogue for customs and with voiced lines as well.

Actually there are already quite a bit of dialogues without cinematics, mostly banters between you companions et background talks.

Yeah, I don't put much stock in this claim. As Rag said, if they're counting those little scenes for random NPCs then that's several hours of unimportant scenes already.

*sighs* *whoosh!*

Anyhow, the point that I was trying to make here was that Larian hasn't shown any consideration towards their single players. Even the mod communities here have been unable to create a real pause option for any of these engines. That will require Larian showing some mindfulness towards their single player base and putting in a bit of effort.

I don't remember a single point in the game where I would want a pause feature. Cutscenes are short, you can savestate very often and combat is turn based. Care to elaborate how this would be useful?

Discussions here do tend to be fairly wide-ranging. We like to talk around a subject. If things go really far off track or discussion about the main point in the original post is being obscured by getting too much into the detail of a tangent then I'd usually suggest taking it elsewhere, but generally I'd just recommend going with the flow .


I definitely have in Mass Effect and Dragon Age games, particularly when there's been a big cutscene that might be a culmination of lots of gameplay such as the return to Earth in ME3, then the doorbell goes or the phone rings or someone comes in to talk to me and I miss stuff and have to reload or else miss fun, interesting or even crucial content. We don't have much like that in BG3 early access, but if, for example, someone got called away just after connecting the transponder then when they got back to their PC they were lying on a beach, that would be confusing!

I'm hearing from Reddit users that pressing Escape actually works properly to pause everything now. It hadn't worked as a global pause before, in that there will still quite a few things happening. I'm in the process of reinstalling BG3EA to triplecheck myself. Larian creations were never capable of a global pause working properly, though, when I had last checked. Looking forward to seeing the improvements first hand!

Im quite sure it dont ...
Yesterday i got a taste for little BG-3 and when i was trying to skip a dialogue with Esc, game menu opened but everything continued behind it.

100%. As someone who (with a few notable exceptions) despises multiplayer games, having so many features driven by a multiplayer-first mentality has a been a point of frustration. I've made my peace with it.


I've made the point before, and I was roundly and rightly criticized for it being illogical, but I stand by it despite it being illogical, that even if you can effectively pause by letting it dangle on a combat round or dialog choice or what have you, it just doesn't feel right. I want positive UI feedback that pausing has occurred. I want a full pause because it makes me feel better to see "PAUSED" on the screen, rather than trusting that nothing is happening because that's how it's supposed to be working. I know it's illogical, but I don't care. I want full, unambiguous pause.

And I've also made my peace with the fact that I won't get it.

Do you know you can suspend Windows processes in the ressource monitor? I haven't tried it but it should logically result in a pause.

Achievement unlocked: Nuclear Option!

That said last two games have been mostly focusing on making singleplayer exerince better - from what I played I don't think coop improved much since D:OS1, but both D:OS2 and especially BG3 are much better singleplayer experiences than D:OS1 was. It is however, a hybrid title, and concessions done toward coop are noticable for a singleplayer only player. Whenever you make peace with it or not, is up to you, but I think one needs to ackowledge how much work Larian put into making their games more satisfying for singleplayer users.



I usually used manual turn based for that - I never tried to pause conversations or turn based combat in other games, so I don't have issue that - if you, however, have a cat I could understand wanting an extra security measure.

Unlike what their marketing would like, most people will play this single player. So yes, pause is essential.