Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Good Game With Some Questionable Decisions

The Bad
1. Feels more like Divinity II than a D&D Baldur's Gate game, despite the dice rolling.
2. Music is a huge letdown. 30 hours in and not a single memorable track. Comparatively, BG1, 2 & Throne of Bhaal had good tracks even at the main menu. Should have employed Michael Hoenig instead.
3. Despite 3 years of Early Access, the game still has a buggy feel to it - some quests are broken, quest pointers on map are sometimes confusing, memory sink issue (framerate chokes after playing too long. Requires restart).
4. Barter system is inconvenient ie. My characters can't even take turns to dump their trash into the barter pool as this resets the barter. Money is constantly changing hands between my characters to the vendor. Why???
5. Four characters feels restrictive. I know this was the DoS formula, but this removes the spirit of Baldurs Gate or D&D games. With only 4 characters for each essential archetype of fighter, cleric, rogue & mage, there are no spare slots for other achetypes. Pathfinder could manage with 6. Why not this game?
6. Giving items to NPCs not in your team. Oh god!! Why can't i have access to the inventory screens of all my NPCs in the camp? Let's say I have a Druid currently not in my main team, but I find a good Druid item. Why can't I just have an easy way to equip my Druid with this item? Instead I have to tell one of my NPCs to stay in came, then tell my Druid to follow me AND THEN equip him with the item, then tell him to stay in camp and tell the other NPC to follow me. Am I missing some feature here?
7. Anyone find your main character's inability to speak a bit jarring? Considering the effort invested to emote all characters in the game with good VA, but your main is mute and just stares at others.
8. Why does pressing Alt only highlight lootable bodies and items, but not interactable objects like boxes, crates and chests? Isn't Alt meant to be a quality of life feature, so that we don't have to be zig zagging our mouse cursor around the whole screen as if we're playing a Monkey Island game?

Agree with most of this. It's absolutely DOS3 set in Forgotten Realms. Anyone that thinks otherwise never played DOS1/2 or is just delusional.

The biggest irritant for me personally is that after 3 years of EA there are still a bunch of common sense broken shit, that was reported on day 1 of EA, that has yet to be fixed. Like Solasta which is made by like 15-20 dudes does some things way better than this game, that is inexcusable.

Also....texture loading / pop in. Good god. I'm guessing this was done to reduce loading times, but having that unloaded armour textures similar to Unreal Engine 3 back in the day doesn't make the game feel polished.

But I guess if they loaded in the game only after all the textures are fully loaded, I would then be complaining about the load times - which to me, was a gripe in DoS II. Long load times. I can never get over the fact that the loading percentage shows 100%, but i still have to wait another 10 seconds for the game to start.

Yeah, it is DoS3 without :
- the armor system
- the turn economy
- the surface spam
- the setting
- the lore
- the tone
- the basic cutscenes
Sure dude, also they are both turn based. So they MUST be the same!

I don't know DOS, so I can't compare here, but the music in BG3 is really great.

I think he was talking about how the game FEELS...and it does indeed feel very... DOS-y

Indeed so. You notice some similarities in the encounter and location design, but overall I'd say this game does feel like a worthy successor to the old classic, and then some.

Some of the OP's complaints are still valid though. The inventory system feels really basic after games like the Pathfinder games or Pillars of Eternity 2, and it's a huge annoyance that you can't access the inventory of companions in your camp while you're there.

Personally, it doesn't feel like a DOS Game. But it also doesn't feel like a BG Game. It feels more like...a Mix of both. The closest feeling I get would be the Neverwinter Night games. Just without the Modules stuff, we had back then.

Although in the end, how it *Feel* to each person is subjective. Me? I'm just happy I got an RPG to play.

I was referring to the 'feel' of the game. I'll tell you what my perceived differences are:
1. BG and Pathfinder games have smaller maps, but more map traversing. You spend maybe 5 hours (or less) per map. BG3 and DoS have large maps. You spend about 30 hours or more on a single map. When you traverse maps, you're basically progressing the Chapters.
2. Six characters vs Four characters.
3. Camera controls. You can't really move the camera that far from where your characters are. You can for BG and Pathfinder Games.
4. Where are the weapon proficiency levels? A classical D&D / Pathfinder game can have weapon proficiencies up to Level 5. This is one of the big advantages of choosing a Fighter - able to have a +5 DMG, +5 Attack Roll for a weapon type whereas other classes can only go to +2. In BG3, it seems you're either proficient, or not proficient.
5. The spell system feels different. In classical D&D / Pathfinder games, you have the traditional say.... Six Level 1 spells, Three Level 3 spells, One Level 4 spell. In BG3, you have a certain spell quantity in your spellbook. You can freely load your spellbook with more Level 2 or 3 spells compared to Level 1, but your number of casts for each Level is a separate thing. I admit this is an improved quality of life design decision, but it feels different nonetheless.
6. Painted character portraits vs rendered portraits. I can understand if you think this is petty, but I think it affects the feel alot. I think painted portraits enchances the fantasy/storybook feel alot.
7. Finally, Dragon Age-esque dialog vs Text Dialog (with Portrait). This one is important. It's about visualizing the dialog from an NPC portrait instead of seeing it being acted out. The visualization is part of the storybook imagination aspect.

Anyway, I'm not nitpicking the above differences to say that the game is bad. The game is good (compared to Diablo 4, which left a bad taste in my mouth). But it feels different enough from traditional D&D/Pathfinder games that it reminds me of DoS.

Some of your points are that way because of the game being based on 5E and not AD&D 2nd ed like the BG 1 or D&D 3.75 a.k.a. Pathfinder.

That said, my main gripes are:

> Inability to create custom hirelings. No, I won't use the pre-generated undead ones, since I can't change their names, race and looks. And because they're undead...

> Inability to readjust my appearance.

> Inability to preview equipment and dyes

> Party size of 4 is annoying. Personally, I'd have prefered a limit of 5 or 6

> Party controls are rather clunky and haven't been improved since EA

> A lot of 5E rules were needlessly changed in favor of homebrew stuff that drastically affects balance and gameplay

People has been complaining about Party limit since DOS1 lol.

Larian game doctrine is 4. You best wait for mods.

I don't disagree with OP comments, nor I agree with it.

But one thing I strongly disagree though: Music is Masterpiece in this game. (compared to RPG released in the last 20 years).

Play with Vulkan. No memory leak there.

Tends to crash more than DX11 in my AMD system ironically enough.

Never had a single crash with Vulkan.

Music is subjective after all, but I think i have consistently been listening to way too much BG1 & 2 music. There is a certain style to the original BG games. My personal opinion is, they should have re-employed Michael Hoenig. Second choice would have been Inon Zur, since he composed the music for Throne of Bhaal, and did a great job replicating the style. Anyway, Inon Zur is no stranger to composing CRPG music.

Borislav Slavov is a good composer, but his style is just different. It's like comparing Hans Zimmer and John Williams. Both are good, but you don't get Hans Zimmer to compose music for Star Wars.

I'm a composer, and I will say some of the main themes are pretty good but the 'down by the river' theme is re-worked and brought back in way too many ways.

It's a common trick and a nice one when employed gracefully but it's almost like he couldn't come up with another strong melody.

Overall though the orchestral music is pretty great in the game except there are SO many music choices that completely take me out of it.

Pretty much anything with those female vocals in this game just sound like early 2000s pop/emo rock stylings and NOT old at all.

It's like the difference between the Witcher game (good) vs Witcher tv show music (baaaaad).

I can't stand the camp music once you're in the fancy Baldurs Gate camp with the 'the games not over yet' on the nose cheese lyrics and I have a love/hate relationship with the house of hope Raphael battle song with lyrics.

I wouldn't call the music in this game a masterpiece, but I think he did a 'good' job.

I like the freedom of the silent protagonist, you're not unable to speak, you just don't hear it. It avoids the problem of 'wait that's not what I picked to say' that every voiced protagonist RPG has run in to, espec bioware.

I one hundred percent understand this lol. I heard this song recently and while I would be devastated if it weren't there, I also had to sit back and think to myself 'is this real?' for a second.


Also, this. I really like that the protag doesn't speak, at least Tav and DU. This might be an uncommon opinion too, but I wish there was a way to toggle off *all* the speech for Tav and DU. They just talk so much when you're clicking around on the map. It's not so annoying that it's something I feel needs to be implemented, but I wouldn't be mad about it if they did.

Some nitpick's I have with the game: (Overall I think it is a very good game)
-Completely agree with 'Giving items to NPCs not in your team' being a bugbear.
-Kicking player companions from your game when playing multiplayer should be doable.
-Lack of customisable hirelings. Please let me choose race/sex/voice/class etc
-The voice sets being somewhat similar to each other (I was looking for a noble sounding accent) not to mention that voice 1,2,3,4 isn't very descriptive of the contents. It could be noble, gruff, rogueish etc. Besides which they alternated male/female/male/female despite what gender you choose in character creation. I shouldn't have to guess which is which! Male should show male voices. Female should show female. If a player wants to choose other then show all of them together.
-Down by the River is the only music I can remember after over 60 hours of play. Not good.
-I would like to be able to preview dyes as well.

Music is subjective, but it is objectively not bad music. You can not like it, but it is well composed and I subjectively remembers several tracks in the game. I can name the harpy battle music, the down by the river song and the bard song from the druid grove as very memorable. (I haven't gotten past Act I yet, but I have heard the house of hope one and I love it as it is very thematic to Raphael as a character).

With regards to party size, this is simply nostalgia speaking. You remember being able to play with six in the older Baldur's Gate games and you are mad you can't do that now. Mods are already available to expand the size if that is what you want. However, the game is balanced around 4 party members. This is actually in keeping with most adventure modules in D&D. Most are balanced for 4 players.

The inventory system has been improved over the years but definitely still needs some work. Specifically being able to manage party members inventory that is not currently active.

The silent protagonist is much preferable for a game like this. The dialogue choices are quite long and it would be weird to read them just to have them said back to you exactly.

Alt does not highlight loanable containers to encourage exploration and the idea of looting everything like the tabletop. I will agree that it can be cumbersome and an option for it just to highlight what actually has things in it would be nice.