Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Larian, you shouldnt have bent the knee to the fans to much

Look, I dont know how to do the spoiler thing but... some of the problems with this game have a lot to do with changes made to the story between EA and the final game. A lot of these changes were not for the better...

(Heavy Spooilers below, I dont know how to tag with spoilers)

You didnt want people to miss out on tadpole/mindflayer powers, so... you created a new implementation of them, that doesnt make as much sense, with significant "residue" of the original version still in the game. I get it, you didnt want people to miss out on getting powers, but this story is not a better story.

You cahnged wyll, but what for? The result is a lot of lost production quality, a voice actor out of the job, and some questionable reactivity surrounding the changes.

All I want to say is... Larian, its good oyu listened to fans, but sometimes you didnt exercise your best judgement in what to listen to, and didnt have the best ideas on how to change some things.

I hope that this game continues to get updates, and potentially even expansion packs. Its unlikely we will see major story reverts to the original plans but... I ask in the future, learn to judge better when to listen to fan critiques, and better creativity on how to respond to it.

but... but... some snowflakes didnt like that the "dreamer" character was trying to seduce us so hard... also touching us??? WITHOUT PERMISSION? UNACEPPTABLE BEHAVIOR!

Larian didnt change simple QOL things (like the damn link chain or the 4 person party only) but bent the knee real quick and changed a whole @ss scenario (writting, voice acting..everything) for a small percentage of snowflakes that felt offended because someone living in our head was trying to seduce and manipulating us into using the powers a certain way.

It's ironic, then, that your party members are still all super horny for you.

Who was saying that? Can’t remember anyone on the forum or subreddit complaining about being seduced. Was that in the first months of EA or something?

Honestly? I think they quickly realized that the seducer was waaay too sketchy, and people immediately saw it as suspicious, which..well, yea. There's a reason Larian changed the name to "guardian".

Gosh, I would love to read a history of the tumultuous changes in development behind the scenes. I feel like this game must have close to a complete rewrite at one point. Both Daisy and the Guardian are so different despite their similar and seeming integral roles to the plot. Like that had to be some serious rewrites, right?

And for Wyll....I get that they wanted to have him more ambiguous, that you could 'branch' him off down a dark path or have him stay on the path of the hero. The goblin grudge+ superhero persona never resonated with me. But the 'showdown' with Karlach was overhyped by Larian. They make up immediately, the dialogue choices in that scene feel....lacking to me. The unnecessary Anders rewrite doesn't help, because having another guy who was ambiguously in a similar situation to Wyll who was determined to kill her to save himself would have given that showdown some nuance it sorely needed.

Showdown = two lines without a skill check IIRC. Anders is just worse Wyll.

I mean, I was skeptic when I heard of these changes at first, but the Dreamer/Guardian if anything is one case that comes off as considerably improved by the changes they made.
So I'd say this example in particular is a weird thing to focus your rage on.

How do we know they "bent the knee to fans"?

It seems more like natural iteration changing Wyll and Daisy after getting player reactions to them. Neither worked so they had to be improved.

The change to tadpole powers seems to come from their own systems devs who wanted more systems because D&D is "too boring". I really hate the massive focus on gross Illithid tadpoles inside your head in this story. You don't need them as a plot device to give Tav forced motivation to be with or against the Absolute after Act II either. Being a hero or villain in the events you are tangled up with is motivation enough in itself. If someone is "bending the knee" I think it's writers to gameplay devs at Larian. Previous D&D CRPGS by Obsidian or old Bioware didn't have or need layers and layers of more boombastic added to D&D gameplay. Extensively tampering with the 5e rules and adding tons of unnecessary things is all Larian devs who proudly refuse to bend the knee to D&D fans.

What we do know, is that a lot of D&D fans have asked for the game to play more like D&D and less according to generic video game design principles taught in video game school. But they haven't bent the knee, or even included a D&D Core Rules difficulty, which is present in every other D&D CRPG. Instead, they have Tactician, where enemies have cheaty advantages and more bombs.

The parts closest to dnd are great. The parts further away from and are worst.

I did and a few others too and the word we were using was rapey not seducing.

Ah, I didn’t see as much of a problem, but I can understand why one might feel that way. I guess I always assumed the Dream Lover was the tadpole so its advances would be sketchy or wrong at best anyway.

I’m not sure I would characterise such a concern as “snowflake” though.

Yeah, I remember this, did your character get raped because you abused the tadpole in your head? I only seen the cutscene once in EA and didn't really think much about it personally, but I didn't abuse that power either so.

I didn't feel myself adressed with the snowflake comment. Everyone has different boundaries.

I did use the tadpole in my first playthrough quite a lot and yeah, there were uncomfortable scenes. I never used the tadpole again afterwards

While I have not finished yet, the more I see from the story the more obvious it becomes that Larian abandoned interesting and good game design in several cases to give the players more goodies, power and satisfy (imagined?) thirst.
Sad that a experience like BG3 gets marred by those bad decisions.

The People they bent the knee to are not Classic D&D Players, i can guarantee that. It's more like they listened to the Kids that Killed everything with a Container in D:OS2 but still complained about Difficulty. I'll just have to wait for the "Complete Overhaul Mod" cause i don't expect anything from Swen at this point . Was this EA 2.0 satisfying? Well i got more content from it so that's it for now.

A?, in the EA I immediately distrusted the dreamer and thought they were out to eat me, the Guardian in the actual game, there is nuance and you can read it both ways. The Dream partner was just, too the monster using mind control to manipulate you, the monster presenting you with half truths and saying only you can save the world, is a more tempting hook and works better. to me it's 100% an improvement

The big change from the EA I notice is SH, how you can free her now, and how she is unavoidable, not found near the doors of the temple but railroad, in your way, unavoidable, your first post-crash companion. It makes her feel more the protagonist than your character when her stuff comes up later as it frames her as the priority companion when time was, her astaron and gale were all equal chances as the first companion you'd meet post-crash

@fylimar
Yeah, kind of wonder if it was suppose to be a uncomfortable scenario. The tadpole is forced on you from the start and you abuse this foreign creatures power to bend others to your will. This is all just a guess though, from what I understand that got replaced. so whatever.

Yeah, my impression was that you weren't supposed to trust the figure. It visited only when you used the tadpole more and more, and we knew from EA that using it at every opportunity eventually gave you the [True Soul] tag, which seemingly gave the absolute a degree of power over you, since there was some datamined scene where Nere could take control over you through the tadpole. Plus Daisy kept saying stuff like 'let me in' etc. Along with some other stuff, it seemed clear to most people who played Early Access that she/he was either the absolute or some proxy of them.

I wonder what point in development they decided to rewrite all of that, Daisy and the Guardian seem very different in their motives. A year or two ago? EA taking ass long as it did makes more sense when you have seemingly major plot rewrites like that.