Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback My take on BG3

Wait for 2 more weeks and you can walk across 1000 of planets in real time.

Yes they are. Just saying.

When you play PnP, you create a whole adventure sat around a table.

This game is already much bigger than just being situated within the scale of a single table.

Might as well argue that PnP is also bad because the scale isn't realistic enough.

That was really dumb... The whole point of PnP is you imagine things.

When you visually represent them in a video game, it takes a considerable effort to imagine it is something else.

Well, fundamentally you of course always have to use your imagination to enjoy a game (you're not actually an adventurer on faerun, you're pressing buttons on a keyboard). But you don't have to pretend like the bandit camp in bg1 is difficult to find, it actually is difficult to find. In bg3, you have to pretend like the grove is difficult to find, even though it's not. I just think it's generally superior design when a game doesn't force you to pretend, but actually is the way it says it is.

BG1 is a game where most of the best moments are happening in my imagination. A top down pixel art game is about as far away from immersive as it gets.

While I’m applying my imagination to different processes, I don’t really see the functional difference between the two different types of experience. I’d rather have an engaging theme park map than a realistic map with lots of dead space or tiny areas, but to each their own.

Say they did make the maps bigger, and added content to not make it boring, then wouldn't the game feel just as 'cramped'?

People have already been debating this exact question for over two decades on the contrast between Daggerfall-Skyrim. People remark on the scale of Daggerfall as a positive but the consequences are obvious--you don't achieve a map size of 210k square kilometres without sacrificing something massive during the development process, which for Daggerfall meant it's almost entirely proc gen and thus the overwhelming majority of the world is barren and copy-pasted.

People will say Morrowind, on the other hand, is far too small; it's only a tiny little island and they had to resort to tricks like a minuscule render distance to make it feel larger (actually just a hardware limitation that kinda worked out thematically), but Morrowind has far more depth in that just about every inch of its map has something to notice, explore or interact with that is also tied tangibly to the world because the upside of not going for a huge map is proc gen doesn't enter the picture and every part of the map is hand-built, ensuring each of those parts gets far more attention as individual components.

Oblivion is widely regarded as comically small for what it's attempting to depict, but Skyrim is where things came to a head; Oblivion was too small and criticised for it, and therefore Skyrim needed to be bigger by every marketable metric; the result was the compromise between your big world scale and small world detail, where an extremely minimal dose of proc gen was dipped into to make the hand-building process more feasible and we got a world map that if you replay today feels pretty small and can only be called not barren because it's littered with literal theme park dungeons which almost never have any real connection to the world beyond it's a source of enemies to kill, loot to acquire and occasionally selected from a predetermined list of locations for a random radiant quest objective to be spawned into the boss chest.

So from everything I've seen those are the two extremes you're caught between and have to choose from for your contentment. Do you want the smaller world which had a lot more attention put into every part of it you experience, or do you want the largest world which definitely had to have a helping hand from procedural generation so the developers are allowed to see their families ever again and consequently has all the size you want but it's almost entirely filled with (if it's filled at all) detached, padded content devoid of most tailoring or relevance to the world narrative? Or do you want to take the middle ground and get a Skyrim world where story and character are backseats to walking around the somewhat bigger world which is mostly filled with dungeons tied far more to the game mechanically than narratively?

While I see you point in this , what I want is more in line what has been done previously for top down RPG's like the older BG and well the new Pathfinder Kingmaker etc , have an overland map that you travel on to several smaller areas to get the sence of travel distance , nothing else !!

Funny !! But to answer , you will first have to define boring !! There is still also ways to create a sence of a large world without cutting down on Larians attention to detail, by doing it in smaller areas spread out on an overland map ! Like almost all top down isometric crpg's has had it , It may take a couple of mouseclicks and you travel over a land , it may even tell you that your journey took 6 hours or a couple of days or weeks but it creates the sence of larger world.

Also, nothing is ever going to change with BG3 , it is done and no matter how many times we discuss this back and forth it will not change , It was simply what I felt was missing me or what felt odd to me when playing this game ..So don't worry your game wil stay just as it is , even thou we are having this discussion Have fun !!

Fun fact about dopamine: The brain releases more of it if the reward is inconsistent. (Ie: you’re more excited by success if failure was possible). I believe that’s the reason most trading card games have a level of card rarity that’s less than 1 per booster pack. Not every pack of Magic the Gathering contains a Mythic Rare, so finally opening one feels great.

By the same token, I’d feel more excited to find stuff in Larian’s maps if I wasn’t bombarded with stuff in the first place.

The caveat is that you can’t just add empty wilderness to make discovery surprising. Players would quickly spot the pattern, killing the surprise. The map needs to look like it could hide something, but doesn’t always do so. I feel BG1 did this quite well with treks through the woods interrupted just enough by wildlife and bandits to keep me guessing.

The best d&d kind of game i played was in 1992 and was solely text based multi user ascii with day night cycles and clouds which you needed to be aware of if you picked a race troll for example. So much greater room for phantasy and imagination 30years ago