Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Why i won't be buying the next Larian title on release.

I’ll admit, when the announcement came last week, I was angry and it took me a few days to cool down.

See, Baldur’s Gate helped me get through a particularly tough point in my life, something I’m still healing from, and I realize now that the hope of an expansion or continuation of the story was really keeping me going more than I’d expected. I’ll get over it of course, but right now? I’m just sad.

I think the way in which we got the news of the cancellation was poor. Swen’s immediate pivot to the next new exciting project, along with the IGN article confirming that an expansion had been started but canceled, left me feeling like Larian really didn’t care about the feelings of the fans who wanted a continuation. A company like Fromsoft would have made those announcements over several days / weeks, taking the time to lessen the blow by showing empathy / understanding that this was going to be disappointing news. The last thing I wanted to be told was how great this next new thing is going to be and how it’s going to blow my previous experience out of the water. It’s a bit tone deaf. Frankly, hearing about how the studio was supposedly elated at the decision to abandon something I loved also sucks!

I hope some lessons can be learned on how to better handle PR in the future.

Now, regarding the game itself. Larian, I enjoyed my experience in spite of you. I bought this game on release. I finished the game by Patch 3. It was rough. I had some major bugs and performance issues, but I found workarounds and pushed through it. Then I got to the ending and…wow. It was legitimately the absolute worst wrap up to a game that I had ever played. Some of it was my choices, but those ending sequences showed such a lack of polish and planning that I can’t believe they were made by the same studio who made Act 1. I felt so let down in fact that I refused to touch the game again until Patch 5. I walked away feeling like I’d wasted hours of my life.

So, Patch 5 roles around, and you know what? The epilogue is pretty good! The prior dock scenes were still kinda bad, but they'd been ironed out a tad. The party? Great. It felt like an apology, or an acknowledgement that what we got wasn’t appropriate for the level of quality that had come before. On top of it, the game starts hinting that there is going to be more! Heck yeah, I was getting excited!

It’s a very different experience getting to see an ending 2 months after you finish something. You don’t get the same kind of catharsis that you would, had you experienced it back to back. I wish I had, because upon seeing that epilogue, all I wanted was one last hurrah adventure with these companions that I’d grown to love so much. To give me one more chance at that catharsis I hadn’t yet felt.

Honestly, I could overlook the months it took to get the epilogue. I could overlook the poor release state of Act 3. I could even overlook having my multiplayer games repeatedly delayed MONTHS due to mac / PC version mismatching. In fact, I still haven’t gotten to experience a proper patch on the day it was released, and I doubt I ever will at this point.

I’ll wrap it up. Larian, you haven’t earned me as a repeat customer. I might consider buying your games when they’ve been on sale for a good year, and all the issues have been patched over, but I’ll lever touch a title of yours on release. I may have loved this game, but I don’t want to have to go through such a rollercoaster of disappointment and mixed emotions again.

Best of luck to you! I hope you enjoy working on this new title you’re excited about.

All of this is on you, not Larian.

I do remember reading somebody saying around Release, that "knowing Larian, I'll start playing a year after release, as it will be a different game by then" or words to that effect.

This may seem like offtopic ...
But i wonder:

How is that relevant?

OP, same

I mean they're allowed to have an opinion and decide how to spend their own money.

(Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion)
Personally, I lost all my faith in Larian the day I saw the interview. I start to ask myself what will happen with the next game? What if they also lose their passion for it and I'm enjoying the game and then they drop it just as they did with BG3? Honestly, I'm not going to buy the next game, I was always interested in trying a D&D game, I loved Larian for DOS2 and I was really hyped for what they come up with next. I was sad when Divinity: Fallen Heroes got cancelled but when I first heard about BG3, I was totally hyped and couldn't wait for it. I played EA asap. Sure, the first downer has been how long EA has taken, but I was fine with it as I knew at the end I would see a fully fleshed out, polished game. And lets be honest, EA was fun, Larian even added stuff based on fan feedback and such, everything seemed like we are on the ride of our gaming life. I was defending Larian several times, for sure. I was expecting the next big thing, something like Skyrim or Witcher 3, a game for a century. I expected Act 2 and Act 3 to be at least the same as Act 1 and that's was easily enough for me.

Then we got the release and it brought just disappointment to my doorstep. So many things changed from EA to release (e.g. Omeluums ring), the writing got changed for the worse (characters and main plot), Tav still looked so artificial and moved/stood/used the same facial expressions no matter what gender/body type you picked. I can pick a voice for the Tav and still Tav doesn't talk? The character creator is a joke (and a bad one), the game is oversexualized in many ways, the jokes are sometimes hurtful towards other chars (and subsequently their fans), not really funny and overall immature, sometimes they used Forgotten Realms lore, sometimes they simply ignored it and added homebrew where it was convenient for Larian, the list of bugs could easily compete with the length or LOTR and so on. I never expected the release to be that bad, I was under the impression that Larian can do better (at least from DOS2), especially when it comes to the extreme immaturity in BG3. It felt like a teenager movie at times.

BUT! Everything was still fine for me on release, as I was sure they will totally work on that. Why else would we have the feedback channel on Discord, feedback threads on here and the official feedback form on their website. Lets be real, bugs are normal and I can wait for them to be fixed. Also, each game has plot holes or contradictions and there have been so many good, well written feedbacks to point them out. None of them (or at least the most) were offensive in any way, you could just see how important the game and the content has been for so many players. Just imagine all the time they spent to write all that feedback in hopes of it being fixed or added (if said feedback is written frequent enough).
And til this day, we didn't really see a lot of that added (beside the epilogue, which is something Larian has been working on before the feedback, at least they said so). Instead, we got some mediocre solutions like the Karlach ending or the addition of kiss animations while there were still way more important things to fix.
I'm really sorry for everyone who spent time writing feedback (who might realize now that nothing of that was never even considered being added in the first place, which hurts and is an insult) just to read that while they wrote feedback with passion the team lost their own passion for the game.

Of course I would've liked to see a DLC, but what I was always hoping for the most was a good ending to the game, just a polished version with at least two (good/evil) routes to take that both feel worthy to play (beside Durge), but now it feels like this will never happen.
So, as I said, I lost my faith in Larian. Of course, it's bad if you lose your passion for the game you are working on and even if I hate the fact that the game is being dropped, I still can understand that they didn't want to go any further. It's just the timing and they way they communicated it, that's cruel.

But to end this on a positive note: Hats off to Swen Vincke, he had to decide between acting professional as a company/keeping their reputation or risking the mental (and physical) health of his team and he decided to take the more human path, which is great. Maybe, if some time has passed, they will look back at BG3 and question themselves if the game itself maybe has been a bit too huge and ambitious for them and they do more what they love. In that regard, I wish them the best.


Yeah, totally not. There are way more people than just the OP. Their PR is bad, just throwing out some interview saying how elated the team was to not having to work on BG3 for a longer time while the game itself is still in a state far from being finished or polished and not even releasing a proper news on any of their platforms is just bullcrap. Even more if they praise their next project, feels like just talking bad about their child while the next bun is in the oven.
I never saw anything like this, never have I read about developers feeling elated while the game is still within it's first year of release and very bugged for a lot of people.

I'm not sure how Larian is supposed to slowly break the news, and I don't think Larian broke any etiquette by the manner in which they let folks know they weren't going to do any expansions.

I am sorry that the original poster found the news hurtful, but in fairness, that's not Larian's fault. They don't need to learn a PR lesson about how to break the news.

I will agree that for all Larian is within their rights to stop working on the game, and for all they can announce that how they like and I will even say it's probably good that they announced it relatively early, Swen saying that they're elated to not be working on DLC is kind of in poor taste. Breaking the news slowly over weeks isn't the answer I don't think, but they still could easily have done better. Not releasing a formal announcement on their platforms for example, feels like a misstep.

That being said, I do think the focus on this aspect of the OP post is missing out on the larger point being made in it. And I think those points are way harder to dispute. I'm certianly not going to be buying anymore Larian games period. Their style just really is not for me, and as a studio from what I've seen from people talking about them on the forums, etc, they just have a bunch of glaring issues that they don't seem inclined to fix anyway. They do just seem very immature as designers, with little self-discipline in terms of executing on ideas and knowing when to pull back or not.

I agree with this. The word 'elated' struck a sour note and making an official announcement on their own platforms first would have been better PR wise, in my opinion. I think the way this news reached the players definitely helped fuel some of the speculation about Larian and WotC.

Hearing they had started work on DLC and then stopped was a bit of a blow. I'll be honest, I heard there would be no DLC before I bought the game and I was really happy about it. It seemed refreshing that Larian didn't want to milk BG3 for all it was worth. However after playing BG3 and enjoying it, I would have considered shelling out for a sequel.

Considering how enthusiastic Larian seem to be about the new shiny thing they are working on, leaves me worrying that BG3 will be left in its present state: Buggy and feeling unfinished. I was hoping for a Definitive Edition with bugs ironed out and a little cut content reinstated, but now I'm not hopeful of getting that.

I think it would be a good move if Larian used their own platforms (including this one) to reach out and give us a definite yes or no on a definitive edition and also to reassure players that all major issues will be fixed before they move on.

I had great hopes for a DLC, as this is the first RPG that I finished and played through several times since a long time. But it's better that they announce they won't do it now than let us in the dark with a maybe it will come, maybe not... Like Martin's "Winds of Winter". That's life. Uppers and downers.

I appreciate that Larian have no history of making DLC's, but even though their previous games were well received they wern't the blockbuster BG3 has turned out to be so I think it's quite reasonable that people did expect 'something', a definitive edition, some add ons even if not full blown DLC's.

Finding out that they have no plans for such from a third party interview does seem 'off'.

Larian have their own forum (waves) and a discord and really an open letter from Swen in both, maybe posted immediately after his interview would have been a better way to do it. Where he could have expanded a bit on what we can actually expect rather than leave us milling about in the dark.

Of course he might have had issues logging in..........

I might buy the next Larian game or I might not. Having been through a fair bit of the EA for BG3 and seeing how it has all played out post release I certainly will approach the next game with a significant amount of skepticism.

Also hearing how elated the staff were at being done with this title barely 6 months after release I’m sure as hell never going to prepay for any of their products again. My Larian rule going forward will be to always wait for the Definitive Edition.

Honestly after that interview why would anyone front them money again via EA? I’d be worried they’d get burnt out again.

Especially not if its just 60 bucks for EA instead of starting cheaper and increasing the price tag over time like several other games did. So they got the full amount of money plus lot of free testing and feedback and in the end, anyone who helped in EA got nothing (beside access to the game) got nothing on top. Not talking about anything special but just some thank you. Especially after changing the release version that much compared to EA.

I more than got my money's worth between early access and now.

As for future projects, it depends entirely on what the project is. If I find it interesting then I'll be interested.

^This.

I paid for a game and I received a game. Larian owes me nothing.

As far as why no more content, I'm willing to bet that the true story is that Hasbro and Larian could not agree on terms for a renewed license.

Yeah, I do feel like I come from a different timeline or have played a different game when I see how harsh some of the criticisms get here. The ending is quite bad. There are performance issues. Act 3 is bloated and the writing feels more rushed. But it's still a really good game, and with the amount of hours I've put into it and the enjoyment I've gotten from it, I can never feel scammed by Larian. It already made itself worth its money back in Early Access. I don't feel owed nothing, and I don't think them not continuing to work on the game or a future BG4 is personally attacking me, saddened as I am. I want new content and fixes to the worst stuff in the game as much as anyone else, but I don't think they mishandled the announcement and were inconsiderate or something.

To some extent, the comments where people say they are never going to buy a Larian game again strike me as disingenuous and pulling a "Karen", so to speak. When the game starts exaggeratedly being referred to as a piece of trash I can't help but think it's trying to guilt Larian into catering to a specific whim, like one of those really pissed off and overblown google reviews for a random restaurant that took 5 minutes too long to deliver the food.

I'll buy their next game as long as it's not sci-fi, sure. It's more about the content being to my liking than the company, really.

isn't it like, confirmed that their next project is going to be sci-fi?


also, i've been a fan of larian since divine divinity (the OG one, the hack'n'slash one), and their games were always a fun mess. Never go in expecting a good, finished and fulfilling story, and you won't be disappointed. It's pretty amazing how they've been making games for 20+ years now, and they are pretty much on the same level of making very fun game with very unfinished and awkward feeling story, in which protagonist is a personality void, and npcs range from great to "why, why is this even a character", ahah. You gotta love it, it has certain charm.
No amount of polish and luster can hide bad writing, it's only sad that it had potential to be good, judging by EA.

either way it's all about expectations, i guess.

It seems to be what they're implying, but I'm hoping that's not what it is lol. The only sci-fi adjacent setting I like are cyberpunk-esque ones. I'm so uninterested in space and aliens. The setting not being one I like can really affect the game experience for me. I know people love F:NV, but I was so bored and uninterested all the time because I didn't care for the setting (or the game's style, really) that I just rushed through to the end.

Regarding the writing, personally I think the main story is just okay, does its work for what it is, typical campaign, rushed towards the end. Act 2 is really solid, though. The writing shines more with the companions, or some of the companions, since some of them clearly got preferential treatment (Astarion, SH, Lae'zel). There are some inconsistencies in characterisation here and there that mostly strike me as Larian's (sometimes annoying) philosophy of letting the player do whatever they want to overriding how a character would or should react. But I think there's some really, really solid stuff in there.
Of course there might also be one or two (one. it's just one.) companions that are written really badly because of Larian's penchant for pleasing fans even if it's a stupid idea, if we need to address the bear in the room.

I feel like the main story in BG3 is mostly just an excuse to explore the world and its characters, so I was always okay with, let's say, act 1 (since I really do like act 2). But the way things quickly wrapped up during the final battle in act 3 still leaves a bad taste in my mouth epilogue or not, and I'm huffing copium that it'll be properly fixed and not get a band-aid fix since there are fundamental problems to the ending that can't be fixed by better cinematics or whatever.

funnily enough, i don't think act 2 is that amazing.
Let's just say, I find the whole shadow-cursed land to be extremely goofy from beginning to end. The weird in-universe concept of whole settlement dedicated to Selune, then Shar (right next to a major city, on sword coast that is a melting pot of sorts, where all sorts of religions should mesh together all the time), the whole idea that there's this little town on top of this gargantuan temple (who built it, what for, if sharran worshippers mostly end up just killing each other \ dying anyway, in general, Shar having such bombastic presentation never made sense to me, wasn't she supposed to be this niche\fringe goddess?).

I dunno, it can all be explained away with magic, or "it doesn't matter", but whole setting of Act 2 feels extremely rushed and out of place to me, much like a lot of things in game. Fun on surface, very pretty, very entertaining - but falls apart if you think about it a little too long.

Now, I don't like going cinema sins on my media, so I'm not gonna say it's BAD for it, but I can't help but wonder - how come we have those 3 unique looking bosses related to Kethric, and they are never even remarked upon by your companions? You'd think they are freaky enough at least for NPCs to have a reaction, but they really are those sideshow attractions in a bubble that really feel divorced from the rest of the world... much like many other quests do.

i still enjoy it very much, but there's really a lot throughout the entire game to pick apart in terms of overall writing\story\setting. I dunno! I might be alone in it, it just feels goofy to me, can't shake it off.