Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Suggestion - Lower xp and add more fights

I think we earn too much experience along the game, i was level 12 at the beginning of act 3. To me leveling up from 7th to 12th looked too fast, too soon to even try once last unlocked abilities. I can't believe it's by design.
Xp from fights seems ok but quest xp i think could be halved straight away and still allow to be 12th level during act 3.
And this was the no effort suggestion i find necessary at the moment.


The middle one:
I wish you added some simpler fights in places where now there isn't any, in some buildings/dungeouns there is so much space you could fit some hostiles, i mean just some super easy monsters to let us experiment the new item we just equipped while exploring.


The impossible one:
Add a mechanic like in bg1 where you could meet random enemies every time you traveled.
At some point, given the less overall xp, you would seek those fights so to be maxed up just a couple of fights before the final boss. But these would be totally optional for the story.

I don't know how this could be feasible at this stage of the game development, maybe in some existing areas, after the standard creatures have been killed, spawn random basic hostile creatures. I imagine wild animals in the woods, skeltons/undeads around cemeteries, current non quest creatures (there are so many you literally encounter once) in dungeons, caves, passages, basements and such. These special creatures respawn every long rest if the area is clear, taken from a pool and scaling in number and level with tav's level so to be always on point, never hard, never trivial. Of course act 1 and 2 should not allow exploiting this system to reach max level sooner; these fights should give very little xp so to be ridiculous at some point to sleep and come back again and again on purpose, fixed xp whatever creature spawns (something like: 5xp per creature in act 1, 10xp per creature in act 2, 50xp per creature in act 3 regardless).

Knowing the world is always alive and hostile around you could be a nice touch and extend the average game, keeping the player alert while he goes back and forth through the same places.

I understand that putting on and tuning such feature from scratch is not that easy.. asking is free. Maybe a modder could do this as well.


(sorry for bad english, i'm not native speaker)

I agree. Brain bugs giving 140 XP each? Crazy ...
Larian knows no restraint ...
Only a "low XP" mod will change this, never Larian.

It's a bit late for such a drastic change to BG3 given that Larian are beginning work on their next project.

That said, experience has had similar challenges in all of Larian's titles, whereby experience gain is not particularly well paced.

Personally, I don't like the idea of combat granting experience at all. I'd much prefer a system where experience is tied directly to story progression (This is actually a rather popular system for TT D&D games, as it shifts the focus from meta-gaming around experience gain and onto just playing through the story and making decisions based on the decision itself and not what will maximize experience points)

This also includes side quests too. I don't want to feel forced to do a side quest just because it offers experience. I want to be able to make a decision to partake of the quest because I (Or my character I'm roleplaying) choose to do so.

Tying experience to things like combat and side quests creates a rift in the roleplay. Where you do certain actions because you want (Or need) experience instead of because you choose to do those actions. And in certain games (Such as DOS2) you can end up doing dumb things like completing a side quest... Then murdering the quest givers for double experience...

In addition, with experience tied to story progression, there's more freedom to add as many enemies and side quests as you want, because no matter the number and no matter how you interact with them (If you avoid combat through dialogue, sneak past enemies, fail side quests etc) a character's progression is unaffected. Meanwhile, you're able to fine tune character progression, allowing you to tie major character development (Such as feats in BG3 or spell levels in DOS) to plot points integrating the character with the story itself.

Gods no.

Sorry the slog from level 4-8 is painful enough. And well no offense but D&D isnt all about fights.

XP are fine as they are ...
We all are just suffering bcs we are completionists.

Ok i see leveling up trough fights vs story progression is a debate itself and i really appreciate motivations pro the latter.
My main observation was and is that 1) we are maxed up ad around 60% of the game and 2) in my experience level 7 to 12 was too fast to experience each new abilities i just gained and totally had no time to become accustomed that i already leveled up again.
We shoul all agree that abilities you get on level up are things you use during fights so if you level up mostly thanks to dialogues and plot xp you as a player will not really experience what being a level 10 or 11 (insert class here) means, unless you encounter fights during it. This happened to me. So those non fight events back to back should be less impacting on xp or be interspersed with more fights.
I think developers should look at the ratio between fights and story progression you encounter along the game and keep it armonic.

Hodo observation: "level 4 to 8 is too slow". I didn't notice this, i indeed liked the pace at that point: each level seemed a endless chapter on its own and i felt the struggle to push it back and the joy to discover the next. This is subjective. What is objective is that there are 12 levels so they shouls divide the playtrough in 12 and give the player 12 layers of complexity, 12 chapters. As it is now the last is disproportioned.
I think in a way or another this is easy to tune.

No to more fights just for the sake of it, please. The big fights were often the least fun parts of the game for me, because turn-based combat is very slow. I much prefer exploring, and my favourite game sessions were the ones where I just spend an hour or two chatting to people. If you want more combat, isn't that what the higher difficulty settings are for? I haven't tried them yet, but if they wanted to add more combat for people who enjoy that part of the game, that's where you'd put it (as well as making fights harder).

One of the big pros is how soon you reach max lv, even if your not a completionist or muderhobo you’ll reach max lv fairly early into act 3. To many games go “alright here’s your full power! To bad there’s nothing left to use it on!” Unless your specifically getting everything possible to get that max level slightly earlier things are fairly good as they are.



Also getting xp from both combat and story events is also a good thing, only possible improvement there is if they could somehow work out a way for you to not get xp for kills if you already got xp for avoiding the fight but that would probably be a lot of work.