Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General The most important feature

Hi guys.

Just saw the trailer for BG3 and as a huge fan of the series, I just wanted to stop by and give my opinion. First of all, I'm glad Larian is making BG3. Obsidian generally makes great games but clicking through endless walls of text in a (literally) soulless world wouldn't make a very memorable Baldur's Gate game. I enjoyed the humor and storytelling in Divine Divinity and Ego Draconis but had to pass on Original Sin 1/2 because the turn based combat system ruined those games for me. It's great that people enjoy those games but Baldur's Gate 3 should be playable in real time. For me, it's the feature that will determine whether I buy BG3 on release day or stick to BG1+2 instead.

I don't know if the devs made a decision about that yet so I figured I'd chime in.

There's been quite a lot of debate on the subject already, so get your umbrella out! At present nobody knows. There's much speculation based on this or that hint but we'll find out when we find out. And Larian will do their thing, and Swen might troll everybody, which he is of course entirely unknown for doing.

fwiw, I'd give the Original Sins a second chance. I'm also not a fan of turn-based isometric but still love the games in spite of that and it's about as isometric as you want it to be, with 360⁰ rotation and being able to zoom in until it's practically third-person. Albeit not very practical in combat but sometimes it's nice just to "be there".

We know that the decision was already made but no one knows which system they chose. We just have to wait for them to release gameplay.

From reading comments and talking to people over the last couple months, you are definitely not alone.

It's possible (likely) that is why they haven't released the info yet (pre-orders). Though I don't know if I believe it when people say the decision's already been made. At least not until we have a release date set and thus an idea of where they are in production right now.

Among all the alternatives posted here, and the many differing viewpoints on both, I still personally hold out some hope they go with a "both" option instead of 1 or the other.

We'll see soon enough.

I really stopped reading just after you complaint about "clicking through endless walls of text".
I think we want a very different kind of game.

To be fair POE 1 had too much boring flavour text Josh Swayer even admitted that later in his blog and the issue was fixed in Deadfire. And the full voice acting made reading mostly obsolete luckily Swen announced that all their future games are fully voice acted as well.

I hope hoping that they do a complete voice over like they did for DOS2

Lore books and weapons/armors/items description and story are not voiced and I do not think it would ever be, as the scripted interactions, etc etc etc

And since games are usually localized in only a few languages of the world and dubbed in only two languages by default (japanese or english), three or four tops, and there are hearing-impaired people, I think reading in videogames will never be obsolete.

If I remember, it was alot like BG2 in that for the bigger dialogue instances, the first couple 'paragraphs' were voiced, but then there was always a good amount of unvoiced text following.

Not that I prefer one over the other, as you're going to read all of the text regardless, if you're into the game. Unless you're playing the game for the 20th time, or you're doing one of those ridiculous speed runs for a youtube channel...

That brings up another issue.. if Larian is putting alot of their eggs into the multiplayer basket... things like reading and spending time in weapons/armor descript's as well as any lore sections included in the game (it's D&D afterall) would be mitigated I'd think, because you'd have party members on comms saying, "Let's GO! C'mon....!" (I don't know, I've never even thought about playing RPG's like this multiplayer).

In my experience with NWN and DoS games, yes you have.

Having lots of lore in the game is a core element of a game being an RPG. So, less lore means less of an RPG.

I prefer games with an interesting world and well-written lore, Gothic and Gothic 2 didn't have much lore yet their world was so much more believable than those with hundreds of pages of lore.

Yes it is of course assumed and expected that the lore will be well written. So if I need to be more specific, then what I'm saying is assuming well written lore, more lore equals more of an RPG and less lore equals less of an RPG. A generation of gamers raised on not reading and only just watching a screen want to try and redefine RPGs to be the shallow action games they love so much.

The Devs mostly include the lore in books, item descriptions, and optional conversations anyway, so they almost never hinder the pace of the game.
You can dive into it if you like, but you can complete the game without if it pleases you.