Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General All I'm sayin is, as a DM ...

if my player asked me "Hey, can I dip my hand and weapon in to this fire to try and enchant my attacks?", I would say "sure,"

and then roll fire damage on the idiot's hand and apply a temporary negative to attack rolls with that weapon until they fixed it.

This game is fun, and improves on DOS2 in every way. Which is why it feels like DOS3.

You threw out everything that made D&D combat feel unique from other TB systems and kept only what you could graft on to your Divinity engine.

My initial impression was that I was thoroughly enjoying myself. After about 16 hours of play I am just feeling disappointed.

But let me not come in here without suggestions:

1) Remove your "free-movement" system and apply a hex grid to the environments. A hex grid would mesh well over the vertical environments you've made. It would also fit your scale of 3's in your current invisible grid.

2) Adding the grid would create a different "feel" to the world, one that makes things like Reaction Pop Ups mid combat fit, rather than break immersion. Reaction pop ups are NECESSARY for 5e.

3) if you do keep the free-movement ... consider adding WASD movement when out of combat, and fixing the camera to whichever party member is active/in the lead. I know, WASD would be a big change, but I think it would be a good one.

4) With a fixed camera, you could allow "right click" to manipulate the camera, which would give you more incentive to make your worlds more open and thus worth exploring. They are exceptionally linear right now. Corridor based maps suck.

5) 2 short rests between long rests. Minimum.

6) Remove Jump as a free disengage from all characters and only give it to rogues.

7) Remove secondary effects from cantrips and make spells more like their D&D counter parts.

8) Where is cover? There are no cover mechanics.

9) Where are melee enhancements like grapple, restrain, and knock out?

10) A lot of people really like Origin characters, and we love how much effort you've put in to them ... but ... we play D&D to make our own character to forge a story within the world you're offering. You've spent too much effort on origin characters and missed the purpose of D&D in the process.

Knock out is an action. I have used it quite a bit just to verify I can end combat without killing anyone

Grid system sounds interesting, but I don’t see it happening this far into development. I think there is knock out button by the jump and dash icons (haven’t used it yet though).

Indeed it feels like DOS with DnD mechanics(and not all of them well made). In modders we trust.

I do agree that I would like to see some of the rules more closely match table top, but;

I don’t see how a hex map would make any difference. Trying to overlay a hex map over an environment that wasn’t specifically designed for it would be a nightmare. That ain’t going to happen.

Not having grapple makes sense-that is a ton of animation work for all of the different t models in this game.

The camera angle has nothing to do with openness. BG2’s maps were also often basically corridors. This actually makes the maps more interesting for most people, as exploration in BG1 often just meant zig zagging across large open maps. This style of map design allows for more content and encounters to be placed closer together without it looking as cramped and odd and eliminates needing to travel across lots of empty space. It’s a design choice that I agree with.

The overworld areas in BG and BG2 were absolutely not corridors. They were an interconnected singular map.

Anyway, I moved this over to suggestions so it's in the proper place.

Think of the maps in BG2: Athkatla - all corridors, the Sahuagin city - all corridors, the Druid grove- one big corridor, the underdark - corridors, dungeons - corridors, elven city - corridors, entrance to the elven city - still corridors. The Umar Hills and Firkraag’s territory were relatively open, but compared to BG1, BG2 is mostly all corridors.

Cover mechanics would be welcome