Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback 18 Hours of Early Access

So, I've just completed my first run through of early access, I explored all of the surface map, and as much of the underdark as I could, levelled up as much as possible, and done all the quests I could find. I truly enjoyed this experience, and I look forward to future updates. Here's my feedback after nearly 20 hours in game:

Dialogue: I actually like the dialogue system, the dice rolls don't bother me, in fact I like seeing them rather than sifting through a log for them or potentially having them completely obscured. Sometimes the writing felt a little off, but most of the time it was fine, though there were plenty of times where I wished for other options. The only thing that really felt bad about the dialogue was the fact that I'm rolling around in a party of myself and 3 companions, and yet for all intents and purposes the only person that exists in a dialogue is the member of the party who initiates it. Nobody reacts to the githyanki angrily standing behind me, and Gale will only ever speak up after dialogue has concluded despite the fact that he has plenty of thoughts. When I run up to the burning building with the blocked doorway, I have to leave the dialogue to have my fighter with high strength try a strength check against the door, if I don't leave, then it's just my poor wizard main character with 8 strength trying to clear the doorway. On that note, it seems like the majority of dialogue instances can be had and then left part way or all the way through and redone with another member of the party. If I don't like what happened, I can have Gale do the entire dialogue over again (without reloading the save) and the npc will react like it's a brand new conversation.

Companions: I've seen plenty of people complain about the companions largely being hostile towards you from the get-go and not really relenting at any point during the early access. The Githyanki in particular strikes me as one who starts out pretty unlikable, taunted me one night for not getting to sleep with her because I didn't do what she wanted enough, and then I assume she'd be humbled by being shunned by the Githyanki in the top left corner of the map, but I honestly don't know, because that was one of the few encounters I couldn't beat, I'll get to combat in a little bit. I admit it can feel like a little bit of a let down to find 4 companions and only really find one even the slightest bit likable because the other 3 are outright hostile to you and will take hours or tens of hours to have any sort of change of heart. Honestly I don't know why on the third night half of them outright say they'd like to sleep with you given how bitchy they can be, but that said I don't hate them, I just think there needs to be more options. Also: I said 4 companions earlier because I never got to meet Wyll, when I found the druid camp under attack he jumped off the rampart right next to a bugbear and immediately died the next turn. I didn't even know he was a companion at first because I hadn't looked up companions, until I recognized him from the loading screens and then found I couldn't revivfy him, so that was just a companion permanently gone from my game without me even grasping what had happened.

Combat: Oooooh boy, if there was any part of this game that I actually had an issue with, it was this. I've seen a lot of talk about surfaces, and frankly I do agree, they really need to be toned down, cantrips, spells, barrels, and more all creating surfaces in every single fight just doesn't feel right for a D&D game, and if you'd like to keep them in, I'd prefer for them to go by D&D 5e rules, or at the very least have fewer of them, between all the tossables that enemies have, the inordinate amount of barrels everywhere, and half of the enemy being exsanguinated on the ground, there's just too many of them. But my real issues have very little to do with surfaces. I'm pretty well acquainted with D&D combat and combat in other cprgs, so I'd like to think I know how to approach situations, but this game went beyond frustrating at times. Combat was actually quite interesting on the whole, but I had my first taste of the issue when I woke up on the beach, ran over, got my horrifically underpowered trickster cleric and then ran into 3 hostile intellect devourers immediately. Hmmmm I thought, this seems to be weighted against my poor level 1 or 2 wizard and cleric with their poor AC and limited spell slots, the CR on intellect devourers is supposed to be one I thought? And then I proceeded to die a few times. Combat from there on was a mix of difficult and mild, I was largely okay with it, but ended up going through a ton of healing items that i ran out by the time I got to level 4 and was greedily devouring them almost as soon as I found new ones. While playing I wasn't sure if there was a timer on what is supposed to be a time sensitive issue (the tadpole) so I tried to avoid long resting at all costs, but now I've seen in the community that with only 1 short rest per long rest, which seems like it's too few short rests, I should really have been long resting all the damn time. Still, it was rare for me to find a fight that I truly got frustrated on, until I got to the Underdark that is. The very first fight I found when I got to the Underdark was 2 minotaurs on a bridge who could body slam from half a mile away, nearly instantly RKOing anyone in my party with a low AC (which for some reason included the cleric, why? I don't know) and it took me about 40 minutes of reloading just to fight them. It was then that I started to return to my earlier concerns about CR balancing, but I kept going, over and over again finding packs of enemies which outnumbered my party, and also hit harder than my party, and also had more hp than my party. I got to the final village in the Underdark and spent 2 hours fighting those dwarves, and in the end had to reload to an earlier save, pass the perception check to find them before going down to the corpses, and then had to spam shove and push attacks until 2 of them went off a cliff into oblivion and half the corpses also had to be repeatedly pushed off ledges. It wasn't just a clever way of trying to deal with hard enemies, it was the only way I could do it after 2 hours of attempts. Think about it: that fight was a fight with 4 dwarves, 1 fighter, 1 cleric, one ranger (i think), and one necromancer (?), but despite being the same level as my party, the necromancer had 52hp, the cleric had a few more hp than mine (and probably a higher AC) the ranger had about the same health as my arcane trickster, and the fighter roughly the same hp as my fighter, but all of the dwarves hit harder. Already on paper that feels a little skewed against my party, but sure the player always has a bit of an advantage, so lets take that away by introducing 5 corpses all with 22 hp (22 hp while my low ac wizard has 30), and they're all attacking at the same time, and if you don't pass the perception check, they'll start off with the high ground which confers ludicrous advantages already. Honestly I think some of the fights on the Surface World were a bit too hard for being normal fights, but the Underdark takes it to a new level, not to mention the burrowing creature who deals unavoidable damage to at least one party member as you're going through and the numerous dangerous shrooms. If a DM did what this game does irl, the entire party would stop being friends with that DM.

Oh and returning to the point about the githyanki patrol: between the multiattacks on every turn, teleportation, high ground advantages, and hitting for a minimum of 10 damage with every swing, that encounter and the encounter with the redcaps just felt ludicrously overtuned, not to mention I stumbled on the Hag and the redcaps at level 3 just by exploring.

I honestly love D&D and I really enjoyed the overall experience of this game, but the last 5 hours spent retrying fights over and over again with the githyanki, hag, and underdark, really hammered home just how off the balancing is in this game. I get that you love surfaces larian, but tone them down, and pay attention to CR for enemies, D&D literally hands that to you on a silver platter, they've already done the playtesting for you when it comes to that stuff, please please please please please.

Yeah the CR rating is off...

This should be fixed once the difficulty options are implemented.
I for one found most of my combat to be on the easy side of things

Some of the combat was easy, combat on the Surface World for the most part felt balanced imo, and most of the time my only issue was rests. There were even instances where I trivialized some boss fights like the hobgoblin leader by having Gale hurl a bunch of caustic pods at the group and annihilate them, but I fear that a lot of the time encounters become easy when you cheese them, rather than become easy when you have a good team and approach it like a normal D&D fight

Good writeup. I'm working on one myself but giving it more time until I finish the available content and do some more class testing.
My two cents on your points:

Dialog/Companions:
It's a tough needle to thread, getting these rag-tag party members to mesh together dynamically in an appropriate way. I'm sure the complexity behind the companion response option trees is substantial, but so far almost all of the conversation has a strange tone to them. Either a lack of context to the current situation or an unmatched tone- or I feel my response options are all off-base.

Additionally, I want to echo what you're detailing about party usage within dialog options. Why can't my tough-as-nails warrior chime in to the conversation to intimidate an NPC when the conversation starts getting off track? Or even force their way in to intimidate based on the direction the conversation steers? Or starting a dialog with my dim-witted Ranger and mid-way letting the smooth-talking Rogue slide in and use their silver tongue. Maybe I'm a bit off-base here, but that kind of party utilization is the non-combat equivalent of the many varying class abilities in combat.

So far my biggest peeve with the telling of the story is that you immediately get filled up to a 4 character party when you land on the beach. Three minutes after crash landing in an unknown place you're "companions" with 3 or more others. That feels way too fast. It's EA, but I don't even have time to get to know a character for more than a single fight (if that) before they're part of the team. Feels too fast and loose to me after about 5 runs through the first hour of gameplay and far too convenient. I'd be OK being bombarded with characters if they were meant to die permanently or be very difficult to revive, but that's simple as well- and starts leading into combat gripes.

Combat:
CRs are weird. Yeah. But that was also a huge part of the BG 1 and 2 playthrough experience for me. If I had a reload-from-last-save counter in those games, it would be in the hundreds. While that doesn't bode well for everyone's play experience I do feel that more difficult average CR on fights is a well replicated piece of the BG feel. I have yet to hit Underdark though so that point may change my feelings.

Right off the bat, I was surprised (at first very interested) in the dip feature. I thought it strange to have a universal 'dip weapon' feature on every character regardless of weapon- but then after only a few hours of play I understood how many surfaces are thrown at you. It very much feels like Divinity:OS on that front. Surfaces exist in DnD, sure, but the prevalence of them is downright distasteful from what I can tell. I prepared candles in each character's inventory so I could put one on the ground (for free), light it (for free) and dip my weapon in it (for bonus action) for 1-4 extra damage. It feels so cheesy and borderline silly.

And one last reflection on movement: Disengage / Jump... I'd vote for full rework. It doesn't make sense that such a hugely important combat feature like AoO can be circumvented by literally ANYONE, almost for free. Every fight feels like cheese because of it- and if I don't use it I'm ignoring a core part of each round of combat. There's no excuse for a wizard jumping 2 feet away from a warrior then running up a hill. It's a huge flaw in combat's integrity right now.

Oh jeez I wrote too much. Sorry to hijack.

Lol no worries about hijacking I agree, and those things like the candle, or having a fighter carry around barrels, having my wizard use grease every encounter, and so on for me wasn't just feeling un-D&D or cheesy, it was also just not how I want to play the game. I'm not normally the kind of person that thinks "I should be able to play however stupidly I want and ignore core game systems" but this just isn't a fun game system to me. It disrupts the flow of combat and isn't remotely how id approach combat in d&d or even another similar crpg like pillars of eternity. If revolving your playstyle around surfaces and trying to king of the hill every encounter with uneven terrain is the only way to play the game successfully then it isn't a combat system I'm likely to enjoy, and it feels out of the spirit of d&d which is a game all about player choice

You also nailed my point exactly on the dialogue, it should be dialogue involving the party, that's such a key feature of any d&d experience and even shows up in other crpgs sometimes. I get that it's hard, but it's worth at least trying.