Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback larian's reaction?

after tons of suggestions and requests for changes to BG3, i'm curious which suggestion/request was the most surprising for them. maybe on the next twitch i will have the chance to ask that myself, until then gather your employees and venture to overtime

I, too, am interested in finding out what Larian's dev's think. I can't imagine looking at forum feedback feels good though - some people can be very harsh critics and I'm sure they worked real hard to make it all work.

You'll have to wait for some sort of video announcement on the matter.

I think anyone reading criticism needs mostly look at the trends of what people are talking about, and then assess if the core complaint is something that's within their power or willingness to change.

A lot of complaints is about the implementations of DnD, I suspect that's something they can easially make changes to, and we'll probably see in the next update.
Things like "It's not like Baldur's Gate 1!!!" I think they will ignore, they probably knew it would come but that's not the game they want to make.

Love that Skyrim picture xD

Yeah really doubt they read EVERY topic on here. Some are indeed very toxic or not that constructive in their criticism.

Some things are very obviouslly brought up alot though so I hope at least that they take note of that

Yeah, I can't wait for another community update at this point. Some new fun insights into what happens in the EA and maybe a little roadmap for the next things to come/change.

So far complete radio silence. I do hope they at least respond to some of the issues we raised, would be nice to know we are not talking to the wall

I suspect that they are busy not only collating the feedback from here but analysing all the metadata they are getting from people playing - like how often they are dying in particular encounters, who's dying where, how theyre dying, what companions theyre using most/least, how long it takes them to get to level 4, which quests are missed by most.

And of course all the bug reports / crash reports.

So likely a lot of work going on in the background with one team looking at bugs/stability and a lot of people trying to make sense of all the feedback both automatic and player provided.

I can tell you for a fact that you're spot on, Eireson.

60+ pages worth of just feedback from the Discord server alone, a VeryAlotO'Many pages from the forums, tickets, Reddit and Steam, and enough bug reports to keep Timon and Pumba fed for decades to come.

Always lurkin', always watching 👀

My problem with this is that the data points you listed are what you look at when you're trying to polish a product. Tweaking a specific combat difficulty is sorta pointless if there remains *significant* work to be done on the underlying mechanics. Using the metadata you mentioned is like choosing number of cupholders in a vehicle before even knowing whether it will be a car or a truck. For example, if Larian listens to the feedback and massively reduces the amount of surfaces and barrels, and returns to closer 5e stat blocks and mechanics, all that metadata will be useless.

Bug reports still useful, the top priority has to be that game runs at all. But after that...

A common rule experienced developers tend to embrace while dealing with large amounts of feedback is that "your audience is usually very good at identifying problems, but fairly terrible at proposing practical, viable solutions".

Boy is that the truth.

Jupp. (Although *I* make EXCELENT(!) advice!)

But yeah, I think we as feedback givers should keep in mind that detecting the issues we have is more important than marrying ourselves to a particular solution.

The whole "Realtime with pause" debate to me isn't really fruitful. It's either people who wanted a different game, or people who see issues with how the current combat system is working ("slow" is the word used)

So the problem there is: "Combat can be very slow, especially with a lot of enemies" exactly how it's solved is up to Larian. (although to me it seems some of it is just optimization that needs to be done to avoid "plotting next move" issues)

Yes and no - odds are it will be different people doing each bit and also some of the metadata can help support or disprove complaints they receive in the forums. I doubt they are going to go very far down any road (bar bug killing) without comparing notes from both sources of data and discussing whether systems need tweaking or complete overhauls in some case.

That's always the case in any major title. There's no such thing as a perfect game. There will always be people who are unhappy/ungrateful with the job done.

I would judge the game's success based on Steam reviews which are going steadily to "Overwhelmingly positive".

What is really making me sick is the lack of feedback from the company so far as we’re approaching 1 month mark since the release.

As a product manager I’m used to Agile Methodology (Scrum) which places the customer on the loop of every interaction during the product development. That align the client expectations and avoid misunderstandings between client/provider when the product is finally released.

Of course, the pool and the diversity of BG3 customers are ridiculously huge and this kind of interaction is impossible. That’s where the market research comes in hand as a VERY cheap solution. Objective surveys always come in hand to decide and remove that damn bias generated through navigating in communities.

I’ve paid upfront for the game early access in the sense that I’m investing in a game that sooner or later will be launched. I’ve played, analyzed, reached my own conclusions and I want to share my feelings in a objective way. It’s ridiculous to think that Larian is READING raw feedback captured on the internet in a qualitative way. That would make the worst market research in the world and I know what I’m talking about as I’m in this market for more than 10 years. I’m being very professional about it.

Hire a Market Research company, run the survey right away by building your questionnaire based on the subjects highlighted by the community and measure it. Enforce that the respondents can answer the survey only once by linking the email that is registered in the channel you’ve used to buy the game ( only early adopters ) . Now, analyze de data and present to the board.
Now you’re ready to make decisions whether to change or not the game directions.

I've kind of tailed off on the feedback. On some of the bigger picture Ideas, I hop in with the slight hope theyre reading larger chains and might find some use in the chatter but ...yeah...the level of effort to engage is pretty low and its not happening. They did a First Week! last Tuesday, then decided skip Week 2! for whatever reason. Just not be handled well. While we've been told people are "watching" forums and stuff, the one and only update given last week was based on data farmed from in-game statistics - nothing from forums. The way you know it isn't being handled right is that these threads keep popping up in every forum i've looked in. While it might not be easy to consume all the info, if nothing else its easy to lie and pretend you have been by referencing some stuff. Thats all anyone wants, really - Sweet, sweet lies.

That’s why I’m very concerned about the final product. Transparency were okay until the EA release. They need to run this market research right away and I do want to participate in it & know the results. Is Larian expecting that WE run the market research with out limited budget since we’ve already done this investment? Feels sad

Tbey said they expected to need at least a full year of furthet development. Not 1 or 2 weeks.

They actually have to develop the game you know, they cant spend the entire day reading the forums as well...

They do both, they've shared some metrics they have built into their system, we don't know how deep or how much they have, but if they do a good job here they could have a treasure trove. They also at least in the past had a person gather all the feedback at all forums and they would analyze, sum it up and then present that to the team for consideration. As far as them getting back to us, they have at least once already, a little under a week in. Historically they have been pretty good at this, no they aren't one to act like they are working with you hand and hand with amazeball updates, but I felt they've been pretty good overall. We'll see, perhaps they won't update us, take the money and run and build a place next to Gave in New Zealand.