Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Actual XP cap in EA?

Has anyone here calculated what the real level is you get if you do everything in Act 1? By level 4 you stop getting XP and all fights in Act 1 seem to be balanced around a party of level 4 characters or lower, so I would imagine being level 5 or higher completely ruins the balance.

You arent supposed to dp dverything though. Realisticly wr are in a race against time so wouldnt be suprised if some form of ingame timer is added at a later point.

Why do people keep saying this? You find out that;




Also urgency storyline bad.

It might be a potential problem since even at level 4 I don't find most of the game particularly hard. And I'm one of these guys who doesn't care much about combat, and never plays on a harder difficulty than normal. Also, I found that I reach level 4 very quickly in most of my playthroughs

You can be level 3 by meeting all the companions and doing the dungeon with the talkative skeleton in it. Takes about 5-10 minutes. I do this every run now since going to the grove at level 1-2 is suicidal. Getting to level 4 takes a little longer for me though, what route do you use for that?

You also learn thay noone know just HOW MUCH time you have. If id have a parasite sitting in my head that occasionaly takes a bite out of my brains and can turn me into a brain eating alien but right now doesent seem to be doing that; it would still sit at the top of my to do list.

yeah... most players hate the time thingy, fallout 1 and pathfinder: kingmaker, that was complain #1

Larian is shooting themselves in the foot if they push the urgency in the main story to such an extent that it hampers exploration of side content. It would be like if in Skyrim dragons started attacking you more and more frequently if you took too long to do the dragonborn questline, if the civil war would just end without you getting involved etc.

personally im not a fan of timed story elements or plot points, particularly in the first act of a game where i still am learning the mechanics and trying to get a sense of where i stand regarding the plot and npcs, if this was implemented in later acts (and i hope that we get more than 3 acts or the remaining two acts have more content than what weve seen of act 1 in ea) then i would be more comfortable in 'setting off' a countdown as i would have a better founding regarding the direction of the plot/story and my pcs role in it.

that being said, it feels somewhat hollow for all this buildup to get the tadpole out - only for a netherese hand wave to put the plot/race on effective hold, but just my opinion here (as an aside, i like the netherese and they usually show up in FR related material and since there is a cleric of shar as an origin character i suppose its not surprising we run across them, but i just hope that other deities get love in this game too)

right now i'd say if you do every quest and kill most of the NPCs you probably could reach level 6, that said i won't be surprised if larian lowers experience gain for quests and kills if you character reached higher level that is required for area

Must be a minority in this forum then because the complete lack of time mattering ruins the narrative for me.

Like in fallout 4 you are 'searching for your son' but take a break every few minutes to erect another settlement. I mean, really?

Time constraints have a time and place in a story and the parasite isent completly inactive. You get the 1st stage of ceromorphosis after the dream sequence incase people forget so no, you cant take as long as you want to remove the hich hiker from your head.

Also if the encounters were more balanced so you arent blowing all your spell slots and abilities in every single fight the story could work just fine if it took part in say... 14 days instead of 7. Or 21 instead of 7. You still have plenty of time to faff about while still keeping the urgency of your situation somewhat of an issue.

I honestly can never see having a long term deadline ever working well in a CRPG. Having a short term timer for a mission is fine so you could fail a quest if not done by set time but for the whole campaign?

While of course this is beyond the scope of what Larian can do, look at Tyranny; there was the hard deadline with the Day of Swords in the opening and then a soft deadline with the player fighting all the Archons to the last man standing for the rest of the game. If everything revolved around the Day of Swords, but you found out halfway through that the edict is on hold forever but could be reinstated to instantly kill you at any time, that would be terrible from a narrative standpoint. Act 1 in BGIII is the Day of Swords, if there is no Archon battle royale between you and other True Souls in Acts 2 and 3 or the story foregoes that angle completely, the narrative falls apart.

I havent played tyranny. Might take a look into it.

I must also add im not expecting the player to walk around with the tadpole to only have it be removed at the end of the game.

If anything, I expect that the tadpole is removed shortly after what we see in EA and the rest of the game will focus on a different narrative that may or may not be tied to the illithid tadpols.

You should. It is one of the best CRPGs ever made.




I hope so. Nothing in EA points to that as of now, but we simply know very little about the broader story.

I expect that doing all of the content would result in close to 6.

It does not have to be a long term deadline.

Pathfinder Kingmaker got a lot of complaints because it did not explain the mechanic well, and it did have game over events when a deadline was missed. If this is avoided, then having story consequences is the best way to prevent players from spamming rests. It adds another challenge to the game, and it adds to the immersion. We already have an example in the game, where resting while a house is burning has the consequence that the house is burnt afterwards (would kinda break the illusion if it were different, no?).

Games like Skyrim work completely different. Skyrim is a sandbox. A lot of players never finish the supposed main quest. It did not bother me that an evil vampire lord threatened to end the world, then patiently waited in his lair, doing nothing, for me to show up maybe a couple of years later, or never.

But for games like BG:3, with a linear main story progressing in acts, it would add to the experience, to have minor consequences for delaying certain things.

The story's urgency is derived completely from the tadpole. By the end of Act 1 you know both that it is not an urgent thing to deal with (the ceremorphosis is in stasis) and that it is more urgent than ever to deal with (that stasis could be removed at any time, causing a violent and instant version of ceremorphosis). So you now no longer have a poison in your head, but a remote explosive. How is that going to carry over to Act 2 and beyond?

We should really wait with topics like this one until we see at last one patch that will bring some big changes in EA ...
Not just hotfixes ...

There is also possibility, that XP gain was boosed for EA so players can actualy try and see all features that was (1-4) prepared for them ... but enemies, and XP will be changed in full release, so we will he happy if we reach level 3, or get just nearly close to level 4 with whole act 1 complete.

I have no idea if Larian knows how much exp they are dishing out in EA right now. Becoming level 5 or even level 6 in Act 1 would upset the balance so much that encounters become trivial. Limiting or removing exp gain at level 4 is a bad way to compensate for this as it discourages exploration of side content.