Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Act I complete ?

Hello there! Playing the game for over 30+hours now with different characters and i love the game so far.
however i think Act I feels very incomplete - i know it is early access, but the way i understood the Content of Act I should be complete - so
i guess the parts where "you cant progress here"plops out is part of Act II ? If so, it feels kinda weird in incomplete - Moonlight Tower and the thing with
the Githyanki Patrol feels very much like it is supposed to be a part of Act I.

In DOS II the change from Act I and II was great, there was an epic climax, a boss fight and something new "mysterious Maladie and the ship" that told you "now, the
journey really begins" - however coming to the borders of Act I more feels like leaving Fort Joy - maybe i misunderstood something ?

No complaining here, i love the game, just curious!

I'm pretty sure we only get 90% of Act I and whatever happens at Moonrise Tower will be the conclusion to the act.

Well, we don't know how many total acts there will be. At least I don't. If there are 8 or 10 it doesn't feel overly short. Additionally, if you look at it, This is were you decide how you are going to branch to the moonlight towers, and marks a major turning point for the rest of the story. It makes sense to section it there.

thought theyd said similar number of acts to D:OS2?

Im pretty sure they said it will be three Acts

Larian's games are always 3 Acts. What people call acts and what they call acts aren't always the same thing. People seems to split DOS2 into 4 acts based on the maps, but Reaper's Coast and Nameless isle are a single act to Larian.

They are narrative driven too, so it's not hard to speculate that Act 1 ends somewhere around the Moonrise Tower or soon after you deal with the place. Act 1 will end when the "remove the tadpole" quest will be completed and replaced by something else.

Anyhow, the EA doesn't have the entirety of Act 1, just most of it. This was confirmed last week by one of the game's writers.

oh, hopefully Act 2 or 3 are longer then.

Oh, I highly doubt we have ''90%'' of act 1 done. After all, there 3 routes to the Moonrise Towers. One is that mountain pass, another is supposed to be a path through some forest/swamp? So maybe we've got like 60% of the act 1 actually available. That's of course assuming that the other 2 ways of reaching the towers are as large as the Underdark is.

And I dunno about you, but finishing everything we have currently available to us (basically having meta knowledge of what's where and such) took me 45h. My first run took me 70h, and on my 2nd run I discovered I accidentally skipped some things. Now I wonder how long it would take me to do everything on a 3rd run? But so far I'm waiting until we get some sort of patch/hotfixes to go through all of that again.

The harper cache has a description of the Moonrise Towers and surrounding area on the Harper's map readable. There is a forest south of it (or it was a forest before the Shadow Curse). I suspect the area won't be has big as the map we currently have in the EA, but 90% being in the EA sound a bit too much, but 60% sound a bit too low to me.

I'm not sure we are supposed to count the entire Underdark we currently have as part of the "Underdark path" to the Moonrise Tower. I mean, I just did a character who left from the Underdark fort and went straight to the dock by jumping some mushroom to cross a chiasm. Took 5 minutes, only had to deal with two rounds of Bulette's visit. Then I True Souled myself across the lake. The real "Underdark path" is actually what we see at the end of the cutscene I think.

It is always possible that additional Act 1 content will be released throughout the EA period, to help play test added or modified skills/spells/levels/characters and so on.

Act 1 is almost all in. I guess, as suggested above, the moonrise towers will be its conclusion. I think Swen said in an interview act 2 will be the biggest of the 3. But I can't manage to remember where I read it.

I'm pretty sure we're currently missing the rest of the Risen Road Area and the whole Mountain Pass with resolution to Gith creche quest plus Moonrise Towers.

And I've also read a confirmation of 3 Acts somewhere, with ACT 2 being the largest.

For me (and I am only halfway through Act I I suppose), this is way too long for to act as an introduction to the game. I also suppose it is not yet fully finished, although I guess it is only lacking some closure or conclusion to the main quest and and a more precise outlook of what to come.

Now, what do I mean with too long? For me, and in the literary and theatrical sense, the first act of anything introduces the main characters and outlines the plot, basically the exposition plus the core mechanics are explained to you. BG2 is a nice example. You meet your character, get filled in with some background, meet the important NPCs and, most importantly, you meet the antagonist along with some foreshadowing and some hints as to what is up with him. The whole chapter only lasts for two hours, I'd guess, but leaves you satisfied with the conclusion and eager to experience the rest.

As of now I have spent around 20 hours in the game and I do not have the feeling I know anything, or that I am eager to learn more about what is happening. There is no intriguing and charismatic antagonist, but a few small ones that interest me not (the tadpole and Raphael, Gutt and the Drow). I also do not know if the tadpole and it's removal is indeed my main goal, or if it is just a symptom of something bigger going on. I also do not care, really. The tadpole seems a minimal threat, it does not bother me or others, it does not affect me personally or on a global level yet. At the very moment I am feeling just like a guy that is urged by family and friends to go to the doctor to get his moles checked out and subsequently removed, because they can cause melanoma further down the road. Similar urgency.

What I am also missing after so much time in the game is a hub like Athkathla or Baldur's Gate, a base of operations from where I can freely choose what to do next. I am still railoaded onwards for hours, which is fine for a classic act I, but not after 20 hours.

The tadpole is a redundant plot point actually. It is irrelevant by the time you discover it is in stasis through Ethel / Omeluum and will (hopefully) become irrelevant after Moonrise. The reason you find Act 1 too long, I think, is because the primary antagonist is supposed to not show up until the very end of the Act. We really have no idea what the story is about yet, so everything we have done up to now is busy work.

If you're looking for a more complete 'wrap up' to the act that we currently have, I would HEAVILY RECCOMEND you invest in attempting to use the underdark. I'll not hint to why, but there is far more closure than the 'oops, can't go here!'

There are so many hints though, but well hidden. I'm on my third playthrough and I am still discovering pieces of information I hadn't even glimpse before. Act 1 is so multilayered depending of what type of experience you want that it is necessary to be long. If it was shorter, by the end of it, you would have no clue whatsoever about what's going on.

Such as? I have no idea what the Absolute is and all of the clues I have found come from this forum or from datamining. The evil path might give you less information about the Absolute, even. People like Halsin treat it as some upstart cult and frankly it comes across as such for the player as well.

Agreed. I feel like there is too little story right now. And of course the main problem is that right now our character's main goal is to remove the tadpole, but everything we come across suggest that the tadpole is here to stay (at least for now) so every lead we find seems like a wild goose chase, and you presue it only to see what would go wrong this time.

I think even dos2 first act had a better story, and much more happened there.

However, I do get the feeling Larian is treating this story much like a mystery thriller, so we won't know for sure how good is this act before we have the full game. It is possible that things that seems mundane or insignificant now will be revealed to be very important once we'll have more context.

Yeah, I have no idea what quests right now bring the story forth and what the sidequests are. At the moment everything seems rather connected, which can be nice, but at the moment I feel rather stretched in my motivations and efforts. I am confident this will rather solve itself in the full game when all the possibilities, ways and storylines open up, and that EA wanted to give us a glimpse of everything, while also giving some form of conclusion, but at the moment the game just throws a bunch of mediocre antagonists and plot points at me which is a bit stale.

Yep. Ethel, Cazador and Raphael are all going to come back in Act 2 but the Absolute and the tadpole along with everything to do with that seems to have little bearing on the story so far. It was not a good call to lead into Act 1 without a hook past "we need a healer" as the plot feels like a wild goose chase where the player is kind of along for the ride.

Come to think of it, the Absolute (?) saving you at the end of the Nautiloid section is a HUGE deus ex machina that is never addressed or explained. The story kind of dies in its cradle because of that, lol.