Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General RIP the patch every 2 weeks

Yea, and thats just icing on the cake on whats already there and to come...They could call it BG3 : Wrath of the righteous and people would be incredibly excited. It actually feels like a natural progression of the prior games. You can tell the developers are big fans of the original Black isle games .
If Larian does not go FULL ON D^D 5th tactical depth + rated R gritty Baldurs gate atmosphere then they are screwed. DOS2 game system, pretty faces and cinematics, corny sex scenes, and <a few good unlikable companions> will not save BG3 in the long run. They are trying to market this to WAY TOO MANY people and systems before actually designing a great RPG PC game.

I mean, just the "4 person-party, 8 companions, inability to reform party with other companions past prologue" bit alone is already a big letdown. It somewhat works in the DOS games because those games have poor party interaction anyway, are class-less and alignment-less, you can learn anything, use anything, be anything, and you also got a magic mirror that lets you respec your characters at no cost. And, well, those games are Larian's own thing, so whatever.

The DOS fans, Larian fans, the old BG game fans, the TT D&D crowd, RPG-in-general fans, PC players, console players, singleplayer players, multiplayer players, people who only like to DM. Yep that does sound like way too many people. They saw a chance to make the big buck and they took it. "Let's throw out a full-price EA and when we get the money we'll figure something out". They're in way over their head.

I've been thinking I'll give P:K another try on normal difficulty, see how it goes. The hope is that I'll find it decent now so I can get on board the P:WotR ship.

Holy macaroni - I thought the world was ending when I saw how much you guys been chattering since yesterday

Well, at least they are breaking the silence c: I am happy enough just knowing that for now. Hopefully they don't do a Blizzard's "soonTM"... :']

Either way! Hopefully there will be something in their presentation to please everyone! \o/ As we say in Sweden - do not grief in advance! c:

Kingmaker is still an acquired taste due to the kingdom management and atypical pacing because of it to be honest.

WotR is much faster paced in comparison, but it’s also a more linear game in structure. The game’s more of an actual journey rather than revolving around a central hub area. Crazy replay value too. Now that I think about it, I don’t think I’ve ever played another game with so many divergent choices that actually mattered before. It’s like they took everything from Kingmaker, toned down all the questionable stuff, then cranked up all the good things up to 11.

There’s a reason why I say the leap from Kingmaker to WotR is similar to the difference between DOS1 to DOS2. Except arguably better, because DOS2 lost a lot of the exploration aspect from the first game while going all in on combat, while WotR doesn’t really sacrifice anything.

Words cannot explain my hype <3 Owlcat might be my favorite company yet (and yes, it might be partly due to them including "owls" in their name :] ).

Does that mean I can no longer recruit Lamashtu worshippers to my main council, instate it as the nationally favoured worship and instigate policies that reward and support the creation of cross-breed aberrations and abominations through normally/previously socially taboo intimate conduct? Awww....

Tsanna and nok-nok were good quality....

I meant the questionable gameplay stuff in regards to how the kingdom management basically threw off the game’s pacing. WotR has management stuff but you don’t have to run all the way back to your base to run it this time around, and there don’t appear to be any sign of hard time limits leading to an immediate game over either.

As far as what you just said, you can still do pretty similar stuff here. There’s advisory meetings in chapter 3, and the suggestions and arguments your companions come up with at the table are pretty amazing for something that’s otherwise pretty minor. You even get the option of asking why some companions have apparently invited themselves to the table since some have really sketchy backgrounds (one is a literal thief showing up during supply logistics meetings), and others obviously have zero political experience (though the player character may not have any either).

Although admittedly none of the companions are as good as Nok-Nok was IMO (perfect example on how to write a goblin and justify his presence in your party pretty damn well at that), but he’s super hard to top. WotR companions as a complete package are still written much better than the Kingmaker cast.

(I also feel like Tsanna was originally going to be a party member, since she got way more focus than most of the other NPC advisors. The only thing Kingmaker was missing was a well meaning but morally questionable cultist, and I don’t count Nok Nok because he was actually sane in a super roundabout way.)

I figured, hehe, I was mostly making a joke, but that's still good stuff to hear ^.^

Circumstantial at best. The only reason patch 4 wasn’t released concurrently to the panel (as by their own admission it was supposed to) is that they noticed some annoying last minute bug and delayed it.

Was it not obvious from the start, I mean I already saw this when I was introduced to the ''totally not dorian pavus'', sassy vampire character of Astarion who seemed to be just created to bring over all of the Bioware/Inquisition fans desperate for another DAI type experience in Bioware's decline. And that worked as i've seen tons of articles from the bio fans making those comparisons, i've seen a lot of the artist making fanart for the character say things like ''I don't know what BG3 is but I love astarion'', ''I never played this game but I love vampire sass'' lmao. My fear is that, as someone else posted on the subreddit, they'll focus too much on catering to these ''new fans'' posting on their social medias, and forget to make the game they initially set out to make.

I wonder what kind of game "the game they initially set out to make" really is. What are the chances that they're actually trying to make what they initially set out to make...? Like, "something that gets us as many players in one go as possible".

Not really. Then again it's not like they ever told us anything about how the production is going, so there's that.

What about sidequests, though? From what Hikari said, it's quite linear, so very dissimilar in structure to BG1&2, which thrived on sidequests and exploration. Still, I'm very excited to play Pathfinder (both Kingmaker and WotR) and whatever Owlcat cooks up next.


BioWare, actually, Black Isle (proto-Obsidian)/Interplay just published it. They made Fallout 1&2, Dark Alliance II, Planescape: Torment and Icewind Dale. Then went on to bankrupt and so the planned third instalments to BG, BG:DA and FO were not done by them. Sadly.


Yep. Though "gritty" isn't really how I'd describe BG; it was dark and serious and epic and funny in perfect proportions, but from I see BG3's "dark" and "funny" is different than BG1&2's in tone/execution. Larian-brand humour?


You're right and I wish I saw that and questioned things before getting incredibly hyped and happy about the game for almost a year. It does seem to primarily cater to "modern BioWare fans" in addition to D:OS fans.

But they are not even close to each other... Except for arrogance, but Astarion is able to manipulate. Although I love the characters of this author (for example Fenris), but Dorian story was surprisingly boring. Although the most terrible thing that happened in DAI is Cole. Especially if you read a book about him before the game. Astarion is generally compared to many characters, but in fact, at this stage, he does not look like any of these.

Evil characters are rarely found ^ ^ in games. God Bless Tyranny

Astarion has a good design, but his writing is significantly different from Bioware characters. And as long as this is the case, I don't see anything wrong with the fact that some character visually attracts new people.

Back then, i really enjoyed the DOS2 update videos, they were usually around 10-15 mins, on-point, included some silly but enjoyable humour, they were more humble than epic which i liked more personally, they gave interesting sneak peeks into development (they were usually recorded in one of the offices, which would be hard to do now due to covid) and provided an in-general overview of new additions/changes. They were also accompanied with patch notes in writing.

Im not against PFH-s but have to say so far i enjoyed them less then larian's old update videos (probably i would've enjoyed them better without the technical difficulties and if they are a little shorter overall). I prefer the type of update they did for patch3, tbh.

Anyhow, either via a new PFH or a community update, im really looking forward to what patch 5 contains as i was excited when swen said it will focus on features. It is a good game already but some of the core features definitely can use some improvement/overhaul so i will be happy either way if they can improve on gameplay. If they really address the feedback a lot of people on these forums and on reddit gave i can live with any type of presentation format they use.

I hate to be a buzzkill but I think wrath of the righteous is seriously lacking in the story department. From the little discussion I had with other people about it, it seems like it is because of a weak source material, which honestly is not a good excuse. The companion cast of this game is probably the best I've seen in years, but still, a weak story seriously drag this game down

Ok so having just re-played DA:I - aside from the sassy irreverent attitude, Astarion is not that similar to Dorian at all... I agree with Nyloth here. He is not the same sort of character.
(Although I don't quite understand the people who claim to love Astarion and write fanfic etc about him without ever having played BG3, but whatever floats their boat I suppose!)

Also, weren't the original BG games created by Bioware? So what's wrong with having Bioware/Dragon Age fans become Larian/BG3 fans, exactly?

There is no One True Pathway to this game...
Some people arrive here with a DnD background, some have played Larian games before, some have played the original BG games, some just enjoy RPGs in general, such as Dragon Age series, etc, and some people are trying this sort of game for the first time ever.

Larian are still "making the game they initially set out to make". We don't even know what is in the rest of the game yet! We can only judge by what we've seen so far, and on the verge of a big patch that's likely going to change things.

Do they need to? Larian communication issues aside, software bugs tend to be frustrating, annoying and difficult to pin down 99% of the time - but probably only interesting to the game's programmers.

Unless it's some very entertaining bug, like this one:
https://twitter.com/_taylorswope/status/1205252714680045568

That's true. Underestimating the amount of manpower needed to fix a single but important bug can be insane sometimes.

About the bug you linked -> Holy shit. Reminds me of a certain terminal we tried to fix. I had 15 people from 2 different countries investigating the mysterious case of a vending machine not being able to sell coca-cola. Like everything else worked but if a cola can was placed it wouldn't work most of the time( sometimes it would).

We checked the software code endless times, the hardware was replaced and...nothing. No coca cola in that particular building in UK for whatever reason. 1 month of 15 people working a few hours per day only on that issue to try to locate the bug.

Until we eventually figured out the country was the issue. We had to pretend that vending machine is in France and all of a sudden it worked. Why? Considering exactly the same machine worked if placed anywhere else but in that building? God help me I don't know.

The level of complexity of software/ hardware interactions reach abysmal level sometimes. Even in games.

it's called - I don't know what it is. but. first, it's a vampire. secondly, you can build your advertising on this. because vampires are popular in certain communities. as a result, advertising works both for the artist and for the original product