Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback [Spoilers] New-to-Everything Player's Feedback

Hi Everyone,

After about 1.5 Playthroughs and a couple of abandoned restarts I thought it was time for some feedback, that's what EA is for after all.
As for my background, I have not played any Baldur's Gate games before nor DOS and I don't know anything about DnD aside from a vague idea of what Pen and Paper RPGs are about.
Because of that many of my problems might just be me not understanding mechanics or problems with DnD rules that cannot really be changed.
I also went through my first try completely blind (I did check DnD mechanics when I stumbled upon terms I didn't know) as I read the recommended way to play is to just go with whatever happens.
I will go further into the no reloads policy later.

So first some of the (probably) usual stuff.
I needed a WAY more expansive tutorial of the mechanics.
Some explanation of how character progression works compared to action RPGs, which I have more experience with, would have been nice.
I had no Idea that the stats (str, dex etc. not sure what their name is here) from character creation are what I would be stuck with for most of the game(or all of EA if I want to take a feat).
Also the needing 2 points for any change (I guess that's DnD? But I don't get it there either).What's that for except a trap for new players?

The UI needs work.
There is something weird with not registering clicks that makes the game feel unresponsive, especially noticable when switching characters via their portraits.
Controling the entire group was painful with companions walking through ground effects or getting stuck, me switching so I could move them manually just for the rest of the gang to come running back.
Sneaking with the group was a nice(not) combination of both those problems.
I can't tell how many times I have wasted potions because my brain for some reason thought 1 is the basic attack. Please let me change that (maybe that's already possible and I just missed it).
A bunch of those little buttons (changing characters during dialogue or the inventory sorting) are easy to miss, some part of the tutorial maybe.
Also PLEASE give me a panic pause button, actual pause not that turn based stuff. Allow me to give orders in pause that I can cancel if I notice I made a mistake after clicking.

Dialogue Skillchecks.
I played a ranger pretty good with nature/animals etc. pretty bad with everything else. The point: I Thought I had a specialist that could do only one thing but that somewhat reliably.
Sooo many situations where I got 50/50 chances at interactions where success leads to nothing useful anyway. I traded my ability at combat and social skills to still be eaten by bears and be belittled by a SQUIRREL!
I bet in DnD the worlds best surgeon kills every 3rd patient. I know my character is still fairly low level, but why would I not just take combat skills, the one outcome I can get 100% percent of the time.
I just feel many of the early checks in dialogue are too hard, even with a 75% success chance (a DC of 5, haven't seen many of those) my "specialist" still messes up 1 of 4 tries and chains are just as likely as misses in combat.
It's not like most of those checks lead to some insane reward.

Dialogue options.
First, an effort was made, credit where it's due. More is needed though.
There is almost always an option to offer help, the typical good guy answer from every RPG ever, often some variations of that to allow a nice amount of roleplay.
There is also often the option to rob or attack. I guess if I am not a good samaritan I must be a thug or a psychotic killer.
Options to leave or tell people I am not interessted in their problems if they cannot help me with mine exist which is very nice but that just makes it stand out more in those cases where they don't.
I am often missing the more moderate, reasonable but not nice guy responses.
What I wish for the most is the ability to tell Shadowheart to mind her own god damn business after this b insults me in every sentence. Seriously you initiated dialogue with me, I've never talked to you, I am not following you, you are following me!
IRL I would have a restraining order against you, f off.
Sorry for the rant.

Balancing. I will keep it short, you have probably heard it all before.
Ground effects and consumables feel! (not sure if they actually are) overbearing. I was wondering what I and the enemies even have weapons for (or armor for that matter).
Why do I feel like every enemy is stronger than me? In addition to outnumbering me their average dmg feels like double that of mine. Where are the goblins getting those 1-2 dmg rolls?
I am not a fan the extreme RNG (Yes I know, DnD rules, that's how probability works etc.).
So let me ask the DnD players (that I assume cannot reload idk). How frequently does your party get wiped out? And I don't mean because you attacked a dragon at level 1, just because of bad RNG and maybe one or two not ideal decisions?
This really brings me to my main problem with the current game:

Am I supposed to reload or not?

I went into this game with the ironman mindset, where you don't take unnecessary risks and when things start going south you deal with it or run, but usually these games are designed to allow recovering from that.
I assumed when I did everything to the best of my knowledge and ability I would not lose. Sure, things would not go the way I want them to more often than not, but I would not have to reload and instead would have my own personal story afterwards.
Here I ran into a couple of situations where I felt I had done nothing unreasonable that resulted in a game over. If this game had an ironman mode, I would have played it and uninstalled after those.

The first example was the gith patrol. I played a gith myself, had Liesl with me (The companion I trusted the most then), that kept pushing me to find that patrol and saying how that was the only way (no reason to doubt that right? They are likely to know far more than some random druid that saw a tadpole for the first time a couple of days ago and since that has been rotting in a cage). And I am one of them (where is that skillcheck for my character's knowledge? I am supposed to be more experienced than her).
So I go to them, party at level 3, and I get wiped the f out.

Second example was my first encounter with my favourite mole. My party, now at level 4, was sneaking through the underdark (tbf even going there seemed like a bad idea but it's like half of EA and I cannot reach level 5).
mole burrows under my party, turns around and jumps at me 3 of 4 down before I even get to do anything. Last one tries running, it's as futile as every other time I've tried it, and reload.
That DM would have been kicked out of the house and never invited to play with us again.

There where a couple of interactions too, where a streak of bad luck led to game over, I would like those to be extremely rare, not happening at least once per act.

Wow that got long, anyway I am interested in what some of you think about that. Where did I mess up badly? What mechanics did I miss?

Hi DasSchn1tzel. Thanks for your detailed feedback; it's good to have some from people coming from different backgrounds.

Intro
You're right that the tutorial needs work. There are lots of things that are not explained in the current tutorial, and it's relatively easy to miss the tutorial windows that do pop up. As a frequent pen and paper D&D player, even I had trouble figuring some things out.
It would be nice if, on the character creation screen, you could scroll down to see what abilities each class gets at following levels.
Larian also needs to improve the explanation of stats and change the default starting arrays to be more player friendly (more even values, more optimal distributions. Or failing that, remove the default arrays, start every stat at 8, and make the player manually add all the points.)

UI
Yep, I agree with everything you said here, and so do many players based on other forum posts.

Dialogue Skill Checks
This is somewhat just a feature of D&D 5e. A level 1-3 character with proficiency in a skill and a high stat for it(16) will have a +5 in that skill. Average characters have somewhere from a +0 to +3 in a random skill, meaning that your "expert ranger" only has a bonus of (5-2=)3 more than a typical character. This comes out to succeeding 15% more of the time, which is really not much compared to the randomness of a d20.
-A suggested fix for this is for Larian to implement more "Passive Checks", where you don't roll, but instead use your Passive Skill Score = 10+skill bonus, which would mean your ranger would always succeed at a DC 15 nature check whereas other characters would always fail.
-Another suggestion is to make heavy use of Guidance in the game. This is a cantrip spell (it can be cast infinitely) so someone can cast it on yourself before any and every dialogue. This adds 1d4 to your skill checks, which is not insignificant.
-Another suggestion is for Larian to add more stages of success/failure instead of all-or-nothing. E.g., if you fail by <5 of the DC, something only mildly bad happens. Whereas if you fail by >5, something worse happens.

Dialogue Options
You can just tell Shadowheart to leave your group :P
But yeah, I don't think anyone would complain if we had more dialogue options. Especially in response to the companion's snarkiness.

Balancing
Larian has already reduced the effects of surfaces (I believe they eliminated surface creation from cantrips??), but yes I also hope they make acid arrows and alchemist fire flasks etc less prevalent.
Enemy Strength: Without knowing the exact build of your party and your combat tactics, I can't really comment on this. Some enemies are supposed to be stronger than any individual PC. It is only through a party that a one can overcome such a threat.

RNG is a big discussion in the forums. Some arguing that the current randomness is fine, some saying there is way too much failure, some even saying that Larian has implemented a rng that is weighted toward low numbers. Larian has said they're looking into using weighted die rolls of some kind, but at this point it is very unknown how that will be implemented.


Reloading
I have moderately extensive PnP D&D experience. TPK's (total party kills) happen very rarely. Even single character death happens decently infrequently, especially in this version of D&D. In most campaigns I have played in, <2 characters die throughout the full campaign. However, BG3 is a video game and has reloading, whereas pen and paper D&D does not. I would be very unhappy/bored with a BG3 video game where my characters never died and I never had to reload. I want the challenge, and the ability to reload means that the challenge can be upped.
On a normal difficulty, I'd expect to have to reload approximately once between each boss fight. So in BG3 EA, in a first playthrough especially, it wouldn't be unreasonable to reload for ~2-5 encounters (depending on your playthrough choices). Thinking back, I reloaded: spider fight (2x), Grove Gate seige (1x), gith (1x), random fire trap (1x), and then maybe 1-2 more times I can't remember. So I reloaded 4-5 encounters, some multiple times.

To be honest, given your 0 experience with BG and D&D, I think expecting to start right away with an "ironman" mode was probably too ambitious. Especially since (I believe this was only mentioned verbally by Larian studios during a multiple hour long interview), the EA is supposed to be somewhere between "normal" and "hard" difficulties.
So yes, I think you are expected to reload, at least in the current version of EA.

Thanks again for the feedback! Posts like these, discussing the entirety of someone's playthrough, should be very helpful for Larian to improve the game.

Hey there!

As mentioned, it's very much appreciated for people to take the time and effort to write up a well thought out feedback report like this, and it's especially useful to have people coming to the game from different play-styles and different backgrounds. Many folks have discussed a lot of what you've put forward here and agreed with it, but each new report, from anew player, who reached the same conclusions on their own, really does matter. So thanks for taking the effort!


You're right; the game does not tell you nearly as much as it should. It is almost as if the designers do not want you to know how things work other than in very broad generalities, or that they are afraid of putting in even a moderate amount of words. Nearly everything needs a better explanation and more detail.

Regarding your raw ability scores. It's not a trap so much as it's a broader grading to give more flexibility and adaptability to individual characters. Your stat rolls may often come out uneven, some feats give one ability point plus some other perks, rather than two points, and some abilities and effects from monsters use your raw scores rather than your modifiers - overall, your stat range goes from 1-20 for a mortal adventurer, and in 5e you don't ever expect it to be able to exceed that except in extreme circumstances. The game does need to give players a better description of what each ability score represents - right now they just have drop downs to show you what skills are dependent upon them, with no real explanation, and it's not helpful.

If you're curious about Ability Scores:


The overbearing nature of skill checks and the floundering that many are feeling is not necessarily an effect of D&D or of 5e, but mostly it's a result of how it's been implemented in this game at the moment. The checks come in over fa too many things that should be left in rolepaly space, the checks are far too all or nothing, for social situations, the DCs are generally higher than they should be for level 1-4 characters, and Larian also uses a cruel 'successive check' philosophy that will throw multiple checks in a row at you, for which you only need to fail one, any one, to be dumped back at the same identical full failure state just as if you hadn't tried at all. It's not a good system, and it's not particularly fun. Larian's DMing cold be described, at the moment, as the worst kind of sweaty dm who wants you to fail the things they want you to fail, and will make sure of it, so that they can jump to their pre-prepared failure dialogue... they're in love with their mary-sues, and your character only really exists to be the fall-line for their superior interlocutor... every time. You must be the 'dumb' person in every situation... even when it makes no sense, because the writing demands that anything introduced by any other character be reacted to in a particular set of ways. The only time the PC gets to have the upper hand in any situation are the situations where you're engaging with NPCs that are clearly designed with the intent that you're actually playing one of Larian's characters... who have to have the last word on everything. Sorry for the rant...

At any rate, regarding reloading, Larian have said that they want to make failure interesting and compelling, and fun, so that people aren't tempted just to save-scum through everything... but they have not, at all, delivered on this in any way, yet. Failures just feel like punishments and, and often the result of a failure is the same as if you had simply choices the exact opposite choice which required no check. I say 'yet' because I don't want to rip on Larian, so much as note that they have a lot of time still to fix these things, but they also have a lot of things that they badly need to fix.

Thanks again for taking the time to give your feedback!

Some of the encounters are level based, I did the same with the Gith Patrol and got wiped out pretty fast. I know another would be the swamp requires some levels under your belt as well. I have no experience with the underdark section yet so I don't know about that.

You mentioned additional damage in another section, it's more than likely poison on a weapon or sneak attack.