Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Long Rest Balance

I imagine the game wil have some sort of ration requirement for rest like many others, probably with a hefty weight or limited supply. You said you have not played the prior BG games....well friend let me introduce you the wonderous F5 button. You (hopefully) will need to save after every fight, every skill check, and before making any decisions. Baldur's Gate 1, the very first fight in the 'real world' you would come across was pretty much guarantee'd to kill you if you didn't have in-depth game knowledge, knew how to kite, or just absurdly lucky rolls. This was pretty much every fight from then on. You could crank down the difficulty but there wasn't a single 'easy' fight on normal and above even if you had ultimate game knowledge and built your character perfectly. Dice do not care. Even with sub-normal difficulty, you could just run into a string of bad rolls and die. That was all with the fairly easy ability to rest.

Resting also gives you a chance to interact with your party members, maybe craft, maybe scribe scrolls, maybe alchemicalize some potions and it will definitely be used to progress party member romances and quests. Requiring rest for spells and abilities instead of just making it gameplay pointless means you get to experience these things no matter your playstyle. Cool-downs instead of hard limits is the Divinity Games style, which means you develop rotations and rarely have to adapt to what you have available, and (no offense) is extremely easy and monotonous. Once you got your core spells, every fight was pretty much the same. Leap to a ledge for advantage, cast a few skills, auto-attack a few times, rinse repeat until all mobs are dead. In Baldur's Gate (and other dnd games) if you blow all of your high level spells right of out of the gate, what if you can't rest afterwards? What if a gelatinous cube is going to bust through a wall like the kool-aid man mid combat? You find yourself saving spells, because you know at some point you're going to need them. This adds artificial difficulty to every unknown encounter but rewards you in your gameknowledge and subsequent playthroughs because you'll know just how far you can push your group before you do have to rest.

Or when you do have to use your higher level spells, they all roll 1's anyways and you begin to better understand alcoholism.