Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Subclasses and Races versus Level Increase

More is not always better.

I was really struck by a recent RPS interview in which level cap wasn't commited to, but the designer mentioned that with less levels covering more content they can better design content without player running into content that is way too high level for them. And that's something which has been bothering me a lot in recent RPGs - be it D:OS1&2 essencially linear progression due to spikes in power, P:K wild swing in level of enemies you can run into within the same zone, or PoE1&2 and how easy it is to outlevel the content.

BG1&2 didn't have that problem. And that's because how slow leveling was. You had a lot of freedom in BG1&2, but you get a direction and you have to go out of your way to run into a content which is really too hard for your characters. If you run into hard encounter it might be 2 or 3 level too high for you - not 8 or 10. Even so such encounters were intentional, special, and were properly set up narratively.

My main dislike for D:OS2 and Kingmaker is lack of brevity. While game size can be a good marketing tool, it matters not if quality of the content is poor. People call Kingmaker a second coming of BG1, and I understand why, but I think they undersell how good BG1 content really was. Pathfinder seems to be picking up some steam now, but I am nearing 70 hours of playtime. Comperatively, BG1 completionist playthough with an expansion took me less then 45 hours. Even if Pathfinder has equal amount of good content as BG1, padding it out with tedious design, unnecessary systems and boring locations doesnt' make it better. Nor does it help that it's companions are talking a lot, while having an equal amount of depth as pretty much silent archetypes of BG1. So rather then slap more companions, spend more time on companions you have. Deeper rather then wider.