Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Serious question — is anyone from Larian reading?

I was submitting dozens and dozens of bugs/tweaks/suggestions. Ive almost entirely stopped as there are 4,000 threads with 43,000 comments in these forums alone. I submitted a bug through their launcher yesterday saying as much after someone in r/baldursgate3 posted Larian Responding. I thought, huh, maybe they are reading those. So I am waiting to see if anyone over there sees / cares that people might start feeling like they are screaming into the void

They have periodically interacted in the past, and Raze is an actual employee who is active here and on Steam. However, things have changed compared to how they were 10-20 years ago and employees have to be extremely careful what they say because it will be taken to be an official policy statement: that has been the case for many years now. Rather than "vaguebooking" and still have the risk of slipping up, it's better to just remain silent; and that includes the mods' forum, I don't get any sneak previews of what might be happening. At times like this it's especially risky because the whole point of EA is to gather feedback in order to ascertain player preferences and what actually works, whereas any sort of official commentary does the opposite in that it is typically regarded as a statement of intent that is set in stone.


Well I'm saying that. I've asked if they might provide more details, which may or may not be forthcoming, but I have first-hand information that they are taking note.

Even with something as basic as that I'm slightly loath to mention in case it encourages some people to shout louder, but that kind of misses the point, which is that they will be taking a very broad view of all types of feedback, however shouty or quietly spoken.

Maybe they really did get swamped with way more interest/sales from the EA than they were expecting, but these forums are moving at a pretty steady clip. It took me a while to go through the backlog, and I think after another week it will be too much to survey.

Challenge now is really nailing the thread title, or lighting up a convo that's already commanding multiple pages to get noticed lol. Least Vometia can make a sticky.

I've been hanging forums like this for a while, and this one seems solid, but I feel Orbax's pain. Its nice to have a community liaison type person who participates on the forums, even if they aren't a dev or able to speak for the devs. Just somebody on payroll, who's job it is to play along with us.

For organization might be helpful to sticky this link...

https://larian.com/support/baldur-s-gate-3#feedback

Obviously its right there in the main game launcher, but some people may have missed it. The first couple bugs I encountered I was able to squash reading through that list (Crash before switching to DirectX.11, using the Nautilus control with Lae'zel causing NPCs not to populate on the beach etc.) Even a detailed well written feedback overview might never reach the people upstairs if only posted here. For the one off bugs, and feature requests I'm sure that's the place to send, since it also gives the option to attach a save and a screenshot.

I think the forums, this section anyway, will prove useful in crystalizing the most common gripes or wishes, but probably will need to be culled and re-listed continuously in block points, or it'll just get lost in the pile.

It would be cool to hear more about what the Devs would like us to actually concentrate on, or how people who just hopped on here can be helpful. Like clearly from the last announcement, they were trying to track impressions of the character creator. I think some of the more exotic head features/models show a lot of clipping or wonky animations or weird textures at lower graphics settings right now, which might have something to do with some of Basic dude's preferences eg. shorter hair no beard etc. With the female hairstyles, I noticed something similar with braids through ears, or an unnatural bounce to some of the pony's that's hard to see until you're actually out of the char creator and into the game. Its hard to know which things the Devs are interested in hearing about, but maybe if they had a liaison periodically posting topics or polls for guided feedback it'd be easier to dive into it more systematically or productively?

If they are anything like me, after the project goes out the door, I have a list of things I have to correct before the rubber really hits the road. If they're not paying too much attention to the forum now, perhaps they will when they've eased their consciences enough about the things THEY know they have to do.

I havent been a part of the dos1 and dos 2 EA but what I hear from people they did greatly use player feedback. How much of that means reading the forums though I havent really heard them comment on.

I inmagine they take the odd few minutes thst they arent hard at work on something (like lunchbrakes maybe) poking their head in and out of the forums. Or maybe they got someone whos job it is to make notes of what subjects come up frequently?

I dont envy that person though, whoever he might be. Sounds like a crappy job to me.🤣

A mixed bag I would say.
They changed, fine-tuned and improved a lot of stuff, but at the same time they blatantly chose to ignore glaring flaws that were obvious to everyone in the user base (i.e. the armor system creating more issues than the ones it solved, the terrible randomized itemization, the exceedingly steep progression curve/power escalation) just to come back a couple of years later saying something among the lines of "Whew, that thing surely sucked, right guys? Boy, that was a mistake. Too bad now it's too late to do anything about it".

I hope they won't repeat this pattern with BG3. What's there is already impressive, but there are a couple of macro-monstrosities that are in dire need to be addressed now and not be let as a rotting foundation to build over.

+1

Been in the same position before having done community management work before, appreciate the effort here and thank you for the posts. Glad to hear they are taking note.

It has been only about a week, I'm not expecting them to respond to every single thread, but I do hope we'll see a community update regarding major feedback points soon though. And I would very much like to see more results from the analytics like the Vault Boy!

@Tuco , seriously, just give em a bit of time, its literally been a week. Have you by any chance considered that they themselves might not have an answer to those bigger questions yet? I am sure they need to think such things trough and discuss them internally, considering all that a decision might entail.

some problems are easier to fix then others, unless we are coding the game we can't say for certain which is easy, which is hard.

Tuco is correct. There is a GCD event or w/e video where Sven talks about OS2 and mentions how armor system was loathed but they were stubborn and said "they just don't understand " and regretted shipping with it. Can't link it atm cuz using phone at work lol.

But if OS2 EA is anything to go by, they won't say much. We won't know what's changing until it's happening and it does suck. For me its a double hit bc I know they can be stubborn so all the stuff I've given feedback about could be for nothing and they just say "nah". Stuff that badly needs changing. All we can do is wait.

Ive been an application architect & developer for almost 20 years now and I call that first week the white glove week. You know its going to have issues, people will be frustrated, and there is a good chance you lose their confidence in your system if handled poorly. It is a time of high communication; I PLAN on not sleeping for 2 or 3 days, and I respond to as many people as I can either personally or with broadcast messages addressing the common issues so people stop reporting them and I give ETAs and what we are trying to accomplish. I usually have a 24x7 conference set up for the first 48 hours so people can dial in with critical issues any time they need. These are at multi billion dollar companies, they arent small groups of people. Nothing like 1 million people downloading the game, but at a certain point scale doesnt matter, as its your end directing communication. Now, most of my stuff involves peoples ability to work and can impact revenue so its a different paradigm and criticality but at the end of the day I have found that that first week is a lot of hand holding and soothing efforts along with your dev cycles. You want cheerleaders, not critics. You get cheerleaders by making them part of the team.

Thats experience from Fortune 50 and Fortune 100 companies. What they are doing is odd. Why make a forum to talk when you don't plan on talking. Why make a feedback system that you don't plan on acknowledging. This isn't the only thread showing confusion at the process being used here and that is dangerous as people spam and create noise or they stop reporting as there is no trust that it is even being read. It doesnt take much to make a few posts and they go a long way.

Somebody called Jess_Larian has been posting about the hotfixes. I think she specifically said "we are listening" in one of the thread titles too.

Edit: here is the link

Ah, but you see there's one thing you forget. We're all fucking vendor locked.

Instead of AWS it's Larian, instead of Cloudflare it's WotC.

Or sub in Oracle somewhere.

Honestly, you get shit tier answers from official forums and have more mileage out of Stackoverflow. Just saying.

Actually this is one area in which I give Larian top marks. I do think they have people looking through everything that's being debated in these threads, and even reading and giving due consideration to posts that are of a critical nature. So when @vometia says Larian people are reading this stuff, I can believe it.

And I will go even further and give the mods on this forum top marks. As mods go they are great, and especially in that they have been very nice and considerate and fair towards those of us who have been critics of the game without trying to shut us up and make us go away (even when a handful of other posters have tried to do just that). There are forums out there that have nothing to do with Larian where saying anything even mildly critical of BG3 gets you attacked, warned, or banned. So it is quite amazing to me that Larian's own forum is arguably the most welcoming forum of all points of view on their game.

5 posts - 3 in announcements, 2 in general - since the game was launched is not what I call involved. it is a .0001% response rate and high level, "We are listening". And while I very much appreciate Vometia's promise, what we have here is us saying "I want to talk to God" and the pope saying "oh, I did, so dont worry about it". You can't logic away the fact that that communication has happened when people have the perception it hasn't. Whatever comms there have been have not fulfilled what some people are looking for. Is it non-existant? No. Could it be better and not take much effort? Probably, yeah.

So, this morning i submitted a bug through their feedback system with this issue. I just got an email, right now:

Sorry to hear that you feel distressed about not being heard (enough)! Rest assured, we are reading, listening and lurking across all of Larian's main platforms. A lot of feedback is also scooped up when no one thinks we're looking!

I do appreciate how it may feel wondering if the message ever goes through at all. We're responding to as much as we can, as fast as we can.

We appreciate all the time and effort everyone spends in helping with making Baldur's Gate 3 better, including yours. So do share your thoughts and know that there are many eyes in the forest, and they are always lurking... Always watching.

For now, the team is fully engaged in further developing the game, fixing issues and constantly looking to improve the game, and make sure everybody has their early launch technical issues smoothed out. A lot of this is made so much easier based on feedback from the community, such as your own. So, thank you!

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Awesome. Thats what I wanted to hear. Cheers, Larian!

As I said in a previous post "We are listening" is basically a mandatory opening formality these days.
What many of us would love to hear about is what did they gather with this listening. What's catching their attention and possibly what are they planning to do about it.

For instance I know I may start to sound insanely obsessed with my personal crusade against their control scheme (yes, the whole "chain/unchain vs RTS controls" thing again) but I'd love to know if they at least REGISTERED that the current feedback on the topic is basically a perfect 100% against their solution and more importantly if they are going to address the problem or shrug and throw us a "We aren't touching that thing, get used to it".

The main thing I really just want to know from Larian is what are bugs, what are design choices and what are simply not yet implemented. It'd help me guide my feedback, especially on changes from 5e to BG3.

Having a road map(not with specific times, just things they are working on) would help. So we don't keep repeating same feedback when it is already being looked at, instead we can post and give feedback on other things that might not be on their radar.