Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Illusion of choice is everywhere.

TL:DR - Conversational choices that don't dramatically alter the outcome of a conversation are a waste of time and 'saving throws' in a conversation need to be more fluid then pass/fail/pointless. There should be degrees of a rolling well or badly.


I have been enjoying the game so far and have run through a good bit of the availible content so far (currently in the under dark). I was REALLY hoping this game would bring about choices that matter. I can see the effort to make this so, but far to often 'saving' throws in conversations have a win or lose outcome. I'm not speaking to the rightful gripes about choosing the character to talk, or balancing good / evil choice paths.

What I man is Omelumn for example. You go through 2 saving throws in this discourse that no matter how many times repeated or result of said choices you arrive at the same end. The only difference is how you talking chars condition afterwards. This is understandable to a point however it's a simple example of a problem that persists in many verbal encounters. All rolls lead to a pass / fail / pointless situation. It would be far more interesting if a critical success or failure yielded some game altering experience outside of the more mundane result of same dialog no matter what with a status effect on the talker after if failed. I realize this would put a lot more complexity into the conversational chains. I personally despise when a game gives you 3 or 4 responses that always lead to the same result with no effect or the same effect.

I know it's not an easy ask, but please stop putting in meaningless response differences or closed conversational forks. If my character is rude as hell to someone , the end result should be wildly different then if I'm personable or simply dull. I don't mean different as say the wrong thing and be forced to kill the character. If I'm nice to a trader or charismatic, I should get better prices. Same sort of result if I just scare the holy hell out of them with my characters raw presence (and a high roll on intimidation).

These are the sort of varied results a PnP group would get with rolls and a DM. You can't full replicate that in a game but you can certainly do better then this and most other 'choice' offering rpgs out there.