Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Mega-threads and Guides Early Access gameplay feedback compendium

Hereby also my impressions and feedback.

Overall
Liked the game a lot already, seems like a very good implementation of 5e DnD and offers a lot of great roleplay opportunities. The story is interesting and I'm curious to see what happens next.

Combat
- the lack of combat options in combination with sometimes high miss chances can be frustrating. Though this will likely get better as you increase in level. Also the items you find with abilities are a good option to give characters more to do in combat.
- initiating combat from stealth is sometimes confusing. It was not always clear why I was being suddenly drawn into combat, maybe I triggered some cut scene or something but I didn't feel like it was very clear how I could set-up an ambush without being spotted.
- shove is way to powerful in some encounters. Especially towards the end of early access there are two encounters where a simple shove can kill characters immediately. In one turn three of my characters died from being pushed off something.
- jump is also too powerful in combat since it's a free disengage.
- there are naturally some bugs, such as the ranger's colossal slayer not always triggering when it should.
- enemy turns can take quite long. I wonder if groups of enemies next to each other in the inititiative order could move at the same time. Or at least act faster by reducing the time they need to calculate their next actions
- some encounters included a lot of enemies while in DnD early levels there are not so many tools to deal with large groups of weak enemies (and larger HP pools of goblins makes it more difficult to get rid of them quickly). It might make more sense to keep encounter size a bit smaller early on in the campaign. Especially the very large group of goblins in their main camp comes to mind.

Character progression, abilities, items
- choices at level-up seem limited for some classes (fighter and rogue notably). Likely this will improve with multi-classing being present.
- just a selfish and subjective wish: please add the Gloomstalker subclass for ranger
- items are great. They feel unique and magic items are not found on every corner which makes finding one feel good.
- the way the rogue sneak attack damage is presented is confusing. Not very obvious that at lvl 3 it progresses to 2d6 damage

skill checks
- not very clear why I have advantage or disadvantage on skill checks sometimes
- for nature/perception/religion etc. skill checks it's often not clear what I have discovered/learned when walking around environments
- randomness can sometimes feel too strong. At one point I had to find a passage into the big end of early access environment. I knew there would be a secret door because all my characters failed a perception check. But I was locked out of accessing the new environment because I could redo the perception checks. That consequence felt too strong and of course I reloaded to get a positive check so I could proceed.
- I sometimes felt like the randomness also detracted from my character build fantasy. Like my ranger with 16 Wisdom and proficiency in perception would fail a perception check while one of my party members with low wisdom and no proficiency succeeded. These kind of situations happened a bit too often. I think because the main determinant is the d20 roll, compared to the relatively small differences in bonuses from attribute and proficiency.

Exploration
- the maps felt too busy for me and confusing to navigate, making it feel a bit claustrophobic, more like a theme park and less like a real wilderness area to explore. Probably not easy to change but I would feel it could be better to space out the content a bit more, for example by having separate maps with each some more wilderness to explore.
- I like the verticality but the camera is not always easy to navigate when some characters are on the ground and others are high up.

Story, quests, companions
- the freedom to determine in which order to do quests is great but this freedom also resulted in some side effects for me. One quest I wanted to wait to progress but on the other side of the map I got drawn into an encounter with some random thieves/robbers and/or an ogre and apparently it turned some old lady on the other side of the map hostile. There was no way for me to know there was a link between these two groups so it felt a bit frustrating.
- the story feels interesting and mysterious. not much to add on that for now.
- companions can indeed be a bit too negative, as others have said. They're also a bit over the top and over dramatic. A character like the druid leader would be a nice addition to have a more reasonable person there .