Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback SURVEY - Baldur's Gate 3 - Satisfaction Level V1.0

Now that Obsidian and InExile are part of one big company they could use the microsoft money to convince WotC to let them do something in Sigil again
On topic: Only a quarter of the reddit dwellers have played PST. Do we need a reddit mission to spread awareness of PST there?

One thing you guys might have not realized DOS:2 "feedback" has gathered in 4 YEARS less threads than BG3 in a month.

With a new, better game goes the expectation of a bigger playerbase. But if you sell a part of your game for full price you don't expect to outsell your previous success in a week.

The point is.... we wrote MORE than anyone wrote about DOS:2 since it was released as an EA. There's no fucking way they were ready for this. I think their feedback management might get a bit better over time especially they already have 80 + pages from discord, reddit and this forum.

The bigger question is what they are going to read. If you were Larian, which areas would you focus on:

Well I would totally focus on the compendium and that's why they have them to begin with.

We do have the " Mega Threads" section and only a couple of major subjects there so I think they are reviewing those too. After all they are filtered by moderators beforehand and normally free of " autism screech". RTwP vs TB being the exception compared to others. The compendium is waaaay cleaner with bulletpoints etc.

One thing to note is we have roughly 50k comments out of 1million + sold copies. Which means less than 5% of the community left a comment(Less than 5% aka probably around 10k people MAX).

We are literally ignorable by my standards.

Yeah, I hate to admit it, but pretty much the only reason I post here is to chat with you bastards. I just can't convince myself any of this is getting read... this is all just academic. As a DM, the conversations are thought provoking for what makes a good D&D story and a game fun, so it I think its just a good exercise in general to look at this stuff. Changing the game though? Nah. I've found the compendium/megathreads to be shallow and not address the larger issues which are fundamental philosophies and root cause analysis to explain chronic symptoms and how to fix them. They are the discussions someone would have in a meeting over this stuff and trying to incorporate this kind of feedback within what look to be agile dev cycles is not something that functions well.

Agile development methodology is iterative, not innovative. As soon as press "go" your deviation from origin is necessarily bounded by the myopic fog of war. They try to break epics and stuff down, but overall I have never found Agile to be an architects tool. Agile teams are what execute their slice of the vision. I am having a hard time imagining them rewriting anything fundamental as they most like have their 3,6,9, and 12 month plans mapped out with a 1 year countdown clock ticking away. Go back to square one and re-examine their fundamental approach to this? Hard sell. 1 million copies and a high rating on steam? Right now their buzzword is "Kaching" not "Rewrite". They have very little reason to truly care.

So, enjoy the chatrooms, I mean threads, and keep on keepin' on : D

i dont think i really disagree with the points you made in your post - altho tbh im not necessarily sure what you are driving at beyond adding your voice to what i would call a general sentiment in the forums that at this stage of the games development and considering the limited responses thus far from larian related to the forum's 'hot topics' that larian has a 'set in stone' vision for bg3 and significant changes to mechanics or rewrites of characters or narrative at this stage is probly unlikely (altho your post does come off a bit like trolling, but maybe that was also the goal lol ) - but i just wanted to highlight your quote below, bc i just think if this truly is the sentiment/stance that larian takes (even if its behind closed doors) its just a sad way to treat your community and fans, both old and new alike, so i hope its not the case. personally, i do think that there are some game mechanics and narrative points that should be addressed, but we'll likely have to wait until full launch to see how it all comes together

Its the difference between a hungry indie studio / dev & getting established. Halo blew the gaming world up when it came out. The studio was fun, interesting, and engaging. If we exclude rabid fans who think Halo 152 is so different and whoa, never seen this before!, the studio got stale after Halo 2. They ended their game, however, with the message "Help us take over the world!". How far they had come from "I hope we can do great things together."

If you watch the indie game the movie, it follows 3 indie devs. One guy said he would literally kill himself, and I believe him, if his game didn't do well. There is a thirst that some companies have and it usually takes the form of engagement. Some studios like Bioware earned a mandate on ME2&3 (forget about the end, was a good game). Andromeda wasn't their main studio and by then EA had bent the main studio over the barrel to spawn Anthem. They lost their autonomy they had fought so hard to earn.

What I am seeing here is a bizarre mandate feeling where its mainly "we are making this, we know you want it" and help us tweak it. I don't know if they know or are just ignoring the level of concern that there is over this. WotC didn't give it to them for 3 years or something because they said "go earn the right". Getting access to the right means you have to earn it all over again. If this bombs Id probably not buy a DOS3, Id wave them off as out of touch and repetitive.

I will amend my statement to "In the short run, they have very little reason to care". They are going to make their money on this. CEO can retire. The devs? Probably not. Will the studio survive a reinvestment of proceeds into another clone? The long run economics on this are concerning for the studio. This is going to be a bubble game that doesn't have any strong predictors of the future success if it doesn't have a differentiated product. Which, right now it isn't. Its a pig wearing D&D lipstick (not that bad, just felt like using the saying). Right now D&D is the more compelling part of this. If it was Blurplorps & Hengits I'd care...so...little. I happen to know the Shadovar that get mentioned in the arcane tower, I know theyre netherese casters. I can tie snippets of all of this into disgusting amounts of personal knowledge of D&D lore. If the note had said "I found some snurkbles" Id be like cool, wow this game has no story.

So, while I have 270+ hours in this, it was mainly because I enjoy testing things and its an entertaining enough platform to try a bunch of stuff and have enough "sweet, i CAN do that!" moments to be enjoyable. I overall think they have shot themselves in the foot this first month, and they are down to only 11 prior to launch now. Thats not a long time and they have WAY more of this game built already than EA. Major course corrections would have to be implemented across hundreds of fights and scenarios.

So - why care? Right now? Short run - they will sell, they will make money. Hands down. This is just too big of a property for it to not suck in a given number of people. 1 million EA is an example of that. Short run why NOT to care - ticking clock. What does changing REALLY get them in the short run? A miserable, frantic, and bug ridden mess from, tinkering under the hood on core issues. The timelines are going to be too tight to introduce haste into the dev process without truly measure the unintended consequences and the inability to have the time to adequately test. The reasons to care in the long run are much more expansive but the short run needs of creating a product preclude some of the things that make the long run so important. They have no reason to not care in the long other than this is seen as a the golden goose being planned with future expansions until the well dries out and by 2025 Larian is a name of the past.

100% speculation, yes its negative, but from everything I heard about previous titles compared to this, their attitude has changed to what all of this means and their position as to what they are delivering. Even doing horizontal comparisons to other games with short EA, EA, and extended EA, they are the lowest ranking for what you typically look at for EA - engagement, the appetite for scale of change, and what % of nuts are on bandsaw. Its an odd juxtaposition of variables and responses and I, Orbax the dumb guy, cannot find the magic hidden variable that makes it all make sense.

appreciate the follow-up - i agree with alot of your points regarding the realities of game development and publishing and where we are with larian at this stage and where we are likely to end up (can be frustrating at the same time tho lol)
i dont think your dumb,

@Orbax:
Well we'll see. The fact is this silence can mean a lot of things including the fact they are seriously considering certain changes and want to test things out before they actually comment on any thing. Remember they were buried under more money and feedback they imagined. ^^

Also Sven said , I quote " We will stop working on making BG3 when we run out of money*laught *".

We know they won't run out of money so let's keep the working part on xD

Also remember the "1 year EA" is taken based of DOS2. It's not DOS2. They are probably aiming for it, yes. But they can reconsider and give themselves a few more months, they never announced a release date. And they never made a title so big.

If i worked for Larian and read the last posts i would eat my keyboard tbh ^^

Haha, I've said many times I acknowledge the potential for me being incorrect. I wouldn't say I have HOPE that it is different, but I am intellectually prepared and willing, desiring even, to accept things to the positive. When I say "Care" I mean at the business & economy level. I am sure the individuals there are passionate, excited, and all have plastic swords and helmets at their desks and there is the occasional Nerf Gun fight in the halls as Sven wheels around on a segway cum chariot or something. People won't read what I wrote and say "He is right, I / we dont care". Its the project board where the 4 epics and 500 stories that are assigned out to teams getting funneled through Kanban procedures that doesn't care. It is the investors, producers, managers, and accountants that say "the reality is...". We can point to CD Projekt Red if we want, but also realize there are some fairly significant differences in their ground up engine build, hard core devs, Cinderella Story. People are giving them a lot of latitude because its never been done before, the goals breathtakingly aggressive, and a hard departure from their previous IP. We WANT IT TO BE GOOD SO BAD we will wait.

Right now this is like "yo, tweak your DOS engine to follow 5e rules better you scrubs". This isn't us running around in a new world, new lore, new mechanics, anything. Its so familiar its easy to poke at. Like the saying "familiarity breeds contempt" says, putting out "more of the same" needs to have some one, golden, thing to make it come out into the market and have people say that that ONE thing they EXCELLED at makes the game and allows the grace of repetition. If you go down your list of favorite games, you can probably pick out that 1 thing that made it amazing. Like Banner Saga, really good game series. There was a lot that was meh about it. Graphics? There aren't any. What a journey they take you on though, wow. There is always something. Some had a lot of #1s, things I would place at 10/10. However, some games have been 10/10 on things and ended up not being very fun. I do *like* Mass Effect: Andromeda, but why was it so meh compared to the others? All of the ingredients were there to have a great game but...just didn't happen. The repetition didn't work. If they don't ask themselves, after every time they sit down and play through something "am I having fun?", its a risk. There are areas in this game where I just have a hard time imagining them saying "that was awesome".

My profession happens to be in architecture but the value is best summed up by one exchange I had with a VP once after I spoke to them about a big plan.

VP: That is so much information and such a huge goal, I honestly can't even think of where to begin on something like that. It sounds great, but thats way too in the clouds for me to do anything with.
Me: Well, that is why you hired me. I can tell you, right now, 10 things you could start on *today* to move towards it and I could have a 3 month plan on your desk by the end of the week. [then I repeated my constant mantra]. It isn't hard, it isn't complex, but people would have to actually do it. This company fails over and over because of one thing - the inability or complete lack of appetite to execute change. It is hard to take blueprints and project them into the future and see the built product, that is my job - I gave you the blueprints so you could get an idea of the elements involved. What I am telling you to focus on is the end product and you let me handle how we get there. You have to agree to the end product, first, however. You don't do architecture one toothpick at a time and hope you end up with a castle. So, forget about the 10,000 toothpicks I showed you, I'll tell people where to put them. Do you want the castle or not?

People see lots of things to do and immediately equate that with complexity, time, change - all of which make peoples buttholes pucker up for some reason. Plus, they're wrong. It isn't that complex, it won' take as much time as you think, and it isn't change - its making what should be made. Is that different than right now? Probably. But it isn't change. Again, its getting closer to Platonic Form of what we are trying to accomplish and we have work to do towards that. Will you have to forget some things and learn some things? Sure. Is that change? No, its growth.

JFK Moon Speech:

No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of man¹s recorded history in a time span of but a half-century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them. Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only five years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than two years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than two months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power

Newton explored the meaning of gravity. Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if America's new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight.

This is a breathtaking pace, and such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers. Surely the opening vistas of space promise high costs and hardships, as well as high reward.

---

If you can't tell I have a rather intense dislike of what I honestly consider to be cowardice when it comes to doing work that is different than what you are doing right now. Is it the right thing to do? Then do it.

bumping because people in another thread were mentioning this survey

We are currently comparing BG3 to walking on the moon. Yes, expectations are high. ^^

This worked. We need another one.

Keep in mind that they also have the numbers on how much time players spent playing the game. They want to come out of EA with people praising them, so word of mouth is key in this situation. It makes no sense to ignore the "5%" of people who are playing the game for dozens of hours and putting their time into providing feedback. If all they were worried about was the initial sales, and didn't give a darn about their reputation, then sure, your standards may be applicable. But nowadays EA is part free QA and part Marketing. Blowing that opportunity is a bad call from a business perspective.

Has anything changed about the evil questline in patch3? I haven't made it past the chapel since game keeps crashing with vulcan now.

I just wat to start and say thank you for making the first 5e computer game. It is long overdue. Please work on adding as many classes and subclasses as possible. Mahalo!

I have to agree, going back at my comment and seeing it now I think I had the wrong approach.

5/10 it is a pretty mediocre game and somehow I don't have faith Larian will do necessary changes to make it an immersive 5e crpg. I think the problem is they wanna make the target as large as possible for it has a AAA budget or they just don't have what it takes. I don't know.
All I know is my expectations back then when it was first announced and now are highly different. I am expecting a very good looking but pretty mediocre game

As of Patch 5, 10/10. This is my all time favorite game. If they don't screw it up, it'll remain that way. Even with all the things I criticize about it, I love it. Of they changed nothing else but foxed the glitches, I'd still love it.

That said, they need to end it well. Of the story ends poorly... well... it'll quickly plummet out of the top spot.

Foxing the glitches would be great, but outfoxing the glitches should make the game 11/10!