Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback D&D is about player choice. Larian is failing at this. Things to address.

The original game let us choose between the core rules or more forgiving homebrew options. The same should be expected in this installment of the game as well. Where is it? You can even improve upon this by adding options like iron man mode for every difficulty so choices are always permanent.

In the original games you always knew when you were about to enter a conversation because the character would get a highlight, call out to you and actively move towards you before the direct interaction began. This is missing in its entirety and is the direct cause of much of the "skill check" complaints you see on these forums. You could interrupt this interaction by either running away from said npc before they got too close, successfully stealthing via a check or invisibility, or interrupt it by attacking the character. This kind of interaction is important and is entirely missing!

In the original games, you could run off and explore 95% of the entire game world after the initial intro. In this game large chunks of the world are locked behind forced conversations or world events unless you know they are going to happen and actively work around them. This game feels like you are forcing plot down our throats at every turn, leading to much of the resistance you are now getting from your player base. If we want to explore the whole world before engaging in plot, or wander into a cave full of CR8 mobs at level 2 that should be allowed without having to know about a forced conversation or cut scene and metagaming our way around it. Plot should not be gating most of the world from us. I don't want to see the "chapters" of the world we can no longer go back to like in divinity either. Let us explore the whole world from the start instead of locking out large chunks of it as we progress. If people want to rush through plot that is fine, but it shouldn't be placed in such a way that plot is necessary to explore the world.

As of right now, consumable item spam and ranged combat is dramatically superior to melee alternatives. If you are melee you are often relegated to just throwing the quite plentiful offensive conusumables. This isn't good design, it is a bandaid on a bad system. This makes item spam and ranged combat feel like a requirement. We feel punished for choosing melee. The number of consumables are far too plentiful and need to be reduced dramatically, and i mean by like 80% or more. There are too many ranged enemies as well, often making melee feel worthless. So much for class choice meaning anything. The number of ranged enemies needs to at least be cut in half and replaced by melee. A good DM designs encounters based on a party composition. As this is a videogame, that isn't possible. So a good balance down the middle is absolutely essential for making our choices feel meaningful. You are currently failing at this hard and need to take a hard look at a lot of combat encounters. The extreme amount of verticality and advantage gained by high ground makes ranged combat way too powerful too.