Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General BG3, DOS and the D&D rule-set

Right now, BG3 feels like Larian is trying to make D&D 5th Edition rules work in an Original Sin game, and it does not feel like a game that was conceived and designed from the start as a CRPG using the 5e ruleset.
The UI, the party controls, the reliance on consumables and environmental effects are all Original Sin and aren't meshing with the 5e ruleset the way this game needs them to.

UI: Character screens need to put all the information that would be on a tabletop character sheet at players' fingertips. They also need breakdowns and tooltips explaining all the character's race and class features, where they come from, how the numbers are being generated and what they do. The combat log needs to be more prominent and provide more options for sorting the information displayed. Spells need their full descriptions and spellcasting needs its own hot bars that auto-sort available spells by level. The single, giant catchall hot bar is entirely inadequate for a class based game where some classes can end up with dozens of spells/abilities that change availability regularly.

Party Controls: Being able to select only one character at a time in a game that requires the player to control a party of four is ridiculous. CRPGs figured this **** out twenty years ago and almost every other CRPG since then has had an RTS style control scheme that is FAR less clunky and cumbersome to deal with than BG3's. We don't need companions to automatically follow the selected character and we don't need a portrait chain to pull characters on and off of. We need to be able to select multiple characters at once, drag select as many as needed, shift click select as many as needed, click directly on their character models to select them, and issue group orders to multiple characters at once. Basically, this game needs to control like a Baldur's Gate game and not make the basic act of moving the party around the world a pain in the ***.

Reliance on consumables and environmental effects: I get it, 5e combat is boring at low levels because the classes don't have much going on. And I actually like that BG3 does offer more potions, scrolls, and environmental interactions, like explosive barrels, than you're likely to find in a 5e tabletop module ... but the game can't lean on that stuff to the extent it eclipses the classes and their abilities. This is a D&D game, and supposed to be a bridge between gamers and the tabletop RPG, so it needs to focus enough on what the classes can do that those abilities are the player's primary set of tools. Right now we've got Divinity, where the most effective way to defeat our enemies is generally to find a way to blow up an explosive barrel near them. Or coat the ground in water/blood/acid. Or cast a zillion spells from scrolls. All those things are great in moderation and when they can combo with a class's abilities, but I'm finding it more effective to lean on barrels, ground effects, and scrolls to a much greater degree than most of my class specific abilities and spell slots.

The result of all this is that BG3 in its current form feels like I'm playing DoS with a 5e conversion mod on it, and not a game that was designed from the ground up as a 5e CRPG.