Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Let's Spill some blood..

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Proceed if you are not faint hearted

BG II had awesome storyline, NPCs and multiple solutions to events, funny moments, drama and all but..

Enough praising the good old friend Baldur's Gate II, but now let me tell you how much its sucks in multiple levels

It was so broken that u can just run through the game..as in just running and nothing else.
*Fighting a lich? get out and wait 2 mins untill it runs out of spells buffs and get in again
*Boots of speed was so broken that u can actually go in a fight and get out causing miss of every spell, or change direction at once.. lets say while a fireball approaching
*Also kiting anything the the same strategy..
*100.000k damage on shadow lord with the infamous daystar sword
*stupid dragons with +18 - 20 intelligence access to almost all the spells but cant use a dispell properly.

but yes it was fun to play..it was the best thing ever, that a DnD game can offer on pc of "it's era"
had a couple goodfights esspecially when its supported by playermade mods like twisted rune.

BG3, as the way it lookss now promises hell lot more, I would say thats the game we gonna play for the next 5 years (10 even) at least, considering how scarce those decent DnD games coming along.
Don't you think so?


I ve seen some terrible comments on forum but well its usual internet I guess

I am just so happy that obsidian didnt get a chance to ruin Baldur's Gate name with their plain cheesy character design or story depth,
besides I ve never seen a incredibly good RPG from them. They were playable tho, but always so out of control in endgame, mid game even
and hard coded game breaking unfixable bugs. I guess some people confusing them with "blackisle" while making those comments. I ve never seen
a combat, worthy of playing in their NWN sequel campains tbh. If you are all about facerolling a game, making items its fine tho.

In combat system I would pick turn based over play/pause anyday because it lets eveyone plays as they should which is way more PnP accoring to their initiative.
Less abusive for the enemy.

Some were saying too many stuff going on in a small zone and different monsters in same area just think of Athlanka..
in the same sewer theres rakasha, mindflayers, githyanki, beholder cults, a forgotten god, vampire den,liches, list goes on and on..


UPS and DOWNS

Definitely not saying Larian Studios are doing everything the best way but I think the best choice out there, except..

Their unspoken fetish about barrels and boxes in their games!

I hope they fix or limit it at least, I know we are able to carry truck loads of weps in our inventory but..characters shouldnt be able to carry 5 barrels
to throw them away in a combat and they are really powerfull compared to early level spells even..Best gish nowadays is a straight warrior loaded up with barrels.
You guys do know about box'omancer in divinity right?
I think throwing crap items from ur inventory is totally ok and cool and fun, but barrels should be a mechanic like Tiny's throw in DoTA if u know what I mean. U can grab
and throw some object like a barrel around your character, in a radius, let say like cleave distance and thats it.. As for the puzzles & hidden areas making use of them..make our characters actually lift and carry maybe.

What I expect from BG3

Some really intelligent AI at least in hardcore mode; other than the usual HP buffing, using dispells, making use of items they have and focusing Gale ofc! u would get down the wizard 1st!

A DM tool, I mean please we need it for building custom campaigns. Also less hardcoded stuff as possible.

You know how many times we see a "miss"..theres a dodge animation..since its turn based we can have an evasion, like a cartwheel or a backflip kinda action.

Some more user friendliness in UI..we need a button in loot window that only takes magical items, scrolls and pots.. simple as it is its a big thing imo, we can handle the other stuff.

Way too early to demand before even the real game comes out but.. DLCs

Gore Option and kill camera if possible since the engine pretty capable.. at least a natural 20 kill deserves it.

10/10 my favourite topic on the forum

My biggest abiding memory of playing bg I and II is fighting the pathfinding. I didn't play the enhanced edition, admittedly, but I will never forget how annoying it was to hear "you must gather your party before venturing forth" in towns, cities, and forts while trying to gather my party.

The other one was how annoying it was to have encounters sprung on me when I was not strong enough to handle them yet so I had to have a specialist for dealing with the most annoying of these sncounters (a ranger with the problematic encounter as a favored enemy as my main character). Remember, in rt combat situations I get tunnel vision and pausing can only help so much. I refused to turn down the difficulty as well, due to the fact that doing so reduced xp gains and I feared not having enough levels for later encounters.

I loved the hell out of BG2 - probably spent far too much time playing it as a child. But even back then, there were tons of issues I had with the game's choo-choo-train narrative. So much of the story is forced, and player agency is constantly denied at every turn, in BG2.

The below is just the base game, and none of the absolutely dreadful content Beamdog added in their EE.

• The initial premise is hinged on you caring enough about Imoen to go after her. She died in BG1? Don't worry about it. She's also invincible in the initial dungeon. This is especially bad because they replaced this motivation with something far more personal mid-game. They could've actually just used that in the start. Instead, the story goes on a pointless loop.

• There was no "do it on your own" way into Spellhold - you had to work with 1 of 2 shady factions and do a bunch of predictable, boring quests for them, which drove me crazy even when I was a kid. No playing them against each other either.

• Per the above - try to kill one of the Chapter 3 faction leaders you've aligned with? An invincible enemy with a one-hit-kill attack spawns and just ends you game. Equivalent to a DM saying "don't like my railroad? die". It's worst than Bethesda's invincible NPCs IMO. Why send the bhaalspawn to do the dumb quests when they had this guy under their disposal? Btw, these guys don't spawn when you attack the faction leaders under the quest line. They exist only for Bioware to say "FU" to the player.

• You cannot do anything to prevent being captured* during the Spellhold sequence (auto negative in any RPG IMO) - even if you can see it a mile away. Bodhi acting sketchy AF? Just gotta play your part in the story and derp your way forward.

• Going back to my first point though - getting captured is extra salt in the wound because the game hits you with leaps of logic/railroading just to land you right back where you started. Oh, and then you get the "villain fails to kill you by playing games instead of finishing you off" trope to keep the story going.

• Outside of the "gather 20,000 gp" in the start of Chapter 2, the game never works to give you reason to do side-quests. In Chapter 2, once you had the money, your motivation should be to get to Spellhold asap (if you buy the whole "save Imoen" thing). In Chapter 6, you're soulless and in pursuit of Irenicus - contradicts the need to do side quests at all (but it's the only other open-world section).

One thing that Larian has demonstrated with BG3 and DOS2, is their commitment to player freedom. The game is always carefully designed so if you can spurn almost everyone, and can still progress somehow. It's very similar to Fallout New Vegas with their yes man option.


* P.S. - old school Bioware had some intense cutscene-incompetence + capture fetish that they HAD to put in almost every game.

BG 2 - Spellhold
Kotor - Leviathan Sequence
Dragon Age Origins (sort of) - Ser Cauthrien (unbalanced, but at least you can fight your way out of this one, although you lose XP for not being captured)
Dragon Age Awakening - Silverite Mine

I said in another thread I would explain why I only got halfway through BG II after completing BG I once, and here I will explain it:

I'm going to be called a heretic for this, but the reasons boil down to: I hated how BG controlled in and out of combat situations especially with six characters (though I could bear with it to some extent, I never want to hear that voice say "you must gather your party before venturing forth" again), combat was (to me) too shallow, chaotic, and reliant on spellcasting and didn't feel at all rewarding (and my tunnel vision problem didn't help in the least), it always felt like if I picked the wrong class the game would be significantly harder just because "fuck you for picking the wrong class", the companions came off as rather shallow in BG I (BG II helped with some, but...) and too pissy in II, especially how if you romance one character and have a second romancable character in your party (Aerie and Jaheira, and while the latter was useful, I found the former infinitely more interesting and that made her my romance target), they can leave just because you didn't pick them, the writing got kinda wooden and pretentious, all the gay options added later are evil (how's that for unfortunate implications, eh?), and all in all, the mechanics felt outdated.

I was playing it I want to say in 2013 (I found a disk for sale at best buy with all the D&D games from Baldur's Gate I to NWN and bought it), after playing games like Morrowind, which I think still holds up well, Skyrim, which also still feels fresh to me, Dragon Age Origins, Mass Effect 1 and 2 (I think, when was 2 released?), all three of which are fun but showing their age a bit, among dozens of other games. Really the only IE-like series I ever completed was the PoE series (never completed Pathfinder: Kingmaker because the time limits just grated too much on my explorer style of gameplay, Tyranny just didn't click with me, nor did IWD, but I did play the crap out of Final Fantasy Tactics: Advance and A2, Avernum: Escape from The Pit, Geneforge I, and other turn based fodder).

Suprisingly the 2000 released game felt outdated 2013 when played after playing all the games that were inspired by it and build upon its achievements? Really?
Also detaching the social reality from the time the game was made and judging it by todays moral standards is a bit asking much. Our developement in society is painfully slow when it comes to sexuality and racism. Some tend to forget how far ago the 90s and 2000s were in these regards (not to mention that romances were far from the standard in games back then - definitely not to thel degree they are now that expectation run up to dating simulators).

I said it before and I will say it again BG 1 & 2 are not good games from todays point of view. The writing is odd, the gamepaly is limiting and so on... but its a ridicolous comparission. At its time it was as revolutionary as it would be today reactionary going back to it.

I don't get the problem with barrels.

Larian hasn't a gun pointed to a player's head forcing them to use said item. On of my habits is that I'm a hoarder, I take all the objects I find around to sell them, to decor the base of my characters, to try combining them, no matter the reason I collect items, I search any chest, any container and take the stuff they have in.

A barrel has a weight that consumes room in my inventory so I don't collect them.

Also I'm not a strategist, I'm more akin to the "lets grind experience and grow up the characters so that I can overpower the bosses" and usually (unless a quest explicitily asks for a stealth run or, like the Goblin bosses one, asks for a solution that doesn't end in a massacre) I attack frontaly (yes, not the best way to handle a fight but that's how I play) so I'm careful not to blow up the barrels due to the fact that those can heavily injure my party (indeed sometimes I am a victim of their usefullness because the enemies blown them up, usually killing Gale ), also barrels can destroy my precioussss items so I decided not to use them (specially since I got aware that with a little patience i can grow up my party enough to overpower bosses).

Did the game force to use them I would agree that they are a problem. But the game doesn't force anyone to use them (like the game doesn't force to use heights, or to save just before a picopocket or a lockpicking or before any dialogue, or choice) that's something that relies on the player side, I'm weak against temptations (really weak) still I'm able not to do some things the game let me the choice whether to do or not (in my current run I lost Astarion because I made a dialogue choice, and subsequently I decided not to reload no matter how I like the pale elf, and I do love that companion).

On the Baldur's Gate, I'm at my umpteenth attempt to finish it, and again I'm fighting with the will to abbandon it. Aside from the graphics I find the fights chaotic, the magic side almost unuseful at the lower levels, ridiculously annoying the way camps and rest are handled (the party is supposed to be composed of adventurers, people that would have an eye for a place to rest without fear of being attacked, and the lack of a fast travel that doesn't imply the need to reach the border of the map lack of any logic).

Maybe is because I was used to daggerfall, morrowind, oblivion (that is bethesda games before the fall that are Skyrim and The elder scrolls online) but I don't feel engaged at all by the BG I and II (an I have to concess that I like BG III for the graphics, cinematics, the not so subtle echoes of the Original Sin, than for the D n D mechanisms).

My biggest problem is, they don't really fit the setting. Faerun is a high magic setting with low technology. But it seems like explosives are everywhere. Smoke powder is rare and only developed by gnomes on a small island yet you can find tons of it in barrels. Oil does exist but with all the barrels I see, the Sword Coast must look like Texas with oil pumpjacks everywhere.

Sure you can opt not to exploit them. The mobs won't have any issue using them. It's just all the explosions ruin the immersion. We are in Faerun, not in a Michael Bay movie.

I mean why not feed a troll thread? It looks hungry and it's Xmas eve. *tiny tim voice* Please, sir, can I have another reaction?

(I modified this quote)

1-3 sure. And there were other exploits. But I never used them and no one is forcing you to use them.

4) Bodi still has lots of hitpoints after you do that. Now granted BG2 was unfinished and the daystar was supposed to a reward for a quest tied to the Temple of Lathander. Sad that the quest never made it into the game.

5) That's just wrong. Firkraag uses uses dispel properly and he also hits you with lower fire resistance to remove your buffs. Granted he does other stupid stuff -- like keep on sleeping while you summon fire elementals but youtube tells me that loooots of people loved that fight. I remember one of the BG2 fansites -- Sorcerer's Place -- eventually told people to stop posting photos of dead dragons because so many people loved that fight and wanted to be acknowledged for their accomplishment.


Please. The story and plot of PoE1 were brilliant. Had a memory element that worked without seeming like a rip off of Torment, had a way to make the MC stand out without using fate / chosen one, had a great twist at the end and the choices you made were meaningful. And Durance is one of the best 'romances' ever.

Now, I've said lots of times, the good thing about Larian getting BG3 is they don't worship at the altar of balance like Obsidian does. DOS2's Pyroclastic eruption is broken OP. It's also loads of fun and I'm glad it was never nerfed. Obsidian, on the other hand, has a nerfing obsession -- even obsessing on whether some mid range dagger is OP.

So if you want criticize Obsidian from a gameplay perspective I'm with you but story perspective :p


Eh, I get what you are saying but "too much content" is not a criticism I agree with.

With you on barrels and dodges.


Waaaaaaay to early to talk about DLCs. And DLCs are just not a good business practice. Another thing I like about Larian is that they give away content without requiring people to dish out for DLCs. I'm done with DOS2 but I still think it's great that the devs are still adding content like the armors of Rivelon this long after release.

Obviously wouldn't be here if the game didn't show promise. And the devs have shown they are willing to change so . ..

Agreed. And the formula for smokepowder is rumored to be lost. And what are people doing with all that mineral oil? For most medieval uses oils and fats from vegetables and animals would have be superior.

In DOS this didn't matter because you didn't take the setting seriously but I really don't know what druids are doing with mineral oil in the first place.