Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Latest News Community Update #11 - Inspiration, Freedom & Pacifism

That was the part of the story not addressed that interested me. Why is it that every NPC has a tadpole in their head like me, as well as some other reason they might die at any moment (besides Lae)? Is that why they were all in that chamber during the prologue cutscene and not just infected like the commoners would be?

Is there something affecting the PC "besides" the tadpole like everyone else in the party?

Maybe your party was chosen because they were seen as powerful, or the Illithid took special interest into their own unique situations for some reason. Does the PC have an otherwise unique circumstance for being there? Raphael and selling your soul is one thing, but this is Baldur's Gate and there are still children of Bhaal running around since he apparently came back to life with his brothers. There's plenty of other possibilities, like the skeleton at your camp actually being Jergel. It could just be a friendly lich, though.

Latest news? More like month old stale news than anything else. This game really needs to be pushed along now. The last big update added nothing. It was a total con. Surely Larian has enough feedback on the tiny bit they have so far produced.

I fully agree with you. Hopefully, the new update will fix a lot more bugs and not break more stuff as well as for some more con
tent

Pacifists will never win because goblins are worth xp, and that makes me more powerful than you vegan goblin-sparing losers. In fact, I wouldn't be averse to a patch that makes the goblins proportionately stronger depending on how annoyingly vegan you decide to be.

LOL!!!!!!! "annoyingly Vegan" LOL!!!!!!! I loved this.

If you decide that the only goal in the game is to gain power ...

These days, I'm really turned off by all this "manlihood through power" thing, which has resulted in game titles like "Godslayer, "God of war", Dragon's Extinction" and all this weird stuff of games doing so as if the only "fun" part of a game was to get enormously, if not monstrously powerful. I find fun in entirely other things, but since game development is mainly driven by male developers fpor male gamers, there isn't going to change much.

I am just not part of that fashion that games should be about nothing but becoming even more powerful.

For me, STORIES are what makes me want tp play, and the better a story, the more fun I'll have.
A story is something that can be re-read, but a simple "rise to powah" is not important to me.

You know, there are others as well. I just checked.

Uh, gaining power in a game isn't something I'd tie into gender tbh. Even games made by women often have some sort of progression that involves a player or character getting more abilities or stats, and there are many games by men who lack that kind of progression because the focus was elsewhere.

Experience is usually an easy way to mark one's progress as a character, getting stronger, and it allows developers to send harder things against a player so the game has a consistent difficulty progression. You can see this with both early and modern games where a lot of it is getting stats to be higher so you can defeat that stronger foe. However, I genuinely prefer games to have some balance between gameplay, story, and presentation. If the focus is entirely on gameplay it can definitely fall flat if the only thing there is to get stronger, while if it is only story or presentation then it sometimes might just be better watched than played.

That all said, sometimes that balance can be messed up even after it is achieved. BG3 seems to be approaching a balance BUT a player can still abuse the systems to get more experience than is intended. Pacifisting past gobbos then killing all of them is a viable strategy if one's goal was to kill them anyways but be in a more advantageous position but some people powergame and so they will select the option to get experience for pacifisting and then turn around to kill the goblins for even more experience. Idk if it'd be a good solution but perhaps instead of allowing players to double dip like that they could make it that succeeding at the pacifistic options awards you all the experience you would have gotten killing them while marking them after as providing no or lower experience?

I always read it as Shadowheart being a textbook tsundere-it was never a stonewalling thing to me, it was a "she needs some space now". I would personally prefer the original dialogue, as you've probably guessed, but (and I know this sounds mean, I really don't mean it that way) players are idiots. Valve mentioned players never look up, with Shadowheart I felt the change happened because people didn't/couldn't read the subtext. I could be projecting that subtext of course, but in terms of pure mechanics the route/flag system for the npcs appears to be "Do the thing" or "Shut down the route" so that was another reason I dismissed her protests. IIRC her exact words were "That was a mistake" not "I never want to do that again, get away from me". Considering how standoffish, secretive and withdrawn, it made sense for her to pull away after exposing herself emotionally that way.