Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Larian's communication, faithfulness to 5E rules, and the players who feel betrayed.

I made a huge post in a different thread about how I feel about the house rules, and in the interests of not dumping that wall of text into this thread, I'll just link to it.

https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=756130#Post756130

That said, normally I wouldn't be that worried about how BG3 would turn out later on, if it weren't for the fact that these interviews exist and that I have prior extensive knowledge of Larian's prior games (both DOS games and Divinity 2), which is more than most people on these forums. I like their games, but it's not because their combat was ever reasonably balanced by any metric, so Larian expecting their 'throw everything at the wall and let players figure it out' design philosophy in regards to the actual gameplay to work with an entirely different IP that is several degrees more revered and established than they are is rather concerning.

A lot about the things they say about what they think is 'fun' only really makes sense if they are analyzing each of their own game mechanics in a vacuum, and aren't very good at seeing the big picture that they themselves pieced together. What they say about Bless betrays a complete misunderstanding about why players assign value to each factor of the game in a combat scenario. In this case, they believe buff spells like Bless aren't used because players find them 'boring', whatever the hell kind of metric that is supposed to be. The real takeaway that most other devs would have had was to check why people didn't want to use them by comparing them to other game mechanics that would perhaps be overshadowing their use, rather than dismissing it as a preference thing. The real answer is that spells like Bless aren't worth using in BG3 because...

1) The bonuses it grants are seemingly miniscule when you have easy sources of free advantage such as backstabs and high ground - both being Larian's homebrew concepts.
2) It is a concentration spell, which is even worse when you consider that damaging field effects are a thing and a lot of enemies possess grenades and explosive arrows for whatever reason. Oh, and even more when you consider point 1.

I know bringing up Solasta is like beating a dead horse in these parts, but comparing the usage of the Bless spell between both games is worth analyzing in this context. In BG3, Bless is hardly worth anything as it is, because the homebrew rules make the bonuses miniscule and a hassle to maintain. In Solasta, where said homebrew rules don't exist, Bless is actually one of the most powerful spells in that game and well worth using, because getting advantage on your rolls in general is MUCH harder in Solasta than it is in BG3, so every boost to your normal rolls is highly welcomed.

It almost insults the collective gaming community's intelligence to assume that the lack of Bless usage in BG3 is just because it's 'boring' - after all, Larian's previous game was highly hailed as an innovative breath of fresh air for turn-based RPGs that encouraged players to think outside of the box, and I do not intend to dispute that. But a lot of these BG3 interviews appear to retroactively reveal that perhaps Larian was just incredibly lucky and maybe never understood *why* D:OS2 became such a hit to begin with. Their attempts to seemingly import a lot of the D:OS2 feel into BG3 is highly suspect at best. It is not a sign of confidence when developers given the reins of one of the most cherished RPG IPs in the world talk about their game design using terms like 'fun' and 'boring' along with wanting to let the visuals speak for themselves, rather than doing an actual deep dive explanation on how their own mechanics interact with each other.

Though to be fair, most people are bad at seeing the big picture too. Indeed, in their highly revered D:OS2, the armor system worked out well enough for the first half of the game, especially during the heavily playtested Early Access content. It wasn't until after the Early Access content that the flaws in the system became apparent - but the game was bloated and long enough that most reviewers would never play far enough to see said glaring flaws before hailing the game as a masterpiece. The last act especially was so much of a mess on so many levels that they had to create a Definitive Edition to fix it. And yet no one in the gaming press ever took Larian to task for that - although to be fair, it was a free upgrade.