So there's maybe one thing in some criticism that I've observed over the past week that has rubbed me the wrong way, even if I tend to agree with most people about the game's combat balance being rather off for the time being. But one needs to take into account that once something is coded in, it's often not as easy as taking it out and expecting things to go well. I myself may have given the devs some crap for seemingly using the D:OS2 engine to create BG3, but at the same time... Hindsight is 20/20. It probably didn't seem like a bad idea at all when they started development on BG3. And now the game may be too far along to just... Scrap all that effort and restart anew.

A few of you may have noticed that I often segue into talking about other cRPGs in development and what programming struggles they ran into, mostly to give a frame of reference to indicate that nobody's really perfect at this. Here's a couple of my own excerpts.

On Solasta

Originally Posted by Saito Hikari
There used to be a pretty crazy bug with the Solasta Greenmage. For the uninitiated, it's a homebrew Wizard archetype that gets access to the Archery fighting style, shortbow and light armor proficency, and can add several Ranger spells to their spellbook such as Faerie Fire, Goodberry and Hunter's Mark. This makes Greenmage a scary competent arcane archer, something that doesn't really exist in 5E except through the fighter archetype of the same name (which doesn't get access to spells at all, but has a bunch of magical arrows instead). Greenmage going off of feedback is by far the most popular Solasta archetype, some going as far as to say that they wish it was an actual official archetype, even if Shock Arcanist is a much stronger blaster archetype.

Anyway, since Greenmage had access to Hunter's Mark, there was a point in the earliest phases of Solasta EA where Hunter's Mark actually interacted with spells that made attack rolls. By tabletop rules, it wasn't supposed to. However, Solasta's wording of the Hunter's Mark spell lead some to believe that this was an intended change and a perk of Greenmage (it did not specify that the bonus damage die would only apply to weapon attacks), so some brief rule lawyering debates broke out about that in the otherwise quiet Solasta discord until the lead developer came in and said it was a bug.

And all doubts on it being a bug were blown away when I discovered a ridiculous interaction between Hunter's Mark and Scorching Ray in that game.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachme...85101568/Scorching_Ray_L4_HM_VS_Boss.png

That was an upcasted level 3 Scorching Ray one-shotting the hardest boss during that EA phase. What happened was that *each ray* was rolling *4* Hunter's Mark die, because 4 of the base rays hit the boss, turning what was supposed to be 4 damage rolls into 20. The game could not fit this total absurdity onto the screen, let alone the normally highly informative combat log.

Programming is hard, ya'll.

Originally Posted by Saito Hikari
Oh, Solasta once had a different bug in regards to one of their homebrew cantrips and the 'Ready Cantrip' action. Like I said, Solasta's implementation of ready actions is rather simple at the moment, you either select a melee, ranged, or a cantrip attack to hit the first enemy that moves within your attack range. The Cantrip part however doesn't let you choose which one to use. The homebrew cantrip in question is called Sparkle, and it works by allowing you to illuminate up to 3 environmental items such as torches or magical orbs as a bonus action. But it was programmed to make an attack roll in order to do so, so the 'Ready Cantrip' action incorrectly considered Sparkle to be an offensive spell, which led to players trying to throw non-damaging pretty lights in an enemy's face. The devs told everyone not to pick up the Sparkle cantrip until the bug was fixed.

Like I said, programming is hard.

Originally Posted by Saito Hikari
They also had an issue with enemies shoving player characters into out of bounds zones to instantly kill them - more importantly with no way to revive them afterwards (and ending a battle with any player character dead with no revival methods is an automatic game over there). There was one early game encounter that was quite infamous for that, so the Solasta devs temporarily shut that off. However, this also had the side effect of shutting off the ability to fly over those out of bounds pits.

On Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous

Originally Posted by Saito Hikari
I assume it would not be NDA-breaking to talk about this here, as information up to the end of chapter 3 of the Pathfinder beta is publicly available. Anyway, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous has had 3 major testing phases so far.

- Alpha 1, which consisted of Chapters 1 and 2.
- Alpha 2, which consisted of the Prologue all the way to Chapter 3, along with adding the remaining 4 companions.
- The ongoing Beta, which added Chapter 4 and turn-based mode, in addition to new content to earlier parts of the game. Most of chapter 4 is using incomplete assets, so information regarding exactly what is in that chapter is under NDA.

Probably the biggest bug that popped up between Alpha 2 and Beta was in regards to a major change in terms of how early you could get a specific companion to join your party. In Alpha 2, the succubus Arueshalae could only be recruited towards the start of Chapter 3. In Beta, it was possible to recruit her several hours earlier, during the final dungeon of Chapter 2, provided that you resolved a dispute back in Chapter 1 in the favor of several friends that she had been trying to assist, and solved an optional puzzle in the previous Chapter 2 dungeon that would provide you with a song that you could sing to convince her to fight alongside you early.

However, during the first week of Beta, recruiting her early actually broke her personal quest in Chapter 3 (which was when you could originally recruit her), eventually halting your progress in the main story, by causing several major quest NPCs to simply refuse to load properly. Many people lost several hours worth of progress due to this bug, if not restarting the game entirely if they did not have a Chapter 2 save prior to recruiting her. The fix was not retroactive for save files that already ran into this bug beforehand.

So you can read all these and share some examples you know, and understand that... Imagine what kind of scary bugs we don't know of that existed within BG3 too. Larian did say that we would have had patch 4 by now if it weren't for a bug they had discovered last minute. I almost wonder exactly what it is.

Last edited by Saito Hikari; 25/02/21 07:09 AM.