UI, Controls, QoL :
Part 1,
Part 2,
Part 3,
Part 4,
Part 5.
Roleplay, Story, Immersion :
Part 1,
Part 2,
Part 3.
Mechanisms :
Part 1,
Part 2,
Part 3,
Part 4.
Longer term considerations :
Part 1,
Part 2,
Part 3,
Part 4,
Part 5.
COMBAT : VARIETY, ENCOUNTER DESIGN, AND DIFFICULTY
I'm aware this part is about combat Larian, and you are not too concerned about some aspects of it (I won't pronounced the b word). Still, it would be great if you gave this a thought.
Currently, the game incentivises the Ranged strategy too much. This leads to a less varied and less interesting combat.
The design of encounters could be improved a lot, in order to be more interesting roleplay-wise, more tactically interesting, as well as to provide variety.
Also, the AI could benefit a lot from showing more variety. And I would like the AI to be a major factor in the game's difficulty options (as opposed to an uninteresting nerfing/buffing of enemies' stats).
The game currently favours the Ranged strategies too much. In DnD, there are at least 3 strategies/styles for combat : Melee, Ranged, and Magic. Of course, most parties will mix and match, with character specialising in some styles. And in BG3, we have additional strategies : Surfaces, and Consumables. Currently, Ranged has a disproportionately large appeal. And I don't think it's a great state of things.
Some reasons why the Ranged strategy stand out above the others. - It is mechanically very strong. As I explained
earlier, we get Advantage on our attacks and the enemies get Disadvantage on their attacks. There are possibly ways to deal more damage, but this one also means being hit a lot less.
- Its effectiveness is easy to discover. The bottom-left corner indicator teaches us the rules, and we'll end up having High-Ground or Low-Ground sooner or later. (By contrast, I would have taken a lot more time discovering about Super-Surface-Fighting and Barrelmancy if I hadn't heard about them on forums.)
- It is very easy to implement. Everyone can use a short bow or a ranged-attack cantrip. No long-term party building and planning is required. Some characters have bad Dexterity ? No worries ! The mechanism of Advantage gives a bigger boost to a raw chance of success of 50% than to one of 80%, thus reducing the difference in efficiency between a mediocre archer and a good one.
- It is usable almost everywhere. Most battlefields are designed with high-ground areas, and thus let us thrive if we are playing the game with a party built for Ranged combat.
- It is hard to avoid using. I can easily abstain from using surfaces and consumables. But if I don't run for the high ground, enemies will take it (when they don't simply start on it). That's a tactically bad position, and the simplest way to avoid it is to take the high-ground. Also, while I'm not a great expert in behavioural science and psychology, I would wager that most people feel more mental discomfort when experiencing a malus (Disadvantage on attacks) rather than when not benefitting from a bonus (Advantage on attacks). In the end, it is quite hard not to fight from the high ground.
Why this is a problem. - It does not encourage variety. When there's a dominant strategy, most players will converge toward it. It feels as if you thought "Ranged Combat is so fun, and we can use verticality, let's incentivise everyone to go Ranged !". And that in the process, you forgot that DnD 5E has other fun things to offer. I feel it would be fun to just let other things, like class abilities, speak from time to time.
- It makes combat become boring faster. Fights currently seem vaguely intended as tactical puzzles : instead of having tons of grindy, trash fights that we can sleep-walk through and that might even be randomly generated, every combat encounter is a hand-crafted set piece. Which is overall good : quality beats quantity. But once you've discovered the Ranged hammer, every fight looks like is a nail. Move to high-ground position, rain arrows, win.
- It leads to meta-gaming and reduced immersion. I'm not playing in-the-world, I'm playing a mind-game with the designers. At every new encounter, I consciously look for the high ground spot, knowing full well that the designers have almost-certainly included one somewhere. And in the few instances where I find myself surprised and without a high ground spot, I can often find barrels ...
- It makes for a weird mix of genre and setting. The combat often feels like that of a Tactical Shooter. This would be fine if the adventure took place in a Western setting like Desperado or a Sci-Fi setting like XCOM, where we expect guns as the default weapon. But it's less thematically appropriate for a Middle-Ages and Renaissance setting like the Forgotten Realms. Throw in the cartoonish jump over enemies, and it becomes even weirder. Of course, I don't have to travel with Shooting Squadron Zero, and turn all battles into a 3D, all-guns-blazing shooting. It's just what is encouraged. Meanwhile, classic knights in heavy armours fighting with melee tactics are allowed to exist in BG3, if they are fine with Jump destroying a lot of the positioning considerations and Backstab being an immersion-breaking joke.
Designing encounters for a more varied combat. I have previously discussed
mechanisms. But even under a given set of rules, a lot can also be achieved through encounter design. Act 1A is what it is, but hopefully future encounters can be more varied.
Less predictable combat encounters. I would like to be more surprised (as a player) when a fight starts.
Currently, a majority of combat encounters takes place on a battlefield that I can survey before the fight, against enemies that I can see, count, observe and downright Examine (however ridiculous that feature is). This trivial scouting is partly caused by the camera and its absurdly-large radius of action. The consequence is that we are encouraged too much to sneak around, judiciously position the party and trigger the fight when we are ready.
By contrast, BG1-2 had many fights start right after entering a new area (room, house, cave, etc). Also, it used a symmetric line-of-sight : if I can see the enemies, then they can see me, and they can start the fight.
BG3 is a video game (with saves and no perma-death) so, unlike the tabletop 5E, there will naturally be die-reload-retry cycles. But I should not be able to start nearly every new fight with as much insight as if I had already died once.
I will always be able to resort pre-positioning and pre-buffing if I fail too many times, but I'd like to get one chance to win the fight in a more immersive and tactically interesting way the first time round.
Fewer incentives to skip talking before a fight. It is sometimes preferable to avoid conversations and attack straight away. The prime example is the encounter with Gimblebock and company.
If I want to experience the conversation with Gimblebock, with all my team at the "main entrance" of the scene (near the statue), then I sign up for a challenging fight. If I win at my first attempt, all good. If I lose (perhaps a couple of times), what do I do ?
A much more efficient approach is to have the team approach behind Warryn. If I then have someone go through the main entrance to talk to Gimblebock, a few things can happen. If my companions positionned near Warryn are Hiding, there's a chance they are not seen, not
drawn in the fight, and that's a slaughter since my lone downstairs character might have received many attacks by the time it's their turn. If my team does not Hide, then Warryn triggers a fight and my characters have no idea why. So I might as well, Hide, pre-position and attack Warryn straight away, without talking.
But my characters have no reason to know this group is hostile ! I only know this because I, the player, have foreknowledge. This is immersion breaking. I find that the difference of difficulty is quite significant, especially for a first-time player, so there is a big incentive to ditch roleplay and immersion, and instead go for a much easier fight. I think this is poor encounter design.
I would like encounters to be designed in a way that doesn't ask me to choose between immersion and lower difficulty.
More flat battlefields, please. Most battlefields have high-ground spots. This enables the nearly-constant use of the Ranged strategy. Designing more flat battlefields would encourage us to try more Melee approaches, more crowd-control or buffing spells, etc. Basically, more variety.
More melee fights, please. A small minority of battles forces us to use melee combat, or to break out of melee if that tactical configuration is our team's Achilles heel.
I fear that a Class Feature like the Ranger's Horde Breaker or a Fighting Style like Protection won't be very useful. There are not so many melee enemies (in proportion) and the battlefields are usually quite large, so enemies are not often packed.
Also, having a tank or two to create a frontline and stop melee enemies from coming at my mages seems like an alien notion : there are so many ranged enemies (in proportion) and so much space for the melee ones to pass through.
It would be great to have fights against melee hordes or in tight spaces, from time to time.
More use for class abilities and party composition. This point is somewhat a consequence and summary of the above requests. You've said in interviews that you like designing systems and tools, then throwing problems at us and letting us figure ways to overcome them with the tools you gave us.
But at the moment, some specific approaches are overly incentivised. The High-Ground rule is a massive incentive to use a Ranged strategy. The near-continuous use of the Consumables approach is enabled by the abundance of consumables. Barrels are not far behind. Meanwhile, the game doesn't encourage us to ask ourselves "ok, how can I solve this encounter with the skills of the characters in my current line-up ?". It doesn't encourage us to explore the DnD classes and the 5E system.
How to incentivise more diversity ? I don't think that ways should be found to actively encourage the other approaches. Rather, some solution methods like Ranged or Consumables, should not be encouraged that much.
In the end, I'd like the game to live up to the message shown on a loading screen, advising us to pay attention to party composition. At the moment, it feels as if the artists and advertisers who created that screen and made "Gather your party" a slogan for the game never had a proper talk with the designers and programmers.
Enemy artificial intelligence. Of course, the AI should probably reach its final form after the full ruleset is finalised, hence why I'm discussing this only now. On the other hand, the development of rules and AI should probably go hand-in-hand, otherwise you cannot track how the game's feel and difficulty change as the rules are changed.
More varied enemy AI : targeting. Not all creatures we meet should seek to take down the low-AC, low-HP companions first (a very sensible strategy that we, players, employ often enough). It would be great to see more varied AI and enemy tactics, especially for different types of enemies (some types are cunning, some just smash the nearest companion, etc).
More varied enemy AI : downed companions. It's interesting that the current AI for enemies has them focus on downed targets. In the Sword Coast Stratagem mod for BG1-BG2, the author especially programmed enemies with disabling abilities (like the carrion crawls' paralysing attack) to focus attacks on characters that are not disabled. The reason was : the goal of the enemies is to win the encounter (not force the players to consume resources like spells slots and scrolls). So they should prioritise those characters that are still a danger to them and ignore the ones that are neutralised. I feel this is the good call to make enemies more believable.
Changing the difficulty settings should affect the enemy AI more than their stats. One easy way to make the game harder is to give enemies better stats (HP, damage, etc). And do the reverse for an easier game. But that's very cheap and not a gamer-changer.
If I can steamroll an encounter with one strategy, giving enemies more HP will likely only make the fight longer. It won't push me to change my approach and find a better use of the games' rules, spells, and so on, in order to overcome the encounter.
So, please, when working on the difficulty settings, prioritise the AI more than the enemy stats.
