Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Looks like Larian cheese is here to stay

Precisely! Perfect summary!

I've always felt the game's portrayal of romance, some story elements and cheese mechanics had a juvenile vibe to it.

Hmm... I certainly agree that a lot of the cheese mechanics are juvenile, and the romances... yeah, they sometimes come off in that way a bit, maybe. But I am not too concerned with those things, really. The juvenile or troll-like aspects of the mechanics are troublesome though. I feel it takes away a lot from the atmosphere, that should be a rather foreboding one.

@andreasrylander Huh?

Their is no "all" you speak for yourself and only yourself. I never said you don't grasp things. Opinions don't equat to automatically making things better. You don't have the latest build of the game, script, or list of mechanics for release. You have a playground of specific things that may or may not be in the final product.

You have no say on how I choose to speak. Ironically you are the one being extremely condescending and rude. What is best is for the game is up to Larian to decide and strive for.

Your entire argument is for how things "should" be. Thats a lot arrogance for someone elses vision. Hence focus on what they are doing and give feedback. From there Larian decides what's best. The extent is suggestion in a vacuum, but you come off as trying to give orders on the whole.

Cool your jets or the convo ends here. At least on my end.

BG3 is a mature rated game. But it almost seems like it wants to cater to the sensibilities of teenagers. I knew Larian had that tendency with what I saw in DOS games (I never played either version and only know of them through videos and reviews) but I didn't expect the same vibe with BG3 since it was a new IP for them with an all new game system. Boy was I wrong.

it's strange, but the more "mature" they make games, the more immature it actually seems to me. I just hope I don't miss out on a lot of companion story/side quests just because I'm not interested in boning everyone in the party.

I am focusing on what they are doing and giving feedback accordingly. You are the one hellbent on using ad hominems, so I have no interests in your input anymore. So consider the "convo" very ended indeed.

Addendum: I still wish you well. I am not as angry with you as you probably imagine I am. I just don't have the energy these days to deal with drama and conflict, and so for that reason I am putting you on ignore so I can just focus on posts that have to do with this game.

I have noticed the same, even though it still has improved. DOS 1 was *VERY* immature, and troll-like mechanisms and jokes basically bombarded you, almost completely pulling you out of the world and the setting completely. It was like playing a Monty Python game. I still found that amusing and I enjoyed it, and continued to play it but hoping that one day they would release a more "serious" game.

Then DOS2 came and it was *WAY* more serious compared to the first, if still very quirky, humourous and occcationally "trolly". Still, it was an AMAZING game, and still is, and I love it. I love Larian a lot! But... I wished they could make something far more serious still, and I also hoped that one day they would do a DND game.

So when BG3 by Larian was announced, I literally got tears of joy in my eyes. My dreams come true!

So far the game is certainly more serious and less "trolly" than DOS2, but .... I am just hoping it will be far more serious, true to the core rules and less "trolly" when it is eventually released. I honestly believe that would be the best route for them to go from both a PR/Marketing/Financial standpoint, and also a qualitative one. But we'll see. No matter what, I love the game a LOT even as it is now. I think it's brilliant. I just hope they fix a few things and change a few things. =)

Now that I have heard Swen and some of the panels, I can see some of his personality in the games. Not a bad thing really, and obviously tons of people like it, but it's not for me.

And I still think you are hoping for some hybrid version. I say let it go. It won't happen, at least not as much as most 5e players want. People keep saying it's EA so things can change but I've watched some other games in beta (I mean, this is essentially beta) and you know what? The game system never changes. At least not dramatically. What we are seeing is pretty much what we are getting. We will get slight tweaks here and there but most assuredly a lot of systems like barrelmancy, shoving, backstabbling, height advantage, healing food is here to stay.

So cut me a bigger portion of that cheese to go with my whine. =)

I would say that this is pretty much where I'm at too. Larian probably isn't very interested in giving us an accurate representation on what they're doing, they want us to test things while obfuscating things for the sake of keeping things a surprise. The gaming community as a whole is used to this kind of behavior, so Larian keeping up the image of being a now successful indie company that occasionally engages with the community compared to the big bad publishers gives them a lot of points among the wider community for... Basically doing the same thing as a fair amount of other larger developers out there. The only real difference is a very goofy company face, who to be fair is actually invested in the company and clearly not faking it.

Perception is everything, however true or false it may be.

That said, keeping things a surprise is a valid concern, especially for a huge project with this many eyes on it compared to virtually every other cRPG. But it also means everything gets tested in a vacuum, and the context of certain things gets completely changed when seen within the rest of the package - kind of like how blessed/cursed surfaces may have been a novel idea during the EA phase of DOS2, but in actual practicality, blessed surfaces were pretty much never worth the effort as soon as you stepped foot past Act 1 into Reaper's Coast. This was because the game's enemies got so many free ways to generate cursed surfaces, some even outright bleeding it when you hit them with a physical attack, while virtually every method of generating blessed surfaces to counter them that players had access to ate finite and precious source points that could otherwise fuel your strongest attacks in comparison. So instead of even engaging with the field effects system, most players would instead just turtle down and keep movement to an absolute minimum within those surfaces, or invest in the many mobility skills to immediately eject themselves from such a situation.

One should also note that with a project of this magnitude, actually changing core aspects of it like the combat becomes a lot harder as development progresses. So, the more analytical side of me recognizes that what we see is what we're getting, especially now that Larian is absolutely doubling down on everything with every communication we've had from them as of late. I'm still on this ride because I want to see how this turns out.

When you get feedback like this, you know what direction the community wants this game to go towards. But few have the foresight to consider the long term consequences. What one sees as 'rewarding creativity', I just see 'just use consumables and certain highly busted spells, don't even bother with martial classes on tactician/honor mode', and I would not be surprised in the slightest if that ends up becoming a very common phrase. At least DOS2 tactician was legitimately hard within the confines of its own rules when you were actually trying to play it with minimal cheese, because almost every skill in that game was busted when used properly. The effort of using raw cheese tactics in DOS2 outside of the standard stealth ambush was generally not worth the time it took to set them up if you had a well built party to begin with (unless you were really so bad at playing the actual game that you couldn't come up with ways to beat certain fights head-on). The big distinction is that BG3 in comparison currently is literally just a couple homebrew mechanics completely overshadowing everything else in the game, a lot of fights feel like they're straight up balanced around their existence (whereas no fight in DOS2 really felt that way at all aside from burning undead scarecrow lady for reasons that don't need an explanation), and the combined effect of every other action or ability cannot even compare to the effect that the homebrew mechanics have on the current encounter design. I mean, the complete context whiplash between both games despite their core similarities could make the more pessimistic among us start believing that DOS2's brilliance is looking more and more like an accident.

(I mean, really, I'm quite sure Larian at one point also even admitted that sticking a bunch of grenades into a basket and throwing it at the final boss of DOS1, with the combined effect resulting in a cascade of field effects spreading all over the map was an unintentional thing, but they applauded that person's creativity and decided they wouldn't do anything to rein it in. So expecting BG3 to take a different stance in the long term is, quite frankly, a futile effort.)

But for people like me, at least Solasta exists for the tactical turn based combat enthusiast itch, and that means I'm ultimately okay with BG3 being a game that I will undoubtedly enjoy for many reasons despite the combat design (especially the whole stealth ambush mechanic which basically means that BG3's combat cannot really be considered true turn-based, if your other party members that are sneaking around outside of combat can literally insert themselves into a fight anywhere there isn't an enemy sight cone at any point they want - BG3's current definition of tactical really just boils down to figuring out how much you can ignore the normal rules at the moment, because the implementation of everything that makes DnD tactical to begin with is either incomplete or straight up missing). As it will likely be for a big chunk of the community.

(On a different note, DOS2 ironically had a strange issue where the game was most arguably balanced during the level 4-8 phase of Act 1. After that phase, it quickly spirals into damage race rocket tag as a new tier of skills become available and every boss fight suddenly shifts towards 'nuke or crowd control them as hard as you can during turn 1 or else you were guaranteed to have a dead party member'. BG3 has the opposite problem of DnD in general feeling pretty awful at low levels, and one could think that the homebrew mechanics are an attempt to make low level combat livelier for the whole year that Larian insists on having the community suffer through being capped at level 4, while masking the lack of core mechanics like ready actions and proper reactions - but all that really did was throw conventional DnD strategy completely out the window.)

My 2 cents: I agree, i like that kind of cheese when i can cleverly connect certain actions/skills or use the environment or certain items to my advantage in certain scenarios but that should not mean i can beat most enemies and challenges in the game using the same tactic over and over again. Especially if you can do that with all party members. Especially if we are talking about a 100+ hour game with high replayability planned. For example as others mentioned as one example shoving is fun once in a while or jumping is okay to use celeverly once in a while but at the moment these can be abused heavily to win fights instead of cleverly combining unique class specific skills or teamwork actions.
I look forward to play bg3 full release as its already a really nice game with a lot of cool features but atm its not nearly as tactical to me as i expected it to be. Thing are changing though, its still EA, so fingers crossed

Larian would not know good gameplay if someone wrote the system for them.

Oh wait....

Basically DOS3 flavored D&D/Baldurs gate is here to stay. Deal with it.
I think what we are getting is the best that we can get close to prior BG games with a 300 development team AAA budget. Anything else just will not sell or be popular in 2021 aesthetics.
Cinematic dialogues are so bad though...just hate them. For me it just does not work...I find the cring to overwhelming. Like a very bad Z movie. Due to the way they are made, no options either for later mods to add stuff to the story like the prior games.
A good book doesn't need 100% cinematics to be better. Just a little for those impactful scenes. My opinion on the matter.

I've been saying this. I'm a realist and prepared for disappointment, prepared for things to be wonky, prepared for things to be missing, prepared for cheese.

As I said before,
As I said people, those links you posted to things is something Larian likes to see circulating around.

Reading further into the interview, it mentions that they are releasing classes based on complexity, which is an understandable stance to take. Druid was complicated in both wildshape mechanics and immediate story relevance.

Still, this has super unfortunate implications. If you really want to take this at face value (and defining complexity as difficulty in coding), then the longer the reaction based classes get pushed back, the more you should expect that proper reactions won’t be a thing in this game.

Would be a damned shame.... then all we can hope for are modders making that work.

I would absolutely hate to have to rely on mods to get a BG3 that plays like D&D. Mods can only go so far if the core game is designed without a proper resting / resource management system or a reaction system.

Mods are also a bit of a hassle with multiplayer where everyone needs to agree and download the same mods. If it even works?

Is it really too much to ask of Larian to provide a true D&D 5e experience in a 5e D&D game?

I'm glad they are aware of how much a turn off RNG is in the game.

Keep that crap for the troll tabletop. In my videogames, I want consistency of outcome.

In regards to Larian cheese, they just need to remove fall damage off shove and just make targets prone, and for stealth attacks to put all your group in combat.

Maybe reduce the impsct of verticality so it isn't completely mandatory for casters to take misty step.

Then fix the garbage concentration system that's making it so only one optimal spell is used while the rest never see the light of day.

Should probably steer clear of games whose stated purpose is to adapt a table-top rule system to a videogame.