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

And the last thing I want is combat where you can calculate the outcomes. Combat should be chaotic and unpredictable.

Why would they remove fall damage? The whole point in pushing someone off a ledge is to hurt them. And the world needs to feel real when you're telling a grown up story. If the gameplay is a total meme it's hard to take the story seriously.

I'm not buying the "RNG is bad in videogames". It's not about the platform. You can design tabletop games without RNG too. It's a choice.

Maybe action RPG's are more your thing if the RNG is so hard to swallow?

Hope is spring eternal. I've been vocal about wanting a difficulty setting with a D&D mode, both for my own peace of mind that the gameplay won't be ruined by the excessive cheese, and for more accurate feedback given there's a subsection of players with fragile egos who are exceedingly intolerant of RNG and advocate easier gameplay because missing/failure is never fun (which in turn incentivizes Larian to continue their cheese/homebrew).

Honestly though, at this point I'm not sure the ginormous ego of the Larian heads is even willing to risk being wounded with metrics possibly telling them the average gamer will reject their entire gameplay design philosophy - discarding both their cheese *and* their origin characters as player characters.

Could be. Action RPGs are designed to work well with the medium for which they are created. Not all have good mechanics, but they are usually more appropriatly paced than tabletop rules if you are intending to create an engaging computer-based RPG.

What you seem to want is something more akin to an computer-based emulator for the tabletop 5e experience with a BG3 game module attached. I don't know what made you think that was what Larian were making, but it is certainly not anything I would expect from what was shown before EA kicked off.

They could do better in some respects, and they could certainly offer more options for how the game plays ( which they may do before release ), but forcing a 5e emulator on an audience that mostly don't want it, is unlikely to be a winning strategy.

Can we stop with these straw man arguments, maybe?

But a large amount of people want the game to move toward 5e though? And 5e is an already constructed system that they can reference. We don't want another Fantasy Grounds or Roll20 where it is just 5e rules set and can apply to different games, but a game that does what it claimed to set out to do, and this is translate 5e like how BG1+2 translated AD&D2e.

Many changes are good and I like some of the changes, but also many of Larian's changes have proved to be contentious at best and game-breaking at worst, and EA makes it our job to give feedback and say what we believe about these mechanics.

Leave the insults at the door, please.

What's this even mean

"Many changes are good and I like some of the changes, but also many of Larian's changes have proved to be contentious at best and game-breaking at worst, and EA makes it our job to give feedback and say what we believe about these mechanics." <--- Totally agree with this statement. They are making a DND 5th edition game, and so it does make sense that they mostly stick to those rules, which is something they claimed they would do as much as possible, which is clearly not the case. I certainly don't mind homebrewing, but some of the homebrewing that's taking place just seems to screw too many things up, balance-wise and for many; entertainment-wise. I would also argue that their homebrewing so far actually gives us fewer options, rather than more options, as some classes lack features, or some features don't work as they should, and the distinct lack of a proper reaction system and such.

Maybe the tabletop is your thing, and you can stop telling people that you have ownership over a game, which you do not. I'll save chaotic and unpredictable for movies, I'd much rather have my known outputs to any input I make in the game instead of reloading a save because I rolled second in initiative and Bulette proceeded to slam half of my group dead on the first turn and by the time I get them up it's the third turn and he burrows out. Or having Baretha get first turn and 2 shot a member of the team through action surge while dodging the next 3 attacks from the party.

They should remove fall damage because taking out one third of the Phase Matriarch's HP by just breaking the webbing under her is absurd and trivializes the encounter, and the same goes for the Minotaurs.

I can’t imagine anything worse than taking RNG out of the game. Sometimes the dumb kobold manages to plant an arrow right between your eye. It is the uncertainty of each encounter that breeds replayability. I don’t think you are going to find many people that want to do away with that aspect of the game.

It is also worth noting that many of the brutal encounters are hard because we are level capped at 4. There is a huge increase in power at level 5 and that will completely change the nature of these harder battles. I don’t expect Larian’s core design philosophy to change. I would prefer a closer to TT experience because I think it will make the game less arcade-y, but I do enjoy the opportunity to resolve fights in different ways. Should shove be an action? Probably. Should I be able to eat a pigs head during combat? Probably not. It breaks immersion, and for me, that is why I play RPGs.

Unlike many here, I suspect that Larian is listening carefully to the feedback from its early access consumers. Many things will not be implemented because of cost or time constraints, but the final iteration of these game will likely make the DND and BG 1/2 traditionalists happy. I am not stressing it.

What nonsense is this?

I want a video game with a great story, a cinematic experience and good tactical combat that doesn't devolve into using the same cheese tactics in the name of "creativity" or "player agency". I want to be rewarded for smart resource management and effective teamwork, making the most of the class abilities of my party. The combat gameplay in BG3 is simplistic and boring. A clear downgrade from 5e as Solasta so effortlessy proves.

Kindly stop this drift into bad-tempered argument and remind yourselves that, just because someone doesn't share your view of what you want the game to be, it does not give you the right to start insulting, belittling or getting snarky with them.

No more calling suggestions 'nonsense', and no more suggesting that 'XYZ is not their thing' and that they should play a different game.

Honnestly I'm not interrested in BG3 "because it's a D&D game" but trying to learn what I was talking about here lead me to this conclusion : D&D has a stronger, deeper and more consistent system than the hybrid system we have in BG3.

I don't understand why a video game couldn't have a strong, deep and consistent system and a few "fun" homebrewed additions at the same time.

Again, it's only a matter of balance not to drive players in a way more than in another.

Let's hope patch 5 will answer a few questions.
I'll be strongly dissapointed if the game was only designed to for this kind of "fun".

That approach would have required Larian to start with 5E rules, and then modify change those rules, but that's not what happened. They started with DOS, and then tried to add in 5E, found it too difficult and/or didn't really understand 5E rules well enough to balance changes to them, and what we have is the current gobbledygook of DOS with a smattering of 5E.

I'm not a game designer but I'm not sure it's a bad idea to show everything first then try to understand what people like, what they don't and make adjustments.

I don't have the datas but reading many feedbacks it looks like players like those homebrewed possibilities a lot but not the too huge impact it has on the game balance, on combats and on D&D possibilities.

Ofc I hope they won't missunderstood their data and focus more on them than on feedbacks.

If people don't use bless it's not because it's not fun... it's because they don't know what it's usefull for and because there's something better in their homebrewed.
If they don't use faery fire, it's not because it's not fun... it's because there's something better in their homebrewed. That kind of things.

Those encounters are not an RNG problem.

It's about pitting power jumped level 5 enemies like the Gith patrol against a lower level party. The Bulette is also an overpowering enemy, designed for a level 5 party.

In D&D you won't be at peak performance if it's your second or third encounter after a long rest. In BG3 such concept doesn't exist - every encounter is your first encounter after rest and enemies have to be beefed up to match that. So of course overpowering enemies winning the initiative is a problem. The 5e system is designed more for attrition where you aren't as likely to get one shot by a lucky higher level enemy. It's more of a question how far do you push your luck. BG3 needs to incorporate that attrition through a meaningful resting system that isn't always available or has some cost attached to it. And tone down the power spikes of enemies and the importance of environmental gimmicks. Then the game will play better.

The Matriarch is another good example how an overpowering encounter is designed around one particular environmental gimmick. She always jumps on the web bridges and for some reason takes massive damage from falls, much more than anyone else. And she doesn't learn from the first fall either. If she teleports in melee range she eats two PC's for a snack in one turn. Why doesn't she just do that right away? That's what Phase Spiders are supposed to be doing with the teleport anyway, catch their prey. But here in the Larian version they are just bouncing around spitting gallons of poison and waiting for you to figure out the gimmick to defeat them with. I don't really understand the talk about player agency when an encounter is designed to be won in one very particular way. The Matriarch could be a little less overpowering without such an obvious and overpowered trick to killing her. It could be more a fight of attrition without an exploitative gimmick where you would use spells like Blindness, Grease and Ray of Enfeeblement and drink some healing potions while fighting her in melee.

Larian are trying to make D&D 5e play like another game and that's why it's not as a good as it could be. Yet, hopefully.

Technically, from what I remember, Swen mentioned that they started out with very strict rules but internal testing showed that they didn't work well.
Believe it or not, it doesn't matter.

I don't want to call someone a liar, but Swen is not telling the truth, and that's obvious from the current state of the game that they started with a DOS framework, and have been attempting to add in a few 5E concepts that don't really jive with all of the DOS holdover.

Dipping in candles.
Barrels of burning liquid everywhere
Nearly every enemy having a ranged attack that causes a damaging surface.
Weapons that give characters access to abilities like cleave or trip.

Or they just have a really narrow vision on what "works". DOS gameplay doesn't work for me at all, so it's all subjective in the end.

I would argue that BG 1&2 gameplay works, and so does NWN, Pathfinder and Solasta as other implementations of D&D for a CRPG. But based on the changes to D&D rules in BG3 it seems the folks at Larian think only DOS works out of that bunch.

I don't believe it. First because they've clearly reused DOS engine and adapted to d20 rolls and might've simply thought that some features are too much work to implement.
Second, Solasta is a very strict adaptation and it works well, in fact it is scoring higher than BG3.