Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Reddit : interresting posts

You obviously didn't read those construtive threads.

Multiple people using logic to form analogous opinions is not "one's own preference".

To elaborate I've seen people say they enjoy the game, but it's very rare to see someone voice the opinion that combat should stay the same. I have not seen a logically written & thought out opinion say that combat is fun as is. It's like Saito said, there is usually small degrees of disagreement on what the root cause actually is... and there are a lot of players voicing that combat needs to change.

And among those voices it's usually, "Yeah adding in more D&D 5e rules-as-written would benefit the game". That's the preference of several gamers who have played Baldur's Gate 3 and voiced their opinions on Reddit or the forums.

I know you have already received a few replies, but the way I see it, even if we are talking about a small percentage of people, as you pointed out, there are still very interesting and constructive points raised there.

Also, what is it about changes to the current system that would make it less likely to "cater for all tastes"? After all, no matter what is done or isn't, the game will inevitable HAVE systems in the end. The regular players / wide masses will learn whatever system there is without prior knowledge of DND or not. What matters in the end is whether or not the system is good, and DND 5th edition is designed to be a very simple system, which is why many believe that a truer adherence to that system would benefit the game. In many ways, the Larian homebrew has made some things far more complicated than the original ruleset.

In the end, what matters is if the systems work, seems balanced, gives good options and is fun. Obviously not everyone can be pleased, but there does seem to be a large consensus among people regarding a few key points about the system, and I am sure that changing those things wouldn't have a negative impact on the "catering to the masses", so to speak.

It really is such a good game. It’s story (so far) is well thought out an intriguing, voice acting and visuals are outstanding, and it is rapidly approaching what I feel a BG sequel should feel like (Nietzschean monster within). The combat can be fun but after a couple play throughs, you realize that the mechanics of the game virtually beg a certain play style.

The whole height/advantage mechanic has been beaten to death, and I really hope it is pared down. It is ultimately Larian’s call, and I think it is unfair to judge them off an early build. I also think we shouldn’t discount all changes Larian has made. Attacking someone from an elevated position should have some advantage. This is why castles had tower and walls and why a hill could be a game changer in a military conflict. It sucks to fight someone above you. It just needs some tweaking. I also think throwing people and getting advantage for jumping behind someone should just disappear. Come on no.

One last point, I had a blast playing CyberPunk for about the first half of the game. I built a sweet hacker who could ping people and kill an entire building worth of enemies with hacks. No one even knew where I was. It was fun the first several times I cleared a mission like this. Then I completely lost interest in the game. The point is that once someone figures out an op exploit of a games mechanics it becomes difficult to enjoy. It is fun shoving a goblin to his death, but after a few times, it just becomes a quick and easy way to clear an area. I actually am really hoping that we run into plenty of flat areas just so we can have some variety with the combat.

There's even people being downvoted into oblivion for supporting health bloat. I really hope this gets addressed.

Good point. Perhaps this is just the return of the repressed.

I expect that what is gradually happening on the subreddit is the people who were only participating for one or two playthroughs to see what it is like, or only participating because its the new thing on twitch have been falling away and so their voices on social media is slowly giving way to the same crowd on the forums here. Hard to prove overall, I guess you could try to do some correlation based on the themes of what is posted at different time intervals by scraping the subreddit, but thats too much work for a mere idle curiosity. Looking at what stats are already scraped was somewhat amusing, especially for top keywords.

The same thing happened on the forums, although it happened much faster. Most people don't care to argue the same points over and over in circles for months on end, so after they have had their say, they just trot off and do something else. If you look at the forums now, by and large the people posting on every thread are the same group of people and the discussions inevitably fall back to the same topics. I was half tempted to make a bingo card of the threads here, but I thought I had better not because someone might get offended. Still, you could make a drinking game out of these discussions quite easily where you take a drink every time someone calls BG 3 DOS 3 or they make a comparison to Solasta. You might want to pick a drink with a very low concentration of alcohol though or you might die from alcohol poisoning.

Early on there were quite a few people constructively arguing different viewpoints, but they have since moved on.

Now there's an idea: maybe I should create a "drinking game" topic where all of those posts can end up...

I did as well because the first OP was strawmanning like there was no a tomorrow.

Hey, to my defense I'm perfectly aware of how much I tend to repeat the same complaints over and over.
It's not by chance. It's a deliberate strategy because you have to hammer these points at home to have even a remote chance that someone will start acting on them, otherwise they will dismissed as "a concern no one talks about".

You either try to control to a certain degree what the "public discourse" is about, or you could as well give up and leave the entire feedback about the game being dominated by the Thirsty Army simping HARD for Halsin, Minthara, Fezza and the kinky masochist priest, under the assumption that the ultimate goal of BG3 is to compete toe-to-toe with Dream Daddy Simulator or some of that shit.

And just to be upfront about it, I have no clue nor a single care in the world to check if I wrote any of these names correctly.

I actually would be pretty interested in seeing the bingo card, if only because it'd be something to lighten the mood, ha. I don't think people here really have that much of an ego to be offended by such a thing.

That said, there is a certain context to everything, and I choose to believe that it's not just that the more casual crowd has moved on, because something like this is rarely explained by a single convenient factor. I think that also among the more hardcore players that remain and love the game enough to continue replaying it, opinions have been slowly shifting in an unfavorable direction in the background, if only due to the very nature of how the EA is structured. There's hardly any new content to keep everyone's attention, so naturally everyone is going to start questioning everything. Especially when you look forward and realize there's at least an 80+ hour game ahead of us. The EA is structured to be repetitive, so one really shouldn't be surprised if the overall discourse around it behaves the same way too.

People have always had grievances with the combat design. It's exactly why the vast majority of the criticism is solely centered on it. The events of the past two days have just proven that people actually believe that the problems with the core combat mechanics are real, and we're not just a small group of DnD purists/Larian haters/whatever perceived insult of one's choice shouting into the void. And if Larian doesn't take this seriously, I'm not going to hold any sympathy for them if the general public lambasts the game over it come full release, because we would have spent an entire year or longer trying to warn them at that point.

By all accounts, people raised the same types of concerns with the DOS2 armor system, and it resulted in an endgame that was universally considered so imbalanced (and coupled with a disjointed final arc in terms of pacing because several things were clearly unfinished, like the possessed girl quest) that it took a definitive edition to fix it, as much as it could be fixed. And it sounds like the current situation with BG3's mechanics are starting several degrees worse than that when it comes to public perception already.

At this point, I realize that I am also saying in a roundabout way that some of the hardcore crowd would probably benefit from simply stepping away from the EA process altogether, because as it currently is, continuing to play has a far higher likelihood of souring your overall experience in the long term. But that doesn't help Larian gauge actual feedback on the game, does it?

I think several months ago, I did say that I was going to leave this community alone in acceptance that if Larian didn't make any changes in their latest patch and indeed doubled down on these mechanics, and wait for final release in acceptance that I'd still love the game for numerous reasons that have nothing to do with the combat. I've since decided that such a defeatist stance helps no one, and the ultimate goal is to recognize that the game can become better. It's not like people's thoughts are narrow enough to attach criticism of BG3 to their very identity, or at least I would hope that's not the case.

I mean I can understand being repetitive. I feel like I might be more than a bit repetitive when I say certain things mainly cause those are the things I zero in on. Like I am really paying attention to Find Familiar and other conjuration stuff because I am worried they might just dismiss concerns about that school cause it is a difficult school and replace much of it with Larianisms. Or I talk about companions and the possibility for more and all that. Honestly hoping I am not annoying when I post about the same shit again and again.

Don't worry, you're not.

Everything we're talking here was raised from the beginning and NOT only by those that are still playing the game and are still active here.

With the complete lack of communication and the slow developpement due to the world context what else could the passionnated BG3 players talk about ?

Should we stop talking about a game we love because some people don't like to see "the same things" when they come here ?

If Larian could be bothered to acknowledge specific talking points rather that brushing off everything with a vague "We are listening" (but listening to *what* exactly?) it would also greatly help to reduce the redundancy.

Not to keep beating what's starting to resemble a dead horse at this point, but look at how the Solasta team handle their public updates about the state of development in comparison: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1096530/view/3003311896028768450

Both are really good post, with what looks like a good discussion underneath. It's been already pointed out, but I don't think the first one has anything of real value to say: of course BG3 shouldn't be like Tabletop for the sake of it.

Well, here you go. I did start running out of ideas for some repeated topics around about number 19.
The forums have a rather small userbase and you can more or less keep track of the people who actively post a lot. Their opinions have been entrenched since the beginning (yourself, sludge khalid, Maximuuus, tuco, KillerRabit, etc) and have not shifted much over the course of time. There were some contrarians who also posted a lot but they have disappeared (firesnake, surfaces_R, etc). They also had their own list of issues, but they disagreed with the first group on quite a few topics and there was some back and forth discussion about it without going into mud slinging. I would strongly bet on the shift of discourse being the result of the disappearance of the latter group leading to the creation of an echo chamber here, similar to how reddit is the echo chamber to go to when you want to discuss Helsin's body.

They have, but not all grievances are the same. I personally think the weakest part of the game is the fact that it uses DND combat and would throw the entire thing away and use something else (I don't think Larian's system is a better alternative), but hell would freeze over before a completely new system was ever implemented.
Just because people are right about an issue in 1 game, does not mean a different group of people are right about a different set of issues in another game. An easy example of this is the vocal crowd in the Path of Exile community who pretty much wants to turn the game into a clicker and forget about the aRPG.

Anyhow, I am not going to get into this argument again. I had this argument when the game first came out with Sludge Khalid and nobody budged, repeating the same talking points again isn't going to get anyone anywhere. I have no intention of being Don Quixote here.

Whilst I agree that the way party controls are bad, I don't think constant repetition of feedback from the same group of people is going to change their minds about anything. Were I a developer, it would not change my mind either. If I was gathering feedback from the forums, I would use a tool to condense all the posts on a topic from single users and then measure the sentiment from the condensed post, then look at it based on the number of people complaining as well as what type of player they are. Multiple posts on the topic from a single user would be completely discarded, because I would only be counting the user's opinion on the whole. We know Larian is big on using data analysis, so I would not be surprised if they did something similar.

The best way to change their mind with such a system, would be to get lots of outsiders who are not currently complaining about it, to join in on the discussion, which would mean promoting the topic in places where it is not heavily discussed. Examples of such being on youtube, steam, twitch, twitter, etc.

Of course I am not going to argue with the fact that the forums always only represent a very small percentage of the game's community. And I would also agree with the fact that whenever people do join the forums, it is usually because they have a complaint or issue of some kind. People joining the forums on praise alone is rare, very rare indeed.

However, I would ask you to not mistake the talkative ones for the only active ones. :] I have been here since autumn of last year, and while I more often than not am way too inexperienced and clueless to actually participate in the conversation (unless I actually just leave some encouragement or a newbie point of view) - I have been reading these forums almost daily ever since, although I do not always have something to post myself. I cannot imagine I am the only one lurking around here with the main objective being just reading, learning and generally just keeping an eye on the active discussions.

EDIT: by the way, while I think any suggestion / complaint / discussion is worth respecting as we all have different priorities when playing the game, your bingo card is on point. 11/10 :'D

I guess you look at names more than reading^^

Great summary of the probably most often reported issues, feedbacks or things discussed but...
You forgot backstab and highground... What a shame !

Even if the entire population of planet earth read these forums, we can only judge the forums according to the content which is posted on it, which incidentally posted by a small group of people who share a similar set of views. Incidentally, this characteristic will lead to more people who share that particular mindset being likely to contribute than those who share a contrary opinion, so with time it is highly likely that this forum will continue to head in the same direction.


From when you first started posting, to when you changed your mind on certain topics was a very brief window in time, for the vast majority of your tenure you shared the entrenched opinions of the vocal group here. I did read your posts and the majority of them were in support of the forum's consensus. I did consider not including you in that list, but since you are mostly harping on the same topics now, I thought I may as well put you there. I thought it more a case of that it took you a short period of time to form an opinion and then afterwards you continued to argue for it. I did leave out some of the others like Niara who I should have included.

Basically, you can look at the names of posters and know immediately what they are arguing in favor of and also how likely it is that you will agree with them. For example if I see tuco's name hes probably complaining about something related to the UI and I will probably agree with the topic. If I see sludge khalid (who hasn't been active in a long time) it will probably be about dnd rules and I will probably disagree with him on the subject.

I didn't, backstab was what I intended with complaining about stealth and highground was complaining about height advantage.

I mean, one thing is PRECISELY aimed to achieve the other.
We don't speak constantly about these flaws because we are in love with our own voice, but in the hope more people will notice these issues we care about and join the request to fix what needs to be fixed.

Objectively false. I started rather enthusiastic about the EA build only to grow more and more disappointed as long as bad trends with the production became more obvious.
Not to mention Larian's disinterest with communicating clearly their intention and/or addressing problems the community almost unanimously agreed with.

Well, guess what?
https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=679414#Post679414

Also, courtesy of Maximuuus:

And that's only ONE of the forums where the topic is constantly pointed as one of the major flaws in the game.
I could point to you threads on the Steam forum boards, on NeoGAF, ResetEra, RPG Codex, Reddit... Pretty much anywhere the game is discussed, someone brings this up. And when someone does, most people agrees that the current system sucks.