Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Cutscenes in combats - the dynamics of combats

Why couldn't combats take advantage of the awesome job they did about graphics ?

Baldur's Gate 3 is a game with wonderfull graphics, especially when your camera is close to your characters.
At the moment combats are only taking advantage of Larian's awesome job about graphics when you're making a critical hit.

Of course, the camera is bugged and the dice is probably too big...
Of course you can choose your point of view then doing your action to have an interresting point of view on the action...

But it's tedious and it's not something it's fun to think about when you're playing, challenging your ennemies and thinking about your actions.

On the other hand, looking a mate slashing an ennemy is fine in turn base but it's not really impressive.

You know what ? I'd like to talk about another game to explain what I mean and give a few exemples : Solasta.
I have said the word but stay focus. This thread is about cutscenes in combats.

Graphics are far from being amazing in this game but they introduced very interresting scenes during combats that would be wonderfull with BG3's visual quality.
A bit like the critical hit scenes of BG3 but it happen more often whatever your roll.

Look at these few gifs I made and stay open minded. It's not about the game. It's about visual scenes that could looks totally diferent (better) with another game's engine.


This is a variety of scenes you have while fighting. These scenes occur randomly during any battles whatever the character or creature, the spell, the feature or the action used.
Obviously they're far from being perfect whatever we're talking about the models, the animations, the environment and so on. That's not the point.

Those custscenes immerse players into the intensity of the battles. It increase the visual dynamic of combats, giving us the feeling that something else happen than just slow TB battles.
More of those cutscene would tone down the barrier between turn base and real time without any consequences on the speed of combats. Only it's visual flow is increased.

Of course those cutscenes shouldn't happen for each moves or it would be boring and visually tiring.
I can't really say but I guess it shouldn't be more than once every 3 or 4 round.

The game wouldn't be faster but it would be more dynamic. We could also see our ennemies point of view to have different kind of scenes.
We could see a sword slashing a shield, an arrow completely missing/hitting its target, a spell that burn a creature,...

I guess it's an easier job in a game that looks like Solasta than a game that looks like BG3...
You can assume a target that dodge an attack but that is visually slashed by a cemetery in a game that has such graphics. Not sure you can do that in BG3.

Or maybe I'm wrong ? Why would it be a problem ? It's something really fast and it's not really a problem when you manually zoom on combats.
You don't really care about the arrows that aren't in your ennemies body when looking at him or the always clean armors.

Anyway. I'm just saying that "something like that" could make BG3 even better.

It wouldn't be a problem, as long as we can turn them off.

Even though BG3 has far more visual flare, I assume they would add as little to the experience as they do in Solasta or XCOM1&2 .

Honestly, this is one of the few things I could do away with in Solasta. Though it has more to do with the awkwardness in execution than anything else.

I am sure the BG3 devs have already considered this, and our only example thus far is the aforementioned critical hits, which is even more awkward because the visual of the die rolling 20 takes up too much of the screen and the cinematic goes so fast that you're left wondering what you actually saw at the end of it. Spells targeting saving throws inherently cannot critically hit either, so you'll never see such a cinematic while casting those. Still, I think the BG3 devs are determined to make it work eventually, like how we get cinematics for talking to every single NPC, even if the majority only have one line of flavor text. It just shouldn't be a big priority right now.

Considering I don't even want the animations that already exist in BG 3 (or at least I would like an option to disable them), my opinion on this would be, "please no."

I like the cutscenes and critical hit animations. However the stupidly huge dice being sliced in the foreground obscures any enemy slicing and dicing my character is doing! I'd prefer to see the character kicking ass animation and not the dice.

I am kinda going off topic, but I personaly liked those. What confuses me about BG3 is this bipolar aproach they have going on. Sometimes they fully embrace it is a table-top game and show dice in an awkwardly prominent way. Sometimes they go out of their way to hide actual mechanic behind a more traditional PC gaming paint.

If you are so happy to show dice when doing critical hit&miss, and during skill checks, why not also give us tooltips with actual modifiers, and not translate chances to hit into confusing percentages? And, if on the other hand, like BG1&2 you don't want players to think of your game as artificial table-top adaptation, why do you have those dice things?

It feels to me, like different teams working on the game, have slightly different ideas on what the game should be like.

I personally prefer seeing the % chance rather than showing numbers, modifiers, etc... I'm a visual person though, and math is definitely not my strong suit! I'm sure more mathematically minded people would prefer seeing all the numbers. Having the option of what to display would be nice I guess.

I have mixed feelings about this, but we already have something special for critical rolls. Combat is stale for a litany of reasons, so anything to add spice would be nice.

Anything would be better than those awful critical rolls. that stupid dice is just massive

Honestly I'm not against "short, quick and snappy" animations to highlight critical rolls, fatal blows and what else.
I know there's a part of the audience that considers it a "waste of time" and a pointless dilapidation of the budget, and if they were giving the option they would play these games at 500% speed and with character animations completely disabled, but on a personal level I don't mind a bit of eye candy in principle.
And it's not like I play these games while being constantly rushed to save any single valuable second. For instance I never disabled the "cinematic killshots" in XCOM 2 because no matter how many full campaigns I replay, I always take that bare minimum amount of satisfaction from watching them.

That said, I sincerely hope that if the feature remains in BG3 it will see some noticeable rework, because the current implementation is MESSY at best and yeah, as others already pointed even when the animation doesn't glitch, that gigantic dice typically covers half of it.

I definitely approve.

... I can already see a closeup on my character taking aim with her bow, dramatically shooting at an enemy... And off it goes, 90 degrees in the wrong direction. Ahh, Xcom (1+2) sure are amazing games. :]

Jokes aside, a cool animation for critical rolls or killing blows would be awesome

This. I don't need forced screen jerking and perspective changing crap that makes me want to vomit. I just want to play a game. I don't care if they add it for people that want it, but would prefer they spend time on other things first.

Agreed.

You'll be glad to hear that it's something possible in "the
other game". I guess if they can, it should be an easy job for Larian.

"Turn off action camera" is possible in multiple "other games". O_o

This annoys me as well, however I do recognise that others like giant dice strapped to their nose so the fairest thing is let us turn that off. The same goes with what the OP's suggesting. I'm all for it, just let players chose what's best for their tastes and their systems.