Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback a big tip Laria Studio

People who bring up Solasta non stop should be fair - Solasta has nothing going on for it other than most aspects of combat (and I feel even on that department there is much room for improvement) which are great.

The game itself is slow, ugly and boring. I've played it for several hours but it was a mostly painful experience with slight bursts of brilliance. And I found out there are two specific aspects of this game I really enjoy - character creotor and dungeon master mode. Unfortunately, this is not enough to sustain a great game, definitely not this day and age, when video games became much more.

About the relationship between Bg3 and Solasta - I think the reason people here keep mentioning this game is not because they think it is better, but because there is something very specific it did batter even if it is inferior in all other aspects when compared to Bg3.

Writing and story is not a strength of Larian. So much stuff in DOS2 does not even make sense, let alone it is a sequel of DOS1 and nothing they tried to bridge together from the first game makes sense at all.

Just because they forced Braccus Rex into the game in a role that made no sense at all and mentioned Sourcerers does not make it a sequel. Not only that, but the writing within just DOS2 was messy.

The last 3rd of the game was rushed and filled with incomplete story and so much excess fluff, despite also being undercooked. I have no idea why anyone would think Larian has good writing.

All true, and I talked about here non stop on the early days of the EA. But the old excuses of "we are small indie studio" don't work anymore... If they knew it's a weakness they should have addressed it once they had the budget.

Perhaps they have hired more writers? They've grown a lot as a company and overall workflow / production is greatly impacted by the individuals involved. I've worked on projects where the addition or subtraction of one or two individuals made a huge difference for better or worse.

I would love to be wrong, but solely based on the EA, I doubt it.

I dunno, I personally have really enjoyed the story and the EA. I'm not yet finished with DOS2 and only started playing it recently, but I think the writing in BG3 is much better. In my admittedly extremely brief googling, it appears that there are writers associated with BG3 that aren't credited for DOS2, which leads me to believe that Larian is trying to do something different in regards to the writing in BG3.

I'm sure they do, I also believe it's not their highest priority

I don't think it's the writers, I think it's the game designers. The decision to spoonfeed exposition by clicking on an NPC and then clicking through their dialogue tree is a game design decision. The writers did a pretty good job writing the spoonfed exposition. The voice actors did a great job delivering the spoonfed exposition.

The issue is that we need to discover who the characters are through their reactions to events and interactions with each other, and those elements just aren't there. The design decision to make nearly all the dialogue happen through one-on-one interactions with the player is a hurdle to immersive storytelling.

I agree that this could use improvement.

This is pretty much what everyone has been trying to say from the very beginning in regards to the combat. BG3's current state of combat is awful enough that it needs to be relentlessly called out at every opportunity, and Solasta just happens to be the most convenient example as a point of comparison.

Though even without the context of Solasta and tabletop DnD rules, I still find BG3's combat design to be awful on its own merits. I'm generally 100% of the belief that if BG3 wasn't a Larian game, this kind of design would already have already been considered intolerable by the majority of the turn-based enthusiast community. And I'm not alone in this assessment, if the recent Reddit polls are anything to go by, the people who think there's something really off about the design actually comprise a majority of the community there. And that should be pretty alarming for a subreddit that generally that tries to stamp out anything misinterpreted as remotely hostile to Larian.

https://old.reddit.com/r/BaldursGat...etter_dd_or_larians_modified_dd_and_why/

(Hilariously, the poll was started by someone who had a clear agenda in support of the current design if their comments in the thread were anything to go by. So much that people called him out on it, checked his posting history and discovered that the poll was most likely created in response to a meme thread the previous day mocking what he saw as Larian detractors that backfired enough that it got deleted, and he deleted his Reddit account after the poll itself also backfired afterwards.

The poll also made me consider something else, that Jump/Disengage in its current form probably isn't that way for any balancing reasons, but more likely due to engine limitations/animation reasons. The devs could split them up and leave them separate if they wanted to. Goblins are already able to disengage by themselves, after all. But at the moment, we've never seen a jump from an enemy that didn't have a disengage tied to it too. It's not that people are against changes in general either, it's just these specific ones are bad and really bring the experience down. All this would have probably been more acceptable as bonuses granted to homebrew archetypes or something instead of messing with the base rules to such a fundamental degree.)

God, that’s funny. Will appreciate the link to the meme thread (can’t bear diving into the bg3 subreddit).

I don't have the link to the deleted thread and there's no way to reach it anymore as I don't think Reddit's search system will pick up deleted threads, since the Reddit OP deleted their account. Pretty much impossible to find after that happens unless I track down someone else who also posted in that thread, which is a needle in a haystack situation.

I think the EA is pretty good. It's my favorite game so far. It has SO much potential.

Potential, though. If not completed well, as I fear, it may leave me with a VERY bad taste in my mouth.

I really enjoyed looking at that poll a few days ago.
It really showed that we're not only a "vocal minority" to think that combats in BG3 just SUCK.

After playing Solasta fora bit, I definitely see where Larian is coming from with that change. Reactions in Solasta feel very... boardgamey? As if it is not a mechanic that would be created if it was designed from a ground up as computer game - it works but it feels very artificial.

At the same time, I don't see how current system that Larian implimented could be considered a decent substitute, unless they do a major redesign of all reactions to fit it. In Solasta reactions feel like one of characters main defining features - along with main and bonus actions. I can see character builds defined by reactions, where is in Baldur's Gate3 those feel like an afterfought - something you might toggle on and off, but in general not worry about too much. Even UI for it is small and cramped.

Funny because I was just reading on reddit people coming pretty much to the opposite conclusion: https://www.reddit.com/r/BaldursGate3/comments/nmq7mw/would_a_pop_up_reaction_window_be_possible/

This thread has a fair amount of people going "after trying it in Solasta I want it in BG3 as well".

Opinion is opinion, personally I hate the reaction from Solasta and I hope that Larian will not bow down on this issue

Reactions are one of the main appeal of combats.
Being able to do something during your ennemy's turn is something that doesn't exist in video games except for AOO and "ready" action.

It allow so many possibilities and combats feel so much less frozen / more alive. It's a huge improvement of the TB system (even if the "how" may not be perfect in Solasta).

On top of that If Larian had properly implement reaction (and DnD bonus action) they probably wouldn't have implemented their shitty new bonus action that breaks a big part of the game.

"We don't have enough things to do per turn in D&D" is another myth brought to justify poor choices/poor understanding of D&D's potential for video games.
A reaction is something to do.

I will repeat once more, proper reactions and ready actions do a lot more to open up a new dimension of tactical thinking than anything else that can be done. It means playing defensively is a viable option, some reactions let you directly defend yourself in some way against an incoming attack, and they let you try to anticipate what an enemy will do during their next turn so that you can outright punish them as they act. All concepts that I struggle to see anywhere in BG3.

They encourage proactive strategies rather than the heavily reactive (ironically) emphasis that is present in BG3's current combat design. Whatever proactivity there currently is tends to be largely restricted to setting things up for major surprise rounds and/or starting on super high ground somewhere.

One can argue that Solasta's implementation isn't perfect depending on their opinions about its presentation. But most people universally agree that the complete lack of any coherent reaction/ready action system in BG3 isn't really an answer.

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