Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Does everything need to be turned up to 11?

Guys, quit being snarky and post constructively. Thanks.


IIRC Tolkien intended it to be a sort of "(Icelandic?) Epic for England" or something to that effect; so apart from the appropriation element, that for me is one of the major reasons the films got the entire "feel" wrong.

BG3 is far too dense with crazy epic content. Also physically too dense because of the theme park map design.

Like others have explained, you need to establish a baseline "normal" for the crazy high fantasy stuff to mean anything to have any kind of impact. I'm becoming increasingly numb every time I meet the next scenario involving archdevils or dragons or a new companion with an even more outlandish story than the previous ones.

Maybe just once the refugees could be a bunch of ragtag humans whose village was burned down by Drow raiders instead of being half-devils who escaped the Nine Hells. As a sidenote, it feels like an obvious story element is completely ignored - are there really no evil Tieflings at all whose devil side is dominant? Shouldn't that race be all about the inner conflict between their human and devil side? The Tieflings in BG3 could all be switched out with human models and you wouldn't even notice a difference. So why are they Tieflings? I hope they go somewhere with that where your goody two shoes party ends up helping an evil (sub)faction. Or just to make the conflict between the Druids and Tieflings more morally gray with good and evil on both sides.

The area design would benefit from having a little bit of air between locations. Not too much, but some parts should definitely feel more empty because that's what wilderness is. I don't get a sense of exploration like I did in the previous games where I could stumble upon an ancient tomb with Ghouls and Revenants inside while exploring the wilderness. Dividing the locations into several maps instead of one big one would have helped a lot in achieving this and getting rid of the fake theme park feel. In this regard BG3 is progressing backwards compared to BG1&2.

But most of all the game world needs more mundane so we can recognize what's not.

Nah. I disagree. Mundane is boring. I agree with Alexandrite. BG1 and 2 and Icewindale, etc., they were boring when it came to exploring maps.

The normal people are dead. End of story. BG3 points this out over and over again. We haven't gotten to the mundane yet. When the party reaches BG, THEN we will see normal people.

Why are so many bent on this? How many epic mythology stories focus on the mundane? No. They focus on Hercules and Ulysses and Jason and the Argonauts. They don't focus on Joe nobody.

Who says all stories must be epic or that the best stories are epic legends about Hercules & co?

Game of Thrones resonates with the audiences because they can relate to the characters. Even though there are epic storylines looming over Westeros, a lot of GoT is about humanity. Their hard life, aspirations, politics, power, betrayal, redemption. These ordinary human characters are so well written the show doesn't need nautiloids, mind flayers, devils, vampires and gods behind every corner to be engaging.

Larian are pulling so greedily from the fantasy bag they seem to be forgetting the basics of storytelling and focusing on quantity over quality.

BG1 have what little modern games have: a sense of exploration. This is precisely where the ‘Venture forth’ comes from. No action packed feature can compensate BG3 railroading.

Ah, that's an amazing sense of exploration.
There is nothing like "exploring" completely empty maps where all you can find is a few enemies or one npc.
You might as well remove half of the locations from the game and it would only be good for the game.
For comparison, BG2 is much better done. Most of the maps are not nearly identical, yet there is a lot more content on them.

You can skip exploring then and go straight main quest. I very much enjoy exploring them and finding something hidden. Yes, this is exploration.

If the game does not in any way encourage the player to explore, it is a bad design.
Not to mention that in BG1, exploration was meaningless since there was practically nothing on most maps.

Same. At risk of poking a(nother) hornets' nest, it's one of the reasons I preferred FO3 to New Vegas: the former had more random stuff to be discovered; often inconsequential, but if anything that made it more poignant or amusing or just that sort of "...why?" that gives me something to wonder about. I was quite surprised when I made that point to someone who much preferred NV and they said outright that exploration and indeed pretty much anything that wasn't directly story-related was of zero interest to them and they considered it a waste of development effort. Then again, people have been as surprised when I've said I'm pretty meh about combat mechanics and that I prefer that exploration, random encounters and pretty much everything that isn't combat-related.

But there IS plenty of non-main quest stuff even in EA. So there is a ton of exploration.

Main Quest = Save Halsin from Gobbos and take out leaders, OR kill everyone else.

Side Quest Exploration = Tollhouse, Waukeens Rest, Gothyanki, Hag, Bog, Kahga Quest, Spider Lair, Ogres, Owlbear, discovering what happened to the Harpers, the entire Underdark, even the first dungeons isn't necessary but is a part of exploration.

And there WILL be so much more once out of EA. At least, that's how they're setting it up. So I don't get why everyone is saying there isn't enough exploration. The whole dang EA map is exploration with the ability to run right to the end if you want. Right?

It seems it's mostly quest-related, though; I suspect most of the bits in question will be at least tangentially related to the MQ, and if not that then part of another significant side-quest. I'm thinking of just random interesting stuff that one might happen upon that's really not at all relevant to anything and just exists for its own sake. Maybe to add some flavour or background or maybe just because. I guess I just like trivialities and randomness.

I wonder how many people here talking about exploring did find the chest above the crash site? The one for which the game even gives you some exp in addition to it's contents.
Yes, the map could use a bit of expanding, but not in old-Bioware-games style or TES style. None of those fits the gameplay and the story.
And talking about everything being "turned up to 11". We do not have that everything, we have pretty much the one thing - Absolute's plot moving - and a few little details along the road. Going by the list from the OP post:
Minthara the Drow leader of the Absolute Cult wants them dead for some reason.

The druids leader went to investigate on the Absolute Cult activity. We can't yet tell if Shadow druids has something to do with the Absolute or they just used the opportunity, but either way it's logical.So the Shadow druid part probably is not the part of the Absolute plot, but pretty much the collateral damage.

Welp, it's says itself: the Absolute.

A village, not a town. As already said by other users: that's not the goblins handiwork and the village wasn't wiped recently, so it doesn't even count.

That's not a town, that's just one Inn. When the last time you saw a town? (joking) And... those drow were sent by same Minthara the Drow leader of the Absolute Cult.

This is the second thing which so far looks like just some collateral damage. The tiefling escaped Avernus by the Nautoloid related to the Absolute, the paladins got corrupted during Absolute minions attack.

The search party pursues the artifact that got on the Nautoloid related to the Absolute.

The one and only thing so far that looks like just like it happened to be there, nor part of the Absolute plot, nor collateral damage.

The ship defenetly not crashes in the middle of it all, if you consider the party members a part of it all. They were on the ship. But anyway… the ship was expected by the Absolute Cult to be in the Area. It just happened so that it couldn't reach it's destination intact.

So what I'm seeing is a holy war at it's early staging, not many different things happening.

I consider FO3 a good game, but honestly I like the exploration of NV more, in particular with the DLCs. Dead Money and Old World Blues are just a joy to explore and there are many tiny details and secrets to find, however both I think do a great job at presenting a world to explore and rewarding that. They go for completely different aesthetics and go a little different with it, but both I think are games to look at with Exploration. Heck, personally, one of the few things FO76 did right was Appalachia and exploring it.

Err to put this tangent on topic, I do think BG3 could actually look at Fallout's different styles of exploring a world as something consistent in the series is the joy of exploring the world and finding small things.

Or maybe just an old world map of the area with a loading bar in the shape of the path the adventurers are traveling. Or perhaps just some nice concept art of the terrain you are travelling across that stays on screen just long enough to load the next map.

The point is that if you can shoot an arrow from one edge of a forest and hit a goblin on the other edge of the forest, it isn't really a forest. The solution to having real scale without a boring 2-week real-time march to the next destination is to imply the passage of time and load a new map set 2 weeks later.

That chest is not so problematic to spot ... more to realize that cliff you see is acutaly a possible path.

I have other secret, even tho is probably nothing. :-/
Since im really compeltionist, i wanted to search whole map, litteraly ... i spend hours just bcs i have seen some "place that didnt seem explored enough" yet i still find things i missed previously. O_o
[spoiler]For example ... Kagha chest i noticed on third play ... and that stash behind waterfall even on sixth, or seventh ...[spoiler]
But that secret ...
Since i used minimap, and map a lot to determine wich parts isnt explore enough (meaning where i havent clearly visible border of the map + that cca 2cm ... i have found that in Zevlor's cave, there is something that seem to be another cave, or something like that.
I have seen it only on minimap, and next time i will be there, i screen it ... but i never found any entrance.

Maybe ... but that would be equivalent of loaded dices ...
It solve one problem, sure ... but imediatly create another one. O_o

For one how would you split the curent map?
And for two, wouldnt in bee too small then? :-/

I mean ... for example Blighted Village is actualy quite small, when you think about it. :-/

Well, it encouraged quite a lot of people hence the cult status. I also disagree about its meaninglessness, most wilderness maps contain at least couple of good encounters. Most of them are quite nice and I still remember them.

I wouldn't split up the current map. That would just give you several smaller theme parks.

I would build a to-scale map for the druid grove, and another to-scale map for the blighted village, and another to-scale map for Ethel's swamp, and another to-scale map for the underdark. If something takes place in a forest, there should be trees as far as the eye can see. You shouldn't be able to walk from the middle of the forest to the top of a mountain in two minutes.

I don't imagine that they are going to redesign all the environments for Chapter 1 at this point, but I hold out a little hope that they might make environments for later chapters more to scale.

If nothing else, I would hope that if enough people feel the same as I, that when they go to make Baldur's Gate 4 they will look back on this seamless "open-world" theme park as a failed experiment.

The only game I really enjoyed exploring every single nook and cranny was TW3. It felt massive. It had some fairly empty areas to be sure…but that was made up for by music, weather, terrain (that you actually had to navigate over with Roach), and gorgeous skies. And hairworks…for parking Geralt on a cliff and watching the clouds role by in style. The atmosphere was so great that I often explored with no hud and no music just to immerse myself in exploration.

Another great game for that was Skyrim. But both of these games are as close to true open world as one can get. And they are single player deals.

Dragon Age Inquisition, despite its many story and gameplay faults, actually found a good balance with open world-like areas combined with hubs. Works well for party based rpgs imho. I think that could work well in a game like this to give the weighty sense of scale and place and add some filler npcs — tho I am now ducking to avoid eggs for saying that.


Also…just fired up DOS 2 for the first time ever in my boredom while waiting for next BG3 major patch. Man…that intro compared to BG3? Shocking how similar it was. Kinda miffed me.

Heh - whenever I log into Skyrim, I get so lost and unsure of what to do, I go look at some mammoths then log out again. It's almost too big and open...



No I agree with you, DA:I did the immersive huge maps really well, combined with smaller quest maps. I've been re-playing it while waiting for Patch 5 to drop here. Really enjoying it.