Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback On Common Sense & other silly things [SPOILERS naturally]

Well, he certainly wasn't a gay man in my game. Romancable characters in BG3 are what is known as Player-sexual; in any individual play thought, IF the player chooses to romance them, then they are, by convenience, of a sexuality that makes that permissible and able to progress.

So, if you played a male character, and jumped through the many hoops required to romance Gale, then by coincidence, Gale is convincibly bisexual – we don't know whether he always was, or whether he's just open to trying this with you, but he is at least on board for giving it a go. This has no real impact or bearing on the established facts – that he was in love with a goddess, or at least in love with the concept of what he took her to be, depending on your view. There's no confusion here; Gale is either heterosexual or bisexual depending on your MC and whether they express interest in him, and the game conforms to that. It doesn't have any great impact on his overall character, and doesn't take away from him to have that particular detail be player-variable.

I've never really found this to be an issue, personally – there's more than enough artifacts that are of interest to him, and they're deliberately varied enough in type that you're bound to have one or two that you're simply not using.

The latter, and he never actually claims or implies otherwise. I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that he claims to be nobility from – Wyll certainly never does this.

This one is a definite Larian design problem that one would really want to hope they fix – Key items are returned to the PC when a character leaves the party, even when they're things that wouldn't otherwise be given up at all. Shadow should absolutely keep her box, and there really ought to be *something* to do with the eye in relation to finding it, returning it to Wyll, or at least asking him about it, etc., so that we actually know where we stand with it ,and whether he wants to keep it or not. Right now, there's nothing by a throwaway comment when you pick it up, and that's all.

Wyll, for example, approves of goodly and heroic acts, and of justice, but he's the violent-leaning side of it – he likes it when you enact violence against 'evil' things; saving innocents is a definite plus in his book, but the vengeance trip is stronger. He disapproves of you having social dealings with evil creatures, or doing anything with them other than killing them. This means he will disapprove of you dealing with the Hag at all, in any way other than full aggression, even if your plan was simply to pacify her temporarily so you can sneak in and deal with her by surprise. You won't get that reputation back, even if that's what you do, once he's taken it away. This is a problem with the entire system.

There are a lot of dialogue tails like this that don't update properly; I'd strongly encourage you, and any one else, to continue submitting bug reports to their formal bug reporter as much as you can spare the effort. The companion dialogues are littered with these, everywhere, and it really detracts from the game.

This comes back to Larian's love of their Mary-Sue origin companions. The companions almost always get to have the last word, an the MC almost always exists in conversation just to be the fall person, the dumb person, the idiot or the interlocutor for them to springboard their awesomeness off, feeding them the lines they need to do it, even if those lines make zero sense for our character to be saying. They are the shining stars, and Larian loves them, so we virtually never get the chance to call them down or counter their attitudes. It's frankly pretty disgusting and unenjoyable. Shadow is definitely one of the worst offenders of this, but they've all got it pretty bad.

You're not the only one who has had these complaints, and they're a pretty glaring issue with writing and design; I still want to hope that adding more voices may help.

The dialogue choices and race-locked options are pretty damn disgusting in the game at the moment, borderline offensive, really... You're ONLY allowed to suggest that everyone calm down and that it doesn't need to come to blows if you're a halfling – no-one else is allowed to use those lines! No one of any other race could POSSIBLE ever want to de-escalate a situation (SPECIFICALY because of their RACE), it's so impossible that they locked the line away behind halflings... who are apparently also to be characterised as the only ones who might be yokels or ignorant bumpkins; halfing only, no-one else. You can only use bloody and violent threats as a drow, and if you are a drow, you lose the ability to make more nuanced or subtle threats because all of those lines are replaced by the tactlessly gratuitous 'drow' ones. It's gross and it's terrible, it's above-game racist and disgusting... and the more people report it as an issue the better.

So, in BG3 Surprise is not working properly, and we're still waiting on them to get it right. In 5e rules, if you surprise an enemy, and the enemy Is indeed surprised, then you will get to act before they do, regardless of your initiative. There is no such thing as a 'surprise round' in 5e, and initiative is rolled normally, however, surprised foes get the surprised condition for their first turn, and while they have it, they cannot take any action at all, including reactions. If you roll a terrible initiative, they'll get their turn before you, but it will functionally be a turn skip for them, so you'll still get to actually act ahead of them. If you roll well, you'll get to act on them while they are surprised, and then you'll get to act ahead of them on the next round again, after they've skipped their first turn.

If you have instances where you initiate combat from stealth, or against sleeping targets, etc., and you find them acting, and actually acting, before you get to do anything, then that's something you should definitely send in as a bug report, save file included. We're still hoping that they do actually intend to do surprise correctly, fingers crossed.

Ogres.
This is a failure of BG3's lazy visual effects... everything is characterised as a miss outright, or as the enemy dodging, when it shouldn't be. Ogres, for example, are not nimble creatures, and they aren't hard to hit – their AC comes from natural armour, which mostly meas that when you fail to beat the AC, it's not really because you missed them, per se, but rather that your strike failed to pierce their hide and blubber, that it glanced off, or rebounded, or otherwise filed to do significant damage to them, through their tough exteriors. The game does not convey that, and leaves you with the ridiculousness of ogres doing phase-dodges, which, I agree, looks silly.

The simplest, laziest, solution that Larian could take would be to put in the 'hit failure' effect that makes the most sense for each enemy type – so that any miss on an Ogre looks like a glance off or a deflection, while any miss on a jumping spider looks like a dodge, etc... not ideal, but better than the present, and the best we've any hope of getting out of Larian, I fear.

Acid.
Lots of people don't care for the over-use of floor spots and other gaudy larianisms – no disagreement here. I don't agree that goblins don't have the smarts for it – they're a sentient race like any other, and each tribe is going to have a few crafty minds in it... but likely not every goblin, and even then, resources are the thing. There's definitely too many special arrows and bombs being thrown around, by a long margin.

So, while the enemies are of a higher individual level than our PCs in the examples given, this is a case of Larian flagrantly ignoring or disregarding the rules in order to make overpowered enemies, rather than actually using the balance already provided by the system they're supposedly using. A CR1 gnoll flesh gnawer as a three hit multi-attack – but it's melee only, and it's a d6+2, not a ranged d8+4 as in BG3. They don't really seem aware of how ignorant their tinkering is, because they expect you to use their class-abolishing larianisms to counter-act it. Their spellcasters are worse – with examples of level 5 casters having excessively more first and second level spell slots available to them than even a level 20 character could EVER have, as well as a slew of special bonus action abilities that are just duplicates of spells but fashioned as free BA abilities instead, to let them stack them up. Having the enemies playing by a different set of rules to the players does not create a sense of a fair system, at all.

So, this is a “for Video Games” quality of life thing, which is pretty wise for them to do, and most RPGs that have a scribing mechanic like this do so. The formal idea is that transcribing a spell into your spellbook, so that you can use and prepare it regularly, takes both time and effort, as well as reagents and materials (and also destroys the scroll) – specifically in 5e it takes enchanted inks and scribing paper, for example. A video game would be doing itself a disservice to meticulously book-keep you on this, requiring you to buy scribing materials in towns with vendors that have them, in advance, and instead they just 'presume' that you have bought the required materials when last they were available, and 'retroactively' subtract the gold they would have cost you. The game could definitely do a better job of explaining that scribing costs materials and money though.

Some weapons (glaives, halberds, whips) have a special property, 'reach', which extends their melee range – all other melee weapons have a standardised effective range that they can be used in. This doesn't mean you use them all the same way. The thing to bear in mind if you're thinking in practical terms about this, is that you are not standing necessarily toe to to with your opponent – you control a five foot space around you, and so do they. Within that space, you move and threaten; a spear-wielder wold move differently to a dagger-wielder, in this situation, but they can both functionally threaten the space around them in doing so. If you actually physically play this out, it comes out making a surprising amount of sense, even if it seems like it wouldn't' in your mind. It's not perfect, of course, but it's a fair simplification. The game doesn't convey this well, since the freedom of movement often leaves you pressed right up against enemies and even clipping into them at times, but I'd argue that it's something that would be better fixed with improved presentation and communication of mechanics, than a hard change.

Ranged weapons have all received a drastic downgrade and hard disservice in Larian's game, where the nuanced differences between them have been largely abolished, leaving some ranged weapons seeming to be pointless compared to others. Spell ranges suffered as well, with most spells that have a range longer than 30 feet being horrendously cut down to almost nothing... along with bonus action dashing and jumping, an movement which has not been similarly reduced, it's a big nerf and imbalance to this aspect of the game.

If you're curious, the formal distinctions between ranged weapons should look like this (range brackets indicate the effective range, and the maximum range; shots in the second range can be made, but are made with disadvantage):

Requiring Simple Weapon Proficiency:
Dart (1d4), Range: (20/60) (Can also be used as a finesse melee weapon, and is very easy to hide)
Sling (1d4), Range: (30/120) (virtually weightless, and looks fairly innocent on its own)
Shortbow (1d6), Range: (80/320) (Harder to hide, requires 2 hands to use)
Light Crossbow (1d8), Range: (80/320) (obvious weapon, 2 hands to use, requires loading)

Requiring Martial Weapon Proficiency:
Blowgun (1 Damage), Range: (25/100) (Stealthy, quiet, easy to hide, requires loading)
Net (No damage; restrains target), Range: (5/15) (takes special training to not be disadvantaged)
Longbow (1d8), Range: (150/600) (Heavy for small races, 2 hands to use)
Hand Crossbow (1d6), Range: (30/120) (light; can be off-handed/dual-wielded, easy to hide, stealthy, requires loading)
Heavy Crossbow (1d10), Range: (100/400) (Not stealthy at all, heavy for small races, two hands to use, requires loading)

They all have their strengths and weaknesses, and valuable uses – but most of those differences have disappeared in BG3 so far, with the drastic range cuts, currently bugged inability to dual-wield hand crossbows, and lack of situations where stealth or concealment may be relevant.

The Devil Quest.
The paladins are lying about themselves and also serve Zariel, acting as her head-hunters here (you learn this form SwD with their fallen member). They didn't summon the gnolls, and did indeed dispatch them, but tiefling girl didn't summon them either. I didn't catch anything implying that she did... what dialogue was that?

The situation is pitched s a moral choice, since both of them have been forced into Zariel's service, and both want out of it. Both would seemingly rather live their own lives, but only accepted Zariel's dominion because the choice was that or death... the difference being that the Paladins Asked for it, turning their backs on their old oaths, and the tiefling did not.

The problem I have with this quest is that you're presented a false fork – it implies that you have no choice but to murder one of these groups, and condemn their souls for all eternity, and no other option at all, even though neither of them is really in a position worthy of punishment... and indeed, the idea of what it wold take to get the out from under Zariel's control is presented during the conversations. I'm not interested in killing either of them – neither side wants to serve Zariel, or has any emnity with the other outside of her direct orders... but we cannot progress the quest other than through murder. It's a false choice, and it's badly done.

Thanks again for taking the time and effort to write this up and add your feedback. Hope some of the responses are a little comforting to you at least ^.^