Haven't played the game yet, but was looking around to see how the game is coming along. This thread stood out to me, as the problems it adresses are very similar to the problems I had with DOS2. So first I got some questions for those still playing EA:
Have there been many changes to the game mechanics around the height advantage?
Are surfaces toned down yet?
Are most battles still setup as an ambush where you win by using meta knowledge to setup your party beforehand?
Can you also move around your characters while one talks to get very silly pre-fight advantages?
Are battles much faster than DOS2? I would've been fine with DOS2 combat, if it was more snappy. I would really like to see moves and animations sped up, like in fire emblem for example.

I'll also give my cup of tea on these subjects.

Surfaces are a great idea, but there's a tendency to overuse the concept. Many things, like sand or green grass, shouldn't catch fire easily. Are enemies standing in dry grass? Then it should catch fire, so throwing a fire bolt at the ground is cool. Same with electrocuting water. It's really cool if you can pull enemies through a river and use electricity on it. It's not cool when you always have a bunch of water balloons to make this happen. Surface effects should be used to make certain situations more memorable, rather than making it always the dominant strategy.

There is an inherent advantage to being on high ground, that negates the need for also giving advantage. D&D 5e already has a cover system. Often times, being on high ground will allow you to shoot at enemies over their cover. The high ground might allow you to target the enemy, or have their cover be less effective. Additionally, looking up at someone can give cover to that person, at which point it also matters how near you are to the cliff. This would make much more sense than just giving straight up advantage to attack rolls. So everyone saying that high ground being advantageous makes sense... It does, and a DM can use the cover system to simulate that. Additionally, giving advantage so often diminishes a lot of other abilities. Ranged is already highly advantageous, even in 5e. It's often harder to get advantage than it is for melee characters though.

In terms of difficulty it's important to understand the role of short and long rests. During an adventuring day, you use up resources. This allows a DM to have encounters that aren't super-deadly, while still putting pressure on the players. Not sure about BG3, but in DOS2 you could rest up at all times. This makes it so that you have to go full-nova every battle. That then means all encounters need to be superdifficult to challenge the players. Were you expending resources, the question would be:"Will I go all the way back to town/out of the dungeon for a long rest, or can I continue on a short rest?" This creates a sort of variable difficulty. A player having trouble can take a bunch of extra time (fail state that's not so frustrating) to rest up, which will feel less like an exploit than pre-positioning with meta knowledge. The player confident in their tactical prowess can go through the whole dungeon with short rests and still get challenged. By doing this, you'd need way less of the extremely swingy battles, where the outcome is usually decided by the initial positioning.


My personal opinion is that Larian has a really hard time understanding the importance of contrast. They have amazing ideas and then use them so much that it gets old quick. They also have a tendency to sort of railroad the player through optimal strategies, where you constantly do the same thing, cus it's just always better than all other options. It's cool to find some high ground that is hard for enemies to get to sometimes and use that to your advantage, but if every battle that is the best thing to do, it's boring. It's cool to find an oil barrel at the magical oil refinery and figure out how you'll steal it and carry that along with you to blow some goblins up. It's boring (and immersion-breaking) when there are random oil barrels everywhere.


I'm very curious how BG3 is coming along, but cautiously optimistic. I hope someone can answer these questions.