Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General New interview with Sven by Gamespot

I agree totally here. At least I think the amount of shit is steadily decreasing! DOS 1 was essentially comedy central, and DOS 2, while still wacky, was significantly less so. BG3 is ... I feel even less wacky, although there's still way too much of it left in there.

The comedic vibe in DOS didn't particularly bother me. it's their setting, their rules, and I'm not even under the delusion that only super-serious, dramatic or grimdark fantasy stories have any right to be.
If anything I think DOS 1 was at its weakest precisely when it attempted to steer the narrative on an epic/serious vibe.

- What I disliked the most in DOS 1 was the horrendous randomized loot, Diablo-style (something I don't like in genera and an especially terrible mismatch for a game with a finite number of non-repeatable encounters). Oh, and the Larian toilet chain.
- What I disliked the most in DOS 2, despise improvements in many areas, was that IT STILL HAD THE OBSCENE RANDOMIZED LOOT and on top of that a very bad, exceedingly steep power curve that basically forced the player to keep up with equipment across the entire party at a stressful, annoying pace. Plus the unfortunate armor system. Oh and of course the Larian toilet chain.

- What I'm disliking about BG3 is.... Look, I have to sleep and I don't have a couple of hours to spare. We'll go back on this another time.

P.S. But at least we got rid of the randomized loot, so that's progress.
P.P.S. Still, FUCK THE LARIAN TOILET CHAIN.

[quote=dwig]I think that the suggestion of increasing the importance of weight is very good. However, enemies should ALSO react to you carrying or rolling or even just interacting with large barrels full of explosives! This should be an instant aggro.

Also, there should be an actual reason for the barrels to be laying around. If there is no good reason for barrels full of explosive materials to be in the room then don't put them in the room![/quot

Yeah I think giving barrels ownership (red outline) solves the second part. You can still move them but you will need to be sneaky about it or you will get challenged on it. This also prevents barrels from being brought in from some other random place since they cannot be carried in a backpack anymore.

In every case I have seen the existing places where barrels are found makes sense. They have a room full of them at the shattered sanctum for a reason that the vendor can tell you. It makes sense for places to have a single barrel of oil for torches and lamps. Most humanoid (goblins, humans) encampments will have booze.

So the fix is:
1. Make barrels weight 100/300 lbs.
2. Prevent all furniture (crates/barrels) from being placed in a backpack.
3. Give barrels in a location "ownership" tags.

2 of these can be implemented by making minor changes to the tags on the items - and done, no more barrelmancy

Me too!

I mean, I'm not wild about the choices Larian is making with the game, but I still think it will be worth the time to play through.

Also, regarding Tuco's comment on itemization in DoS... that is why I never finished DoS 2. I could not stand the thought of re-gearing with random loot every other level.

BG I & II set the standard usage for barrels, which is a hiding place for anywhere from 5 to 30 gp. That is it.

For setting things on fire or whatever, D&D provided rules for oil flasks. Based on this discussion, it seems to me the issue is really that Larian simply needs reduce the size of their oil containers. According to the old DMG, a single "grenade like missile" flask of oil should be about 1 pint, or 16 ounces. Now, if there were a magic spell to make styrofoam,things could be very different ...

Hello. Crawled out of my lurker-dimension for a moment. Surprised someone remembers me after half a year, haha.

Oh, don't get me wrong; I wasn't saying that you were a hater and changed, rather the opposite(?) - that my perspective flipped dramatically when EA came; it was when I realised BG3 is not the game I had thought it to be and Larian aren't saints who can do no wrong. Before that I had rose-tinted glasses welded into my face and saw a lot of legitimate criticisms as "hating". I greatly appreciate you guys fighting the good fight, although I myself have pretty much lost hope for the game (and hang around because I can't let go). I'm fairly sure BG3 will be generally well-received, but it has a couple of (semi-)deal-breakers for me personally. I just hope at worst it won't damage the genre as a whole by being a very high-profile game with many flawed aspects that future cRPGs might blindly copy.


Well, BG3 certainly is "timeless"... :P

Also yes, random loot (with colour-coded rarities and all that) can go die in a fire. Or at least go back to Diablo-likes and MMOs, where it belongs.

I'd make an addendum to 2 where it can be placed into a bag of holding and it can be carried by a floating disk and placed in magical storage spaces, otherwise not in a basic backpack.

Me three; so far I haven't seen much that I don't like and a lot that I do. I'm not saying it'll be one of my all-time favorite games - I doubt it'll even make the top twenty, there's some fierce competition - but unless Larian really drops the ball at/after full release, I expect to have a lot of fun.

Sven all but confirmed that they are making BG3 for fans of DOS2. Not fans of the original series, not fans of tabletop DnD, but for their fans whom have already purchased their previous games.

The Larian cheese won't be going anywhere, and will eventually be released will be DOS gameplay with a thin veneer of Forgotten Realms, and a few hamfisted throwbacks to the previous two games in order to satisfy the licensing requirements.

This is such a missed opportunity on Wizard's part.

I imagine that after BG3, Larian will probably go back and make a proper DOS3 before tackling a possible BG4.

The major hope is that WotC gives Tactical Adventures an actual license and a hefty budget to go make a second series of DnD cRPGs in the meantime (preferably based in Waterdeep, there's a lot of potential there), to take advantage of the increased interest in the wake of BG3 and to fill in the gaps between other major DnD-focused projects, so that DnD enthusiasts can have some actual stability in terms of cRPG projects for once. TA has recently opened a new studio in France too, and for the time being they're said to be working on more Solasta-related things.

(But seriously, a cRPG series based in Waterdeep would be amazing. The lack of any recent cRPG taking place there is a huge missed opportunity. You can talk to Gale about the Yawning Portal and the Undermountain to get a small idea about what goes on in the mere outskirts of the city. There's a reason why there's a lot of adventures and modules taking place in the general area, basically double or triple the amount that Baldur's Gate has.)

I wouldn't mind a substantial expansion some time later with a campaign in Waterdeep. Since after the EA is done most the mechanics and engine will be completed and fine tuned as well as most generic Assets and Scripts, they could likely use the game as a base to make it.
But I am mainly focused on BG3 itself, it has a huge amount of potential and could become the best cRPG, which is probably why I am so critical.

He also confirmed they are working on improving combat and other mechanics based on feedback. Since we don't yet know which feedback - let's not take one comment out of the context of the entire interview, let them work and see what happens, hmm?

I agree with this. Lets wait and see whats in the update.

On oil flasks, alchemists fire and other surfaces yes D&D does have rules for those and Larian decided to homebrew their own instead and add them generously to a lot of the game encounters.

Niara and others have excellent posts elsewhere detailing Larian's changes to surfaces and how they affect other systems.

Yeah, it was fairly terrible, and just another case where they were warned multiple times since DOS 1 that the system detracted for the game but they decided to not listen to the "vocal minority" and disregard feedback.

At least this time having a game being (loosely) built over D&D is saving us the pain.
There are countless reasons I always preferred the way D&D handles itemization compared to a lot of these loot-focused computer games.
Let's take two examples here with Baldur's Gate 2 (which is pretty close to my golden standard when it comes to itemization) and Divinity Original Sin 1 and 2 (but especially the second).

In BG2:
- items have a very narrow range of stat scaling between early game and top tier, meaning you go from basic weapons to +2/3 at most, then you adventure into +4/5 when you go in the insane top levels where you are basically a demigod.
- Consequently you have a limited amount of tiers for weapons. A common sword will always be the same, consistently, wherever you'll find it, a +1 magic weapon or armor will be relatively common but expensive, +2 will be a luxury, +3 a valuable artifact or so, etc. Every time a bandit will drop a iron sword you won't have any need to check it and compare it with the inventory, it will just be the same iron sword. And they are worth so little at one point you can even stop picking them up as vendor trash.
- Most of the difference between magic items in the same tier comes from special skills and properties enchanted on them ("attack twice in a turn", "does double damage against enemies of this group", allow you to self-cast celerity once a day", "negates this sort of debuff", "raise this stat to value X", etc, etc.).
- items are designed one by one, the valuable ones are unique, hand-placed in the game world ad when you find them you can confide on the fact you'll carry them for a long time, if not for the entire adventure.
- Merchants also have a defined set of more or less valuable possessions in their inventory and they can occasionally add few more unique items after some specific circumstances.

Conversely, in D: OS1 and 2:
- items range is insane. You start from weapons doing 3-4 damage to end game shit dealing 600 or so. That's a more than 100X scaling factor.
- You drop them constantly, they are randomly generated and stats are ever-changing. This means every time you kill some shit it will be time for a busywork of comparison in your already crowded inventory.
- The above mentioned item range also implies that every time you are finding something cool, it will INEVITABLY be obsolete barely a couple of levels later. While I'm not a fan of this sort of system even in games like Diablo, it can work there because you pay attention to a single character and loot is the whole point. When you are managing a full party of four characters or more, on the other hand, the frequency at which you'll need to compare items and the one at which you'll be asked to replace them become WAY too much busywork to keep up with in an enjoyable manner.
- The randomized nature of item stats and their random placement works actively to damage the reward system in the game, especially when you have god tier stuff dropping out of a random crate you inspected or popping up casually in a merchant inventory, while bosses drop useless garbage with stats misaligned for your needs.

I could go on, but these are the salient points on why I feel "Diablo-styled" loot has absolutely no place in this subgenre.
And I can't overstate how glad I am we are past it in BG3.

Well, hopefully the difficulty settings will save us so some of us can have all the fun we can handle with gear that keeps us ahead of the enemies and others can have the difficulty that requires constant micromanagement and places combat strategizing over enjoying the story. And an "Ironman" mode. I hope people who want it get an Ironman mode. Just wish they'd stop nerfing the fun out of the game.

This bugged me a lot in DOS2 as well (though less in DOS1 because it had a much more robust crafting system, to the level where IIRC you could upgrade your gear on your own as long as you had enough materials for it).

By late game, you had attacks doing thousands of damage. Your example of 600 damage is actually mid-game numbers. Either way, the stat bloat becomes so insane later on that you start looking for weapons and rings that can increase your critical hit chance in order to keep ahead of the ever increasing enemy armor and HP values, and any gear that didn't boost it was not worthy of consideration by endgame. It was so important that the mods that allowed people to refresh shop vendor inventory instead of waiting one real life hour were generally considered must have by the more hardcore sects of the DOS2 community.

The devs evidently noticed this behavior so much that gear that gave critical hit chance had their bonus halved in the definitive edition.

How did you manage to write two posts without mentioning Halsin? O_o
Or throwing confetti?