Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General So...is this game still being made, or what?...

It’s weird because from an abstract standpoint I’d be tempted to claim that the two DOS are in many ways very high quality games. High production value, loads of unique, non-repeated content, some fun and engaging combat dynamics, high reactivity, high environmental interaction, flexible quest design where multiple approaches work...

But once you start to go into specific mechanics and subsystems almost everything about them breaks down very quickly and turns into a mess. The itemization is downright bottom tier in the genre, the progression curve is terrible, the perk system is incredibly uneven (few very good ones, almost unmissable, while the rest is garbage) balance is a thing of dreams, gimmicks are over-used to the point of suffocating the rest, positioning becomes quickly meaningless because twenty different teleport/warp skills trivialize it, etc, etc.
And don't get me started about the armor system, for Christ's sake.

The problem with the armor system in DOS 2 is that it makes hardly any sense in principle and it creates way more problems that it solves.
Discouraging mixed sources of damage (which it factually does, it doesn't matter if you can work your way around it) is only the tip of the iceberg. There's also the fact that makes a certain amount of utility skills/spells utterly useless (not "unreliable" as much as literally 100% pointless to even attempt) until a certain threshold of damage has been passed, etc.

Basically it's a system of HP bloat (now in three different flavors!) that favors direct damage dealing above any other strategy. And conversely once that threshold of damage is surpassed the exact opposite becomes true, and some of these crowd controls become 100% reliable.

I mean, sure, you can learn to live with that. We all did.
But holy fucking shit if it doesn't go straight in the bottom tier among all the countless attempts at "simulating damage mitigation" I've experienced across the years in different rulesets.

...See? This is what I meant.
Every time I stop to think about it too much, at some point I almost need to stop and ask to myself "Wait, is it ACTUALLY a good game in the end or am I just forgiving too much to it?".



Incidentally I also think CP2077 is right there with DOS 2 and Oblivion as one of the worst itemizations I've ever seen in the entire genre.

What's even more aggravating about Cyberpunk is that they felt the urge to come up with their own Witcher-derivate flavor of bullshit (one aspect that was ALREADY detrimental to their past games, I might add) while adapting a pre-existing tabletop ruleset that was famously level-less and not affected by this sort of bloated garbage.
At least you could argue in Larian's defense that with DOS 2 they were starting from zero and had to come up with something on their own. CDPR can't even appeal to this excuse.

But what's really interesting about CDPR is that this isn't an "inexperience" issue on their part: their system got progressively worse at each game.
For instance in TW3 while most of the random loot was useless trash, you at least had unique and hand-placed Witcher sets marking clear milestones across the progression curve. Not in an ideal way (still too much stat bloat for my taste) but at least with some decent degree of reliable determinism.
In CP on the other hand the predominance of randomized trash becomes quickly almost suffocating.