Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Extremely few melee animations, why?

Hello Larian!
First of all, I want to express my gratitude to you for incoming BG series game what you making. It should be great!
To the point. Your game visually looks awesome, especially in details, so, there is one thing that cannot be ignored by this fact. The melee combat animations. I meen, let's remember how it looked in other RPG projects: old BG games, Newervineter Nights series, Dragon Age, DOS/DOS2, In all these games, we can see at least 3 or 4 variations of normal melee attacks with different weapons. But for some reason, it's steel not about BG3. let's say I decide to go through the game with a warrior class with two-handed weapon, of course, I will use abilities, but also I will often use ordinary attacks, however, сonsidering how long the game promises to be, one and only one animation of ordinary attacks on each weapon, with such great detail work, just not enough, for sure it will be boring - looking on single animation time after time for many hours, it's.. looks poor. It catches the eye, especially with such objects details.
So, there is my question: Will we have some more animations of normal attack on release? And if not, why? You definitely can do it and there is no reason to not do it, objectively.
I will pray to the gods that you will give an answer.

Much thanks for your really big work!


P.S. Animated executions (fatal blow) mechanics would be masterpiece 100%.

It was like this in DoS ?
So I guess it's work in progress.

Maximuus has been very vocal about this. I think it would be amazing to have multiple animations and execution animations.

But the game needs so many improvements on other areas that I don't know how elaborate they will be on the end.

I'll add to this, that if you browse through the halfling thread, I do comparisons of all attack and recovery animations that I could find, for every weapon, comparing them on medium sized creatures against small sized creatures. While there are a lot of different animations, in total, a good number of weapons share the same animation set; they don't even have tweaked or unique animations for each individual weapon type... and past that, they NEED unique animation sets for smalls versus mediums, which are only partially done in a few cases, and mostly not at all yet... so we can hope for a few different ones for each weapon, but realistically our chances of seeing it are slim.

I'd still LIKE to see it, definitely.

Yes, I would love to see more combat animations, critical hit animations, and just looking awesome while fighting.

(As an aside, if anyone captures a good screenshot of one of the companions doing a critical hit animation, please send it my way as I'm looking to practice doing some action sketches! Don't care if it has giant dice unless it completely obscures the character.... I tried to log in and pick a few fights in game for the purpose of catching a critical hit screenshot but of course, the goblins got way more crits than my team. Murphy's Law!)

I'll agree - in a game that is so oriented in looking pretty the lack of different animations (especially for bow usage / melee usage) feels... Out of place.

I mean, I am not really asking them to go full Digital Extremes on the melee combat, but ... c:

More than attack animations the game lacks block and deflect animations.

This has player feedback implications as well because of how armor works in D&D. Armor does not make attacks "miss", it absorbs all damage. This is not presented correctly in BG3, which fuels the complaints about missing too often. A lot of those misses are actually hits that get deflected by armor.

Half Plate + Shield equals +7 AC. That's a 35% chance for armor to absorb all damage or a shield deflection. We need to see that. It would not only look more exciting but also explain the mechanics better. Heavily armored warriors dodging a lot feels and looks wrong.

E.g. warrior with Plate Armor + Shield (AC 20) gets attacked by a hobgoblin (+3 attack) breaks down to:

30% Dodged
50% Deflected by armor / shield / weapon
20% Hit

Half of the hits are blocked or deflected but BG3 would show this as dodging 80% of the attacks. Of course it feels more frustrating seeing clean misses when you're the attacker. We need to get a more accurate visual presentation. The impact would feel more satisfying than the clean misses of BG3 too.

I wouldn't complain if more "visual variety" was added, but I have to admit I'm not really perceiving it as an issue in its current form.
Nor I remember these games mentioned being particularly better in this sense, frankly.

So.. no response. Very sadly.
Then why talk about attention to the community everywhere. My question is more than adequate. If answer is "yes", thanks! I will 100% buy the game and will recommend it to everyone who likes RPG and D&D. If not, just explain why, I will understand it.

They don't respond in detail to anyone on the forums, despite the validity of your question. You will most likely see an answer in the next patch notes or the next video update panel thing.

Naaah, he won't. The next panel is about how they process feeddback + " the big thing" they have been working on since nearly a year now but didn't want to talk about + few minor changes.

I doubt they will change their ways of working with the community just like that. For now it's an internal community dialogue with updates from devs every few months and I doubt it will change before they start a new project. Not blaming them btw, you just can't change the way few hundred people work just like that in a project so large.

Well.. interesting politics. Сomfortably.

Then hope is everything i got.

At least Sven won't be able to say someone "Forced his Hand" if the Game turns out to be a Flop. I think he really is making the Game he wants. So no Excuses i guess?

Otherwise:

There is a scene at the beginning of the new Patch 5 video of a Druid doing a "finish move", though I have no idea of this was already a scripted scene I just didn't have on my playthrough, or if it is a new animation.

Either way I too was quite vocal after EA first came out that I hoped there would be more animations other than a swing and a miss, as the move from RtwP to Turn Based not only means fights take longer, but the sense of battle is lessenes due to fewer animations & sounds happening.