My grades for the update.
And, well, we’re partial to some of the incoming fixes as well:
· Skeletons are no longer in a celebratory mood when emerging from coffins.
· Fixed being able to eat some buckets.
· Fixed being able to cast Charm Person on yourself.
· Liam will no longer run away while unconscious
A- Mostly because I didnt know I could eat buckets, but good for catching bugs. So many games now just leave bugs in unless they are significant to gameplay experience, or if it costs the company money in gatcha games.
Active Roll: A new way to die (as in dice, it’s a dice pun)
A+: Reminds me of the assist system.
In this patch we also wanted to find new ways to really celebrate roleplaying. Enter, Background Goals.
You know how the character creator includes an option to choose your character's background? Folk Hero, Acolyte, Urchin, and so on. Now every character will have their own series of secret miniquests based on these roles. Finding out how to complete them is part of fun, but for each you complete you’ll receive an Inspiration Point. Players will get a maximum of four Inspiration Points which can be put toward rerolling dice whenever they wish. Or alternatively, if you’ve already reached your IP cap for the moment then any further point becomes XP.
B+: I like this but I think this should have been implemented at a later date, i dont think it will affect much of the EA gameplay. Rewarding roleplay in a significant way and getting XP for roleplay is part of a good DnD campaign, however we are hard capped at level 4 and so a lot of the reward is going to be meaningless until we get a level increase.
Camp Resources are a new feature that will make you think a little more strategically about when to activate a Long Rest. Now in order to make camp, you first need supplies. You know all the food and scraps you find around Baldur's Gate 3? Starting this patch, those can be used to unlock camp for the night. So if you ever wondered to yourself “how much Waterdhavian cheese wheels could one person possibly need?” the answer is as many as you can physically carry, for cheese is now one of the sacred doorways to sleep. Alternatively, you can still initiate a Partial Rest without using any resources but this won't recharge you fully.
Another new addition are Mini Camps. Previously, any time you camped for the night, you would return to your HQ down by the river regardless of how far away it was from the area you were exploring throughout your day. This made us feel sorry for all the characters who were being forced to partake in marathon hikes just to go to bed. So we’ve now introduced smaller localized camps. From the Chapel near the Ravaged Beach to the Underdark, we've recreated every landmark as its own isolated location that can be accessed when you’re ready to hunker down for your Long Rest.
B+: Food/rations are a required part of DnD, right now though the issue is economy and down the road Tavern activity (hopefully). The orignal BG games allowed you to buy drinks and talk to the barkeep to get tips, If I buy a bunch of food and drink at the tavern do I need to eat the same amount of rations at camp? If the bar is at an Inn will I be able to use the inn and not have to buy food if I buy a long rest. More pressingly for the moment, I tend to have to use the food I pick up for the stupid pricing I get from vendors. Pick up rotten apples I can still sell for a gold when in DnD table top Id get laughed at by the shop keep or offered a copper or two, not a gold. get the prices in line with tabletop prices (for everything) and it wont feel so bad.
A+: for the camp location change. I always feel like having to leave the dungeon to go to forrest camp would bring about a random encounter on way back, which I know we dont have random encounters in the game yet, and maybe wont ever, but i feel like its not realistic to go back to the forrest on every sleep.
You’re going to discover a lot of AI improvements in this patch, so expect to see enemies who are a lot smarter and more resourceful in combat. For instance, now if there is a weapon nearby, unarmed enemies will grab it to defend themselves. Not only does this make fights more challenging, you can also use this behaviour to your advantage: if you disarm an enemy, they’ll have to use up an Action Point to go retrieve the weapon, which puts them at a disadvantage.
You can also expect better resource planning from enemies – when it comes to deciding what spells to use in a fight, who to target, whether to use actions like Dash, or to throw a health potion to a character in need, they’re a lot more adept. And all of these actions are new to friendly NPCs too.
Grade TBD: So this comes down to does it feel like the balance of normal mode feels just as difficult and does it get more or less hard at the same scale rate as you change the difficulty. If the AI improvement makes it feel like the DM is just out to kill Gale because the player tried to sleep with the DM's sister (or brother?) and is doing his best for a TPK that just ends up being a meta against player meta trying to outmeta the computers meta (A dude playing a dude disguised as another dude?)
Spellcasting improvements meh, give me fireball. It can be garbage animation to start
We’ve done some tweaking to the game which should please our pacifist players, too. We have added a new Nonlethal Attack Mode. This means that if you steal something from NPCs and they start attacking you, you can actually just knock them out instead of killing them. [/quote]
Disengage/jump An okay improvement back to closer to DnD mechanics, I think?
Tooltips: I never had an issue with
Shadowheart’s storyline just got a little more mysterious
Shadowheart got extra love in this patch. Not only does this update feature extra dialogue permutations with her, her storyline was also kicked up a notch. Expect to start hearing a little more about the mysterious item she carries with her. Oh, and you can now free her in the tutorial! Or leave her of course.
Im glad to know a bit more about her, but I feel how hard it was to get her to open up was justified (you stopped trying in prologue at behest of someone saying leave her) so it should be difficult.
Speaking of dialogue, let’s take a look at our new Point and Click dialogue system. This is something fans have been asking for from the beginning: Your character will now speak as you click through the world, reacting to the story and environment around them in real-time. A lot of recording power went into making this feature come alive - not only is the dialogue context-sensitive, it also changes depending on which character you're playing. But, of course, if you're of the 'less talk, more game' philosophy then there is an audio option to change the frequency of their barks.
A-: More backstory and improvements in tutorial, yays. Most interested to see how her interactions with Pinky the Brain and the NPC that makes me want to roll melee classes as an extra excuse not to take her in the main story get along.
A+: This is going to be one of those things that make the game feel more like a Baldur's Gate game, Theres still no butt kicking for goodness, but its a great start.
Overall improvements B+ lots of good things that improve
Currently feeling like a BG game: C+ I still feel like I am missing some of the experience, outside of things lacking due to early access, it still feels like its a game that exploits the name of the original 2/3
Currently feeling like DnD: B-, the gold system (no copper or silver), no taverns, no stat rolls, no face palming due to a stupidly timed/aimed fireball but youve got the basics down and most of the tweeks to the system dont detract from an overall DnD feel.
Also congrats on being the one WotC licensed game that isnt hot garbage since what magic online, maybe Neverwinter?
