This synopsis is for the events of Larian's latest advertising production, their Panel From Hell III. It was a three hour stream, and this synopsis will provide a running report of the events of the stream, for those who don't have three hours to dedicate to watching it.
I say advertising production because it wasn't really accurate to call it a Panel at all, and while it was three hours long, exactly 6:30 of it, at the end, is all you actually need to watch if you're interested in what is coming in the new patch and what Larian are actually working on. The rest of the three hour stream is a guided LARP session, which sometimes dips into discussing some of the new patches features as they go, but doesn't offer anything that isn't spoken about in more detail in those last six minutes.
With that said, Drath Malorn has posted a thread already listing the discussed patch notes, and I cede priority to their thread in this case - if the direct patch 5 game features are what you're interested in, then that thread (
Here) is where to look - it may help to keep discussion neat if you favour that thread for those topics. I'll discuss my own here, briefly as part of the synopsis, but I'll post my thoughts more clearly to that thread as well, once this is done.
First things first: Many of you know that I've grown cynical and sceptical of Larian in the past months since the EA began. Gone is the bright-eyed girl full of enthusiasm and excitement, and it has left me cold and bitter. I said that I was sceptical about their advertising, and would wait until I actually saw something of substance and value before anything got me excited... well... I am tentatively hopeful and optimistic at this point. In terms of the actual game patch details, I'm feeling very positive about much of what they had to say - most of it even. This was at least a strong indicator of the something of substance and value I was hoping for, and I will admit that gladly.
So, to the synopsis itself... of which I am less positive overall. I still consider the production value, costs, and the sheer amount of work hours, that had to go into creating the spectacle to be excessive, and that they would have been better spent on the game. I would have enjoyed the stream anyway, save for strong elements of it that left a gross taste in my mouth. I will try to keep it clear and obvious which parts of this run down are my personal opinion, aside from the aspects that are raw reporting. The synopsis below was actually written first, as I watched the stream – so if the writing tense seems a little odd at times, that's why.
==
The stream opens with couple of minutes of nice fan art, props to everyone who makes it, I really wish I had the time to dedicate to the amount of work it takes to develop that level of skill! We then cut to Swen in armour at his feast table, and he talks for a few more minutes to introduce the panel and greet viewers – though he looks kinda of uncomfortable in the set up this time?
We're going to be watching a live action roleplay story of a party of adventurers, made up from the Larian employee crew, and twitch will decide what they do and how they progress. Sounds fun!
Swen mentions that, if chat 'wins' the game they'll get the actual information about the patch in a separate, pre-recorded video. If they don't win, they won't. Umm.... I mean... kinda a dick move? If they are potentially punishing their viewership for playing along and 'failing' that's extremely poor form; likely as not they've already decided what they're sharing and what they aren't, so there's no actual fail state here... but in that case, implying that they might be punished and denied that actual patch information that they literally came here for if they fail is still a dick move. Bad call all around.
The scene jumps to a view of our party members, outside a great castle - we see some of them using their class abilities, and it's clear that Larian really want to make a splash with their SFX, all things considered. Twitch is then presented with a vote on who their party should be - they must pick a party of 4, from a group of 7 (representing one of each of the classes that BG3 has got in so far). On a personal note, I felt like saying: No halfings, no sorcerers, totally unsatisfying, though, I say this mostly in good humour and jest.
We have:
Farhang, the human ranger,
Stijn, the [race not mentioned] Rogue (He is Larian's token undead character, a vampire),
Nick, who you all recognise as Larian's resident cow-druid, from the last panel,
David, the tiefling fighter,
Ine, the tiefling warlock,
Charlotte, the elven cleric, and
Kelly, the human wizard.
Twitch is given 4 options, with various party make-ups. At this point I noticed something and did a quick check: Farhang the Ranger, was nominated for three out of the four possible parties, where everyone else was represented in only two or even one instance.
Twitch choose the one and only choice that the ranger was not put into, giving us an initial party of:
David (fighter), Stijn (rogue), Charlotte (cleric), Nick (druid).
Swen tells us we need a party leader too, but then he tells us he's going to pick it for us. He sounds like he's thinking abut it, and then announces his criterion to make his choice clearer.
“Well, we're going to go with the oldest man in the party, so that's going to be... ah...”
What. The. Honest. Fuck.
That is not a valid selection criterion, Swen.
…
Anyway...
We 'load in', while we wait for their systems to be ready; they do this by putting an actual loading screen up on the stream, mirroring BG3's loading screens, but with the LARP players character portraits instead. It's cute. Eventually, we drop into the headset-eye view of the Swen-designated party leader - David the fighter. Swen greets him as Farhang, the ranger, and then gets corrected that it's actually David the fighter (since, against the biased odds, Farahng wasn't chosen to go). The others are warned not to touch anything or do anything, and from here on out it's implied that Swen will be reading off chat to help him give direction to the group, more or less...
Ah... So... Swen is the leader, really. Of course he is. It was never going to be anything else, was it? I think we all knew that, really...
In the room we see a suit of armour, a book case, a map table, several wall decorations including a sword rack and a pool-cue rack, and a few smaller cabinets. Twitch chat immediately zeros in on the chest, naturally! Chat suggests that the rogue should check the chest. They use this as a vehicle to show off the new ability check interface coming in patch 5 - I'll talk about this at the bottom, but it's neat, and welcomed for what it is. They still haven't accepted that natural 1s are not automatic failures on ability checks, but perhaps that was just so they could talk about another patch 5 feature; character backgrounds will have a variety of mini quest actions that, when pursued in accordance to your rp background, will award inspiration or experience. There's about 10 per background in act one alone, so that's pretty cool. In this case, it's brought up so that Stijn, the rogue, can use his inspiration point, from his background of being a sneaky lock-breaker, to re-roll his failure, and successfully open the chest.
I'll jump back to the natural 1 thing briefly, because it was an annoyance that I took note of: The natural 1 was treated as an automatic failure, because while we see in other situations, the modifiers and potential buffs, such as guidance, were added on, it did NOT do this for the natural 1, and simply declared it as a 1 straight up, and a failure, and did nothing else. This is problematic because if we suppose the rogue had a higher proficiency bonus, or perhaps expertise on his check, then even with a 1, he wold have passed the DC 10 lock... but in Larian's current iteration, he would fail, and that's not cool.
The chest contains two whole salami, three pieces of cheese, a whole ham hock... so clearly we're in a Larian RPG... but also a couple of small clue-like diagrams, and a scroll (of Speak With Dead).
The fighter-camera has been casting meaningful glances at the suit of armour this whole time so far, and the Swen tells us that the chat has picked up on it and wants them to examine it now. It has a red hand print on it. Chat interrupts the examination of the armour, however, to instruct the fighter to begin using one of the salami as his weapon. Excellent. They also want him to take the armour's sword. Of course. David tries to disarm the armour, but he can't get the sword out of its grip. They briefly get distracted by looking for false walls, and checking the map, which confirms a lack of false walls, but then it's back to... according to chat... romancing the armour? It gets a bit silly for a bit.
They search the rest of the room and find a small mannequin that has the same red hand print on it as the armour, and after inserting it in a matching slot, discover that they can move the armour around using the figure. They make it dance; this poor actor isn't given any credit for his work.
While searching, they also find some more clue cards, as well as several items that mirror the card pictographs, bearing clue phrases. All together we have an Egg, a Tadpole, a Horse, a Dying Tree and a Skull.
They also find the place to put the cards, and before they can make any attempts at solving the puzzle, Swen stops them all and insists that they not touch anything, and that the vote must go to twitch on which order to place the cards in.
Twitch votes on option 'C' to place the cards in the order “Egg, Tadpole, Horse, Tree, Skull.” Swen confirms that they are voting C, and then, to the party, tells the fighter to put the cards in in the order “Egg, Skull, Horse, Tadpole, Tree.”
The armour comes to life on its own, and kills David the fighter, who was the one who did as Swen instructed.
The scene cuts to Swen at his feast table, where he confesses: “Yeah, well I thought it was time for Farhang (the ranger)”.
So... to be clear here... We're less than twenty minutes into the adventure so far, but he felt it fit to insist on giving twitch a choice on something, then immediately violate their choice and override it with his own, in order to deliberately kill off the character that twitch chose to take with them, so he could insert the one he wanted to have, after twitch didn't pick it despite the biased weighting. Just to be clear, that's what happened.
Swen continues in the most dead pan, non-committal and utterly insincere and uncaring voice:
“I know, I know, I shouldn't have done that it was wrong...” sounding for all the world like he really doesn't give even the tiniest of fucks. He promises he won't doing it again. At this point, I honestly don't believe him at all – with the exception that this might “just” have simply have been a little bit of personal nepotism because he wanted to get the crew member in that HE wanted to have in, no matter what the voting audience actually said or wanted.
He holds up David's portrait, and continues with with a very bored tone:
“This was David, right, may we remember him, right,” and justifies further with: “Obviously, he should have figured it out for himself, I didn't think he needed all that guidance.” He, of course, says this ignoring the fact that he himself loudly warned David not to touch anything or do anything without twitch chat's instruction, on that specific puzzle – who got it correct, but which he overruled to make wrong. He then throws the portrait on the floor with an audible clatter and brusquely talks about moving on.
Swen apparently thinks this is either 'acceptable treatment', or 'good humour'. In this viewer's personal opinion, it is neither. It's disrespectful, rude, it's not funny and it is not in any way good press. It's the behaviour of a bully, in fact.
==
We cut back to the party; Nick (presumably the next eldest male...) has been appointed leader now. Swen gives the correct order, and the puzzle is solved. Inside there's a little glowing thing amidst some greenery. Swen asks another one of his pointlessly loaded rhetoricals to twitch – “should they take it or not”.
Twitch asks for detect magic – one of the players side-comments that it's not in the game.
Twitch asks for other checks – arcana, nature, anything – are told there's nothing they can do.
With the focus being solely on the shiny and seemingly with all other avenues exhausted, Swen asks again if they should take it or not... with little else to do, Twitch relents and says, yes okay, take it. The druid takes it, it's trapped, he dies.
Back to Swen at his feast table, he holds up Nick the Druid's portrait.
“That was Nick, Worthless!” he proclaims, and then throws it on the ground with another loud clatter. Heaven forbid any of the actors might actually want to keep the nicely framed and presented portraits of their LARP characters in good condition; they sound like they're getting damaged badly when Swen throws them away.
Chat is sounding *very angry* at Swen at this point, and to be frank I don't blame them. He holds up his hands: It's not rigged! He's not rigging anything, honestly! He proclaims this, sounding very defensive. Perhaps not rigging, not exactly, but so far, in this viewers personal opinion, he's definitely just outright trampling things to make it go the way he wants it to, irrespective of what anyone else wants... including the twitch audience whose whole premise is that they're the ones making the choices.
He promises to just ask them to do exactly what twitch says (which was, you know, the premise of this whole thing to begin with), and then spends the next few minutes of game play making out that doing so is a laborious and difficult process. It does seem as though he has no chat curators for the stream, which is an unfortunate oversight.
Cutting back, Twitch gets them to take the shiny object using the armour and mannequin; Swen stops the process while the poor actor wearing the armour is in a very difficult, exhausting to hold position to break away and start talking about the disarming feature they're putting in the patch; As part of improving the AI, and its ability to understand the game, they're also giving players the ability to disarm weapon-wielding foes. We haven't seen any sign of how this will actually be implemented, so I'm cautious about it – to be fair, it needs to be an action, with a chance of failure, and it needs not to be a damage-dealing attack at all. We'll see. Having mentioned this *now*, apparently taking the sword from the armour works easily, where it didn't before. Okay. Fine.
When the armour removes the crystal, we expose a new secret – a hidden cavity behind the book case. Swen throws another of his pointless rhetorical option to chat:
“Chat, should we enter the hole, or sit around in this room and have some salami.”
Needless to say, we progress. One loading screen later, we come in on a camp scene – Swen talks about the new camp setting features coming in the patch. Again, I'll talk about this below, but it's a neat thing that I do appreciate.
Chat is also asked which two we want to add back to our party out of the remaining three – Farhang, the ranger Swen desperately wants, Ine, the warlock or the Kelly, the wizard. Considering we lost two, and have three replacements, it really just seems at this point that we should simply go as a party of five. Literally nothing else makes any sense in this circumstance.
Still, knowing how badly Swen wants to put the ranger in, to the point that he would violate the social agreement between twitch players and their stream, and deliberately kill off another character that twitch DID choose in doing so... Twitch, of course, picks the Wizard and the Warlock as the replacements.
The party rests, and we get a shot of them being watched by a cloaked figure.
Swen opens a Q&A to the twitch chat while they do so.
The first question is about what new classes we can expect and when: Swen answers that this patch was focused on game features, and the next patch is likely to be quite content heavy, while reminding us that they're working on building the whole rest of the game as well. Which is great, but not an answer to the question...
The next question is about what new races we might expert to see and when: Swen answers that they're going to be a bit stingy about that because they want to save a lot for full release, and so he's not going to answer that one.
Picked out of the chat: “+1 Salami DLC weapons when?” Swen says that this is a really good question actually, and he should talk to wizards about it.
Great Q&A so far.
Next up: “Elaborate on Background Goals”: Swen answers this one properly, and explains a little more; nothing much that isn't covered in the patch detail discussion, however, so I'll talk about that later.
Next question is about loot. Swen says there's time being taken looking at making hand crafted magic weapons. Given the way he describes it, he means handcrafted in the sense of “unique ones made by Larian”, and not player-crafted, just to be clear. More are coming in the patch, which is neat, though I have my concerns about how many of them will be game-breakinng, like the magic missile amulet.
People asked about the level cap and getting level 5: Swen says 'maybe', and that the jury is still out.
Multiclassing is asked after: Swen re-confirms that it will be a thing, but likely very late in EA. This is still concerning, since the ore they home-brew change classes, the more they need to be cautious about balance upsets, and multiclassing is an amplifier for those dangers. It should be tested as soon as they can *reasonably* give it to us, not later.
He answers that they are definitely planning on 'extending' reactions, and while that's not a confirmation that they're going to actually give us a proper full reaction system, it's at least an acknowledgement that they're working on something related to improving reactions, so, fingers crossed.
At this point, the party is rested and ready, so we cut back.
The Party awakens, and we arrive in a small chapel room, with carpets with symbols on the floor, banners relating to those symbols on the wall, and a dead body on one of the carpet tiles. Stijn (the next and now only remaining male) has, of course, been appointed the new leader.
Twitch chat suggests that they eat the dead guy. Thanks twitch chat. They then suggest, more sensibly, to use the speak with dead scroll.
Twitch chat is given one question, while the rogue who used the scroll (Bleh... please stop it with the anyone-using-scrolls thing) asked the first few basic ones. There are two incredibly dumb choices and one sensible one – twitch chooses one of the incredibly dumb ones. ^.^ Oh well.
We learned that the dead person is a thief who broke in seeking riches, and that what he knows about the trapped floor tiles is that the one that killed him is trapped. Fancy that.
The party can clearly walk around the tiles safely, and Swen gets a party member to jump over one, to demonstrate that they're now disentangling jump from disengage. Thank you. This is such a long time coming, and I'm glad they actually did it. I want to speak more about how welcome this is, but I'll save it for the patch note discussion.
The party finds a waypoint sigil, but it won't activate – they determine that they must solve the floor tile puzzle to unlock it.
The party examines the puzzle, and solves the first element between themselves. The leader then commits dumb-suicide for some reason, moving to stand on the wrong tile of the next element without even looking at them. Not sure why exactly, except that Swen talks about loading their auto-save to bring him back; he asks chat if they should – I can practically feel him itching to bring in Farhang the ranger instead, but chat votes to reload and do so, I presume because they had no hand in his death or any chance to save him, and possibly also because they are resistant to Swen's ranger, at this point.
While we reload, Swen chats about how important save-scumming is, and how he loves doing it – that he's been save-scumming his entire gaming career and is a master using it to make things go the way he wants. No-one is surprised by this; of course he is.
When the reload finishes, we've reset to the chapel entrance again, and Swen then active roleplays out fore-knowledge solving the step of the puzzle that he knows without even looking at it, and getting the party members to fellate him for being so clever. Riding that high, he picks on one of the other characters and cajoles her into singing a song based on her entertainer background (though she protests the request at first, and doesn't seem very comfortable singing in front of a massive twitch audience, at all).
Moving on, we get some amusing peanut gallery comments from the party:
“What's the first thing you do when you find a body in BG3?”
“You smell it!”
“You loot it!”
“You Eat it!”
I think Swen was fishing for speak with dead, so they could ask it different questions, but oh well.
Chat votes on which button to stand on for the next stage of the puzzle; it's fairly simple, and they get it right – I presume. Swen did not actually confirm what they voted, he just told the party to step on the correct tile. Sorry; my trust is low right now.
The third step, Swen doesn't really try to solve – just opts to brute force the puzzle by elimination and reloading. Because that's FUN.
Or, well, he says he's going to do that – he assures the Stijn the rogue that he's got him covered, and that they'll do it by process of elimination, and asks him to step on the right one. It's wrong, and the rogue dies.
Then Swen says he won't reload after all, and that Stijn the rogue is now dead, and he tosses his portrait on the ground roughly with another painful-sounding clatter. He puts the vote to chat for the last puzzle section now, rather than doing it before he killed the rogue. He talks about who will be the new leader and seems confused; he wonders about getting a replacement in, and getting Farhang. They're already ready to go, though, since he's spent some time talking already, so he declares the cleric the new leader.
After a moment, he also immediately asks for reinforcements, as well, anyway. Got to get that Ranger in! No waiting for rest this time, nope, got to get him in right now!
Returning, we get one of the character's backstories briefly, then Twitch solves the puzzle and the portal opens. Swen 'compliments' chat by telling them that he thought they were going to fail that very simple puzzle. Thanks Swen!
During the loading wait, Swen reminds everyone that they're moving into the finale of the adventure, and that if Twitch succeeds, then they'll give them a proper patch update video. Dick move, man... Even though at this point it seems like Swen is more or less going to make it play out as he wants to regardless of what twitch does, implying that there's a fail state in which they won't get the details that they came to this stream for in the first place is very uncool.
At this point I'm calling it that the ranger that Swen wants in is going to be the last person in the party, who successfully gets the magical scrying orb and gets to the end. The others may or may not die, but Farhang WILL get the orb and WILL get to the end on the adventure. Swen will ensure it. That's my feeling and I won't change or rewrite this line if I'm wrong by stream's end... I'll even call it out.
We have another Q&A during the load while they transition as well.
Swen begins answering questions as he can pull them out of chat:
- There will be more romance, but players need to be patient for it.
- Stijn's dead, no reloading.
- July 13th should be the patch drop date.
- There will be some new content in the patch, even though it was mostly feature focused, though he doesn't say what.
- Something else new in the tutorial; Swen hems and haws about whether to mention it or not, then decides he won't.
- A revamp of inventory management is coming (not now, but it's being worked on). I really hope it's good, it's definitely necessary, fingers crossed that it will actually bring the game into the modern age.
Swen spends almost more time making long throat noises of confusion, saying 'wait', and 'hold on', and dissembling about having trouble reading chat, and not having time to answer everything, than he does answering questions... I'd strongly recommend that next time he gets a few chat moderators to curate the chat and manage the questions to shift to him quickly and smoothly for the Q&A sections; it would really help the flow.
He does confirm that stand alone disengage is a proper action. Good.
Other UI changes and improvements are coming and being worked on, but they aren't ready yet.
He reconfirms that we won't be getting Act II in EA, which we do know, but lots of people have been making noise about regardless.
There might be a few new spells in the patch, though he didn't seem certain about this – though he mentions, spring-boarding off that question, that they've worked hard on changing the VFX of spells and themeing them by class. This is neat, though I wonder on a personal level if this will include independent animations for small sized characters, or whether that battle will need to be re-fought again, if it's forgotten.
He mentions that they're improving the combat AI and that it's gotten much better at using all of its mechanical options in game. Maybe if the AI exploits more of the broken Larian home-brew more often, that will lead a greater voice swell of people who will see why it needs to be controlled, possibly. Fingers crossed.
He reconfirms that GM mode is not on their schedule, sorry. Too much else to take care of with higher priority.
At this point, the party is ready and set up to continue, so we jump back into the LARP.
We come to in a catacomb of some sort, with several strange artefacts on display, a book on an altar, a locked chest beside a small altar containing a blood-filled goblet and a ceremonial knife. Oh, and giant spiders in containers on the far wall. Nice.
Chat asks for detect magic on the chest, but they can't, and Swen sounds a little frustrated that they keep asking. Maybe take it as feedback with a live audience – D&D players want things like that, even if you don't.
Our wizard identifies the book as containing what she believes to be summoning rituals. We get given four summoning phrases to pick from... or they start to, only one gets read out before Swen directs them back to check the chest.
Twitch chat insists that the ranger should climb into the chest. I feel like they want to get the ranger killed – I'm not surprised, all things considered. The chest is not locked, and is empty. Well, except when it has the ranger in it.
They decide that the books should be read near the blood ritual cup and knife, and that it's a sacrificial ritual... and er... yeah, they decide that this is a thing they should do. Twitch is given the four phrases again, and picks one. Charlotte, the cleric reads it out and offers blood. When she opens the chest it jump cuts to a pre-recorded shot and our cleric is eaten by a ghoul.
Swen dashes her portrait away on the ground and calls her incompetent, and then moves us on.
OF COURSE, immediately Farhang is declared the new party leader! Never mind that Kelly and Ine have been notably more active and engaged in the game so far. Either it's because he's the only male present, or it's because he's the character that Swen wants to live/play/etc. Either way I just want to give Swen and the whole thing two giant middle fingers at this point, even though it doesn't surprise me in the least.
They try another ritual, Swen says which one was the second most voted request (I'm feeling particularly cynical at this point, so someone can please perhaps reassure me that twitch voters could see that he was telling the truth here and not just supplying a safe answer to his ranger?), and the ranger tries it, summoning an orange. Contrary to the summoning rhyme, the orange is indeed curved, being that it is round. We do the next ritual, another safe one, for some sexy Astarion fan art.
Finally, we do the one that was obviously about scrying last. Maybe we can bleed the ranger dry this way? No luck, it seems. The scrying orb appears in the box, and the ranger picks it up without hesitation – we know it's not trapped like the last magic shiny in a box we had, because it's the ranger doing it, so of course he's safe.
Smoke begins to fill the room and the party talks about getting out, and about using the teleport scroll they were given. The scroll doesn't work; possibly an anti magic field, they think, and a new problem lights up as smoke continues to thicken!
A puzzle about the planes and which creatures are from where, which the party and Twitch solves fairly rapidly – identifying Devils as being from the Hells, Angels as being from Celestia, and Githzeri a living in Limbo. This causes the anti magic zone to shut off!
Farhang, the party leader, gives the scroll to Kelly, the wizard, to read and teleport them out of there... but then Swen insists that the party leader has to read it... because he has 'the inventory' with the orb... and the scroll only works for one person... of course... right... yeah... of course... that tracks.... got to get that ranger you favour through to the end and kill everyone else, don't you Swen? I hate being right sometimes. Fuck all of this.
Farhang arrives top-side, alone, while his companions die of smoke inhalation, but is immediately ambushed by Shadowheart and killed (This is not a consolation; Farhang himself was not the problem here). She takes the orb, apparently using it to scry on the lament configuration.
Time out a second.... She's a cleric, and the implication is that before we all got tadpoled, these origin characters were much more powerful (Wyll was a heroic figure, Gale was an archmage, etc.). It's daft that she couldn't simply scry on it herself... but oh well, minor niggle I guess.
Anyhow, we do get a little teaser after the fade out, suggesting we'll be seeing more story elements related to Shadowheart and the device, too... which is cool, but I'm not sure how I feel about Even More attention being given to Shadow and her stuff, while all other other companions haven't had practically any further development at all. The more important you make Shadow's stuff, the more it's going to feel like the game is actively punishing you for not taking her. That's a problem. Companion quests and elements should be sideline material that adds to the game, but never detracts from it by being missing.
Anyway, that's it for the LARP side of the stream. The party wave goodbye from Swen's feast table, some of them happily holding their character portraits – those whose ones weren't dashed on the stonework by Swen earlier. Because we succeeded, we're told, we now get the actual patch information video.
==
Community Update video:
The community update video is just a straight talk spot with Swen, in a relaxed setting. It opens with Swen greeting us, and then without too much ado jumping into what he has to talk about. It's refreshing and to the point.
We do get a short game shot of a combat-like cutscene in the druid grove between a tiefling and a druid; curious, it seems like a new cutscene, and a new event.
Swen starts by talking about the “Active Roll System”: Now the ability check Roll UI shows the actual DC, the die rolled and your bonuses added. Thank you. This is greatly appreciated by me at least. The UI also is interactive and now lets you add relevant buffing abilities and spells in the moment if you want them, casting spells and using abilities that fit. This is another nice feature; it's a little strange, for the way it implies overt spell casting mid conversation.... buuuut, A game won't ever really be able to respond and react to something like that as a live table can, and this cuts down on the tedious out of conversation pre-buffing immersion break, so, I can give this a fair pass, personally. I think it's a good thing, overall.
Rolls in the middle of conversation are still a big cut away that is damaging for conversation immersions, and with this improvement, I think t looks like that won't change... BUT, this change isn't making that any worse, really, and having it made into a little bit more of an actually interactive moment, rather than a non-interactive break away, kind of makes the break a little bit better, honestly. Kinda.
While this is being discussed, we get another little cut away – this time showing Astarion reading the necronomicon; Astarion, you're pretty but dear gods you're dumb...
Next Swen talks about backgrounds: these will be hidden mini-event actions that lean into Rping your background choice, and will award Inspiration or XP for completing them. This is neat, I like it. I'm optimistic about seeing how it plays out. It sounds like they've added ten of these per background in Act I alone, and that's a big number.
We also get more Shadowheart story updates – as hinted at in the last patch, you can now free her from the pod in the intro. We knew this was coming, and this is almost certainly what Swen was debating on sharing in the stream earlier... and also the 'new secret on the beach' that was teased before that. It's still neat though. My earlier concern for the amount of Shadowheart focus compared to others still stands, but we'll see how it looks.
Next up, we'll be hearing more voice barks for characters! This is good, great even. The absolute silence of them outside of actual conversations was brutal on having them feel like present members of the party. Voice barks are a small thing, but they're atmospheric when done right. I hope there's a setting for how frequently they occur, because too much is bad, and everyone's threshold for how much is too much is different.
Briefly, Swen talks about disentangling Jump and Disengage (by popular demand). This is huge and Swen skips past it very quickly... I get the impression he's not fan, at a personal level. Oh well. It is a big thing, and a good thing, and a much desired thing that many people had actually given up hope on seeing. I'm so glad that they're doing this, and it restores a certain amount of my personal faith. In particular, I'm hoping that they remember to give disengage as bonus back to rogues' cunning action.
After that, we learn that we're getting a button to voluntarily end Concentration – finally. This is something that should never have been overlooked in the first place, but I'm glad it's here now. I'm not sure we needed an extra little white 'x' on the concentration icon, since the icon itself looks good and could be taken as a clickable on its own anyway... but I'm just glad they're fixing this.
Another big, positive change next! They're removing the useless 'knock out' button that dealt a single d4, and giving us a toggle switch for simply being in 'non-lethal' mode. Thank you! This is the correct way to do it, and I'm glad to see this is being fixed as well! Thank you very much. Much appreciated! Now, here's hoping that knocking people out will actually have a notable difference of impact in many places, if you choose it over killing.
Moving on, we come to 'Mini-Camps'. Swen is clearly super excited about this one. When you camp, your camp site will reflect the zone your in, as near as it can. We see brown rock caves, like the owlbear cave, we see underdark mushrooms, we see the crypt; it looks like all of your camp supplies, like your stash, come with you as part of this, though we don't see any camp follower npcs, except in the normal rive-side space, so their status is unknown for now. Even so, this is a huge boon to immersion, and I'm really glad they're doing something about it. It seems like this is a pretty good middle ground between Larian's desire for a fixed base camp, and the immersive realism of camping while adventuring. Can't wait to test it.
On that note, he also mentions a bunch of new camp cutscenes... and we see a much fluffier-looking scratch. Who's a good pupper? *ruffle-ruffle*
As a part of this point, Swen also talks about Camp Resources. This is an experiment they're trialling to see if they can make long resting a more impactful and more measured thing that you need to consider. They want feedback on this in particular. Ostensibly, it seems that when you camp, you have to eat food to get the full benefits from your long rest – don't and don't gain the full benefits (perhaps reduced benefits, it wasn't clear). It looks as though various food items will be 'worth' different amounts of camp supply, currently, and there looks also like there will be a standard 'ration' type object that we can obtain as well. It was mentioned that camping requirements will grow as we level up and as out camp following grows.
Currently, I'd say they still need to drastically reduce the amount of food that's lying around to make this actually meaningful – there's enough food filling up Act I that you could still easily rest between each and every combat encounter and still not run out of food... but we'll see. On the face of it, it's a positive change, but not the sole solution to the long rest issue. More will still need to be done. It's also something that should be optional or graded – and I agree with Drath here, not tied to your difficulty setting.
During this conversation, we get a little cutscene of the mark actually glowing when it's mentioned doing so. Nice! Thanks, that's actually helpful because it grounds the text and the visuals together in a way that they weren't before, so as much as it's a small thin,g it's still a very helpful thing.
That's it for the details: after the three hour stream, the actual community patch update took 6:30 or so.
Does this feel like it was worth the long silence between last patch and this? Well, no... but at the same time, they ARE still building the rest of the game as well, and this patch has got a lot of much desired stuff in it, many of which are things that the community has been saying for awhile, and some of which we'd even given up hope on them listening to, so, overall, I'm actually really happy to hear all of this. I'm excited to see it, and I hope that the trend continues!
At the end, Swen says goodbye by sharing a personal story of his... in which he talks about his experience playing the game on this newest patch, and seemed to, if I'm not mistaken, actually discover for the first time the value of story immersion while playing, and he seemed to really appreciate it. Maybe this will be the start of something positive?
That's it for the PFH3, I regret watching the three hours of the stream itself, and the grossness that it left me feeling. I wish I hadn't, and could just have the very positive feelings that I have about everything that's actually in the patch itself.
