Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Low pool of EA testers worries me

If the Steam chart is anything to judge by, there really isn't a lot of people invested into testing this game. Sure we passed a million copies sold on that platform alone, but most of them didn't even finish the product, let alone went through multiple playthroughs and left a valid criticism with their review (easily checked by their hours played tooltip next to their name)

Compared to DOS2 I'd say Larian really did make a mistake with their update schedule and planning because theres not a lot of interest left (speaking from a personal standpoint, but even so, the numbers don't lie)

What data, if any, they are still extrapolating from those small amounts of playthroughs is anybodies guess but I don't think we're going to see meaningful improvements and additions until the big release even with the loud minority on the forums voicing their concerns and ideas.
Heres looking at you patch 6

The hype arround the game was really high at the beginning. The first monthes were crazy.

Then Larian didn't really do anything to keep this hype really high.

With communication, regular patch, polls or events from the community managers, regular gazette and so on... players (streamer, media,...) would talk about the game during the whole EA but with a single PFH and a patch every 3-4 monthes there's not so much to talk about and the hype slowly goes down each time.

Yeah, but D:OS2 was crowdfunded title, not EA. So it's not exactly 1:1.

As far as data, that might be more helpful, then bunch of hardcore, multipleplaytrhough gamers. Most buyers won't finish the game, nor replay it.

Everyone times someone says "meh, wasn't that great; I didn't finish it", someone else puts their $60 into a different game.....

Also, there are folks like me who do not want to burn out on the game before release. Played thru once on patch 4, messed around with some different char builds a little to check out other classes, etc. But I have no desire to go back in till more classes are added.

Not concerned. The game already sold over a million copies and will sell a lot once released.

what exactly are you worried about? This is a crpg. Larian has a history of completing their games. What else do you want? This doesn't have to have a large playerbase at all for anyone to enjoy themselves.

I feel like the concern being raised here is not that the game won't complete, but rather that the game has a LOT of ways it still needs to improve, and many of them are ways that go against Larian's original ideology.. and so for those improvements to actually happen, they need that volume of data and feedback from a large pool of independent testers. Without it, the game will complete and launch anyway, but some folks are worried that it will remain as intrinsically dissatisfying and underwhelming as many are currently finding it due to the problems it has - and folks want the game to be as good as it could be.

Some of us are just awaiting patch 6 before spending any more time testing.

To borrow an example from a totally different game genre, this EA kind of reminds me of a FreeOrion to Master of Orion 3/MOO:CTS type situation, where the whole Universe hopes for something more like 1 and 2 but way better! but then you get that sort of sinking feeling like its going to level off and crash before it gets there. I think if they should push out some more content or a new class in the meantime even if its still kinda bugged out in patch 6 just to show forward momentum and maintain interest. They need to go big at the end of October and into the holiday season.

This is more to do with preventing burn out and waiting for the next patch. Most of the features were already gone over by many players and new bugs reported. Not much left to do other than wait for patch 6.

That's what people said about CDPR before Cyberpunk 77 turned out to be fucking awful from start to finish. Some good ideas here and there, but nothing was actually executed properly, and the game is probably the most schizophrenic experience I've ever had. Can't make up its damn mind if it wants to be a looter-shooter or an RPG or a story game, and it essentially fails at all three.

Larian has a history of not being that damn incompetent but so far all they've managed is a decent first act. They haven't managed to get the ruleset sorted out, their approach has some tangible problems, their user interface is making naughties games look good, and their communication about what they want to do and how they want to do it and when they want to do it is pretty much zilch.

So am I worried? Do I have any bad tingling in my gut that the company that gave us toilet chain movement and drag-to-group and frustrating camp mechanics and incredibly unreliable party dialogue triggers and origin nonsense and three-quarterlings with giant heads and an aggressively cramped map that doesn't convey adventure or exploration or really any care or effort to build a nice word is going to phone it in a little too much? Yeah, I do.

What makes you think all they've managed is a first act? They told us that that was all they intended to share in EA, but we've no idea what how much progress has been made on things they don't intend to show us until the game is released.

Personally, I'm still as interested as I ever was, but I'm only playing the game if there's something specific, such as the new approach to camping, that I want to test. Not wanting to play the game constantly just means that I don't want the first act to feel stale when I start my first real playthrough.

I don't know what they've managed. They're not really telling us, after all. But if act 1 is indicative of how they've decided to do things then it suggests some design choices that I, and probably a fair few other people, would find less than optimal.

The complete radio silence indicates that they're not at all concerned about hyping up EA at the moment. And that has me worried that they feel they're beyond the need for regular feedback and are confident enough in their design choices to push ahead with intense production of the rest of the game. If that's the case then i suspect they'll give us a fall patch to maintain the appearance of caring about EA, but then one more update in March or so, and then nothing until second half of 22, in order to get a feel on priorities for polish. But more depressingly, it means the rest of the game will probably be very similar to act 1.

So no time mechanic, buggy dialogue triggers, characters everywhere that just repeat their lines over and over and over, a ridiculously compressed map, and along with that also extremely nerfed ranged attacks. Along with that comes other necessary homebrew rules to maintain an illusion of balance. This has the potential to be a fine DOS game, but an exceptionally awful Baldur's Gate experience.

That is understandable concern ...
Problem here is that the more game will be tuned to satisfy Group B, the less it will satisfy Group A who liked it before.

So ... statisticaly, its inevitable that *someone* will feel like this is piece of shit. :-/

You of all should know that ... just look around.
Scrolls, barrels, high ground, hotbar and dozen other topics ... some people will never be satistified until those things will be gone forever, bcs their very presence "ruins their game" ... they never accept its existence bcs "dont use it" is stupid argument for them, while "using during complaining about using it being stupid" is somehow seen as genius argument or what.

I mean, its "Larian game" after all ... so its first and before anything else should fulfill Larian vision ... at least that is how i see it, feel free to throw a rock if you feel the urge. :-/
Once someone will be crazy enough to development game, that will be "exactly as people wants it" he will never deliver final product, as long as there will be at least two people providing feedback.

It is a Baldur's Gate game. If Larian wants to make their very own game exactly how they want it to be then they should not pick a name that is this strongly tied to a particular kind of game. If Larian wants to use that particular name then they should also accept the restrictions that come with that name.

If Larian just wants to make a DOS-game that isn't DOS then they could have made Mortality: Original Virtue and had a completely free hand to do whatever they wanted to do.

Okay:

No. That's not acceptable.

First and Before Anything Else, they must deliver the game that is being, advertised and pitched and sold. Their vision is irrelevant if that former condition is not fulfilled. If they deliver their vision, but in doing so they do not deliver that former condition, then they have failed, and worse than that, they will have deceived, and defrauded people.

If a company hires you to create "Better Gardening 3", the long anticipated third instalment in the much acclaimed Better Gardening series.... a game series much beloved as a video game simulation of a story based gardening system that takes you on an exciting adventure in gardening... and this company hires you on to make Better Gardening 3 using their latest system evolution of garden simulation, Digging & Dirt 5th Edition... and you agree to do that, but your previous games involved explosions everywhere, silly voices and cartoonish violence... and so your vision moving forward is to make a game with more of the same, because that was really popular with your existing audience... and what you ultimately produce and launch is Worms Armageddon: Garden Warfare... a game that doesn't really feel like Better Gardening, or really Gardening at all, or playing with Digging and Dirt in any real way.... then I'm sorry, but "You followed your vision", and "It's digging in the dirt, isn't it? It's just doing it in a way that we think is more fun!" is not, in any way, an adequate defence of your failure to deliver the product you were hired to produce, or your fraudulent misrepresentation in your advertising that was used to draw in the crowds of players who came for the Better Gardening series, or for a Digging and Dirt simulator... If you hadn't ever intended to produce those things then you should not have taken the contract, and you definitely should not have advertised that that was what you were making. Vision, in this situation, is of secondary importance, and the overall product delivered should not bend to it so far that it no longer matches the original commission as advertised.

Don't get me wrong: Worms is a great game series. I love it. I genuinely do... And if this theoretical company had advertised that they were making a new Worms game, I might have been excited for it, in its own way. But it's not what was advertised, so it's not what I came here FOR, in this case. I don't care if they say that this was their vision for the series: That's no apology and no excuse for failing to deliver the original stated goal.

I would love a Worms Armageddon: Garden Warfare

Yes. This. ^^^^^

Ah, when this thread started, I was thinking "what's the catch?" And it turned out to be another "BG3 should be an Infinity Engine title". I, for one, really hope this game will be much closer to DOS than to original BG series. And that's what I'll emphasize in my testing.