Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback This doesn't feel like a Baldur's Gate game (or D&D)

This is a very grounded and astute idea and highlights exactly what is missing from this game. It is all flash, no substance. I don't think the game actually has any structures where normal people are living? Every single house, village or barn has been ravaged, burnt, or is inhabited by enemies or vagabonds. There is no "breathing room" for life in such a setting. Adding any of these would make a huge difference.




Yes, you get it. A lot of this is simply bad writing and misunderstanding the source material. Your last sentence hits the nail on the head. Sure, D&D has changed over the years and 5th edition brings in a lot of new content but this is still a Baldur's Gate game. Most importantly it should stay true to Baldur's Gate and it most certainly does not.

So you think people in the middle of nowhere do not eat, need housing, have a professional activity, etc ? I agree, there should be less things in the middle of nowhere but still, people would need to farm, hunt or trade to secure food, while they would need markets or craftsman to provide them with the necessary services to live their lives (e.g. carpenter, stable,...). I mean if there are all these barrels and food items scattered over the map, I assume someone would have put them there ? Or is food magically conjured in 5e DnD ?

+1
I don’t consider myself a DND fan - never player a tabletop, have no interest in the world itself, never read any novels or even player handbook. Just played majority of DND based cRPGs and similar. I liked some of them more then the others, some I didn’t like at all.

BG3 is the first game that just doesn’t “feel” like the other.

With the drow, goblin, and gnol armies nearby, any ordinary human would have escaped by now.
In the first act of the game we mainly have forest areas, it is certainly not a densely populated area even in better times.
Apart from the druid grove (who are able to deal with it on their own), there is a fishing village nearby and it might as well be destroyed already. We do not have access to it, but it does exist.
We can also come across a toll station (currently destroyed) or an inn.
The fact that the vast majority of it is in complete ruin makes perfect sense. It would be strange if people could live peacefully with such neighbors.
We will certainly have more "normal" terrains when we finally reach civilization, which will happen sooner rather than later.

It all boils down to preferences if i see it right.

Back when D&D was new there were no tieflings, or genasi. And if there was a race like this, it was never intended as player race. i guess that most of this feeling the OP (and me at times too) comes from the fact that we encounter monsters that are usually expecteced at a much higher level.

I am with you on that "in my age everything was better". I really hate that too. Maybe "in my time i liked everything better" would be a better way to put it.

My only fear is that when you start off on such a high and epic level, with mindflayers and so on, you have to keep a high level. Who wants a story to get boring later on? Hope they did not fire most of their powder.

also, regarding the lore i know, mystra making contact to humans is not that rare . but why go after a fop like gale? :P

Again, they throw OP monsters at us, but then nerf them so it FEELS like you're killing super OP monsters when you aren't.

I, at one point, equated it to fighting and killing a dragon at level 4. The DM had to dumb the dragon down severely because he thought it would be fun to bring it in not expecting the players to actually say "Let's kill it!"

I often get exhausted by the overwhelmingness (is that a word?) of the story. It's all too much, too epic. I mean WE have mindflayers, red dragons, spider matriarchs, hags, beholder, drow, gighyanki etc. in just a few hours gameplay. And when you encounter normal enemies like goblins, they come in hords, because the gods forbid If it's not epic. I miss normal beginner quests and some excitment curve.
To be honest, nowadays I often burn out midgame and stop playing.

Well technically, there are spells for that xD

Create Food And Water
3 conjuration
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: 30 feet
Components: V S
Duration: Instantaneous
Classes: Cleric, Paladin
You create 45 pounds of food and 30 gallons of water on the ground or in containers within range, enough to sustain up to fifteen humanoids or five steeds for 24 hours. The food is bland but nourishing, and spoils if uneaten after 24 hours. The water is clean and doesn’t go bad.

Exactly.

Beginning of the game should not have us fighting imps. A single Imp could potentially wipe a party of 4 level 1s. We fight at least 7 before we reach the helm plus 2 hellshogs, whatever those are.

Then, most likely before level 2, we fight not 1 but 3 intellect devourers, and again, 1 could likely wipe an entire party of 4 level 2s, but we face them with just the MC and SH.

Why not, instead, start the game fighting 4 Manes. 9 AC and 9 HP with no resistance and +2 to hit. Challenge Rating 1/8, meaning 8 is a moderate challenge for 4 level 1 characters?

Then, on the beach, have us fight something like 4-6 Neogi Hatchlings. AC 11, HP 7. +3 to hit. No resistance. CR 1/8. This would also then tie into Lae'zel's dialogue later which says, "I've seen Kith'raki pull the legs off of a screaming Neogi.". Ah. Now the players know what a Neogi is.

You can have intellect devourers running around the nautiloid and demons and mind flayers, and if a player is dumb enough to attack one they wipe the floor with them, but in no way should the player be able to actually kill any at that stage in the game unless they are SUPER lucky.

That's the kind of stuff I'm talking about. They want you, the player, to go. "Oh dang! I just killed a dragon! Can you believe it? I'm so awesome. I'm like a god."

The answer, "No. That was no dragon. It had a dragon skin, but it acted nothing like a dragon and had virtually no dragon stats. You fought a nerd sword, my friend."

Magnificient post, OP! Absolutely +1

I don't care that much about it not feeling like a D&D game. I do care very deeply and passionately about it not feeling like a Baldur's Gate game and not feeling like it is in the Forgotten Realms. Yes it very superficially has all the trappings of a D&D and FR game, but when you scratch that surface just a tiny bit you immediately see D:OS underneath. But I don't need to say anything more. Your post does a superb job of making this case in a very compelling way.

+1 to the OP and many of the comments above.

But as mentioned previously, this is Larian's style. They don't know how to do grounded fantasy. Considering Larian's level of engagement with the community (zero), I suspect a negative review on Steam or Metacritic will be the only way to have those concerns heard.

You don't get to claim the heritage of some of the best CRPGs without actually trying to emulate the better aspects of those games. Progress is fine and necessary, but a token appearance by Minsc isn't enough to call this BG3.

There are many people who have criticized the world design, especially the over the top elements, me included.

I do understand that BG3 needs to sell and therefore Larian has to "grab attention" - with dragons, evil Illithids, Tieflings etc. That's just normal & I can't blame Larian for that. But that's what a prologue is for. After crashing with the Nautiloid, the story could have stepped back and begun more slowly.

Just think about it:

(1) In BG1 you are bascially a teenager, having lost his godfather, roaming the countryside
(2) In BG2, Elves, Drow and Tieflings are something rare and cool
(3) In civilization 1 you start with a puny settler, building a civilization that flies to the stars
(4) In starcraft/command and conquer, you start with puny marines and end up commanding battlecruisers
(5) In 3d shooters, you start with a crowbar or puny pistol and end up with rocket launchers

-> you always start small. If you start with giving the player a rocket launcher right away, that's anticlimactic.

We have already skipped over Flesh, clay, stone, bronze, and iron golems into fighting an adamantine golem. at level 4. Might as well be throwing atropals at us. Even a flesh golem should be a nasty opponent at our level, but it kinda feels like we the players are supposed to feel like huge badasses even at level 1 with world-shaking events swirling all around us. There's no time to move through fighting flesh golems to clay golems to stone etc. The goblins in Act almost feel like an outlier in comparison to that.

I have been trying to articulate a cogent simile (thanks stewie griffon) and yes overwhelmingness is a word .

Ignoring all the game mechanics, BG1&2 built the world around the player. It introduced the player in a controlled manner, monsters and lore were introduced in a way that felt organic. The world felt lived in and real with NPC's doing stuff like work, eat, shit and sleep. Night time was dangerous and exciting with entire story arcs built into it.The story was built around established lore and adventures felt chosen rather than "WE NEED TO FIND A HEALER!!!!". The story progressed as you grew, your allignment changed as you faced difficulty and became desperate, you made strange unlikely allies depending on choices, you became stronger and every part of the story felt like you achieved something or progressed even when you are suckered by Bhodi.

Enter GB3. It feels like the player needs to play a complete game BG 2.5 on all origin characters to gain an appreciation of where the story is as you start. You had a life before the mindflayer ship right? You weren't cloned a level 1 ranger in a tank. How were each of you captured by the mindflayers? Larian want you to play origin characters that technically know nothing about themselves? Mmmmmm I suppose we don't know yet as we cannot play them. Motivation is different for everyone yet everyone is dead set on "find a healer". I mean Githyanki are the most xenophobic race in the forgotten realms, no way would you ever trust them unless you were Gith. I mean wtf is a creche right? Narr pass Lae'zel cheers I like my head attached.

Why do we even need to bother pissing about in local politics when we could just walk to Baldurs gate ignoring ALL of it? Pretty sure Gale knows a few archmages in waterdeep right? There will be high level clerics in Baldurs gate for sure. If you are in the arse end of nowhere what are the chances of finding a level 17 cleric or a mage that can cast wish? He would tell you to get stuffed btw unless you could offer something like a legendary item in exchange. The second you realised you had more time aka "super tadpole" you would have got an uber to a big city IF a cure was your motivation.

My point being first and foremost you need to understand the motivations of a character for the story to make sense. BG1 you had a big scary warlord after you that just killed your mentor. Not going argue that running away is a simple but understandable motivation. Stories don't need to be convoluted to be good they simply need to make sense. On a side note Gale with a true resurrection spell could cure the tadpole by simply dying, waiting for the bug to come out and resurrecting!!!! Plot hole much? Narrr it will be fine.

Who is the AbSoLuTe? Why would you care anyway? Nobody else knows what the bloody aBsOlUtE is. But it all adds to the mystery right? No because you have no reason to care. Clear as day, surely the mindflayers that stuck you with a tadpole were working for this AbSoLuTe right? Why mindflayers? CoNvOlUtEd. By the end of act 1 I am ready to call it a day and just turn into a mindflayer and chomp some brains. I have nothing against mindflayers, they are super powerful and you can have a laugh making people do dumb shit. I would rather be a mindflayer than an errand boi for every clown I meet. Another thing that bugs me, why can you only use the tadpole after resting when all you did is convince a level 1 goblin to move out of the way? Other true souls are whapping da power guffin like a champ. I guess your TaDpOlE is a legacy version or something or is solar powered instead of Lithium Ion.

I am not a nostalgic person AT ALL. I don't want BG 3 to be BG1 or 2. I just don't want the disney version of Baldurs gate or a Jar Jar Abrams rehash of star trek where classic pop-rock music blows up spaceships for some reason. If I feel like being confused and depressed I'll drink a bottle of Jack Daniels and watch the force awakens.

It's weird. I keep hearing about how I'm playing a game that started so epic that it can't be working. While I'm playing a game that's working.

If your heart longs for a smaller story right now with a simpler approach, I get it. The type of story some of you are describing appeals to me also. Start off in a hamlet, learn to be amazed all over again by the sight of an otherworldly elf.

Which is fine. All of that is fine.

Except this isn't that. Which is fine also. This doesn't have to be that. There's a compelling narrative in this story that's pushing the plot forward.

For all the talk about how this *feels* different, it is. DnD has changed over the decades. Massively. I started off playing Ad&d years ago. There were no tieflings. No dragonborn. They didn't even have sorcerers, much less wild magic sorcerers or dragon blood sorcerers with scales.

I loved the Dalelands and Cormyr. I must've read the original box set a thousand times over or more. I imagined the ruins of Myth Drannor with devils crawling through the remnants. And when I think of that, or when I think of the city of Phlan being teleported to a cavern in a plot initiated by Bane... well... plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, the more that changes, the more it's the same thing.

There's nothing wrong with fighting a minotaur at level four. Or fighting a hag at level three. It's the story that counts. The challenge, the choice, the goal, the want and need. All the rest is an arbitrary number, a CR someone made up some time back. Who cares? You only think a Mind Flayer is overpowered because you think a Mind Flayer is overpowered.

Why not live in a world where Mind Flayers are like humans, in that some are tougher and others are weaker? Or, and this is possible also, consider that your character never really beat a Mind Flayer, not one at full strength. Just like your character didn't really defeat an Adamantine Golem. Rather, it happened to be an interesting setting where a giant hammer came down and crushed the creation.

That's not uninteresting. If you were telling a story about a game you were in and that happened, it would be pretty cool. You were at a giant forge, you managed to get the golem under the hammer and wham. It's not that you beat the golem in a fair fight. You were in an interesting circumstance, and you used it to your advantage in a clever way.

Anyway, my point is that it's okay to hunger for a smaller story. And it's also okay to enjoy an epic story. You can even enjoy both if you want. Neither is inherently bad.

Did they really lol. I fought the golem but that detailed completely went over my head.

You know what it reminds me of? Snyder’s Superman films. Expecting for wow moments to be wow moments because of familiarity of the franchise while doing no set up of its own, while pissing off everyone remotely familiar with the IP.

So there was a gimmicky golem fight. Was I to be frightened by it being adamant one golem? If they assume players will have an extensive DND knowledge, why do they mess with DND so much? And if they don’t, why did they go for adamantine golem? To me it was just a golem, they might have put anyone one of those and it would be the same.

In BG2 when I encountered badder golems I went “oh shit” because smaller ones where already kicking my butt before. And it felt great to fight my way through golems at the end of BG2.

Eh, I just hunger for a decent story, at this point.

I wont even get into “what the point of leveling system, if everything stays the same”. RPGs tended to be constructed in certain way because it worked. If you want to do something different, then great, but you still need to come up with something that doesn’t works as a coherent narrative and as a representation of systems.

Again, for all the "decent story" jabs... I'm playing a game that clearly has a decent story. Numerous people are enjoying it.

Saying it's not your cup of tea isn't the same thing as saying it's not a decent story.

Uhm, because it's an adamantine forge?

Well, the graphics are great, there are many little side stories, the combat mechanics are fun. Divinity Original Sin 2 was also fun, but had an unhinged story and world.

But yes, we're not talking high class literary fiction here. BG3 has more of a sandbox feeling and less of a credible fantasy world. Which might just be ok.