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)

I agree. I want to be able to switch companions, different setup for different occasions.

It makes a pretty good habit of disregarding immersion. These are some of the issues which personally break immersion for me:

-No day/night.
-No weather.
-Conversations only happen at camp. (Speaking of which, did they ever change the awful Fixed Camp Location? That was another immersion breaker-traverse the under dark but port back to the surface to rest each night)
-No clock/calendar in a game where the plot is literally an urgent race against time.
-Magical way portals liberally littered throughout the realms that apparently only we have discovered and only we can use. I'd imagine surface raiding Drow would have loved to have know about these portals?
-Level 1 companions with backstories more befitting of high level characters. The 'because tadpole' explanation of the loss of their powers is appalling writing.
-A condensed , railroaded map, devoid of life. The place was a literal graveyard once I had cleared a few quests. No random spawns, no random encounters, everything feels like a trip along a rail track. Little to no animals, no birdsong.

Correction- it’s the story of up to four playable characters, because it can be played in co-op with up to four players. DOS1 has two main characters and up to two followers, as it’s playable with 1-2 players, DOS2 and BG3 have up to four main characters because they are playable with 1-4 players.

Before anyone says it, that’s not really a DOS thing, it’s a how Larian implement co-op thing. I have little interest in multiplayer myself, but it seems perfectly reasonable that those who want to should all be an equally big part of the story, rather than one player being the star of show. And that means that the story has to fundamentally be built around a group of characters, not just one.

Personally, I quite like that I can go into dialogue with any one of the origin characters, or even separate them off to do something on their own.

However, I do agree that it would be good to also have a bunch of regular companions we could meet along the way with their own stories and personalities, but without the full control of origin characters. They could be functionally just be a combination of mercenary and camp follower, with their own dialogue and potentially quests.

That probably wouldn’t mess too much with whatever reasons Larian might have for fixing the party origin characters, but still allow a pool of companions. Additionally, it should be much easier to add more regular companions than origin ones and they could be spaced out a bit throughout the game, making them feel more like companions from the original games and others like it.

Of course, Larian might be deliberately trying to get away away from the Pokémon “Gotta catch them all” type gameplay that tends to happen. If so, they could still probably find ways to stop you recruiting absolutely everyone.

It’s the best compromise I can think of anyway.

I don’t know that they needed to go down the route of making everyone the star of the show in order to to make co-op work. If you took the Lord of the Rings or Star Wars then conceivably you could say that Frodo and Luke Skywalker were the stars of the show…but they couldn’t have done what they did without the aid of other ‘stars’.

Some of Larian’s decision making seems to have been driven by accommodating co-op a certain way and the result is that game has suffered for it. What percentage are playing co-op anyway…surely a minority?

One thing I will say is that I actually don't think the game does a good job of immersing you in the setting because having played through as much of act one as I have, I don't really have a clear idea of the setting. Like, I can guess it's classic medieavel fantasy, but we get hit with so many strange things that we don't really have a baseline for what normal is in the Forgotten Realms. I'm unfamiliar with the Forgotten Realms, and having played this, I only have a vague sense of how rare tieflings are, I only roughly know the place druids have in the setting. We don't actually have a sense of their power because Halsin, the leader of the druids, was caught by goblins. But those goblins were allied with powerful leaders, but we don'tsee any real displays of his power. Gale is a supposedly a powerful wizard from Waterdeep, a city we don't get to really learn anything about, but he's level one, so how powerful is a typical wizard in this setting? What place to they hold in the setting? What role does magic typically serve in the setting? Astarion has been a vampire spawn for overa centure but is still level one. And how common even are vampires in this setting? And Githyanki and mindflayers are unique creatures. I get the sense that they're rare, but are they as rare as vampires? Rarer? And we don't have any sense of who our player character was before this, and so we don't know if they're someone who would have special knowledge or not, so when dialgoue implies our character knows something, we can't really use that as a measure of how commonplace that knowledge is. So whether it feels like Baldurs Gate or not, what it doesn't feel like is a cohesive world. We don't ever get a good sense of how things normally relate to other things, so we can't fully appreciate just how weird things are. Sure, we took a trip into hell, but then we get to the grove and hear about an entire city that got pulled into hell. So...how much of a constant threat is going into hell in this world? Is it a standard thing that adventurers can expect to experience? The large number of tieflings (my favorite race by the way) would suggest that the presence of hell is at least somewhat pervasive.

People point out that Wrath of the Righteous also starts out really epic, but that's not entirely true. The first thing you experience, however shortly, is a festival. You get to look around a little bit and see "okay, this is a standard medieavel fantasy world. The place I'm in has a dragon protecting it and demons are a threat, but this place is an exception in those regards. It gives you a quick baseline for what normal is like. Plus you even get a glimpse at a few early companions. Then even after the demons attack, you're told that such a thing should not have been able to happen, so you can appreciate the gravity of it. On top of that, you can appreciate the horror of a day of celebration turned into a mass slaughter by horrific beasts. If WotR truly started like BG3, then your character would start off right as they were falling through the ground, seeing the demons swarming above them.

Regarding the companions issue specifically, I made an observation a while ago that I think still holds true; it's possible to make a crpg where an ensemble cast of the player and companions are all equally important and get the chance to shine, but I don't think that's what Larian is doing. To me it feels as though what they're doing is making a story where one character is meant to be the central character, but the story doesn't know who that central character is yet, so it's written to allow any of the characters to fill that role. And I think that's a mistake that keeps the group as a whole from feeling like a cohesive unit,

I am in 100% agreement with this. I came into BG3 and WotR knowing more about the Forgotten Realms setting than I did with the Pathfinder setting due to prior experience with 5E tabletop. I did everything I could in BG3 EA and finished WotR, and came out of the experience with a FAR greater understanding of the Pathfinder setting than Forgotten Realms, because the story and the party members of WotR are clearly written to interact with or add to the setting itself.

BG3's overall presentation is damn near 100% seemingly self contained plot with only vague references to the larger world in comparison. The party members don't exactly help, only Gale seemingly talks about the setting in broader terms that is less directly related to his personal subplot (namely when he talks about the Yawning Portal in Waterdeep and actually explaining what Mystra is). The mention of the Yawning Portal and Undermountain holds special significance to me as someone who is participating in a tabletop campaign entirely revolving around them - but it is utterly meaningless to everyone else without additional comparative context that the game can't really provide, when the context for many other things in the setting can't be observed within BG3 as it currently is.

Admittedly, this may change later in the game and we reach an actual city for once. I really hope Larian understands that they have to knock the presentation of the city of Baldur's Gate out of the park. Or else we may be about to witness the cRPG version of 'HD towns are hard' that FFXIII got absolutely slammed against a brick wall for back in the day, that cast a dark pall over the entire series for a better part of a decade.

It might not even be Larian's fault though. Apparently BG3 is actually meant to be a sequel of sorts to a recent 5E tabletop module that among other things explains exactly why we run into the tieflings at the grove. Though I also think that maybe the game's style of presentation already assumes that we should know a lot about the overall setting already, which I think is a mistake - but I'm not sure how to go about addressing this, other than a proposed idea to overhaul the opening entirely in a way that actually gives us time to familarize ourselves with the setting instead of essentially throwing us in-media-res as it currently is (and/or make it so that the mindflayer ship sequence isn't actually the start of the game).

I’m not sure that Star Wars and Lord of the Rings are really comparable, unless you are talking about specific co-op games based on the stories?

My point is that there’s a reason that the origin characters are just as “special” as your main, and that reason is multiplayer. I find it weird that many people don’t address this when talking about it. I don’t know how many people will play multiplayer, but it’s a pretty core feature of the game and therefore entirely reasonable for the game to designed so that all players would have equal agency instead of some being relegated to side characters in someone else’s story.

I don’t think the game suffers for that decision in single player either. My main character is still the one who calls the shots, they just aren’t the unique special one, but one of several. However, I also have the option of making other characters take the lead on occasion, so for example, I can do something much more dickish with Laz'el or Astarion than I would with my main character.

Seen a few people throw this out there and it's a ridiculous assertion. If this argument had any merit those that use it would not be wasting their time on this forum but would instead be huddled with lawyers in the discovery process of a potentially lucrative lawsuit. I challenge anyone who seriously believes this to shop the idea around to some attorneys, but I suspect most who employ it know it is nothing more than lazy rhetoric.

Well. Maybe not really a sequel but yes, in the first phase of BG3 development, Larian and WoTC did work together as to make the module Descent into Avernus(released 2019) in some part pave the way for BG3, as stated in this interview from E3 2019.


Which, in my opinion is a really nice touch for those that are engaged in current 5e table top, getting an insight how events in BG3 fits the timeline etc. But sadly it does nothing for those who's first interaction with Forgotten Realms lore will be BG3 and that is something Larian really can improve upon. Speak to me Larian. What is this world? Who are those strange people(?) with horns and tails? People speak of Shar, who or what is that? A god, a religion, a goth movement?

There are some hints in books and dialogue that places our MC in regards to current year, geographical point etc, but I would really like for Larian to somehow, give a quick intro to as where their story takes place. It can be an intro cinematic explaining that Faerun is a continent on the world Toril, shaped and constantly affected by the war between the deities Selune and Shar. On this continent there is a province/region called Sword Coast and in that region is a city called Baldur's Gate.

I don't know the best way to do it, but considering that Larian wants their game to feel intuitive, that should go for the presentation as well and not only the gameplay. In my opinion.

Ironically, I think the companion character that gives you the most background on the setting is Lae'zel. She gives you a very evocative description of what the astral planes and life as a Githyanki are like. But I don't recall being able to talk to either Wyll or Asterion, or Gale about where they're from or what the world beyond the area we're in is like. I give Shadowheart a pass because she explicitly had her memories erased, but what's the excuse for the others? I should be able to ask them about where they're from and what it's like there. Part of the point of companions in these games is that they give you an opportunity to learn more about the setting you're in. In Dragon Age: Origins, you get to learn about Orlais and Antiva from your companions, you get to talk about what life in the circle of Magi is like, you get to learn more about the Chantry, all by just talking to your companions. They're able to teach you more about the basic aspects of the setting which otherwise you might not have been able learn. That really feels like it's missing with our current companions. This is act one of the game, we should have a general sense of the world by about the middle of it. Instead it feels like we're going to be experiencing the opposite; a whole lot of weirdness front-loaded into the first act and we don't see any sort of "normalcy" until act two when we're in the city of Baldur's Gate. And if part of their goal with this game is to appeal to people who aren't already fans of the series, that is the wrong way to do this.

I've also mentioned in another thread that the story of the game as presented kind of disinsentivises you from getting invested in the area you're in. With maybe the exception of the cult of the absolute-and even then it's iffy-none of the people you can form bonds with in the area are really very tied to it. Tieflings want to leave, smugglers want to leave, the druids want everyone else to leave, including you so if you sympathize with them then explicitly you're encouraged to move along and not come back. Halsin goes with you if you want him to, same with Volo and even if he doesn't go with you, he doesn't stay in the area. The game as it stands is really pushing you, telling you that everything of interest is in Baldur's Gate, which means that you're going through the beginning portion of the game actively being encouraged to feel attatched to the setting itself. Yet we're given basically no concrete information about what makes Baldur's Gate special. We know it's a big city, but that barely means anything. Hell, we have someone from Baldurs Gate and someone from another city, that's a prime opportunity for Larian to build the setting by presenting us with two different cities with two different personalities that we can learn about. But we don't learn about them, the opportunity is squandered.

+1

As someone who has not played D&D since AD&D and thus had never heard of Baldur's Gate or the Forgotten Realms I agree with all of this. After the first few days of playing BG3 I wanted to know more about the world and searching the net brought me to the Forgotten Realms Wiki which has been an excellent source of information that has significantly enhanced my enjoyment of the the game (for example allowing me so much more ideas for how to build my characters back story). However that was my own initiative and effort completely outside of the game. I agree with Private Racoon and others that Larian could have done a lot more to provide or access this background within the game. They are missing out on rich and easy opportunity to provide a much more immersive experience by ignoring all of this fabulous lore that is just there to be used.

First of all, how do you get "vast majority"? Vast majority of what? Vast majority of all gamers? HAHAHA. Dream on.

Then, you still keep (intentionally?) missing the point. I don't care how many people like/enjoy the game. That has nothing to do with the issue of the game NOT feeling like a Baldur's Gate game. All you are saying here is that a lot of people who don't care about the original Baldur's Gate games like this game. But those people (which may include you yourself) are completely irrelevant to this debate.

The game feels like a Baldur's Gate game.

Most people playing the game (the definition of majority) enjoy it. The people enjoying the game are buying the game. Their feedback matters also. They are not irrelevant.

Again. The game feels like a Baldur's Gate game. I've played the other BG games. I've played all the Forgotten Realms games. I've played through multiple DnD games that took place in other settings, including Greyhawk and Darksun. I have a long history of playing in these games.

And this feels like a Baldur's Gate game.

Say it again. Maybe someone will believe you. 😏

JK.

Really, I get where you're coming from. It's your opinion and you are entitled to it.

But ultimately it is your opinion. We can argue until we die about this, but it is pointless.

You believe it is a BG game and many do not.

I, personally, am in between. It is great, but it could be SO much better IF they did more to make it a legit D&D world with legit D&D elements instead of what many of us feel is a simulated, looks like D&D illusion.

D&D was created as a roleplaying parody of Tolkiens LOTR saga. What made this story so good on a fundamental level? It was based on fantasy but grounded in reality.

All of the great fictional stories ever written no matter how fantastical have this in common. This is immersion. A reader or player needs to believe the story and setting is plausible for them to be "sucked in" or immersed in said story. Otherwise it is just special effects and the human brain naturally disconnects.

The BG 3 story and setting breaks this fundamental rule at every level. The world the game is set is not grounded in reality, it is a pretty looking chess board with stuff plopped on it. Your companions and their fantastical backstories are quite frankly ridiculous. Could I believe these people existed, sure. Could I believe these people just so happened to be in the same predicament, in the same place AND at the same time? No, why? Because my brain is telling me on an unconsious level these characters are there for the sake of the story not because of it. At this point my brain becomes aware of these anomalies and switches off.

The game world, story and character motivations break rule 1. <<<< This is the story and as such is objectively shite. Chess is a good game but I don't get immersed in it. I don't wonder what motivates the queen or if the king is having it off with the rook because they are just pieces on a board for the sake of a game. BG 3 in a nutshell.

I am not saying this to be overly critical.

Spoilers: You kill all the druids at the grove and find Halsin, you tell him you killed his entire family on purpose. He gets mad for a sec and you say "they were being a dick", he says oh that's ok then and carries on waffling a bunch of words. Total disconnect.

At the Gith patrol the Kith'rak discovers his holy mission is standing in front of him. He asks his minion to kill you and says "I am going to report our success our mission is over" then buggers off to magic land. Eh? He may as well have said "you stay here, I am going home". A real Kung Pow moment made me laugh actually.

Two of the many but these stood out as they made me laugh.

Heck, I've even made an argument about the similarities between BG and BG3, and I've shown where the major differences are coming from, which happen to be results of changes in editions over the years, as well as general changes to the setting.

As for arguing until we die, I'm just providing a counterpoint. A much needed counterpoint, in my opinion.

You say: "You believe it is a BG game and many do not."

In fairness: Many believe it is a BG game. See? It's not me against many. The "many" you refer to are actually a handful of folks here who regularly voice their same opinions on repeat. The many I refer to are die-hard fans out there buying the game, playing it, and having a blast.

That's why I believe a counterpoint is sorely needed. I find a lot of the typical complaints echoing about are rhetorical in nature, lacking roots in dialectic. Shaky subjectivity masked as fact behind walls of venom. These things need to be challenged, in my opinion. I would hate for someone from Larian to see these comments go unopposed and assume things that are actually working in the game need to be fixed, thus making the game worse over all, not to mention making it take longer to hit full release. That's why I believe a counterpoint is sorely needed.

Grounded...in...reality...with magic and dragons? Care to elaborate how you mean that exactly?

The other thing with Halsin and the Kith-rak...i am not sure you realize how far people go for their beliefs. Even in our world more extreme things happen.

Halsin is a firm believer in balance and nature. Nature is not fair or friendly. He knows if you back an animal into a corner it will bite back. That goes even for his own grove. It is his way of life. He is sad that he was not there to guide them. Same goes for the Kith-rak. He is so sure of the superiority of his own race that
he cannot believe some low-race-adventurers and a small time gith can actually foil his underlings. So he does not even think about getting his own hands dirty, or the mouth of his dragon.

Hard to believe for "normal" thinking people. Goes for me too. But only think what happens in our world. Extremist believers BOMB themselves up because they believe they go to paradise with that. In the USA people created a church praying to their fking machine-guns. Well, Halsin and the gith are acting more logical than
that if you ask me....

It depends ...
If this is only complain topic, that is not suggesting anything ... you would be right.
BUT Suggestion and Feedback topic, wich i dare to presume it is, since it is in suggestions and feedback section ... those people are as relevant as any other, since their point is that they dont want this game to change ... no matter how close it is or isnt to previous titles.

Because *your* brain can't figure out why these characters are there together means the story is objectively bad? Objectively. As in: not influenced by personal feelings or opinions, but only representing facts.

lol

Okay.

Hmm.

Shadowheart is there because she was chasing an artifact. So we know why she was there.

Lae'zel is a Githyanki. The artifact is covered in Githyanki symbols, and Githyanki are chasing the Nautiloid. Maybe Lae'zel got caught when the Mind Flayers raided some Githyanki to get their hands on the artifact? Gosh, suddenly it's feeling more reasonable that Lae'zel is there.

Wyll has a pact with Mizora, and she's been kidnapped away to Moonrise Towers. Maybe he was captured as a bystander because they had reason to get Mizora? Sounds like Wyll's reason for being there makes sense.

Gale? He has a condition based on Netherese magic, and whatever's putting the tadpoles in stasis is Netherese in origin, so maybe there's a connection there somewhere?

Astarion? Maybe he was just captured. Maybe Cazador traded him in some kind of bargain, and maybe that has something to do with the infernal tattoo on his back?

The point is, we're in early release, in act one, and because you can't figure out why all the characters are there, you immediately assume everything is objectively bad.

This is not objectivity. This is your subjective opinion. There's a big difference.

As for understanding why all these characters are in the same predicament, I think that's going to become more and more clear as the story unfolds. There are already hints all over the place.

I'd really like to know what makes you feel a Baldur's Gate game when playing BG3.

And because you're probably going to answer "city", "DnD" (Magic missile, D20, AC) and "FR" (Sword coast, underdark, mindflayer)... Can you explain why most people that enjoy those games think that Pillard or Eternity, Pathfinder, Tyranny, Solasta, DA:O (...) feels like BG games and/or are "spiritual successors" ?

On the other hand, I never heard that about DoS.

Is that only a matter of graphics ?