Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Feedback - M1 Max User (Patch 5 & 6)

So I’ve played one playthrough on Patch 5 and two playthroughs on Patch 6 on the new M1 Max MacBook Pro, and I figured I’d offer my feedback. I separated my feedback into “suggestions” and “bugs”, with items being listed roughly in order of importance, with the top being the most important. Below is the information on the hardware used, if that helps. I never played D&D, only some previous Baldur’s Gate and Dark Alliance games, so I’m looking at this from a perspective of just “Is this fun for me?” rather than “Is this true to D&D, Baldur’s Gate, etc”. Also I’ve never played any previous Larian games.

Hardware: I primarily play on the new M1 Max MacBook Pro. My specific configuration is the 10/32 core variation with 32GB unified memory. Occasionally, I’ll play on my Windows 10 desktop with an Nvidia 2070 Super and an AMD Ryzen 5 3600.

Suggestions

1) I very much want a direct character control mode

I think a direct 3rd person (or even 1st person) character control mode should be added when outside of combat. It would be very similar to centering the camera so that it follows the character then zooming in all of the way. The only difference would be that WASD moves the character, and the camera follows, rather than clicking to move the character. I often feel like I’m chasing my character with the camera or rushing to keep a continuous stream of movement with my mouse clicks. Directly moving the character would also make the game feel more immersive in my opinion, since you are stepping more into the role of the character rather than being an outside oracle watching over the character and the rest of the party.

The world that’s been created is beautiful, might as well show it off in this “exploration mode”. Places like Druid’s Grove would be exceptional for this.


2) Centering the camera is inconvenient

When centering the camera so that the camera will follow your character, the camera positions itself in places that aren’t where you’d want it to be. For example, if the character is walking, centering the camera will often make the camera face the character rather than looking in the same direction as the character. I subsequently have to rotate the camera 180 degrees so that I can see where my character is going, which is where I will most likely be looking to move next.

Additionally, if you are zoomed in before centering the camera, the camera should stay zoomed in. Right now the camera zooms out every time I center it. The zoom level should just be the same before and after centering.


3) Darkvision either not working or underpowered, and other comments on seeing in the dark

When I was exploring the Underdark and the Grymforge, it was very difficult to see in the dark on my last playthrough. Multiple of my characters had darkvision, but it didn’t seem any brighter when I switched to them. Further, produce flame claims to produce a bright light in your hand, but it doesn't actually illuminate anything for me. I could see well in the darkness on Patch 5 when playing as a Drow, so I was very disappointed with my inability to see with regular Darkvision when playing Patch 6.


4) Hoping for a good post-game

There is nothing worse for me than investing 100 hours into making the perfect character, getting just the right gear, spells, stats, social standing, etc, and beating the story only for it to say “okay you won, want to load your save from right before you won?” or, worse yet, there is just nothing to do once you’ve perfected your character. This game is great in terms of replayability, but I hope that I can enjoy coming back to a character that’s already beaten the game. For example, Witcher 3 and Skyrim have a great post-game. Plenty of side quests to do, some even harder than those encountered in the main storyline, and there’s always places to go and difficult enemies to fight even when you have your perfect gear and obscene stats. I hope very much that this game is like that.


5) Shadowheart kind of stinks

While she is somewhat necessary, because she is the only cleric unless you make your own cleric, she is not very good for anything other than a few heals. Sacred flame always seems weak, and it often seems to just miss entirely. Guiding bolt (I hope I’m not mistaking the name off the top of my head) is a much better spell, but once you use your few spell slots, that’s done. Shadowheart with no spell slots is practically useless it seems. She needs a better attack cantrip, maybe a weak healing cantrip, or sacred flame should be strengthened or something.


6) Show movement location on minimap

When we’re clicking to move somewhere, it would be useful to see where that is on the minimap. This would be a quality of life improvement when exploring new areas, making sure you don’t pass up the turn you’re looking for, etc.

It may also be of use to allow users to click the minimap directly to cause character movement.


7) Cursor size and speed setting needed

It may be in the settings under a different name, but I didn’t see it. When I play the game in native resolution on the Mac, the cursor is small and needs higher sensitivity but I don’t know how to fix it.


8) More utility with food and alcohol

I saw in Patch 5 that, after drinking wine, you get a status of “alcohol” that lowers your dexterity or something for a few seconds, but all that I noticed out of combat were some bubbles above my characters head. Not sure how it affects dialogue and combat, but unless you’re playing in turn-based mode you probably won’t find out. It just seems that the richness of interaction is lacking with food and wine. Maybe you could eat the food for small increases to health, and drink the wine but drinking shouldn’t be purely negative. Maybe you can even cook meals that have different effects.


9) Better explanation of barter system

I’ve played through the game about 3 times now, once with Patch 5 and two with Patch 6, but I can honestly say that I still don’t see the point of the barter system. Is it essentially just trading except you can see all of the stuff you want to buy and sell before finalizing? For example, maybe you want to buy a sword and sell some cheese, so you’ll put forward the cheese and enough gold to cover the rest of the cost of the sword and they’ll just put forward the sword, then you press the button to make that exchange. If that’s all it is, then what’s the point? Its the same as just buying the sword then selling the cheese in trade. I figured bartering meant you can haggle, but I haven’t noticed that to be the case. So maybe I just need a better tutorial for bartering, or it should be changed or removed.


10) Contrast adaptive sharpening or bust

Whenever I turn on AMD FSR, even in the highest quality mode, the picture just seems to be downgraded so heavily. It seems that this is because contrast adaptive sharpening (CAS) gets turned off when FSR is on. In fact, even if I keep maxed out settings and FSR off, just turning off CAS alone is enoughly to severely reduce the quality of the image. That makes it so anything FSR could offer is just useless to me since have to have good visuals personally. This is true for both Mac and Windows btw.


11) Camera could be better

I asked my girlfriend give the game a shot and she played from the beginning until reaching the beach. She seemed to like it well enough, but thought the controls (particularly the camera) were difficult. I actually agree. The camera is often decoupled from the character, so using WASD to move the camera, other controls to rotate the camera, and the mouse to direct the character simultaneously seemed to be a bit of a hassle. This of course could be mitigated by allowing the direct character control move I suggested in (1), or it might at least help to have a way to lock the camera to a character then unlock when needed. Moving the camera back to the character and setting it as a vehicle should be smoother than the current “center camera” feature though.

Additionally, the camera might bounce up and down when in a cave, has trouble following up stairs, and often obstructs visibility by going inside of things when you don’t want it to. I do understand that the last one is difficult to handle however.


12) Increased character customization options

I’m sure this is coming, but I wanted to say it just in case. In character creation, body tattoos and maybe a few sliders to have more than a handful of face options would be nice. As an aside, some of the hair options have really really wide parts that are just bald and I wasn’t sure if that is was purpose. Also the ability to maybe dye clothes or have just a few customization options would be good.


13) Runes?

It could be interesting to have some weapons that can be augmented with runes later in the game, e.g. fire rune, hex rune, push rune, etc. I don’t know if this would be true to D&D, but just a thought.


14) I’m sure everyone has said this, but higher level

Level four comes quickly, and I don’t know much about D&D but I’ve heard that essentially you are a god by level 20, so maybe it can just go to 10? Either way I want more progress with my characters, once you hit level 4 it just feels like the game’s progress goes from fast to slow. The overall leveling can be slowed down if needed, but more levels should be added.

15) Hotbar is a mess

I really don’t like how spells, potions, scrolls, bombs, etc. all get jumbled together and im constantly having to reorganize. Yes I can turn off “auto-add to hotbar” for everything in the setting, but this isn’t a great solution either because then I have to manually add things all of the time. I don’t know what the solution is but maybe it could look like: instead of “1, 2, 3, …” you could have “spells, potions, scrolls, ….” as the pages of the hotbar.


16) Fully custom parties would be great

Just being able to edit the details of the standard party members would suffice so that we can still use the same character quest lines , e.g. Shadowheart can be a male dwarf.


17) Need a hub of activities / camp needs more

Whether there is a large city or more things to do are added to camp, we need a place to trade with a variety of people, hangout for a while, and do fun little side activities. Some distractions, maybe we could do typical town stuff like cut your hair or upgrade the appearance of where you sleep. After all, with thousands of gold, they probably shouldn’t be sleeping on a bedroll on the dirt. The camp is a currently just a hub for conversation with your party, and yes there is Withers, a dog to play fetch with, etc. but it still feels like there’s not very much to do in the camp. I’d like the camp to either be upgradable and have more to do, or for there to be a city area with plenty to do that we find ourselves going to for a variety of things and just to hangout around for a while enjoying the world. A great example would be Oxenfurt in Witcher 3. I hope that the city of Baldur’s Gate will be something like that.


18) Using controllers

I personally would love to be able to just plug in an xbox controller to my computer and use the left analog stick to move the character and the right analog stick to rotate the camera. Typical 3rd person RPG stuff. The current camera/point-and-click system is not the best for me. I have heard that controller support is supposed to be coming, but still wanted to include it.


19) Need inventory sort button

Sure, there's a workaround for this. Press n then sort by weight then by type (or whatever else you actually want) for each character, but why is there no quick inventory sort button?


Bugs and Technical Issues


1) Cross-saves causing crashes

After creating a new game on the apple silicon MacBook Pro, I tried to load my save file on my Windows 10 desktop, but it caused the application to crash without fail. It always got about 60% of the way done after choosing a file to load, then the loading screen then hung for a bit before crashing. This happened with both Vulcan and DX11. However, when I tried creating a new game on my Windows desktop and then loading on my MacBook, that works fine.


2) Various UI scaling issues.

When I increase the resolution to native 16:10 on the new MacBook Pro (2160x3456) the cursor in game is very small and moves very slowly. It seems that there is no setting to increase the size and speed of the cursor either, which is pretty inconvenient. But beyond that, if I press the mission control button to go to my desktop, all of the UI outside of the game (Dock and menu bar, even window sizes) become much smaller as well. This persists across my computer until I close the game application.

I also found recently that when I exit the game, if I had changed the aspect ratio in the game settings, the bezels around the MacBook’s display remain artificially larger. I don't know how to then get the MacBook display to appear normal again without restarting my laptop.


3) FPS Overlay issues

The Steam Overlay didn’t work at all for me in Patch 5 while playing the native ARM application. In Patch 6, the Steam Overlay works now, but it is a purple staticy mess that looks almost as if the screen were busted. It looks like the colors are inverted and its nearly impossible to read. Perhaps adding a built-in FPS Counter to the game would overcome this if the Steam Overlay cannot be fixed for Apple silicon Macs.


4) Issues with crime detection.

I was asked over and over if I committed a crime. Rolling successfully to get out of it works for about 2 seconds until I have to do it all over again. One time everyone in my party had to roll one after another. It’s like there is no clear way to get them to leave you alone if you steal. It should be a one-and-done roll of the dice in my opinion.


5) Climbing difficulties

I experienced this in Patch 5 and I cannot recall for sure if I’ve experienced this with Patch 6 as well, but climbing ladders often went poorly. When climbing ladders, the characters climb to the top then fall/climb downwards through the ground once at the top. Even if I try many times, they will continue to fail at making it to the top and staying there.


6) Crazy tails / bodies

In Patch 6, tails (and sometimes entire bodies) will go crazy and shake violently for a period of a few seconds. It eventually stops, but even in dialogue scenes this can happen. It hasn’t created any problems with me being able to play the game properly, but should be fixed before the final release.


7) Not dead enough goblins

In Patch 6, I found an eviscerated goblin or something like that in the Owlbear cave, and he was just standing around. I could search him, and it was as if he was a dead body, but he looked very much alive.


8) Unusable camp supplies

I sent my camp supplies to my camp, all of them. I had a stack of about 11, but it was apparently too heavy to do anything with. I couldn’t split the stack from the camp chest. I could drop it outside of the chest and then I could lose enough inventory weight to throw it, but then it just disappeared after I threw it. So I lost of my supplies. It was a great inconvenience that I couldn’t figure out how to just get my supplies to take a full long rest.


Final Thoughts


I love the game so far. Specifically,

- The graphics are great
- I personally like the party size of 4 (allows me to eventually get to the next round while having a diverse team, any more is probably too much for me)
- Love all of the interaction with the world and how much changes based on your race, class, choices, approval, etc. Very well done.
- I simply enjoy exploring and talking to people, animals, etc.
- I never liked turn-based combat games, but it makes sense here, seems necessary even, and I enjoy the combat a lot.

I think that the level of care and detail being put into the game could make it really great, if it keeps moving it the direction it has been without calling it good enough too early. The current camera and movement system aren’t for me so I hope that changes but pretty much everything else just needs to be cleaned up and potentially expanded upon and it’ll be perfect.