Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Larian's Biggest Oversight, now with review of ea

TL;DR: GTFO

Okay, I am here for one thing and one thing only: excoriation. Up front, I really don't care about other clarifications or justifications in followups, I've read through the first couple pages up to the point this thread becomes a BioWare tangent. My problem here is with the original post, and what a giant piece of festering trash it is. I'm getting pretty sick of drivel like this in the gaming community, and if I can help assure that even one person thinks twice before making an asinine post like this in the future, I'll have achieved something.

The only incompetence and lack of care here belongs to the OP. And OP, if you come back to this thread and that makes you feel bad, cool, that's intended. Maybe apply an empathetic lens to a reconsideration of your original post if this strikes a chord with you. That said, I don't know why you feel justified in flat out insulting people's work when you can't be bothered to proof read your own post, but I for one am sick of seeing people make posts like this, and watching as they inevitably take this attitude to AMAs to harass devs with. Everyone wants to be Red Shirt Guy, and it's insufferable every time. He was a dick, you're a dick.

Part One: The Constitution of Criticism

You did part structure here, so I'll play along. I am by no means here suggesting that criticism is not warranted, or that you cannot make it. I am simply asking that you inform yourself first, back up your points with meaningful examples, and state them plainly. It is extremely fair to criticize Larian for something like Sebille and The Red Prince conflicting in Divinity OS2, and especially for not finding a way to resolve it - but foundationally unfair to criticize them for not solving it the way you would. Constructively building on the criticism would be preferred; for example, suggesting that the characters should present the player with a choice between them and a forced confrontation, or that if The Red Prince is in your party then his quest should block Sebille's conflicting quest element from being started. However, criticism ends when you start asserting shit you can't possibly know as fact and then continuing to construct horse shit theory based on vapid assumptions.

Now, as an example of you not being informed, take your apparent lack of ability to divine how the interaction system in this game works - which, honestly, I have no idea how you managed. Larian uses an arguably antiquated dialogue/interaction system wherein, despite offering players a character creator, tying success to the focal character, and suggesting via that focus that the game revolves entirely around that character, does not actually center its interactions on that character. We can see this in how skill checks are resolved. In most modern CRPGs or RPGs the player is given the option to choose to use companion characters' stats in rolls or simply does so automatically. At the very least, with a game like Dragon Age Inquisition, the entire party is accounted for in conversations. Larian does not do this. It cares only about the interacting character, and normally at most one other party member that is relevant to the quest. I would say that this was to allow the studio's structure to work on characters in vacuums, but IMO it doesn't really matter either way.

Like or dislike, there is a reason for this in Larian's design that is core to the structure of the game, and if you knew enough about making games to level the accusations you level you wouldn't level them in the first place because you'd recognize the trade off being made and why. Original Sin 2 and Baldur's Gate 3 (as it follows the same formula) present players with an option that simply does not exist in many other games. It is possible to have a companion die and stay dead, unscripted, from combat. This means that assuming companions are available from party comp alone is not a viable check for the flag system you complain about but don't understand. More importantly, it means that more checks are required to integrate dialogue as tightly as a game like Dragon Age, and more checks means more chances for those checks to break in a game as complicated as OS2.

Even games like Pillars, where death is fundamentally harsher, still shield the party from it by default and also do not lock the player into a party comp - as they are traditional CRPGs. Larian seeks to straddle the line between a harsher isometric experience like Pillars or the Pathfinder games, and BioWare's rather casual party story romps where no one can die in combat and it only really cares about who you brought on your little narrative roller coaster. Larian also seeks to provide a more organic approach to traversal. Avoiding locking you into small areas (PoE, Pathfinder, Tyranny) or linear paths (ME, DA). Games with similar freedom of exploration like The Witcher also include either a universal main character and/or the exclusion of things like the gloves of teleportation that allow massive sequence breaks.

I honestly can't believe that people are complaining that sequence breaking the game is accounted for. You don't have to skip Fort Joy if you don't want to, sorry skipping a bunch of the story breaks a bunch of the story later. I'm not sure what you all expect to happen when you choose skip the entire prologue.

Part Two: Rose Tint

It's obvious from the thread that OP likes BioWare games. Great! So do I, I've played every single one of them multiple times. I will not, however, abide revisionist nonsense. The suggestion that BioWare would have accounted for everything and, at least in their prime, never made a mistake like Sebille and The Red Prince is ridiculous. [Spoilers] Origins released with a bug that made it impossible to complete the game if you you married Anora and killed Loghain, and more commonly had Allistair constantly refer to himself as king after the Landsmeet even if he wasn't.

Basically every BioWare game has had the occasional issue with gender flags not being read properly in conversations. Awakenings is notoriously packed full of quest bugs. Sequence breaking the original Mass Effect regularly resulted in side quests behaving weirdly. IIRC, Iron Bull's companion quest line could break quite easily. (Hell, a bunch of DAI was way more broken than BG3 or OS2 and it never had early access.) It's possible to lose multiple companions in ME2 from check thresholds that the player cannot know before experiencing them. Jack is written and styled as a Bi character, and that option is never given. Stop saying just demonstrably false shit, seriously. If you have nothing worth saying, then at least spare everyone fabricating a reason to whine on a forum.

Just like these quest bugs and oversights, however, the issue you have with BG3 is a problem that's scale does not warrant insulting the developers. It's possible to lock yourself out of content in almost every game that you mention as handling their systems better, and every single one of them has a wonky or overly restrictive quest line if not many multiples. There are quests that conflict in all of them, and all of them include the ability for narrative elements to simply break. Bugs exist in games, this fact is unavoidable, and your ability to find bugs in an Early Access game is not a sign of incompetence. It is simply impossible to avoid, so faulting people for the game not being perfect is, frankly, insane. Speaking of which.

Part Three: Games Are Made By People

I have no idea why I have to keep pointing this out, but yeah, games are made by people. Larian is a group of people not a faceless machine spitting out code. People are fallible. People make mistakes. If you can only muster single digit examples of this supposedly foundational problem in two massive games that's more of a point against you than it is for you. If Larian actually didn't care, which is such a straight up rude thing to suggest that it borders on obscenity, you wouldn't have problems finding examples - and these games wouldn't be successful.

Part Four: Games Are Made By People, And Time Is A Finite Commodity

No, seriously, games are made by human beings and you should start treating the people that make them like human beings instead of content factories. It's not absurd that Larian didn't go back and add dialogue to fix a bug, it doesn't show a lack of care or competence. Would it have been nice? Hell yeah, but all it shows is that you know nothing about how gamedev works.

Larian is an independent developer that self-publishes. Their funds are far more limited, even with Wizards onboard for BG3, than a lot of the studios you're comping them to. They're also, as a good reference point, about the size of one AAA studio, like, let's say BioWare Edmonton (320 people), split across 7 studios and outsource partners. CDPR gets grants from the Polish government and runs a successful storefront, BioWare is owned by one of the biggest entertainment entities in the world, Obsidian was an already well-regarded studio that could have easily gotten funding traditionally but asked fans to pay for PoE - including asking thousands of dollars to essentially do work on the game by designing stuff.

At some point a game has to be called finished, regardless of how much people care or how competent the artists, writers, programmers, actors, and musicians working on it are. Regardless of how much they want to keep working on it. The classic 80/20 rule comes to mind here, but the reality is that things are often more granular. Eighty percent of the work might be getting the game content complete, but the next fifteen percent might only solve half of the problems after all the content is in the game, and the next five might make as many problems as it fixes.

At some point people need a break, at some point you want creative people to try something new, and at some point it becomes detrimental to continue polishing the game. More money and more people does not solve this problem as someone naively suggested it should. Big complicated projects are regularly poorly served by simply throwing manpower around, and it can lead to a scenario where things like worker health is traded away. You can, ironically considering your praise, look to BioWare and CDPR for examples of this lately.

Epilogue: This Thread Sucks

I can't say I'm surprised to show up to a studio's forum and find an overly self-entitled person being a jerk to the devs, it's pretty par for the course, but I wish y'all would just go the hell away.