Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General BG3 progress

I think that in hindsight, Larian would not have released EA until 2021. But that doesn't mean development is going poorly, it could just as well mean they did a crappy job of assessing how long the game would take to develop.

For a AAA game a few years in EA seems reasonable to me. It gives them time to implement feedback and make a great game.😊

Patience is a virtue. Good things come to those who wait.

If only we felt they were actually taking full advantage of the feedback by telling us that they have listened and are changing XYZ (admittedly the dice change seemed half-hearted...either just let my dice always success or expect I'm save-scumming to pass, they at least gave us more chances)

This is definitely true, just trying to come up with ideas to encourage people to actually have to fight the goblins. Otherwise the dialogues about us helping don't make any sense.

I think if we are thinking about things in normal situations that it would 'almost' always be a bad thing for Early Access to drag on for years. I think the issues with it are both in that it seems to usually point to development issues and could also lead to your most hardcore player base burning itself out on the game before release.

But in this case I imagine a lot of what is taking so long is:

1. Baldur's Gate 3 is a massive undertaking. It would not shock me if the game offers hundreds of hours of gameplay while also containing branching story paths, player choice, tons of classes, spells, races, etc. while also including quality graphics and a lot of little things like every conversation zooming into to be somewhat cinematic in nature.
2. But even more so I imagine that Larian underestimated how much the pandemic, lockdowns, the panic over COVID, etc. would impact their development as it seems to have impacted all development teams. I think if they were able to wrap their heads around this ahead of time we would have likely got Early Access sometime from mid-2021 to early 2022... because I think the game will probably end up coming out late 2022 to mid-2023.

I never finished DoS2, was it a massive branching epic story? Or was the gameplay/companions/coop more the focus?

It's massive: took me 256 hours on my only run to finish (I'm non-tedious completionist). It's branching: you definitely allowed to solve quests differently, there are several endings. Gameplay has also a huge focus (the combat actually has a real AI, it's not stupid), companions were fun too but you have to permanently choose them after chapter 1. I haven't played coop, so I don't know how fun it is. DOS2 has all the aspects done pretty well, which is why it was so popular.

Regarding 1: Pathfinder WotR has hundreds of hours of gameplay, branching story paths and far more classes and spells than BG3 will on release if it actually implement all classes of the PHB, and yet was developed in 3 years with a fraction of the team size and budget.

Right, which is why I added the second point of point one "while also including quality graphics and a lot of little things like every conversation zooming into to be somewhat cinematic in nature.". Baldur's Gate 3 isn't Pathfinder WotR or Divinity 2. The graphics used for the game are far more advanced than those games, the voice acting is on a different scale, every conversation you have is 'cinematic' in nature in terms of the camera zooming in and things like that. So this game is like developing Pathfinder WotR, which took three years or so and released rather buggy... plus then on top of that adding every bell and whistle imaginable that I can think of for a CRPG. Every conversation voiced, every conversation zooming in, higher end graphics, higher end cinematic cutscenes and things of that nature.

Then on top of that when Larian has said that they will not have certain 'bells and whistles' like a day/night cycle, you see get pretty upset that it is not going to make it... even though that would likely extend development out even further.

This is not to say that I back all of those decisions. For instance I think it is pretty neat that every conversation zooms in and you can see the participants up close, but I don't think that is really necessary if it adds a ton of extra dev time or cost to the project.

Also, I am not a developer... but from what I have seen a lot of these extra bells and whistles that were not in a game like Pathfinder or Divinity 2 end up not only taking a lot of time, but a lot of money. I also believe that they take not only voice actors, but actual actors who get hooked up with censors and stuff... and that is rather difficult to do when everyone is locked down with COVID stuff.

I guess I am saying that I agree there could be development issues plaguing this game just due to the sheer scope, size and ambition of it. But I think there are a lot of factors with this game, along with a lot of other hyper-ambitious AAA games that are coming out these days, that point to it just needing more time than a lot of other games.

I don't think many AAA games actually go into the EA process, so BG3 is an interesting experiment in that way - production and marketing wise. While technically Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord has a bigger EA, it's pretty easy to tell that Bannerlord was never intended to be a AAA game (just look at the graphics and production), whereas BG3 clearly had the ambitions to be.

Larian seems to have embraced using the EA process a much for marketing as it is for production. It's definitely generated sustained attention throughout this period (and I think it's done a good job at showing the product and managing expectations), but we've also seen people (even in this thread), experiencing burnout from the lack of progress. We'll see how that all works out at the end of the day.

Production-wise EAs tends to work well for smaller projects because the feedback is much more manageable and focused (you really have 1 core audience), and is far quicker to apply (imagine deciding on a course of action with 3 people in a room vs. multiple departments across countries). I don't envy Larian's situation in terms of working through the EA process and mountain of feedback and thoughts - just take a look at this forum and the various highly passionate camps of people... you've got the 5E RAW Mafia, the DOS Legion, the "Original Games" Elitists and the "Everything is Okay" Gang all going at it, spawning 50+ page discussion threads that resemble the explosive final battles of anime space operas - often with good arguments from multiple sides too.

Lol. Now I want a poll or a silly test to see which group I and others belong to :P

5E RAW Mafia and Original games Elitists....JOIN FORCES!
Got to love classic gaming these days though. Perfect marriage of modern/classic; I can play BG2 classic version on win10, tons of mods, scaled at 4:3 on a 32 inch and runs perfectly and looks fantastic. Dont even need the botched <<enhanced>> edition.

We already knew that from Larian having to do mass hires everywhere and Swen saying their own developers weren't fully comfortable with programming the requisite changes on their engine in earlier PFH stream. Whenever the initial game launches, it will still be a buggy & broken mess.

To their credit, I have not encountered a single game breaking bug in Early Access as of Patch 6 and had only one crash to desktop for the whole playthrough. There were minor, mostly graphical bugs but nothing too bad or annoying.

P.S. It does not mean such bugs do not exist... it's just I have encountered none, which means they might not be too common.

Bugs were a problem with original elite games as well. What saved the franchise for me was the independent development of GateKeeper, the save-game editor, as well as access to the in-game cheat codes. Once I mastered those, I was able to get past all the big bugs and then everything was OK.

It was definitely lengthy. What you have seen playing, is more or less what the whole game is.

There aren't really big choices to make, outside picking your ending slide if that's what you mean. You can cut yourself from content, of course, through free systemic nature of D:oS2. The biggest branching content are companion quests.

Ive not even bothered to buy the game yet, because I dont believe 2022 is the year. Fingers crossed this isnt another Cyberpunk 2077.

I say this rarely but I was struggling with DOS2. It was so damn tedious, good music could help. Larian style is definitely "turtle" if that makes sense.

Maybe they should take ideas from AC Valhalla boat trips, you could ask for story or music?