Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Starting area changes?

I am wondering if what I see was intentional in the starting area. I am on an m1 mac in case that makes a difference. I upgraded from patch 6, no betas, on steam.

1) shadow heart and la’zel can not pick up anything, though I can give them things.
2) character sheet for shadow heart and la’zel show portrait only, no inventory options or equipment options.
3) shadow heart and la’zel can not drop things (no inventory).
4) they can not equip things (like a bow or crossbow), again no inventory.
5) the dead in the final fight can not be looted.

I have completed patch 6 3 times, so not new to this.

Michael

Yeah, I am not sure if this was intentional on Larian's part or not, but I have the same issue before getting off the ship. The only thing I can think of is either this is a bug (though pretty big bug to have after 7 patches) or they intentionally did this as they are not officially part of your party yet and they put it in to prevent you loosing any gear should you NOT recruit them after you get off the ship... but since Larian people never reply to ANY threads we will likely not know till the next patch. :P

I got lucky the very next run. The mind layer keep stunning Z and we were able to kill him and get the sword and escape.

Yes, this is an intentional change. I submitted a bug report to Larian and they got back to me right away that this is an intentional change because Lae’zel and Shadowheart are not full party members yet during the tutorial. They become full party members after the beach.

That's honestly to bad... as I use them as a MULE to hold heavy gear, and retrieve it off there corpse later (after the ship crashes).

Then they need to come equipped with ranged weapons. This is ridiculous otherwise.

The irony here is that they've made a whole string of changes one after the next, attempting to stop players from taking Lae'zel's armour from her in the intro, and in reality, this change is just the next of those... and yet, they still haven't managed to actually do it, because you can still take her armour, very easily, using the game mechanics and interface they've provided to create unintended effects.

And it's hilarious because you have to ask why they even care so much about players taking Lae'zel's armour, when the entire rest of their design philosophy is built around cheese, cheating, exploiting, and gaming the system in extremely gamey ways...

It does not inspire a lot of confidence in their ability to design a game interface and the mechanical game system underneath it, when they've made it clear they don't want us doing something, and have now tried four times (maybe more), with various changes and patches, to prevent it from being done... and still can't seem to do it; forget about them not knowing 5e... this is a matter of them not even really knowing their own internal systems well enough to close loopholes and exploits that they are actively trying to close.

And good ones, preferably. Longbow is not an obscene luxury for a Fighter. And for Shadowheart it should be light crossbow.

Bloody hell, I was hoping they just overdid their announced fix to remove Us's inventory, and LZ and SH were just collateral. In that case, they are certainly entitled to beta-test their "absolutely lovely game" themselves.

Ranged weapons dont bother me even half as much as inability to choose Shadowheart spells ...
Imean Protection from Good and Evil is cruicial part of my strategy! :-/

Agreed, that is probably the best time in the whole game to use that spell.

You can still can use them as mules. You can still drag items to their portrait and it will go into their inventory, and at pretty much any range. You just have to add them back to your party latter to get the stuff back if you want to sell or send it to camp.

It would be hilarianous indeed, but unfortunately there are other ways to explain the things that we see.

1. Swen's personal idiosyncrasy. If he, for any reason, doesn't want us to take Lae'zel's armour, he will stop at nothing short of cancelling the product, but he will get what he wants. As recent events clearly show, hell-bent dictators are impossible to predict.
2. It may be another step in Larian's le grand objectif to get rid of single-player's part of their audience. Indeed, if you start as a 4 player party, the issue becomes irrelevant - no one will even notice it.

I'd love to be joking.

AFAIK you can still take her armour, at least you could last time I tried. I just clicked on my own armor and hers came up as equipped but selectable. When I equipped it, we swapped. Doesn’t seem to work if she’s party member 5 though.

One of the hot fixes must of done this, I made a four pc party and picked up Lae'zel on the ship. I had 5 inventories at that time and was using her as a mule like normal. The bar on the bottom when you hit tab is gone and ya she has a huge character portrait instead half portrait half inventory. Really strange, wonder if they are countering the pack mule system for intro.

I feel like I need to at least express how riddiculous what you have written is - from comparing devs creative decision to real life dictatarship to assuming that it is Sven, a CEO of a company employing hundereds of workers across 7(?) studios spread accross the world who is behind every decision and change made to the game. Considering how massive Larian became I would be surprised if Sven would actively design the game and not run the studio.

That ... and Ethel.

Oh yes, I know that. I'd love to be mistaken, but it's not the only sign:

1. The way Swen treats his employees during PFHs? He goes about with an attitude of a slaveowner overseeing the work on his plantation. I had managers like this in the past, and it was never good.
2. Larian's remarkable stubbornness regarding their toilet chain system? It doesn't exist for them, because they always use 4-player party when they do demos.

You can say "let's wait and see", but I have very little hope for any of this to change.

Me neither. I suppose there is stuff Larian likes about the way they do certain things, and so far met with critical and financial success. Unless, they either change their creative vision and start bomb critically/sales wise they are likely to continue doing thing their way.

I hadn’t even noticed that Lae’zel’s armor is supposed to be difficult to steal during the prologue. Niara’s right, such a limitation is pretty funny for a game built around exploits.

Fun fact: items with a “once per short/long rest” activation are reset when equipped to another PC. The whole party can use a single amulet of Misty Step (and magic pockets) to get across a chasm.

Hard to believe Larian are scrutinizing the cheese potential of Lae’zel’s armor of all things.

Quick question....

If you can't access the other character panels in the prologue now, but you can and do have full control over them in combat (and it makes very little sense to have those two things side by side)...

So...


What happens, for example, if you drag a spell of Shadow's bar by accident?

How do you put it back?

Plain and simply: you can't.

You are able to do something to your UI that you then cannot undo.

This is an abject failure of design at the most fundamental level - and once again, it's assign of them doing something with zero foresight and no care for extended consequences.

I've got a file right now with Lae'zel and Shadowheart in the nautilod with completely empty skill bars, and the result is that they are seemingly incapable of taking any actions other than basic melee attacks (ranged in Lae'zel's case; shadow doesn't have a ranged weapon).

I cannot fix this. I cannot change this. Interacting with the UI has, to all appearances, broken these characters of their ability to use their skills and spell, in a way that is irreversible and cannot now be fixed.


Now... there IS one way to access their abilities still, but the game does not tell you about this or indicate that it is possible in any way - indeed, it's pretty counter-intuitive and anew player is not going to discover it except by random frustrated clicking; you have buttons down the bottom that sort your hot bar tabs, and these are clearly marked. Your resource bar up the top shows your action, bonus action, and class resources available - these do not look like buttons, are in a different place and have a different visual appearance to the other buttons, and give no indication that they are also clickable things - they look more simply like a resource tracker. These will bring up an unmodifiable bar of the things associated with that resource - it will lay this out as it chooses and you can't change it, and you can access your abilities through this pop-up sub menu... if you know it's there... but it is now the only way of doing so.

Furthermore, if you have anything that is a free action - such as the prepare weapon skill - you CANNOT access this ability now AT ALL, because it is not tied to any of your resource buttons... and you cannot undo this once it is done.

Please just take a minute to let the sheer high school level of bad design percolate for a minute.