Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Origin balance?

Do you think the origin characters are intended to be balanced with one another when we actually get the chance to play them?

For instance, right now:

1. Laezel is standard. Unless you count her starting armor as a perk.
2. Shadowheart is standard. I guess you could argue that starting with a special item is a perk.
3. Wyll starts with a perk: an extra weapon proficiency in the rapier.
4. Astarion has a perk in his bite attack and a flaw in his vulnerability to running water.
5. Gale has a flaw in that he has to consume powerful magic items.

To me, it seems like Gale has a pretty big flaw. Maybe that will be balanced somehow when the origin characters become available for play?

Astarion's bite attack is a nice feature, and the water problem isn't that bad so far.

Wyll's extra weapon proficiency isn't great in my opinion, mostly because his stat build is such a mess.

Shadowheart has some kind of odd magical effect happening to her in the Blighted Village. Maybe there'll be more to it when we actually have a chance to play her?

I find myself wondering if all of these characters are clones of their original selves, thus explaining why they're lower level than they remember being.

Anyway. Do you think these characters are meant to be balanced with one another? And do you think we'll be in for surprises when they unlock for play?

For instance, I wonder what kind of mechanic they'll put in for Gale to let us know he needs to consume an object? And when he does drain an item, will he get something positive in return for a while?

I am under impression that Larian is not terribly concerned about balance.

That said I don't see much that would make companions more desirable then others, other theen personal experiences.

I found Astarions bite and water to be little more that flavours.

We don't really know if Gale will need to consume items continually - as far as I can tell it seems to be more of his story progression. Even so, in EA with limited content and items I never had an issue feeding him. We only have part of 4, and I find myself with spare magical items I have no use for. I imagine it will be even more so in 1.0.

I am hoping that the player can select the stats if choosing to play an origin character. None of them are ideal for me, and having fixed stats adds yet another reason I have no interest in playing one.

As for balance:
Wyll's rapier is useless unless Hexblade gets added so he may as well not have it.

Astarion's bite attack is useless to me and the water thing is only a slight inconvenience. Not having Expertise hurts more.

Gale's need for magic items isn't really that bad since we find so many of them, and depending on choices he nay not even need them after a point.

I expect Shadowheart will have more plot related stuff simply because of her item being so important, hopefully this will not be the case and all of them will have equally interesting stories.

That's interesting. I'm surprised those things don't seem like a big deal.

To me, Astarion's bite is a big boon, giving a +1 all the way until the next rest. I get that the water issue doesn't seem like much right now in early access, but I imagine it could be a serious drawback if there's a portion of the game yet to come where the characters have to do something like swim through an underground stream.

And Gale's condition seems like a serious flaw from my perspective. Sure, there are plenty of items now in early access, but only some of them qualify for Gale, and they tend to be the better items. I rarely want to give up the Tyr sword, for instance, and I get the impression there's a plot point with Astarion and the Necromancy of Thay book so I'm reluctant to hand that one over. No way I'm giving Gale Nere's boots.

I agree that Wyll's rapier proficiency doesn't feel much, although I'd love it if I could choose a random weapon proficiency for other characters to enjoy. My guess, though, is that the proficiency is nothing more than a stand-in at the moment because there's no pact of the blade available at the moment.

I'm interested to see how playing as Gale will work. I might be wrong, but I don't see Larian suddenly throwing up a "Game Over" sign one day if the player decides not to sacrifice anything and thus they blow themselves up. He doesn't like it, but you can still have Gale as a companion if you don't feed him items, and he doesn't blow up. He just conveniently works something out on the side.

Not really seeing the point to the whole deal if him actually blowing up isn't ever really likely.

I have never used his bite because I always keep him ranged. You do have a point about issues if there is any swimming necessary, but I would expect that there would be some alternative way to get to an area. Locking players out of bringing a party member somewhere or themselves if playing as origin would be bad.

With Gale, I am pretty sure I was able to offer him something other than what he asked for, maybe this has changed since I last played. If it gets too much for a player then there are some options and if they prefer not to they would at least be able to choose their own item rather than being asked for a particular one.

I don't think there any balance or difficulty level intended for Origins as it's a seconday story/gameplay part added the main plot that you have to manage, although I wonder just how much compared to a regular Tav.

For example, this would be one of the points of playing as Gale - to see things from his perspective and what (and how) you can do about it.

They can easily give Gale same effect as Exhaustion have ...
That would force player to feed him

I blame EA for that honestly ...
Do you remember that backlash they get when people find out that Mindflayer on beach WILL actualy eat them if they are not carefull?

I bet they had more such traps in mind ...
But im not quite sure if they didnt change theyr mind seeing so negative response. :-/

I have to agree with Ragnar on that last point ^^
i remember the forum shitstorm about that mindflayer and holy shit was I disapointed. That's exactly what I expected from Larian, that's one of the few things I though were perfect and yet clearly I was one of the few to think that on this forum.

Is that what happened? I must not have been on the forums at the time, but it was so much better the other way.

I've noticed how much harder it is to trigger bad things now. It's almost impossible to not save Arabella, for example. I preferred it when things were more difficult and important situations like that had questionable outcomes.

Same thing with Nettie. She used to be more inclined to poison Tav. Now she's all soft-hearted and easily swayed.

I find myself hoping there's a difficulty setting that puts it back the way it was.

I have same feeling ...
Thats why i fear those golden opourtunity like Githyanki simply order that Dragon to burn us to ash will lay wasted forewer.

it seems to be an unfortunate trend in both games and real life that people can't handle things not going their way, and instead of working around their issues or coming to a compromise with others they complain until they get what they want.

I really liked that mindflayer encounter and the old Nettie. The new encounter with her isn't nearly as interesting. Perhaps with the Arabella situation, turning off the hand holding dice mode (forgot what it is called) will make it easier to fail? Don't have room to reinstall the game and find out.

Perhaps there could be a "fluff" setting for those who don't like anything negative or hate failing and a "grit" setting for those of us who don't mind it. Then they could bring the interesting stuff back without causing issues.

Agreed that bad things can and should happen if you proceed stupidly, ignoring warnings of danger. If you're foolish enough to get really close to and peer into the mind of a MIND FLAYER, then you deserve to get your mind eaten. And it's not like it's an instant game-over screen either; you could still use your other characters to try to kill the MF.

It's a video game. If something really bad happens that you don't like, then you can just reload and *not* do that thing.

Making the entire game twice basically really isn't a solution I think. It's more about being consistent and not afraid to pursue your vision even if some don't understand it at first. I just hope larian made this choice to change those things not as a result of pressure but rather as a consequence of calculated experiment(That experiment being the EA).

It isn't a solution, it was more me hoping that they had already spent time and money on scenes like that and giving them a way to keep them in game for people who want them.

Sadly I believe they caved to pressure because the same sort of thing happens in other games where people cry and complain because they can't handle anything they perceive as negative. Eventually the developers give those types their way because they are the loudest and tend to be the ones threatening to not buy the game and tell their friends to do the same. Then you get streamers adding to the cryfest to get more views and the developers panic, not realizing that streamer groupies don't care about the game, they only flock to what their overlords tell them to play.

From what I remember, it was quite a big criticism (at least so much that Larian decided to change it).
Same with Nettie, Arabela and to a lesser extent Shadowheart.
It was probably more, but I bet they gave it up under pressure.

they should just revert it back to how it was and promote save scumming on their load screens "remember to press f5 for when you fuck up, and trust us kids, you will fuck up'. Done.

I think just after the game comes out I'll be rolling the stats until I can get high charisma without compromising my character at the same time.

The problem is that most criticism around Arabela is lack of satisfying options after you fail persuating Kagha ... if Larian indeed just lowered dificiulty roll for persuating Kagha so not so many people have to see poor Arabela die, the problem remain intact ... its just not as obvious, since not so many people see it.

I hope this isnt Larian way to fix things. :-/

The problem is the medium; for the mindflayer example, a player could point out to the DM "Are the others really going to just stand there, when they're not dominated? They're not dominated because no-one did a save except me". If the devs don't think of everything, and they can't because they're human and a game simply cannot account for every option. The other thing is the metrics; they put out heat maps on where people died, how often they died, how often they got attacked, how often Scratch got petted, ect.
Odds are they see players repeatedly loading to pass a check. If enough people do it enough times, someone is going to suggest they just save people time, skip at some least some reloads, and make things easier.