Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Option this, option that

Ooh. I know what you mean, but that's a surprisingly tricky sentence.

On the one hand, every option will have some development cost, even if it is minimal, therefore I could say no options should be supported.

On the other hand, no alternative use of the development time could result in universal enjoyment, because human opinions differ so much, therefore I could say all options should be supported.

I think Van'tal was just being amusing.

As the entire game is designed around vertical terrain, and shoving actors off that terrain featured heavily early on, it's a pretty safe bet the feature will remain. But they may be persuaded that the shove distance is excessive.

Sure, but it is the subjectivity that causes so many problems with videogames. I already know I will enjoy BG3 whether or not it meets all my preferences. But reading some of the vitriol spewed at BG3, I'm not sure everyone could enjoy it without customization. And that's leaving aside the subjective nature of words like "challenge" and "balance" which also tend to inflame passions!

I should clarify:
Not all options are created equal. Some options probably take more time and resources than others. Some options are must-haves by large groups of people, while others are must-haves for smaller groups of people. Some options are must-haves for people, while others are, "Wouldn't it be nice if..." kind of options. I think the "Wouldn't it be nice if..." options from smaller groups that would take a lot of time and resources would be rightfully ignored, while the must-have options demanded by large swathes of the community that would be easier (relative to other options) to implement ought to be implemented. Its a bit of supply and demand. That's why I am against the mentality of "If you don't like it, just turn it off," for major changes to the game, but I support people requesting options so they could tweak the game this way or that to fit their preferences. Human opinions do differ, but the idiosyncratic demand that requires a lot of resources ought to be reconsidered. I get flashbacks to that "We Demand More Sexy/Revealing Armors" thread. Or folks demanding Larian somehow incorporate RTWP when they made their recent claim to fame on turn-based combat since 2014, and they are creating a gameified version of turn-based tabletop. In such a case, no, RTWP is a bad use of resources. On the other hand, tweaking the occasional rule shouldn't be a big deal and is a feature found in other CRPGs.

It's true. I enjoyed Fallout 4 for what it is, for a long time. Then I started doing some mods, and it's extended that even longer. I last played yesterday, as an example of just how long... I remember way back when, when someone told me that Oblivion was the best thing since sliced bread, if you had this rather extensive list of mods. For me, I was barely able to get out of the prologue. Sadly, the same was true with all three games in the Witcher series. I own all three, multiple times in some cases, because CDPR was the guide for how to treat your customers back then, but I've never been able to finish any of them. Ironically, CP 2077 was the first CDPR game that I actually finished...

I can't make any judgements on what this game actually is, only on what it is so far, and so far, it's been enjoyable. Some of the optional suggestions I've seen made have been over the top, and some have been "well, I might actually use that one". The "loaded dice" were over the top, in so far as I'm concerned, and a suggestion for a fade to black on sex scenes was in the "I might use it" category. I'm not going to spend a lot of time advocating for, or against them in particular, but to say "there should be no options" is taking it a bit too far too, which has been stated in this thread.

Options are good, generally the more the better.

I don't think there are any demands coming from large swaths of the community.

There are a handful of very loud people who are extremely sure of themselves, certainly, but that doesn't mean they represent a large group. It just means some people *really* like to repeat themselves, ad nauseam.

are we talking in 3rd person now?

I'll put my post count next to some other folks any day, lol.

On the bright side, people are vocal on what they want because they care (except some of those weird threads from the early days of EA). I'd rather people care about the game in good faith than demand stuff carelessly as part of some wish-fulfillment bender.

Trying a bit too hard, mate.

Its nice of you to take this under concideration ... but two notes:

1) This is, allways was, and allways will be Larian decision.
No matter how much time and resources things take and no matter how much they would be wasted in our opinion ... once Larian decide to do something, they will ... once Larian decide to not do something they dont.
And there is nothing we can do about it ... so i would say there is no reason to worry about this either.

BTW this was exactly topic of the last interview with Swen ... he decided to give Mysterious Box to Shadow ... and that decision led to huuuuge amount of permutations they had to implement.
One would say that this all was wasted, especialy since Swen himself admited that he isnt exactly happy with the outcome.
It took less than 15 minutes for people on this forum to come up with better solution ... but no matter since Swen decided.

2) In many cases its not option that would cost additional "time and resources" its the change.

All time and resources Larian invested into implementing every single thing would be wasted ... if they would just replace it with new thing ...
Unless they would keep the curent state as an option.

You know what i mean right? Implementing things as they are now had some cost ... and if they will just throw it away for some "better" way ... its wasted.

I could repeat that casting system example ...
That could save them some time and resources if they would have listened to my suggestion and expand the old system instead of replacing it ... they didnt ... so now they have to reinvent that system again to achieve funcionality we allready had in the past.
Just bcs somebody decided to make change and throw away old mechanics instead keep them as an option.

Judging by what Swen said about the new UI, the codebase branched more than a year ago, so "keeping" the old mechanism was probably not an option as it was developed on a different code branch.

Assuming the UI data structures in the two branches are not too dissimilar, it might be fairly simple to merge functions from the old UI branch to the new one, but that is just speculation.