Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback How limited is the engine? Is that why so much can't be done?

Larian seems to not care for defensive options. Has bless still have the shitty AOE?

Yes, Bless is still a circle AoE, and trying to control exactly which 3 party members get the buff if all of them are within the AoE is still as finicky as ever.

Normally you would be right, but this time they work under a license. This fact imposes certain obligations - they can only deviate so far from what it's supposed to be. Otherwise we might end up with another Demon Stone.

Limitations of the engine... a purely speculative topic, for the most part. Modders might have something to say about it, but the rest of us... We haven't seen the source code, so how could we know? And even if we did, it won't tell us much, because it's literally megabytes of text, split across hundreds, or maybe even thousands, of files. And it's C++, which is not the most pleasant thing to read.

Clearly, some signs point to Larian becoming a victim of its own past success. The seemingly simple things which are still absent from the game, like the aforementioned Dodge, the way they implemented multi-attacks for Gith patrol, the reactions we have - unless someone at Larian is hell-bent on never doing things right the first time around, no other explanations except for the engine appear to be plausible.

Figuratively speaking, how difficult it could be to take a railroad engine, and cut it down to a helicopter using only rasps? Well, that's what Larian has been busy with for the last several years, as far as I understand. (That, and cinematics of course).
The bad thing about the current situation is that, normally the company should have been able to expand and modify the engine to meet the core requirements, considering how much time they had for it. The fact that we still don't see any of it could be explained by only a few possible reasons, I think:

• 1. They have no capacity to do it, because (as I'm pretty sure) their engine is one huge chthonic bolt-on mess, architecturally. Why I'm so sure of it? Because products that are well designed are exceedingly rare, and immediately become huge hits in the industry, being licensed to other devs and quickly taking over the market. The stuff they have, it's probably easier to flush it down the toilet and write a new one from scratch (and with luck, it will be better designed this time).
• 2. They have no desire to do it, and aim for the "pig in a poke" strategic gameplay. Since this doctrine is considered Evil, its application will have corresponding consequences for the company - assuming they are actually playing it, and I sincerely hope they don't.
• 3. They have no capacity to do it, because of #1 and because they lost their top C++ devs. If that's the case, the engine is already doomed, because no one at the company understands it well enough to introduce necessary changes (hell, any changes) without breaking absolutely everything else in the process. Still, it looks and smells good enough for just one quick cash grab (which will be even easier than usual this time because brand recognition works in their favour). Kind of a mixture of #1 + #2.

Would love to be proved wrong.

Nah ... this sentence is wrong.
Its not "so far from what it's supposed to be" ... its "as far as owner of the licence (WotC) let them" ... and they let them.

Just to be clear: what's a limitation for modders (because of poor tools available, hardcoded stuff they have no direct access to, etc, etc) is not necessarily also a limitation for the developers with full access to the source code etc.

There may be some partial overalap, but let's stress it again: "modders can''t do it" about anything is NOT an immediate justification for developers, too.

You still can't pick which targets get Bless or Bane, just like you can't pick the 2nd target of some Twinned Spells (Hold Person, etc.)

It's kind of ridiculous that you have to hope and rely on positioning to get the ones you want. I'm exhausted with the spell interactions from the misleading AoE indicators to Concentration being so hard to achieve for more than 1 round.

It’s not really a fair comparison because Solasta built their game engine to run 5th edition d&d. Larian built their game engine to run DOS2 and they are now just hacking in (some) d&d rules and things

Absolutely. What I meant by this statement is, rather, "Of all of us, modders probably have the most information and as such, the most informed opinion". Yes, it's essentially "the best of the worst" kind of opinion, but still much more than what I know, for example.

In that case, we risk getting another Demon Stone, which was DnD in name only but capitalised on featuring Patrick Stuart as a narrator.

Solasta had a fraction of budget and staff that BG3 has and by Larian’s account the engine have been heavily modified for BG3. BG3 perhaps couldn’t use same solution that Solasta did (like cube map design) but frankly any limitation that BG3 engine has is by choice, not by necessity.

Well ... yes. :-/

Exactly. When Larian released DOS2, Swen and the upper management already knew that BG3 was their next project. Then they revised engine (I think they are now at Divinity Engine 4, or something like that). And then they started developing BG3 with it.

So if there are things (DnD things or basic and general video game things) that the engine cannot handle, it's mostly by choice. Larian either decided very early that this feature X won't be feasible (e.g. looking at the sky, for the sake of giving an example), or they did not anticipate that they would need it.

The Spider-silk armor, that drops near or on Minthara has a nifty bonus: advantage on concentration saves.

That's like a feat!...I put that on Shadowheart, but would be nice on any light armor caster. It absolutely helps for maintaining concentration. That and Mirror Image or blur, ect.

When spell sniper is implemented, that will help with positioning for twinned.

That armor is great for a warlock, also.