Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General What's you biggest fear about the final BG3 release?

Damn guys that's some serious doomer attitude in this thread. Take it easy, no need to tune yourself that way.

It's good feedback for Larian.

Since this is a Baldur's Gate and D&D game, players are understandably passionate and have certain expectations. As a long term D&D player of tabletop and all crpg's I can say for myself I will be VERY disappointed if BG3 strays too far from D&D in favor of Divinity-like gameplay or other video game tropes. And this is already happening on some "features" like unlimited long resting, op homebrew combat gimmicks trumping class abilities, and magic item design.

Lost Valley was pretty damn good, at least up until the ending phases which is... Rather expected to turn into a complete mess, given the unique campaign and multiple ending structure.

I'm really curious to see what the Solasta devs do with the next campaign. (if there is one. Chances are very high there's going to be at least one more before they move on to a Solasta 2 or something, otherwise why bother going through the effort of releasing the remaining classes?) The world map of their setting looks rather intriguing (and outright hilarious with the split Dwarven kingdoms, I want to know what the deal with THAT is).

-No day/night/clock/weather.
-The awful party control system.
-Party locked after Act 1.
-Custom PC being a decidedly lesser experience than the tragic Origins system.
-No 6 person party.
-Theme park maps.
-MMO style loot.
-That Shove will continue to be an optimal battle strategy.
-The UI.
-Limited Companion choice.
-Continuation of comic-style, goofy animations (Super Mario jumping, Shove and missile trajectories).
-That the end game will run out of steam because of the explosive introduction and exposure to high level monsters and dangerous locations from more or less the outset.
-That it continues to deviate too far from D&D.

On a personal level I suppose my biggest concern is that I will never play the game once it is finally released because it more or less stays as it currently is, and I haven't touched the game since the end of 2020. I would genuinely love to be enticed back to this game, which is probably the only reason I have hung around these forums to see what, if anything, changes.

I feel you. I have already mentally prepared myself for this. A release with lots of bugs, crashs etc. leading to at least 1 more year delay until you can play it properly + DLCs with subclasses etc, so again 1+ year delay until I can actually play the "full game with full content"... I hope DA 4 (at least multilingual voiceovers) will finally come out next year or Hogwarts Legacy will be really good to pass the time, maybe even a new virtual home in the long term. It was supposed to be BG 3, but from what I've experienced with patch 7 and 8, I highly doubt it. It has a lot of potential, but unfortunately even more annoying errors and inconsistencies. The fact that I am writing here in the forum and not enjoying the game is the ultimate proof...

They get lost in small insignificant details like how you get "The Box", instead of focusing on creating a great gameplay experience and one great main plot with a few small variations.
I see that as a pattern at this studio, sometimes it is better to keep things simple.

That, even though it keeps all the larianism, it will become an economical success and Wotc therefor won't give the next sequel to another studio.

Sorry, do not want to shit on Larian or their hard work but I've come to the clear understanding that Sven and I have completely different ideas of the concept of fun.

YUP

I worry that the fanboys are wrong. Every time someone complains about something missing or lacking I read all these posts that EXPLAIN that this is EA and that everything will be fine by full release. Well, it's Patch 8 and we still don't have Dodge, so I'm starting to doubt that all of those missing spells, races, subclasses, reactions, readied actions, etc. will ever exist.

Amen

My fear is, that there are too many and too complicated fights. That the game is just too hard and complicated to give me fun between the figths.

There are so many classes and races and spells. For a player like me who doesn't know the BG rules, it's very complicated. I'm afraid it scares players who have never played BG.

D:OS2 was the best RPG I playes for ever (My first was Ultima Underworld in 1993) The story in D:OS1 was great too, but the figths there are much harder.

I fear BG3 would not reach that, because of the to difficult fightings

I bought the BG3 game as soon as it came out because I found all the Larian RPGs so far awesome.

I'm afraid this will be the first not so brilliant one. There are too many guidelines from outside!

I don't get it. You really fear it would be too hard even on the easiest difficulty setting?

Yes, DnD rules can be complicated.
But I think the bigger problem is that the game does not use DnD rules but a mix between DnD and DOS.

Understanding DnD rules does not help that much because the game has so much homebrew broken stuff.
"broken" in a sense that the game that the game revolves around abusing some mechanics over and over (e.g. shove) and the game is "balanced" around abusing broken mechanics.

In my opinion it would be better to use DnD mechanics in a way Solasta did.
If they keep lots of homebrew stuff (which they probably will) they need to explain things better.
Right now both DOS and DnD fans have problems because they are not sure how the game is supposed to be played.
I guess DOS fans are in a better position because those game were designed around abusing cheese mechanics.
Personally, thats the reason why I like DnD more than DOS.

PS: If you call BG3 complicated, beware of Pathfinder Kingmaker and WotR.
They are great games, but the rules are very complicated and the games are extremely difficult until you have a good understanding of the rules.

It is not ...
IF it would be the game would be unbeatable without using them ... wich it isnt.

- No way to change to night time as a player
- Persistent immersion breaking in world contradictions being swept of the table by unconvincing arguments (e.g. Astarion's sun sensitivity, Grove being 2 min walk from Golbins who attack in the day)
- No 'living' world, only encounter hubs with static NPC's , anything dynamic only happening in cut-scenes: e.g. the city being destroyed and in Lock down, no 'normal' or regular Faerun life anywhere and this again being unconvincingly argued for because of 'muh absolute' : e.g. if everyone fled to the grove, then where are the abandoned houses, where are the farms providing the grove with food, etc.
- Narrative focus meaning that world building is seen as secondary to very resource intensive animations which I will probably skip usually while not being given the option to skip by sentence so that I can at least get the gist of it. also, them not fixing the 'skip line' button being the same as the 'select first dialogue option' button.
- No unique story for the player character - be it origin or custom, i fear that we will either be a bland generic observer to the main story or have to play as an origin. I want to play my character and see how that goes in their story. Playing their character in their story seems a bit much for a rp game.
- Loot and equipment being very MMO gamey: no unique items but a color coded plethora of conditional items with very obvious synergies instead of unique items with an epic background story (e.g. collect all items from lightning set vs. a warhammer of the thundergod that synergizes with armour of the warhammer wielding barbarian)
- relatedly, equipment being a constant shuffle to min/max as you level up, thus the loot losing its appeal and epicness
- Mages being able to learn all spells
- Not having split-screen/local coop on release (this will make me ask a refund, as it was promised and a reason for me to support EA)
- Not upgrading the camera, forcing us to play with a set angle and all the problems this means for the so beloved 'verticality' e.g. not being able to target from/to small high places, camera glitching when trying to understand where you can jump
- no real exploration because of the railroaded 'do not trespass outside of the marked path' map
- listening too much to the tabletop crowd vs. the RPG videogame crowd leading to a worst of both worlds: e.g. static tabletop boardgamey maps and not taking full advantage of computing power to DM for us (and achieve things a normal DM would never be able to pull of because of complexity) for instance automatic rolls in the world are missed a lot while dialogue rolls totally interrupt the flow
- Randomized loot and even worse, vendor stock (seriously, you can randomize the kind of vegetables one has in stock, but you can't randomize magical equipment). Think of how in BG2 the adventurer's market sold a lot of items that made kinda sense from the owner being a retired adventurer himself, so the item collection he amassed made sense.
- Too strong focus on multiplayer and streamers/influencers
- Too much focus on 'romance'
- So much 'exoticism' that it doesn't stand out anymore/world feels like an eclectic bricolage of eccentric ideas that are all 'exceptions to the rule', meanwhile normality being completely absent.
- Evil path in EA being representative of the rest of the game
- Camp remaining a weird hub you're forced to go to to have interactions while not 'existing' in the real game world, filled with totally over the top NPC's that for some unexplained reason felt compelled to leave their super important high level life behind to simply stand in our inter-planar camp waiting for you to click on them.
- summon limit staying as is, if the computers can handle it, why not let me summon more than 1 creature ?
- The focus on hyper advanced 3d cutscenes taking too much dev time, e.g. I couldn't care less about the subtle differences in dialogue if they don't lead to differences in gameplay/the game world.
- relatedly, 'actions have consequences' simply reflecting different dialogues nonetheless leading to the same outcome (inbf CP2077)
- No random encounters, no wildlife, not even the slightest semblance of an NPC going about his daily life, only "carefully placed" NPC's that exist only for the players/game/quest and not to populate the world.
- etc etc etc

Tieflings, anyone?

I'm afraid the story will be just rank average or even worse. Main reasons for this:

1)The already poorly written evil/stupid plotline, and the plot armor shielding the player from fail states due to their stupid-evil choices, will manage to worm its way into the main plot even on a good walkthrough. Meaning, the story will turn into a convoluted mess of suprise twists that make the tadpole a harmless/pragmatic source of power and a constant "companion" you can't get rid of until lategame, or in the sequels.

2)The world will be a streamlined, mostly lifeless theater set with little feel of exploration and lived in environment, even in urban environments. I wouldn't put it past Larian to resolve compounding problems of accounting for player choice by killing off scores of NPCs and the companions you discard. Maybe they'll resort to the already mentioned DOS2 plot-twist, where the city of Baldur's gate is already under siege when you get there, to achive this.

3)The game releases with the narrative mechanisms still buggy and poorly implemented: You don't even know if you're on the clock or not with the tadpole, companion storylines fail to proceed due to them being tied to long rests you're actively avoiding due to RP purposes etc.

I would say an even bigger problem is that BG3 doesn't explain its rules adequately.
- Character creation and tutorial sections are woefully inadequate to explain all things about the D&D 5e + Larian homebrew system that is BG3.
- The combat log is not useful: it doesn't record many rolls and those that it does include aren't fully detailed. What are the rolls behind Shove?
- There is no in-game rulebook / glossary, combined with the fact that key terms aren't highlighted in item/ability/spell descriptions, etc.

Addressing these would go a long way to making people better understand - and thus probably more enjoy - BG3.

as insanely confusing Pathfinder is, at least WotR attempted to explain some of the rules to you with pop-ups, and extensive documentation in-game. Unless Larian doesn't want it to seem like a rule system, and more organic, which would make sense I suppose. I personally like having some information though.

+1 to all of the above. These are all why BG3 is (currently) failing to live up to it's predecessors. All while there is ZERO engagement from Larian. It's pretty disappointing tbh