Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General 2 year EA ANNIVERSARY event? (OCTOBER 6)

The way Bard was released should have told us all we needed to know about Reactions. A major change to that system is not happening this late into development, and I wish people elsewhere would stop using that one community manager post as confirmation of an overhaul, because no such thing was ever stated and these people are literally setting themselves up for disappointment (or they're merely overzealous fans trying to use said post to shut up any criticism). The most we're likely to see is an improved system for toggling reactions on/off or settings to prevent certain reactions from automatically going off depending on certain conditions, and many reaction-based abilities being converted to being pre-cast, like what happened with Cutting Words.

I'd love to be proven wrong, but we'll see what happens when we come back to this post in a few months.

We will see. What you write would assume that we have seen no change, because no change was made on Larian's end - while it is possible that they have been working on a better implementation of reactions for a long time now, and the system hasn't been finilized enough to show. For a long time there seemed to be no chance for UI to change - and then came Ui overhaul with many positive additions that community has been asking for. Sure, it might not be precisely what "I would do", but it still attempted to address many of my complaints and made playing the game more enjoyable in the process.

Speaking of the UI, with how sidelined the reactions got in new UI, it would be strange if they didn't attempt SOMETHING different with reactions. Right now reactions are buried in a submenu that not many people are likely to be accessing on regular basis or ever. Recent community Managers mention they they are indeed doing some stuff to reactions isn't isolated instance - earlier Sven also mentioned reworking reactions some Panels from Hell back. I genuilly don't have particular expectation as to how this rework might work - but I remain hopeful that they will find some way to address some of the core issues of the current implementation.

Right. I think the point is that if there are major changes to the system they have already been decided on or they are MOSTLY finalized. Plus just about all feedback to major systems has been discussed to death. Does that mean we will see them in EA in one of the upcoming patches? Maybe. Maybe they will just save it and release it with the base game or something like that. But odds are the feedback being given now is not going to dramatically change a system this late in the game.

If I had to place a bet on it, I'd expect not to see an updated reaction system, but it isn't impossible (I'd go with something like 70% no, 30% yes in terms of probability).

I would argue that from a technical perspective, adding in an alternative reaction is 100% doable even at this stage of development (obviously not preferred from a production standpoint). It's not a very intrusive change compared to other systematic changes that affects content and narrative. The butterfly effect of a reaction system update is mostly limited to mechanics (and maybe encounter design).

The reason for this is the DNA and bones of the 5E reaction system IS in the game, the problem people have right now is with its current expression/control. I.e. the current BG3 reaction system is the 5E one, but with the logic of "always apply to first applicable condition" enforced, with no room for user input. Changing it to say the Solasta prompt version would require a logic shift (instead of always yes, prompt user), and a user UI (for pop-up).

This is kind of the same reason why modders managed to make a Turnbase Mod for Pathfinder Kingmaker (before it was officially implemented) - because the backbones of the PnP turnbase system was already in the game (rounds, action, initiative, swift actions, etc). They obviously had to do a lot of work to add proper limitations and provide a proper UI, but it's infinitely more doable than making a new system from scratch.

On the other hand, something like a proper Day/Night cycle implementation (i.e. with proper NPC schedules, etc) is a HUGE change vs. reactions because it affects tons of content - almost every level/map in the game, NPC logic/movements and also potentially dialogue design.


Now, with all that said, I 100% agree that Larian's already basically heard most of the feedback from the 1st months of Early Access. Their reason for not making reactions more manual was most likely due to their design vision of the game. I think this Eurogamer article is very informative in regards to what Larian is going for: https://www.eurogamer.net/how-larian-and-slitherine-adapted-dungeons-dragons-and-warhammer

But to be fair, I would argue that the recent discourse from fans on the Bard reaction system might help push the needle on making them reconsider (though not likely, because the current subset of EA testers is pretty niche). We'll have to see. For the record, Larian has talked about updates to the reaction system at least twice, but not in any concrete way (with words like explore, extend, etc).

There was Nicou's post here on the forums, but also this answer from Swen from Panel from Hell 5.

Sure. The development is nearing completion, and in recent Panel Sven do say they are nearing polishing stage. Releasing any feature will give Larian data that they might find useful to refine what they have further, but yeah, that’s about it.

Yeah, it's more than worrying they've been trying to create a new system for 2 years now and don't even have something worthy to present...let alone test in EA...

They did add an official Reaction tooltip and icon on abilities, but that's about it.

[/quote]
People with office jobs got to (or were forced to) work from home and that, I know from experience, is a nightmare. When you are used to work in a group and have free access to all the teammates and resources a sudden shift to remote work forces a change of schedule.

Plus of course people get sick more often.[/quote]

Yeah…so like some small disruption I understand if you’re used to interacting with a team in person. But I find it hard to believe that people working on computers can’t effectively work remotely.

It feels a lot more like they have bitten off more than they could chew, particularly because of things like saturation of cut scenes for meaningless npc interactions.

This is the other major thing that tells me we're not getting an updated system. Imagine we DID get a major updated reaction system so close to release, and then it turns out it's implemented in a way that's still rather flawed. Any fixes before the final release would be haphazard at best, compared to a system released far earlier during the EA phase that would have had more time to be refined AND with future classes already being designed with the system in mind. Though with that logic, one would say that the current system IS the system that has been refined throughout the EA phase thus far, with each new class being designed around its existence, Bard being the ultimate proof thus far.


I agree with this overall message, but I also think that adding proper reactions into BG3 would be on a whole other level of difficulty compared to adding turn-based to Kingmaker, since I think the backbone for converting Kingmaker into turn-based was as you said all already there, while BG3 appears to be missing key components such as mid-turn interrupts (along with the vast majority of reaction-dependent abilities just not yet even existing) that would allow reactions to work. If it were truly that simple, I feel like the modders would have already made some attempt at it - indeed, BG3 even in its EA phase has a far larger audience than the Pathfinder games did, and I imagine a bigger modding scene as a result too.

You would need to actually work in a big office enviroment to get it I guess, if you can't imagine the scale of disruption of half your crew working remotely, some on shitty home hardware.

As an aside... the extreme vast majority of people I've interacted with over the past three years have all, more or less unanimously, reported that working remotely has been the biggest boon and improvement not only to their lifestyle, but also to their effectiveness, their efficiency and their productivity, as well as being a massive reduction in stress. They discovered that so much office time wasted in various meetings was, indeed, wasted and unnecessary, and that most of them found the idea of going back to the way it was before to be a genuinely horrific idea. In fact, the only people I've encountered who didn't find it an improvement were middle-management workers whose primary job was wrangling team members into status reports, productivity meetings and other organisational faff - they found their jobs harder to do while workers were working remotely, while those workers were swiftly discovering that said wranglers were largely unnecessary at the end of the day.

There is old saying in Czech: Hundert times nothing killed the donkey.

I give you an example ...
Its not my own, its from my friend who is working in gamedevelopment in CDPR ...

She send a message to colleague askind for some data ...
He answered in an hour ... bcs he was doing something and (as most people i know) didnt check his emails every few seconds.
But he forgot to add attachment to that answer email ... so she had to ask again.
The second answer took him another hour.

That are two hours wasted for something they would regulary manage to do in few seconds.

Now ... all you need to do is multiply.
This was single colleague, single problem, resolved just once ... presuming she would be so unlucky with two collagues twice per week during that homeoffice timet ...

For half year (dunno how long it was in Belgium tho) it would mean aproximately:
6(months)*4(weeks)*2(cases)*2(hours) = 96h of delay ...
So things that would regulary take her hardly more than 15-30 minutes ... is being resolved for 4 whole days.

And that is still for only one person.

Now imagine that there are dozens (in Larian cases even hunderts) of people whos work is dependent on someone else work ...
So thanks to this ... several dozens of people cant continue bcs they dont have foundation from my friend, who is waiting to someone else ... and another dozens are waiting for them and so on and so forth ... you get the idea.

Or you can ignore all this for simplicity and presume that stretching go all the same ...
So if something that would take an 1 hour lets say for simplicity ... took them 100h, rounded up, again for simplicity ...
Something that woul take them a Month would take them?

I know this is false math ...
But just to imagine the scale it can work.

Its called chain reaction.
One splitted attom is not a problem ... what happens afterwards is what makes people affraid.

That is true now because all companies have mastered remote work. There was an akward adaptation period for some months though, where everyone has to figure out how to be as productive as before. You were in an office with a lot of ressources and the day after you were at home with only your subpar laptop to work with. No sudio for recording, no mocap for animating, no powerful machine for coding, no beautiful screen and tablet for drawing, the list goes on. As a network administrator, I had to introduce big changes I wouldn't have to do if it wasn't for a global pendemy. It wasn't a smooth process for many.

I think reaction system will stay as it is, maybe with some improvements, but still. Just because it's not a IRL DnD process, when players can react to any event, and that will be OK in terms of game flow. In case of the game, the flow of a battle would be completely lost if player get overwhelmed by a ton of reaction pop-ups EVERY turn, EVERY action, EVERY enemy do. Even Solasta devs understood that and implement Bard's cutting words as a "until bard's next turn" debuff to all rolls for an enemy, clearly said "we don't want to people be buried with pop-ups". So all of that is just another game implementation thing to be done, a sacrifice for making the whole process smoother (the same as DnD itself goes to simplicity to attract more people etc.). I assume the reaction system people desire is only possible in a "real-time with pause" version of DnD game, and definitely not in a turn-based one.

Also i think that many people kinda forgot that EA in case of BG3 was opened for beta-testing purpose, and not for conseal the raw-release or just to make some money for an idea of a game somewhere to be done. These days the game is in the final state and it is quite obvious and right thing (maybe just for me as a developer myself, but not gamedev) that it can be no more patches until release. Because the game is ready and do not need to be tested any more, not mentioned about a really painful process of making such EA builds, because merging is always painful, with many chances to break something old or new. The Paladin and Monk do not have any unique mechanics to be tested in mass, like another fighter with some holy magic and a weaponless boii with a ton of toggle-activated stances? In case of barbarian (if some guys will start to imply why test barbarian class then) there was some new basic actions like improvised weapon and a general throw-other-entities-than-things-from-inventory mechanics, and barb just coheres with that very well. For bards it were the performance things and a reaction system feedback. Etc for the other classes.

For people assuming BG3 feels more like D:OS3 - of course it does. If a product is made by the same group or individual, it always have some things that recognizable as their "style". IRL you can take any artist's pieces of work, they are always have a "personnal style" of painting that diverse one artist from another. For RTS lovers, you can look for example to Frost Giant studio (the Blizzard Veterans) and their new game-in-dev of "Stormgate" - it has A LOT of recognizable things from StarCraft series in artworks and unit design (maybe done for purpose, who knows). Or you can always differ From Software souls-like from any other by many aspects, such as combat for example.

As a conclusion: no pathes is a good sign that game do not need further mass-testing and proceed to the pre-release state with polishing to be done. In case of community managers there are no big things they can do or say, just repeat Sven's words about the game state from the last PFH? As they just can't share more. I khow the world has changed in terms of information given to people even from 10-years old perspective, but in the good-old days we had literally zero info about the games in development other than name and maybe some teasers from game-dev events. Be patient and pray for Q1 2023 release :-D

Technically, aren't we still in Alpha? We haven't even gotten to test on the Beta yet. 2 years and we can't get there or any concrete timeline.

No, technically we are in Early Acess ...
Alfa and Beta testing is both something different.

Eh. Let's not mixed up artists (self-expression, high art etc.) from commerial products - which, unfortunately, most games are just that. Marvel be Marvel not because it is their artistic vision, but because charts suggests what sells and what doesn't. What bothers me about BG3 is preciely lack of a coherent artistic vision. It's a product aimed at as wide of an audience as possible, toughing everything and focusing on nothing. Not doing anything interesting as an RPG, not having interesting story to tell. Just something for everyone and for no one.

If FromSoftwere's next game was Devil May Cry or God of War, and they just did Souls-like again - "that's what we do" is not a good defence, is it.

I think BG3's story is fine so far. Certainly nothing spectacular. But as video games go it is solid. I can't really judge the entire story until I see it all unfold and potentially even explore different avenues through a couple of playthroughs.

I would say the only real complaints I have about the BG3 story so far are:

1. The need to remove the slug from your head seems to mirror the collars in Divinity: Original Sin 2. The story device is almost the exact same. Not that it is bad, just not at all original.
2. I think they should have a small prologue before you end up on the ship - something to attach you to your character before you wake up on a flaming ship soaring through the sky.
3. The presentation at certain parts of the game comes off as very... Michael Bay'ish. I think anyone who has seen his movies will know what I mean. There are just things that are over the top and action filled for the sake of throwing a bunch of effects at you and stuff. And it starts right off of the bat. You don't start as a lowly adventurer working your way up... you start out on a flaming mindflayer ship soaring through hell and fight/encounter incredibly powerful creatures right off of the bat. Just not a great way to start an adventure or story, IMO.

Let's not mix up pieces of art with conveyor mess like marvel
And the purpose of a work is in the head of its creator - some artists make their paintings for money as well.

C'mon, you have at the best 20% of the game and story, how you can tell about story quality when you've seen literally nothing?

That is a harsh thing to say. Thanks to it, I was able to play a CRPG with two friends who would have never played a CRPG otherwise. We had a very good time thanks to presentation and the streamlined game play, whereas there would have been no chance in hell for them to have any interest for traditional games of the genre. For me Larian is making the right choice in making a game appealing for the current mainstream audience. For people who want a more traditional experience, there are plenty of games out there (Pathfinder, Solasta, PoE...).

Here is something that was posted on Reddit today that might be interesting.


I thought I would share it here.
I don't know what to think of it, personally.
But I'll relay the information anyway.

We don't really have a lot of context. Larian Studios did make this strange tweet not long ago (but all their tweets are a bit weird soooo 😅).