Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Long rest needs rework

Done with my first playthrough and wanted to share what I thought was the most glaring issue from my blind run: the long rest. Looking at some of the other feedback I've seen, it's surprising to me that most people seem to be commenting on the combat, which I found to be one of the most stable parts of BG3. My biggest issue had to do with long rest and all the very important story elements tied to it. There are two main things I want to address:

1. It is available way too often
Unlike tabletop and every other game based on D&D, there is no obstacle or risk to long resting in BG3. You can long rest at any point. It is as available as a short rest. At first, I tried playing as I would in a campaign or any other game, and I long rested only when I had fully run out of spells and potions. This playstyle seemed to also be encouraged by the game telling you about the tadpole taking over you and time being of the essence. I quickly found out that not only is long resting extremely important to advancing the main story, not doing it enough can also make you miss out on a ton of content. I started to long rest more often and found everything became very easy. I could long rest after any out of combat spell cast, ensuring my characters always had full spells without missing a beat. Not only does this remove the main hindrance for spellcasters, tilting the balance in their favour over martial classes, it also doesn't make much sense. How can I long rest in the middle of a temple with a bunch of enemies right around the corner? And then keep doing it after every single fight in said temple? Why would I ever short rest when I can just long rest instead? I'm not sure if this is still actively being worked on by Larian, but the whole function of long rest doesn't make much sense from a gameplay/immersion perspective.

2. It is tied to companion dialogue
Maybe the reason long rest is available constantly is that you need to spam it to progress the story and side stories. The worst thing I noticed from not long resting enough is that I missed out on a ton of companion dialogue and quest progress. A lot of the scenes, some of which are required to advance romance with certain characters like Gale, I missed because other cutscenes took precedence over them. Even when there wasn't a main quest cutscene, you could only speak to one companion per night. If you have a full party, this ensures you have to long rest many times in a row (also significantly breaking immersion) to be able to progress with your companions. While someone could argue that it makes sense you wouldn't stay up all night talking to everyone and that you couldn't befriend everyone perfectly in one playthrough, the randomness of this doesn't make much sense. For instance, I got Shadowheart cutscenes almost every other time I long rested. I only got one or two cutscenes with Wyll my entire playthrough. I had both of them in my party. If I wanted to talk to Wyll more, I couldn't because I couldn't choose who to talk to at camp. This mechanic makes no sense. Furthermore, many of the cutscenes did not need to play out at camp at night and could (maybe should) have happened while you were adventuring organically.

Overall, I enjoyed my first playthrough, but I'm going to hold off on a second one until this issue is fixed, as it made the experience feel inconsistent and half-baked. One of the things I really enjoy about Larian games is the sense of choice and options they give you, along with risk. The linear progression of random cutscenes tied to long rest really goes against this ideology of player choice. Risk from random encounters is also significantly less dangerous if you're always fully refreshed. I hope this is fixed before launch, as I can imagine many people complaining about missed dialogue or romance with their favourite companions because they were forced to talk to another one they didn't much care for instead.

The only reason this isn’t actively being talked about as much now is that many of us have discussed at length for previous patches, and nothing significant has changed

For a couple of the more recently active threads on related topics, see …


https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=837705
https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=837713

Yes, as mentioned by The_Red_Queen, this has been the subject of many conversations (maybe why this post may or may not get as much attention), but it was never officially addressed (like many other feedbacks), unfortunately.

Other examples of threads on the subject :
https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=829230
https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=833503

I think a lot of people are one the same board when it comes to seeing those things as an issue, with various solutions given.

I hope this will be improved on full release, but there is probably no knowing if that will be the case before that date 😕

I finally found one downside to frequent long resting:
I have not found a single other instance where there's a penalty for long-resting all the time though.

They could implement places like the Hags lair where you cannot rest and block your path behind you so you can't just cheese it by running out.

I recall that in later parts of the game it is supposed to cost more to long rest but with how easy it is to pickpocket traders and generate an obscene amount of money and camp supplies since they reset on long rest and you can pickpocket way more than you need to rest.
This could also be easily fixed by not letting you pickpocket ~1000 gold with an ability check of 10. Between the ring and proficiency and dex you are easily looking at characters that can almost never fail pickpocketing gold.

This has been suggested and discussed in previous threads, including I'll bet the ones Melivy and I linked above. And it's of course something other games do.

But there are pros and cons. As I'm sure I've said before, I personally can see the rationale but it would annoy me in practice. I wouldn't normally try to rest in the Hag's Lair, for example, but if something went horribly wrong and I'd used up all my spells and short rests I think I'd be peeved if the game forced me to reload and start the whole area again. Even more so for somewhere like the shattered sanctum, where the idea would also make sense in principle.

I don't think there are any easy answers here, which is why there are all those threads talking about it

There's also a recent thread talking about cheesy mechanics you might want to check out (at your own risk!): https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=838995. I can't recall whether pickpocketing has yet been aired on that relatively new thread, though it's something that's cropped up in the past in other similar discussions.

Currently I think the game really doesn't want to set you up to failure. This is why you can always resort to taking a long rest everywhere or just leave get stronger by getting more items and levels if you really want to.
I could see them implementing difficulty levels where on a higher difficulty you do get locked into a part of the game and have to get through it without abusing long rests, rests costing more in general, have higher checks for stealing so you can't generate infinite amount of money, scrolls and supplies, npcs using more consumables etc.
We only have act 1 right now but it is fairly easy to solo the game even if you don't abuse long rests or scrolls more than you are "intended" to have. With a party of 4 you just steamroll everything even if you only take a couple of long rests the entire game, which is fine I guess but would love some really tough fights that require preparation and tactics to succeed.

I'd think it very likely that Larian will implement difficulty settings, and I guess it's possible that rest frequency/cost and stealing skill checks might be configurable as part of that.

I also think you're right that Larian don't want to set us up for failure, and while I'm not a PnP player, I understand that's in the spirit of D&D. And it seems that Larian are very much erring on the side of being a permissive DM, giving players the flexibility to do as much as possible and create the stories they want even if this can be exploited, as opposed prioritising giving us constraints to test ourselves against. We need both, but while they’re not entirely mutually exclusive, they are in tension. And personally I am very sympathetic to a balance that tips towards flexibility, and we can always set our own challenges on top of those actually imposed by the game if we want to. That said, there are some specific cheesy mechanics I desperately hope are changed, but the possibilities of infinite long resting and cash are ones I'm happy to just ignore .

I'd suggest moving further discussion on this point to one of the active existing threads linked to above so we don't end up having overlapping discussions in various places!

Thanks for the links to the other discussions that I missed! I'm glad other people have also brought it up, and I hope Larian is working on something for full release. It's clear in the Underdark portion that a lot of dialogue is still missing, since the companions all go silent. I'm hoping that, since they are still actively working on this, they will factor in these discussions so that players can develop the stories they are interested in.

REPEAT MODE ON : In my opinion the problem is not that you can rest very often but that there aren't any risks at resting.

Allowing players to rest as much as they want seems pretty ok to me. With such a "semi open world" it would be nearly impossible to limit the number of rests so it is "balanced". Some of us previously suggested that only supply bag could allow resting... but I'm only using them and I can mostly rest as will. Solution would be to limit them, but what if players are stuck and HAVE to rest ? Should they search the whole map to find a supply bag ? Should they buy one ? But if they can buy one there's not limitations but only a few more steps to rest at will.

The real problem in my opinion is that the resting system don't encourage AT ALL ressources management / ressources economy.
=> We use and replenish all our ressources at will.

With possible encounters/events when you rest, we would still have to define our own "when" but we will all have to think about our ressources.
=> We use and replenish all our ressources at will, but we never know when we may need our last spellslots.

This in my opinion would be enough to create A VERY different experience.
Resting would not only be a matter of food (it really isn't) but would become a matter of ressource management !

Players that are already resting after every combats could still do it. At worst they'll start the next day with a few less ressources / HP.
Players like me that are already resting as less as possible would probably rest a bit more often. Which does not seem really bad due to story / companions elements.

Exactly this for me. I don't enjoy missing content [that there is no good reason to miss - companion cutscenes should at least be queued up instead of skipped], but I also don't enjoy long resting after every fight or two as it makes the game trivial. I also think the premise of "you have a tadpole in your brain that could transform you into a mindflayer soon" is interesting, and it's disappointing that BG3 removes that urgency.