I finally caved this weekend and bought the game through Steam.
I am enjoying what I've played so far, even though it feels more like DOS3 than a Baldur's Gate game, but I do have some feedback:
1: I adore the dice rolling for tasks and conversations, although it would be nice to be able to speed up the animations. However, I would LOVE it if the dice rolls could be added to combat too (as an option, not as default), with the same options to add advantages, buffs etc. This would extend the tabletop feel massively and help expose the mechanics of combat to the player.
2: Density and quantity of interactable containers is a big problem.
Quite often, seemingly random containers in a scene will actually have better loot in them than containers that highlight when you press the highlight key.
This is a problem because it feels like you may be missing out on something unless you search every last box, bag and crate in a scene. And this can take AGES in busier scenes.
Maybe fill non-important containers with no-value trash, then colour their nameplates accordingly?
These ones are more subjective criticisms:
3: Party size. It's probably hard to balance this so close to release, but this is a Baldur's Gate game, which has traditionally had a party size limit of 6. If the game had been properly built around tabletop rules, encounters would have been simple to scale, as they could have been built around hit die, but I suspect that's not the case here. I've modded my save game to allow 6, and I'll do so on release too. It's not a matter of making things easy, but wanting more options and interactions.
4: This one's almost certainly impossible to address, and quite hard to convey, but essentially boils down to this:
Encounters and the narrative seem to have been created as if the game were a DOS one, where skills had cooldowns. The trouble is, after almost every encounter, unless you're taking a long rest, you will lose access to a lot of spells and abilities that make said encounters fun. And this is a problem when you've designed a narrative that implies the more you rest, the quicker your "condition" accelerates.
Basically, there seems to be a core disconnect between Larian's encounter design and D&D's rest mechanics.
It's also weird being ripped out of your current map into a campsite map every time you restm especially after other games with rest mechanics have managed to allow for resting in your current location, such as the Pathfinder games.
Last edited by Mungrul; 26/06/23 02:17 PM.
