Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Larian, is feedback still sought ?

Thank you! I think I should definitely stop typing for today, my brain is already offline.

That is of course the sensible thing to do . Especially as we only have a few weeks to wait.

Speculating can be fun, though, and I’m all for it as long as it stays light and friendly … and particularly as long as we can refrain from insulting one another over our differences of opinion.

Lyelle, I was referring to kanisatha's last post, sorry for misleading you. I'll be honest, I could avoid this joke... On the other hand, I see their dissatisfied posts all the time, and they could use a treatment of seeing my stupid jokes from time to time... makes us equal...

I support everything you and RQ said about the developer's vision. I actually think that sometimes feedback can be harmful, especially when the developer is hyper sensitive to it. If we are talking something fundamental like introducing another origin character who is 'not as special' as ones we have now - its a lot of work that needs to be squeezed into the general pipeline AND it can be detrimental to the tone of the story. Another criticism that walks among the forum nerds is the grander scale of the story. Can we even imagine a proper reaction to that criticism? Scrape the whole idea behind the game? Would never happen. Yet the air has been hot with debate during the past few years, same gum being chewed over and over. By that point it usually becomes a cult of complaining. I tolerate every taste and opinion, but I wish people would settle for a thought - the product should not be perfect to be enjoyable. Zelously seeking sense in every grain of sand, actively agitating for old templates and tropes, never adapting and never enjoying... this is just not the way to interact with media, in my opinion. But to each their own, sure...

I hope my post where I replied to kanisatha did not come across as a criticism or insult directed at anyone in particular - it was definitely not meant as such.
I just wanted to explain why I even mentioned that point, that I, personally, would never expect from a studio to completely change their approach to a game just because I don't happen to like it.

Since the question was who those are who want the whole game to be changed from Larian's vision, I tried to share the impressions I got from various platforms/forums, to prove that I did not try to make a straw man argument, and that I was referring to posts that I had read.

My (admittedly quite passionate) criticism of this "I want the game to be exactly like I want it to be"- attitude in these posts was not directed at anyone, but just me stating my opinion on this in general.

EDIT: I just noticed that you have replied as well, neprostoman. I hope it's ok when I read and reply to it tomorrow - my sentences are getting worse and worse now... 😴

Lyelle, I think you may have been caught a bit in the crossfire between two throw-away cracks from others, one (in my opinion) an unhelpful complaint about the conversation without adding anything to it, and the other a very funny response to that. I guarantee that 0% of any perceived drama had to do with anything you wrote.

I would agree with this, but from my personal vantage point not one of the criticisms I've made of the game goes against Larian's vision for the game. Every single one of my issues could be positively addressed by Larian without the game being changed in any fundamental way.



Yes, correct. Obviously if someone is 100% positive then there's nothing to react to. So I also was speaking in terms of relativity: people who are mostly positive while having one or two criticisms versus someone like me who has a lot of criticisms.

I wasn't speaking about your criticisms or views in particular, just about whether Larian might be responding differentially to different constituents of players giving feedback and favouring those who have praise. Which the more I think about it seems to be a point about Larian's internal discussions and approach that we will never settle satisfactorily here so we'd perhaps better leave it.

What can be more objectively settled, at least when we actually see the game, is what specific feedback Larian have actually made changes as a result of. We may never know whether they made those changes as a result of their critics or their fans (probably they even don't, they just saw a lot of people saying the same thing) but at that point we'll in a better place to assess what kinds of changes they made and where they stuck to their guns despite folk requesting alterations.

But as Blackheifer said, we probably should wait and actually play the release version before we make any final determinations on that!

It will be interesting to see how much clarity we get about feedback they've incorporated at the PFH on Friday.

Yeah, I've been following these forums since Day 1 of Early Access, so I know too well that Larian rarely interacts with players, especially if players request such an interaction.

I also know that Larian said that if we have questions, they'll happily provide us with answers, if it's information that can be shared publicly.

I have come to understand that most/all of the information about the features of the game lie in that "information that can't be shared publicly" category. I don't quite agree with it, but this is just how it works. It seems that Larian treats any info about game features as top secret information, to be revealed with great pomp during some Community Update, PFH, or at release. So if my question was "will MyFavouriteSpell be in the game ?", or any of the questions that I and many players have written up in that thread, I would definitely not have expected to receive answers.

But I was hoping that "are you still collecting feedback ?" was not in the category of information that has to be kept secret. Same for "what's up with the Q&A ?"


One reason I posted my question in the forums is because I believe the answer could be of interest to many players. (As a matter of fact, I have recently seen at least one other player, who has written awesome feedback in the past, wondering if it was worth doing anything more.)

As far as I'm concerned, contacting Larian support, getting an answer, and relaying it here ... is functionally equivalent to having Larian just give the answer here in the first place. Just more convoluted. Also, the only time I ever used the Larian support forms, I didn't get any answer. And all the times I heard people talking about receiving an answer, I felt it was about some technical questions (typically, "is this working as intended, not working but it's normal for now, or not working and it's a bug ?"). So I didn't quite have the support forms high on my radar, as a way to get information.

But ... having now given this a thought, I could see why there would be a chance.

It is conceivable that the people in the community management/communication/marketting team don't have "answer players' questions" in their list of job duties. And that, while they may chime in and give us some info once in a while if there's not much happening on the Important Communication front and they have lots of free time, given that BG3 is set to release in less than a month, we are probably not in one of these phases.

It is also very conceivable that the people in charge of collecting what comes in through the support/feedback forms actually have "answer players' questions" in their list of job duties. And if they're still monitoring the feedback forms, they may as well reply "hey, yes, we're still opening and reading what you send to us here, and yes/no about feedback still being actively sought".

So, yeah, I'll try that channel instead.