Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Can't you speak with the dead!? Everyone can do that!

In short - Amulet of the Lost Voices is a problem.

Getting universal access to the unique tropes destroys the meaning and flavor behind these tropes. If everyone can infinitely recast speak with the dead by using an amulet then there is no point in using classes to which SWTD is special. Apart from that, the abundance of SWTD and Detect Thoughts scrolls is seriously over the top. I have more than 1000 hours in BG3 and by the end of the EA there are always 10+ SWTD scrolls in my backpack. The quantity of these should be drastically decreased, imo.

Same critique applies to the guidance necklace, it is also a problem in its current form.

Another critique is the availability of resurrection scrolls. Currently they are literally dirt cheap for their effect. In the tabletop version there are components and time restrictions to such a spell. Not to mention we have a resurrecting skelly in our backyard. I think there is still time to reduce the number of these 'resources' in the game.

I agree. While I don't think that the presence of the speak with dead amulet is necessarily as extreme as you say, it still means you basically never have a reason to use the actual speak with dead spell when that becomes available. It kind of changes speaking with the dead from a cool thing if you have the right resources to something more mundane. The guidance necklace is similar but less intense since Guidance is already a cantrip that you can cast infinitely.

And I also agree that the abundance of resurection scrolls is over the top. I'd probably be indifferent to it if not for having withers around on top of that. The abundance of those scrolls makes Withers far less meaningful, since you're less likely to need or use him.

We'll have to wait to see, but I suspect the distribution and location of loot will be significantly changed in the full release.

I’d also be happy for the speak with dead and guidance amulets to be removed or at least seriously nerfed to restrict uses per day, and for there to be fewer resurrection scrolls (and potions and food).

Like others, I’m hoping these were just early access things.

I like that items. I guess this Fane's Mask of the Shapeshifter will be unlimited too and synergizes with Speak with Dead Amulett. If you don't like them just sell these items. The best compromise would be to declare these items as consumable artifacts for Gale. Those who like these items, like me, keep them. Those who don't can destroy them permanently via Gale. Then there is no temptation to buy them back from a vendor... As for the resurrection scrolls. In Bg 1 / 2 I hardly used them either. These are also the first items I sell in BG 3, if you do not need them for certain quests. Reloading and Withers make them largely obsolete anyway.

Yes, sure if we still have these items come the full release I'll be getting rid of them. But we're still pre-release (just!) so we're still in the mode of saying what we'd actually prefer the game to do, rather than how we'll manage if it doesn't do it

Of course, wanting those items in game is a perfectly valid preference too! Particularly for people who don't intend to play and replay the game, so worry less about replayability and losing the distinctive feel of different party compositions and classes.

I don't want to deny replayability, but I have the feeling that it is also just a token argument. I've played through BG 1 / 2 dozens of times with the same party combos, so limiting things is not absolute proof of more replayability. In the end it's similar to the 4 vs 6 party system. Having more alternatives is always good. Now, considering that the predecessors didn't have the class-specific depth (e.g. dialogues), you know where the journey is going with BG 3. I think I'm getting addicted to this game, so to speak, and that's despite having to read everything (tiresome over time). This means that other reasons, such as the lack of native language dubbing, are a much bigger obstacle to replayability. Dragon Age 4 will score again here.

I just had another thought. Maybe such items are also linked to the difficulty modes? That would also be another solution.

Amulet of Lost Voices is key to Larian's design philosophy. To account for player freedom, including the freedom to kill anyone, Larian need ways to let players know what's going on in the story that don't rely on any one NPC being alive. The Amulet solves that neatly. However, player freedom means that they're not guaranteed to find the amulet. So in places where the designers fear that players might murder plot points, they'll place a scroll of speak with dead in a nearby chest.

Swen Vincke calls it "n+1 design", and it does not apply to the Guidance necklace or the Resurrection scrolls. I don't think there's a deep design reason for their abundance. It's a balancing issue, in my book.

Well, the big part of their uselessness is the current difficulty of the game. We now know that more challenging ones are coming and those can drastically increase their value. BTW, I didn't quite catch your drift - do you think the abundance of the item is good or bad in the environment where you never use it?

In my book, when the item is good, it needs to be rare, and when the item is trash, it needs to be present in bigger numbers. So there are some overlapping issues here with the res scrolls being trash and those are Withers and infinite long rests. Withers makes resurrection scrolls look useless and vice versa, I can't put my head around Withers' resurrecting capabilities in the first place... If these two ways of resurrecting want to coexist and be both useful, there needs to be a change. For example, Withers could just become a resurrection scroll merchant only, while the cost of such scrolls can be increased tenfold and their presence in the world cut. The inclusion of difficulty modes inclines that the game is aiming for the challenge as much as for the story and exploration.

TLDR, what I am saying is:
- between the abundance of resurrection scrolls, Withers and infinite long rests there is no challenge.
- the universal availability to skills like SWTD and Guidance hurts exploration, story and replayability

Hey Flooter, this is a good point and a fresh perspective, yet there is something that still doesn't add up:


This basically means that there is no need for the existence of such thing as the Amulet of the Lost Voices, at least in its current form. If this spell is necessary for pushing through the story points, then scrolls would suffice. Once again, I see the issue in the simultaneous existence of the amulet and the sheer abundance of these scrolls. Why do you think I have 10 scrolls in my backpack by the end of EA? Because I didn't need to use them, I had the amulet. See? The least good they can do is restrict the spell to being 'once per long rest'.

All of that is fair. I'm guessing that the designers aren't willing to take any chances on players missing key pieces of information.*(see edit) Remember that the power granted by the haunted book is also Speak with Dead. That's waaay overkill on the face of it, so let's give Larian a modicum of credit and assume there's a reason.

I can see two, entirely speculative, reasons. The first is that narrative payoff depends on player knowledge. If the game spends a bunch of effort setting up a payoff, it doesn't want the player confused out of pure ignorance. "Ok, but why are you betraying me, again? I killed your brother? Listen, I kill a lot of people... Who can keep track?"

The second reason is that it's really hard to get players to do anything. Larian's designers count on players seeking out information from corpses when stuck. That requires 3 things. 1) The idea that it's possible to Speak with Dead; 2) The means to actually Speak with Dead; 3) The willingness to spend ressources to do so. Multiplying SwD isn't subtle, but I'm guessing it's effective in provoking the desired player behavior.

*Edit : this is not at all consistent with the camp scenes system, where it's trivially easy to miss big chunks of the story. So maybe my underlying assumption is flat out wrong. Maybe Speak with Dead is just a placeholder effect for early access, which will be changed on full release.

You've already answered your own question and I agree with that:
However, since this is currently not the case, the scrolls for resurrection are superfluous. Also, the scrolls can never be used in combat, or can they? Anyway, I haven't tried it in TBM yet, is it worth reviving with 1 HP? With only four characters, there is an extremely high chance that two characters will be busy with resurrect and heal actions. Depending on the turn order, the opponent may still bludgeon or shoot your character again. A waste of actions. Two attacks would then have been the better defense to take out the opponent. This would mean using resurrection outside of frequent combat. After a fight, though, you might as well switch to camp to use Withers or, if you're not satisfied, just reload a save game.



Here I argue exactly the other way around. I'm stranded somewhere in the middle of nowhere, with corpses all around me. I don't know what happened and have a thousand questions. If I have the option to question dead people as early as possible in the game to get my bearings and find clues as to what's going on, that's good. If I have this possibility only from e. g. Act 2 it bothers me and I think to myself all the time, why was there not the possibility from the very beginning (3rd level spell). In BG 1 there was also the Ring of Wizardry near the Friendly Arm Inn. Why? Probably to support low level characters with spell slots. In BG 2, the Ring of Wizardry was found much later, because it was no longer necessary to support low level characters early with items.

Why they don't replace the Amulet of the Lost Voices with the scrolls might be due to the not too long duration? You end up finding a lot of corpses and for immersion I use it on each one too and not just the highlighted ones because I believe this is Larian home brew and not part of the original spell... So I would need dozens of scrolls because I shouldn't know when and where I'll meet the next corpse either. At least that's how it should be. The highlighting of corpses for Speak with Dead should be removed again. It's not very exploratory at the moment.

To me this screams a completionist mindset, when you try to follow a streamlined and shortest route to acquire all possible information, without exception. It basically diminishes the value of both information itself and of different ways of getting it. Because getting the needed information from source A (lets say a fresh NPC corpse) negates the value of getting it from source B (lets say a written note nearby) and can completely lock you off from source C (lets say speaking with the same NPC while it was still alive and asking more than five questions). So, I can't see how this can be 'exactly the other way around' in terms of harming replayability and exploration.


They work in combat, but are not worth it. However, there are situations, when you are pushed down the abyss and/or separated from the rest of the party. This should be exactly the rare case when you want to use the rare scroll. What good does it do for the game in terms of both challenge and immersion? If scrolls are so common, why aren't people reviving everyone just for the lulz?

Not that there's anything wrong with a completionist mindset! We're all free to play our single-player games however we like

Though I'll admit that playing and replaying BG3 early access has largely cured me of mine, and in fact changed the way I play other cRPGs. I now find I personally enjoy them much more if I don't try to do everything every playthrough but instead focus on the bits that make most roleplay sense for my current PC. Which is a bit of an embarrassing discovery to make after playing cRPGs for 20+ years, but better late than never! And of course other folks' mileage will vary.

This! I can live with that just fine. When the game finally comes out, I'll be like a sponge in a bathtub, sucking everything in and happily floating on the surface. In my defense. I am also somewhat predisposed. I played Bg 1 / 2 passionately for years, but just as long, for example, only found out years later that there is a Shadow Thief vendor at the lower right edge of the map of Waukeen's Promenade. I don't want that to happen to me again.

I agree, yet in this case this mindset makes it difficult to make an objective assessment. There is a big contradiction at play here - Lotus Noctus doesn't seem to use the resurrection scrolls and is content with the resource as a bargaining chip. It is objectively not their primary predicted function. If the knife is only good for chopping rather than cutting - it is a poor knife and it needs some sharpening to fall in line with its primary function. Same here, I am just asking for a bit of 'sharpening'.

Edit: Lotus Noctus, sorry for addressing you in a third person, our posts crossed

Agreed.

Unique class perks lose their magic and meaning when they are handed out to everyone. And the game loses a huge chunk of replayability when you can just do everything by default. Something like speaking with the dead would be so cool if it could open up a whole new world for you on a second playthrough when you have a Cleric in the party.

It's not just Speak with the Dead, either.

Rogue gameplay is nothing special when everyone can hide as a Bonus Action.

Wizards and especially Eldritch Knight Fighters are less special when every non-magic class can simply cast any spell from a scroll. Magic becomes mundane.

Being able to cast Healing Word is not important when everyone can just throw a potion for a ranged combat heal.

Larian have been actively working towards diminishing class identity and opening up everything for everyone.

Conclusion: Larian don't understand why unique abilities and restrictions make the game fun and classes cool.

Yes, I don't like the Speak with Dead amulet as well as the abundance of Speak with Animal potions. Their very existence and universal access makes picking those spells as class feature a waste. It also makes playthroughs feel unnecessarily samey - where is the reward for playing a necromancer or druid if their cool interactions are universally available to everyone?

I did pkaythough where I intentionally didn't pick those items - I didn't feel like nothing essential to the experience was missing. I hope Larian will take advantage of the sandbox they build and allow themselves to be more restrictive. It devalues all gr options they crafted if one doesn't need to invest to access them all.

That would hardly help as one only needs to cast Speak with Dead one per day - unless the item version of the spell is modified, so it cant be recast.

A popular way of doing it is charges - spells from item can cast only handful of times and they are just trinkets afterwards. Of course, it's pointless if one goes all BG on those and gives 30 casts. In my current BG1 play though poor Xan carries buttload of wands that he will never get to use 😞

I can agree about the guidance amulet, but I think Speak with the Dead really depends on how important that will be to gameplay. If it's a capability that every party will need, then every party will have to have access. Forcing party composition to that degree seems to me a larger problem than loss of class flavour. The reward to parties that provide the capability "naturally" is that all members can wear other amulets.