Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Panel From Hell/Creator Day Impressions

Agreed, I'm very curious to see what they have for crafting. I honestly wasn't expecting anything, so this is good imo.

Right, I'm back home! Time to plough on with answering questions here.


Thank you, and yes I had a fantastic time. I think I already answered the question about stats to the best of my knowledge.

Gameplay for the little bit of the game I managed (including a grand total of 5 combats) didn't feel all that different but then it didn't have much time to.

BUT there were a couple of changes that made me MUCH more hopeful on the stealth front, which was my top hope as I generally like sneaky play and found it unplayable in EA.

First: Hide for my ranger was an Action, not a Bonus Action.

Second, every time I attacked an enemy from stealth initiative was rolled for the attacking character and they ended up out of stealth.

Third, and perhaps less significant in my book, is that though it is still possible (as we saw in the PFH) to independently stealth our party members and get in one free attack, I didn't manage in my playthrough to trigger a surprise round, so I did wonder if that might have been removed to balance the potential free attacks from each party member.

All that comes VERY heavily caveated though, as I did not have all that long to spend testing this specific thing out. It probably is still possible to cheese stealth and I'm sure someone will work out how pretty sharpish, but it looks like it might be much harder than in EA so with that plus Hide as an action, I'm now cautiously hopeful that stealth won't be unplayably cheesy for someone not actively looking for exploits.

We'll see!

Oh, and yes there are a few things I've noted that weren't shown in the PFH or might not have come across in all the chaos, and I'm happy to share. But I've not had chance to look at the rest of the forum yet. I definitely will, including Tuco's thread, but I'll work through this thread first, so if there's something specific you're interested in knowing about you might get an answer here first

Ooh, it didn't look as though we could change the starting classes of the origin characters other than The Dark Urge (for whom we can select class, race, appearance, etc), but I'm afraid I didn't actively check what we could change. Fail! I wouldn't rule changing stats either out or in, based on my memory.

And it has been confirmed that there will be no automatic party lock at the end of act 1 - it was the plan but has been abandoned. Party members might still leave at certain points if they really don't get on with you or agree with what you do, but that will be tailored to each individual companion and the story rather than a D:OS2 like mass dumping of companions at a particular point in the story.

Congrats on your invite, it must have been a lot of fun!

Did you see anything on the advertised GROUP ROLLS for checks and the party being able to interchangeably do conversation?

We must have played different game, since when i attacked from stealth, while at least single person of my party was in combat ...
Person who attacked allways skiped first round.

So i didnt exactly get free attack ...

It was more single attack on wich enemies cant respond ... i wonder if they will be able to counterspell. O_o
Bcs that would mean completely waste whole turn in exchange for nothing.

Looking around the forum, I'm sure you've noticed a small amount of discussion about the bear in the room. In PFH the audience reaction was delightful. Did you get the feeling that many in the audience had a similar strong negative reaction like many here have?

First: Hide for my ranger was an Action, not a Bonus Action.

Second, every time I attacked an enemy from stealth initiative was rolled for the attacking character and they ended up out of stealth.

Third, and perhaps less significant in my book, is that though it is still possible (as we saw in the PFH) to independently stealth our party members and get in one free attack, I didn't manage in my playthrough to trigger a surprise round, so I did wonder if that might have been removed to balance the potential free attacks from each party member.


Awesome!

So Rogue is the ruler of stealth once again.

We'll see if the company that gave us underwear will lower itself to provide a functioning crafting system.

As I mentioned in response to another question above, we seem to have a keyring, alchemy pouch and camp supply pack on us at the start of the game (actually, each party member I found had one, too). I'm assuming and hoping that keys, alchemy components and rations respectively get auto-sorted into those containers, though I confess I didn't actually test that.

There also seemed to be a torch equipment slot separate from our melee weapon slot, though again I didn't have chance to test exactly what that did.

Beyond that, nothing jumped out at me but that doesn't mean there weren't tweaks (and hopefully bug fixes!) that I didn't get chance to spot.


When I clicked to level up my (initially) Ranger halfling, there was an option at the top right to "Add Class" which I clicked then selected Rogue and got the option to pick some additional skills. If I'd had a bit more time I'd have checked to see if and how the game imposed D&D multiclassing prerequisites but by the time I got to level 2 I realised I was going to run out of time so just ploughed on!


I rested once, so didn't notice anything significant mechanically, only the aforementioned camp supply pack, the fact that the bedrolls were shown neatly rolled up during the day and there'd clearly been some prettifying of the tents and what not.

Oh, and the introduction of camp clothes, which apparently can be used out in the world as well if you choose to hide armour. (I'll admit the outfits Lae'zel and Shadowheart were wearing in the clip I saw in the morning made me blink a little. If those are the defaults I think I might need to find something different for them else I'll be fretting they'll be catching a chil In my own playthrough, I didn't even stop to notice.)

One more thing that I'm not sure is significant. I never found any food, and only seemed to have supply packs. I didn't stop to loot, and do recall Swen mentioning a vendor having a potato for sale in the morning presentation, so I'm not sure how significant that is. I could easily have not picked up any food even in EA if I'd played the way I did yesterday, but I'm hoping at least some is still there. I'd happily forego supply packs, but I quite liked the variety of food stuffs!

Oh, and so I must have seen a vendor in the morning demo, though not in my playthrough, but apologies I didn't take in whether it looked any different.

I do also want to talk about what I noticed about companion conversation triggers, which we saw in EA as heavily linked to camping and resting, but I'll not go into that now, in case someone has asked specifically about that later.

Aargh!!!

This was an epic fail on my part, as getting the party more involved in conversations is one of my top asks, but I simply don't know. It was on my list to check but with one thing and another I didn't.

Nothing obvious jumped out at me as different in the conversations, but then I didn't actively look for it either. I wish I had!

Hah! No, I believe the redhead you're referring to is the lovely Knightenator. I left the front rows to those who appear on the internet for a living, or at least a serious hobby, and took up a strategic position half way towards the back in the room. It's possible you might have been able to make me out, but in the only still I've seen so far the resolution is so poor that even I'm not sure which featureless blob is me.


Yes, Swen was really trying to encourage the attendees to try The Dark Urge in their playthroughs. I didn't as I knew I'd be bashing through the conversations trying to get to see as much as possible (which I did, so am slightly puzzled how I still managed not to see so much of what I was interested in), but at least one other person I spoke to did and said they were impressed. I'll definitely be trying the Urge at some point (possibly twice, both resisting and submitting), but like you it won't be my first playthrough.

OMG this is HUGE!! YES!!! I won a bet!

I didn't see utility cantrips, but then I didn't look at any places they might be, sorry Lotus Noctus. Nothing to confirm or deny on that front.

Variant Human no, but then it did look as I noted before that all races get a configurable +2 and +1 to ability scores. I'm kicking myself for not checking to see what, if anything, humans got as well as that. I kind of feel they should get something, given that in EA they don't have any racial abilities, just the +1 to each attribute. But then giving them a free feat might be overpowered as I think VH just has +1 to two attributes? We might need to wait and see on this one.

I didn't see any way of exporting/importing our characters, but again I didn't specifically look. Swen did happen to mention in response to a question in the morning presentation that characters from one campaign couldn't be imported into another, but that's slightly different.

With respect to custom party from the start, I get the sense that the official plan for a custom party is via hirelings, and that these will be picked up later. We assume from Withers based on prior information received, though I didn't see any of that either in a demo or my own game where I didn't have time to go find Withers. Swen did mention that hirelings were customisable, though.

There's one more thing I saw that might be relevant here. In the demo in the morning, at one point Swen fired up split screen co-op part way through the game, picked up a second controller and created a custom character on the fly and then had them join the party (bumping one of the three AI companions). He then exited the split screen, and the second custom character was left in the party of the original player. I did kind of get the sense that something didn't go as planned in all that, though, and he ended up reloading, so I wouldn't depend on that as a way of sneaking additional custom characters into the game rather than using hirelings.

Sounds very disappointing so far, but thank you for your insight.

Having a dark urge(:P) to ask some questions myself :o

I don't expect you'll be able to answer, but still, i have to try :P

First, congrats for the invite, hope you had a great time :3

1) Can Dragonborn wear helmets? I mean, we saw one with a hood, but actual armored helmets? Been wondering about that

2) Is pact of the blade lock in the game? did you notice anything in char creation, or after encountering Wyll?

3) I have to ask this again, sorry :P, did you see any plate armor models that were, ehm, "complete"? Like, matching armor and boots for example, that didn't look wrong for the armor? I keep seeing mismatches and gaps between legs and boots, it's becoming an obsession :P

I don't think that you would notice it, since your character doesn't wear plate, but still :3

Cheers

So it may be possible to replace a custom party member in a multiplayer run with a new player with their own character! Wow, another huge deal.

Since Red Queen told us she was only level 2 ... and pact boon is level 3 feature ...
And Since she told us she barely made it to the Groove ... and Groove is where you meet wyll ...

I would take the liberty to guess she have no idea.

She looked so fricking cool! I can't recall if there were any new female halfling heads (there was the odd new head I noticed for some races/genders), but the one I used was available in EA. It was one I didn't particularly like, but by the time it was aged up, scarred, with one eye a different colour than the other and one of the cool new hairdos (there aren't a lot of new ones, but there are a few) she looked really badass and quite different.

I wouldn't swear to anything on the proportions, and would need to see them side by side, but they seemed better. Certainly I didn't feel that the female halfling heads/faces were so oddly huge or their legs out of proportion to their bodies or their stance quite as unnatural. But I wouldn't totally swear that I wasn't just misremembering how bad they were. Or getting distracted by all the fancy new features available.

I also had a quick look at male dwarves, which was the other race/gender combo I thought was really oddly proportioned in EA, and I thought their chests might be looking slightly less overinflated. They still had ridiculously huge hands though!

I was trying not to get stuck in character creation for the whole time I was there, so confess I didn't check this out and just used her default hair. But overall, I think the colours did look better in the build in EA, and I certainly didn't see any of that weird almost whiteout stuff that started happening in the prologue in patch 9 so I'm going to keep my fingers crossed that the hair colours will be better again as well.


I'll bundle these together, and you're going to be so disappointed in me

So, first of all, as a chooseable action, I only saw Sneak Attack as a main hand attack.

BUT it was there (as was Sneak Attack critical) in the reaction system. But due to a combo of the difficulty of getting advantage on attacks given aforementioned tweaks to stealth and flat out user error (I'd ticked "Ask" but not the separate tick to activate the reaction as a whole) I wasn't able to check whether the Sneak Attack damage would apply on an off-hand hit, and ran out of time just as I was trying to get this working. And because I was so busy trying to check it with the off hand I didn't even verify it with the main hand. (As I'd taken my rogue level second, I only had one combat to try this in.)

I'm afraid I'm going to have to leave you with the cliffhanger. Looks like the mechanic is there that could apply sneak attack damage on off hand attacks and AOOs, but I can't verify that it in fact does!

Oops i missed that. I don't know, maybe in the character creation of warlock it tells you what awaits down the road :P

Yeah fat chance of that but oh well :3