Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General I think I'm giving up on Larian

No gonna argue Diablo, but rest is just opinion.
Story and gameplay separation. In this case optional. If people want to make/change character like that they can, narrative wont change around them tho.

A part of narrative cohesion and intricacies around reactivity is around what race, attributes and class that your companions are. If you can will-nilly change that it absolutely diminishes the depth to the story. It's a ridiculous notion to believe this doesn't matter and I hardly believe Larian has decided to make decision-trees around the 50000 different possibilities you can set-up your party if these factors are also interchangeable.

When I say that your mentality is what destroys the legacy of franchises, why for example everyone really cares about the fact that this is called Baldur's Gate 3 and not New-Larian-RPG, is precisely about this sort of stuff.

Thank god for mods...

It really looks like I'll have to wait with playing until the modders get their mods out and hopefully one of them is a core rules mod that aims to be as close to RAW as possible.

Regarding D&D 5.5 next year: From the looks of it, I'm done with D&D entirely. I'll just stick to my AD&D 1st and 2nd edition books.

Yes, we expect Withers to let us respec our party, but I didn't hear Wolfheart say anything about letting Withers change origin companion starting classes. If that's the only place that's coming from, I suspect it's a misunderstanding, especially as Wolfheart said he didn't have time to find Withers.

Being able to change custom Tav starting class is one thing - it's not something I would ever want to do, but at least this is just changing something we were able to specify in the beginning anyway - but in the build I saw we weren't even able to update origin classes (other than The Dark Urge) at character creation so it sounds bizarre that we could do it later, or for origins as companions.

But if there's another source, I'll take it more seriously?

I get what you're getting at, I think, but respectfully this is just a bad take imo. For three years Larian's been constantly promoting what astoundingly deep choice & consequence we can expect from their game, how much reactivity they're implementing, how many unique interactions and dialogue options there will be depending on your race and class, all to make the game respond organically to the character you choose to play. What's it all for if I can change my decisions on a whim? Whether my character is a tiefling druid or a dwarf cleric of Tyr reflects their background, their past, their entire life.

It's the commitment to your choices that gives them weight and value. Removing that commitment absolutely also cheapens the choice absolutely.

Commitment is so last millenium. Today entitlement rules and getting everything you want, whenever you want with no tradeoffs or consequences.

Many design decisions both in BG3 and D&D 5E can be traced to that.

It would make no sense if you can change the race/class of your companions? I mean how do they even design reactivity/story around that possibility? It would simply be impossible. So much depth would be lost in that case.

I mean, the same can be said if your own character can go from being a human lvl 1-5 and then suddenly be a tiefling. There is absolutely no way the game is designed to react to those changes.

Well said. Having an opportunity to respec on a whim feels like having an access to a debug room. I don't want to feel like I am a playtester with the sole purpose of stretching the possibilities of the game in one playthrough. I also think that they shot themselves in the leg with this change, because it very much affects the replayability of the game. Why would you try different tropes throughout several playthroughs, when can respect your whole background, class and race after every level up? Need a baldurian tag for your drow? Switch races and you are all set. This sounds terrible to me, yet still the most concerning thing is them being so silent about it and then dropping this changes out of nowhere and acting like if they were long expected.

That is sadly very true and the new DnD ruleset sounds awful. I mean I play a DnD First edition campaign atm and that is very limiting and unforgiving, but it makes you think of new strategies to come out of a fight with your whopping 4 hitpoints. I think 5 e gave a lot of freedom of choice without taking away the challenge, but it sounds, as if it will get watered down with the next edition, which brings me back to agreeing your statement.

Can't remember 100% but the mirror, in DoS2, only allowed you to change stats and appearance not race. So i kinda expect the same for BG3.


Sure i agree with you 100% when it comes to narrative, choices should be permanent and meaningful. But for gameplay, being stuck with a broken build is a game killer for me. I don't want to start a new game just to fix a build mistake.

Yeah, look - I'm not a fan of these things either. But some things are just not for me. Likewise, I'll not be straying from racial bonuses; I'll never touch exploration difficulty or give my characters custom genitals and weird pronouns. I'll also never play a Warlock or Custom Githyanki at all and none of my characters will have purple hair. It's all just not to my taste. And that's fine, I don't have to. Doesn't mean someone else should have trouble with that.

I can imagine that if you only have a a few hours or so a week to play, and you're halfway through after nine weeks - you might want to trade your feat or something. I get it. Can it be abused? Sure. Can it be ignored? Sure. It's not like it's a competitive game or anything; let people enjoy it how they want.

You might not, but the NPCs and companions might.
You cant escape it.

When you argued for 6-ppl party you literally said the opposite. So more options are good when they give you something *you* want, but bad when they give something you dont want?

No he didn't mention companions in the video, sorry for being unclear, but in his pinned comment on the original age restricted video he wrote that he confirmed from two sources that you should be able to respec companions too.

I'm ok with respecing stats/ levels for the player character, maybe you decide along the way, that your warlock fits better with Pact of Tome instead of Pact of Blade or so. I'm concerned about changing race/class etc. alltogether. That would be too interrupting for me.

This is something I'm agnostic on. I'll admit I probably did abuse respec-ing in Pathfinder WotR, but on the other hand it was my first playthrough and I don't really know the system so the alternative would have been living with some mistakes I'd made constantly being annoyed I'd not made a different choice, or reloading from way, way earlier in the game. I definitely see respecing as the lesser of those evils. Though I wish WotR had given me an additional option to just relevel rather than completely redesign my character, as after the first retry I was happy with them at level 1 and it was tedious having to do the whole character creation again every time. Though I suppose it was a bit of a disincentive to respecing, so perhaps it was intended.

I'll wait and see how BG3 handles it. It's not a feature I'd probably be clamouring for if it weren't there, but on the other hand I find it hard to see having the opportunity to fix mistakes as a bad thing, especially in single player and while I get to grips with the ruleset.

No, I didn't.
You were just poor at understanding the point back then as you apparently are now.

Not all "options" are created equal, anyway.
Being able to manage a larger party incidentally DOES NOT conflict with the existing rules, it doesn't remove long term commitment from your choices, it doesn't fundamentally alter the progression curve for each character.

I'd say it's baffling that you don't grasp the difference, but then again I'd be lying if I claimed to be particularly surprised by it.

Okay, so I'd assume that means that you can respec them from level 1 (or possibly the level we meet them at if it's higher), rather than that we can redesign them from scratch.

I'm going to continue working on that assumption unless and until we get something more concrete suggesting that we can make changes at respec that we can't even at character creation, and keep my fingers crossed that that part of the concern at least is a false alarm!

I think divinity only let you change the stats and appereance at the mirror not race or origin tags. Probably gonna be the same here.

I apologise, but it's obvious that the ability to change race and class of companions is nonsense, and it's not in BG 3. It's not said trivially anywhere but in this thread, there's no confirmation of it. Moreover, we have Queen saying that companions can't change their appearance or class, which is logical. Shedowheart can't be anything other than a Cleric, and Will can't be anything other than a Warlock. They can be multiclassed at the player's discretion from level 2, and that's exactly what would definitely be changeable: characterisation distribution, classes after the first, spell set. Basically, anything that doesn't define the character as such.

Characters already have lines where they refer to each other's races, Laezel's story is literally tied to her being a githyanki.

Please stop panicking and spouting nonsense taken literally out of nowhere.