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

I played on core. Was having a good time with the party i had. Then i reach the cancer threshold and get demolished first fight there. No matter how much i micro, the spells i use, the buffs i cast. Toyboxed a respec and rebuild the entire party with builds from the internet. Boom easy.

I agree its pretty ambiguous and not something I would get worked up over until there are firm details or we have played it. One of the problems with multiclassing is that there are very fixed levels where it is optimal to progress to until multiclassing and with levels 1-12 over 100-200 hours I can imagine that they didn't want casual players to be super punished for not doing optimal level progressions. I can see them doing things like pooling 'warrior' levels so that multiclasses get extra attack faster if they level up each class 1 at a time (rather than knowing that it is best to get to level 5 then multiclass etc).

With the original character respec I really, really doubt you can change their class or stats. I suspect one of the reasons that the multiclass ability restrictions were removed was so that you could actually multiclass origin characters even though they may not quite have the stats to do so.

Oh my god, it has NOTHING to do with Larian's selling point, he was talking about SYSTEMIC design. Systemic design doesn't care about who wants what, it is set there in place in order to make systems work and create a fair and balanced experience. What they did is said: "Well, we are leaving big holes in our systems so that you can abuse them to feel good, and if it makes you feel bad, you can avoid abusing them and become a system designer yourself". This is so lazy, they made a poor system, disguised it with freedom of choice and then crashed it on top of every EA players' head. EA players are people who made this game possible at this scale in the first place and they played a COMPLETELY different game which is likely going to be substituted with some casual bs.

All of this does not apply if the news prove to be false.

Let's say I'm new to all this D&D malarchy with it's classes and feats and who knows what.

I create a fighter gather my party, save, and take on the Blighted Village. Not bad but what if . . . so I roll back to the save, respec to a sorcerer, gather my party and take on the Blighted Village. I can rinse and repeat that to my heart's content until I'm happy that I have a decent idea of what I want or need. A lot handier than scouring the web reading various people's opinion about this or that aspect.

As for the Larian or BG junkies. They could do something similar to experience all the dialogue options or whatever.

Or, shock-horror revelation, people who have no wish to respec can just ignore it.

I also started on core. That character had no exotic builds but also wasn't optimized either and I had to leave several encounters for later like playful darkness.
Still finished the game.

While I also would prefer WotR's respec to be a level 1 reset button rather than a full character redesign, I do feel it is appropriately punishing for wanting to retcon. To a degree it encourages you to stick with your choices while still allowing people not to. I just wanted to change my portrait and regretted one early feat selection, so doing an entire redesign almost wasn't worth it. I imagine min-maxing meta players doesn't enjoy the process any more than I did.

If BG3 also gets this full rewriting of characters at any time without any cost it's silly though. Come across a situation where being drow will let you bypass it? Quickload, warp to camp, change to drow, pop back out. A battle seems like it will really benefit from some more cloudkills? Warp to camp change to wizard, pop back out.

I agree with what a lot of Tuco is saying. I do think there is a certain level of being willingly ignorant of exploits in a game. For example I didn't use 'barrellmancy' or 'removing a party member' from combat in DOS2 because they just seemed like unintended exploits to me that weren't fun, nor were they really intended to be used in that way.

But I think the best example Tuco gave is with the Headband of Intellect. The obviously optimal thing to do whenever you get it would be to go to respec, set int to 8, buff up your other ability scores and go on your way. Then if you find The Belt of Dexterity or whatever the obvious thing to do is to go respec again and set int and dex to 8, then buff everything else up.

This strikes me as bad game design on two fronts:

1. It goes away from what makes classes and ability scores those things to begin with. A wizard should have (or desire) high intelligence, they shouldn't just have high intelligence because they found a cap. Or they shouldn't suddenly become a low intellect individual just because they found a cap (which will then magically make them a high intellect individual again) and want to wear it to get stronger in other areas. They shouldn't then randomly become naturally intelligent again when they find a different cap they want to wear besides the one that gives you high intelligence just by wearing it.

2. How can they possibly balance around something as obvious as what is listed above? In Exploration/Story Mode I don't think it matters. People playing that difficulty obviously do not care much anyways and do not want combat, skill checks, etc. to be a challenge anyways. In core or normal mode perhaps there will be enough casual players where they do not connect the dots to do this kind of stuff - but it seems like you could turn the normal difficulty into Exploration/Story mode rather easily by doing these types of things.

But then on the highest difficulty you know people are going to min/max... and Larian in the PFH said if that difficulty is punishing you, then it is your fault... not their fault. So are they going to factor in repeatedly respec'ing into the highest difficulty level to balance it? Are they factoring in these new multiclassing changes and will multiclassing be required/essential because it by default makes you significantly better because they removed any drawbacks from it? If so - that doesn't seem like this stuff is optional at all and that doesn't seem fun at all. If not - then isn't the hardest difficulty mode just going to be made rather easy for min/max players because they are obviously going to min/max if they are playing this difficulty level?

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This is to say... there are good ways to implement respec and bad ones. Just flippantly being able to do it without any penalty or cost seems bad, at least at a certain level or on certain difficulty levels.

Exploration Mode - You want to respec whenever? Fine, who cares.
Normal Mode - You want to respec whenever? No. You can respec for free until you hit level five, after that you have to purchase "TEH ORB OF PERSONAL RECONSTRUCTION!!11!!1" for $50,000 gold (or whatever steep price there is) in some Baldur's Gate shop and there are only a limited amount of them available.
Tactician Mode - You lose the ability to respec all together.

Even in DOS2 there seemed to be some level of cost associated with respec. It wasn't directly tied to the act itself, but you would have to go and buy all new skill books... and potentially buy all new gear if you completely changed the make up and build of your character.

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DOS2 and the origins/companions were also different than BG3.

Wyll makes almost no sense as anything but a Warlock.
Gale makes almost no sense as anything but a Wizard.
Shadowheart's description on the main website is literally "Cleric" and her opening line is "devoted Cleric of Shar".

I do think Astarian, Lae'Zel and Karlach could be somewhat class agnostic. Though Karlach's heart machine thing seems to tie directly into a special berserk and stuff like that. Which is to say... I did not associate any class with any of the DOS2 characters when I met them. With these characters I do and I did when I first met them in the game without knowing a ton about them ahead of time.

I also have no problem with being able to change origin character appearance in character creation if you are going to play as them - that seems like a good feature to me. But being able to completely change who they are when they are a companion seems... not good. Giving them some new clothes, a new haircut or getting them some piercings? That seems cool. Completely altering them into an entirely different looking and functioning person just seems... meh.

Can you explain why this is bad, apart that you don't like it?

I played the EA, i see no problem with these changes. Respec is kinda standard thing these days. If people want to respec every fight let them. If people want to abuse system they will and no one can stop them. On other hand these changes will help new players from screwing up and having to restart the game if they don't like the class they picked or want to try something else. IWhile i don't really care about changes race of the characters, i doubt Larian will give that option. Most likely it will be just class, stats, and feats for Tav and stats and feats for Origin characters.

Who would respec ? It’s an rpg you play your character from start to finish - optimised poorly or perfectly - it’s more challenging if it’s not perfect but that’s life - make the best of the situation & do the best you can - no character is perfect.

That’s me the rpg player not the power gaming min max look at my perfect build gamer - that’s not d&d - that’s a whole other thing…

Play your character as is no respec.

You know what would make respec better? Being tied to a very limited resource. Why not require soul coins for it? As far as I know those are very rare and are given as a reward for special occasions. Elden ring also has respec, and it was tied to larval tears which are very rare consumables, it was a good compromise.

Something like this would also work.

Aren't Tuco's chess analogy and button analogy good enough an explanation? I think those were well put (even if seemingly a bit emotional) and I really don't want to repeat if reading through them again more thoughtfully can suffice. Pls consider reading through once more, then pls let me know if those are completely alien for you to understand, then I'll try to come up with my one examples.

Yes, you CAN. You don't have to, but now you have the ability to.

I don't get this thread, so many faces here that were screaming "choice!" in some of the mega-threads and when Larian gives us a choice (albeit in a different thing, that might have something to do with it "why are THEY getting shinies and not US?" mentality and all that) it's suddenly bad?

At it's core it is a single player game, and saying it will make multiplayer unbearable because people will want to respec mid game...well, find people that like to play your way, it should be obvious in a RPG.

Also to all hardcore D&D fun-killers here - remember that this game might be the first contact with D&D for some people, if they get into it they'll learn the rules themselves and not ruin your single player experience any more...

You mean the SYSTEMIC [sic] design of a game built from the ground up to provide choice? Your washing machine gives you choice but there is nothing in its design to stop you abusing those choices - you can still choose to put colours in with your whites.

"What they did is said: Well, we are leaving big holes in our systems so that you can abuse them to feel good, and if it makes you feel bad, you can avoid abusing them and become a system designer yourself". Did they? Did they really?

So what if the people who played EA played a COMPLETELY [sic] different game? Firstly they didn't all play the game the same way and secondly, these alleged features weren't in EA so they weren't there for people to use or to get hysterical about.

And your quoting has gotten out of kilter. It was me who wrote that not BiasWINS

Let may say this, I'm not a hardcore DnD fan. I played BG1 25 years ago and I loved it. The main thing I remember from BG1 was the stat rolling from character creation. It was something unique and fun. I wanted to experience that feeling again after 25 years, but no, Larian decided that it is too much to have.

Instead Larian is giving me all these other things that make the game way too lenient and easy. What I liked about DnD was the strict rules that you have to abide. Now this game feels like some RPG that is designed to children, to make them feel good about easy gameplay and no hard strict rules to follow.

I'm not much of a gamer myself, I just wanted to experience that Baldur's Gate nostalgia gain after 25 years, but it seems that this is not what I'm getting.

The same people who screamed for the ASI change. Because to them a character is only worth playing when its minmaxed with the optimal attribute distribution and everything perfectly planned.

That attitude is pure toxicity, especially in PnP RPGs, but sadly the one that is catered to.

No. The thing is if people want to play like that, they can. If you don't like it then that is fine too. You don't have to play it or like it, but you can't take that choice from other people.


Also Mr. Hardcore, as previously stated, i played the game in EA too. and i welcome the changes as they make BG3 accessible to more people. So stop the gatekeeping.

I think at times it can be best to use extremes in order to drive a point home as to what people are saying.

Let's say you run into an NPC who is rather bad early in the game and easy to kill. You can either talk to them or kill them, but either way they will either give you or have 'THE CAP OF AWESOMENESS!' on their corpse. 'THE CAP OF AWESOMENESS!' sets all of your ability scores to 100, gives you every spell in the game and makes you have a million hit points. Is this good game design?

What is you run into other characters that drop the belt of awesomeness, sword of awesomeness, etc. And some of them set your ability scores to 30, some others set them to 50... but they overall all make you absurdly powerful. Is that good game design?

After all - you could just choose not to use these absurdly powerful items that are dropping all over the place... right?

The balance of a game matters and it is definitely part of the fun. It can be a tricky thing to get right because people are going to have different opinions on it. But I don't think this is a 'choice' thing. They are making these (total respec, multiclassing) fundamental parts (systems) of the game that will be presented to everyone to use. So they should at least try to make them balanced and make sense, even if it is a single-player game.

Yes, they did, lol, and you were just recently pressing those points yourself, remember, along with some others? Something along the lines of "If you don't like it, self-restrict yourself and don't use it?". Seems like a damn job to me, rather than entertainment. Like doing the chores at other person's home in order to get tipped a dollar in the end and still not be happy, because someone got tipped 10 for nothing.

@Vitani - The issues discussed in this thread aren't just about respec - look at the original post. It's also about other claimed broken /unbalanced changes - which are not part of D&D 5e and don't need to be there. If there is no option to disable these, if they are designed into the game, this will definitely impact the experience for those of use who want a 5e BG3.

This could all have been addressed by a "core rules" mode vs "Larian" mode. Then everyone would be happy (well, probably). This was suggested multiple times - and was supported in the older BG games.