Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Suggestion - Larian, give us the option to go back to the old rules for Racial ASI and multiclassing

With the announcements made about the rule alterations during the PfH and afterwards, I must say I've gotten quite skeptical.

Removing racial ability bonuses and instead allowing to freely distribute a +2 and a +1 to whatever you feel like basically makes an already shoddy system fall apart even more and takes away whatever nuance and complexity there used to be. You no longer need to weigh pros and cons when designing your character - like how you can pick a shield dwarf for a wizard and get those free proficiencies while being less optimized statistics-wise. Now you can have both those proficiencies AND have a +2 to Intelligence, so what seems like "yay freedom" is actually making choice less meaningful and impactful and streamlines character-making to a point of being much too dumbed down, even for 5e.

It also makes some choices not only meaningless but downright harmful - like how there's no freaking reason whatsoever from any standpoint, be that role-playing or min-maxing or aesthetics, to pick a human. Before you could at least make an all-rounder with +1 to every ability, but now it's not only the most boring race as far as potential unique interactions go, but also the most useless - no darkvision, very awkward proficiencies, no identity. It's specifically racial identity, that was partially defined by the AS increases, that is now missing. Not to mention that, from a perspective of basic common sense, a dwarf with their physique will never be quite as agile as an elf, for example - they're just built different (literally, what with how the dwarves were effectively made by Moradin). The bonuses reflected the, you know, genetic advantages - as much as that applies to fantasy - that the races had because of their developmental background.

Half-elves too are now just worse elves, because they miss out on weapon proficiencies and perception while offering no unique bonus of their own, with wood elves effectively becoming worse deep gnomes (the same stealth proficiency and now the same ability choice, but inferior darkvision). Tradeoffs and choices potentially suboptimal on some scale but powerful in some other aspect are what makes character-building fun, and when you distill it to being a piecemeal buffet, it feels like admitting defeat when it comes to setting rules and restrictions. I know that the "just use mods" arguments will likely get used by the defenders of this direction - to which I can only reply with the same point, except it's one thing when the game is competently designed and balanced and you use mods to whack it up, and another when mods are needed to fix obvious shortcomings. Playing chess where you can arbitrarily assign rules to pieces is not the point of playing chess, or whatever other allegory fits here.

As for the multiclassing, it's again the balancing issue. I hope it was a misnomer and a misunderstanding, because the whole point of multiclassing is intentionally throttling the usual progression of a character to get advantages they otherwise don't get - again, a tradeoff that requires planning and thinking. When you don't need to plan and think, the game's value as something to think about and rub a braincell or two together for plummets down.

So wouldn't it be for the good of everyone involved to have all these changes be an optional difficulty customization setting or something? This way both the people looking for at least a semblance of a competently put-together and engaging system can have what they want, and people who have seemingly only heard about the game now thanks to the stunt Larian pulled can have their experience where they can make no wrong or suboptimal decision unless they really, really try. Which, by itself, means there's no value to a decision in the first place, then.