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

Why can't I? It's perfectly reasonable for me to comment on any aspect of the game I want. Sounds like you're looking to engage in gatekeeping.

Not really, when you haven't played the game you can't make informed comments on things like character morality.

TES6 might be good, however rumors of it being a Xbox exclusive ruins my mood, buying a console just to play 1 game seems like a waste of money, oh well... at least I now have ESO and BG3 now to scratch that itch, even if the rumors are true.

You've made claims about the game pushing you towards the evil path and Larian not wanting you to play good-aligned characters while not having experienced the game yourself? No wonder some of your takes felt so out of touch. Watching youtube videos and reading other people's opinions is no academic research, and definitely doesn't equate to first-hand experience.

Also when you say you're not going to give them a sale... Do you mean that you are not going to play the game or that you will be skipping the money part?

Larian themselves have made statements about trying to tempt players into a more evil playstyle, and I've had the EA since day 1. Now what? Going to move the goal posts and find something about my posting you don't like?

There are other ways of learning about the game than playing it..?
- Watching Panels from Hell
- Reading Larian Interviews
- Watching WolfheartFPS/etc videos on youtube
- Reading the forum discussions (this one is guaranteed to be true given kanisatha's presence here)
- Going on Reddit (explorer beware)
- Having *friends tell you about their experiences
- Being psychic
- Hacking the game and reading all of its code
- Being a Larian writer
- Making total guesses that luckily turn out to be 100% correct
- Immersing yourself into psychology so much that you can fully understand Larian employees from only seconds of interviews/their FB pages and using that knowledge to figure out what will be in the game like some kind of Sherlock Holmes
- Lying about not playing the game

*must have friends

There's a difference between tempting the player into going down a certain path and making the alternative purposefully unattractive, which is what he implies in other posts when saying stuff like:
This comes off as extremely disingenous when coming from someone who hasn't played the game. Don't you think?

I know that Larian are putting effort in making the evil path an attractive choice, I believe they also mentioned that evil playthroughs are considerably less popular, so I think it makes sense to try and make players more interested in them since they also put a lot of effort into this darker path. But I don't at all believe that this effort will mean that the good path will feel unrewarding or second to evil, it has not been my impression during EA and it wouldn't make sense for them to sacrifice the more popular choice to tip the scales in favor of going evil.

I hope this clarifies my previous post which admitedly came off as excessively confrontational.

It does clarify your point, and I understand that Kanisatha can come across as a bit fed up with the game and pessimistic.

I think if you see more of Kanisatha's post history, you'd see that while they're frustrated at where the game is currently, they very much WANT to like the game, but is more of a classical heroic type of roleplayer. Then you see things like the Dark Urge, which is the ONLY custom character origin, and it's straight up an evil wet dream. Even the redemption arc of Dark Urge has been shown to be not quite 'clean'.

Take that with early EA insistence from people that the "evil" origin companions were released first, and that we shouldn't worry, because "good" origins would be coming later, and well..we got Karlach, a tiefling with a heart of gold, but sure enough, a dark haunted past. A single "good" origin, in a sea of evil and morally grey.

All of these things have slowly driven Kanisatha cra..i mean made them frustrated with the state of the game. (I jest about the crazy part :D) I myself have had to readjust how I view the game, and I'm now trying to simply enjoy it for what it is, not for what I wish it was, and that's fine for me, but for some it's not.

My dude if someone has been bemoning a games state for 4 years and yet hasn't even played it they are here for the reactions their post provkes, they arnt here for the game itself.

There no possible way to have productive conversations with posters like this because they frankly have no idea what they are talking about.

Trying to understand where someone is coming from is always a worthwhile endeavour imo.

We don't really have alignments anymore, so most of the characters are as good or evil as you want them to be. And given the amount of effort required for each of them, I reckon Larian didn't really have much choice. It just isn't an option to have enough companions to create full good, neutral, and evil parties with room for player choices, so instead they've made it so most of the companion characters can roll both ways, depending on how you influence their story.

Karlach is good, Gale is generally good, Wyll really wants to be good (even though he isn't), Shadowheart seems to be two-sided with a capacity for good, and then there's Halsyn and Minsc and Jaheira. And I reckon Laezel might also have a wakeup moment, but we'll see how her story goes.

Who are undeniably evil? Astarion and Mintara. Shadowheart and Laezel obviously start off as "evil" because of the teachings they follow at the start of the game. Who else? Wyll is a jackass and a liar, but is he truly evil? Gale is putting everyone at risk instead of teleporting into the ocean, but again, is he truly evil?

Context matters. Some dude even said it at the last PFH. Players generally pick the good options and reject the evil options, which means all the stuff made for evil alignment sees much less use than all the stuff for good alignment.

Hence the question is, will Larian try to make it more tempting to take an evil path? And the answer is yes. They will try to tempt players. Not to take "the evil path", which implies a singular set of choices, but rather "an evil path", which means a path in which some of the choices made are morally questionable. How many and when and what is entirely up to you.

This game will set new standards in RPG world ..Act one with 507 hours in early access (sorry thats my time played without getting bored not the actual length of act 1) & Wolfheart quoted today Act 1 is approx 25% of the full game - Fexlife said that even those of us with the highest expectations on this game are already underestimating what Larian has done & he hasnt seen half the game (he hasnt seen hardly any in two days to be fair) .

How you can be an RPG/D&D fan and at this point not be out of your mind with hype is beyond me.

Yes I am clearly in the latter camp - having said that I feel im ok as ive waited thirty - thirty five years for a company to deliver a true D&D experience at this standard - and my money is firmly on this game - no I dont care if it isnt rule set perfect - rejoice people this is going to be amazing.

Same way as you can be a fan of fantasy fiction and not be a fan of all fantasy authors.

And that's fine. Tastes differ. It's when you start attacking developers for making things that are not to your taste, or attacking other people for liking things that are not to your taste that you are out of line. You can say "okay, this product is not for me" and walk away. It's when you use your personal sense of self righteous entitlement to try and spoil the fun of others that your behaviour ceases to be that of a decent human being.

The game will be amazing but I'd manage expectations on how "long" the game is in hours.
The turn base combat is very slow + cinematics dialogues everywhere inflates the playtime so I wouldn't say its 1000 hours long (for example) for a tradition RPG sense. Probably less than half of that is more in line...which is still pretty huge.

Which when you think about it makes Baldur's Gate 2 such a beast of game... it had nearly NO cinematics nor slow turn base combat yet still managed over 200 hours (my recent full playthrough). I think on my first play I must of spend over 300hours playing it back in the day in 2000...

Things aren't looking very good here either. I haven't yet had chance to look back through this thread to see what all the context is as I'm just doing a quick trawl of the forums to see what's been discussed overnight, but from this thread and the other I've just looked at it's starting to sound as though bits of it were a bit bad-tempered.

I know we're all itchy for the full release and impatient for news on the new stuff that's come out over the past few days, but hope we're not going to spend the next (only!) three weeks bickering and taking it out on each other. Let's save our criticisms, if we have them, for the game, not other forum members and if on the contrary we're positive about something say what we like about it rather than taking a dig at people who don't agree. And remember that we're all here because we care and the vast majority of us are hugely excited to play the game even if it's not absolutely everything we dreamt of.

And while I very much hope it's not needed, a reminder that if you see a post that's beyond what you think should be acceptable in a space that's intended for fun and friendly discussion of Larian's games, you don't need to argue and can just report the post or (which will get to me more quickly because of that bug with forum notifications I mentioned before) just PM me.

Be excellent to each other

So let me get this straight: If I don't pay Larian $60, I don't get to be critical of their game; if I want to be critical of their game I have to first pay them $60 for the privilege. So, whether someone likes the game or not, Larian gets their money. How very convenient for Larian.

Thank you. It's very heartening to see that there are at least some people here in this forum who are able to appreciate how it must feel for someone to very badly *want* to be able to play a D&D/BG game, who've been waiting 20+ years to play such a game, only to be presented with such a game that they find utterly poor and disappointing.

And which many other people love. No one is ENTITLED to a D&D game they like. Larian has made the right calls with regards to what is commercialy popular. If you weren't trying so hard to rain on everyone else's parade people might feel some sympathy for your disappointment. Personally, I hope you find Starfield more to your taste.

I also think it's hard to be critical of a game without playing it, before it has even been released. The theoretical features are one aspect of a game, and to be frank, I don't agree with every decision. For instance, I don't like actions being confused with bonus actions, the shove, tons of items adding random skills, or the removal of ability score prerequisites. But the experience itself needn't be bad because it's not 100 % compliant. The rules are mostly there as a guide to have fun, not as a rigid law. Yes, I'd rather have something as close as the ruleset as possible, because otherwise it's confusing, but what counts in the end is enjoying the game.

I tried the EA when it had just been released, so when there were even more deviations from the ruleset, but the result was very enjoyable. The game brings more than a ruleset to the table, and that may be enough to make up for any deviation.

I'd encourage you to give it a try, just to make sure you are not missing out on something. If you quickly see it's not good for you, you can ask for a refund. On Steam, you must request it within 14 days and before 2 hours of play, which isn't enough to get a good impression, but on GOG, you must request it within 30 days and the time spent on the game isn't mentioned. If you bypass the Galaxy launcher, they won't know how much time you've played.