Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General A Shocking Experience

Hi, I am one of the many waiting impatiently for 3rd of August. In order to pass the time, and because nothing interesting was going on in this forum at the time I went to the Steam BG3 forum to see what was happening over there. It was my first time on Steam chat forum.

At first glance it seemed to be much like this forum, but the more I read the more threads I found with people complaining in a weird and childish way that the game generally just sucked. Well complaining is ok I guess, depending how you do it, but starting out with saying you don't like d&d is kind of weird since it is kind of a founding idea behind the game that it is a d&d game. It is like going to a furniture store and loudly starting to complain about why that chair is not a table when in fact you came there to buy a table. In the end I couldn't hold back and decided to start a thread asking for a little respect towards the community as a whole instead of just bursting unfiltered malice out over everybody.

That was a grave mistake. Yeah some people agreed and told me this was a forum where that kind of posting flourished, but most posts was just a shitstorm towards me, accusing me for daring to limit their right to complain. They also gave me the 'customer is always right' speech. I tried to confront their argumentation, but what I got back was just pure hostility, and nobody listened to arguments. In the end I had to leave the thread for the sake of my own mental health. It then occured to me that what I had been subject to was nothing less than psychic violence.

Is this a normal way to behave on the internet? I don't see it here, nothing like what I experience on the Steam forum, so I guess it is also a question of what is allowed by the moderators. Why is this not moderated on the Steam forum? And what makes a person decide he wants to go on the internet to make silly complaints and trash everybody who dares speak up against him?

To be clear, I am not against giving critique, that is part of what these forums are for, nor do I want to generally limit peoples freedom of speech. But just because you are allowed to say anything that comes to mind doesn't mean that you should. I guess I am mostly defending my own right to say something without getting attacked by an angry mob. Can anyone explain to me why this occurs, or do you have any comments about this? Please if you answer to this keep it civil, don't want this thread to turn into an emotional fight where people just throw insults at each other.


Update: Thank you very much for your comments so far. Please keep commenting those who want to, I'm reading it all

There are some contrairians here that have posted for years about how bad they feel the game is, literally spending a significant portion of their lives on it, even insulting the dev team at points.

Typically if someone doesn't like a game they dont follow and post on it for years.

All we can really do is stay civil and report them when they are especially egregious

In short, i agree with you... attack peoples arguments, but never the person behind the argument... and if you are going to critique something, state why... and no not all of internet is like this, but there is sess pits on the net like reddit, and it tends to leak over to other forums, and Reddit has fostered a shit posting mentality, where its more important to down vote away peoples arguments regardless if their right or wrong... its really something awfull !

And welcome to the forum, sorry you had to vade into this ;P...

Sadly that kind of behavior is fairly common in some parts of the internet. But fortunately the ones behaving like that are a very small minority. If you look at the game on steam it has a "Very Positive" rating from both all time reviews and recent reviews. The best thing you can do is just not engage with the toxic people.

In fairness, a lot of criticism is from people who love dnd so much they are criticizing the many changes from dnd. A lot of meanness are those who belittle those who actually like dnd and want the game to keep at least the option to be as close to dnd as possible. Makes sense because it is a dnd game.

For the record, I think bg3 will be fun just like both DOS games, but it is far from perfect.

Asking for things to be as close to dnd as possible or at least optionally (like rolling for stats and HP), heavy armour affecting weight/strength requirements, et al. is not hating dnd.


And, the internet is the internet. People love giving opions but hate listening to others.

We all have likes and dislikes.

Ultimately, Larian will make the game they choose to make, and we all decide if we like it or not. I like DOS1 and DOS2 even though I have criticisms of them, but they were ultimately reasonably enjoyable. That's okay.

I think there's a lot of young people on Steam, while a place like this only appeals to old people, so the discussion cultures are quite different.

From your post, I get the impression that maybe you didn't "read the room" very well over there...

I find the Steam forums extremly toxic tbh. They are beyond normal discussions and apart from being unkind, there is a lot of racism, sexism, homophobia and the likes going on. I guess, there are not enough moderators maybe.

Steam forums are legendary for their toxicity. Different communities foster different cultures based around how strictly they are moderated. There we a few dedicated contrarians here, but the volunteer moderators do a good job at keeping this place far more pleasant than most. If anybody becomes enough of a problem, they get banned. If you want to talk to people who are excited about the gaming in ways that are more meaningful than Reddit, this is a good spot to land.

Plus these forums are laggy and broken, so that tends to keep away the people who just want to shit post constantly to get the dopamine rush.

The quality of posts, for any game really, seems to be: developer > reddit > everywhere else >>>>> steam. A lot of people are shitposting just to stirr up reactions and trigger people. It's not my kind of fun, but it quite obviously is someone kind of fun. Outrage is comedy gold for a lot of people.

There are multiple reasons for the Steam forum toxicity. The barrier of entry is super low, you can post as long as you have a Steam account (which is prettty much everyone). You can also earn points when someone grant you an "award", that you can use in a shop for Steam profile assets. That led to what is called "clown farming" where people are posting the most silly things just to earn as much clown reactions as possible. The moderation pretty much doesn't exist there too, so outrage threads can last for months before being locked.
If you like a video game, the Steam forums really isn't worth your time.

I don’t think I ever witnessed a sensible conversation on Steam forums. I dipped every once in a while, but tend to stay away from those, unless devs hang out there. There is also bunch of people just fishing for clown steam awards for points, intentionally making stupid threads and replies.

Welcome on the internet, darling.

Yes, it often sucks ...
But that is just how it is.

*Obi-Wan voice* The steam foums... you will not find a greater hive of scum and villainy.

Dammit! Our cunning plan has been rumbled! (If only ).

Seriously, though, I think the trouble is that it only takes a relatively small number of people who just want to share their own opinions and don't want constructive debate, and are okay with upsetting and offending others, to make an online space feel hostile to hundreds if not thousands of people. And as Steam is a hell of a lot busier than here, even if the proportions of anti-social posters aren't greater, it can feel a lot worse. I don't often check Steam, but when I do see people post toxic stuff there I also often see plenty of good challenge to them from other users, but unfortunately that doesn't remove the bad taste from having read it in the first place.

Unless the forums completely keel over and die (which frankly I'm not ruling out as they've been so temperamental lately) we can expect it to get busier here around the release of the game, and I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't nervous that we'll see more unpleasant stuff pop up here as well, in addition to the new contributors with different and interesting perspectives that I'm looking forward to. But we might have to fight harder than usual to keep our small, quiet backwater of the internet civil and safe for everyone.

So I'll just put in my moderator plug and say that part of that is not being shy about PM-ing me or reporting posts that you think cross the line. There is no need to suffer in silence, and even if I end up not agreeing that a post is bad enough to warrant moderator action it helps me hugely to understand how people are feeling and reacting to posts, even when (often quite rightly) they're not publicly engaging with them.

The Mods here do a really good job of heading off threads that start to get abusive or are hateful. They also preemptively remind people to be civil - and draw the line at direct insults.

I have a member of my guild that purposely goes to the Steam forums to troll and "start shit" - he does it to let off steam. I think a lot of people do honestly. There is very little moderation there. It's like the Barrens in vanilla WoW.

He has never tried anything like that on my Discord so I don't have cause to do anything and he is not an admin anyway.

At the end of the day I think its unhealthy to expose yourself to places like the Steam Forums where negativity thrives, but it's worse for the people who post there because they are essentially de-socializing themselves.

Any relationship counselor will tell you that the key to having friends and relationship partners is to practice respect, practice love, practice kindness.

Welcome to the Forums.

I don't mind the shit talking on Steam or elsewhere.
My formative internet years were on forums where men were men, the women were also men, and the children were the FBI ...

I for one am very pleased that it is now acknowledged by many that the widespread casual cruelty, racism, homophobia, and misogyny of early internet was actually pretty fucked up.

Okay, I chuckled lol.

Steam is great because there are no upvotes/downvotes, no strict moderation for the most part, it's just unfiltered thoughts about what people are thinking on the game. The big AAA forums often get pretty bad, and the bear sex thing set the alt-right and trolls off for sure, but normally it's nothing so extreme. Smaller games have great forums, with good discussions all the time. You're simply used to a very controlled internet experience.

I have to laugh at people saying reddit is a source of high quality discussion though. Take a look at the current front page and it's 'meme, meme, meme, meme, "wow, positive sub reddit!", "best game ever", meme, meme, meme, etc' There's little discussion to be had, it's just low effort positivity.

To the OP: do not take the forum discussions too seriously. Some people are just trolls, others try to persuade the world in their point of view, third... all kind of people there. The steam forums vary greatly from title to title... My advice is concentrate on things you like to discuss and just ignore everything else. There are plenty of decent people there... it's just that some of the others are louder.