Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Will BG3 incentivize a “kill everyone” playstyle too much?

I am asking this question because I have been playing DOS2. And while that game has mechanisms that incentivize a “just kill everyone” playstyle that BG3 will not have, I see enough similarities that it is a cause for concern. My observations:

Encounter design
It appears that every single encounter with a sizeable group of people of uncertain disposition is carefully designed to put you in a very disadvantageous position should you decide to talk to them and the encounter turns into a fight. As a result, you think twice before you talk to people of uncertain disposition, and may avoid it entirely if it seems likely it will end in a fight. Sometimes, this seems reasonable – after all, if you talked and sneaked your way into the Goblin Camp you’d be well advised not to speak to their leaders. However, in many situations this is unsatisfying from a roleplaying viewpoint. After all, as a rule any character with at least average intelligence would only fight if necessary, or if *they* held an overwhelming advantage. With a bit more verisimilitude, you’d have your initial encounter with such people in a more neutral environment. What we have instead is “Well…this doesn’t look good. Better to ambush them now….” Which of course, now and then, is a valid in-world tactical decision. But if every encounter is like that and you never have a reasonable chance for talking without putting your head into the jaw of the lion, so to speak, that’s very much unsatisfactory.

Effect of turn-based combat
And the plain fact is, turn-based combat makes this dramatically worse. Consider how an encounter with, say, the Githyanki patrol might’ve gone in a BG2-like game. You’d have cast some protective spells, put on your boots of speed for the talking character and positioned yourself so your talker could run away into a less disadvantageous position. Then you’d have started talking, and if fighting broke out you could’ve *Immediately* moved with *everyone*, while your protections prevented you from being held or damaged. Someone would likely get hit once anyway but there would’ve been very little chance for enemies to hit anyone multiple times while they were unable to move. Unfortunately, there’s no free movement in a turn-based game *and* your best talker is likely to be, say, a wild mage sorcerer with high CHA who can get advantage on their persuasion rolls. So not exactly durable. Which means again, better avoid talking altogether and ambush them before they decided to become enemies….the difference is so dramatic that a single ambushing sorcerer can win the fight on their own, while any party of two that decided to talk first (you’d likely take Lae’zel if you wanted to talk) had a very high chance of getting killed before being able to take a single action after the talking ended.

No or very little quest XP
Traditionally, D&D rewards killing stuff. Or so they say. But that’s GM’s discretion so there are no rules about that, and killing stuff isn’t the main point of roleplaying. Roleplaying means resolving a situation in a way that fits your character. Or at least making an attempt to do so. And the games shouldn’t punish people for convincing roleplaying, right? That’s why some games have quest xp that are given for resolving a situation, regardless how you went about it. This was a very significant change between BG1 and BG2, and one of the best changes since quest xp were significant enough that players of characters who didn’t think killing everyone was desirable didn’t feel all that disadvantaged by the fact that they didn’t kill everyone. In DOS2, meanwhile, this is more of a token attempt. Quest XP are insignificant to non-existent. And so they are in BG3’s chapter 1, as far as we know from the EA.

Conclusion
I think if these observations hold true for the release version, this will be a major point of criticism. What makes it especially relevant is that this is a flaw as old as the genre. Decades old in fact. And the solutions are also decades old. It’s something I’ve personally resented basically forever, to the point that I vividly recall my first significant counterexample: “You get 1000 xp for sneaking into the Mariposa Military Base without getting seen”. Fallout, 1997. At its time, Fallout was considered a revival and advancement of the genre…. And part of that was that it was the first game, to my knowledge, that rewarded players for anything but fighting or the occasional puzzle, thus featuring several new playstyles and character concepts. Roleplaying games of today shouldn’t fall back behind those times.

(Meanwhile, I’m very glad BG3 will likely lack the three additional features of DOS2 that incentivize a “kill everyone” playstyle: damage and armor scaling, which makes it extremely important to keep up with your enemies level-wise, scarcity of xp compared to what you need to achieve that, so you absolutely must kill almost everyone to keep up, and “every major faction is dark grey at best”, which means that most likely, you’ll want to kill everyone - but that makes for a rather depressing world).