Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Swen Vincke on Dropped Frames show!

Playtesters are meant to represent your average gamer, they might not be the brightest. Reminds me of this developer commentary on Half-Life :

I personally am unsure what being a "gamer" means. But many who go to Role playing game are not here for the successor of War games, but for the Story it tells. So battles are reduced to an element, which should not be too long are tiresome, that is there to improve a story and not to, in lack of a better word, gatekeep it.

Other people like D&D for the tactical and stat based combat. It is always a challenge to balance between those two crowds, true.
But just dismissing the more story-inclined group as "not wanting a challenge" and the games as getting "dumbed down" is unfair and, in my opinion, completely missing the point.

Companions speculation:

Thats what the story mode difficulty setting is for, or in PnP a very lenient DM.
But instead everyone gets dragged down because games now are designed for the lowest common denominator.

And its not only D&D/BG3. Except for a few games which use difficulty as a way to differentiate themselves like Souls games everything gets more and more easy to "broaden the appeal". So much so that you often have to try very hard to actually lose.

Okay, it’s perfectly possible to say what we want or like in games without taking digs at people who might want something different.

Let’s keep it friendly!

Many Story modes are kinda insulting though. Like "here, have a random +2 on stuff that has nothing to do with battles" in BG3.
I for one fail to see the appeal of games like Dark Souls who have difficult battle mechanics just to ..have difficulty battle mechanics. For some people challenging themselves is fun. Others want to enjoy the world and a story.

On top of that, what does "lose" mean to you? Is it a call to become better or does it mean to not achieve what you want?

To take an extreme example: Visual Novels. In many visual novels there are no bad ends, so getting a game over would be a challenge. But if you pursue a specific route and fail to do so, just getting the "normal ending" instead, would that be losing to you? You did not read the characters correctly, so you failed at your goal.

Losing and winning are usually relatively to the person playing. So someone who plays for the tactics sees a defeat in battle as a challenge to overcome.
Someone who is here for, say, creating a specific character sees loosing when he fails (in their opinion) to truly play that character.
If you fail at a challenge that you do not care about, you are not feeling like you are loosing, you are feeling annoyed that something unimportant to your enjoyment is stopping you from the challenges you are here to.



And its not only D&D/BG3. Except for a few games which use difficulty as a way to differentiate themselves like Souls games everything gets more and more easy to "broaden the appeal". So much so that you often have to try very hard to actually lose.[/quote]

[/quote]
Losing means for example running out of money in park builder games (currently nearly impossible to do with current builder games) or in RPGs that you simply can't do a encounter and have to go or solve it another way, even if it means following a different story branch, or if optional leave it out entirely.

And insulting? Thats the problem. People want to always succeed but don't want to see that they are playing easy mode, thus the games become easy mode by default.
And its not only video games, D&D itself also follows that pattern.

The problem with those danger zones is that you break the style of play. If you teach players that in every semi-serious encounter, they should burn all their spellslots and dailies then that's what they're going to do in those danger zones too. And then it gets weird, because suddenly they're supposed to play differently.

But the vastly easier recourse is to play as normal and backtrack out of the danger zone, which makes the rest restriction a grindy nuisance more than anything. This problem isn't one with weak modern gamers or whatever, it's one with the game offering one set of instructions and then being inconsistent, and of course with rest mechanics being very generous.

Losing means for example running out of money in park builder games (currently nearly impossible to do with current builder games) or in RPGs that you simply can't do a encounter and have to go or solve it another way, even if it means following a different story branch, or if optional leave it out entirely.

And insulting? Thats the problem. People want to always succeed but don't want to see that they are playing easy mode, thus the games become easy mode by default.
And its not only video games, D&D itself also follows that pattern.[/quote]
Well, I actually disagree with your examples. The game may have game over screens at certain points, but that is just the end of the game. Losing means failing at the goals you yourself set. And if a game has a mechanic which are just tertiary to your goals, not managing to do that is not loosing, it is annoying.

The only thing lost is enjoyment. And that is the point of a game ultimately. Not showing how good you are or getting specific routes or creating empires. This are just ways to play a specific game. The goal is to have *fun*. How people have fun is subjective, so their goals are subjective. What the game tells you are guidelines. And you should pick a game that tailors to your personal idea of fun.
I'm not going to play something like Elden Ring and then grumble about the difficulty. I know that before hand and know this game is not for me. But a game like BG3? They *try* to give different groups a chance to play the game to have fun. They succeed (probably) for people like me.

Like I said multiple times before, I was baffled when I learned that there are people who enjoyed battles in BG2. I love(d) the game for the ability to create a character and have companions talk to them. The battles where an annoying distraction from exploring and waiting for the next banters.
But at the end of the day, that game was for me (Banters) and for people who like challenges. It was not perfect for our exact tastes (I assume), but it still created enjoyment.

Everything, difficulty, mechanics, story, they are just there to give us a chance to have fun. Difficulty itself does not make a game good. Neither does story. What makes a game good is the best mix of multiple elements to give its players enjoyment. Everything else is meaningless.


Also, sorry for messing up quoting in my last post, I have some lag with the forum and that makes quoting weird for me.

You have a danger zone right in the beginning: you can't rest anywhere in Auntie Ethels teahouse and the labyrinth below. So if you think, you need more spellslots and resources recovered, you have to go out of the house to rest. So I think, this is a good teaching moment that something like no-rest-zones can happen.

The problem is that that isn't really "right in the beginning." You at least will have gone through the blighted village, which is a ways into the game. And a player going at a fairly average pace will likely have been going through numerous hours before making it there, which I think is long enough that the danger zone is less a lesson and more an aberration, which is the problem others have identified.

I think a problem with danger zones is that 5e's rest mechanics are ill suited to a videogame. If a player enters a danger zone, uses a short rest after the first two encounters, then in the third uses up the rest of their resources and after that they have a boss encounter they could enter that encounter drained of resources and unable to continue. Then what? A DM could fail forward something like that, but on a computer the best case scenario is they reload a save from three to four hours earlier and start over. That would just suck, for a lot of people thats uninstall and write a negative review territory.

If Danger zones are limited then they could always be placed in scenarios where fail forwarding is accepted, but in general for a long form game its not good for failure to be seeded hours and hours in advance with the player unable to see they've already lost.

Or people could just lower the difficulty...

Conquering Drezen in WotR felt so much more satisfying by managing to pull through on the skin of your teeth because resting was limited instead of you just hitting rest before every encounter.

For me I don’t like the resting system in video games, so I don’t like anything that enforces it such as danger zones. I find it boring to not be able to cast spells in combat.

Where was it confirmed? I was hoping to make my party of mostly non-origin companions, so I hope they are not only late game companions!

Minsc tadpole was confirmed in yesterday QA stream.

Thanks!

I disagree

Long rest shouldn't be something you can spam every time you leave combat like a quick save. It makes no sense and it makes spell slots something you can just expend without thinking about next encounters. Also it ruins immersion. The original baldurs gate games punished you for spamming the camp button and i think it worked fine. I hope larian reconsiders this and adds a option for a better camping system.

The problem here also seems to be how much of the story is tied to the campsite. Devs want you to be able to visit it often to push forward the side and companions stories.

I saw some stuff when I got to play a later version of the game for a short while in Ghent on 7 July that implies the approach there has been changed, or at least tweaked. I’d not base any argument about resting frequency on campsite discussions until we see how it works in the release version.