Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Spacetime considerations on BG's flawed (non-)implementation of time and distance

I'd love to love the Dragon Age games, but after 1, they switched the story completely to the mage vs templar plot, and I have zero interest in it. I love having big bads to fight, and the whole 'everyone has good points' thing was just boring. As for Fallout games, 3, NV, 4, are all incredible lol. Fallout 4 is a guilty pleasure for me, I don't care that it's not a proper RPG, I just love playing in Bethesda's worlds they create. I can't remember FO 1 and 2, it's been decades since I played them. Actually, I should play through them again with a guide, just to see some of the stuff I missed when I was young.

You say they switched to the Mage/Templar plot, but my recollection of Inquistion was them dropping that immediately in favor of some ancient bad guy villain plot.

Bethesda Fallout is a very different animal from OG Fallout, I like Bethesda's games fine, but they operate with such different attitudes that it really becomes hard to compare them.

Uh...DOS2 is....less linear? By what metric? Even where you have nominal choices the path is almost prescribed by the enemy levels. And it has an almost even difficulty curve after act I, almost all fights feel almost the same. You never feel any more powerful than in the previous chapter, it's like scaling enemies, only implicitly rather than explicitly. And actually, I have seens signs of the same in BG3. Thankfully, the progression system is less crazy in BG3, but I certainly get this "every fight is at your level" vibe. Unless I run into the Githyanki patrol early and get killed of course.

Also, which Dragon Age? The three games almost couldn't be more different. Even in their handling of - to get back on topic - time and distance.

+1
DOS2 is aggressively linear by its macro areas, like the Dwarf place cave thing vs the Blackpits vs Bloodmoon Island vs Paradise Downs, but somewhat less linear within each of those areas, as you have a few different orders to resolve the conflicts intra area. But the levelling and progression makes macro areas a straight line.

Actually, in this way, DOS1+2 are exactly like DAO.

I thnik they have a fuckton in common, actually.
BG3 feels a lot closer to DA:O than it ever did to BG2, for several reasons.

- The same system of istanced camping where most of the big conversations seem to happen
- The same lack of a day/night cycle, with a world frozen in a series of setpieces crystalized in a time bubble
- The same limit of 4 characters and the same default auto-follow (fortunately default but optional in DAO, not so much in BG3.
- The same style of party banters between companions during exploration
- The same "dirt &blood" system "decorating" your party after combat and exploration
- The same vaguely disturbing emphasis on romance and sex
- The same focus on full-voice over but with a silent protagonist
- The same focus on "reactivity" and changing the story according to your choice, but admittedly BG3 seems far more advanced in this sense.
- Both focuses to a degree in "spell and ability interactions" (even if Larian was basically forced to tune it down here for the negative feedback)
- Both spend some effort on the idea of "Origin character" even if the implementation admittedly diverges

Once you get past the lack of a D&D license, which is the major differentiation, it's easier to think of things the two games handle in a similar manner than the ones where they diverge significantly

I would describe it less as linear vs open, and more active vs passive.

Foundations of Dragon Age games are rather consistant - Narrative Adventure with MMOish combat inbetween. Those games are passive - player's gets no agency. You don't get verbs - you can't attack unless the game decided enemy is hostile, pickpocketing... is there. You passively follow game's narrative and everyonce in a while the game asks you what branching path you would like to explore. This is not a wrong way of making a game - Witchers are pretty much just that, and I think are phenomenal.

Larian games are system driven - you can always attack, you can always pickpocket, you can pick up and move objects etc. You do get scripted cinematic choices, but a lot of BG3 interactions are systemic. As such, I think it has more in common with Tim Cain RPGs, and Immersive sims (and most importantly Ultima, but I never played those). Add cinematic dialogue to Fallout1&2 or Arcanum, and I think you would game that is about as Dragon Agey, as Baldur's Gate3 is.

I do agree that while D:OS1&2 gave player a lot of systemic freedom, they were poorly equipped to react to whatever player did narratively. BG3 story is much, much more reactive and flexible and I am much happier player thanks to it.


Edit. @Tuco that's a solid list, but I didn't say that Larian took no inspiration from Dragon Ages. I do think, though, that those are mostly superficial similairties. And I think the few solid ones might be the result of Dragon Age and Larian both doing cinematics. More elaborate cinematics require characters to be in predetermined places. Not a problem is a game where we don't control NPCs (like Witchers) but a bit more problematic if one wants to stage a scene between controllable NPCs. Therefore, a stage where our companions become NPCs - Normandy in Mass Effects, camp in Dragon Age&BG3.

Really? I don't recall DAO being that restrictive but...hmm...I did not vary my sequence of larger areas much, indeed. However, what DAO did not have was this even difficulty curve. There were all sorts of fights, from the inconsequential to the difficult. And you had a good - to get back to the topic again - sense of scale, very much unlike in DOS2. I don't recall DOS1 but I didn't make it past Braccus Rex there, so my impression would be incomplete anyway.

Makes you wonder why it mostly worked in DAO. I certainly don't recall feeling unusually non-located.

Maybe because there was actually a world map with locations, and the game maintained an illusion of travel time, so that events and places didn't feel clustered, even though they were frozen in time until you arrived.

Well, first off, linearity and difficulty curve are not directly related, so that doesn’t really pertain to wait I said.

While DOS2 is more linear than BG3, it still allows for far more expression and creativity than the Dragon Age games in how you handle solutions. A basic example is that in DOS2 you have a broader toolkit and can use things like stealth and pickpocketing to avoid combat entirely in a way you cannot in DA games. You can also fundamentally break certain encounters by doing things like teleporting an enemy into lava before combat has even begun.

That is true. When we get to the level of single encounters, things tend to work well in Larian's games. But that's exactly not the focus of what we're talking about here. It's more about what happens when you string events and places together. How does your sense of scale and location hold up? Is it feasible to do things in different orders? If you get an encounter that functions as a gate, can you run away and keep immersion, or do you have to wait to get killed and need to reload (again, the Gith patrol)? Do quests with multiple encounters have different paths through them (DAO did this well, BG3 appears to be good at it as well, we'll see)?

Also in DOS2 you were always motivated to just kill them all. Almost every non-civilian was awful, conversations rarely mattered because the quest had to work regardless of whether you killed them all without talking, and you really needed every single xp you could get.

I think so. Locations are smaller, and it is unlikely our party would spend more time in most of them more than a couple of hours. Some locations do have day and night variants, but they were triggered by story beats, not any in game clock. It's definitely a different feel than spending 20-40 hours on the same map, and seeing no change whatsoever.

Still, I personally don't have an issue with BG3 not having a day&night cycle - I am willing to buy that our party travels during the day, and sleeps at night, though it is dissapointing that in such system and roleplay heavy game we don't have an option to, for example, decide to infiltrate goblin stronghold under a cover of night.

I struggle more with how poor of a job BG3 does with maintaining the facade. I want to be immersed, dammit. Dont' remind me so often that it is all just a content in a game. It happens in other RPGs as well (DA:O including) but it seems to happen more often in BG3EA.

Sure, I was just agree with Wormerine that Larian games and Dragon Age games are not as similar as they might initially appear to be.

But I do think the non-linearity has a lot to do with how the maps are built in BG3. I’ve been amazed how throughout the EA experience I have been constantly discovering something new each time I play. This is a direct consequence of Larian using large, single maps that are crisscrossed with a variety of intersecting paths. In games like Dragon Age or Pillars of Eternity, with more focused maps, it is very easy to tell when you have completely explored each map and experienced everything it has to offer.

While it is certainly better done in BG3, even in DOS2 you have more agency to explore and move around the map as you desire, even if that means sometimes encountering a fight you aren’t ready for yet. But if you do, you have more tools to break or even escape the encounter entirely.

It is interesting that you bring up running away from fights. This is one of my big gripes with DA Inquisition. The moment when I decided I hated that game occurred when I was wandering around the wilderness and accidentally stumbled into some bears. I wasn’t really paying attention (and to be honest, I find DAI’s combat really tedious, so I was kind of already checked out. The bears immediately dropped two of my party members and said “oh crap, I’m going to run away.” I then discovered that the game doesn’t actually allow this. When I got a certain distance away from them, they would just respawn right on top of me. I ended up just running all the back to the camp “safe zone,” with teleporting bears popping up alongside me all the way until I crossed the threshold which force-ended the combat encounter.

This was such bad game design that I decided I had seen enough and lost interest in playing.

Exploration in BG3 is absolutely great. I regularly hear people talk of rather sizeable things I haven't seen, and I've been through the EA twice. My problem with the maps is that I have no sense of how big they're supposed to be, and the distances between major events suggests that we are on a really very, very small island. Which makes all those nice locations feel to be implausibly close together.

LOL, I didn't even know that things worked that way in DAI. I guess I just reloaded whenever I was in over my head because, like you, I find DAI's combat tedious and boring. I've been doing that in BG3 and in DOS2, too. I'd rather not, really, but running away is just so tedious in a turn-based game. If I ever play DOS2 again, I'll give everyone the Escapist talent. That way I can always escape ambushes and engage the enemies later at my convenience. I'd rather like some kind of auto-escape feature in BG3. That would greatly mitigate the incentive to "ambush everyone, roleplaying be damned" I mentioned in another thread. It would also greatly mitigate the effects of the "every fight is at your level" impression.

I've made my original post a few days before release. I'd like to know how people now feel about this, as we have had time to play the game a lot.

I *am* having a blast playing this game, to get that out of the way, more than in most games I've played in recent years, and I think BG3 is great and deserves the hype it's getting - but I think the original criticism stands. The maps we play on are great, but they don't feel connected in space and time, only in story. I have no sense of the distance between the Shadow-Cursed Lands and the city of Baldur's Gate, nor of the distance between any other two maps except for the city maps. I have no sense of a greater world out there and I feel like playing a game set in a pocket dimension. Which makes the plot's hyperbolic assertion that, as usual for Larian, absolutely everything is at stake feel even more irrelevant and nonsensical than it usually is.

I consider this the second most relevant downside of this game, right after the feeling of incompleteness you get in Act 3, which is probably caused by the cut content, but that's discussed at length elsewhere.

How does everyone else experience this?

Your comments about there being no sense of a greater world put into words a vibe I felt. There continues to be very little sense of place to anything. It doesn't feel like anywhere is really anywhere. Apparently there's a large(?) chunk of region on the road to the city that's blighted by a pretty terrible curse and has been for a long time, yet until we hear of it from Halsin it never comes up. The city is 10 days away from the Grove supposedly, so the shadowlands must be closer still than that. The tieflings should mention that as a wrinkle in their travel plans. Or it should come up when we arrive at the city. But for whatever reason, it doesn't. It feels like the only places that exist really are the places we happen to be in at the time, with maybe some mentions from Gale and Lae'zel about where they're from.

The game lacks its own internal logic in various ways. The OP regarding time and space is just one aspect and points such as Gray Ghost's above abound. Too much of the game consists of things that are there for the sake of being there or stage-managed to happened at precisely that moment.
Comparisons with other games are largely irrelevant and nearly always degenerate into "I preferred game A" and "but I preferred game B".

Example of the first type: Entering the Underdark from the Zhent hideout. At the bottom of the knotted roots you immediately step into minefield. Who placed the mines? The Zhent? Common-sense suggests they would place the mines at the top of the roots. Some denizens of the Underdark? Who? The first creatures you meet (within a few metres) are the minotaurs. The bulette also works this area.

Example of the second type: Last Light inn. Why does Marcus attack not only just as you are talking to Isobel but after you have just received the blessing thing? Why hadn't he abducted her 5 minutes before you arrived or 5 minutes after you left.
A side note. Given that there are three(?) entrances to the Underdark then the scale used in the Underdark should match the scale used in the upper world which should match the scale used in the Zhent hideout which should match the scale used in the Whispering Depths ((?)the spider place).

I have my criticism on the game, but some of these seem odd to me:

Zhent:


Last Light:

The Black Riders are actively seeking the Ring are they not? They do not just happen to turn up out of the blue. I agree that timing plays a part in story-telling (even in BG3) but too often in this game it is too contrived.

Zhent.
Last Light.

As a general comment, events happening at times convenient for the story is part of storytelling. It does not bother me at all, unless it is implausible, for instance by placing a character where they're very unlikely to be. If you can reasonably answer the question "Why exactly now" with "Why NOT exactly now", and the only argument against it is probabilistic in nature, it's fine. That is notably not what I was referring to in the OP.


BTW a sidenote: this thread was apparently damaged at the time when the forum was defective around launch. The OP has acquired some oddities in the reconstruction and the title has lost a colon. Is there any way to repair this? Editing is no longer possible.

I can suspend my disbelief just fine over most of this, but I really wish that some things would advance on long rest. Like, if there is a fight in an occupied area and you come back the next day, it shouldn't be "life as usual, but now there's blood everywhere and a corpse just lying there forever". And if a building is on fire, it should be burned out the next day.