Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Why did Larian promote cut content?

I haven’t finished yet, but so far I would give it a 10/10! At worst if the ending is very bad, I would give it a 9/10. No game is 100% perfect, but I would give it this score because it is one of the best games I have played!

Just finished - the end was definitely *not* polished (and included broken conversation logic) - I tried different endings, in one

The visuals in the last post game cinematics were of low quality (compared to earlier), and it seems you only visit the lower city in BG - I was expecting to be allowed into upper city at some point, but after defeating the game I don't think you can return. If you only look at Lower Baldu's gate it is not that large - certainly the comparisons to the scale of Novigrad in the Witcher 3 are not warranted. That was also rendered in higher detail too. And had a day/night cycle.

*Overall*, the game was fun and enjoyable but there are quite a few design (incl UI, mechanics and inconsistent stories) and visual issues which mean that for me mean this is not a 10/10 title. I can't help but think that reviewers scoring it as such did not actually play through to the end (or they don't really care about Faerun, baldur's gate as a D&D game - perhaps seeing this as a successor to DOS2). That said, I clocked in at 110 hours for a fairly complete playthrough (if you included EA this is about +200 hours) - so I certainly got my money's worth.

Far from a 10/10 game. Though I would give it 10/10 just to annoy AAA game studios

Story, Dialogue and reactivity
Act 1 10/10
Act 2 7/10
Act 3 5/10

UI/Camera/Movement 4/10
Graphics 8.5/10
Gameplay/fun 9/10
Music 8/10
Sound design 10/10
Game mechanics & System 7/10
Stability/Bugs 7/10

I still wonder what happened, considering the cut things were promoted in June.

Either the decision to cut them was made after that which would be very last minute which raises the question why Larian still thought they could implement it or they were cut before that and Larian knowingly mislead people with their advertisement.

To be honest, I came away from the Baldur's Gate intro trailer in June thinking that we'd only get to visit the Lower City, so I was surprised to read we were getting other areas too. I'm still only at Wyrm's Crossing, but had always expected that if we were going to get to the Upper City it would just be the odd little bit of it, otherwise we'd have seen more of it in trailers. I guess I'll see if I was right soon!

There was one oddity in Community Update 19 that I noticed at the time, in that the Steam version referred to the city being made up of three seamless open worlds (which I think people might have assumed were the Lower City, Upper City and Outer City though I don't think that's stated), whereas the version here doesn't give that number. Until I've actually explored the city more, though, I'm not sure whether that quoted three looks justified, or whether to hypothesise it was included in error in the Steam update.

Your 100% correct. I have not rated any game in the past 6 years higher then a 3/10. Last game worth reviewing was Kingdom Come Deliverance. That one I gave a 5.8

I think the biggest problem with cut content is how it has impacted some of the main companion quest conclusions and other relevant main story plot points. Every game has cut content, maybe you are cutting side content to better polish up existing stuff, but when you start cutting critical content that resolves quests, or frames villains more appropriately, then it hurts companion stories and the main story itself.

There is evidence, through datamining, of cut content that specifically resolved companions currently/seemingly unsolvable quest chain.

There is evidence of cut content to the upper city where Gortash was supposed to be, thereby providing a de facto 'additional act', which would have chopped up the pacing of the game a bit more in Act 3 where it is all a jumbled mess of a million random side quests/busy work all while you are given a sense of urgency for the BBEG.

There is evidence of cut areas that would have resolved and built up a lot more framing to the main story (e.g. Avernus).

There is evidence of cut content specifically related to the actual epilogue for the game itself.

So it's not just cut content, as every game has cut content, it was cut content that specifically resolved currently existing quest chains in the game that are now rendered unfinished and unsatisfactory and literally make the game feel explicitly unfinished.

My personal theory is that so much was changed in the lead up to release, that they had to cut a lot of this other stuff to focus on the massive re-writes, e.g. Daisy/Guardian, Wyll's entire re-write, Karlach's and Halsin's inclusion into the game, etc. They have to pivot to these re-writes and trying to frame them in the existing story and had to let a lot of other stuff go, but that only served to make all of the late additions either feel unfinished, which they literally were, and/or create a lot of plot holes with late inclusions to the main plot that served to weaken the overall story itself. This isn't hard to believe because the
I can only hope we get a real revision to Act 3 and a restoration of at least some of the cut content to make the main story, and critical companion stories feel whole. I don't think this is that far fetched as we are in a very similar situation to when D:OS2 was released in terms of final act content/story and certain companion quest lines.

It won't happen but I would rather see a complete restoriation and not just adding cut content back because frankly all rewrites Larian did made the game worse.

I feel like it was the result of one or two things, maybe even both.

The first is that the long rest system is still so unreliable that it's difficult to tell when it's working as-intended. Certain events, such as Raphael's visit, were decoupled from it to ensure they happen by certain points in the story. It could be that Larian realized that between Daisy, the various ways of interacting with them, the various ways your companions could respond, the way it depended on using powers, etc. was just too much reactivity to put into a system that not only didn't function correctly put a player could conceivably play through up to the goblin camp without utilizing once. So, enter The Guardian: a bland, good guy character where there's no choice: powers are fine, feel free to use them. That gives Larian a lot more structure to build around, and a lot of reactivity they need to no longer account for.

That said, if Daisy was the Absolute and/or Orpheus, then this necessitates sweeping changes to the rest of the story. This could be why a lot of interactions with the Chosen were removed, because presumably having a link to their slaved Elder Brain would impact things there. The Mountain Pass is probably the biggest example of something that was outright cut, even though the game seems to put forward that the Underdark or the Pass should be exclusive to each other. Notably, Kithrak Voss still shows up in the state you'd expect him to be in if the datamined events happened -- injured and missing his dragon. Under the time pressure, Larian elected to cut with an excavator and not a scalpel.

The other possibility I think is that Larian simply decided that there was little point in focusing on content that wasn't a typical 'good guy' playthrough. They decided late in development that they wanted to shift the tone from moody and melancholic to epic heroism, and anything they couldn't retrofit was cut. You can see this in the change of even small things that were a sub-optimal outcome (stomping the Mind Flayer), to companions (Gale's magic hunger being drastically easier to fulfill), to choices no longer having downsides (Volo's eye surgery), and massive rewrites to eliminate moral ambiguity in questlines and plot points (Halsin killing Isobel, Nightsong being less upstanding, Gale making a deal with Raphael.) However, this makes the comments by Swen that there's so many paths that some people will never see all of it a pretty poor thing to say: there is very little strong reactivity in BG3, and the alternate paths are clearly signposted. If you're thorough in your good guy playthrough, you've seen everything but the obvious bad guy stuff. And the bad guy stuff is seemingly unfinished.

Wyll's rewrite is directly linked to the change in tone. He used to be a warning against accepting deals without knowing who or what was offering them, yet finding the powers he was granted to be very useful. This would not, at all, fit with the tone and feel of the Guardian, so, he had to get changed.

Very interesting write-up and ideas here. Yes, what you say does make a lot of sense in terms of how they chose to design it. To me though, it just seemed to make the plot:

Finally some "mainstream" press acknowledgement of act 3 issues from (ahem) Forbes:

"2. Act III Is A Total Mess
Crashes, screwed up quests, pacing issues and more make Act 3 a real slog to get through, and I’m a little surprised that so many reviewers have given this game a 10/10 with Act 3 in such rough shape. Frankly, it doesn’t seem that Baldur’s Gate 3 was actually ready for release (despite years spent in Early Access) and this was rushed out the door prior to getting the necessary polish."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2023/08/20/two-warnings-about-baldurs-gate-3-review-scores/

More evidence the endings were cut to meet the date. Nearly an hour of Withers ending audio courtesy of Noble





https://www.reddit.com/r/BaldursGate3/comments/15w8b3z/cut_withers_ending_audio_files/?rdt=53527

Yea, the game needed another 3~6 months for that last act. Its a mess and a slog.
"Reactivity" goes down the window.

By the way, from Community Update 22, end of Juli a few days before release talking about tadpoles.


and


Nothing of that is true and you can't tell me that 3 days before release consequences were still in the game and were removed after the update. So Larian knew fully well that what they promoted was not in the game.

Ps: And remember that the official reason for the earlier release date wasn't Starfield, but because the PC version was progressing so well...

Frankly, is that even of ANY relevance?

These are not the type of chances/cuts you make to your game to release ONE month earlier.

Except it looks like they were.

And for me its quite relevant to compare Larians marketing to the end product as it is imo relevant to Larians integrity and how much I can trust them.

A very recent community update they said "giving you a chance to explore the menacing roads of the Outer City, the opulent estates of the Upper City, and the dark alleys and pubs of the Lower City"
That was 12-6-2023. And while I could understand the communication about cutting the upper city being slightly slow, it shouldn't be 6 months slow. So it does seem large parts were cut very close to release. And if PC version was progressing so well, they could have spend some more effort polishing things. Like all the bugs and lose ends from quests, even in act 1. or example: try knocking out de brothers near Ethel's house and see how Mayrina reacts. Or the ending of that same quest where a paladin can chose between being a huge jerk or breaking their oath. And gameplay mechanic issues like dice rolls somethings giving a negative number when yoou skip the dice animation, ground effect spells locked at 12DC, eldritch blast randomly losing it's third hit (and probably many more).

So yes, I think claims of the PC version being "done" a month early is relevant when there is so much stuff in the game half baked.

People, I don't know if I'm speaking a different language or what but let me make absolutely clear that I don't give a shit about the "cold reading" of what they said a month ago.
I'm telling you, these are NOT the type of changes you decide few weeks before a release just to release a bit earlier. This stuff was cut a long time ago. You wouldn't even be able to "readjust" a game with changes of this scope in barely weeks.

If that was not the case, the implication would also be that in a month or so the missing content could be fixed and reintegrated into the game. I can PROMISE you this won't be the case.
In fact I'd be shocked if most of the "cut content" will be back in a year or so for the "Definitive edition". Chances are most of what was cut at this point is just gone.

In fact, in would even argue that the decision to freeze features was made at least before the release date was announced (dec 08, 2022). In software development, if you have a deadline you have to stop moving things around to match it.

Calling a direct quite "cold reading" implies much more than you should be implying if you want to have these discussions in good faith. And there is not only cut content. Like I said a few posts up, there is also bugs and oversights that could have used that extra month of polish.

And when looking at stuff like Mol, Karlach and Astarion's quest, and pretty much the whole of Act 3, it seems very plausible there were significant cuts much later in production than any normal timeline would allow.