Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback BG3 Trying to be too many things

Does anyone feel like BG3 is trying to be too many things at once, and that it sometimes feels like it's being stretched thin as a result?

For example, this game has to be a multiplayer game, a semi-multiplayer game, and a singleplayer game. It has to be a party-based RPG, an immersive sim, and a tabletop simulator. It has to let you have a cast of colorful characters follow you around, but can't have those characters be so fundamental that you couldn't just as well play the game without any of them. It has to have so many ways to resolve a quest, or a location, or a game that it doesn't dwell much individually on any point or location or plot as a matter of significance.

As a result, I feel like the buzzword "reactivity" in this game has immense breadth, but is lacking in depth, not because it is bad, but because there has to be so many ways for it to happen and still work: Multiplayer custom party skipping content, singleplayer solo completing everything, companion party stealthing past NPCs to collect only essential plot moments. Consequentially, there is no "vertical" look at the chain reaction of consequences from a single moment; everything must move from one thing to the next in order for the game to continue "playing" and "making sense."

Not knocking the game. Just noting that sometimes it feels stretched.

Absolutely. In terms of the much-touted reactivity, Larian fixated very strongly on all the 'little' stuff in terms of reactivity-what if X character is dead when you are doing this quest, what if such and such an item is stolen from someone's inventory. There's a lot of variables effecting 'small' things in regards to the outcomes of events, that I suspect ballooned out the complexity of the game, but conversely there is often a dearth of 'big' decisions at times where it feels like there should be big decisions-and I feel like a lot of major decisions, repercussions, that lauded 'reactivity' got cut because of all those little variables. Look at the lists of cut content and it's like a graveyard of important plot stuff that got left out. But nowhere is it more obvious than if you decide to play an evil character in this game, particularly a custom, non-Dark Urge one. As you can read about on a lot of threads here and on the subreddit, many major 'evil' decisions just sorta dead-end with no follow up and you just sorta end up like that meme of confused Travolta from Pulp fiction.

There's no doubt that the multiplayer element made the singleplayer experience worse off with the weird real time world/turn-based bubble.

The overarching plot of the game though is probably where this approach hurt the most. The plot is just going in way too many directions at once and the evidence of huge rewrites even late into development is everywhere. Any one of the major elements would have been enough to carry a game, but it shouldered way too much for its own good-just consider some of the elements, we have (Endgame/cut content spoilers):


Larian really should have focused on one or two of these elements. About the time when they considered adding freaking Larian should have considered pumping the breaks a little bit. It's all just so overwhelming. Sure It's engaging for the player when you get all this stuff thrown at you one after the other, but after it's al lsaid and done and you have time to process it, the spectacle of it all starts to wear off and the shortcomings start to be more visible.

Yes, this is a big problem with BG3, I think, and all of it seems to have caused problems.

It's an exacting simulation of DnD 5E -- except it isn't, and a lot of people don't actually like a computer GM that strictly interprets dice rolls.

It has so much reactivity -- which collapses the moment you realize that [MONK] or [PALADIN] or [BARBARIAN] dialogue tags probably end up in the same place.

Choices and consequences -- everything is pretty well sign-posted, evil content is as lacking as any other CRPG, and you can respec your companions entirely for 100 gold.

It's a massive open world -- except this basically outright conflicts with the structured 'time is of the essence' story they wanted to tell.

It's not a bad game, but the flaws become pretty well exposed the moment you start a second playthrough. It's like Larian filed off anything that might cause any choice to feel like it had repercussions, which left so much of it feeling flat.

The game succeeds as having more depth, reactivity, choice, voicing and graphics than any game in years.
It's not as wide as PoE2, but every inch of it has more in it, doesnt have the tactics of solastra but thats all solastra had and it has close enough, and et etc
Is it perfect no, but just, you can't say it hasn't done what it set out to and been better received than any CRPG in decades?

I'm just providing feedback. Never said it's a bad game.

But PoE was trying to be 1 thing. Solasta was trying to do 1 thing. BG3 is trying to do everything at once, and I wonder what Larian sacrificed to accomplish such a task. I think Milkfred and Leucrotta make great points that because of the sheer scope of "types" of game BG3 is trying to be, it ends up cutting off a lot of depth to things actually mattering beyond a handful of voicelines and cinematics recognizing you did something marginally different. It would be nice if some decisions had massive ripple effects throughout the game, rather than bringing the player back to the "main timeline" if you will. Or if the game sat the player down and said, "These are our characters. You will learn about them. You will recruit them. You will investigate their lives and minds. And they will have in-depth interactions with you," rather than, "Hey, you can kill them and you'll miss out on a few cutscenes, but otherwise, no big deal."

Depth? Questionable. Reactivity? Sure, but it's very shallow reactivity. It's really awesome that it acknowledges your class, sometimes race, etc. But often times those options lead to the same place, and some of those options are really unbalanced (for example, Barbarian -- those dialogue options are almost always made with advantage, whereas I can't recall a single Monk option having any, and Barbarian had a whole lot more to boot), and it's the same with choices. Voice work, animations, and graphics are all stellar.

I've felt the Eurogamer review that summed up BG3's approach to choice and reactivity as working extremely well providing you don't really try to fight what it's offering you (the 'yes, and' aspect they talk about) but it's not remotely comparable to, say, Disco Elysium as far as player agency goes which it's seemingly compared to by critics and audience. Pillars 2 is probably the game I'd put it up against, honestly.

Basically, yes. I have my issues with Pillars 1 and 2 but they have a distinct vision. It's funny to me that Josh Sawyer got mixed up in the stuff on Twitter because BG3 ended up similar to a lot of Obsidian's games -- reach exceeding grasp, heaps of cut content, a third act filled with bugs and combat sequences you're beginning to tire of, etc.

Based on what I saw in EA, and based on what people like Swen had been saying, I anticipated things like not partying up with Gale maybe being an enticing option if it was difficult to give him his magic items and he makes a deal with Raphael and, gee, he sure is keen on embracing these tadpole abilities, isn't he? What would happen if I'd never wrapped myself up with this dubious wizard?

I feel a bit flaw Larian has from the opening of BG3 on the beach is that there's almost a desire to put player choice and flexibility above even establishing a groundwork of narrative structure to build around. Even DOS2 had you meeting everyone aboard the ship and establishing the key parts of the narrative. Meanwhile, I can see heaps of conversations around the Internet of people not really getting key beats of BG3 established, or getting realized too late, because so much of it is tied to long resting (when the game basically says, hey, no time to waste or you'll turn into a monster.)

So much this. The plot is literally imploding upon itself due to so many re-writes and changes, and these really come to the fore at the very end of Act 2 into Act 3. The two villains you meet in Act 3 are extremely hollow after what you experience in Act 2, a shadow of what they could have been. The dream visitor felt very flat to me and it culminates in so many plot inconsistencies by the end that I was just shaking my head at the game forcing me or a party member or someone else to do something you have been trying to avoid the entire game if you go against the visitor, not to mention that it turned the Chosen Three into nothing more than empty lip service to the old games, the final two amounted to nothing but a couple of pushovers with minimal dialogue, interaction, and events.

But yeah, you nailed it, big time.

Agree. At the beginning of the game all this stuff is very exciting but later the story gets irritating and even annoying. There are too many factions and NPCs. Even NWN 2 did it better in my opinion. But this is because today normal down to earth stories are not enough anymore. It is also not enough to have normal DnD classes you have to be a kind of superhero. So we got the annoying octopus powers. The whole story feels ridiculous for a level 12 party. PF:WotR is even more crazy but in this game you are a demigod later (as well as lvl. 20).

There's something that bothers me about BG3's '5E kitchen sink' approach but I don't think I'm versed enough in game design lingo to explain it. Basically, it's similar to the idea of breadth versus depth. BG3 has great hand-crafted encounters and I appreciate that none of the combat feels like a random encounter. I appreciate that the game is generally better than it's predecessors when it comes to loot and such -- no longer are there no good magical weapons for particular classes, for example. If you want to build your character a certain way, you can probably make it work.

But there's something that bothers me about how, I suppose, because a player can do just about anything and potentially have any type of classes in their party, it's like all the encounters lack anything too surprising or astounding. I think I've seen people say that Spore Druids have issues in Act 2 because their damage types and unique gimmicks just don't work on various enemies in that section of the game, and that feels bad. People have pointed out that Unstoppable is just not fun to play against. And that's sort of where my thinking is, but I suppose the best way of pointing it out is...

When I hit Act 3, there was no challenge. Actually, there was one challenging fight: the interesting gauntlet with the Power Word: Kill guy. But every other fight, I 'solved' it the same way: barbarian Karlach rages to grant advantage to hasted battlemaster Lae'zel, who promptly knocks the target prone and then beats them to death, doubling her attacks if necessary. I don't think there was a single fight beyond maybe Raphael that took more than two rounds. Well, excepting the slog toward the netherbrain and then its incredible collapsing platforms. But Sarevok, Yugir (in Act 2), the Avatar of Myrkul, Orin, Gortash, the Steelwatch Titan... It was the same strategy each time.

And while it's great that martial classes are still relevant, for example, it feels like the sheer breadth of possibilities that Larian had to prepare for resulted in encounters that you could thwart pretty easily without needing to engage with much of the systems underneath. Admittedly, I haven't played on tactician, and maybe that's just what 5E is like, but it just felt... strange.

Admittedly, probably better than BG2 where you had to buff and pre-buff and whatever else, but it just stood out to me that I don't think there were many times where I had to think on my feet or otherwise adapt to a new foe.

I suppose that's the combat version of how many of the [CLASS] dialogue options just exist to do fundamentally the same thing as each other, and often just the same thing as a charisma check (but without rolling, or rolling with advantage.)

Agreed, it has a lot of shallow reactivity. In contrast, Wrath of the Righteous has relatively little shallow reactivity and many quests have just one way to solve them, but at the same time your mythic path choice, your companion choices and some key quests heavily influence outcomes down to the road and affect both gameplay and story in a more substantial manner.

Yes, absolutely. BG3 aimes not only for wide appeal (which will always lead to dilution of focus in order to appease as many demographics as possible) but it also aims for conflicting ideas: single vs. Coop, authored, high production value content vs. Emergent systems and more, choice heavy game vs. Making everything available to everyone. There are couple good games in there, maiming each other fighting for controls.

I started act3, and to me BG3 biggest failure is not living up to its own goals and promises. Act1 promises a lot - it promises density of content, reactivity, complexity of quests and multiple solutions, rewarding applications of niche skills (speak with animal/dead). That stuff is mostly gone in act2. A much more standard D:OS2 experience. I hear things get weaker in act3, but I haven’t seen much, beside uneven framerate.

The issue I have, is that act1 doesn’t stand as a good, contained experience - Elden Ring was too big for its own good as well, but weak end game content, can’t quite experience fantastic 60-80h I had with it before it started to unravel. BG3 act1 is all promises though “look how much content and reactivity our companions have this time around, look how many systems we build for you to use: speak with animal/dead non-lethal, stealth, steal - all offer unique ways to solve every encounter, your every decisions can impact how powerful your tadpole is and will have consequences, you can reach Moonrise through mountain pass, or bypass the death fog through underdark CHOICE!”. Not surprising they can deliver, but it feels like a lot of stuff was build that isn’t utilised properly. I think there is a lot of inefficiency and excess in BG3 that ultimately doesn’t contribute much to final game.

But as someone pointed out BG3 is a smashing success - critically and commercially. And I think it is more than justified as long as you don’t look past act1. And I think most won’t.

Yes, WoR is a game that while I'd say I liked it overall less than BG3, it's a game that genuinely wowed me with its reactivity. I did multiple playthroughs just to see how other paths went, other romances, etc.

Another thing that bothers me about the various ways and choices you can to resolve encounters, the solutions and niche applications of skills that Wormerine mentions, is that... how much of it do players really do without meta-knowledge?

Two things that come to mind immediately, both in Act 1. Priestess Gut meets you in her chambers and gives you a sleeping potion. If you don't drink it, or can't be drugged, she calls the guards. People talk up how great it is that you can cast silence on the room before that happens, and so no one can hear her call for help. And that is cool, it's a great use of a spell. But how many people are going to do that first time around, versus being told they can do it, or save-scumming various ideas and strategies? And don't get me wrong, that's fine, but I don't find that particularly engaging. To me, what was missing, was for my half-elf to note that it's a sleeping potion (she did) and then realize, oh, I should fake being asleep or something like that. Instead, she drinks it and Gut flips out (why, exactly?) and it's a fight.

The Minthara siege is another one. Sure, it's fun and awesome to lace the battlefield in barrels and blow Minthara's little army off the face of Faerun... but it's something that feels like it's there so players can go, haha, wow, can you believe what you can do in this game? And it is awesome, I think I've done it every playthrough -- but, like, come on... Minthara just leads her forces into this little clearing filled with explosive barrels?

I've said before that Larian seems yo have very little capacity for restraint. They felt the need to take everything to its absolute limit in a way that was not good for the game as a whole. There's a reason you sacrifice things in a game or story, even stuff that's good. Sometimes you have to pare down extraneous plots and systems in order to make the stuff that's really important truly shine, and Larian seemingly didn't do that until they were forced, seemingly. They tried to do everything all the time and jam in every idea they thought of, to the detriment of the whole.

I just don't think you can have the degree of freedom and flexibility they promised as well as a deep, complex epic story. The story they have now has to function when everybody save three or four people can be killed at any point in the process, that is not a framework for a functional, satisfying epic narrative. Imagine if Larian hadn't insisted on us being able to solve random quests by like, pickpocketing an NPC and instead really focused on developing good and Evil choices for the main plot, focused on the story around the tadpole.

Or look at Shadowheart. What does Shar have to do with this whole plot? It's not important enough to come up at all before the conclusion of Shadowheart's plot, certainly. But how could it, when you can kill shadowheart or drive her away. And the gith? They shod be super important, but you can kill Lae'zel and skip the creche entirely. None of this stuff that the companions are attached to can matter because they wanted to give us the freedom to skip it. So the story always was going to be choppy and disjointed. To use DA: Inquisition as an example, you will always have at least 4 particular companions with you, and a host of unkillable supporting characters, so they can contribute to the backbone of the plot. We don't have that for BG3 and it suffers for that.

Disco Elysium is still my No1 RPG Game of the decade. Probably of the past 20 years I'd argue. Reactivity and writing is on a whole other planet compared to BG3. And its ORIGINAL and creative. Everything about it. And, what a breath of fresh air, its NOT a fantasy RPG.

I'd agree that Larian's reach has exceeded its grasp in many areas of BG3. But personally the game's ridiculous overambition is one of the things I love about it, and if it had tried to do less but more successfully then sure I'd have had fewer frustrations, but also probably less admiration too. Even when BG3 doesn't quite succeed at what it's attempting, I still think it's both fun and clear enough what Larian was aiming for, which I find inspirational as a player. And I hope other developers, as well as Larian, will also be inspired to build on those elements and do them better in future games. And, more practically, given the probable expense of making BG3 as cinematic as it is - something I appreciate hugely and wouldn't want to lose - trying to cover more bases probably did broaden the user base and help bring in the money needed.

I also hope, of course, that Larian will continue to invest in BG3 and help it live up to its potential in more areas. And the fact that they've at least got the basis of such a huge and multifaceted game means that there is opportunity there that a game more limited in scope wouldn't have. I'd not be surprised if Larian were feeling pretty burnt out at this point, but hopefully they'll be energised by the positive reception of the game and the response of fans who, while appreciating all they've done already, are keen for them to continue and make the game all that it could be.

(The above sn't to say I don't also like smaller and more perfectly formed games. I agree Disco Elysium is amazing. But there's no way I would have wanted BG3 to be like it, given the games that inspired BG3 and the D&D franchise it is based on. For me, BG3 needs to be a sprawling fantasy epic, with a large amount of player agency and ability to determine the character we play, and while I'm not a multiplayer fan myself, making it a game that can be played with friends seems to me really fitting for D&D.)

I think I remember conversations from the datamining days where people were basically going, "Hey, isn't it weird that none of the companion characters seem to be relevant to anything plot-related we're datamining?" I kept thinking about that as I was playing through the later acts.

But Larian could've coded a plot where there was reactivity to account for that. If it was something they knew they had to do at the start of the process. But sometimes I get the impression that they started with ideas and tried to make them work. For example, the article about Larian grappling with the importance of Shadowheart's artifact to the plot and needing to find all these ways to keep it around the player. As a professional editor, I had this pang of concern for their story then and there because they were spending so much time to make it work with 'the artifact is in Shadowheart's hands, it must end up with the player at all times' instead of just... going back to that core concept (the artifact is Shadowheart's) and changing it to something that'd work (just put the artifact in the player's hands ASAP.) Not to use a cliche but this is precisely what people mean when they say 'kill your darlings.'

It's unfair to compare it to Disco Elysium, but I'm going to do it. Disco Elysium is a detective RPG where you need to figure out the mystery of a hanged man behind your hotel room... and you can actually figure it out without ever visiting the body behind the tree! BG3's scope is a lot more expansive than DE, sure. But DE's writers knew what they were working toward and every aspect works toward the goal of being a detective RPG with, honestly, an absurd level of reactivity and branching narratives. Similar to most RPGs, DE works best when you go with the core hook, but gets very funny when you try to push against it ("So, have you gotten the body out of the tree?") but it also allows you to try and outsmart the game, allowing for so many ways to pick up info around the case and follow threads, or simply not figure it out at all. But even then, it has a few things you must do to reach the end of the story. It also helps that everything is tightly and delicately interwoven, so, doing something that seems random on one side of the map might logically lead you back toward the case, or some aspect of it.

Now, BG3 has a bigger scope in both scale and geography (DE's scope is, like, two city blocks and a fishing village; a detective story versus a fantasy epic) but if the Larian writing room knew they were going to weave a plot where all the player characters may not be a part of it, then they could've written something that accounted for it. But they'd have to be prepared for players being upset or missing content. Which they seemed like they had! Swen talked it up, EA pointed to stuff like Gale and Raphael making a deal. It feels like they had a whiteboard full of some really blue sky brainstorming -- eight companion characters who can each be a protagonist, a plot involving illithids, and the Dead Three, and Shar, and a dream visitor, and crazy reactivity, a dozen ways to solve every quest, content you can skip over, talking to corpses, events that develop organically as you rest, faithful 5E adaptation, multiplayer etc -- and then it just didn't come together in time.

Like, I don't even think it'd be terribly difficult, you'd just need to grapple with players calling things 'cheap.' Kill Lae'zel? Fine, she's not there to vouch for you to the gith, and they're hostile. Don't free her from the cage? She's there when you meet the gith and she says you left her to rot -- difficult persuasion check or they attack. Don't recruit Gale? Well, he goes to Raphael. Kill Gale? Raphael's little helper does his resurrection riddle thing and then he signs a deal with Raphael. Don't recruit Astarion? He tries to bite you during a long rest. Kill Astarion? Good going, you've . As far as I'm aware, BG3's writing lead was working on his first game during this production, so, maybe he was out of his depth? IDK. I know from coding my own little interactive fiction games that even features and ideas that seem small or easy can end up drastically bloating out the workload... but I was an amateur with no experience, not part of a big CRPG team, y'know?

Everyone, please remember spoiler tags in this thread if/when discussing specific BG3 plot elements.

I get where your coming from and agree that the game tried to do to much, but the fault for this is more on the gaming community than on Larian. Gamers ask today for vast game designs and often forget that a simpler design can give more game.

The base story is solid and feels like something right out of the Forgotten Realms. ( I KNOW Ed Greenwood and DMed in the Realms for decades, the story line is very well done) A few of the companion backstories are excellent and drive the story forward well. The reach issues of the game come in trying to please everyone all the time. The game mechanics, in my opinion, where hampered enough by 5E and then where further nerfed by some of the house rule choices made by Larian due to gamers not wanting "deeper" play. Things were too simplified. The same with story, instead of embracing the traditional good vs evil dichotomy, they instead, again from community pressure, tried to work everything in shades of grey. In the whole relationship system they again caved to the 12 year old boy mentality and where focused on sexual partners and not having the opportunity to develop relationships without a sexual component. Deep friendships would have made way more sense and offered way more content. Even the fact they spent time on sexual anatomy in character creation instead of a more robust creator for body type and facials, shows caving to an adolescent mentality in the game.

Larian did create a modern masterpiece, of that there is no doubt. However even that is a bit sad when you realize that compared to older RPGs, once you take off the visual polish and fancy cut scenes, it is just middle to the pack at best. Compared to modern games it is amazing, shows how far we have let developers fall without holding them accountable.

So I kind of agree but I still think a lot of I works. The whole cazador and sharran stuff I think are handled in satisfying ways.

But I do agree the gith and chosen stuff was handled a bit poorly.
I got like 2 scenes each with each chosen, and gortash in particular i can walk up and kill anytime and ignore any of the side quests tied to him. they were cool characters I wanted more of them. The gith are handled poorly from beginning to end, the crech was nonsensical and they really do a good job of making you want to screw over vlaakith but then they give you no chance to do it....