Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Latest News Community Update #24: Looking To The Future

A complete strawman as I have never said any of this. I am criticising your fantasising not whether actors will be called in.

Your other argument about "no other developer has ever done better" is at the very least subjective. It doesn't have much going for in terms of logic either. Using my analogy of my broken legs, my left leg is in better condition than my right leg but neither is in great condition.

I'm not interested in Minthara. I would much prefer a game where the camera is fit for purpose; where there aren't dice rolls on screen every two minutes; where you can grab your party with your mouse; where you can assign a formation to your party and a host of other actual gaming things.
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Remember the Swen interview about the city having a thousand-plus interactable NPCs all talking away in the background making the city feel alive, etc? My guess is they suddenly realised that all that and some other technical problems they had caused performance to nose-dive.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Larian talk a good game.

Camera zoom out, improved inventory, ability to sell directly from bags, dedicated bags, automated self accumulation of objects in bags and inventory, party formation, reduction of junk, barrels, chests and so on.

Quite a hostile response here. One of those replies wasn't for you, don't drag that into your argument and then accuse me of a strawman argument. And second of all I purely stated what Swen said, which is they ARE calling back actors which means they ARE recording more for the game which means they ARE planning to put more companion and party content in the game.

Are we playing the same game? The overwhelming majority of features that were promised as of a few months ago have made it into the game. While there have been demands for certain features, Larian has never indicated that they were always going to follow popular demand. The only thing that seems to have been promised and subsequently cut is the Upper City. I contend that this is not an unreasonable expectation or something fabricated by the playerbase because it did not exist in BG1 and seems to have been originally promised, and such promises are the source of demands. Are there better quest endings and epilogues in order? Yes. However, this is not an incomplete game, and some of the complaints here are issues with the entire vision Larian had for the game, rather than legitimate complaints of incompleteness.

I say again, as I said above ...


I assume people were so busy arguing that they didn't actually see my previous moderator intervention, so if that happens again I might need to give folk a break to catch up.

Ideally, though, we'll just take feedback on specific elements of the game to the appropriate subforums, and disengage from any spats.

I think a big point of contention for a lot of people are two big things they promised just two weeks before release that didn't make it into the game, the upper city of baldur's gate fully in and playable and 15 minute epilogue...now the epilogue will come...although it sounds like they're working on a different one than the datamined version, which will hopefully be better and Larian said they left it out because they were unhappy with the quality of the epilogue they had ready for the game. But the upper city it sounds like it won't. Maybe for the definitive edition but even that is probably too much to hope for. Personally I can live with it if we never get the upper city. Beyond that another major issue people had was some companions(notoriously Minthara and Karlach) were obviously missing a content, this sounds like it will be fixed in the near future with 1500 lines of reactivity for Minthara and one of Karlach's endings plus some epilogue for her set to arrive in Patch two.

Personally my take is, for me to be completely content with the game I just hope for three things: 1) all of the Minthara content, though the more the better, 2) the epilogue for all companions, and 3) albeit never promised, some of the Raven Queen content from the game files realized in the game(again, the more the better) even if later in the definitive edition.

It would be useful to add a narrative ending.

It might be possible to consider restoring some of the "cuts", although I found some of them quite bold and inconsistent with the status quo.

What Larian did with this game in respect to Minthara and Halsin is the equivalent of an artist who smeared brown muck over their own painting because the viewers would not see the painting in the way that they intended them to.

Our artist, Larian, had announced the showcasing of their much-hyped painting and was worried that it was missing a sun and some clouds in this otherwise beautiful landscape. On the day of the exhibition, Larian nervously decided they would stick to the deadline and rely on the public's goodwill for a pass on the missing features.

Larian were pleasantly surprised at how few people had actually got round to noticing the missing features of their masterpiece, so decided to have a few drinks and whatever else, to celebrate having got away with it.

Then out of the corner of their eye they spot a group of viewers huddled around the picture, admiring two mis-shapen trees (Let's call them Halsin and Minthara) that seemed to capture the natural beauty of this work in an uncanny manner. Realising the geometric imperfection of the trees, and, by now, high on copium, Larian barged into the middle of the crowd, stuck their hand in a pot of brown paint, and smeared it all over the two trees, declaring that noone would see the painting in a way that they were not intended to.

Reeling in indignation, the viewers started to exit the gallery. Many remained to marvel at the wonderful blue sky before realising that the missing sun and clouds were actually quite jarring too.

As Larian pleaded for the viewers to give them another chance, the rest of these viewers slowly flocked out of the gallery.

They had heard of another artist down the road who was promising a sky with stars and fields with trees, and this artist was even promising that their viewers would be able to fly in those trees too! (If they really wanted to). Truth be told, there was no such field of beauty in those stars either.

Larian spent the next few years trying to paint a sun and some clouds over their blue sky. Over time, many would come to appreciate the 'original vision' of the artist. Many would even pay for subsequent expansions to this landscape.

But for some, the stench of that brown muck would prove too hard to forget.

Question though: will we be able to change race alongside with our looks ? We can already respec at will, and change race at will with a spell/mask (but not with custom face)

That would be awesome

We need more romance & kinky sex content

Not sure about the part with Wither's wardrobe, but the fact is -

So are you saying the upper city cut was planned long ago? The wording heavily implies it, but you can wiggle out of it with a "the upper city wasn't shipped".

If the cut was planned a long time ago, it might be a good idea to explain community post 19 and why it wasn't made clear before launch that the upper city wouldn't be included. And if it wasn't planned a long time ago, it might be a good idea to change the wording in this community post. Mistakes happen but this would be a rather egregious mistake, made worse by not properly and fully addressing it.

So as a spoiler but have to say...

Lol, the new patch is gonna make people furious.

Not comparing BG3's ending to Mass Effect 3's absolute disaster of an ending in any way, but the way Larian is handling fan feedback is kind of similar to how the Mass Effect 3 Team did it back in the day:

To be honest I personally wasn't expecting anything meaningful regarding Karlach because it's too soon to be anything in-depth regarding her endings, but I kinda do like what they said about it in the patch notes. The three musketeers in Hell is good enough for me for now

There probably will be a better ending for her in the future, but not for at least a year or so. Most likely something that comes as a Definitive Edition thingy.

As for the patch itself I'm always happy about the fixes and optimizations, but was really hoping for actual community requested features such as;

• Transmog
• Character customization post-creation
• Vendor menu having functional inventory management as it does in actual inventory screen
• Camp party management
• Weapon abilities not randomizing every time we equip a Torch
• A Torch keybind
• And many more commonly requested QOL features to make the game more intuitive

I'm probably going to make a longer post about this in story section once I've fully finished, but the "bad" ending for a particular character is on point when you consider a main theme of the BG3 story:

The essence of love is sacrifice, not victory or trade. One can define sacrifice as letting go of something you cherish highly for the (not guaranteed) hope of something you cherish above all else. ALL of our origin companions (and the PC) have to make this decision at some point, where they can "win" or "trade" something away for what they want, or they can sacrifice something they hold dear to hope for what they truly need. I'm worried that people demanding an unapologetic "good" ending for this character did not understand the story or her character and want a sort of "moral desert" for this character to trump the thematic storytelling at play. This character makes it abundantly clear where their true priorities lie, and an unqualified "good" ending makes their entire story superfluous, and just a personality stuck to a character model. If you remove the "bad" endings, this character faces no sacrificial dilemma in the game and undergoes no arc.

For those of you unaware of the concept of moral desert: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_(philosophy)

I'm one of the first people who critiqued the "bad" ending on the grounds of being an incomplete tragedy, in that there is no catharsis or "being one's own undoing." Those who are upset by what I am about to say can check the beginning of those threads in defense of this character. But as my game draws to a close, I disagree with what I initially said: this character does bring the end upon herself in a cathartic way, and it is thematically in line with the sacrifices other characters have to make. A good ending cheapens this.

Look, I'm not even a huge Karlach fan. I barely had her in my active party. But I DID care for her personal quest and to be completely honest, compared to other party NPCs, Karlach's quest really DOES feel incomplete.

After Act 2, it just ... stops. Why? There is nothing in Act 3, am I right?

COMPLETELY agree on the quest needing finishing. I just think the

I'm not against a bad or sacrificial ending. But I would like to see a complete questline in Act 3, where we do everything we can to get a "good" ending, and besides our efforts, we fail. And we need a GOOD reason for why we fail.

We meet many VERY powerful people in this world and we have access to MANY powerful spells. Off the top of my head, there are three suggestions on how to get a "good" ending. The game MUST give explanations on why none of them work with said character, otherwise, it remains inconsistent with the laws of the forgotten realms:



Again, it's fine if none of these things work in that particular case, but there need to be reaons WHY it does not work.

Yeah it feels the same way to me, Karlach although is incredibly awesome doesn't feel as fleshy as other companions.

I romanced her from the start and have her in my party always, but she always feels like she is just a side-character tagging along, both in terms of adventure and romance. Lae'zel who I decided to co-romance just until Karlach is ready for it turned out to be such an in-depth relationship that it developed so much further that I was planning for it to go. Meanwhile Karlach is barely making any romantic moves even after giving her the 2nd iron.

And in terms of personal quests... Lae'zel and Shadowheart both have such massive quests which lead them to their own acts basically. Just look at how long Shadowheart's journal entry is... then look at Karlach who has only two puny lines (we defeated the fake paladins) and collected two Infernal Iron. Just sad really...