Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General What do you think of Act 3?

It was for the first game, actually, where a whole finale was added that made it look less abrupt, and the plot's general pacing and details were all heavily reinforced. The second's changes were a lot less significant (and mostly final act-only) and in some cases more of a side-grade than an improvement (and they changed a certain frog's voice actor for some reason, completely ruining him. Horrid).

My worry is, to re-iterate some of the things said by others in this thread, that the game is treated as a success and a standard-setter and as such is not seen as requiring any improvements or changes. Now, pretty much every RPG classic had heavy cuts or compromises, but they have all also suffered from publisher pressure, which is not as much of a case here - at least it shouldn't be? Meanwhile Bioware's companion interactions still remain a lot more fleshed out, while Obsidian/Black Isle still remain the best examples of character- and world-building, and Owlcat are nothing if not aiming for great scale (for better or worse...).

Like, what kind of a "glitch" can possibly make Minthara's entire post Act 1/2's content inaccessible, and how could a glitch so severe be unnoticed in testing after the game was in development (hell?) for so long?

The pre-release advertisement made the game out to be practically a raunchy fantasy dating sim but both the raunchy and the dating parts are barely there, with Dragon Age: Origins (and BG2, as well!) having implemented it all better some 14 (23!) years ago, sans the honestly unnecessary nudity which looks off with how rigid and low-detail the bodies are. It somehow got tamer than EA, with Minthara's alternate scene cut for whatever reason, and the hints at the Lae'zel/Shadowheart interactions dying alongside any and all interactivity they have after the one argument and two extra banters total in Act 1.

And a far more personal gripe: for a game where there's some thinking to do about character planning, there is No. Progresssion. Preview. Something that existed in RPGs since at least NWN 1, if not even earlier. Cracking the PHb open doesn't help on account of all the homebrew. Add the inability to create custom hirelings on top of that so instead we have 12 seemingly trolling creations with awful backstories and suboptimal race/class combos (at least as suboptimal as they get without the racial ASIs...) and it all becomes rather disappointing.

I didn't hate the game, far from it, but it could have been so, SO much more. Where other games can overstay their welcome thanks to less than competent design or pacing, BG3 instead underdelivers. There are games that you're happy they're finally over, and then there's this where it leaves you wanting for what should have been there.

A strange take, given how the EA feedback was supposedly the driving point for the game's evolution up to the release version (if not for it, we'd still have cantrips spawning surfaces or something) and that the game sold well enough during EA to have built up a large enough dedicated following who one would think will be the ultimate target audience (making the heavy alterations done prior to the release a very odd move, to be honest)...

...then again, some people back then were complaining that Daisy was inappropriately touching their characters and such, though you'd think that if you are willing to telepathically touch others and rummage in their thoughts and manipulate them against their will it's only fitting you get touched back. Regardless, getting what at first seemed like a (insert one of the gods from D:OS2) re-iteration which made me think that Larian are just re-doing their old story almost letter-to-letter only to turn into the most annoying, patronizing, railroading, and not-at-all manipulative voice in your head instead of a manifestation of the allure of absolute power (another aspect dropped entirely, since apparently my 100% tadpole clean playthrough was mostly pointless and locked me out of content instead of being a genuine choice to make) seems like a big loss to me.

But hey, he's a walking tentacle hentai premise, and apparently the new target audience can be shallow enough to overlook anything past that, just like Orin and Gortash are being ignored for being a sadistic murderer/fascist tyrant because they are seen as waifu/husbando material, meanwhile Thorm (an actually tragic figure who went through two crises of faith and a family downfall) is just some mean old guy who objects his daughter's relationship or something.

Let's be clear: Fighters are totally capable of great single-round burst in 5e RAW, doing more damage to a target in a single round than a caster can do *for a limited time* and I actually think that's perfectly balanced (since casters get, you know, all that other stuff like AoE and super powerful crowd control and movement.) The thing is that Larian makes martials WAY more powerful through
1. Itemization that allows you to achieve incredibly high levels of strength
2. Gear (including gear that outright adds extra die rolls to every melee hit)
3. Haste being IMPLEMENTED WRONG *this more than anything is the big one*

You mention 6 attacks per round. Properly implemented, a 12th level fighter can do that ONCE in a battle with action surge (with it being restored on a short rest.) Haste could give him +1 attack per round for a total of 7 attacks within a round that he could do once per battle if properly set up. So let's say 14d6 + 21 (for a +3 weapon, which is pretty generous) + 35 (assuming 20 strength.) I think that's an average of like 105 damage. With GWM you could do significantly more (a whopping + 10 per attack, so an additional 70 damage...*assuming all attacks hit.*) I think at level 12 the average monster ac is 17, and proficiency bonus of 4, weapon +3, and 5 stength adds up to 12; if you use GWM you have +7 instead....so without using GWM you could expect 75% of your hits to connect, with GWM you could expect 50%....so without GWM you would do .75 * 105 or around 76 damage, while with GWM you would do .5 * 175 or around 85 damage. Now think of the fact that in BG3 through various items and in-game buffs you can get to like, what, 26 strength, for a +8 bonus instead of +5? 14d6 + 21 + 56? That changes it to .9 * 126 without GWM for 113 damage, or .65 * 196 with GWM for 127 damage. Then consider JUST Balduran's GS, which DOUBLES your strength bonus on a hit? .9 * 182 for 164 damage or .65 * 252 for...164 damage (yeah, in some regimes GWM seems like it may not actually matter. Though of course you could do way more damage with GWM than without on against a paralyzed target, which is not difficult to get). And tis isn't even getting into the items the game gives you that just outright add damage on top of every melee hit.

Keep in mind that this is all off the top of my head (I usually main a wizard both in tabletop and in this game) so I might be wrong about something here. There's also things to take into account like spells that may buff or give your fighter advantage on attacks, etc. But let's not get too dragged down debating the specifics, the point is that you could absolutely burst in 5e tabletop, but for MUCH less than you can burst in BG3, and most importantly you could only do it once per short rest, and only once within any battle. Because every other turn, haste only gives you +1 attack per round, meaning you'd have 4 attacks per round. In BG3, however, haste gives you an extra FULL ACTION each round, meaning that as long as you are hasted you can make your full 6 attacks per round. Add action surge on top of that, and it's 9 attacks per round. BG3 essentially lets a hasted fighter do the whole "Single round mega burst that i can only pull off once per battle" EVERY SINGLE ROUND. This is an insane boost to fighter dps (and indeed to martials in general) made worse by the fact that it is NOT difficult to get haste, even without a caster.

I don't consider it imbalaned in 5e that a fighter, burning his "once per battle" resource, can do more single target damage in a round than a caster can. What makes it imbalanced (and makes casters feel impotent in comparison) is letting them do the same ALL THE TIME. It's not helped by the fact that Larian's homebrew HEAVILY nerfed a bunch of caster crowd control spells, made sleeping mobs easier to wake up, and has a bunch of crowd control spells STILL BUGGED (spells like hold person roll a save at the beginning of the turn instead of at the end, so for an enemy to lose even one turn to hold person they get to save twice, and apparently the DCs of surface CC effects are incorrectly low.) So when casters are trying to do anything BUT damage (you know...a humongous part of what their class does) they are severely gimped. But it's okay, because Larian actually added in a bunch of items that make Magic Missile the best damage spell in 90 percent of cases by adding +damage die, + damage and extra missiles to every cast, all achieved through itemization of course. (Haha it's not okay I hate that.)

I will INSIST that 5e is not responsible for the broken balance in this game. First because it's not, but second because this is the one thing that Larian did that actively pissed me off. I've played Larian games before, see, and I've experienced BEFORE how both their plot and narrative, AND their combat systems, fall apart in the late game. In multiple games. This is not new for them. For BG3, I thought to myself: "Well, at least they're using someone else's much-more-tested combat system. It is true that DnD 5e can start to fall apart at higher levels, but a level cap of 12 should be fine. Even if I expect their narrative to fall apart, I can expect the gameplay to hold up in the late game."

So while I was disappointed with what happened to the plot in act 3, I wasn't exactly shocked. I kind of expected it. What actually *angered* me is that they took someone else's combat system and BROKE IT SO THAT IT FELL APART JUST LIKE THEIR CUSTOM BATTLE SYSTEM ANYWAY. It was COMPLETELY unnecessary, they shot themselves in the foot with their own modifications to the system and by having basically zero restraint when it came to the items they were handing out. In my very first game I ever DM'd when I was like, THIRTEEN, I handed out magic items like candy because I thought that would make people happy, only to realize that it totally threw off the balance and made it difficult to come up with appropriate challenges, which made it boring for players after a while. If I could learn that lesson as a CHILD, why is Larian making *the exact same mistakes?!* I'm sorry, I'm probably ranting at this point, but this specific thing really stuck in my craw. Due to my history with Larian games, I was prepared for disappointment in the plot. I was not prepared for them to actively break another, already-made combat system so that it had the same problems their own custom system had.

I was mostly bored during act 3 and towards the end lost interest in completing the game, which wasn't entirely suprising, since it was more or less evident they were going to double down on the boring and problematic stuff already present in EA.

Isn't that what we are trying to accomplish here though ? To make them see this game is not the new standard, YET. But they can cement themselves a place in the hall of fame of RPGs by FINISHING it.

And tbh even the game websites are starting to catch up, I saw an article IGN posted about act 3 being rushed, I will post it somewhere in a thread it feels appropriate. Maybe the one I made in the feedback forum.

Act 3 is at times, so laughably bad I can not see developer pride in it, at all


The framework is already done, all that is required is a second pass on the main story (pacing and plot points) and clean up act 3 (companion interaction, bugs, quest spam etc ). This game can still be the new benchmark, right now it is not.

While it�s been some time since release, I�d like people to use spoiler tags concerning specific late-game plot beats, especially when in the general subforum.

Well, my run was hardly the most completionist, so I may have missed some things that further emphasize the issue (my late-game fighter weapon was the silver sword, and I couldn't be bothered to fully comb Act 3 for everything there is after a while), and I opted out of using Haste after some time because it made the game much too trivial, so I have to concede on that front. What I did find truly broken was the potion of bloodlust which refunds an action after killing something, especially with how late-game tends to throw trash enemies at you in combination with the properly powerful ones.

However, the calculations didn't account for GWM's pseudo-Cleave attack (extra bonus action attack after a kill/critical) which still can provide a 4th/7th attack even without Haste, and that BM can burn the superiority dice to outweigh the accuracy penalty from power attack (using 3e terms here because that's what I am used to), so the increased miss chance from power attack being on can be practically ignored, especially if you consider how easy it is to get Advantage in 5e (if there is one mechanic I would definitely consider much too simplistic and reducing combat to milking that one way to heavily increase your odds, it's definitely that).

As for the spells, the surface DC is certainly bugged to all hell, which made Evard's Black Tentacles practically useless instead of a reliable control tool. As for damage-dealing spells, their scaling in 5e somewhat hampers their usefulness by itself, while the nature of their effect makes using them without metamagic (let's delegate a very important and interesting caster mechanic to sorcerers alone, why not, 5e?) so that you can guarantee save disadvantage or at least on average better damage rolls a crapshoot compared to just whacking someone with a +2 or +3 weapon a few times. Even then, high AC counters the ranged/melee attack spells, high Dex saves which many enemies have make AoE unreliable (and if they have Evasion, practically useless), and high Con saves (every beefy boss enemy, basically) or being a construct/undead counter all the necromantic/poison-based sources of damage.

I am afraid I remain of an opinion that 5e inverted the 3e's caster idea of "start weak, finish strong", because regardless of itemization and balancing the spell DC barely increases and outside of being a sorcerer or doing a sorcerer dip you have little to no ways to circumvent higher saves and damage variance, except for the level 10 evoker feature (which Larian did implement wrong, actually, and the damage bonus applies to every instance of a multi-target spell). You don't have the old Empowered and Maximized Spell metamagic, you can't easily bump your casting ability up to increase DC, you can't really weaken the enemy's abilities except by imposing Disadvantage on saves.

A fireball with its 8d6, doing ~28 to all targets in range, far more likely to be ~14 because saves and very few ways the player has to bump the DC high enough, potentially as little as ~7 because resistances, when the game tends to use high HP enemies in smaller groups, is not nearly as reliable as even 3 attacks with a +2 weapon (assuming our fighter is min-maxed, it's 3 attacks of, say, 1d12 + 7, so 8~19, 18~29 with GWM, resulting in ~13.5 / ~23.5 per hit, times three, plus potential criticals, of damage output per turn)...

...alright, as much as I enjoyed the exchange (thanks!), it's getting off-topic.

I think it's kinda dumb to the ending.


I think Larian should fix this because it's something we can easily do.

Well written. I cracked a smile.

Idk, I am just here, hoping that Larian sees that the main story needs a quality check, and rewrite.

Just got to act 3 and so so lost... so much so many directions.


Act1 and ACt2 it fell into place on what to do.... I need focus man.... focus I need someone to besides youtube to help me keep on track.

So far it seems very congested, with so many NPC's who are actually named, I can't tell if I need to talk to them, or ignore them. Then I'm baffled by how my parties approval/disapproval in the area makes no sense. In chatting they will tell me one thing, then when we do it they immediately disapprove of the very thing they all agreed we need to do. Almost feels like I should solo explore the area just for consistency since my party member are all hypocrites.