Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Feedback from a filthy casual

Heya Levghilian, I can field a few of those complaints with at least some answers, even if they aren't very satisfying... Though I'd encourage you to submit your impressions and experiences as feedback to Larian directly through their feedback form; letting them know how the game led you to experience it is always data they may be able to use.

Anyhow...

Folks have been asking for a more robust difficulty settings spread, as other contemporary D&D-based or similar games offer, for awhile now. It seems unlikely that we will ever get one, at least not before a theorised definitive edition years from now... For folks used to faster paced play, the large number of enemies that BG3's battle design often pitches at you can leave you twiddling your thumbs for several minutes between taking turns with your characters, which may themselves only take a handful of seconds, before leaving you to wait again. Understandably, a lot of folks who aren't deeply engaged in the combat minutia may find this tedious. The reason that most other contemporary games of this style focus on larger, more dangerous enemies in smaller numbers is precisely for this reason, but it's a lesson that Larian haven't quite learned yet. The camera behaviour during enemy turns doesn't help, since the way it jumps around, often lagging behind creatures actually acting (creatures may begin to act immediately, while the camera may take up to a second to move to or reach them with any clarity, often making it unclear what the creature even did... this is juxtaposed by the equal measure of creatures going brain-dead during their turn and spending upwards of eight or nine seconds doing nothing at all and just bouncing in place. It's not great.)

Larian are quick to say that they provide options, and don't 'expect' you to do anything, but rather make the space free for you to be creative. This is only really true at the paint-deep surface level... many fights are set up specifically as set pieces and designed for you to abuse various elements of the environment to win the fight cheaply; some find this funny, and satisfying, but many do not. Playing on the lowest difficulty, the story mode, should provide you a fairly easy run through and let you focus on the story elements themselves; you don't need to be a D&D vet here or have a tweaked build - you can bumble your way through this game without ever using nay of your class abilities at all, and just rely on beating creatures to death with a sack of chain shirts you throw around, throwing enemies into other enemies, and shoving them off cliffs; that's all Larian homebrew and it's more powerful than most of what you might get from your formal D&D class, and if utilising it doesn't bother you, it'll make your play-through very easy. If you want to actually learn about playing D&D, however, you're right that Larian's tutorial information is bare bones, and there exists no in-game resource to check things; there's no glossary, other than what you get popping out individual tooltips, and those are usually lacking in detail, and there's no clear description of the rules of the game. Various folks have been pushing for a compendium-type resource to be present in the game, where you can read up on the mechanics if you choose to, but it's just not the sort of thing that Larian does - they much prefer the "We're not going to tell you, just try it and find out, it'll be funny!" approach. If that isn't something you enjoy, then much of the game may rub you the wrong way.

Another example that keeps coming up, even after being grilled repeatedly during EA, is the issue between threatened and ranged attacks; how far do you need to be from a hostile before it stops imposing disadvantage on your ranged attack? Game refuses, utterly, to tell you this. You can be out of opportunity range (which the game also doesn't give you a rule for, just a visual indication), and more than five feet away, but still be told you're too close... you've just got to 'try it to find out', taking gradual steps further and further away until it stops applying the penalty; there's no way to know before hand if you'll be far enough, because the game will not tell you, or explain the rule, anywhere.)



Fallen answered a couple of these, but here's some more: Environmentally, Larian likes blowing stuff up. They like things to be big and flashy and colourful and dramatic, all the time, 100% to the max. That's their philosophy. What they generally mean by 'use your environment' is "shoot the thing that blows up to blow up your enemies". There are other things, like breaking rocks of the ceiling to drop on enemies, or destroying the bridge they're crossing, but a very large percentage of the time, it's blowing things up, and the vast majority of all such interactions are done by shooting them with a projectile, preferably one that's on fire.... Or shoving them off cliffs/into hazards, they love that too.

Monsters are often able to shoot through solid rocks and other obstacles, while you can't, because the UI lies to you, and the AI doesn't have to contend with that. It knows where the exact one pixel exists that it can get the shot through, and it doesn't have to worry about wrangling a UI that wants to force-move your character, or tell you that a path is obstruct when it isn't (or not tell you when it is). The other element is that most of Larian's customised monster abilities don't require line of sight or path to target for the enemies to use, while most of yours, derived form D&D abilities, do. It's as simple as that, unfortunately.

You have limited uses of your spells and special abilities because that's part of how D&d works, in terms of resource management. A level 20, near god-like, wizard still only has 4 1st level spell slots per day, for example (they have a large amount of other slots too - three 2nds, three 3rds, three 4ths, three 5ths, two 6ths, two 7ths, one 8th and one 9th). You're bound by those rules, but Larian decided that it wouldn't be 'fun' enough if they had their enemies play by those rules as well... so they don't. Their enemy casters have 8 1st level slots off base, even at level 2, and it only goes up from there. As well as this, they homebrewed a lot of offensive bonus action abilities that deal damage, something else that 5e rules don't do for monsters except in very rare occasions, and they gave them to their monsters to use freely every turn as well. Because that's 'cooler'... right?


They hinted at starting to do this, in the EA - one of the things they showcased was your character making an internal history check to learn about the Descent, when mention of it came up... however, that turned out to be mostly smoke and mirrors in the end, and the game seems largely destitute of the surrounding lore that would help. There ARE a number of books with stories in them that help, but not nearly enough except for folks already generally familiar with the world space. They act like cool hat tips and nostalgia points for people already vaguely familiar, but don't give enough detail for those who aren't. A glossary and compendium of lore would be excellent, and many would like to see it added, but don't hold your breath. Other contemporary games make names and terms highlightable in dialogue, and popping out a tooltip on them brings up a lore description of what is being referenced, often with further pop-outs available from those if necessary. Short of having an in-game compendium that can be checked, that's a pretty neat solution. What I will say is that the forgotten realms wiki is pretty good at giving background setting information, and it's easy to fall down a rabbit hole of reading about lore bits and pieces there, to give you a broader picture.


Not much help I can offer on this one, sadly the camera has been jank since day one, and it's still jank now. If you're trying to target something specifically in combat, there's a 'tactics mode' that you can go into by pressing (default) 'O' - this moves it to a more specifically top don view, which, because the game does not actually have any legitimate verticality, or ability for you to target things on the vertical axis (which other contemporary games manage with aplomb), works for most things... though once again, the camera's inability to be moved up and down, or to handle multiple floors properly makes this come undone in many places as well...

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That's extremely unhelpful as a remark, Dex.

Larian wanted this game to appeal to as many people as possible and as much of the potential market as they could... that's part of why it turned out as such a tonally inconsistent mess in the first place. They wanted to try to appeal to everyone and couldn't keep their game identity under control... and if fans of fantasy sword-and-sorcery rpgs weren't part of the target audience for BG3, I'd to know who you think were. Who DO you think were the target audience (though if you say dating sim players, I'll probably have to pay that...)? It certainly wasn't D&D veterans; Larian's own scorn of the D&D system, and their wilful obfuscation of its mechanics and potentially unintentional misunderstanding of many elements of them, and their back-handed blame of the 5e system as the thing at fault for any poor game-play or clunky systems (they claimed to have made a faithful implementation and found it wasn't fun, so changed it up; there's no feasible way this is true without severely stretching the meaning of the statement)... well, that mostly speaks for itself, in spite of those determined to defend the game or the company at any cost. It is the D&D enthusiasts who were drawn in on the promise of a 5e D&D game, who have been the ones most commonly left feeling let down by the game.

It really feels like the majority of what you do, recently, is come into threads with the intent of blaming the player for any fault they find with the game. Please stop doing that - it really doesn't contribute anything, and there are much more productive ways to offer insights and advice to players that don't heap on a portion of scorn, blame of implied inferiority.