Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Might be thinking difficulty level wrong

Scripted fights are boring for a 2nd time, but there are much bigger problems with difficulty and replayability.

The biggest one being Larian's stubborn reluctance to make the D&D ruleset work properly, i.e. the "op is fun" philosophy. Crazy Illithid powers, magic items, abundant exploits and of course, unlimited Long Rest. They destroy D&D's resource management and bounded accuracy concepts with reckless abandon. Combat becomes a dumbed down smash fest where damage is insanely high, reviving downed characters is trivial and a Long Rest is available anytime you want full powers back.

What the game needs is a Core Rules difficulty mode that imposes restrictions of the 5e system in a meaningful way. Embrace how the system the game uses is designed, not break parts of it. BG3 uses 5e, but the devs didn't really want to because they wanted a flashy frag fest over a smart tactical experience. That shows. And because of this shift in play style and how much damage martial classes inflict, high level magic like Chain Lightning now feels weak and underwhelming.

Conversely, increasing enemy stats and HP is not a real new difficulty mode. It just means you now have to use the most OP builds and resort to Illithid powers. The game would still essentially play the same. So a difficulty mode like that actually limits your options instead of adding anything meaningful. D&D-like restrictions would be better for challenge and changing how the game plays, but I'm sure Larian disagree. Then again, objectively, if you already have 3 difficulty modes that just fiddle with stats and modifiers, why wouldn't you want to add a difficulty mode that does something more profound and actually changes how the game plays?

The amount of companions is a huge hindrance to replayability. I'm sick of them after just one almost finished playthrough. Well, not sick but replaying their stories is not appealing and using the same characters in combat is not a fresh take tactically. Adding just a few more companions would have created a massive increase of different party compositions. And no, respeccing Shadowheart into an Open Hand Monk doesn't help, it's just stupid.

All that said, the game also desperately needs random elements. Random encounters and randomness inside encounters. Random events. The world needs to feel real and unpredictable rather than a movie where you get to choose path A or B.