Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Not BG4 or D&D

Whatever Larian might come up with as their next game, I will not going down the EA path again, not after all the disappointments BG3 brought me.
Also, I hope they don't oversexualize the game, they work on their humor (especially on how scripted it feels some time) and I hope there will be less hate in the community regarding the genders and sexual preferences of the characters in the game.
Overall, a more laid back fandom without making threats and being heavily aggressive would be much appreciated. Not saying that's the case, but I can imagine that such behaviour can add to being burned out.

Well, I certainly won't be playing another Larian game. (BG3 was gifted to me, so thankfully I didn't pay for it.)

7 years of "perfecting" Act I, then throwing crap at the wall in the few months before release to see what sticks (spoiler: sex).

Project management has some real problems at Larian.

I avoided the early release stuff right at the start. Software people created this concept called "agile development", which means the requirements always evolve, the code always changes, it is never really finished, and the customer needs to prepare for an infinite budget and an infinite schedule. That sounds like the perfect business model, no? No.

As far as BG4 goes, maybe it is time to just let the franchise end. The BG3 ending does kind of hint that there will be reprisals against the Dead Three for what they just attempted to do with the Absolute. And the Astral Prism certainly looked like it was built upon the skeletal remains of an old god, perhaps Jergal? I don't know, it's hard to keep making sequels "more epic". Just look at what Marvel had to do ... save the person, save the city, save the Earth, save the Galaxy, save the Universe, save the timeline, save the very essence of reality, ... wither do we go from there? (pun intended)

If they read it its during bathroom breaks to have a chuckle. As to whether they care - probably not, the server hamster died as I was writing this. Besides that so many good and well written suggestions, critiques and otherwise pressing issues in Early Access got straight up ignored. Some broke through to them via Reddit, sure but most weren't critical. I didn't visit the Discord as much so I can't speak for people voicing their opinions there. I know Twitch chat ate everything Larian gave them for PFH shows, whilst I was just sitting there waiting to hear a crumb, a slip of the tongue, anything about a Day/Night cycle or at least weather that isn't static because it would make the experience dull to play through after you combed through the game a couple of times...and we weren't wrong in that aspect. If my memory serves me right, it was not even adressed.

The more I come to settle into the news of no continuation or DnD games the more I like it, it is the right choice for them. Regardless of people feeling bad about it. Hopefully they leave a dedicated team to patch out arising issues.

Unfortunately, at least for me, I can't imagine Larian/Swen will use/create a new IP that is fantasy-based given that they already have that in their Divinity franchise. So it is much more likely they will go with something sci-fi/post-apocalyptic/steampunk etc. And since I only like fantasy-based games and only now am beginning to become open to these other genres, chances are good I'm not going to get a game from Larian that will make me rejoice. That sucks, and it's too bad, because I believe in giving credit where credit is due and Larian as an RPG developer does have some very positive things going for them.

Fair enough. I get your pov. But for me, what you consider to be "bloat" I consider to be juicy goodness, and what you consider to be "simpler" I consider to be simplified. Different strokes, I suppose.

Personally, I don't see the game being fixed all the way to how it needs to be. With what has been said about the modding tools and how bad the tools seem to be, I don't really see a new team learning said tools and the engine (which is one made by Larian iirc) because there is no money to be made.


I've been active on several social platforms and it seems that reddit and twitter is where they really read, interact and retweet, which is funny, because I consider those as some of the most toxic communities. Their Discord has been a good place to write feedback, especially a couple months back, when you could upvote and see if people share your ideas. They even had a frequent feedback post, but that got updated rarely and nearly nothing from that feedback made it into the game, same for the feedback you can find on this forum. Imo, the feedback on the forum and on Discord has mostly been well written with a lot of thought, but what mattered more were all those "give us more kisses, give me more Astarion, I want to kiss xy" community fanboys and fangirls over on Twitter.
I'm pretty sure there are members of Larian who are reading threads on here or Discord, but they never react to it, making you and your feedback feel worthless, while they keep retweeting superficial stuff, fan arts or awards. I don't know why they act like they do, maybe it's because they don't like the feedback or if they just act as private accounts and they don't want to talk about their work but more about what they like.

Also, I haven't seen any of the news this thread is about on Discord or this forum and if it wasn't for some news pages (I don't read IGN) I would've never known. And I think it is an important news for every player and fan, especially when it comes to expectations and the future of the game.

This may be the biggest understatement ever!!! (And to be clear, I totally agree with this.)

And I stand by my claim that we won't be seeing another quality D&D-based game for a good long while. We already have Sawyer from Obsidian publicly stating they will never again work with Hasbro/WotC. I'm quite sure inXile, another studio that wanted to make BG3, feels the same way. A lot of people in the gaming world were very angry with WotC's decision last year to pull the plug on five D&D game projects that were, by all accounts, progressing very well, leaving those studios and their employees high and dry. I'm pretty sure we're done with D&D RPGs for a while. At most we'll get more of the silly mobile-only games and that's it.

I find this perspective coming up a lot, and it's interesting to me because it makes me wonder how much of BG3's wild popularity relied on what people saw in its potential rather than what the game actually is. (And don't get me wrong, I do think it's a solid game as is, I've just never thought it was the best crpg ever).

I think a lot of the fandom, especially people new to the genre, got kind of "spoiled" with the idea that they could ask Larian to do something and it would get added to the game. Romance Halsin? Added. Hug Shadowheart? Added. Want epilogues? Added. And I think this created an illusion that Larian would and could keep doing this forever, just creating game content based on the demands of the fans, up to and including a dlc and sequels. I personally doubted BG3 would get the BG1 to BG2 sequel treatment because the story lacks the narrative focus of those games: a central protagonist.

So I think Larian saying they're done (to whatever extent they are; I do hope for a definitive edition so I can play the game without some character changing their personality every other patch), is a wake up call. Either you love the game for what it is and it can stand by itself, or you loved it because you thought it was a promise for what was to come, and that promise will never be fulfilled. The game has always had issues and still does, and if people overlooked those because they thought it would be "complete" someday, it just seems like yet another day in the current gaming industry tbh.

I think you misinterpreted what I wrote. As a former RPG player (really, trust me), I've always thought that among the cult games, we find those that offered a new perspective with rich and well-written expansions. Think about the richness offered to BG or The Witcher 3 by sequels and expansions. This added considerably to the quality of the original game. I don't care about small fixes and additions for the community. I'm talking about new content. This is why I think Larian is making a mistake by abandoning a game that I consider very successful.

I would be pleased with a new Larian game not being based on D&D, because there is too much immersion killing silliness going on there. I would love a new Larian game to move towards the way XCOM games work:

• Keep turn based combat (of course, that is a no-brainer);
• Permadeath - let us feel the agony of loss;
• Interesting gear, but realistic loadouts (don't carry three warehouses of stuff in your back pocket);
• Different types of missions;
• A party of six (eventually).

Right, the next Larian project will surely come without immersion breaking silliness.

Oh, I agree that dlc and sequels can add a lot of richness to a story; I doubt the original Baldur's Gate series would be as influential if it had ended at BG1. I guess I was just wondering (and this goes more to comments I've seen on other sites) whether people were actually in love with BG3 as is or if they were in love with its potential.

I apologize for looping your comment in with the comments of others I was thinking of, which are more like full on meltdowns. You make a reasonable point.

Well, I think you should give other genres a try. Owlcat's Rogue Trader has one of the best writing I've seen (personally, I find it comparable to PST or Disco Elysium). This shit is absolutely top notch, providing you are a fan of walls of text. Fallout, especially first two games are also great and there is a spiritual successor, Broken World coming next month. The only issue I see for you is that all of those games are turn-bssed, but I have a hard time to find a RTwP game you could potentionally not played yet.

Swen mentioned their next game won't be their peak game, because they still lack the tech do do it. It will be like an intermediary step to their opus magnum game. I get the feeling they either already got, or are working on acquiring Ultima licence. This game is Swen's major inspiration and I can totally see them trying to make a worthy successor.

As for BG, I think we should let it rest. There were already multitude discussions after Larian announced BG3, that it should not be named BG3, and that BG saga is finished. Now, this statement is even more true.

My memory might be wrong but I feel like DOS2 had less silly humor (or at least bad timing on the humor), but I totally might be wrong.

I found BG3 to ultimately be one of the most disappointing gaming experiences I've ever had, and I wouldn't have bought a DLC even if one had come around. But I still feel strangely sad about the news that it's definitely not coming. I'm definitely not buying another Larian game, their style just does not work for me, but I can see a lot of people saddened by this news, and I share their sorrow. But Larian is well within their rights to step away and I don't think they're doing anything wrong by doing that. Not diong DLC certainly doesn't mean "cutting and running." I expect they'll finish up patching the game, I don't think it's crazy to expect a definitive edition in a year or so (less likely now than before, but still not out of the realm of possibility) and I think that's fine. Let the game end, let Larian move on. Let this just be a good game that existed and you had fun with.

Personally I've always had a suspicion that Larian really like Baldur's Gate, but they don't care as much for D&D the system. That seems pretty reasonable based on all I've seen around.

Certainly for me, much as I love the game BG3 is, I also thought its reach exceeded its grasp. Which I’m glad of, as if Larian had played it safe then I wouldn’t have got those tantalising glimpses of what could be, but I am disappointed that we won’t now get a BG game from them that wholly lives up to BG3’s potential. Given the scale of what Larian tried to achieve, I feel it would have been too much to expect them to make my perfect RPG straight off, but with the groundwork firmly in place and ready to build on, I reckon they might have got there had they been willing to try again,

But while disappointed, I’m not entirely surprised that’s not the technical or creative challenge they want, and I’d prefer they embarked on a game they were passionate about rather than try to do something because of fan demand or money that their heart wasn’t in.

I am still sadden that BG3 had to made by Larian. I have total respect for their work but dislike their style of games.
But the sad reality for this last decade is...WHO ELSE? Larian is the best we could get for this scale of a game.

And that is the problem these days. What gaming has turned into as a whole. Apart from a few shining beacons of hope, and some top tear indie studios... No more GOOD games for profit. In the old days that is the only way you can make a profit. Build a good FULL game. Even for the Arcades. The better the game the more the profit the happier the gamers.

And then in 2000s came the Gatcha games with Maplestory and the realization that you do not NEED to make a GOOD game for incredible profits.

Now games turned into multi-million dollar digital profit slot machines designed to enslave your mind into these well designed systems to MANAGE USERS (not gamers) and max out profits.

Honestly tell me, if you were to make 1 million a day with minimum effort for a shit product versus 1 million after 3 years of intensive effort for a quality product...which would 95% of people pick to work for??
That is why we need passionate artistic people in this world.
Larian could of made 1000x more money. They can be proud of their work and you can bet it will be remembered 30 years from now compared to the shit show AAA stuff that has been made the last decade.
Legacy and remembrance is priceless. People who worked for BG3 can tell their grand kids, "You know that game, BG3? Well I was part of the team who made it."

And that people will be my last post to this forum. Its been a fun ride, happy gaming life!

Well, as for Larian's next title, I suppose the one thing they shouldn't do is Early Access. Like, at all.

Their development has always been tumultuous and messy as-is (what with constant rewrites and redesigns very late into the cycle causing everything to come apart at the seams, BG3's just the most obvious example because of how oversaturated it is), and if BG3's EA has shown anything, it's that they can barely maintain a stable vision of what they are trying to cobble together, and you add the player feedback on top of that which they stopped giving a crap about around a year before release, switching to appeasing the "slobbering over a somewhat poorly written globule of pixels" crowd instead...

...Oh, right. Remove romance entirely, please. Altogether. Either make a full-on Subverse-like if you're so commited to slapping sex on everything and everyone, or ignore the subject altogether, because BG3 certainly was anything but a smooth mixture of tones.

And maybe focus on the PC playerbase first and foremost this time around, the, well, overwhelming percentage of whoever even plays CRPGs? Proper mod support on release and not spreading resources to try and squeeze the game onto a brick until a year or so after it comes out worked just fine for D:OS2.

And no need to rent castles anymore, perhaps. That budget could have gone into much, much more pressing matters. Like character customization that isn't embarrasingly simple for a cinematic CRPG. Or not having your AA settings reset every time you launch the game if you're using FSR. Or slings. Or belts. Or proper reactivity....

This, 100%. All those rewritings made me feel like playing a different game on release with characters who pretend to be the same as in EA but simply are a version you can order on wish. The moment I saw the last PFH I had a real bad gut feeling, as people went crazy about "whoa you can f*ck a bear, nice" and "whoa so much gore and blood, nice". Sadly, my feeling was right and what they delivered wasn't a good, deep story but more a shallow story only used as the groundwork for some abysmally bad narrative choices and sex-driven characters just to please the part of the crowd that can be pleased easily whenever they see pixel nipples or nude stuff more down south. Yeah, I get it, it's easier to go that route than to actually come up with a story that's so good that it sticks in your head for a long time.


Exactly, the romances itself, if you compare all the companions, show huge differences in their quality. There were some good moments, ngl, but overall it played on a American Pie-level with all those teenager horniness and the lack of a real adult romance. When I heard Larian talking about their vision for romances for the first time (like grown-up romances, sex should not be a reward etc.) I felt like this could be really good, because I hate how relationships in games are either depicted somewhat childish (like Harvest Moon / Story of Seasons) or way too focused on sex. Makes me question if the developers ever had their own one.
If they decide to add romances again, please tone it down, make it slow burn and less about sex but more about how important compromises are and how you evolve together as a partners.