Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Disappointed in Larian

I don't have much hope for anything really. At this point I'm just popping in here from time to time to see how it will all end.

They also mentioned altering other animations, so I wonder what people will discover.


Some new cosmetics would be nice.

There is/was also Karlach's scrapped/unfinished ending that was, apparently, connected with the Upper City; but I guess giving her a bandaid ending seemed to be sufficient for everyone.

Larian has explicitly stated this was untrue. They've been vague about other allegedly cut content but not this. I don't see any reason to disbelieve them as her entire arc seemed to be leading up to that scene on the docks.

I mean, if I thought the game was developed well throughout I wouldn't be disappointed that they're not going to work on it anymore. So it's not an either/or thing. I'm focusing on the third act because it's where things start to fall apart a little to me. In both the main quest and the continuation of side quests that don't pan out much at all when you arrive. I suppose this would be a criticism of overall development because it seems to be a pattern with Larian.

I wouldn't expect to see every perceived flaw rectified, but I know Larian has fundamentally restructured the quests and story in the final act of their games in the past. I think BG3 is in need of the same treatment so I'm disappointed that they have no intention of working on it.

The side content is less important to me than the issues with the structure of the main quests and story though. Omeluum not being an option when there's no good reason for him not to be is one issue among many. Your choices throughout the game ultimately don't matter with the outcome of that and it feels inorganic and forced.

Honestly I don't think I would be so upset if the problems of the game were contained to the development process. There's places where every game falls short, and this is certainly no exception. If for example you look at the Witcher 3, you'll see that a common thing pointed out is that the end of the assassins subplot feels very anticlimactic considering how important those side quests are to the main ending of the game. Yet, that stands out in a wonderful game as merely a place where the developers dropped the ball and didn't get a chance to polish things up, it doesn't feel like something that NEEDS to be addressed because it's a problem in the game. In BG3, there's very clearly a lot of situations that resemble this one. Obviously in Act 3, it's a bit of a letdown to see that the conclusions of the stories for many of the recurring npcs suddenly feel like there's no consequences from your prior interactions, leaving you to just have a brief chat with them where they say "look I'm here at the end of the game too!". But despite it being a letdown, at least they're there, with some form of conclusion to that piece of the narrative. Situations like this really don't upset me as much as other issues I've come to realize in the year since the game's release.

The reason I'm upset about the end of post-launch support is at it's core because I feel like we haven't gotten ANY post-launch support. Everything we've seen in the major patches has been essentially just Larian Studios finishing the game after it was released. On the launch of the game, the whole third act was riddled with so many bugs that it was practically unplayable for a good chunk of the playerbase. For those lucky enough to make it through that, they would come to discover that the game doesn't even have an ending. There was simply a brief moment of falling action after the final battle and then the credits started rolling. In a game like this that tells such a wide story, that absolutely counts as blatantly not having an ending for the story. It would be like if Return of the King ended and went to the credits as Frodo and Sam are carried away by the eagles after their brief moment of celebrating that they had accomplished their goal. All of the things Larian has been doing since the launch of the game has nothing to do with giving it more polish after release, they've simply been bringing it up the state that it SHOULD have released in in the first place. I'll admit that I do find it puzzling that somehow during this time, the Larian decided that an equally important goal to actually giving the game an ending was... adding several brand new animations for kissing. I'm just bothered to see that Larian's understandable excitement to work on new projects has seemingly 100% eclipsed their desire to actually have complete, polished games and to stand out in the gaming industry for putting the player first. They've left the game at a point where as they've said it "has a beginning, middle, and end" and actually works more often than it doesn't, but don't feel any need to address the other points where the game is outright not a fully finished product. Sure, we're never going to get a real evil path or an adventure in Avernus because those ideas were left behind a while ago (I think this is caused by a very fundamental issue with Larian's development process that has affected all their games and will continue to do so unless they stop to rethink how they approach their project. But that's something I can talk about later.).

The things that feel genuinely unfinished now are mostly to do with the companions. They've given the main narrative a fully fleshed out conclusion and made sure it flows well despite some pacing issues that are due to the aforementioned development issue I discussed, but almost half of the companions in the game are still stuck in a phase where they probably needed several months more of work to be even remotely on the same standard as their peers. Astarion, Shadowheart, Gale, and Lae'zel all have complete, functional stories that add a lot to the game and feel satisfying both in terms of their narrative and their in game quest. Astarion and Shadowheart certainly had more love and time given to their parts of the game because they were the clear favorites among both developers and the fans, but Gale and Lae'zel still feel like they hold up to those two golden children. Compare this to Karlach and Wyll, who were added to the game later in development and underwent a complete rewrite later in development, respectively. Their characters frankly feel like they're still from a Beta playtest where we don't have access to all of their content. Both characters whole personal quests are simply conversations that are tacked on to places and encounters you would already be dealing with if they weren't there. Karlach only needs to grab some random bits of iron from chests and chat about them with Dammon (A regular merchant you meet anyway), and then her only relevance for the rest of the game is to have her big cathartic moment after killing Gortash, who needs to be dealt with regardless as one of the game's main villains. I'd imagine that the rumor of "cut upper city area with a Karlach quest" likely are false, but there are visibly places in the game where it's clear there was meant to be more for her to do. There's crazy amounts of enriched infernal iron found in Act 3 that serves no purpose, and there's a clear story building up with the Iron Watch/The Gondians about their infernal engines that suddenly vanishes into thin air and isn't addressed. Poor Wyll suffers from the same problem, as his whole story is about everybody except for himself. The first part of his story is about Karlach (who's not actually tied to him in any way beyond the immediate circumstances. Then in Act 3 he gets totally sidelined in favor of his father (who's still relevant to the plot even if Wyll's not there) and the Emperor (Why is the giant bombshell of his identity related to Wyll's story in any way beyond Wyll wanting to go find Ansur just because his dad said so?). His whole personal story just amounts to his two important decisions where you as the player get complete control over binary options that decide how his story ends. Minthara and Halsin are in even worse states, and I don't even expect them to have as much as the others in the first place because they're not origins. Halsin's entire purpose and life goals are resolved before he's even a full party member, so all he gets to do in Act 3 is sit around as likely bait for Orin or become a sex object for you to interact with because he's only in the party anyway to satisfy people's horniness. Minthara, just like the end of the game, was basically unplayably broken at launch, and clearly hadn't had a huge amount of time dedicated to developing her after it was decided she would be a full companion instead of just an npc who you have a one night stand with in Act 1. She outright doesn't have a cutscene (romance or not) for herself once she's joined your party, and even compared to Halsin, she's absurdly lacking in dialogue and reactivity, always greeting you with the same one line and not even being able to have a conversation about your supposed romance if you are in one. Sure she's generally functional and more easily accessible now than at launch, but a couple of lines about Orin (again another already established antagonist) and a mention of you bonking her on the head don't classify as her own personal journey as a member of the party.

So yeah, generally there's just a bunch of stuff that should have been addressed in patches even if Larian's only goal for post launch was to make the game actually finished and functional.

Well, that would mean her entire original arc is: A pair of fetch quests, so she can touch people again -> "Isn't life unfair" -> Death.
Meanwhile, you have the Gondian + Steelwatch connection that fizzled out after it being setup at the start of Act 3 and possible datamines for cut Upper City content (Which I personally havn't seen evidence for, but people were reporting it last year)

It was mentioned somewhere recently that the infernal heart thing was quite a late addition. It seems it took them a long time to settle what Karlach is. Even if there was "upper city" and if Karlach had some story in it, it is quite possible that it was a different story than she has now.
And while her story beats are simple, I thought they worked ok for the most part. And not being able to fix her, is rather effective in a game where you can usually do anything you want and more on top. Personally, I cared for Shadowheart and Wyll story the least, simply because I found them rather daft.

But I wouldn't call any of those unfinished. Yes, they vary in content and quality but they all give characters stories which are in some degree tied to game's events.

That's called post-launch support. Bug-fixes is quite literlally the main support one would expect after 1.0 release. The very best aspect of Larian games is that they don't do modern AAA bullcrap of roadmaps and infinite monetization.


What state a game Should/shouldn't release will really depend person to person though. It's a rather massive, reactive cRPG. Stuff will be rough on release. Maybe I am impartial, as while there was noticable dip in polish after act1 nothing prevented me from completing the game. Ending was anticlimactic, and that's the only part I can agree felt actually "unfinished". And that's the part Larian has and is working on.

As to what Larian "decided" to add post launch and in what order. Obviously, polishing existing content will take less time than creating new one. So that they patched in better animation for existing cutscenes, before shipping new features shouldn't be shock to anyone. It doesn't mean they worked on them in that order - some things will just take more time to cook. As to how heavy Larian has been leaning on thirst in their marketing pre- and post launch - that just shows you what most of the audience cares for and what sells.

The point I’m trying to make in saying it isn’t post launch support is that I feel as if the game was released to the public in a state that I hesitate to call a proper launch for a AAA game. It might have had a 1.0 sticker on it, but it sure did feel like it was still in a pre-release state and Larian decided to use the public as their final stage of QA testing while they took a few extra months after the game’s release to actually complete the development of the project and market this work as “new content updates”. I feel like it would be hypocritical of the community to praise larian for speaking out against greed in the industry that has brought about microtransactions and the decline in the quality of todays games, but then not criticize them for outright releasing an incomplete product to earn as much publicity as possible before the imminent release of a major title from a known company that would compete with them (Starfield). The expected Larian approach given their track record would be “sorry guys the game just isn’t ready yet and we need to further delay it to give you the best experience we can”.

I’m curious as to what you would say your general opinion of BG3 is if you could sum it up. It seems like you and a couple other people in the thread feel generally ambivalent about this game and despite recognizing the same flaws as me, would much rather Larian just starts from scratch and learns from their mistakes to make something you’ll like better on their next release. Is that accurate? I think most of us who are continuing to be vocal and trying to get Larian’s attention are among the biggest fans of this game specifically. I for one appreciate the awesome work Larian put into this game, but I wouldn’t say I follow them as a studio because I’ve never had a fondness for anything else I’ve played from them. I fell in love with BG3 because I was already such a huge dnd fan and was excited to have a well-made game using 5e rules and set in the forgotten realms.

Given the state of recent AAA games... It's actually about average. Even Elden Ring, a game I think is amazing... Still had missing questlines that were patched in post-launch and bugs a plenty that were patched out (Such as the gamebreaking 13k DPS doggos)

Now, as gamers we should try and push for better. Being satisfied with slop is what got us into the mess regading MTX, Live Services and copy/paste IP's (Like CoD or, Ubisoft's entire library)... However, we also have to acknowledge what expectations we should have.

We should expect even AAA games to have some rough edges (Due to many factors), and assuming any developers to go above and beyond our expectations is unreasonable.


It's not really the same thing.

Since, the nature of video game development is something that inherently has hurdles.

Video games don't make money until they release and sell. That means for the entire time a game is being developed, you have to pay everyone who's working on the game money. But you don't earn the money until after everyone's finished working on it. Thus, the catch 22 situation and the reason why publishers are so prevalent in the industry. As the publisher will pay for the development of the game, in return for a large share of the profits of the actual product. But for self publishing studios, they don't have this. They need to have money before selling their game, to develop their game, to get money from selling the game.

As such, there are often deadlines in order to release a game to earn money. For self published titles, this would be when they start to run out of money for development. For developers under a publisher, it's whenever the publisher states they want to start earning money (Normally to look good on their quarterly earnings reports to please investors and stockholders).

So while the ideal situation is "We just delay the game until it's ready", in reality this simply isn't feasible. (Well, actually... Major publishers literally can do this... They just opt not to because corporate greed > all)


It's okay. Nothing amazing, but not awful.

In general it has the major flaw of being caught between 2 systems. It's too much of a DnD game to be a good Larian title and too much of a Larian game to be a good DnD title.

With wonky writing that reeks of developmental flip-flopping rather than deeply developed narratives and characters (Not to say that some of it isn't decent. Just other parts feel hastily written and poorly planned out)

My disappointment in how BG3 handled characters from BG2 aside, I think BG3 does a lot of things well, but its lack of focus also makes it a bit of a mess. I honestly don't know if I'll be rushing to purchase Larian's future games or not (since I'm ambivalent about both Divinity and sci fi as a genre), but I sincerely hope they look at BG3's flaws and try to improve for the next game. There's a lot of potential in Larian as a studio and I admire them for what they have achieved during this weird time in the game industry.

I do think stronger narrative writing, structure, and planning would help make their stories feel more cohesive and satisfying. And maybe the origin characters make multiplayer more fun (not that I'd know from experience since I don't like playing someone else's character and I'm too busy for multiplayer sessions these days), but IMO not having a central protagonist hampers the strength of the plot and scatters resources. Most rpg players I know like making custom characters, that's a lot of the fun of it, and the fact that you miss out on so much voice acting if you play one of the companion characters is a hard trade off IMO.

When every character, including the player character, has a place in the story, it feels more fulfilling (to me anyway). I also think it's easier to plan out the beginning, middle, and end of a story when it's tied to a central character (ideally the player's, so they feel invested and involved). Something like the first few Game of Thrones books balanced multiple protagonists quite well, but even that series ran into trouble IMO, as we can see with how difficult it has been to finish. And when you have limiting/grounding elements to the story with a central protagonist, antagonist, and themes, I think it can limit the developmental flip-flopping to an extent. With BG3's plot as it is, it feels like Shadowheart and Durge were fighting over who got to be the main character and not only did neither of them succeed, but the other companions and main plot points suffered for it.

I think the quests for her story suck. As you said, just a bunch of fetch quests and they take away the emotional impact and sense of urgency you're meant to feel. But I believe the story is meant to be analogous to dealing with a terminal illness. The hope and search for a cure that never comes, the fact that it happens to good people who deserve better, etc. At least it felt that way to me as someone who has experienced having a loved one diagnosed with a terminal illness. Story wise there were impactful moments but I agree that the quests were poorly and lazily executed. I'm glad they ultimately did provide a real chance at a cure in the epilogue but that was written after they finished her main story. (I also think this had to do with the fact that they were working on the canceled dlc at the time.)

I'm also speaking as someone who loves the game. I've finished like 13+ playthroughs and it's one of my favorite games of all time despite it's flaws. I wouldn't bother criticizing it if I didn't love it so much.

I also want to say that I would gladly pay for them to restructure and add content to the third act, even though I know Larian has done this for free in the past. I do think things like the epilogue should have been in the game to begin with so I appreciate that they didn't charge for it. And while I think the third act feels like a rough draft that should also have been better to begin with, I'd have no issue paying for the work put into improving it.

I suppose I just expect that a game offering this amount of player agency will require a lot of post-launch work, and frankly it launched in a better state than I expected (think I posted it before but here is Tim Cain talking about Bugs in RPGs). And I also sympathise with you, if you feel BG3 will loose out by not having more support. I somewhat felt that way with Pillars of Eternity2 - a game that I feel is frustatingly close to being excellent, but in spite of a decent post launch support, I don't think devs were able to fully resolve it's underlying narrative issues. Just to be clear, I think it is fair to criticise what BG3 had and didn't have on launch and be unhappy with the state Larian leaves some of the narrative beats, but I just think that it is unfair to call the game unfinished (not now and not on launch). And that's mostly because I think there is a distinction between devs not finishing their game, and devs overpromising and deciding to lesser the scope of the title.

I think it is important to distinguish as by all accounts most if not all games ship with less (or at least different) content that devs originally imagined - so that some areas were cut during production, or quests abandoneded or shorten isn't a problem in itself. It is how Larian went about it (aka. how noticable it is in the finished product) that is a problem, and I don't think a solution necessarily comes down to "make more content".

Let's take one instance from act3:
And on a side note, I had little technical issues with BG3 1.0 - quite a bit narrative reactivity being off (characters refering to past events as if they werern't achieved, or mentioning things we didn't talk about in barks etc.), but for me that's accaptable level of junk for 1.0 of a game of this scale of reactivity.



Sure.

Except that this is Larians own doing.
The Emperor was inserted into the story very late in development which required massive rewrites. And the effects of those rewrites are seen all over the game, from the messy narrative to vestige of the old story that make 0 sense.

All of this is Larians fault and not an excuse for the bad state BG3 is in. The reason they did not have a grand plan is that they scrapped their plan a few months before release and decided to simplify everything and remove as much consequences and choices as possible.

I think this was already discussed in the Karlach forum, but the problem with that idea is the setting, the game takes place in a setting where her problem is pretty insignificant.

This is once again, a problem with how her story/quest is handled.

Should the quest explain in a satisfiying way why she can't be healed i wouldn't have a problem with it, yeah, it would be sad but at least it would give us a reason.

Might I suggest we don’t get into another tangent about the actual writing/writers of the game or any analysis of it? That took this thread off topic for a while when we’re really trying to focus on the actual implementation of things within the game. Given Larian’s new video thanking fans of BG3, it seems like they’re still pretty set in stone on their decision to completely move on from the game once there’s another patch or two out over the coming months. Regrettable that we’re not even gonna get a definitive edition to address more of the game’s outstanding issues, but I guess Larian has decided it’s just too much of a resource sink to be worth it when the general playerbase thinks the game is good enough as is.

I’m really bummed we’re unlikely to get any new dialogue or any changes of substance beyond what we know is in patch 7, but it looks like Larian has already moved ahead enough that it’s too late to change their minds. Wish they’d have at least given some more attention to Minthara before putting a bow on the game’s narrative (I know the patch notes for patch 7 say she has new dialogue after killing Orin, but I feel like that would be the perfect place to insert a romance scene similar to the one Astarion gets after finally killing Cazador, as both of them are now free of their links to the past).

Larian has stated this is untrue. They said they changed the dreams but it was always The Emperor behind them. I'm curious about how the storyline would have been different had they kept the original dreams. I imagine the violent urges the player was getting toward the dream figure were coming from Orpheus. I like the idea of them trying to use the player as a means to overpower each other. But I guess that's another discussion.

I wouldn't say it's too late. The fact that they're currently set in their decision to move on isn't new information. They've been clear about it for months and them ending the partnership with wotc always meant they would need to change their minds and revisit that deal if they were going to make changes. While we don't know the specifics of what they're allowed to do now, I imagine any story and dialogue changes they weren't already planning are off the table because they no longer have the rights to the companion characters. They may be able to add narrator lines and cinematic scenes that don't include new companion dialogue or changes to the story.

A true definitive edition with a reworked third act would require them to work with wotc again. It's entirely possible but they'd need to change their minds about being done with the game and I'm not sure what would do that at this point.

Then Larian is lying.
If it always was the Emperor, he would be in the artbook. But he is not. At best he was a very minor character and actual "Emperor" and not the driving force of the story.

After all its not as if Larian was especially open and truthful in the past. They were completely happy to mislead people about the upper city and tadpole consequences for example. And who could forget their explanation for the missing ending coupled with their bragging about how many different "endings" they have...
The same thing is happening with the Emperor.

Even if he did previously exist, his role was totally different and more minor. There is a lengthy post in the story forum somewhere analyzing all that.