Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Can i as a old dnd gamer enjoy bg3?

Sounds like we are pretty similar in terms of the cRPG eras we grew up in, and I definitely share your views on the importance of Portraits.

It's deep in the marrow of the game for me. When NWN came out I assembled 2,600 portraits for use in the game from all my old artbooks. So that's what 13,000 individual TGA files? Huge Large Medium Small and Tiny targas, for each portrait set. Took me something like a whole year just to assemble my portrait library for Jah Din's Ultimate. I'd say even flying with hotkeys in photoshop and turning myself into a crop master, it still probably took a good 5 minutes per portrait because unlike these jank gen ai's we see today, I tried to keep a list of the source and the artist for each one. And then to come up with a labeling system that would be comprehensible, so I could actually navigate my own library, flat bed scanner - tough going there. In the end my strategy was more to Load as needed, rather than using the game as the gallery portrait browser, although previewing TGAs was a total pain at that time. Also the Vault had caps to the filesize for packages, so trying to split and categorize, all a huge part of the process. To me the custom portraits (along with custom soundsets for barks, and custom scripts) were the thing that separated BG from all other games that came before it.

Anyway, total and complete agreement there. I'm not entirely satisfied and never have been, but I can say this is probably the closest anyone has come to giving me what I want in 3 dimensions. Not the broad spread, but the templet there. It's an excellent start.

If I'm anything to go by, I think it's fully possible for you to enjoy BG3. I had no prior experience with any previous Larian title, and I also had a rough impression of combat and party management, since like you I was used to the RTS blend on that. The Pathfinder series gave me a lot of what I wanted for scratching the real-time/oldschool infinity engine itch, and custom portraits, but those games didn't have the Realms which is a major draw. But then BG3 gave me Scratch! They also have this cinephile sensibility for representing the avatar, which feels very next level to me. I mean compared to the sort of paper dolls and sprites I'm used to. Still there's a gap there for me between the portraits and the stuff we can create using the tools provided in-game. On the one hand that's frustrating, because I'd love to see something like a BG3 that can produce an image for use in say BG1 or BG2. BG2 in particular was pretty rough going I felt for the vanilla portraits. Also the way the wind is blowing, the kinds of portraits that are now available from mass grift stable diffusion makes me immediately suspicious of any portrait I see that looks too badass and doesn't have an attribution. I'd almost rather have a paint by number approach using professionally 3d modelled work by actual human beings, which is what BG3 is giving us.

The whole concept of an Origin character, I didn't like that at all, but I also didn't really realize that Origin was a term they used for the Motion Capture. Like the point of origin is where all the infra-cams triangulate to do the Mo Caps, and that changed how I thought of the term. Cause otherwise I was just like, 'why aren't these Origins meaning what Origins meant in Dragon Age?' heheh Cause I understood that one. This new take though, what I'd love to see is a game with a dozen Origins instead of 6, and a party of 6 instead of 4. You can get close to this with Mods, even already, which is encouraging. I mean the full game has only been out for a year, so there is some room for optimism, even if I wish the game was in this state since like 2020 when it first entered the wild.

I still have a hard time branching out fully into 5th edition, since I prefer my AD&D comfort zone for class archetypes and systems, but it wasn't too hard to pick up and just start running. I think the combat system in place here just works better all around with the party of 6, like the old games. It makes micromanaging each character's turn in TB less onerous. Less pressure to min-max every single round, or pre-buff, or even allowing for things like skipping turns within the party to speed things up. Similar to BG2 where you might just charge into an encounter on the blind, and get shit handled with slings and arrows, or regular weapon attacks. To me that's just a more BG style game-glow.

The game changes dramatically right around the Mid-point, because that's when Characters start getting more summons and you can manage the game more like a party, with extra ups in the turn order sequence. Also the lvl 5 power spike, which is basically the same in terms of impact as the old BG1 days. Getting over that initial hump the game really comes together in the second act for me. What can I say, I love Skeletons! But then in Act III things take a bit of a dip. Still, even when the game has it's lulls, there are plenty of enjoyable moments, and it was very satisfying to reach the end of the campaign.

It's absolutely worth every penny in my view, and probably my favorite game now. Never expected that while playing in Early Access honestly, I was super nervous. Also never expected to ever see a BG game again though, so all in all it was a net win for me and they basically delivered. To have seen such interesting times! Still feels cool

I think it's worth giving a go, especially if it's on special. I think it's like 20% off or something now right? Not too shabby