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

I was raised on classic as baldurs gate, icewind dale and fallout 1.
Of course i continue my RPG adventure with game like nwn 1&2, kotor 1&2, etc.
Most of the games i played was real time with pause.
I can accept turn based in strategic games like alpha centauri, call of power or endless legend/space.
I can also accept it in RPG games with post-apocalyptic/steam punk nature like arcanum, fallout 1&2 or colony ship.
I been playing larian games since dragon knight saga.
I tried dragon commander, it was a strange mix of risk/rpg and rts.
I also tried divinity original sin 1&2.
In the first game i got lost while exploring the beginning of the game.
In the second i got bored by the second act, i got that every encounter was turn based.
At the beginning it was nice but later it has become a nuisance since i was winning every encounter but everyone had to take they sweet ass time.
For me the sweet spot was dragon age origins where combat was in real time but you could create tactics for every character.
I loved every other aspect of bg3 ( at least what i watched on youtube).
The only things that gets me off from getting this game is turn based combat.
I was never a fan of both recent x-com games when it comes to combat.
Secondly i was disappointed by D:OS 2 in terms of combat.
I love great character interactions, conversations, different way to resolve quests, etc.
What i hate ,from my first impressions, : turn-based combat, dnd 5e, and no custom portrait option.
Maybe custom portraits is not a big deal for most people but for me it is.
I created hundreds if not thousands of portraits for my crpgs. From bg, icewind dale through tyranny to nwn1&2.
One thing that this game has going for it is modding since i love modding games.
I do not remember how many hours i spent modding oblivion.
Thanks for your honest answer.
Cheers,

Everyone’s different, of course, but I played and loved BG1 & 2 when they first came out, and also enjoyed the IWD, NWN, KotOR games and Planescape:Torment. Dragon Age:Origins is still up there as possibly my favourite game. And it took me three goes to get through D:OS and I’ve still never made it past act 2 of D:OS2. In short, liking earlier Larian RPGs isn’t necessary for appreciating BG3.

And I do love BG3, and much prefer its turn-based combat to the RTwP of the earlier BG games and many of their more recent successors. It’s not great for massive battles, but then I’m not sure the combat in those worked brilliantly for big fights either. I do absolutely agree that the real time with pause of Dragon Age:Origins and DA2 with the programmable tactics was the best RTwP experience I’ve had, but certainly don’t have any issues with BG3 being turn-based only and think it lends itself to interestingly-designed, tactical and meaningful encounters. But then I also enjoyed learning about 5e for the game and personally don’t care about custom portraits (though am glad the generated portraits were improved from early access).

In short, I don’t think there’s any substitute for giving it a go and seeing what you think!

Well it is an adaptation of 5e, it is turn based because that's how D&D works, and your character portrait is whatever your character actually looks like. You custom design your character's actual look and that's your portrait.
So if those are deal-breakers, then no you're not going to have a good time.
But if you can cope with those, then I'd say this is a worthy successor to BG1/2. I've enjoyed the heck out of it and have played since early access and I'm still playing it and trying out stuff.

Based on your comments re DOS 2 I don't think you'll like BG3 any better.

Based on your comments about 5e you may actually like BG3 less than DOS2.

Despite Act III being a tad untidy the game is very good overall and in some respects excellent. It has a ton of content and a lot of variety and despite many hours in EA and several play throughs since release I am still finding new things, and new ways to play.

In the end though the feel of the game play is very similar to DOS2 albeit with a much better story, a more interesting setting, a real class system, and superior graphics etc.

Hard to say: I'm a long time DnD player and played all editions at some point and I love BG3. Your party feels like a bunch players making their quirky characters and the game gives you a lot of freedom to approach things. It might be one of the best approaches to get the table top feeling in a computer game.
Of course, if you don't like 5e, you might not like the game.
And yes, you can't make portraits, but you can customise your character at the start.
I haven't played any Divinity game yet, I discovered Larian through BG3, so I don't know, how similar they are in terms of gameplay. I like the turn based combat in BG3 and most of the implementations.
Maybe look at a let's play ( I would recommend only first act though to not spoil too much) before buying the game?

I really can't say. I would say the appeal of BG3 is very, very different than that of Infinity Engine games and Tim Cain's RPGs - their focus and priorities are just in different places.

But if the combat is what you are worried about, I wouldn't. If you suffered through Fallout1&2 just fine, than BG3 shouldn't scare you.

D:OS1&2 are closes counterparts to BG3, but in my opinion BG3 is superior in quite a few aspects. While I have issues with BG3 narrative, it is stronger than in previous titles giving players more direction. I did feel D:OS1&2 had a lot of aimless exploration while looking for something interesting to happen. D:OS2 act2 was an extreme drag, and BG3 has nothing close to that. I also feel combat in BG3 is a bit more sporadic - or at the very least it's combat offers quite a bit more variety, while D:OS2 armor system made everything feel homogeneous.

So, yeah. I can't promise that you will click with BG3, but I think it would be worth giving a shot.

In my experience the 'enemy turns take forever' aspect is not that different in BG3 compared to DoS2. I like turn based combat myself, but if you have low tolerance for how long it can take to resolve a battle, then I think BG3 might not be much fun.

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

D&D was created for pen and paper and is thus round based.

Therefore all computer games that adapt D&D are also round based. Some just attempt to hide it, more or less.



Cant say I get this statement at all.

Dragon Age: Origins played just like BG1 and BG2. You paused and gave different characters different commands. Its not possible to control multiple characters at the same time otherwise.

By the way, the rulesystem of Dragon Age was also still created as a pen and paper system. Thats how they playtested the system without implementing it on the computer. It was thus also round based.

And in regards to strategies, you could very little in DAO, especially compared to BG2.



D&D5 is the youngest and most successful instance of D&D. What is your problem with it ?



Custom portraits are a huge deal to me and BG3 has the perfect solution. You design your characters looks and BOOM you get the character portrait generated from that. And its 100% consistent in regards to looks and artstyle with all other portraits, too ! Wished BG1 and BG2 would have had that.

I must have wasted endless hours back then just looking for portraits on the internet for BG1 and BG2, while finding very few candidates that fit well enough into the game. It didnt help that the art style between BG1 and BG2 changed, too.

If you enjoyed painting your character portraits yourself, thats your perogative. I am not that good of a painter, and neither are the majority of people. Learning to draw and paint well takes a lot of time, time I simply dont have.

… and you like modding, then a custom character portrait mod could be an ideal start.

Turn-based combat is fine. Think of it as real-time with auto-pause for each character.

BG III portraits are of course based on your character appearance choices during creation. I like that well enough, but I would have also liked to see scaling like they did in NWN2, where you can modify the width and height by a certain percentage.

One thing about BG III that still bugs me is the concentration requirement for certain spells. In the older games you could cast blur on yourself, launch a cloudkill, and put a hold person on someone else and have these all going at the same time. In BG III you can galide with only one of those three to concentrate upon.

DA:Origins had this AI editor where you could set up how characters behave when they are controlled by AI. So you could kinda set up what they are to do, without actually having to control it.

Not a fan, but there is a group of players who like this kind of play. Deadfire did something similar.

That's not really a BG3 thing but a 5e thing. It carries over from there. Most non-instantaneous spells in 5e have a concentration requirement to keep them going.

I have been playing turn-based games for over 20 years. My first ever game that i played was turn based aka civilisation 1.
When i tell you i do not like turn-base combat system in party based RPGs, this means i do not since checked it in multiple of games.
No one is telling you to paint your portrait. There are countless of fantasy images on the net. It is easy to find one, resize it and apply to your character.
I do not like to watch how my character looks, i prefer to look on ideal version of my character face.
I spent countless hours on dragon age origins or in da2 to make character portrait actually look good or funny, only to find that i do like them after couple of hours.
I prefer a custom portrait, it takes less time and is easier.

That is what i hate about modern games. Back in the day i could experience game right of the bat.
Nowadays i had to mod it for them to become playable, at least for me.
Same goes for MMOs; i cannot just play it; i have to change the UI, resize it, change font, etc.

It seems he didn't even play that game.
The tactics window was one of the best aspect of that game, it eliminated the need to micromanage your party; If you set up your tactics right, you could just focus on playing your main character, most of the time. Of course, you still had to micromanage in the most difficult fights.

I did play through them, i mean fallout 1&2, but that was years ago.
I tried newest versions of xcom and xcom 2. I didn't enjoyed it that much.

That is what i am afraid of.

Nice to find a friendly soul. I think we are in the minority. At least that is my experience when surfing through the web.

Back to the topic.
I did enjoy AD&D but also game implementation of 3rd edition (nwn1) and 3.5 implementation (nwn2).
That is why i love pathfinder games aka kingmaker and Wotr.
Unfortunately, wotr is kinda too long for me tastes or at least it takes too long to get interesting.
The selling point of wotr was the mythic path system and it starts to roll out in chapter 3.
I love 3.5 dnd of pathfinder but i miss dnd setting, like you.
I even tried ddo but that game was made for old pc's. I need to play it on very low resolution to make comfortable for my eyes.
Another pushback from bg3 is that you will not become a powerhouse like in nwn persistent worlds.
Some nwn servers allow to advance to level 60.
I WANT to become powerful. I want to become superman in RPGs. I really do not get why they locked us up at level 12.
I have the same feeling i do not know if i can get into dnd 5e.
3.5 edition had so much complexity; dumbing it down feels meh.
To be frank i never understand why this game is called bg. From my knowledge it has nothing to do with bg1&2.
Also from all the character they could have a cameo they had to add minsc, why that idiot. Why they couldn't add Edwin.
Also they changed viconia backstory, and we have to fight her.
Jaheira and Viconia were the best female characters in bg2. In bg1 i liked safana and shar-teel more.
Unfortunatelly not cannon, i loved Baeloth the Entertainer, from beamdog black pits bg ee addon.

I'll address a few points.

There are mods to go past lvl12 but you'll need an xp buff mod to get to 20 which is the normal max for 5e.

While the protagonist of BG1/2 plays no role,
BG3 is 100+ years after BG2 so anyone not of a long-lived race is almost certainly dead. Minsc only survived because the big goof got turned to stone and spent most of it as a statue. He and Jaheira are both potential companions.

It took me a while to get used to casters NOT being able to cast like 5 buffs on the whole party.
Now I love the Concentration requeriment. Much more interesting.

Aka used a plot twist to keep him alive. I have nothing against such plot twists but there are more interesting characters like viconia, edwyn. Edwyn is far more interesting companion. He is especially fun in bg2. It is especially fun when he got turned into female. Instead of making viconia a enemy, they should have turned her as a companion. It would be much more fun as a cameo.

That is good you can get to level 20 via mods but that is not the point. The point is that developers designed game in way that you won't be op. I hate when we are introduced this kind of handicap.

For me, leveling is one of the main points of an RPG. In nwn 1 you start as a noob and you end up as a man who could defeat a king of hell.

I'm not sold on BG3 for exactly your concerns OP, so I think you should do what I am doing which is waiting for the game to be on sale for a significant discount (ideally 50% off) before considering trying it. I cannot justify giving Larian anywhere near full price for this game (and it's not a money issue but rather one of principle; I can easily afford it).