Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General The latest very disappointing developments

Thanks for doing that! Here's another. If you resolve the burning tavern quest by opening the door with the key Florrick will talk to the first person she see and will not not be able to recognize that Wyll is in the party unless you position him so he's standing in fire.

Also, this will take more doing but there are times when I want a party member to take over dialogue and the patch prevented one of those. When saving the man from the exploding mushrooms I send in Lae'zel to throw a bottle of water on the torch. This initiates a dialogue that involves a strength check. My squishy wizard has difficulty passing that check but Lae'zel can pass it easily. It would be nice to be able to designate a speaker in such instances.

Larian was very supportive of Mods for DOS 2 so I expect they will ultimately offer similar support for BG3. I think it's great they are so far continuing to support it through patches and hotfixes imperfect as they may be. As has been mentioned several times plenty of publishers are done as soon as a game is released.

edit

as per the "Larian needs to surface" thread, Salo makes it clear that Mods will be supported.

I hope so. All I want is confirmation that custom level support is in the bag. It's what I'm the most worried about them cutting as it would drastically limit the kinds of mods we could theoretically make.

People seriously need to chill, updating this game is probably complicated as hell.
I don't mind Larian adding new stuff in without being afraid of breaking things.

I understand the annoyance but come on, chillout.

Like I said before I don't want Larian to rush things or cancel anything. Just a little heads up on what they're working on from time to time would solve so many issues they run into with their community.

Meh I lived through EA, If its more manageable for them to add new stuff and with the help of community identify and fix them a short time later than to slow down/scrap content than to risk making things break.
Anyhoo not like we make decisions anyways

For this to even make sense, they would need to also add support for creating/adding cutscenes and voice acting. Having now dungeons filled only with monsters, where the story is solely told by dialogues and/or lorebooks would be jarring. The problem is, that even if they do this, there is no modder or group of modders who will have resources to pull off cinematics and voiceovers on the level of original BG3. And even if we do get modded cutscenes, these will be screaming "mod content" (and people will be complaining anyway to someone).

That's why I think this mod support will be focused on gameplay features and/or UI, not on adding now story content. But we'll see, Larian proved they can reach high, so who knows what they are cooking for us.

Are you sure about that? Seems like they were perfectly content with the status quo of being non-comunicative about mods until the community forced their hand.

And I keep seeing this awful comparison, which publishers stop all updates as soon as the game is released?
Unless they're making shovelware, I'd say most publishers do have post-release support.
The previously used example, Volition with Saints Row, kept updating it for another 6 months before they went under a few months later. Even Redfall and Gollum got updates.

Adding voice acting was a feature in DOS2. Assuming they created an editor for adding cutscenes they could just let us use it. It's unlikely Larian licensed a custom editor just for cutscenes it's much more likely they upgraded DOS2's toolset to include a cutscene editor. It's also not unprecedented for a developer to let people use their own cutscene editor. The editors for The Witcher 1 and Dragon Age Origins came with robust cutscene editors. Dragon Age Origins was so robust it led to a highly impressive machinima being produced called Warden's Fall.
I strongly disagree. One thing you're not considering is that this would actually be more appealing for coop play. Since players would actually prefer a more hack and slash approach to dungeon design in this respect. One member on this forum mentioned a flaw Baldur's Gate 3 has is because it's such a long game the vast majority of coop playthroughs never make it out of Act 1. So having custom dungeons would be extremely appealing to players who prefer to play in coop. Additionally, Neverwinter Nights had hundreds of modules akin to this.
You're making a lot of assumptions. Namely that
A) there wouldn't be a group dedicated enough to create cinematics or voice overs. Which is inaccurate. There are extremely notable high profile examples recently. A great example is there's a mod in development right now called Fallout London which even got Astarion's voice actor to contribute to it.
B) that because someone might make a cutscene you personally don't like, that the developer shouldn't work towards it. Just because people might make art that isn't visually appealing doesn't mean it shouldn't be allowed. There's incredible value in modding for it's ability to inspire developers to then get jobs in the industry or grow their skills and start companies based upon it. Killing Floor's developer Tripwire admitted in an interview their company wouldn't exist had it not been for a modding contest Nvidia setup for Unreal Tournament 2004. Which brought the team together to produce the mod Killing Floor.
The only reason I can see Larian neutering the SDK in comparison to DOS2 wouldn't be because of any of the things you listed. It would be because they use licensed components in the engine. A good example is they use Granny for models, Noesis for GUI and so forth. However none of these are insurmountable on Larian's part and they've already announced being able to make custom GUIs. It would be extremely disappointing if they prevented us from making custom environments as it would lead to the modding community not being anywhere close to reaching its full potential. However Swen has said in an interview back in July that custom environment support was one of the things they're looking into so I'm very hopeful they don't abandon it.
I'm unfortunately inclined to agree. As everyone has pointed out previously Larian has remained conspicuously mum about what they're working on. And it's only recently due to the recent Hotfix that it's started to cause issues.
I also agree with this. It's actually more in-line with a practice developers have started doing recently where they ship a very unfinished game, then patch it later. No Man's Sky is one of the best examples of this where the 1.0 release of the game was barely finished and didn't feature promised features like multiplayer. And after years of patches it is finally what the developer initially promised. With Baldur's Gate 3 in general it feels like its first year is just another unadvertised Early Access period and it's likely the eventual Definitive Edition of the game will be the true finished product.

I understand that the question was meant to be kind of rhetorical, but I still want to voice polite disagreement,

I think that these animations are important. They bring a lot more character to a part that was lacking (the mid-stages of the romances where you had a long time without much change).

That said: a friend of mine absolutely loves Astarion, so I think focusing on him is fitting. Though I didn’t romance Halsin either. But maybe I’m just not the target audience for that Character.

I have a lot of trust in modders. However if no new content would be possible to make, the interest in the game might wane. I currently already have all mods I need for normal gameplay (and I would not play the game without mods) but I would really appreciate the creation of new environments. The best part of the whole game for me was exploring Shar's gauntlet and I hope for additional "simple" dungeon crawler content. I would not mind if scenarios made by modders hadn't less or no cutscenes, and voice acting is nice but not mandatory. I want some adventures where you look for treasures or the lost person or ..., without the necessity to constantly save the world.

“Larian” is a useful rhetorical device to remind us not harbor personal animosity towards any specific employee. I don’t think it’s useful to call out the lead systems designer by name, for example, when the same feedback can be given more neutrally to “Larian” as a whole. The exception here is Swen Vincke, as CEO and armor-clad face of the company, though it’s important to remember BG3 isn’t solely his game.

It also reminds us that Larian is a company, and that companies don’t have feelings or an innate sense of ethics. So when they sell a full-price game that doesn’t exist to mac users, it’s important to do more than praise the good parts. “Larian” giving up for all the negative feedback would amount to abandonning a succesful business model to cater to the non-existant emotions of an administrative entity. Capitalism won’t let that happen.

Thanks Ecc2ca, Crimsomrider, and alienspacebats for reporting the bugs, and thanks Salo for replying and putting them on the list to be fixed! The game prioritizing your avatar as the main speaker will be a great feature once all the bugs are fixed! No more running to the front with my sorcerer to try to get dialogue!

I fully agree with this.
There are also certain parts of the game I really liked and would like to see expanded upon. Like my favorite combat arena thus far has been in the Guildhall in Baldur's Gate in Act 3. I would love to see that arena in particular expanded upon with unique encounters. That sort of thing is what truly feels exciting to me and I genuinely hope it becomes possible.

Another annoying instance is in the distillery in act 2. When the group comes close to the bar, it is not the selected player that sits down to challenge Thorm for the drinking contest, but whoever reaches the "perimeter" (wherever that may be) first. In my PT's someone else was systematically chosen, so finally I ungroup every time when I get here, and walk up to the bar alone with my chosen PC.

(I haven't been back here since patch 6 yet, so maybe it was fixed)

That is just untrue and I think you mean 'done and dusted' not 'said and done'.

The kissing animations do not mean much to me, mostly because I will never see most of them in my gameplay. There are other animations, however, which I thought were brilliant. For example, when Karlach gets her first hug after getting a dose of iron ... that was a perfect scene. And I do like Astarion in just about any animated scene.

Here's what blew it for me on the romance animation stuff (please read no further if you are under 17 years of age): date with Karlach, Henk serves the wrong stew but who cares, we go upstairs and somehow end up in a missionary position with my character on the bottom, Karlach standing. I wonder, hey isn't this backwards? What is Karlach thrusting with if she doesn't have a ... oh wait a minute, she does have a spiky tail .... oooh nooo! Argyle now wears a Chastity Belt +1, encrusted with frost.

This is the 3rd time I've seen this mentioned so I'll chime in.

That position may not be typical but it is possible without a tail. I don't enjoy it but it has some advantages depending on how the partners are built.

I'm kinda glad to see it because in porn it's pretty typical to see two women doing things that aren't much fun and few women actually do when they don't have a camera aimed at them. "I mean I guess you could do that but why would you. . ." So there's a part of me that's happy to see a sex scene that leaves men scratching their head.

Agreed.

I have held a Bg3 Multiplayer guild for 2.5 years now and I can say we had a much higher completion rate in EA when the game could be finished in 8-15 hours (we just did the 8 hours that 1 time - it was a speed completionism run with highly experienced players) - but we saw a completion rate of about 30-40% with most runs 'failing' in the Underdark.

The current run completion rate is sits around 8%-10% on our Discord - and those take a lot of work to get across the finish line - we have a whole procedure we go through to check in on runs, and each run has a leader, a private text channel and a private voice channel and I audit the active runs once a week, reaching out to the leaders to get a status update if there hasn't been any activity. We have to swap out people who just disappear, or have life events and can't play for a bit - I have a team of admins who help recruit replacements. On the Larian forums the completion rate is probably closer to 1%-2% - with 90% of runs never getting out of Act 1. A full run can take about 50-80 hours.

We also have a Graveyard channel for honor runs that end in a TPK, and a Hall of Fame for honor runs that successfully complete. Runs that are abandoned are unceremoniously deleted.

I agree with everything you said here Owl. Good modding tools are essential to this game - and a core component of my long term strategy. This engine is absolutely brilliant for multiplayer, we just need smaller, less epic and sprawling adventures to run. Ideally, being able to run a 8-10 hour campaign for multiplayer would be a great start. We don't need a lot of cinematic stuff, or really any, it's not what people are primarily interested in on multiplayer runs.

very long term -I would like to run a persistent version of the city of Baldur's Gate that can be joined by scores of people and can be a jumping off point for other adventures. That may be a pipe dream until AI lets us simply program anything ourselves - because the engine would need a major overhaul to allow that to happen.

But holy shit that would be amazing.

Well, I'm of two minds here. My initial reaction was I thought it silly that they were worried about fixing kissing scenes.
WTF cares about that?
But, then I thought, at least they're doing something, not just raking in profits, so kudos to them for that.
It does seem to me that they are trying to keep the game updated, to a point.
So, there's that.