Hi all

I was lucky enough to be invited to Larian’s creator day event on 7 July in Ghent. I got to meet a bunch of folks who create online games content and are way cooler than I am, and be part of the live audience sitting through that marathon PFH. But I also got to see another presentation of the game earlier in the day which covered some of the same stuff but also some different elements, and even got to play a bit of what looks like a nearly - but not quite - release version of the game. Though I feel I barely scratched the surface and there’s tons of stuff I wanted to discover (and you probably would have wanted me to discover!), but the time absolutely flew by.

I was wowed by the character creator and the added polish the game has acquired in the form of animations to bring key moments, including companion entrances, to life. I was sad at the lack of a fully voiced protagonist, and there were some other of my wishlist items that don’t seem to be there, but overall I was so impressed by the way the game was looking and am now even more stoked about the full release.

Bearing in mind that I only had chance to get my halfling ranger/rogue to level 2 and adventure as far as the druid grove, and so am only going to be able to share some impressions of the early game plus the little bit of the later game shown in the earlier presentation, feel free to ask me any questions below and once I get back to my desk with a proper keyboard tomorrow UK late afternoon I’ll start answering the ones that I can.

In the meantime, I’ve had limited success trying to keep half an eye on what’s being discussed here, but I can see that there’s stuff people feel strongly about. Which is great, and we’re all here because we care, but I hope that we will stop before disagreements turn into arguments and we’ll all do what we can to keep things constructive and friendly.

Looking forward to chatting with you all about what we’ve all seen over the past 24 hours!

I am happy for you, it must have been a very interesting experience to play the final version of the game beforehand. I bet playing it brings much more emotion than watching a reveal - basically other playing it (and not being very good at it, either...).

I'm impressed that you managed to escape the character creator. Even after ~400 hours of early access, I'm probably going to be stuck in that thing for far too long.

favorite new thing?

Did you notice any changes to the trading or any sign of crafting?
Any new content up to the point/place you managed to get to? Probably not as it was only level2 and the grove.
What about the xp and the level progression? Did it feel about the same speed/pace?

Is rolling available for stat generation or is point buy the only method for stats?
Thanks!

Also, could you shed some light on attributes? Are racial attributes still a thing? Are rolled stats a thing? Anything completely different?

Edit: Alodar was faster

Without spoilerly details, how different is what you saw of Act 1?

When you say "Ranger/Rogue" are you implying that multiclassing is in? Or is that just how you think of her?

multiclassing was confirmed this morning.

Multiclassing confirmed.
Respeccing whenever you want confirmed.
Being encouraged to blend classes for unique combinations confirmed.

I would like to know:

1) Is it possible to multiclass the companions?

2) Are there any additional options to the difficulty settings besides the three standard settings?

3) Is it possible to pause the game during realtime exploration?

Super glad for you! What a treat, and the effort you put into moderating, it's very well earned!

Can you rename the Dark Urge like you can Tav? Or are you stuck with the name “Dark Urge”?

Big grats on the event !

I do have a question, its probably not as important but im still curious, do you know if there is hair dressers and or barbers, or any kind of changing custom apreance ingame ?... thanks

That's great, that you were able to go to the event. I hope, you had tons of fun.
I also want to know , if you can roll stats and If the gameplay feels a lot different.
Tuco made a thread about what wasn't mentioned in the PfH and might not be in the game. Is there any chance, some of that made it in and just wasn't adressed in the game?

have they said something about changing origin character attributes or classes?

also is there news regarding party after act 1, can you keep everyone or only 3 + you obviously will stay

I have a few questions that haven't been added yet...

1)Were there any QoL updates to the inventory system?

2)How did multiclassing work in game? Do you just have the option of choosing any class each time you level up?

3)Were there any changes made to the camping/resting system?

Happy for your experience!

Do you have any news on how the discussions are handled? Are companions stats taken into account when performing a roll? Can we change who's talking in a conversation?

Are you the Red Queen sitting in the front row on the end with Red hair? :)~

Joking aside ( see what I did there..) I enjoyed PFH, Then that happened. Ive watched it again since, Im still excited to play. Im even more interested in THE DARK URGE path. It wont be my first play through however.

Have you seen utility cantrips (Shape Water, Druidcraft, Prestidigitation, Mold Earth, Gust etc. pp.) or VHuman in character creation? Is exhaustion a thing? Did you try to make a full custom party from start and is it possible to save our char builds?

I feel like i should say im happy for you ...
But to be completely honest, im much more jealous on you. :P
But happy too!
If this invite was reward for your work here, you earned it and much more.

Most important question first:
How did your Halfling look like, and will you change your profile again?
//Edit: Actually ... there is one important question for me about looks.
Have you noticed any darker hair collors, or is it all just bright pastels?

Not so important question then:
How Sneak Attack worked? Especialy with off-hand attacks?

And the least important question:
What things that are not curently, were part of reaction system? And especialy, was Sneak Attack damage one of them?

Maybe i swaped importance of those questions accidentaly. O_o

Yes, how did the halfling look? Did they fix the proportions?

Nice informations, although I did not need to see the female one of the main (?) adversaries. I especially like that the potential party members are not locked after Act 1 and that you can change play difficulty on the fly. BTW my planned way of playing sounds so boring (having a custom char, being mostly good, using only EA companions) compared to all the possible "evil" stuff they made so much effort for at Larian.

What I would like to know and didn't find searching, although it must be there: When does the early access to Act 1 phase start from the Digital Deluxe Edition (which you seeminggly get as upgrade as EA player)? Is it August 3rd (on PC) or three days earlier?

Did anyone catch how many ki points monks gain per level now?

Well ...
Dark Urge character, that was running around Nautiloid crash, so level 2 i asume ... had 2
During that Karlach romance scene, the other Dragonborn Monk, was on level 9, presuming our companions still level with us, well at least Karlach is level 9 there ... had 10
And during that Goblin fight ... they had 5 ... but i have no idea how to figure out what level they are.

Anyway my guess is that level = ki points ... +/-

Thanks for trying. 1 per level is as per PnP rules, but they did say they had increased them. Which would be pretty much essential to make Four Elements not suck.

Hi Red Queen

I hope you had a lovely time!

Question: have they changed sneak attack?

Thanks

Okay, checked in at the airport and waiting for my plane home, so will start working through these and see how far I get!


Yes, I felt so fortunate to have this experience, and certainly I don’t find watching other people play nearly so much fun as playing myself, and I think BG3 is a game that rewards actually getting stuck in and creating your own story. Though I make no claims to being very good at it either! And it definitely was helpful to get shown some stuff I’d never have had time to find probably even if I’d played for days

You poor thing!
In your absence the forum has been fast, furious and prolific

Despite giving myself a stern talking to in advance, I probably did spend too long in character creation before forcing myself to get started! I am going to easily spend as long or longer than I had to play the game yesterday just getting my first character perfect once the game releases.

This is SO hard. I saw loads I loved, some of which I definitely don’t want to spoil, but I guess maybe the character creator changes? There’s no way a character creation system is ever going to be enough for me, but the improvements exceeded my expectations and I’m foreseeing hours of fun.

I’ll not say some of the other stuff right now in case it comes up later in the thread, but anything that I really enjoyed and doesn’t crop up in this chat I’ll add at the end!

I didn’t actually manage to do any trading so not sure on that.

But my character did start the game with an Alchemy Pouch (and a Keyring and a Camp Supply Pack), and there was a screen for alchemy that apparently lets us create “poisons, elixirs and weapon-coatings” from raw ingredients, though unfortunately I never had chance to play around with it.

And yes, while the bit of the game I played was very definitely recognisable from EA there were also a number of noticeable changes. Some of those will probably come up in the chat here, but if not then if anyone is interested I’ll go into a bit more detail about the kinds of things I noticed, but I expect folk would most enjoy discovering them for themselves in a few weeks!

Level progression is a tricky one. As I said, I was still only level 2 on reaching the grove, whereas in EA I’d tend to hit level 3 at the grove even if I’d not visited the Ancient Ruins (as I didn’t yesterday). But I’m not sure if the slower progression was due to any changes in XP balancing, or mainly because I discovered one of the aforementioned changes which allowed me to bypass some of the stuff on the nautiloid. (I’m assuming that what I found was a shortcut and the stuff from EA or something like it is still all there, otherwise the prologue is definitely shorter!)

With the caveat that I didn’t have much time to hunt around in options, I didn’t see any option for stat rolling or any attribute allocation system other than point buy. But see next answer …

That is such an amazing experience, good for you! My biggest question is how did the dialogue options look? Does it seem like there are more than there were in EA?

From our recent chat on this topic, I realise this is going to be a divisive one!

But in the build I got to play with, for my custom character, each race seemed to have a default +2 and +1 to different attributes, but this was configurable (it had to be a +2 and +1, though, not three +1s). So I was able to give my halfling +2 Dex, +1 Wis. I’m pretty sure, though not 100%, that this included humans, but didn’t have time to look through every race to see what they got in addition to their stat bonuses.

Yikes, I guess I'll have to live with that! I wonder if there would be a toggle for this option.

That is certainly a very interesting change if it is the case. I wonder what they will end up giving to Humans to offset that then? They just seem... bad if they don't get the flat +1 to everything?

Also impacts thoughts on what race I will be playing as the game begins.

This is a tricky one! Definitely different enough that I’d not want to make any assumptions or skip through scenes if I were really playing, though I did yesterday to try to see as much gameplay stuff as I could. I suspect more changes have been made to some areas than others.

And the whole thing just felt so much more polished. I mean, it’s still BG3 so possibly not compared to some AAA games, but just things like little animations to bring things to life, like the imps you first encounter with Lae’zel.

If you don’t get enough info about changes from the rest of this chat and want to discuss further once other questions are answered, I’d be happy to go into a bit more detail.

Thanks for answering questions!😊 In the PFH they said you could dye your camp clothes. Can you dye your armor as well? How about transmog?

Yep, as folk have said, we definitely have multiclassing. I didn’t have much time to really look at it, but I saw nothing to indicate that it wasn’t being handled in line with 5e.

As feared.
When you make a BG3 you sadly cant escape the dumbing down of D&D.

I’m so sorry, kanisatha! I did very badly on spotting answers to your questions.

1. I think I had the option to multiclass my companions, but as I was trying to hurry I just accepted the defaults so I’m not 100% sure. Probably safest to wait for confirmation from a more reliable source.

2. I didn’t see any options for fine-tuning difficulty settings beyond the three levels.

3. I always just press escape to pause and didn’t try to do anything different, so I’m afraid I don’t know if there are any changes here.

Just as a heads up to both of you on the first question -

There are screenshots of Jaheira being spec'ed as a Druid/Sorceror. So multiclassing for companions does seem to be confirmed.

Thank you!


Another one where I do not know! I had a v quick look at The Dark Urge character creation but only really flipped to it.

When I created my custom character, I was asked for her name at the end (big improvement, and so hopefully no more accidental “Tavs”), and it’s certainly possible that the same is true for The Dark Urge, but I genuinely don’t know.

Very interesting. The obvious thing to give humans would be a feat.

Thank you!

I didn’t come across hairdressers or barbers, so this remains an open question I’m afraid. It doesn’t feel out of the question given other character customisation options I did see, but we’ll come to them in a bit as I think I saw a later question on that.

But I’m afraid my plane is boarding soon, so I’ll need to pick up on these questions when I’m back in Scotland.

In the meantime, can I suggest that if anyone wants to discuss any of the stuff I’ve already said here in more depth, they use a different existing thread or start a new one specifically on that topic, just so we can keep this thread focused on questions and answers, rather than opinions on those answers (which I’m sure we’ll all have!).

I’ll be back in a few hours.

During the last part of PFH, when Swen was playing and find his game corrupted ... he pressed escape, and you could still clearly see the scene moving on in background.

So i would dare to presume the answer here is: Nope.

Have a good and save flight, Queen. And thank you for taking the time to answering us.

So we have a full crafting system in place - and the keyring is implemented. This is huge. This is the biggest reveal I have seen since yesterday!

I'd really love to know more about that crafting system if you have any additional info. Blacksmithing? Magic item crafting?

Have a good and flight, Queen!
Can you say, was there an option to change character in dialog to pass checks with right character who has needed skill?

Agreed ...
Feels kinda weird they missed opourtunity to tell us huh?

The whole event felt like they were not so much telling to us, but to the band of bloggers and influencers from the media. It also felt like if the event was time pressured somehow.

They did have numerous technical issues.

Thanks for answering! Much appreciated. Glad you got to have this great opportunity.

Yeah I did see that, but was not sure if that was due to someone multiclassing her or if she just comes that way now per how Larian has written her.

But they spent a bunch of time on spoiler cutscenes and bear sex..?

Thanks very much for the reply.
Personally I'd have preferred keys to disappear once used but the camping supplies pouch will be a godsend on the inventory management front.

And we will want a full report on the bear incident and how you read the room.

I wouldn't call that anywhere near a full crafting system. 'Poisons, elixirs and weapon-coatings' isn't making or enchanting weapons or armour.

yeah, hopefully we can get some additional info on how extensive the crafting system is. I can't imagine they stopped at alchemy and were like "ok, that's good enough"

This is VERY exciting.


Who hurt you? Why so negative? Buck up fella, it's going to be ok.

Look, the preponderance of evidence suggests they were gearing up for a full crafting system as all the elements for it have been included - we got crafting benches and forges and ingots and tools...that there is an actual "Crafting Panel" is pretty darn solid evidence that its a full system.

I imagine a lot of this is also because they want the game to feel fresh and surprising when it comes out.

I also see no reason to reveal every little detail or system that is included in the game. I don't think it is going to sell more copies for them or anything like that - nor will it make the game more or less fun when it comes out.

Forums are here to chat about stuff and it is fun. But we are three weeks out from release. A bunch of dorks getting upset on Larian forums because they don't know if every system was fixed/changed/included has very little impact on the overall perception of the game, success of it, sales or how those people will think of it when they actually play it.

Agreed, I'm very curious to see what they have for crafting. I honestly wasn't expecting anything, so this is good imo.

Right, I'm back home! Time to plough on with answering questions here.


Thank you, and yes I had a fantastic time. I think I already answered the question about stats to the best of my knowledge.

Gameplay for the little bit of the game I managed (including a grand total of 5 combats) didn't feel all that different but then it didn't have much time to.

BUT there were a couple of changes that made me MUCH more hopeful on the stealth front, which was my top hope as I generally like sneaky play and found it unplayable in EA.

First: Hide for my ranger was an Action, not a Bonus Action.

Second, every time I attacked an enemy from stealth initiative was rolled for the attacking character and they ended up out of stealth.

Third, and perhaps less significant in my book, is that though it is still possible (as we saw in the PFH) to independently stealth our party members and get in one free attack, I didn't manage in my playthrough to trigger a surprise round, so I did wonder if that might have been removed to balance the potential free attacks from each party member.

All that comes VERY heavily caveated though, as I did not have all that long to spend testing this specific thing out. It probably is still possible to cheese stealth and I'm sure someone will work out how pretty sharpish, but it looks like it might be much harder than in EA so with that plus Hide as an action, I'm now cautiously hopeful that stealth won't be unplayably cheesy for someone not actively looking for exploits.

We'll see!

Oh, and yes there are a few things I've noted that weren't shown in the PFH or might not have come across in all the chaos, and I'm happy to share. But I've not had chance to look at the rest of the forum yet. I definitely will, including Tuco's thread, but I'll work through this thread first, so if there's something specific you're interested in knowing about you might get an answer here first

Ooh, it didn't look as though we could change the starting classes of the origin characters other than The Dark Urge (for whom we can select class, race, appearance, etc), but I'm afraid I didn't actively check what we could change. Fail! I wouldn't rule changing stats either out or in, based on my memory.

And it has been confirmed that there will be no automatic party lock at the end of act 1 - it was the plan but has been abandoned. Party members might still leave at certain points if they really don't get on with you or agree with what you do, but that will be tailored to each individual companion and the story rather than a D:OS2 like mass dumping of companions at a particular point in the story.

Congrats on your invite, it must have been a lot of fun!

Did you see anything on the advertised GROUP ROLLS for checks and the party being able to interchangeably do conversation?

We must have played different game, since when i attacked from stealth, while at least single person of my party was in combat ...
Person who attacked allways skiped first round.

So i didnt exactly get free attack ...

It was more single attack on wich enemies cant respond ... i wonder if they will be able to counterspell. O_o
Bcs that would mean completely waste whole turn in exchange for nothing.

Looking around the forum, I'm sure you've noticed a small amount of discussion about the bear in the room. In PFH the audience reaction was delightful. Did you get the feeling that many in the audience had a similar strong negative reaction like many here have?

First: Hide for my ranger was an Action, not a Bonus Action.

Second, every time I attacked an enemy from stealth initiative was rolled for the attacking character and they ended up out of stealth.

Third, and perhaps less significant in my book, is that though it is still possible (as we saw in the PFH) to independently stealth our party members and get in one free attack, I didn't manage in my playthrough to trigger a surprise round, so I did wonder if that might have been removed to balance the potential free attacks from each party member.


Awesome!

So Rogue is the ruler of stealth once again.

We'll see if the company that gave us underwear will lower itself to provide a functioning crafting system.

As I mentioned in response to another question above, we seem to have a keyring, alchemy pouch and camp supply pack on us at the start of the game (actually, each party member I found had one, too). I'm assuming and hoping that keys, alchemy components and rations respectively get auto-sorted into those containers, though I confess I didn't actually test that.

There also seemed to be a torch equipment slot separate from our melee weapon slot, though again I didn't have chance to test exactly what that did.

Beyond that, nothing jumped out at me but that doesn't mean there weren't tweaks (and hopefully bug fixes!) that I didn't get chance to spot.


When I clicked to level up my (initially) Ranger halfling, there was an option at the top right to "Add Class" which I clicked then selected Rogue and got the option to pick some additional skills. If I'd had a bit more time I'd have checked to see if and how the game imposed D&D multiclassing prerequisites but by the time I got to level 2 I realised I was going to run out of time so just ploughed on!


I rested once, so didn't notice anything significant mechanically, only the aforementioned camp supply pack, the fact that the bedrolls were shown neatly rolled up during the day and there'd clearly been some prettifying of the tents and what not.

Oh, and the introduction of camp clothes, which apparently can be used out in the world as well if you choose to hide armour. (I'll admit the outfits Lae'zel and Shadowheart were wearing in the clip I saw in the morning made me blink a little. If those are the defaults I think I might need to find something different for them else I'll be fretting they'll be catching a chil In my own playthrough, I didn't even stop to notice.)

One more thing that I'm not sure is significant. I never found any food, and only seemed to have supply packs. I didn't stop to loot, and do recall Swen mentioning a vendor having a potato for sale in the morning presentation, so I'm not sure how significant that is. I could easily have not picked up any food even in EA if I'd played the way I did yesterday, but I'm hoping at least some is still there. I'd happily forego supply packs, but I quite liked the variety of food stuffs!

Oh, and so I must have seen a vendor in the morning demo, though not in my playthrough, but apologies I didn't take in whether it looked any different.

I do also want to talk about what I noticed about companion conversation triggers, which we saw in EA as heavily linked to camping and resting, but I'll not go into that now, in case someone has asked specifically about that later.

Aargh!!!

This was an epic fail on my part, as getting the party more involved in conversations is one of my top asks, but I simply don't know. It was on my list to check but with one thing and another I didn't.

Nothing obvious jumped out at me as different in the conversations, but then I didn't actively look for it either. I wish I had!

Hah! No, I believe the redhead you're referring to is the lovely Knightenator. I left the front rows to those who appear on the internet for a living, or at least a serious hobby, and took up a strategic position half way towards the back in the room. It's possible you might have been able to make me out, but in the only still I've seen so far the resolution is so poor that even I'm not sure which featureless blob is me.


Yes, Swen was really trying to encourage the attendees to try The Dark Urge in their playthroughs. I didn't as I knew I'd be bashing through the conversations trying to get to see as much as possible (which I did, so am slightly puzzled how I still managed not to see so much of what I was interested in), but at least one other person I spoke to did and said they were impressed. I'll definitely be trying the Urge at some point (possibly twice, both resisting and submitting), but like you it won't be my first playthrough.

OMG this is HUGE!! YES!!! I won a bet!

I didn't see utility cantrips, but then I didn't look at any places they might be, sorry Lotus Noctus. Nothing to confirm or deny on that front.

Variant Human no, but then it did look as I noted before that all races get a configurable +2 and +1 to ability scores. I'm kicking myself for not checking to see what, if anything, humans got as well as that. I kind of feel they should get something, given that in EA they don't have any racial abilities, just the +1 to each attribute. But then giving them a free feat might be overpowered as I think VH just has +1 to two attributes? We might need to wait and see on this one.

I didn't see any way of exporting/importing our characters, but again I didn't specifically look. Swen did happen to mention in response to a question in the morning presentation that characters from one campaign couldn't be imported into another, but that's slightly different.

With respect to custom party from the start, I get the sense that the official plan for a custom party is via hirelings, and that these will be picked up later. We assume from Withers based on prior information received, though I didn't see any of that either in a demo or my own game where I didn't have time to go find Withers. Swen did mention that hirelings were customisable, though.

There's one more thing I saw that might be relevant here. In the demo in the morning, at one point Swen fired up split screen co-op part way through the game, picked up a second controller and created a custom character on the fly and then had them join the party (bumping one of the three AI companions). He then exited the split screen, and the second custom character was left in the party of the original player. I did kind of get the sense that something didn't go as planned in all that, though, and he ended up reloading, so I wouldn't depend on that as a way of sneaking additional custom characters into the game rather than using hirelings.

Sounds very disappointing so far, but thank you for your insight.

Having a dark urge(:P) to ask some questions myself :o

I don't expect you'll be able to answer, but still, i have to try :P

First, congrats for the invite, hope you had a great time :3

1) Can Dragonborn wear helmets? I mean, we saw one with a hood, but actual armored helmets? Been wondering about that

2) Is pact of the blade lock in the game? did you notice anything in char creation, or after encountering Wyll?

3) I have to ask this again, sorry :P, did you see any plate armor models that were, ehm, "complete"? Like, matching armor and boots for example, that didn't look wrong for the armor? I keep seeing mismatches and gaps between legs and boots, it's becoming an obsession :P

I don't think that you would notice it, since your character doesn't wear plate, but still :3

Cheers

So it may be possible to replace a custom party member in a multiplayer run with a new player with their own character! Wow, another huge deal.

Since Red Queen told us she was only level 2 ... and pact boon is level 3 feature ...
And Since she told us she barely made it to the Groove ... and Groove is where you meet wyll ...

I would take the liberty to guess she have no idea.

She looked so fricking cool! I can't recall if there were any new female halfling heads (there was the odd new head I noticed for some races/genders), but the one I used was available in EA. It was one I didn't particularly like, but by the time it was aged up, scarred, with one eye a different colour than the other and one of the cool new hairdos (there aren't a lot of new ones, but there are a few) she looked really badass and quite different.

I wouldn't swear to anything on the proportions, and would need to see them side by side, but they seemed better. Certainly I didn't feel that the female halfling heads/faces were so oddly huge or their legs out of proportion to their bodies or their stance quite as unnatural. But I wouldn't totally swear that I wasn't just misremembering how bad they were. Or getting distracted by all the fancy new features available.

I also had a quick look at male dwarves, which was the other race/gender combo I thought was really oddly proportioned in EA, and I thought their chests might be looking slightly less overinflated. They still had ridiculously huge hands though!

I was trying not to get stuck in character creation for the whole time I was there, so confess I didn't check this out and just used her default hair. But overall, I think the colours did look better in the build in EA, and I certainly didn't see any of that weird almost whiteout stuff that started happening in the prologue in patch 9 so I'm going to keep my fingers crossed that the hair colours will be better again as well.


I'll bundle these together, and you're going to be so disappointed in me

So, first of all, as a chooseable action, I only saw Sneak Attack as a main hand attack.

BUT it was there (as was Sneak Attack critical) in the reaction system. But due to a combo of the difficulty of getting advantage on attacks given aforementioned tweaks to stealth and flat out user error (I'd ticked "Ask" but not the separate tick to activate the reaction as a whole) I wasn't able to check whether the Sneak Attack damage would apply on an off-hand hit, and ran out of time just as I was trying to get this working. And because I was so busy trying to check it with the off hand I didn't even verify it with the main hand. (As I'd taken my rogue level second, I only had one combat to try this in.)

I'm afraid I'm going to have to leave you with the cliffhanger. Looks like the mechanic is there that could apply sneak attack damage on off hand attacks and AOOs, but I can't verify that it in fact does!

Oops i missed that. I don't know, maybe in the character creation of warlock it tells you what awaits down the road :P

Yeah fat chance of that but oh well :3

In that case, I won't mention anything further to you about her, though I did get to see a bit more of her in the presentation earlier in the day than we saw in the PFH


It is really confusing, and when I asked Molly (from the Community Management team) about it she said all the info would be updated and that this would be properly clarified on Monday. But my understanding is that the early release of the full game on 3 August replaces the 72h early access to act 1, so unfortunately we don't get the game on 31 July. Or, probably more accurately given it seems Larian are releasing the game as early as they possibly can, we don't need to wait until 6 August to play act 2

Apologies, no. I didn't risk trying a monk as I've no idea how to play one in 5e and didn't want to spend all my time trying to work out how to use my character!

Hopefully my response to Ragnarok about sneak attack covers what you wanted to know on this topic. Or at least as much as I was able to discover of what you want to know! But feel free to ask any follow-up questions and if I can answer I will.

But given I failed as a sneak attacker in my game, you probably shouldn't hold your breath

It is confusing indeed

This is something I'm really interested in too, but knew I wouldn't be able to do justice to given everything else I was hoping to check, so I confess I skipped through most of the dialogue as quickly as possible. Not that there was a huge amount anyway in the little bit of the game I reached.

But even on a quick whizz through, I did notice a few tweaks and changes to dialogue I'd seen in EA. And certainly Swen said that lots and lots of lines specifically to reflect reactivity to our class and race had been added in the past few months (actually, did he say that in PFH? I can't recall if it was there or in the earlier presentation), so I have my fingers crossed on that front.

Thank you, I' m hopeful, that you said that your halflings proportions seem better, especially since they made so much fun about that in the PfH.
I think my halfling bard Helia might take off then ☺️.
And thanks for answering my questions.

In the presentation in the morning, Swen really quickly used some dye on a robe Gale was wearing. It was so fast that I didn't spit exactly what was happening or how the dyeing worked, but on the assumption that robes are treated like armour rather than camp clothes (which I can't verify but seems reasonable), I think things are looking hopeful for being able to colour armour as well.

I didn't see anything to indicate that there would (or wouldn't!) be full transmog, though as I think I mentioned Swen did say that armour would be hide-able and you could just wander around in your camp clothes appearance if you prefer that.

(As an aside, I thought the Gale's robe that Swen dyed was dead cool, and though it was at a later level and I think that we might have seen it in one of the trailers, some of the starting armours also seemed to have been improved. My ranger's initial leathers, for example, didn't look nearly so much as though someone had sewn them together in the dark and I really liked the design: it was simple, as befitted a low level armour, but just stylish enough.)

Thanks god they redone that starting rogue/ranger armor, it was terrible, imo. Now let's hope they do the same for the wizard's robes. And if they implement the dyeing feature, it can also improve on the NPCs by giving each and everyone (that uses generic armor) a more distinct look.

I think I already said this in response to a different question, but I unfortunately didn't spot anything like this. I wouldn't say it isn't there either but I was skipping through dialogue as quickly as possible in order to check other stuff, and somehow forgot to look for that option despite it being something that's high on my own wishlist!

I'm afraid all I saw was the alchemy bit I mentioned. My notes are letting me down, but IIRC there was an "Alchemy" tab next to the spell book and reactions tabs. I don't think it had anything on it except that bit of blurb about being able to use stuff we find to create poisons, etc, but whether that was because I didn't have any components, or because I needed some sort of kit, or a skill or feat of some kind, I'm afraid I don't know.

And I saw nothing at all that indicated that we would (or wouldn't) get other sorts of crafting or, say, scroll scribing. I'm afraid we'll need to wait on an update, or even the game!, for that one. Unless someone else playing managed to work out more than me and shares details elsewhere on the web

Yes, it didn't seem to go quite as planned! And it was certainly a (panel from) hell of a lot longer than it was originally intended to be. I think the technical issues were at least partly responsible for the feeling of time pressure and chaos, but also just that Larian wanted to show so much and, in my view, they probably should have been a bit more focused. And there are perhaps some things that could have been left for a community update (I think an update might be a better place to cover something like crafting too, though admittedly it's not usually something that I am fussed about so I'd have been happy to just discover what was there on release!)

I will say that it didn't feel as someone who was there as though the content was aimed at the content creators who had been invited, mainly because they'd already had that other presentation I've mentioned earlier in the day and the opportunity to play the game for real. So while there was definitely stuff in the PFH that hadn't been covered earlier, a lot of the key stuff had been shared already. I think the the PFH genuinely was aimed at the people streaming it, though whether it hit the mark is another question!

Whaaaaaaaaaaaat?!?!

Where did you hear that?!
Thats AWESOME! Best info from whole PFH! ^_^

//Edit:
Oh ...
I just read thoroughly the previous coment, and i take it back ...
I almost thought that Rogues and Rangers got brand new armor (wich is something i was beging for since first class with its own style was added), but now i feel like curent one just got a bit more details.
Shame.

Swen said they were having trouble thinking of a way to market the game. Specifically in relation to the breadth of choices available in a playthrough, I think, but from the marketing we've gotten, I think they're having trouble in general to communicate what the game is to people who aren't already on board.

Have you seen their YouTube shorts marketing? It was like the worst thing ever. I feel like marketing team is either incompetent or going for some modern marketing crazy shenanigans.

Oh, and I can't believe I forgot to mention this. I got caught up in Sneak Attack.

I didn't spot any more reactions in my playthrough, but then as you've no doubt realised I was rushing too much to pick up lots.

But you would have seen arrow deflection in the PFH.

And I'm not sure if it was in PFH, but in the morning presentation we did see Shield .

"Baldur's Gate 3 - Now with underwear".
The game will fly off the shelves.

I'm sorry, I don't think I have anything for you on any of these, either positive or negative.

As per the subsequent chat with Ragnarok, I only got to level 2, and while I did meet Wyll in the grove I didn't have time to check out his build. (I was, though, MOST surprised by his very different intro chat, which I'm happy to talk about here though I think I spotted someone had created a separate thread to discuss the changes to his story announced in PFH.)

And I didn't see any dragonborn with helmets, or any dragonborn without helmets that I'd expect to wear one. Given you have a choice of a number of different crests for a dragonborn, I'd imagine fitting a helmet would be very difficult indeed!

And apologies, I didn't note any plate armour so can't comment on that. I'm sure there must have been some in the presentation I was shown, but it clearly doesn't impinge on my consciousness as much as it does yours

Custom Lineage (Tasha's) gets +2/+1 ASI and a feat and a skill/proficiency at level 1.

Please tell us more about Wyll. They said they redid his story from the ground up, what changed?

You punch things in the face until they are dead.

Ooh, I definitely want to hear about the new intro conversation!

The ranger starting armour (I didn't even look at rogues and wizards, I'm afraid) was of quite a different style. It was more of a leather breastplate affair, kind of strapped on, rather than a jacket/coat. Not fancy, but then that's not really what I want for a ranger's starting armour. So I wouldn't want to get your hopes up, but ... you might like it more? I wish I'd been able to take a screenshot, if only to show off my halfling, but any pics of the gameplay were strictly forbidden!

Right, sorry folks, but I need a bit of a break.

I'm going to go have my tea (ie northern English-speak for my evening meal) and try to stop my eyes from crossing. In the meantime, feel free to keep the questions coming. I think you'll be all too aware by now that I won't be able to answer them all, but if I did happen to pick up anything relevant I'll certainly share.

I think I've answered (or at least responded to!) most of the questions up to this point, but still owe you my in-room perspective on the incident with the bear, and now I've prompted some further questions about Wyll.

Have I also missed a question about the UI? I thought I'd seen one, but perhaps that was something I spotted in one of the other threads.

See you later!

Aee you! Thank you so much for all these answers! You are an absolute trooper! No pun intended!

Thank you very much for the provided info!

Thank you Red Queen,

Thank you for all of the insight! Looking forward to more after you get some well deserved rest.

Thanks for the Info!

Were you able to choose starting equipment or did it default to the same as Early Access?

It seems like Origin appearance can't be customized.

Left is a regular Tav, right is Astarion (the "Edit Appearance" button is grayed out in his case).

Hmmm ...

That makes me wonder, what are chances it was Nymessa's armour ...
I believe that was what Rangers were wearing in pre-Alpha footage ... sheesh, thats long time ago.
I dont think its any spoiler per se ... but i keep it hidden anyway, in case someone would wish to leave it as surprise.

IF this is it ...
Its beautiful. ^_^

But it makes me wonder what Wizards, Rogues, Clerics, Fighters, and Warlocks are wearing. :-/
I go searching for prealpha footages!

Huh. I guess I missed this part. I'm hearing impaired, and the event not having closed captioning made it very difficult for me to follow.

You can have both, they seemed to imply that this is sort of a against his wyll (hah!) sort of thing, and they could becomes good friends.

That's really unfortunate. It's 2023, decent nearly-simultaneous captioning is possible, isn't it?

It still gets a lot wrong sadly. it helps a bit though.

Edit: Especially when people speak with accents and dialects.

Yay for being able to dye armor! Thanks for answering all these questions! You are a superstar!😊🎉

Okay, a bit more before I crash tonight. I'm going to park the bear scene questions for now, and come back to them tomorrow when I'm going to be around to moderate any subsequent discussion.

So I think, unless anything else pops up while I write the next response, that just leaves Wyll for now.

Though if you have asked a question and I haven't answered it, or at least said that I don't know what the answer is, then that's an accident and feel free to repost your question or a link to it. I have been trying to work through them in order. And while I was under strict NDA until the end of the Panel from Hell, I've been assured that now it's over I can talk about anything I saw over the course of the day, so other than being careful about spoilery stuff I'm not holding anything back.

Sorry, that's not it. It was much more all over leather on top, without much (or perhaps any?) cloth visible on the main body section. I'll see if my brain can manage to summon up a better description of it once I've had some sleep

Since you played a ranger can you tell us if they changed anything on favored enemy and if you know how it and natural explorer progress at higher levels?

Okay, Wyll. I'm going to pop in spoiler tags, even though it was covered in the Panel from Hell so most folk will be aware of the key point anyway and I don't know much more, I can only give you my impressions of meeting the new, and allegedly improved, Wyll.

I didn't look carefully at the favoured enemies or terrains, but on a quick glance they looked the same as EA.

I also didn't see anything obvious that would tell us more about how the classes progress, which is a bit of a disappointment as I think that's sorely lacking. Obviously not quite as bad given we'll apparently be able to respec, though I'd rather have the info and make the right choices up front than have to relevel because I later discover something that would have changed my earlier decisions (I didn't catch any glimpse of how respeccing might work).

That said, I've not totally given up hope. I certainly didn't spend more than a small fraction of the time in character creation that I could have, and I rushed levelling up so I could carry on playing, so it is entirely possible I missed something.

Okay, that's it for tonight folks. I'll start tomorrow by answering any new questions here, then trawl through that bear thread to see what I make of it and if there's any moderator action I need to take.

See you tomorrow, and in the meantime your help postponing any discussion of wildshape sex would be much appreciated!

Hi RQ! Glad you got to go to Larian and meet all the folks over there. Who says hard work never pays off. Thanks for being a great mod!

My question (sorry if I missed it, there's a lot and the forums are being sluggish)

How was the build you played? Still have stuff missing/bugs/etc? Any more graphical upgrades? How was the cinematic camera when dealing with different heights? I imagine the version was not the most current. Just wondering in comparison to EA.

Thank you!

Thanks for the info dump! I'm really, really glad Wyll's gotten more interesting

Thanks! I'll give you the short answer just now as you just managed to catch me before logging off, and expand on it tomorrow.

It seemed way more polished and definitely felt much closer to complete, including nice touches with animation, though I did encounter a few minor bugs even on my really quick playthrough. I thought the colours and graphics looked much improved (especially from patch 9, which I think was the one that really seemed to break something). I also didn't notice any problems with the camera handling verticality, though admittedly there wasn't a lot of it in the bit of the game I played. And I'm afraid it still wasn't possible to actually look up.

And I only climbed a couple of ladders, but did so with no problems and popping up and down. So not definitive, but at least we can hope that is fixed.

And yes, the forums are being temperamental again. Definitely time to call it quits for tonight! Bye for now, all.

Hi RQ - did you get a chance to see if you could choose your starting equipment in character creation? was there anything indicating future class abilities? so you could see class features of future levels?

That is all very interesting. Was Wyll still teaching the tiefling boy how to fight? I thought that was a really endearing way to introduce him, also I'm glad the lighting has changed. I never really noticed but I know a lot of people will be happy about that.

Hi Red Queen.

Thanks for taking the time to answer so many questions. I don't think these have been answered (and some maybe not asked previously). And i know your halfling saved Gale so you may know about wizard questions.

1. Can use choose starting equipment?
2. Can you dodge?
3. Is Ritual Spell casting implemented?
4. With Gale could the familar use the help (distract action), or do anything new?
5. Can players use the help (distract) action in combat?
6. Any sign of the blade cantrips (green flame blame/ booming blade)?

Thanks heaps

I have few more questions ...

Since you were Ranger, i dare to presume you werent able to test if Mage Hand can handle things like levers, huh?
You mentioned that Tutorial was shorter ... can you tell us more? I would really like to hear about it.
And since there was some scenes in Gortash trailer that looked like being on Nautiloid ... was it looking very simmilar, or was there some big changes?
Also, how map in the game looked like? I know many people was complaining about it being a bit too ... well, just ugly.

//Edit:
I presume you didnt have enough time to truly explore tadpole powers ... i really wonder if they got better for Ranger, since personaly i find short charge kinda boring ... especialy for Ranged class. :-/
Have you noticed any new items to loot? Armors, weapons ... slings?

Any new backgrounds (Noble/Acolyte/Urchin etc.) for release? I felt they hinted at it during the panel, but wasn't shown or further mentioned.

Breezed through some more pages didn't look like these were posted.

Did they make the background tags customizable? It probably would of been added to the background tab, but at the moment, everyone originates from Baldur's Gate (Balduraian or something like that).

Can you hide or change the size of the minimap still looks huge.

Did you see any donkeys? lol, was going through some of my old posts and remembered requesting for donkeys to carry my junk, if a donkey actually made it to the game it be close enough.

The combat log gets spammed by npcs repeating the same lines over and over and made it really hard to read. Did they add another tab or change the combat window at all?

Congrats on the invite btw, hope you had fun, & thanks for doing this thread.

Oxen are in the game. And chickens. You could string together hundreds of chickens to carry your junk.

@FrostyFardragon Yes! Or, I could take the Oxen, string the chickens to it and have a traveling breakfast stand along with easy storage.

Sorry, missed this one yesterday.

I only saw this with split-screen co-op in the presentation, but though it doesn't seem unreasonable to suppose that it might be possible to do something similar for multiplayer I unfortunately didn't see anything during my visit that would confirm it.

I didn't see any options to customise starting equipment at character creation, though would caveat that I could have spent all my time there and forced myself to rush through.

Similarly with information about class progression, which is something I did hope to see but it didn't jump out at me either at character creation or level up, though again I'd not swear it wasn't there and just not obvious on a quick rush through.

I am not actually sure whether we still got that scene with the kid! I agree that was really endearing, but I confess I was merrily bashing space with my mind on what else I could possibly manage to check in my rapidly expiring time with the game until I was brought up short by sudden realisation that the conversation wasn't going as expected. Wyll was still in the same place in the grove, so it's possible that remains the same, but I don't recall for certain.

Apologies, I'm not sure on any of these. I didn't notice any evidence they were there, but could easily have missed it even if it were there. These will have to remain in the to be confirmed column I'm afraid!

I wish we could get confirmation on this as it would be a huge deal for the multiplayer community - sometimes a player doesn't work out for whatever reason and if you are 5-6 sessions in then it's REALLY difficult to sell that players character to a new player. If we could have a new player come in, create a new custom character that would be leveled up to the party level that would be a huge deal - especially if the character being replaced is a really gonked out mess of a class/race/look.

People generally HATE playing other people's toons.

No, I didn't have time to check this, so we don't need to lose hope yet

Popping in spoiler tags in case anyone wants to just discover this for themself ...
Hmm, I'd need to go back to the trailer to check that one. Certainly it looks as though at least some bits of the nautiloid have had some design changes.


I didn't have time to really look at it properly, but it was pretty obvious that a fair bit of work had gone into improving both the minimap and the full map and on a reasonably quick glance they were looking MUCH better and more useful and readable. I think Larian have also tried to get a bit of classic D&D map aesthetic into the map which I find a fun idea. In short, hopeful signs though I'd need to spend longer to decide how much I really liked the changes.

I rested only once so didn't get even a single dream. Which reminds me I do have a snippet of news about Daisy, that I'll share at the end of this unless anyone asks me about it first

I didn't have time to loot! Or shop! So no, sorry. As I mentioned, some armours have clearly been redesigned, but I didn't see any brand new types of thing, though that doesn't prove anything given how much I rushed.

Oh this is really good, they did say you could hire hirelings one for each class. But full new custom would be pretty cool, also atm you can't get rid of / swap out custom characters for other characters in the party, at least from what I could find out.

Despite feeling like I got stuck in character creation for too long, there were still things I forgot to check! I didn't notice new backgrounds, but then I didn't actively check for them either, so it remains open.

Btw, if I'm recalling the same thing as you, I'd taken the comment at the PFH as meaning that more reactivity to backgrounds rather than more backgrounds had been implemented. But then it also sounded as though "background" might not have been meant in its technical D&D sense, but instead was referring to class/race. I was left wondering!

Hello Red Queen. Hope you had a great time in Ghent in general. I would like to ask if we know now for certain that our Pcs will or will not be fully voiced over. Because I've heard a lot of things from everywhere. Thanks! .

I see. Thanks for the answer! Guess we'll know for sure in a few weeks. I'm fine with Urchin, Noble and Criminal for the characters I have in mind, but more than the currently available ones (there's like 9?) would certainly be nice.

More reactivity is always very welcome and we've seen them add some in the early access patches already, so no doubt final release will also get more.

The more i read about it, the more i wonder how is it possible that no content creator i follow (and i know they were there) created some video about "all things i have seen" ...
Is it possible that they had to sign some kind of non-disclosure agreement? :-/
That sounds really weird for publicly accessible event. :-/

Quite honestly im more interested about if i may make hirelings of every Race.

Thanks for the thread. My question might be a bit weird and maybe you can't answer, but were you folks told anything (or the content creators) about getting copies early, or is this just it? For such a deeply narrative game like this, it sucks when a youtuber dumps 200 videos the moment embargo drops with massive spoilers in the title that Youtube then force feeds you in recommendations with no way to stop it.

To a less extent, I guess it'd also help to know when to go media blackout since a lot of content creators have loose lips and their fanbase then goes around purposefully trying to spoil people. Ask me how I know...

Selfish and self-centered as it sounds, I kinda hope Larian just makes them content creators wait with the rest of us lol, but I seriously doubt that'll be the case.

Okay, definitely curious about this! Could you share with us the snippet of news about Daisy? Thanks for all the great answers so far

I didn't spot any option like this, caveated by the fact I didn't spend as long in CC as I'd have liked.

I didn't try, though as per my reply to Ragnarok just now, the minimap has definitely been improved so people might find it more useful and so not be as keen to hide it even if they could


No, and I didn't notice any significant changes to inventory handling so I'm afraid it looks as though folk are going to have to carry on head-canon-ing their donkeys, floating disks, etc.

I'd have liked to spend some time looking at the combat log as this is an area that could have been improved, but I didn't have time to look at it properly. It did look as though at least some changes had been made, but I didn't have time to check whether there were filters or tabs or anything. In fact, the only specific thing I noticed was that it seemed to record loot picked up which I don't believe the EA version does.

Oh! Just recalled one more thing about this.

At one point after a battle, a message popped up saying something to the effect of "your replenishable resources are getting low, you may want to rest". I'm not sure if this is part of the tutorial system - the window looked like the tutorial ones - but it did make it look as though there may have been changes to help new players decide when to rest and, by implication, assure them that it's okay to do so.

Who is Daisy, and what has she done to Hal?

The protagonists weren't voiced in the build we were shown (and I think that applies both to custom characters and origin characters when leading the conversation, though wouldn't swear to that latter). And given this is presumably pretty close to the final release, I'm losing hope of a voiced protagonist much as that was one of my top asks. I guess it could be added in at the last minute but I don't really believe that will happen.

Figured WolfheartFPS would be making a vid, probably working on edits or traveling back, or whatever. He's pretty active normally.

Ya, I would figure the hirelings are customizable in some way or form, at least I would hope. I know in dos1 or/and 2 you had a mirror you could customize your characters with.

@The Red Queen
Nice! Improvements on minimap is better than nothing & changes to the combat log is really welcome. I'll cross my fingers a donkey made it in, thanks for replying Red Queen.

We were all strictly warned against spoiling anything before the end of the PFH, but anyone there would now be able to chat about what they saw. I'm guessing one tricky thing from the perspective of content creators was that no recording or screenshotting was permitted which would make it a bit difficult to make engaging content. Plus they'd also have only been getting home yesterday or today too so won't have had much time to do anything! I'd expect to see some other folks' takes over the next few days, though some might of course decide that they'd rather wait until they get their hands on the game and can actually show some vid to support their commentary.


I didn't see hirelings, but Swen did quickly mention in the presentation that they would be customisable and iirc the specific example he gave is that we could use them to create a party of four barbarians if we wanted. My guess (and it is just a guess) is that the reference to being able to create a hireling of every race just means that you pick the race first when you pick your hireling, then you can set everything else like any class you fancy. I guess we'll have to wait and see for sure, though.

Morning, hope you got some sleep!

I have a very specific question, not sure if you'll be able to answer.

In early access, a lot of the char. models have "shiny eyes" where the bottom of the eyelid almost looks like its too bright in close ups.

Was this still present in the version you played?

As always, thanks.

That's what i gathered as well but i wanted to know for sure. Well either way the game will be amazing. It doesnt really make sense to me because we have heard they would add more PC voices without the PCs being fully voiced. Does the sound barks need to be so detailed with 8 different voice options?

I didn't hear anything at all about content creators getting early copies, though I wouldn't necessarily have done even if this were planned as that could have been something that Larian was discussing with them individually rather than just announcing in the wider forum. So apologies, I don't have anything definitive for you on this front.

we will still benefit from the 3 extra days before the release now that the release is on August 3rd?

Indeed ...
As i was writing the reaction on this message i quote, i just remembered he shared reason to be inactive for few days (i dunno if its cool to share it here, so lets stick with just that, we all can check his twitter and read it oureselves. ).

Wich completely explains it.

"Daisy" is the nickname for the character we're asked to customise along with our protagonist as part of character creation.

I'm going to pop this bit in spoiler tags, though given everything I saw that was different was at character creation it's not something you'd need to wait long to discover once you play the game

I found her lack of underwear disturbing.

Ah, I don't really do twitter, thanks for the heads up btw.

DAMN!


This is big!

Huh. I've never encountered "Daisy" so I've always assumed she's a character in act 2 onwards, though recently I concluded she was just someone I've managed to miss much like Karlach, who I now actively went back to find. Obviously I'm playing the game wrong

If I'm correctly picturing the issue you're referring to, I think it might be related to the weird "white-out" effect that iirc I only really started noticing in patch 9 which seemed to do something very bad to colours. I didn't notice that effect, or any (unintentionally) weird eyes, in the build I played in Ghent so I think we can be cautiously optimistic on this front. Fingers crossed!

In Early Access, you only encountered them if you kept using your illithid wisdom checks. Now I guess, bets are off!

But while I'm on the topic of illithid wisdom checks, the DC to break SH out of her pod in the build I played was 2. Implying to me that we are going to get harder illithid checks as the game progresses. It was always a bit weird in EA that we were rolling checks with 0 DC.

To me it always made a perfect sense and felt like an emergency button when all other scenarios seemed grim. It is exactly the type of moment when you can appeal to your darker and costlier powers as the last resort. If checks become progressively harder, at one point you won't even think about taking the illithid option in favor of others, unless you are doing some crazy roleplay stuff.

I think this should be properly clarified by Larian tomorrow, but my understanding is that no, the full game will be releasing as early as possible on 3 August, replacing the 72 hour early access to act 1. And it's not so much that we won't be getting the game three days early as that we won't have to wait until 6 August to play act 2 (and of course are getting everything a few weeks sooner than we thought)

This is definitely something I need to explore then. Luckily I have the GOG version so I'll keep all the early access installers and can mess around with this at my own leisure to see the differences when the game goes live.

Thankyou for sharing your experiences! I am sad about the lack of stat rolling but not surprised as I think they would have mentioned it by now if it was going to be in given how much it was requested. I guess I will have to continue to roll stats on a website and then edit the stats as I am in EA at the moment at least till someone managed to mod it.

Okay, I think I'm caught up again, though still need to address the bear in the room.

But I also have just a few more snippets you might all be interested in so will go through my notes to see what hasn't come up yet. You might want to ask me about companion conversation triggers

And on that note, I'm going to take a break and get some fresh air, but will be back later this afternoon ...

Yes! Do companions chime in more in conversations now? Or do they still stand around like lumps?

It was even weirder when you failed it.
(Nat 1)

Tell us about companion conversation triggers, your highness!

Also I am very intruiged by this change of the dream person. I do hope we can choose between the seductress and the guardian since I think it would be good for roleplay to give our character different options for who that dream person can be and who we would be tempted by. Some characters would be tempted by softness and sex appeal, while others could belured in by a strong protector promising security.

Hey ...
I have another question! Juicy question even!
Not sure if you will be able to answer it tho ...

PFH ended in Swen telling us that they wanted to show us one more thing ... it was even hinted during the event, that Nick was supposed to show us something he was very proud of.
And since you said there was more presentations during the day ...
And Swen himself said there was another one day earlier (wich i presume you were not part of) ...

Do you have any idea what that last thing was? O:)

One of the characters I started failed every single skill check roll on the nautiloid and indeed even that illithid one with a natural 1.

@RedQueen do you have a list of the other content creators that were there? I saw Wolfheart - and I have been waiting on an update from him but if we could get a pool of people to ask questions of it would really help fill in the blanks on some questions that THIS forum has been asking for years.

So far you have casually mentioned:

Crafting system
Keyring
Hide is now an Action for all but Rogue
Possibility of replacing existing characters with a custom character in a multiplayer game.

These are all HUGE things that the community has been speculating about for years.

And there were SO many other questions - NONE of which would have been spoilers that focused on the actual game mechanics that a lot of us would REALLy love to know more about. The PFH was mostly broad strokes and bear sex - which was great - but I am really itching to know some of the more technical and gameplay details. I have zero interest in story elements or spoilers.

Is there a way to pull more of those folks into a common thread or do we need to hunt that stuff down piecemeal?

Is that a quote from Halsin?

I got the Wyll versus Karlach thing from the PFH but Red Queen's comment about it being virtually the first thing out of Wyll's mouth knocked me back. Two obvious questions: 1. What about the Wyll's eye and goblin camp gig and 2. What about the fake knights in the toll house?
Okay, I'll come clean. Q2 is really about the sword.

That likely(*) means they are keeping Natural ones as automatic failures for skill checks and simply removing the incongruity of a 1 failing a difficulty 0 check.




(*)baseless speculation that could very well be wrong

To be honest I don't know on that point because I didn't experience all that many conversations and banged through the ones I had at top speed.

But what I was referring to and what I did notice was some very clear evidence that there had been changes to the way that companion conversations with the protagonist were handled. A number of us on these forums, me included, found it very frustrating that many of these conversations were tied to resting or that what one companion had to say got usurped by another with higher priority, so you almost had to spam long rests unnecessarily to progress companion relationships.

And I on that front I have some good news and some ... not bad news, but caveats to the good news.

Even on the little I managed to play it was clear Larian had listened to feedback and made changes. For example, at one point while walking through the grove both got exclamation marks over their heads to indicate that they had something they wanted to say to me. And Gale gave me his spiel about needing certain objects in a conversation when I then spoke to him out in the world rather than this being tied to a camp conversation.

The caveats are that, first, I only got to play a very little of the game and rested once so didn't really get to experience how this really worked in practice or whether the new approach successfully addresses all the problems we had with this in EA. And second that it still seemed rather buggy and therefore was still presumably being worked on when the build I played was packaged up for us to play. For example, Gale had apparently grown to trust me enough to share his deep secret in the course of a wander through the druid grove without even a rest and evening to chat first - I know I helped haul him out of a weird portal, but still! And Shadowheart wanted to come clean to me about something that I don't think had actually happened yet, though admittedly as I've said I skipped through a fair bit.

But still, I'm taking it as a huge positive that the approach to companion interactions with our PCs has been reworked, and hope that remaining issues with the changes can be ironed out before the release.

Sorry, I'm none the wiser on that one! That bit at the end was new and hadn't been covered in our earlier presentation, where we saw a bit more of the game on the approach to Baldur's Gate instead.

(Btw the presentation the day before was for press, and yes I wasn't involved in that so I'm not sure what was shown then.)

Very good news indeed! This won't quite solve all my issues, but at least I won't need to worry as much about Shadowheart being a scene hog.

All of the changes sound good so far, including the ones for Wyll. Looking forward to this.

I've got a question!

Did you talk with Larian about how they process the feedback from the forums?

And did you bring up their issues with communicating with the games audience? Seeing as this we on the forums have had been felt ignored by Larian during the course of EA.

Happy that you got this opportunity!

I'm afraid I don't have a list that I can just share. Obviously I know a few people who were there because I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to chat to some of them and we were all involved in the same comms about the event, but I feel it should be up to them to say what they want, if anything, about the event and their attendance at it.

I know that these forums recognised WolfheartFPS and Josh Strife Hayes at the event as I've seen them mentioned in posts here. And if anyone thinks they might have recognised someone else then I'd be happy to say if I came across them.

But I'm very aware that the answers to some questions we've had for years are now in tantalising reach, and these last three and a half weeks until we can discover all the answers for ourselves are going to seem very long!

Sorry, I got nowhere near either of those! I really don't know where the time went. Okay, that's a bit of a lie as a fair amount of it went on looking at the character creator. And, in my defence, on taking as many notes as possible so that I could make sure any info I shared with you folk was as accurate as possible

I also kind of missed exactly how Wyll came to introduce Karlach because I was rushing through the chat until that point. I think his rationale was that we saw something through our tadpole conversation, and my character might also have passed some sort of check to find out more, but don't hold me to that!

That is amazing news!
Thank you!

I'm very glad to hear they'remaking changes to conversations. There are definitely plenty that could happen outside of camp, so good that they're making improvements.

I was wondering about that too. I didn't see anything that positively confirmed that 1s and 20s in skill checks were still handled that way as, while I certainly failed skill checks, for once I didn't roll any 1s. But my assumption is that 1 and 20 have been kept as auto fail/success. Which I know isn't RAW and many folk don't like, but actually I kind of do.

In fact, I think during the PFH when trying some of those harder dialogue checks in the hospital it might even have been mentioned that a natural 20 would have been a success, and if that's the case I'd assume that would be balanced by a natural 1 being a fail.

I did get to meet Salo and Mollygos (our Larian community management contacts) in person which was fab. And I did chat to Salo briefly about the forum performance issues which I knew she was already aware of but she assured me again she was escalating within Larian. And she also told me she was still trying to get our forums banner to update properly, as it's now out of date!

It was all pretty full on and I was trying to glean as much info about the game as possible so we didn't have time for more wide-ranging conversations. I'm expecting that the next few weeks are going to be pretty busy for them and for us as we absorb the news and updates that are likely to be coming and then actually start playing the game, but after that might be a good time to reflect on some feedback for the team on what we'd like to see in terms of community info in future. Unless anyone wants to start a thread in advance of that. I'd certainly be happy to help draw attention to such feedback, as long as it was expressed constructively at any rate!

Im a little woried about what you told us about companion conversations ...
It seems like all their stories was just speeded up. :-/
In my opinion, they were allready quite fast. :-/

I did ...
At the end of presentation, when ... Adam (i think?) was trying to persuate the Doctor to kill himself ... the goal was 21 ... he rolled 20 ... and it counted as sucess.

It wasn't that they were speeded up, but that the way their triggers worked and where they happened had clearly been changed. That's the thing I found encouraging.

They certainly also happened way too fast in my playthrough and I'm taking that as a bug related to the fact that the new approach still hasn't been fully polished. Hopefully that will be fixed before you folks actually see the full release.

And just one more snippet about camping.

In the presentation I saw in the morning, there was a section shown in (I think) the outskirts of Baldur's Gate and when the party rested they were shown camping out in what looked like an alley somewhere. Swen was presenting and commented that this was because he hadn't yet rented a room in an inn.

So, jumping to some conclusions from that, looks like staying in inns is confirmed, and that how it might work is that we can hire a room in an inn and an area and then when we long rest in that area we might return to that inn, at least unless we have to hire an inn each night. It also seems that rather than taking the act 1 camp in the wilderness with us, we'll get new camp locations for each area we visit (which we were probably expecting from the fact that the game already gives us different camp maps when we venture into the Underdark and so on, but still to see that confirmed).

Loot on the Nautiloid? Did it change?

For instance, right now in EA, you can get the following four scrolls:

Firebolt
Mage Armor
Chromatic Orb
False Life

Do you know if the same scrolls are available, or did they change?

Also, did you come across any buried chests? Were they still so... large?

Thanks for all the info on resting updates!

As someone that seems to long rest less often than most, I'm glad story will be less tied to it now.

mourns my camp decorating dreams

Put your stuff in storage and redecorate.

I think its equally likely they set the default Ilithid DC to 2 because they would still fail on a Nat 1 at DC 0 and it was easier to fix by adjusting the DC than recode the rolling system...

I just wanted to say Red Queen, thank you. I really hope you're getting paid for your work here, and paid well, because you've put in more effort to communicate with the forums here than the rest of Larian has combined, and it's appreciated.

Guard: "Why are you trying to haul three carts full of junk into our city?!"

Tav: "I, uh... collect. Things. How big are your inn rooms, incidentally?"

I wasn't really stopping to loot, but I suspect some is the same and some may have changed. There have been some changes to the nautiloid map and, for example I think the chests up near Us weren't there. But don't hold me to that, I might just have been missing the obvious in my haste to see as much as possible!


I didn't come across any, no, so can't comment on whether there are still giant chests buried about the map

I basically just walked along the beach, through the crashed nautiloid, picked up Gale, swung by and freed Lae'zel then went directly to the grove.

Sorry they got scattered through the thread! Clearly my notes on camping and resting weren't very well organised


We can still hope that at some point in Baldur's Gate our "camp" will become a permanent stronghold that we can decorate to our heart's content, without needing to pack everything into the Traveller's Chest every time we move to a new area!

Well, I guess in a way I got paid with a jolly to Ghent and opportunity to get a sneak preview of the game, which is more than I was expecting when I took on this moderating gig

But more generally, no, I'm just a fan of the game excited to share what I've discovered with everyone else who is impatiently waiting for the full release!

@TheRedQueen You have already talked about the resting system, but I'm not sure it included the short rest mechanic.
Have you tried to SR and noticed some changes ?

I somewhat suspect that might be a thing. If we can buy inn rooms maybe we'll also (eventually) be able to buy some house or "stronghold"; after all, strongholds have become quite common in RPGs now, BG2 was one of the early games to do them even.

I don' t have a question (right now), but I wanted to say thank you for answering all these questions! I am glad you had the chance to go to Ghent, and I hope you had a lovely time there!

And thank you from me as well for moderating this forum - it must be like herding cats at times 😄

I hope all the companions can get their own place.

I mean, imagine. You and a few business partners all get rich. You go out shopping for a mansion, find the perfect place, and move in.

Suddenly, all of your business partners move in with you. What is this about?

It's like, "Um, Gale, listen. I know we've been camping together for a while now, but maybe... I mean, we're older... yeah, and I'm in a relationship and all... right, I appreciate that, but listen... I've been thinking... aren't we too old to still be roommates? Wouldn't you prefer something down by that Sorcerous Sundries you like so much?"

I only short rested once as well, and the only difference I noticed is that Gale commented something to the effect that "that was welcome", whereas I don't recall any party reaction to short rests in EA. I thought that was a nice touch, but obviously not a massive change. Still, it at least shows that something is different so it's possible we'll see some more significant content related to SRs in the full release. Or perhaps just some more party barks

Thanks for your answer
And all other!

Good point. I really liked in DA2 where all the party had their own pads!

Wolf is going into surgery on his leg, when he gets back to the states. If you go to his Youtube page and look under Community, he lays it out.

"Hey all! Just like last week, I am going away again for a few days. Heading out to pay Larian a visit in Belgium. I will be back July 8th/9th, but THEN I also have a knee surgery on the 11th (busy times lol) As some of you may have noticed, live streams have been a bit scarce, and they will continue to be for another week or two. I should still be putting out a few videos though. Getting close to BG3!! 🍻 Appreciate all the support, and I will be back into a more normal rhythm before you know it." - WolfheartFPS

https://www.youtube.com/@WolfheartFPS/community

Okay, looks like I'm caught up again, so I'll just start going through my notes and see if there's anything that I think you might be interested in that I've not mentioned yet. Feel free to keep questions coming, or let me know if I've accidentally missed your question.

First, a few random spells I happened to notice being used and don't think we saw in EA, though I might just not be remembering them: Knock, Telekinesis, Blight, Otto's Irresistable Dance, Cloudkill, Slow, Wall of Fire, Banishment, Arcane Lock, Ice Knife.

And, of course, Shield which I think I mentioned earlier.

Magic Missile also now pathfinds, which looked pretty cool.

Cheers!!

I had forgotten about that. Downside to only ever doing one playthrough I guess. Don't think I even finished the expansion(s?), though that will probably remain in the backlog for even longer now.

When I get to playing my bard, there will be at least a few battles where I cast this on all the enemies and just enjoy the show for a few rounds.

We need encounters with highwaymen for sure! Seriously any indications that we will have minor encounters when traveling / resting in the wilderness?

PS: Oh and how was the battle at Druids Grove? Was there still powerful shove ping pong?

Oh, and I don't expect this will surprise anyone, but Swen confirmed no day/night cycle in the game.

He only mentioned this in passing and didn't elaborate at any length on the rationale, but I took what he did say to indicate that it would have been anathema to them to half-arse it, but that properly implementing all the systematics night-time adventuring would imply was judged to be too huge a task.

The bear?

Actually on that point... did anyone in the room mention that scene later on?

Whaaaaaaat?
That sounds awesome!

Can you kill the demon guy fighting the mindflayer on the ship in the opening to get the big flaming sword still? Or has the big flaming sword been removed?

Okay, let's see what I noted about character creation that I've not already said.

• A few races at least seemed to have at least one new head option, though I didn't see loads of new heads.
• There are a bunch of sliders that you probably saw at PFH that can be used to increase variety: for maturity, freckles, freckle intensity and vitiglio.
• We can also select from various scarring options, piercings, have different colour eyes and tint our lips.
• Both head hair and facial hair looked better and more luxurious, without the odd gaps from EA (though caveat that the graphics capability of the machine I was using in Ghent was likely to be better than my own PC)
• A few new hairstyles, including a longish straight one with side plaits I've seen in a mod and some cool curly/afro ones with shaved sides I'm definitely going to use. And each hairstyle was given a fun name - the only one I can recall was Waterdhavian Scholar but I did appreciate the effort that had been put in.
• Again, shown at PFH, but the fact we now have icons for hair, faces, etc so we can see our options at a glance rather than having to scroll through was a HUGE improvement.
• A couple of new facial hair options, though still not nearly enough in my book!
• Dragonborn could select a face and crest separately. And I didn't note this, but I think someone mentioned to me that there were three different tail options, as well as no tail (or maybe no tail was one of the three options, and there were two tails!)
• Humans and a few other races, eg elves, have four body types (normal male/female and buff male/female), but other races only seem to have two. I didn't check every race, but halflings and half-orcs, for example, only have a male and female body shape.
• Genitals can be specified independently of body type (options were "default", "penis" and "vulva")
• Unfortunately, paladins still didn't seem to be able to say in game who their deity was if they have one, though I didn't actually try to create a paladin.
• I also counted 21 cleric deity options, but now I look at EA there seem to be 22, so either we're losing one or - more likely! - I miscounted.
• 8 custom voicesets probably was shown at PFH too, and anyway was expected as a result of what modders found, but just to confirm there were 4 female-sounding and 4 male-sounding ones, any of which could be used for any character.

I've not forgotten. How could I?

I'm just guessing once we get to that it might then dominate discussion, so trying to cover everything else first.

@TheRedQueen Thank you for sharing with the experience. I must say, PFH left me really disappointed and you have given me a decent amount of hope.

I wanted to ask if you have seen anything like a class preview. Sven said they want to make character creator more understandable to newcomers but I spotted nothing that would help to understand what each class does or their level progression.

What else?

Oh, there are definitely modesty filters in the options. I seem not to have noted exactly what they were, but from recollection (so heavily caveated) I think there were three in total that sounded as though they were intended to equate to (1) no nudity, (2) no sex and (3) safe for streaming.

Though from what I hear about some stuff that's been screenshotted from the PFH, options (1) and (3) at least, and maybe (2) sound as though they could possibly do with some fine tuning!

One more thing, though I suspect you might have no answer for this one:

Any changes to the fast travelling system to integrate it more believable within the world?

I barely spared him a glance as I headed straight for the transponder, so I'm not actually sure that Zhalk still had the flaming sword. But that whole fight seemed pretty similar to EA, so I don't see any reason to expect that we won't be able to kill and loot him. Though that was rebalanced even between patches, wasn't it, so even if still possible it might be harder (my preference!) or easier.

I'm glad I've helped I had a blast playing the game and saw some stuff in the presentations that really whetted my appetite for the full release. I didn't feel it came across as well in the PFH as in the earlier presentation I saw, but wasn't sure how much that was due to the technical issues that plagued the PFH, how much was that they tried to cram too much in, and how much was due to the fact that by that stage I'd had a pretty long day and my attention was starting to flag!

My overall impression from what I saw is that if someone wasn't already broadly positive about the game in EA then they're probably not going to suddenly become a convert. But if someone found stuff to enjoy about the EA experience but had issues and reservations with elements of the game, then the changes that have been made are on the whole improvements and show that Larian has been listening to EA feedback even if they've not completely overhauled, or changed, everything as a result of it.

In short, if you were looking forward to the game before this, then what I saw I think means that you would be justified in looking forward to it even more (as I certainly am!). But if you were already thinking it wasn't for you, then I didn't see anything that I would expect to completely change your mind about that.


I didn't see anything like this, though I agree it's sorely needed. I wouldn't swear there isn't more help there that I didn't see as I didn't spend as long at character creation or level up as I'd have liked, but there was certainly nothing jumping out at me.

I didn't actually use a teleport. At PFH you may have seen that there's a bit more to Gale's entrance through a portal which I felt did help integrate them into the world a little more, but this is certainly something where tastes are going to vary. For me, the amount of explanation we get about the teleports in EA (ie that they're mysterious Netherese magic) is already spot on: ie enough to say that they are intended to be in-world things rather than merely a gameplay convenience, without giving me enough to start getting my critical thinking faculties firing on their implausibilities

It actually has bothered me that "makeup" thus far has only really meant "makeup around the eyes". A welcome addition I did not expect.

So was Gale not on the ship (if he is stuck on the other side of the teleporter)?

Okay, getting there. Here are a few random UI/odds and sods I noticed.

• Shove was still a bonus action but I didn't manage to check whether distances looked the same (I only tried a couple of shoves and both times the opponent saved!).
• We still have the same chain system (which is not a bad thing in my book, as I do think it has some advantages over click and drag selection).
• Still no formations, and when you select a new party leader the previous leader still goes to the back of the diamond which I was hoping would be revisited.
• Summons and similar still seem to be attached to a party member, but on the plus side there was now an option to ungroup and move independently of them. I didn't get the chance to see how that would work in the event of multiple summons for one party member, though.
• Going into and out of turn-based mode seemed much quicker (it took an oddly long time in EA).
• Did I already say that character portraits looked much more distinctive and better? I didn't see any option to customise the ones for our main character, but they were now differently coloured and posed for both our party and enemies, rather than boring headshots.
• I did get a quick glimpse of the wheel-like controller interface in the presentation, but didn't try that out. I'm strictly mouse and keyboard!
• The silent protagonist reactions didn't really seem to have been changed, and I'm sure folk will still find them a bit much unless there's a late change.
• We still seemed to get the 2AC bonus from a shield when wielding a ranged weapon (which I'd understood was planned to be fixed from a bug report I'd made, but perhaps turned out to be too fiddly in the engine), and seemed to be able to swap freely between melee and ranged weapons. I didn't play around with changing equipped melee or ranged weapons in battle.

Or he tried to use it to leave the area on his own and got stuck.

Now that you've mentioned new spells, did you get any info on some of the divination spells?

On the smaller scale: detect magic, identify, etc.
Larger scale: community, divination, etc.

I know your pc didn't have access to any, but would love to hear any insight you have.

Personally I hope they don't implement a formation system, and If they do I hope we can turn it off. I find the little circles that your character are going to fill as they run there are off putting and kill immersion. Imo what they have now works for me.

In EA, we saw him just step through the teleport to us. He told us he just tried to get a "taste" of the magic and got whisked away. I'm assuming his story is basically the same, except instead of just being able to step through the teleport he got stuck for some reason. Or at least, I saw nothing in the bit I played to lead me to think his backstory had changed dramatically.


Sorry, no! My post about spells here was literally all the new stuff I noted about them, but I wouldn't draw any conclusions from the fact I didn't spot anything specific about divination spells, as it's not something I looked into. Practically all the spell stuff I noted there was just because Swen happened to show it in the presentation I saw in the morning which is why it's a bit of an odd selection

Oh, that is surprising. I thought in the panel from hell right at the start they said they had 'lost' shield and detect invisibility so I presumed that meant they weren't in the game.

Okay, last pass through my notes for some more random but probably non-spoilery content stuff I spotted in the presentation by Swen on the morning before the PFH.

I am going to put this in spoiler tags, though, as though it's things I'd not mind knowing in advance of the game, some folk might prefer to discover it for themselves as they play. And I do have just a bit more stuff noted that I definitely judge to be spoilers so I won't call it out, though I might try to drop tantalising hints if anything to which it's relevant crops up here or in other places

The beginning of the PFH was a skit acknowledging that they didn't include many spells on the spell list in community update 20.

Ok this is the thread with 411 info.

Given that technical details aren't really spoilers at this point, can you ask Larian if they intend to directly or indirectly update the BG3 Wiki site (I don't know who manages it).

Glad it's been useful!

The only wikis I'm aware of are fan ones, though.

Okay, I like all of this. I'm wondering if we can get more detail on these ones...?


I asked a few questions in the spoiler tag. Sorry if I'm asking too much. I just kinda like hearing about this game.

Imagine trying to sneak pretending to be a cultist at moonrise and immediately getting killed by kethrik because they saw you kill minthara with the eye

Okay, here's just a bit more detail on each of these, still trying to avoid completely spoiling anything, but I'm definitely, definitely recommending folk who prefer to discover things for themselves do not click for goblins here!

Okay, I have finally - I hope - answered almost everything here to the best of my ability (please shout if I've missed anything - it wasn't intentional!) and shared everything non-spoilery in my notes that I think folk here might be interested in.

The questions I've not yet addressed are about the reaction in the room and from the people there to the Halsin/Astarion scene. Right now, I'll just say it was a bit of a mix of shock, admiration and amusement. And probably a combination of those three things would be an accurate description of my own personal reaction too.

I'm sure you'll be curious for more detail (particularly on the "admiration" bit, which might seem a strange word to use in this context) but you can see from all my posts today that I've already spent a long time here so I'm going to beg your patience for one more night and will expand on my short answer properly tomorrow, once I've had some sleep.

Speak to you all then!

I think everybody who has something to say on that topic has said their piece, and clearly, no minds are being changed. It might be in everybody's interests to just put a moratorium on that subject, and limit it to what you observed of the audience in the room, conversations you had with other participants, etc. All the stuff that you have access to. And perhaps, when you saw it, did you know immediately it was going to be a moderation nightmare?

But beyond that, unless there's a lot of disagreement, I don't think we need burden you with yet another free for all.

I heard that Daisy was changed, it's a little disappointing. I literally don't understand what the point of the guard is, I thought the dream should "seduce" us, that was the point... It's useless now.

Well given Baldur's Gate is Act 3, I can see us getting one or more Strongholds in the city. In fact I can see each origin getting a unique Stronghold, Gale a new Wizards Tower, Astarion his former Master's place, Shadowheart a Temple, Wyll his family's estate, Karlach & Lae'zal I'm not sure, Dark Urge that murder den in the sewers, Tav a customizable Tavern maybe?

Are we able to customize Origin characters appearance and subclass when playing them? Like changing Shadowheart off Trickery domain or Wyll to Great Old One?

Thank you. Really looking forward to release.

We're leaking ya'll:
https://old.reddit.com/r/cursedcomments/comments/14v3hua/cursed_bear/

I think the point is to make Daisy different from the Dark Urge, less dark & creepy, more heroic? My guess is she is a guardian angel. Could still end up a lover.

Yah, I have no idea what I'd make for any of my characters now. It was easy to just imagine a cute Dream Girl for each of them, but some kind of guardian? They're adventurers. They don't exactly desire someone else to protect them from danger.


OIh wow, this is exciting! one of my favorite regions of Faerun. Just seeing it for a second will be fantastic. I hope my druid can learn a few tricks while he's there.

Also thank you for covering all this!

Cross my fingers that Astarion is also openminded.

I'm curious about the Nautiloid ship and the first map as mentioned changed compare to EA. Size too or just the layout?

I'm afraid I didn't note this for definite, but I don't think we can. In fact, I think someone shared a screenshot on these forums somewhere showing the Edit Appearance option was greyed out for origins other than The Dark Urge, and from admittedly hazy recollection we simply don't have a class/subclass tab for them.

Definitely feel free to wait for more reliable and better evidenced info from elsewhere, but I'd brace to find that the non-Urge origins are pretty fixed.

I kind of feel that he would be, but that's just speculation

Because of the change in layout, I can't actually comment on the size, because ...

Hope I will be able romance them both in one PT.

I have took a closer look at the PfH stream, and it seems that class preview might be in the game - in class screen there is a small button “details” right to the class’ name.

I don’t see anything of that kind for Sublcasses, but they don’t spend much time there.

Hello，I‘m a chinese player，My English is not good，In PFH，we meet Jaheira and Fist Marcus，I want to know in which chapter does this plot take place？We can enter the Tower of Moonlight in which chapter？We know there are two routes to the Moon Rising Tower，Blasted Lands and Underdark，We can go to the Underdark in act1，but why does Swen say that the plot of encountering Jaheira is in the act2？I think both of these areas should be in the act1.I hope you can help answer the question，thank you.

I'm afraid I don't know.

I think it's reasonable to assume that Moonrise Towers is somewhere around the end of act 1/start of act 2. From the comment you mention, it sounds as though act 2 might formally start on the approach to Moonrise Towers, but I guess we will need to wait and see for certain.

Oh, good spot. I can see that, for example, at 4:18:27 in the PfH Release Showcase. I can confirm I didn't see or click that details button (dammit!!!) so it is at least possible that might be the class progression info we are hoping for.

It does seem that Larian's vision for how Daisy works has changed - I'd guess in response to Early Access feedback - and that's going to take some adjustment. I kind of liked the creepy dream seducer, but I appreciate many others didn't and even for my own PCs it didn't always fit. So I'm willing to keep an open mind and see what Larian have come up with instead (or even as well, as for all we know at this stage it is still possible for the relationship to take on that seductive tone).

But I do agree with the point that it means we don't really have any guidance on what kind of character to create. Unless this gets clarified in the run-up to the release or in the game itself (more than I spotted on my quick play) I think I'm just going to come up with something that could work for the old style Daisy but is reasonably neutral and see how things go in the first playthrough.

Just noticed from clicking through near that part of the video human has three "race feature" icons. One seems to be common to every race. I don't recognise any of them (4:11:57)

Another good spot. Presumably whatever they are is intended to balance humans given the fact that races seemed to have floating +2 and +1 attribute bonuses in the build I saw.

I can answer this for you. the shadowland area (cursed land, moonrise towers, last light inn etc) is Act 2. The 2 roads approach here is Act 1, including the current available Underdark (and more), or the surface road through mountain pass +githyanki Creche.

I wonder if that one makes reference to the default (but adjustable) ability score bonuses?

I want another chance at the game!!! There's so much I didn't catch.

"Blue eye" is clearly darkvision (humans don't get). Gold -> on grey background = +2/+1 ASI? I'm guessing blue icons represent a passive ability (I've spotted one for "drow weapon proficiencies") and red icons are active abilities/spells.

The human appears to get something I would decode as "human proficiencies". Looks like a torch, but "torch proficiency" doesn't make much sense. The other shows three arrows, on left, one right, one up. I would infer that this most likely represents a choice, but could be related to navigation.

First one is Fluid stat bonus that all races had during the presentation +2 to main stat +1 to secondary.
The other are weapon proficiencies ... in case of human its Halberds, Javelins, Spears and one more polearm weapon i cant remember right now.
Im not sure what are those three blue arrows aiming up ... Humans also get the Light Armor proficiency, so in theory it can be that but dunno.

BTW this things are listed between all proficiencies on right side of screen ... first class prof. are listed, then racial ones.

I hope this question hasn't already been asked and I've missed it, but did you see if the owlbear cub was still in our camp? I'd imagine it wouldn't be that difficult to take Scratch along with us to Baldur's Gate, but what happens to the little cub? (Ok, maybe it's not that little 😄 But it's cute)

Thank you in advance, Red Queen!

So no party skill checks in dialogue? Your Barbarian has to roll Arcana while Gale stands behind him and watches?

Maybe humies need arrows to show them where to put their head and arms? And if humans can wear leather armour, why is Gale still wearing his bathrobe?

NB: It's Spears, Pikes, Halbards, Glaives and Light Armor. (good spot)

Hi!!! English isn't my mother tongue, I hope my expression won't make you confused. Don't know this question hasn't yet, if it is, I'm really sorry for bothering you. I want to ask did Larian really make the whole city, including the outer city? Could you describe the size of it? If not, which part of the city is abandoned? Is this kind of question really allowed to be answered...（）

I sincerely appreciate your work!! Thank you!

Thanks!

The best look at the city we have so far is probably still the city reveal trailer (https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=851751&an=86#Post851751). But I did get a bit of a glimpse of some of the outer city in the presentation I saw, including a little bit Swen said was Rivington (which I think is a satellite town rather than Baldur's Gate proper?) and an area where a circus had been set up, carrying on a grand tradition from BG1 and BG2. Swen also mentioned that the Undercity was there, though I didn't see it.

At this stage, I think it's reasonable to assume that we'll be able to see at least part of the lower city, upper city, outer city (including Wyrm's Crossing) and Undercity and it sounds pretty huge!

Sorry, Lyelle, I have nothing to report on either Scratch or the owlbear cub so we can but hope. I didn't see them in either of the camping areas that were shown briefly in the morning presentation, but then I didn't see most of the companions that must have been there somewhere either, and of course they may not even have been collected in the playthrough we were seeing the later part of, so there is no reason to despair

This is one of the (many) things I'm kicking myself for not properly checking. Not that I had any more time and I was going as fast as I could!

Nothing really jumped out at me as different about the dialogues, but then I had very few in the bit of the game I managed to play and didn't experiment to, for example, see if I could change characters in the course of the conversation. Which is what I'd like to be able to do, and I confess wouldn't like the best character to roll a skill check if another character was talking, at least in most circumstances.

But either way, I'm afraid we'll need to wait for more info from another source for anything definitive.

Okay... When I saw this I decided that I NEED to make an account here. Let me explain.

I will be playing a TAV first and also A Dark Urge, playing them at the same time and switching between the two to see how different they are and for the story I gave them. It will be a War Cleric Dwarf and Dragonborn GOO Warlock. I want to give my Dwarf an ideal partner in their head which is a female Dragonborn (I have my fetishes, don't judge) and I will make the Dark Urge that exact Dragonborn.

I even came up with this small background for this story and both of those characters

So my Dwarf is a War Cleric who was lost in his love for War, his devotion to slaughter and the only person to take him out of it was a certain Dragonborn girl, someone who was truly dear to his heart. He found her when she was all alone, she was alone all her life and was losing herself to violent urges that made her go berserk every so often. Meeting her made this Dwarf wake up from his devotion and start to feel something different. A need to help this poor soul with control over her need for murder and he grew truly attached to her and she did to him... and then he lost her in one battle where she went wild and turned into that Slayer looking monster from release trailer. In that form she also attacked the Dwarf who accidentally killed her as she tried to kill him. This made my Dwarf pretty much completely depressed and lost in dark thoughts wanting nothing, but vengeance, losing himself in the haze of violent thoughts, yearning for brutality of war to keep his mind off of his loss, of his failure... Or maybe because he wants to think that she is there on some battlefield and there is a chance he can still save her. But now he has to wake up and deal with his guilt, move forward. Do something better. But now it's like she is always there next to him. Looking over his shoulder. Watching him every time he closes his eyes.

While in the other timeline she got to live. She got to live while the Dwarf died sparing her life, not being able to kill her even as she tried to kill him. She got out of her haze of violence and turned back to normal, but once she saw what she did she fell into complete despair and now was completely alone, filled with sorrow her violent urges came back even stronger later on. She ended isolating herself again, she tried to seek help through learning and eventually looked for guidance in forbidden knowledge of great unknown. In the unreachable depths of space she found hope in eldritch beings that could possibly rid her off this violence and loneliness. She studied the secrets of Great old ones but in result she became more insane and the Gobbo got to her and made her into a violent monster again, forcing her to murder people against her will, tearing her apart as she was turning back into the monster she was before that took away that Dwarf, destroying her mind further. Now because of Tadpole she has the chance to rid herself from this. Somehow. She will find a way. And atone for all of her sins.

Two stories about people that lost each other. Each on ending up in this situation in different ways. With different stories as they were connected through violence and through loss of each other try to break their need for murder. Escape this violent cycle.

Kind of role play based around two stories from different timelines.

But if this bit about you posted there is true about a Guardian then this story just gained for me a WHOLE new light. My Dwarf's guardian would be the girl that was killed by him, protecting him as he tries to forgive himself for her death. Always there as she already forgave him and wants him to be safe.

This is honestly making me even more happy to play both TAV and Dark Urge at the same time. It would be just beautiful.

None of which is really relevant to this thread.

Okay, finally that bear scene and an answer for those of you who asked for my impressions from the room and from talking to people there.

I feel this has now had too much of a build up as it's taken me longer to get round to than I thought it would, so I hope noone is disappointed! But here goes ...

First, I should make extra clear that this is just my subjective impression and I can in no way speak for everyone in the room. I was there as it was happening, and I spoke to a few people about it afterwards, but there's of course no guarantee that their and my views were representative.

But as I said last night, I felt that the reaction was a mix of shock, admiration and amusement.

Shock, because clearly there are taboos against sex with animals so seeing the build up to something that looks a bit like that can be rather startling even for those of us who like to think of ourselves as open-minded. And I think that some of the people there didn't expect the game to go that far in depicting a sexual encounter that involved a wildshaped character, and even some of those who weren't surprised it was in the game were nevertheless expecting that we would be permitted to see less than we did in a global livestream. But while people were surprised and even somewhat shocked (as seems pretty clear from some of the audience shots!), this seemed to be because of how they thought it was likely to go down on the internet and in media more generally and weren't expecting Larian to risk the level of furore that it was likely to generate, and nobody I spoke to was at all personally offended by what they saw. And certainly nobody I spoke to had interpreted what they had seen as a depiction of bestiality. Insofar as people saw any real world parallels at all, the discussion was about furries, and hoping that they'd be stoked by the content and that some sections of that community might feel decently represented by elements of the Halsin romance.

Admiration, because while Halsin certainly seems to be a character who has a complicated relationship with his bear shape (I've spotted some interesting speculation about that pop up elsewhere on these forums about that!) it probably would have been easier to brush the question of how that might impact on his sexuality under the carpet, especially as he is such a fan favourite and that could be potentially alienating for some people. It felt quite brave of Larian in that context to let players explore this potentially difficult side of him if they wanted. It also seemed to reflect respect on Larian's part for player agency, giving those players who really do want to go there the option to do so, and not preventing them as a result of not wanting to deal with potential fallout.

And, taking it less seriously, amusement because folk thought it reflected the kind of absurd flights of fancy that happened in their table-top games and found it great fun that they could be just as surreal and silly in a cRPG. And because there's something inherently awkward and ridiculous about sitting in a room full of virtual strangers watching animated characters prepare to have sex, even if one of them isn't shaped like a bear. And because however a person in elf shape would prepare to have sex with a person in bear shape (and I'm not planning on speculating on how it would actually work any more than I've already involuntarily done ), it doesn't seem as though it would go like that: the very fact that the setup wasn't realistic and the animation and expression (that smirk!) weren't particularly bearlike made it funny, but I also suspect was very much intended. And finally, because it was hard not to immediately jump to the thought that some poor sod had the job of trying to animate a scene with a bear-shaped person having sex (complete with bear penis).

I hope that answers the question, and that others who were there would feel that was a fair summary.

I understand that sex with a bear is good marketing (shocking to be precise), but why are we discussing it as if it's a big part of the game? Like well... Uhhh. We have sex with a bear but we censor Daisy's nipples, interesting.

A question - is the +2 / + 1 abilities score rule for all races mandatory or optional? Second could be the better option, since some builds can be heavily reliant on current race bonuses.

In this thread, I am simply answering the question that I was asked about what the live audience at the PFH made of the scene as I was there, which I think is a reasonable question given the exposure that the scene has had on the internet more widely.

But you are of course correct that it is only a tiny, optional part of the game. Which doesn't mean we shouldn't or can't discuss it (we're all for discussing tiny, optional parts of the game here!), though I'd agree it wouldn't be doing the game justice to let it dominate discussion to the exclusion of all else.

I don't think that's what's happening, so am not going to attempt to shut down any discussion as long as it's civil, constructive and posted in an appropriate thread. And as this particular thread is probably best kept specifically for questions and answers about the Creator Day I attended, I'd suggest any wider discussion of the Halsin scene should be taken elsewhere, though if anyone has any further questions about what I said above they can certainly ask those here.

As far as I could see on my very quick survey, it applied to every race. Of course, many of them have a +2/+1 already so in a sense it is optional as the player can always leave the bonuses on their default attributes. But for some, eg humans (which I did look at) and half-elves (which I didn't) it looks at the moment as though we're not going to be able to replicate PHB.

Though the usual caveat applies: this was based on me trying to see as much as I could of the game very quickly, so there are things I could have missed, and also while presumably it was a nearly-final build of the game, things could still change before release.

Have you been able to recruit anyone? If so, can you recall their ability scores? I wonder if anything was changed, especially about Wyll and his puny 13 DEX.

Thank you for reply!

If possible, please pass feedback to Larian to make this +2 / +1 rule optional if not already (for example, as a toggle). It is optional in tabletop (as it is a rule from Tasha's Cauldron of Everything) and should remain so in BG3, so that people can pick the suitable option for them.

I did get Gale, SH and Lae'zel in my party, but didn't check their stats. (A minor point: I could access Lae'zel and SH's inventories in the prologue again.) And I recruited Wyll but he went straight to camp as I was full up.

I do agree that Wyll's dex in EA seemed particularly badly judged, but I'm afraid I can't offer any good news on that front. Still, I don't have bad news either

The smart money is on Wyll being able to use charisma with his rapier, at least after level 3.

These forums are our way of giving Larian feedback (you can also use the feedback form on their launcher if you have the game, or email Larian support for whom you can find details on the support section of Larian's website).

If this is something you feel strongly about, I'd suggest adding your voice to the ongoing thread at https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=858345#Post858345.

Okay, thank you!

Following this PFH I expected a deluge of previews and videos from "content creators" talking about their experience trying this game, but so far it's been weirdly silent on that front.

Searching "Baldur's Gate 3" on Youtube and then sorting by "most recent uploads" you mostly get flooded by videos talking about the fucking bear.

Thanks for your take on the bear incident and for this thread generally.

My, hopefully, last thoughts on the bear thing are:
1. Sex is like crafting - either leave it out or do it properly.
2. Larian went for max impact by pairing Astarion and Halsin.
3. Larian intended to go for the shock but due to the shambolic nature of their technical skills the scene went further than they intended.

Not much new stuff for them to comment on to be fair at least not without spoilers. Everything they saw and experienced will be 'awesome' and 'amazing' etc.

Edit:
Just spotted this but not watched it yet

Thank you for your answer, but I still have some questions。In PFH，When we arrive last light inn etc，We're only at level five，I think this place is in act1.

Could I get more clarification on this, because this seems like a great change.

So I understand.

if you play, say a Gnome, you would get +2 or two +1 to put into any ability score of your choice, and then on top of that you would get an additional racial from your subrace? Then you get Point buy on top of that? is the subrace racial increase exempt from the +2/+1 +1?

if THAT is what we are getting it would be amazing, since it really does a lot to open up more race/class combos without unduly penalizing certain races.

As far as I understand, all races start 8/8/8/8/8/8 and can allocate +2 to one stat and +1 to another, then distribute 27 points as usual.

i'm more shocked that Larian showed the filter removed which means thats how they see the game being played i.e, after hacking the files to remove it
and i'm more upset by the clear lack of testing but thats really just because i want them to stay in the market and not do another Bioware or PR

As I had mentioned before I think what Larian did here is incredibly brave. Most fantasy world never really explore the consequences/possibilities of their fantasy elements. We joke about them or are horrified at them behind the scenes but these thoughts don't get placed into the mainstream.

At the end of the day, this has been a huge marketing coup for Larian as well. it was shocking and it has spurred a lot of great discussion. There are more people today that have a better understanding of consent than before this scene.

It also outed a small minority of bigots who we all got to make fun of for being weak, over-sensitive little snowflakes and who think the entire world needs to cater to their personal bigotry.

So big win.

Ok, I think I get it, then do you also have Subrace racials or is all of that replaced by the +2 +1 thing?

Speak for yourself? I haven't made fun of anyone

Hm, not sure, but I think no. I've watched through PFH character creation twice on slow but they've never switched subraces I think, only races. May be RQ can shed some light on this.

As far as I could tell, the +2/+1 replaces any racial attribute bonuses. In many cases, it's actually the same as the racial attribute bonuses by default, though the user seems to be able to reassign them.

So my stoutheart halfling ranger, for example, defaulted to +2 Dex, +1 Con as normal, but I could change the +1 Con to +1 Wis instead. I could have changed the +2 Dex to +2 Cha or something too, if I'd wished. I assume I couldn't have put them both on the same attribute to get a +3 but didn't actually check that.

Of course, not all races/subraces get a +2/+1 by default but what it looks like Larian have done is change their attributes to match this pattern but then give some additional benefit in proficiencies to balance in the event that this makes the race weaker than as per PHB, and some folk have gone through the PFH screenshots and gathered a bit more info about that. I'm afraid I didn't have time to do more than note the basics.

Are the special racial feats still in? For example the Lucky feat for your halfling or fire resistance for tieflings, special weapon specs for dwarves, gith, elfs etc.?

that makes human worst race, as they dont get anything on top. and i guess makes half orc and wood elf best ones for combat and magic/roguish class respectively.
btw, does anyone heard about stat / class customization options for origins?

so like an unlucky/ tall halfling could take an extra +2 Con to help with banging his head on all those low door ways

Humans are getting light armor proficiency as well as polearms proficiency. At least in the PFH version.

for combat characters that is useless as they are getting it anyway, and for magic characters you either go with half-plate with cleric dip or wear no armour, so useless again.

No worries, thank you for your reply! I hope we'll have them both in our camp, though I don't think it would be a wise idea to bring the owlbear cub to Baldur's Gate. But then again, we could try fighting the BBEGs with a mix of cuteness overload and impressive claws 😄

Seriously, this feels like a 'play something other than human please' move. D:

If you are a true chad, then this won't stop you from making a generic pure human fighter.

That's fantastic, thank you for the in depth explanation. I love it. This opens up all sorts of doors - I will communicate this to my Guild now.

I wanted to hold off until i fully understood what we were getting. Do you have any additional info on any additional racials implemented? I assume all the standard ones are still there? darkvision, armor proficiency etc?

As long as any making fun and name calling doesn't happen on these forums!

Disagreeing with substantive points is, as always, totally fine.

Just watched the Woolfart vid and everything is 'really cool' as per usual. His comments about the number and variety of magical items got my attention and he reminded me that the maps have been overhauled to be more functional.

Well it's not working. Unless they physically block humans from playing draconic sorcerer. In which case I would just play human oathbreaker. No optimal meta build required for me!

Wait... there's no option to have both a "penis" and a "vulva"?

Cheers for sharing! I've just watched and it looks as though Wolfheart picked up on a lot of the same stuff I did, though he of course talks about it engagingly as always so definitely worth a look even if there's a lot of stuff you'll already know if you've read this thread.

He also seems to have looked more at alchemy than I managed, and he created a dragonborn monk Dark Urge so has some more details about that race/class/origin than I was able to provide.

He also mentions that he tried to hide behind an enemy (which I didn't as I was trying to snipe from a distance) and found he couldn't hide in the threat zone which I presume is in melee range, which sounds like yet another restriction on stealth on top of the Hide as action and immediate rolling of initiative that I encountered, so more good news in my book!

Oh, and he also noticed that supply packs could be used directly from the Traveller's Chest which I didn't.

He also chats a bit about items which he got some info about from another player, and mentions the panther wildshape and facepaint which I did come across but think I might not have mentioned here.

I'm feeling a little better now I know he doesn't seem to have got much further than me in the game, though. It sounds like he got stuck in character creation too, possibly even more than me

Humans always had been the worst race, why do you think humans have the variant human subrace?, because no one would play humans otherwise, most people prefer the variant human over the regular one because of the extra feat, even during the last Panel from Hell, Twitch chat was going wild with the Variant Human spam.

AND something else which we haven't been able to figure out from the screenshots, other than it's a passive ability represented by three arrows.

Yes. You can tell by looking at the character creation shots in the video. Pause button is recommended.

WoolfartIBS

I didn't check everything, but yes there are definitely still racial abilities/feats. I'm assuming (though it is an assumption) that if the race was one which has a +2/+1 to attributes, everything will be the same except that the attribute bonuses are updateable, but that there are tweaks to races who have/had different attribute bonuses like humans and half elves to try to balance them. Possibly unsuccessfully, based on the chat here

Wolfheart has posted!!

re-posted:

[video:youtube][/video]

Humans get poleweapon proficiency apparently, could be really usefull for some clerics and druids, as well as other casters.

They get another bonus too.

I'd say polearms are nothing to scoff at... If you aren't playing a class that already had that proficiency.

If you do, on the other hand, it gets pretty underwhelming as an option.

Hello, Red Queen, and thank you for your for sharing what you saw.
I have really small question. Was the scene at the gates of the Grove with Aradine and Co changed? Just "yes/no" will be sufficient answer, but details if it was changed would be cool to.

I assume most stuff remains the same, especially for races that already had +2/+1 attribute bonuses, but didn't have time to note more. Some folk have posted on these forums additional info they've managed to glean from careful watching of the PFH section where each race was flipped through.

Wolfheart mentions the customisable attribute bonuses in his vid, but I don't think he goes into any more detail either.

It might be worth starting a thread specifically on what we have discovered on this, if anyone is in the mood. I don't have time today, but if noone else collates the info and I happen to find myself at a loose end at some point I might give it a go!

[quote=Blackheifer]Wolfheart has posted!!


Oops, it was taken down. He may have needed to change something. Apparently it got age restricted.

Thank you for all the great info, very much appreciated!

It looked pretty much the same, except that Wyll's entrance had been jazzed up with some close up camera work and fancy swordplay. (Here's hoping he'll actually have the build to back up his apparent rapier-wielding skills in the full release )

I just watched Wolfheart's video.
Additional standouts for me were shield spell in the game and works exactly like 5e. Dark Urge Oath of Vengeance sorcadin for playthrough 2 confirmed! Plus you can no longer just circle round the back of an enemy and hide as it won't let you hide in an enemy's zone of threat. Also very cool. Also panther form for druid. I'm going to be honest, he's really hyped it up even more for me.

Yay for panther form!!!🎉

Do you respec through Withers? When can you respec?

Wolfheart said the option is when you unlock a character beginning with W, so looks like it

The original got age restricted, hence it wouldn't embed.

Here's the re-upload:

You know what happen to half/elf... they still have three bonus stats +2 +1 +1 ?

List of changes from Wolfheart

Hiding.

1. Only rogues can BA Hide.
2. You can no longer hide in the threatened area of combat, so you cannot circle around and hide anymore.

Shove:

Shoving has a die role that you see above your head - still a BA

Crafting system:

1. At least alchemy is in place and its very detailed
2. recipes must be found

Map:

Complete redone.
Looks like a D&D map.
Much more clear

World:

ACT 1 - Between Baldur's Gate and Elturel
ACT 2 - Shadow Cursed Lands
ACT 3 - Baldur's Gate

Additional Creatures mentioned:

Genies,
kobolds
dinosaurs


Half of the NPC's are interactable in Baldur's Gate
2k NPC's in Baldur's Gate
All animals are interactable

Wolf mentioned an unknown place he went to far from Baldur's gate

You can also end up in jail - as in a huge prison.

Looks like an amazing update for MAPS!! According to Wolf, very much D&D flavor. Nice!

Thanks very much for the summary

Good to hear that Salo brings up the poor performance of the forum.

Thanks for the answer!

Also...RAIN EFFECTS CONFIRMED!! Raining in the following shot and during the dialogue. Hard to see, but looks great and adding lots of atmosphere.

- Get yourself or one of your cronies elected president then pardon yourself or have them do it.

Do you have a rough timestamp for that shot?

Found it. It is the place where Swen tells Crystal(?) to go to camp (at about 4hrs 28-29 mins of Wolfheart's PFH vid.) They go from a bright sunshiny city to rain. Hardly adding atmosphere. I'm guessing nothing will get wet.
If you want to know what rain is ask Scout Harding, she was stationed up on the Storm Coast back in '14.

So shadowcursed lands are act two? Interesting, becasue in EA it seemed as though we were meant to be choosing between it and the underdark as the routes to moonrise tower. I wonder if that was the case when EA first came out but along the way they made the shadowlands in their entirety act two? It doesn't make a difference to anything but it's intereting to think about. Also interesting from a story structure level. Act 2 in a story is typically the longest act and the part where most of the action takes place, with act three beingwhere everything wraps up. But based on what we've heard, being in the city is going to be the biggest part of the game. So I wonder how that will play out in terms of experiencing the story and how the pacing feels.

Virtually impossible to use the forum right now... and for long stretches of the last several days.

Wolfheart made it sound like:
Act 1: Early Access
Act 2: Shadowcursed Lands and MAYBE parts of the outercity.
Act 3: Baldur's Gate City proper and the Outercity if not in Act 2.

Also there are places that teleport you to other planes/locations.

Gah, the forum seems to be getting even worse again!

I'm glad that Wolfheart and I are at least not contradicting each other

As a matter of fact, all of the below relate to items that I'd put in spoiler tags in this post, so I'm not surprised if folks missed them. But I can confirm these from my experience for anyone who is avoiding the spoiler tagged stuff:


And yes, Beecham's guess that Wolfheart's unknown place was probably the place I was also talking about will be spot on! And of course, I didn't mention the jail itself, but it does have a connection to two of the bullet points in my spoiler tagged list ... and that's all I'm going to tell you Well, except that the prison we saw was more than the cells we get in other areas, but I wouldn't call what we saw "huge". Wolfheart's tip that keeping your party separate so that some can ride to the rescue if others get in trouble is a good one, as were his hints about using things like disguises and spells. And I'll add that making sure you have a source of force or bludgeoning damage to hand can be helpful too! In short, properly prepared, you don't need to worry too much that getting locked up is the end of your adventure, and actually you might even discover some useful stuff while you're there

Like Wolfheart, I caught the 2K NPCs number but hadn't noted whether that was the game as a whole or some subset of it, which is why I hadn't shared it here. And now that the interactable animals are mentioned, I recall Swen saying that too, though I'd not noted it down so I'm afraid I'm not able to provide any more clarity.

The impression I got was that Moonrise Towers is going to be a hub and various quests will originate from there.
Whether you get there late A1 or early A2 could depend on how much of A1 you do or various choices taken in A1 resulting in more or less A1 content to get through. Also see my comment above about some one spotting a level five character in Baldur's Gate.

I hope those are huge enough in scale, not in the number of NPCs. They were talking about the amount of NPCs in BG3, but it is not a very good metric I think to showcase scale, because those can be placed (and were, according to the PFH) pretty densely. Do we have any info on the city scale besides 'its huuuuuuuuge' and the number of NPCs? Maybe compared to already existing locations from the EA?

NOOO...I was trying to stay positive regarding weather effects...I guess we won't even get basic nicely implemented weather and rain in Baldur's Gate 3. I was really looking hard for it...Still time stand still, sunny 24/7.

This is frankly, shocking for this scale of an RPG, yet not having this.

From Wolfheart’s video I am happy to hear that we can use camp supplies directly from the camp storage when resting!

If you are referring to what Wolfheart said then he made the other planes comment in relation to the 'mystery' location which you would never have dreamt of and was very, very far from BG but NOT on on another plane. This is the place mentioned by The Red Queen.



I got the 1K number of citizens from one of the two vids from the last week or so rather than the PFH. I think it was during out first view of inside the city.

Wolfheart video pointed me towards something interesting.
Part of character creation, where tatoos are is called "Body Art" ...

My question is: Is it REALLY "body" art?
Or just poor name?

I remember Sven saying something about how someone should remember to do face painting because he enjoyed face painting. Not sure what he was talking about.

Here in the UK tattooing is now referred to as body art. IRL you can get a tat anywhere on your body but I think in BG it is only on the head.

Wasn't it the... you know... dino place? (I don't know how to do spoiler tags here...) I think Wolfheart simply didn't read the article offhandedly confirming we could go there.

@Beechams
Im honestly more interested in Faerun than UK, no offence.

I thought you were asking the question from a language perspective and as the UK is the home of English and 'body art' is an English term I answered accordingly.

Oh yes, it seems to be possible to buy and apply face paint. I think it can function as a kind of disguise, though I didn’t see it used to fool anyone. Though Swen did show us Gale with a kind of clown face (using some paint picked up at the circus I mentioned).


As folk have said, that tends to be the term used here now, and iirc piercings are on the same tab. The icons only show markings on the face. Though as an aside, I did notice an option on the character creator to hide clothing, so I guess I could have checked to see if it did affect other parts of the body. But I didn’t! (We don’t have that in EA do we? I’ve not noticed it.)


Well remembered. So that might mean that there are 2K in the game as a whole, and 500+ interactable NPCs out of 1K in BG itself. Or that there are 1K interactable NPCs in BG, and 2K including the crowd. Dammit, still not conclusive! Except that either way it’s a hell of a lot of NPCs!

The "1000+ NPC" was mentioned in Community Update #19:


WolfheartFPS mentioned 2000 and (I think) that half were interactable, even if it was only a simple phrase. I'm not sure where this was coming from, perhaps from something that was said at Ghent?

Either way, it gives an order of magnitude. Both values are big enough.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to report all that to us, The Red Queen!

That's what I thought but I watched that vid at least three times since last night and I don't hear the number mentioned. I can't find it in any other vid I've watched either. It's now got the stage where is is driving my crazy.

More importantly, can The Dark Urge murder them all?

not sure this is mentioned by anyone at all. but what was the technical problem that has stopped not once but multiple times on swen and crystal presentation in the cities? was it frame rate issues?

I'm pretty sure that the technical issues during the PFH were to do with streaming rather than the game itself. Certainly, I had no issues with frame rate or game performance when I was lucky enough to play it earlier in the day, and Wolfheart mentioned on his update that I think is linked earlier in this thread that he'd got the same impression.

Unfortunately my notes on Ghent, like Wolfheart's, weren't clear. Swen definitely mentioned in the presentation in the morning that we both attended that there were around 2,000 NPCs, but neither Wolfheart nor I managed to note whether that was just in the city or the game as a whole.

Separate from that, Swen said that more than half (I think he actually said 50-60%) of the NPCs in Baldur's Gate city were interactable with, with the rest being crowd figures to make the place feel more lived in. A lot of those interactable characters might only have one line, but Swen told us that some of those lines could change depending on what we'd done in the game so presumably they could be different on different playthroughs or on when we talk to someone. Plus I saw there were lots of people just chatting about stuff we could eavesdrop on. And then plenty of characters who have more to say and quests to give.

So, safe to say, there are a lot of people to talk to both in the city and the game as a whole.

I have a horrible feeling that the answer is "yes".

Though Swen did say that to be aware, when starting fights in the city, that the Steel Watchers were very tough. But I'm sure plenty of folk are just going to see that as a challenge

Hopefully the guards that come screaming still goes "I serve the Flaming Fist!" and "I AM the law!"

I think anyone can murder them all. There is a shot of Asterion launching a fireball into the civilians. And the baldy-beardy dev makes a related comment. Rather undermines the premise of the DA if anyone can go psycho but there again it is Larian.

Even more annoying would be all the innocent civilians who also turn hostile when property is damaged.... Especially with 2000 NPCs in the city and we use AOEs and whatever else we have in our repertoire to take down the tanky Steel Watchers.

I did that in BG1. Let off a fireball in the Undercity and killed pretty much everyone. It was an accident officer. Collateral damage.

Also, in the EE, I summoned a Balor with a wild magic surge in Bergarost, which exterminated the entire population.

Yes, I don't think it will feel empty either way. I'm even wondering if that won't be somewhat overwhelming.

I always hope to find an option to disable the "!" quest markers on NPCs and on the map, so I can play it old school (with the help of the journal), but I suppose it's not realistic to design such a big game like that anymore. With 2000, 1000, or even 500 NPCs, even if only half of them are potentially involved in quests, the game would have to be sold with a thick notepad, a pack of pens, and blister bandages. Even with the markers, it will be a lot to take in.

I've tried to see if there's an answer for this, and I can't find one, but if I've missed it, please let me know.... I've a question around camp cinematics and long resting. In EA, I spent aaages long-resting in order to trigger some of the camp cinematics, I'm thinking things like Gale's romance scenes as an example, is this something they've fixed for release? Or, conversely, will we be penalised for spamming the long rests in order to trigger the particular cinematics?

Silly question XD. Do you know if we´re gonna be able to change or choose our character portrait background?? I know its nonsense (BIG NONSENSE) but it would bother me a little bit playing with a druid with a purple background.

Early reviews from influencers and stuff are coming in. Seems almost unanimous that they think this game is going to crush even games like Starfield. Sounds like people were incredibly impressed by what they got to spend time with.

So that is really encouraging!

Despite some of the concerns that I have about the game I an psyched.

Yeah, I've watched a few - with snippets of footage! They've said it's not even close, BG3 could be GOAT for crpgs.

Hi Red Queen.

Firstly, thanks a lot for taking the time to share with us the info you gathered at the PFH and answer our questions. I'd be likewise thankful to Youtubers like Wolfheart, or journalists/video game sites like Fextralife, who have been sharing info with us on YouTube. But they have views to gain by doing this, and you don't. So, massive thanks.

I am not super happy with how Larian is communicating with us in that final strech about, at a global level, everything that will be in the game. It's not like there are things still the work that they don't want to talk about until they know for sure that they have them working. RagnarokCzD started a thread recently about all the things players want to know. I can somewhat understand that giving us all this info didn't fit into what they had already programmed for the PFH. But they have other ways to communicate.

At a more local level, well, a big round of fresh info was shared during the PFH, and it is hard to get it all from one single place.

A part of me started thinking about compiling a list of all the things we learned from that PFH. Putting together what Larian highlighted during the PFH, what was not highlighted but that people spotted anyway (e.g. the "details..." button in the character creation), as well as the info that we got from people who attended the PFH/Creators Day (combing through this thread, plus a few YouTube videos). But I have a fair amount of work this week. And I gathered (from a Reddit post linking to a reply-tweet from someone who works at Larian) that we're going to have a Community Update soon.

I expect that the first topic of this Community Update will be clarifying the 72h head start situation that many players are unclear about. If this Community Update could also summarise the new info we learned from the recent PFH, that would be really great. Alternatively, maybe Larian will tell us more when the time for the Q&A comes.

But in the meantime, while I feel that it's a bit unfair to rely on you, well ... help us The Red Queen Kenobi, you're our only hope.


I'm not sure I'm 100% on top of all the posts in this thread, but hopefully I've seen most of your answers and will not ask to many questions that were previously answered.

• Party controls.
  
  I know you said that the chain control scheme scheme isn't gone. But what about the order of portaits ? Can we fix them (e.g. Lae'zel in 1, Gale in 4, etc), or do they keep being shuffled around ?
  
  I like that Larian gave us hotkeys to select characters (F1-F4). Hotkeys are a great way to increase the efficiency of routine operations that don't need much attention. If every time that I want to select Gale, I have to pause to check which position his portrait is at (instead of just hitting F4), this requires my attention and the whole point of a hotkey becomes moot. An alternative is to regularly re-order portraits, but that is also annoying.
  
  
• Camera.
  
  Can we rotate it upward/downward (tilt) ? (found the answer, and it's "no".) Can we translate it on the z-axis ? Can we zoom out (and in) more than before ?
  
  
• Inventory UI.
  
  Can we move multiple items at once ?
  
  Do you know if Larian introduced a shortcut for Send To Camp (e.g. Ctrl+LeftClick, similar to the shortcut for Mark As Wares) ?
  
  
• Looting UI.
  
  Do we have a View All Loot In Vicinity functionality ? (found your answer in Tuco's thread on things we (apparently) aren't getting).
  
  
• Ambushes and start of combat.
  
  I've read that you've found that Larian changed the interaction between Start Of Combat and Stealth. It seems that, now, attacking from Stealth will always trigger a Start Of Combat. That's good. How about the characters in Stealth who did not perform the attack ? Do they get dragged in Combat ?
  
  A big issue right now is that we can't do ambushes properly. It's a bit unclear who will be dragged into Combat (roll Initiative) and who stays out. Some of our character may fail to join Combat. This results in them experiencing Continuous Time and losing several rounds of buff duration. Or being spotted by an enemy who plays early, dragged into combat, and take no turn on Round 1 as a result (which feels like a penalty for being surprised when we were the ones doing the ambush).
  
  
• AoE Spell Visualiser. Any chance that they fixed the disconnect between what the visualiser shows us and what area the spell actually affects ?
  
  It's always annoying when you spend some time carefully positioning the centre for your AoE spell, so that it affects 3 enemies, and upon casting it affects only one.
  
  
• Opportunity Attack indicator. Is it more visible now, that a certain move will cause an Opportuinty Attack ?
  
  Previously the red arrow could be hard to see, especially when under Large Creatures.
  
  
• Do spells with spherical AoE work better with verticality ?
  
  
• Do all the conversations cutscenes that progress the relationship with a Companion still happen at Camp ? And if so, can we experience multiple Camp Scenes when visiting the Camp ?

I would be calm about what Wolfheart says, from what I heard the guy has tendency to REALLY fanboy over this game and ban people for commenting anything critical about it (although I have not seen proof of that, but the way this guy talks about BG3 makes it... not that out of place). If there are 2000 npcs then I think it is in entire game. If it was just the city I feel like it would be very visible on screen. 2000 Npcs in the entire game and around half of them being interactable... again, in the entire game, that seems more reasonable and realistic.

Does Bless still target so badly as in EA?

I have no affiliation with the channel but my general stance is that of avoiding spreading that sort of rumours about someone.

Even if it were true, managing a forum or a Youtube channel isn't easy and sometimes actions are required. Did you hear it first hand from someone who was banned? Did that person explained exactly how it happened? I've already seen comments of people correcting him and he was taking that honestly and with humour. That's only what I've observed though.

Be that as it may, it has no relationship with the content. I'm not watching every video, but those I've watched were accurate.

Besides, as we said, the actual number doesn't matter as much as the order of magnitude. If you watch the video, you'll hear him say that he thinks it's 2000 but he isn't sure whether it's just in the city or in the whole world. I think that anyone would already be more than happy with the latter.

True. I just prefer to be cautious. And while I would also be impressed and love the latter I do feel like with everything else going on like rewriting certain characters I feel like the 2000 NPCs in the entire game is most likely the true option. Better to not oversell your game in your mind and end up being disappointed, not saying this game will be disappointing by any means, I can tell it has great magnitude and a lot of work put behind it, but I feel like certain things people say about it can end up overhyping it too much.

Oh ... this. So much this.

In the same category :

When using a Sorcerer's Twinned Spell Metamagic, is it still the case that Attack Roll spells (e.g. Chromatic Orb) get a multi-target UI (like Magic Missile), and that debuff spells (e.g. Command, Hold Person) get an AoE targeting ?

Damn I find this massively disappointing. I think it is an especially bad idea for Larian to throuw out this change with no warning to EA players on release. I really liked the seductress act and hope we can choose to keep the seductress option

+1

Larian has said all along that there would be changes in the first act so even if you've played early access a ton there will be things that feel new to you.

What is it about the new implementation that you didn't like when you played through it?

I get there would be changes bug a big story change like that on something that has been there since the beginning with no warnings just sucks.

I don't have any issues on what I have played through in EA. It's according to the mod The Red Queen they are drastically changing that character. Taking them in a new direction that I find disappointing,

I like how people are bringing up Daisy when I havent seen her once in 100s of hours of ea.

Why yall let a tadpole eat your brain ill never understand.

Hey you got your kinks and I got mine

Why does it suck?
Larian has been iterating the story throughout the development process.

I'm asking what were your impressions when you played through the new version that replaced "Daisy"?

Again the new version of Daisy hasn't been released yet. This is from the mod The Red Queen plus Fextralife's video.

Why am I not allowed to dislike a change to a story element that has been there since the initial release? I really like the way the character is now.

If you haven't played through the new version yet then how do you know you don't like it better?

Because the basic idea of the character now is cool with lot's of possibilities while the basic idea of the new version is boring to me. If you want some essay on my likes and dislikes and how I evaluate what I do and do not like I hate to break it to you but that ain't happening

Starfield doesn't look that good, it has the same problems fo4 did, uncanny doll faces and bodies, going to be really hard to get immersed.

Also doesn't look like there's much combat build variety.

Good chance it will have the nomans sky syndrome of a bunch of dead worlds.

Only one waifu.

Its probably going to crash.

What I'm trying to point out is that you know practically nothing about the new version.
Based on a single line there is no way to determine if it's boring regardless of your likes and dislikes.

Snap judgements based off of little to no information don't lead to good conclusions.

Ok I have played the game so far seen the way the character is now. They then decide to take the part of the character I like and remove it. It doesn't take some great leap of logic to determine if the part of a character someone views as the coolest part is removed it can hurt their enjoyment of a character.

EDIT: The part of the character that has intrigued me throughout early access and I have been excited to see explored more has been removed. What ever the new version is like I don't need to see it to know I will be disappointed with what they took out

Part of my argument is also that this change shouldn't be a surprise. Now I have time to reflect on my disappointment it won't taint my experience as much when I first boot up the release game and find the parts I liked about that character removed right then

Truthfully I think the daisy change is probably going to e for the best. A seducer is pretty cliche and we all know what to expect from them. By contrast I believe if you genuinely consider what your character would seek out in a protector, that can open up interesting new angles and realisations about them. what your character finds sexy is pretty surface level. Creating the character your character would feel protected by is something else, something new. Maybe it's just because the idea of "seduction" and being seduced has always been less than desirable for me and doesn't tend to have the desired effect on me for various reasons, so I never felt that daisy was anything other than a blunt and transparent temptation towards self destruction.

I commented critically under some WolfHearts BG3 videos and he gave me Likes, same with others. I don't think, he has problem with criticism, he even voiced some himself in the past. I never saw someone banned. I like his content, especially the DnD lore videos.

Me too ...
I watch Wolf for last two years and the only Bans i know about is 1min top temporary bans he sometimes give people who donate too much or too often during stream... but there is no bad blood, its more like ongoing joke on that channel.

What you describe fits to other youtuber ... but it would be probably best to not give names ... lets just say he cover lots of Cyberpunk along with BG-3.

I guess you couldn't see if dragonborn follow Fizban rules like being able to use their breath weapon as part of a multiattack if they have one. Or it being useable proficency bonus times a day/between rests.

Right, fair warning that I've pretty much exhausted my notes from the event already, excepting just a few more spoilery things I decided not to share, so chances are the answers to further questions is likely to be "I don't know".

It can't hurt to ask though, as your question might shake a memory loose!

Regarding Daisy changes, just so we don't derail this thread, I'd suggest taking the chat to the one Ragnarok made about Daisy. Feel free to PM me if there's any post of yours here that you'd like me to move there,

For science.

I think I mentioned earlier in this thread (which has got really long, so if so I don't blame you for not spotting it ) that I saw some definite evidence that this has been reworked at least to some extent. Gale, for example, told me about his little problem in a chat as we were wandering around the world, rather than in a camp convo.

But it did seem a little buggy in the build I played. I imagine tying the conversations to resting was at least partly to impose some pacing on this content, and without it Gale apparently came to trust me in about half a day (we hadn't even camped together) and Shadowheart wanted to share some additional info on something that I don't think had even happed yet. So good news and bad news.

Personally I'm taking it as good, as what I saw clearly proves Larian have listened and reworked the way conversations are linked to camping, and I'm sure remaining issues can be ironed out.

I didn't see a way of changing character portrait background, which doesn't prove anything definite given that it's clear there's SO MUCH I missed.

I thought character portraits were looking pretty good in the build I played, including that for my own PC, though I can't recall what colour background it had!

I'll have to check them out! Feel free to post links here to any commentary you think other folk here might be interested in.

And yes, everyone I spoke to had a blast with the game, seemingly whether they'd already played in early access or not, and so hopefully (for all of us who are desperate for the game to do well so Larian will keep working on it) BG3 will get some good additional hype as a result.

I didn't have time to do more than check the basics of this. No difference jumped out at me (other than the additional option to ungroup a summon that I mentioned), but I wouldn't swear there weren't some more hidden changes. I didn't try using hotkeys for party members, and I agree it would be helpful if the mapping were more reliable!


I did quickly play around with the camera, but if there's a way to tilt it I didn't find it. I didn't notice any obvious change to the zoom levels. On the plus side, I didn't notice any problems with the camera getting messed up with verticality either, but that's caveated by the fact I wasn't in any of the locations that gave it the worst of the difficulty during EA.


It definitely looks as though there have been some changes to Stealth, including making Hide an action (presumably except for a Rogue cunning action, but my ranger/rogue never managed to get her second level in rogue) and, as I didn't notice but Wolfheart did, restricting hiding in enemy's threat zones, as well as it now appearing much more difficult (or even maybe impossible) to attack from stealth without initiative being rolled.

Specifically on ambush, no initiative doesn't seem to be rolled for the whole party, only the attacker. At least if the enemies can't see the rest of our party: presumably if they could then they'd be pulled into battle too. And possibly even if they're hidden but close to the attacker, though for what I was testing I had the other party members hanging back so can't confirm that.

Perhaps it'll be helpful just to explain what I did try, so it's clear how much (and indeed how little!) I could try out.

I was testing this in the fight with goblins in the underground passage beneath the druid grove, and was trying to see if I could replicate the problem in EA with sniping enemies from a distance without initiative being rolled, so I had all my party in stealth and brought them up one by one, starting with my PC. She fired an arrow at a goblin from stealth, and initiative was rolled. As far as I could see, there was no stealth check immediately rolled (as happened in EA) and she wasn't in stealth after the attack. No surprise round was called.

I then brought up each party member in turn, attacking from range in stealth from outside the enemies' vision cones. Each time a party member attacked, initiative was immediately rolled and they were pulled into the battle order, again I didn't notice stealth being rolled and they popped out of stealth on their attack. I am almost certain (though I didn't actually write this down) that the attack they made from stealth counted as their action for that first round so they only had their bonus actions to use on their turn, but of course they did have the advantage of getting off their attacks at the start regardless of their initiative roll.

I'd have loved to play around further with this, but that was actually right at the end of my time with the game. But based only on what I was able to check, I can only say that it looks as though Stealth and Ambush will be much less cheese-able (and therefore more satisfying in my book) but not necessarily perfect.


I didn't have chance to check these.


Hopefully my answer just above to yellowsapphire88 has covered this one, but feel free to shout if you have any follow up questions. (With the caveat that the answer will probably be that I don't know )