Reading around I see a lot of people advocating the fact that we won't have a chapter 2 BEFORE the relase (1 year from now?). Is that statement based upon some factc or not? I joined the Ea to give feedback and PRE-PLAY the game, are you really sure We wont' have a chapter 2 or more before relase? That seems stupid, for me. I mean I'm interested in new classes, new archetypes and minor quests or areas in chapter 1, but still It would be a wasted opportunity not having more contents about thistory and so on. What do you think? Can someone quote Larian on this?

It's not about "advocating for".
It was a known fact from the beginning that Act 2 (and more) will only be out on the final release.

Early access will be all about additional iterations of the first act and its related content.

It's the same formula Larian always used for their previous games in early access, too. Nothing new.

Sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if they decide to alter that formula in some places.
DOS 2's Act 4 was a garbled mess in many ways and a little bit of testing and input would probably have worked well there.

I just hope we will get to play with some of the nearly finished content soon.

EA needs to focus on mechanics and functionality and general story tone, lets not spoil the actual game.

If they want to avoid the problems of DOS2 where the story falls apart after Act 1, they kind of have to include the whole game into EA.

I strongly disagree with this. This is not Dvinity, It's another game entirely with a big IP involved. The EA will be longer, and Larian did not state anywhere the fact that we 'll have just chapter 1. It would be crazy stupid, especially if u consider the Ea going for a full price.

Tastes differ on this I guess. I wouldn't have bought into the EA if it was the whole game, or even most of it. Why spoil the surprises and have to re-play so much content to get a more polished product? Act 1 is just about the right size that I won't mind playing through it again when the game is released.

Disagreeing doesn't change anything.
That's still what's going to happen.
People can either accept it or suffer in denial when it will happen anyway.

Revealing more story content in a story driven RPG would be a mistake I think, especially when saves don't transfer to the 1.0 release.

If Larian polishes systems in EA it should positively affect entirety of the game. Further patches can be done post release - Larian proved themselves already as studio supporting their works post launch.

Or care about the story

Well I haven't actually seen that in written form. Do you have any official references on it?

I also believe the smart thing to do would be to make it available for testing and feedback with warnings about leaving Chapter 1 for those who do not wish to venture beyond - it's win-win for them so why not?

Besides many games suffer from narrative crumbling in later chapters so I'd think more feedback could only be welcome (do you think ME3 3 colored ending would have made it through playtesting - and how much headache could be avoided that way)

This. 100%. There are a lot systems that need tweeks and many more that still feel like they are completely missing. Larian needs to get that all sorted before they worry much more about content.

I WOULD like to see more races and classes in EA though. They will need to be play tested before release as well, I think.

We have companions and player setups in the current EA that are based on the general game mechanics of physical attacks and spell casting. We're all testing various combinations of those abilities with our different party setups.

New classes we haven't seen yet, like Ranger, Bard, Druid or whatever, will be just variations on the fighter and spellcaster themes we're already using. Maybe they can be tested internally without dumping them into the EA.

+1 to this. They should (however slowly) release the rest of the game up until the point of the official release. At this point the jury is still out on whether or not this feels like a successor to BG2. Larian has said there are connections to the earlier series but they've not shown up yet and my (preliminary) take is the that this feels like D&D but not like BG. I want to know if that feeling changes in act 2.

Yep. By the time we are out of EA they will thank themselves for making the story good through constant player interaction and feedback. Otherwise you will end up with an optimal Act 1 and uncharted waters from there on out.

EDIT: Some of the bigger aspects of the later story that we know of;



Need playtesting to feel satisfying. If the game does not let me;



Without feeling like I am a cartoon villain I will be dissappointed.

EA is act 1 only - it may expand & show us more but its about mechanics & feedback without spoiling the whole story - I think this a good thing - others may disagree but thats all good. Jump into Solaster as well might scratch that itch ??

I really hope they change their stance on that further down the line (AFAWK Acts 2 and 3 are in the storyboard phase right now, the Duergar camp that signals the midway point in Act 1 is not even finished yet), DOS2 suffered from the lack of feedback its later acts got. I read on this forum that the only story element to receive signicant changes in DOS2 due to player feedback was the Red Prince's character. Larian has said that the evil path in Act 1 is being looked at, so here's hoping that that means bigger changes are coming this time.

The story need testing too, how could you deny that? LOL. It's BG3, not a random IP, 1 and half a year of EA without any further narrative? How can people evalute it? It would be questionable.
If you don't want to get spoiled you can stop at act 1, btw. Just keep testing classes/archetypes and mechanics.

Also, I repeat this: there are literally 0 statements of Larian about it, how can these guys up here be so sure?

Tbf I'd like a roadmap and some clarity on this topic in the near future. So we can live on in peace, without people like this Tuco guy right here (Bro, you can stop commenting btw, I got your point. You r an hackerman with deep intel, gj)

Not in this open EA format. That, if done at all, would need to be closed with NDA.

And how many chapters there will be in Baldurs Gate 3, does anyone know?
I want to believe that there will be a lot of chapters, and we have only 10-20% of the content of the game now
5 acts are too few

Last time they spoke about this, Swen said it was going to be three acts, of which the second "by far the largest".
But I guess plans can change. Who knows, really.

I hope it really will be more than the first act, the first act is too short. Although it may be because I liked the game so much. Need more content

I dunno ...
It takes me about 20-30 hours to complete it properly once ... counting with possible permutations for possible replay ... it seems like much more than most games even do when fully released lately. :-/

There is never too much good game, only too little

They have on several occasions said that Early access will be Act 1 (ie, the description of EA on the support section of this website). While this doesn't technically mean they couldn't also add Act 2, they have not promised more than Act 1.

Given how they always have stated the early access content will be Act 1 and that with previous releases they have done Act 1 for EA. It seems reasonable to assume we're only getting Act 1. (They have indicated some intention to add more content in the EA but have not clearly defined the breadth and scope of that outside of the additional class/race options)


Sven recently said in an interview that they'd rather not make a roadmap because they did it before and then people felt betrayed when they didn't hit targets or had to remove things.


I would not recommend getting your hopes up over an Act 2 release in EA.

It's not so much content that I'm worried about, there's already quite a lot of content in Act 1, I'm more concerned about the max party level being 10.
If I don't diddle around too much and stay at least somewhat focused I can be level 4 (with enough experience for level 5) in about 15 hours.
30-40 hours seems a little short to me to go through all of your character progression in the game.
I have an unfinished save in DOS2 with 110 hours on it and I'm not fully through Act 4 yet.

Somewhere here there is a thread discussing that. Apparently the 5e progression levels off after the early ones and it takes more XP to ding the next level. It's not a linear progression where you can extrapolate from the hours spent to get to level 4 in the game. So it shouldn't be a problem for Larian to create a very large game where we "only" reach level 10 or thereabouts.

It won't be 10 anymore.
They already confirmed that too. They said it turned out they had too much content ready to stop there.

Will it be 11? 14? 20? No one knows. But I'd guess 12-14 at most. Which would be a whole lot.

in one of the dls we will still reach level 20 and become the new Cyric, there is such a theory