Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Space-Time Continuum

Introduction

Patch 9 shows real promise. As many longtime complaints get addressed, Baldur's Gate 3 is more streamlined and overall more enjoyable.

Some issues still stand, though, and time grows short to fix them. We haven't had word of what features are locked in, though Swen mentioned only tweaks could be made at this point. It's a fair bet that Larian will remain true to their design philosophy: If it's fun to do, it stays in, consequences be damned. That's fine, if not entirely my jam. In the end, these things are subjective... with one exception.

Baldur's Gate 3 messes with my sense of space and time in a way that is surely universal. Everyone knows, truly knows in their bones and inner-ear, that time and space are continuous. I don't understand why BG3 breaks the illusion so often.

Space

There are two major spatial discontinuities: the z axis and camp.

Z Axis

The problem lies in the fact that the world is functionally in 2.5 dimensions; each map is a series of 2D planes at various z levels connected by ladders or stairs. I'm not sure why it works this way because the engine is clearly 3D (hence bridges and sloping terrain), but I suppose the illusion of the up-down dimension works well enough most of the time, except in two important ways.

3D spells
The first are spells or effects which should manifest as 3D shapes but are only 2D projections on a plane. If the 3D shape encompasses several levels, the 2D projection is often applied incorrectly, which breaks the illusion of the third dimension. Let's file this one under bugs and hope that v1.0 can properly calculate impact areas on all affected z-levels.

Flight
The second is flight. Because characters can't end their turn on anything other than a surface, flight amounts to long jumping. What's worse, the visible flight path often winds oddly through clear air, which makes it painfully obvious that the world is just an amalgamation of vertices. Flight being a fairly primal fantasy, I hope it gets realized in a more satisfying manner.

Proposed tweaks
I think spells just need the once over, but I have two suggestions for flight.

The first one is a tweak: Whatever the real flight path may be, please make it look like flyers can actually travel in any direction in the air. Interpolating a clean flight path from beggining to end seems doable.

The second is more ambitious and probably requires an automated process: If the engine won't let characters travel to anything but a surface, you could create an invisible layer above the map which only flyers could access.

Camp

I always find going to camp disorienting. It's both nowhere and everywhere, and in many situations the minicamps don't make sense.

Main camp
The main camp's location is lampshaded early on with the line "This is as good a place as any to make camp". Sure, so the game doesn't want us to think about it too hard. Fair enough, it's just a game mechanic. Another convenience: Everyone else knows where to find you, like it's Faerun's premier hangout spot. I wouldn't mind it if it weren't for one conversation with Volo:
Two implications: First, this place is supposed to be a secret somehow. Second, and more important, this place is supposed to be somewhere. You can't have it both ways; camp's location can't both be metophorical and the focus of rational thinking. Trying to bridge that gap only brings into sharp relief how fake the world is.

Minicamps
Minicamps underline this problem, particularly in hostile environments. It always feels odd to me to enter a scary place with the knowledge that there's a safe nook somewhere that only my friends and I can see. Also, why does the party drag corpses around from minicamp to minicamp?

Conjecture
Hundreds of hours into BG3, here's how I've made sense of camp: The party are aliens posing as locals and camp is their spaceship, cloaked to blend into the environment where it's parked. Every night, they teleport back; they can also teleport guests. Tav is surprised to see Volo there because he's the only person to have found the spaceship without their help. Only explanation.

Proposed tweaks
Small tweak: have a marker on the map to materialize at least an entrace to the camp/minicamp. It would be a door, or a gap between vines, or a crack in a wall that leads from the main map to the camp/minicamp. Nothing else actually needs to change (you'd still teleport to that camp to end the day and reappear where you were next morning), but it would lend that little bit of cohesiveness to the world. Also, this doesn't need to exist in every basement for the basement minicamp, for example. But it would help a lot in the Underdark, the goblin temple and Grymforge.

Big tweak: If this is a real place in the world, it can't have a forcefield that keeps baddies away. (Or was the Volo dialogue supposed to lampshade that?) Combat can occur in camp, and it probably should do so more often, especially in scary places. That seems like a lot of work to get done from scratch, though, so something like that is either in the works or not happening at all.

Time

The way time flows in BG3 is a little baffling. Let's break it down into combat and story.

Combat

Most of combat is turn based, except for surfaces which expire in real time. Like surfaces, the rest of the world doesn't stop for combat, which means both teams can add extra players to the field after combat has started. This has been discussed to death on the forum; all in all it's a discontinuity I can tolerate.

Proposed tweaks
Surfaces need fixing so that their time counter drops by six seconds every round. The current implementation is nonsensical.

Story

This is where the illusion of continuum is stretched to its thinnest. Narratively, time is incremental: The only thing that changes the state of the world is the player's actions. Unless spoken to by Tav, NPCs will stand in place and bark the same lines over and over and over and over. Unless Tav rests or accomplishes a quest objective, the world is in a holding pattern. Tav commands the sun itself to rise and set, though a handful of NPCs use the cover of night to be proactive.

It wouldn't matter in a setting trying to be less realistic, but this falls into uncanny valley territory, making NPCs feel like actors at a renaissance fair rather than actual people. I applaud any effort to buck that trend, such as little scenes that occur as Tav passes by, but I've a feeling that the fully animated dialogue means that NPCs really do need to stand in place. I don't know if tweaks can fix this, but let's give it a shot and hope that secret systems are in the works (*wink* day/night cycle *wink*).

Proposed tweaks
NPCs need to seriously stop repeating lines. I know it makes for a vibrant soundscape from a distance, but it underlines in quite an annoying way how time stands still. The ogre will never find that chicken. No need to remind me over and over and over and over.

Most surfaces expire in real time, except for blood, which I believe requires a day or two to clear. That's weird. It could be a longer timer than fire, maybe an hour as opposed to 10 minutes, but it should probably dry out in real time.

Waukeen's Rest's fire needs to go out. I'm guessing the burnt inn assets are being worked on; if they're not, paint it black, remove the furniture and move on.

Some kind of a weather system would help differentiate consecutive days. The perma-noon light is slightly off-putting. Honestly, I think you could get way with a gray shader for overcast days and the sound of wind or something simple like that.

Kind of a non-sequitur, but I hope non lethal attacks get improved so that the game recognizes your victims aren't dead. Why not just advance their story the next day, or better yet let us revive them?

Conclusion

I think Baldur's Gate 3 will be a fine game. I've played enough to know what ruleset to impose on myself for fun (with any luck, something close to it will be an option in v1.0) and I'm looking forward to the sense of wonder and discovery of a first playthrough. However, the way it represents time and space seems to be at odds with the way people perceive the world. That alone could be enough to keep BG3 from greatness.

Funny.

I agree on certain points.

Not the combat though. You enter combat with one character and hide the others. Your characters turn comes up. Time stands still and you can walk your other chars into desireable positions, fire an attack at a convenient target and only then enter the battle? That is just broken. I have killed whole groups of mobs without
them beein able to do anything just because of that broken mechanic.

All character have to enter a combat at the same time. Period. Also if you enter turn based mode, time needs to stop. For all. Thats what turn based is for. What use have i if i enter turn based mode but the NPC i want to attack is just going for a walk? He can contiune his walk when it is his turn.

I definitely agree that it would be good if the world were more convincingly 3D.

And that the NPC line repeats are way too frequent and don’t have enough variety.

Weather effects might also be nice to have, but I suspect that the constant sun in much of the map isn’t something I’ll think about as much in the full release once we’re moving about more between different areas (on the assumption those will each have a different ambience).

The Waukeen’s Rest fire going out would also be good, though again I think that will be less of an issue once we’re not stuck in the same area so much. (Though if we get a chance to return to the area in later chapters, it would be good to see the fire quenched and possibly the inn being rebuilt.)

The camp thing, however, doesn’t bother me even a little bit .

The Dimensionalty is kinda important. Agreed. For the Shatter spell we acutally see a sphere. Fireball really seems to be 2D.

Camping is awkward.
That system was developed for PnP...in this game it feels really off to me. That would have been something to think about. But Larian rather does changed like shove and jump, which ruin the combat balance. Or puts a lot of effort in utilizing strange ground effects and even creating items for that...Electrified water is HORRIBLE to look at.

Nearly all these aspects where discussed since day one of EA. And are major game changer.
It feels that all has been done and changed in these 2 years, are just minor tweaks to this and that. Nothing really substantial. Yea the UI changed, a little. But its generally the same. Some combat systems changed...a little. But they are mostly the same. etc.

If you ignore the added content...this has been the EA of little tweaks and fixes to a game that was already 95% decided from day one. I cannot think of ONE single thing that was drastically changed/added (IGNORING ADDED BASE GAME CONTENT) since the beginning of EA. I think its SO BAD that stuff like party members jumping with you when moving, swarm AI, reaction system, un-summon (?!) etc...all might feel like major changes but they are NOT.
Hence going back to everyone being ridiculed calling this game DOS3. That the game will be totally different a couple years down the road... Well, here we are and this is indeed DOS3 in a shallow Faerun setting with a light D&D sauce.
Still a fun game no doubt. Most definitely not a Baldur's Gate game, but its 2023...who cares?

I think I have written about that at some point, but if I didn't that is a thing that's been anoyying me for a while. One would hope that spells would be sphere rather than a flat circle, and would catch enemies on different planes that it is being cast. As it is I found the implementation very dodgy - Harpy hill is usually an easy place to test the spells.


Do they really? If so, that is a baffling design indeed.


Yes, this artificiality of the world is very distracting. It's fine in wilderness, but it really kills the atmosphere of populated areas - I wonder how Baldur's Gate will feel.

It is pretty common for interactable NPCs to be static - you don't want the players to struggle finding an NPC they wanna talk to. Usually, though most games have flavour NPCs - ones you can't really interact with, but are there to provide window dressing. I think PoE vs PoE2 where walkable NPCs in the sequel made for a much live enviroment, in spite of the game not being that much more interactable.

Larian doesn't really have such NPCs - or rather it has them but still names them and presents them as important individuals. I am sure, they could take quite a few of grove inhabitants, change their "cutscenes" into barks and have them walk around a bit to make the place feel a bit more live. Constantly repeating barks are just a nail in the coffin for immersion.

Yeah I feel like this is a summary of a lot of complaints on this forum. +1.