Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General So, who are the playtesters?

First time on the forum since the 3rd, needless to say.

I just wanted to know who playtested BG3 before it came out? I'm finally happy to get this off my chest after 3 years without telling anyone. It was hard coming here everyday and seeing complaints about things that I knew were already implemented but were not available in EA yet

I tried at start of EA, but had an awful time of it due to crashing (literally struggling to get out of charter creation) and gave up until most of feedback was no longer required (when I replaced a bunch of hardware). That was just something flakey in my system that really didn’t like a few specific games. Disco Elysium was another for reasons I have no idea about. Weirdly I ran cyberpunk 2077 with virtually no problems from day one, while everyone else had a bunch of issues.

TLDR: Not me really.

There was no way this forum wouldn’t have had plenty of people complaining about how Larian did things. When you take an old much loved franchise and totally rework it, some people are not going to be happy with it.

I was playing from day 1. Only put about 300 hours into EA, since I didn’t want to burn myself out. I am loving this game so much.

I put in 150 hours of EA and took a long break in between playthroughs. I was also very vocal about hating the game when EA was first released due to it being more Divinity than D&D. Larian has done a great job at addressing most of our biggest gripes and has created a wonderful RPG experience.

You were one of the playtesters? What are some of things you knew were fixed but still saw people complaining about?

Hey, Gt27mustang, do you know that your DX11/Vulkan thread is inaccessible?

For exemple, the fact that monk, half-orcs and dragonborns were not in EA, people were afraid that they wouldn't make the final game when in fact they were in the version I played over one year ago.

Reactions, additionnal spells, companions (Karlach, Dark Urge) and countless other stuff had people worried but playtesters knew that it was gonna be ok.

Some of the biggest issues I had at the start of EA were:

direct target cantrips and spells causing persistent aoe damage by creating elemental pools on the ground like divinity
jumping was manual for each party member
no toggle for reactions and there weren't many to choose from
many actions changed to bonus actions (still don't like this and waiting for the mod that fixes it to be updated for live)
If you engaged in combat in places like the goblin camp, the entire zone would attack you. The battle took forever.

How did you ever maintain NDA with such special knowledge? Everybody complaining that Tav didn’t have enough of a backstory while the entire time you were sitting on DUrge.

No one was ever afraid we wouldn't get monks, half-orcs and what else in the final game. Not sure where are you even getting that info from.

Also, reactions are -by their own admission- something that exists in the final game in the form we have now ONLY because people vehemently asked for them.

Last but not least, everyone and their grandma was aware the final game would have content and features not included in EA.
The rumbling was often about how poorly Larian kept the user based up to date about what they were planning to do, rather than the fear changes would never come.

The forums. Sure the vast majority of people knew, but occasionally I read some post of someone saying:"we've been in EA for X years and still no this or that, I bet they decided not to put it in the game!" It's those people to whom I wanted to say:" chill buddy, Larian got this".

Gt27, how much are you bound by NDA after the game comes launches? Can you tell us anything or should we just not bother asking?

How about he things people were worried wouldn't get fixed that indeed didn't get fixed?

Things like crowd control being nerfed, ranged weapon distance being nerfed, or crazy shove distances? Barrelmancy? Enemies having weird stats? Lack of formation control?

What about them?

And what crowd control nerfing? Crowd control is incredibly effective in this game.

Barrelmancy is not a big part of the game. Larian did nerf that.

Formation control doesn’t matter in a game with 4 party members.

Man, I'm looking desperately for a mod that addresses this one, because with a party of six the default one is HIDEOUS to look at and not very practical to use, either".

It did came to discussion with the people at Larian and the playtesters were pretty unanimous that it was a poor system, but I guess nothing came of it

So great that you were a playtester! I wish I could have been one!

Larian doesn't do themselves any favers by not telling users what they are or arn't working on so of course things tend to wonder off... personally i find it very frustrating when bugs that where fixed years ago manage to find their way back into the later EA/ release builds but thats the nature of big dev teams

gratz on your playtesting... i just wish Larian would do more of it