Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Feedback on EA so far

Cross post from Reddit, submitted via feedback to support as well; https://www.reddit.com/r/BaldursGate3/comments/j75d6d/feedback_ea_early_impressions_gameplay_ui_etc/


Camera

Is there a reason to lock the camera angle/tilt? I can’t remember if DOS/DOS2 was like this, but its really annoying when you’re fighting someone inside a building from outside, or when they’re above/below you significantly. I feel like I constantly want to angle the camera but all you can do is zoom, go to top down view (tactical) or swivel/pan around.



Combat

I think its too fast. Funny right? I heard Larian saying that speeding up combat was a focus for them in one of the pre-EA panels/shows/updates. I think it has gone too far the other way. We’re not given the time to enjoy combat, and a lot of the nuances fly by without really penetrating the scalp because the combat log zooms by and has separate lines that you have to mouse over in specific places to see the rolls, and what happened. Half the time as my light cleric it was hard to tell my reaction was going off, and if you check the combat log you can’t even see any acknowledgement that it was used. Speeding up combat was used as the reasoning for reactions having to be automatic, more on that later, and honestly its pretty hard to tell what is going on from one moment to the next, though some of the battle verticality and spread, combined with the camera angle lock might be to blame.

Even the crit marker is bad at the moment, because it’s the only dice roll you see but it completely hides the damage you do, putting you into some kind of action cam which often hides the actual impact of the attack. More on putting the dice on screen later.

The time it takes for some NPCs to “decide” what to do is vexing, and this is not intended I guess, so not part of my feedback above. I’m really talking about how fast activated skills fly by doing their thing. Something that is a d20 roll, followed by damage dice is over in half a second right now and I'd prefer it was a few seconds long I guess so we could see what is happening. It may also pave the way for a better reaction system.....

Reactions

Automated reactions are not as bad as I first thought they would be. It makes sense for some things. AoO is fine, when it’s the only thing you have anyway, and stuff like “Shield” (Currently not ingame?) or even Riposte (battlemaster). The problem comes when a class has multiple reaction triggers, some more preferred or appropriate than others, or when an iconic and powerful reaction needs specific player agency and control to a) be used most effectively and/or b) to make the player feel powerful and like they’re having a key impact. Counterspell and Cutting Words would be my examples here. I don’t see any way of implementing these automatically, without nerfing them or changing them. Cutting words is a dice roll, and the caster is meant to know the attack result before they decide to use it. Moreover the caster might or would use this to prevent an attack on a key ally at a key moment, when an opportunity presents itself. Warding flare is another good example (improved). Impose disadvantage on a creature you can see attacking a creature other than you. Automatically this will just trigger on the first attack following the clerics players turn? I want to be able to save my wizard with it, or myself, or however I choose to use it. Choose being the key word. What about counterspell? Will I just stop some half-caster’s cantrip because it’s the first spell cast after my turn, leaving the party wide open for the fireball?

I’m not sure of the solution. But given that I feel like combat is already too fast, I’d honestly prefer interrupting the combat flow to present the player with a few seconds worth of “do you want to counter this spell?” rather than destroying these iconic abilities to make them work under the automated system. Please rethink this!



Rolls

I feel like we don’t see enough dice for a D&D game. I kind of get why a lot of it is hidden, and I’m not saying that we need to see every dice roll, but there are options here. We could just have toggles for a lot of it, so you can see your damage rolls and have it presented on screen instead of the “floating combat text” that shows just your damage – an option people could disable if they wanted.

Initiative is a good one for me. Currently I can’t even find where you see your initiative (number), you just get placed on the initiative track and that’s it. I feel like I want to see the dice, and see my bonus get added. It can feel pretty bad when you’re really low in a big fight. If you see the bad roll, then at least you experienced it on screen and understand what happened. Put the numbers on the portraits of the turn order too.

Doing this on screen I think could help make the combat more D&D, as well as solve some of the pacing issues mentioned above. I consider this a great multiplayer feature as well to be honest, anyone who has played D&D knows that one of the simple joys is looking at your friends damage dice and seeing those 4 D8s roll really high above average. Let us see that if we want, gate it behind an option if you think not everyone wants to see – but I’d be willing to bet it would be popular.

(Multiplayer) Dialogues

Some fellas made a couple of great threads on this already https://www.reddit.com/r/BaldursGat...larians_dialogue_system_doesnt_work_for/ which I agree with 100%. https://www.reddit.com/r/BaldursGate3/comments/j6q59j/feedback_using_the_best_speaker_in_party/

First, my personal pet peeve, automatic dialogues or ambush dialogues. You need to bloody well pull ALL the players into it, not just the one who triggered it. I do not want to miss things because someone was exploring ahead a bit. It makes no sense and can only create a negative multiplayer experience. I’d also say that manually selected and started dialogues should also pull in all players to “auto listen”, and they can have the option to leave (but not start more dialogues) if they’re wanting to sell etc.

Further to this, the best party members bonus should be used for any checks. NPCs are talking to the party, not the player who happened to click them first. Your party will have a ‘face’ who does your persuading, a wizard who does your arcane divining and a cleric who knows about religion. And everything in between. Maybe you have some massive holes, but thats how you decided to play! Making it the person who clicks first who gets to do the checks makes no sense when you consider it a cooperative party experience, especially in multiplayer, at least most of the time. I’m sure there are some cases where it makes sense. I guess if I’m using speak with animals, I shouldn’t get to use my bard’s charisma for checks while talking to a chihuahua, and you can balance those edge cases by enforcing the checks to be from the relevant player where appropriate. For the most part though put the player's name in the conversation response so we know whos bonus is being used (and who is providing the option if its a cool race/class/background/etc option) and give us all options so other party members can chip in. That person should then see the DC and click the dice, and that character should be the one who says the dialogue. Currently other players in multiplayer can’t see these rolls either, but they should. Rolling dice and watching others roll dice is the backbone of fun in D&D!

In the same way, the current voting system isn’t really a voting system as far as I can tell. It’s a vote suggestion, and the person controlling the dialogue can ignore the rest of the party and pick what they want. I’m not sure how big a deal this is, but it doesn’t fit with the party/cooperative spirit of the game again. NPCs are generally talking to the party, not just the player who clicked them first.

The DC reduction based on your skill bonus also doesn’t make sense. Obviously it’s the same, mathematically, but it doesn’t feel as good. Likewise your “guidance” bonus doesn’t even get shown to you. You should see the Guidance dice roll next to your D20, and then see them all get added up with your bonuses to your result. Reducing down a DC just makes it feel like there was no point in rolling the check somehow, and yes, that is just human psychology but what can I tell you. D&D have been doing it this way for years, and it works!



UI (Spell Slots/Spell Levels)

Adding a button for every spell slot level you can cast a low level spell is not a scalable solution, and the space economy it destroys even at level 3-4 is already showing that. I would suggest revisiting this with spells being represented by single icons, and then the spell slot levels for each spell being presented. Maybe even do it both ways, so you can select the slot first and then that changes all the spells on your bar to that spell slot level of each spell so you can mouseover and read the increase. The base should always be in the tooltip as well, so you can more easily see what the higher slot is giving you in terms of upgrade.

The way they get splashed onto the bar is also annoying, especially with every potion, scroll and usable ending up there too. Which brings me to..



Inventory Junk

There is too much inventory bloat imo, and not enough sorting options etc to help you manage it. With better options for sorting/selling I'm sure it could work, but honestly there are too many scrolls and potions etc dropping at the moment. I'm pretty sure spell scrolls are meant to be a lot more rare in the D&D setting, and having them littering the world like this is a bit silly I think.

I hate, with a passion, the fact that keys dont disappear when you've used them. Or have a tooltip saying if you've used them. Make it easy on us, please! We've got a tadpole in our brains, I don't need an hour of inventory shuffling when we get back to town, only to find 10 keys with no idea if they're all safe to throw away. Have a heart!



Encounter XP (non-violent resolution)

There are already loads of encounters in the game where you can resolve a situation through dialogue, with nonviolent solutions. This is great, and is how D&D is supposed to be played! Awesome! However, a DM would also give you the XP for resolving the encounter. Probably the same as if you had defeated the encounter with combat. It makes sense to do this, but it doesn’t seem like Larian are doing this. There are a lot of guides for DOS/DOS2 where you simply kill everyone in sight for the “better” XP path through the game, and it’s a fundamental flaw. I’d honestly prefer milestone progression where the party levels up at key quest completions than have a situation where the best way is just always going to be murder your way through Faehrun, and all the other planes. Resolving a situation with good check rolls, using your out of combat skills should be just as rewarding as using your in combat skills to murder everyone! Switch to milestone progression, or just reward the XP for each encounter much more evenly. 100% parity isn't required, but at the moment I feel like you get WAY more for just doing murder death kill. If I am wrong, its not presented very well.

How is the combat too fast when the average fight is filed with 20 minutes of people missing 45 foot ogres that take up half your monitor with arrows from 10 feet away?

I'm not really sure what to do with your opinion on that, dude. Its a lot to unpack in a single line. You're upset that you miss a lot? Size has nothing to do with your chance to hit in the D&D ruleset. But you don't know why you're missing, which is part of what I am saying above. If you could see the fact you were rolling low, you could put it down to a bad streak. Similarly if the ogre in question has 18 AC you might understand that with your meagre +5 to hit you still need to roll 13+ which is statistically less likely.

Some of this info you can see already, but you have to dig in the combat log, which I find takes up more time than if they just showed the dice rolls.

About reactions. I think most of the comunity, and everyone that played d&d 5e thinks tha same way, why are shield, paladins(smite), bards (cutting words), counterspell, sentinel, war casting, an a long list hard to implement? ... i can imagine Larian breaking their heads on how to implement them ... and it so easy if you allow us to decide what and when to trigger.

I'm more concerned about this that any other thing in the game. It is a CORE mechanic, it's not something we will be able to mod, Larian needs to implement this if we want this, so please, even if there is an option to autoresolve everything for the people that want fast combat, listen the community on this one.



About Encounter XP, I think the same, current implemation is close to forcing killing hobo gameplay. Why would i resolve anything in a non violent way, when i will lose tons of xp and rewards that will make me weaker for the rest of the game. I'm ok not getting some gold and so on, im also saving resources, but you need to give the encounter XP. (If you want make it so that if i resolve non peacefully and then i kill without reason i dont get the kill xp, or just change kill xp for encounter resolve xp)

Combat is so slow, and it gets slower and slower the more enemies are on screen, which seriously limits how you can design encounters. Please don't make it any slower. It's literally turn based. How much slower can it get? It's your turn, select an ability, click enemy. Wait for your next turn. You have all the time in the world to analyze the situation and decide what to do.

Then just let reaction in autoresolve, but most of d&d players want the option to trigger reactions.

We are not asking for Larian to remove the autoresolve option, just to have the trigger selection option.

In the spider cave it took the 30 spiders about 10 minutes to finish each one of their turns but I guess the combat is too slow.... Hi welcome to the BG3 forums have you even played it?

I really don't feel this way. I honestly think what you're experiencing is the delay when the AI makes up its mind what to do on some NPCs when it gets busy, which is specifically what I left out of my feedback. Moving and clicking your action etc is really only a matter of seconds at the moment.

To handle larger combats where there are a lot of bad guys, its really easy. DMs have been solving it in table top for years. Either make fewer, more powerful bad guys, or have some of the minions/grunts turn up in waves. Solving the AI "thinking" lag would also help.

Curious point, none of those spiders were using reactions beyond opportunity attacks, this change will not affect the time it takes for the spiders turns.

Also you are right, they need to improve the lag between enemy turns (optimization), and the spider phasing animation it’s a little bit too slow.

Again, I mention specifically in the post that this is nothing to do with the AI "thinking" lag, obviously that is a bug/issue - I'm really talking about player turns, which is the opposite side of the same coin you're describing here. Our turns are really quick, but the AI takes longer because generally there are more of them and they spend a good few seconds each "thinking" (it says at the top of the screen).

When playing with 3 friends coop they want nothing more than for the turns to take longer.... True lol...

What are your computer specs? I see no "thinking" at all done by the NPCs. They execute their turn immediately. The problem is that when there are 100 spiders, then you have to wait for 100 turns & animations to complete before your next action, so you either sit around watching your screen for 10 minutes or go make a cup of cofee.


Edit: On the inventory topic, it looks exactly like the inventory menu they designed for consoles for DOS2. It sucks and I hope they fix it, but I doubt it'll change. It's really frustrating not being able to see equipped items while you're messing with inventory. In most cRPGs you'd be able to see equipped items of the selected character, plus full inventory of your party, or at least inventory of the selected character. In BG3 we get the worst possible option. Inventory of the character's equipped items, or a separate screen of all inventory items that covers your screen so you can't move, and then there are no sorting options or anything (that I see) even though you're in a dedicated inventory screen.

Might be worse in multiplayer, I've not really gotten to the big encounters in my solo playthrough.

the mobs do bug out some times and take an abnormally long time to finish their turn sometimes they just freez up for up to like 30-40 secconds has nothing to do with computer specs, also happens due to terrain LOS and pathing issues.

Honestly I don't think any of this would result in dramatically longer turns, it'd be way less time than the time we currently lose due to the AI thinking time bug/issue.

But rolling dice is the backbone of fun in D&D. Not seeing them outside of checks is criminal, I think. I want that cool feeling when my friend maxes out his damage dice on a key hit! And once you see the hit dice and stuff, you progress to naturally being presented an opportunity to do your complex reactions. Win win!

I can tell you that having everyone on the table jumping when our paladin did 2 crits in a row with smite for 100+damage after misty step with a successfull save o inside a forcecage against the #thingyouhavetodestroy in ToA for a 1 turn kill felt amazing.

It'll be way cooler, thats for sure.

Just came here to say this. We need similar XP rewards for non-combat resolutions. I hope they can confirm if/that this is coming. I'd also be perfectly fine with milestone progression. Maybe make in an option on game start?

i wholeheartedly agree with your last 3 points.

also the reactions.