Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback The rest system is a missed opportunity

I expect there are further plans for resting as early access progresses. Regardless, this feedback should be relevant given the current game state.

Currently resting feels like a missed opportunity at best. The camp is beautifully implemented with great story beats. Unfortunately the gameplay impact, to me, leaves much to be desired.

Currently resting has no limitations or drawbacks. You can rest after every fight. This has an adverse impact on game balance. This likely results in one of two outcomes:

• The fights are tuned for full slots, encouraging players to rest before every encounter.
• The fights are tuned for partial slots, allowing resting to trivialize fights.

A case can be made for not resting if it makes the game too easy, but I personally don't like the idea of an overpowered mechanic that we are simply told not to use. Saving scrumming more than enough already.


For this reason, I would love to see resting turned into a better game mechanic that adds to the depth of combat and exploration.










I am not proposing any exact solution. But here are some ways other games that have implemented interesting meta-resource mechanics like resting:

Safety - DnD
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The basis for most of the mechanics in BG3 uses "safety" to limit rests. Basically, this turns dungeons into gauntlets. You must complete the 3-4 encounters in the area before getting access to a safe place to rest. This works well in a tabletop setting with a DM controlling the finer details. Game implementations can be hit or miss depending on how well the areas are built around this mechanic.


Timer - Fallout, Pillars of Eternity
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You have X days to complete your next objective. Normally these are not prohibitively low values, giving you plenty of rests while still giving some sociological pressure not to rest spam. This would also fit nicely with the whole mind flayer tadpole shenanigans.


Resources - Pathfinder Kingmaker, Darkest Dungeon
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Resting takes resources, limiting how often it can be done, and giving incentives to minimize it even further. This requires decent scaling through the game to balance but can work.


Complex incentives - XCOM, Darkest Dungeon
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A bit off genre, but XCOM is an excellent example of meta-game planning and resource management. I am by NO means suggested BG3 should have something anywhere near that complex. But it is a good example of successfully mixing resting and preparation mechanics in a game.

Just want to say that I absolutely loathe games with countdown timers, and really would like that to not be a feature in this one.

Would just rather you have to be in the overworld in order to rest, and if you're not then you can't. That's my suggestion. Thematically makes sense, and makes it so you have to commit for dungeons, or at least inconvenience you if you want to rest between every fight (requiring you to run all the way back through to get back from the overworld), which still thematically makes sense.

+1

You said it very well that there are two possible outcomes. I am finding so far that #2 is mostly true (you do not need most slots for most fights, so with constant long resting you can steamroll most encounters).

I wonder if it would be possible to add an actual day/night cycle to the game. In 5e you gain the benefits of a long rest only once every 24 hours. This prevents the problem of trying to constantly long rest in a dungeon etc. I imagine this would be borderline impossible to implement in a reasonable way but mentioning it as another consideration.

Another possibility that would probably fall under the idea of resources is that you must earn a certain amount of XP between long rests. The amount would scale based on your level. I could see this causing potential issues where you could get stuck with too few resources but maybe a hard save and a "reset to last long rest" option could help avoid any major game-ending / TPK issues.

Honestly, though... Hasn't every single BG game been prone to the abuse of rest mechanics? Heck, they even had "rest until fully healed" options!

I agree with almost all of your points with the exception of a "deadline" timer. The X amount of days always made me paranoid that I couldn't explore as thoroughly as I could because I wasn't sure how close I was going to be able to cut it and complete that task. I always ended up doing about 1/3 of what I'd normally do and then give in and move onto the next deadline. That didn't make for a fun experience for me.

+1

Limiting resting would go a long way in almost every aspect.

Potions would be more important
Spells would be more important
Dungeons would feel like dungeons

suggestion 1 or 3 from OP sound perfect to me.

Great post, Burdock!

For me, frequent resting is essential, as I am so weak at the game that my party is always on the brink of destruction. What is happening instead of resting, since the game is so difficult for me, is that the entire process is three steps forward, two steps back, i.e. making some progress by consuming all potions and spells etc. and losing huge amounts of health, and then reloading and trying again with what has been learned about the location of monsters and their reactions etc.

How many times is an ordinary player meant to take to complete the trapped man in the burning building? How many times should an ordinary person have to save and re-fight the goblin boss? Really, I would like to know this. The burning man I did over ten times and still haven't helped him find his wife. The Goblin boss I have tried 3 times and failed so far. That is totally what I expect now. I don't know how people have managed to play through the entire game yet.

+1 Particularlly the long rest needs to be limited.

Agreed. Personally I loved XCOMs and Darkest Dungeons "timer lite" mechanics that simply have short term incremental punishments for not accomplishing enough in a given day. The long term "100 days to finish the game" is really hard to actually play around on your first playthrough and simply leads to paranoia.

I rested after every fight through all of BG1. It’s not a big issue for me. But if it were to change, then expensive camping supplies would be my preferred way.

I love hoarding gold in case an expensive Item I really want shows up. If it cost me 100-200 gold in supplies, camp guards, lodging etc, you can be dammed sure I would minimize that shit and be diligent about which fights I pick.

My drawback for absolutely NOT "resting at every fight" (fun fact: more than 10 hours into my third character I'm exploring the spider caves under the village and I have yet to rest ONCE) is that it would be fucking boring and a tedious waste of time.

But hey, I'd be all for enforcing some restriction.
Except developers probably don't want to even attempt that sort of mechanic or they would be SIEGED by Kotaku and all the gaming press of people who can't play decently to save their life would cry about how elitism and gatekeeping are preventing them from having fun or something.

Wasn’t there talk of the tadpole “issue” meaning we had a timer?

I oppose resting limits, it sounds good but realisticly it would just hurt those who wanna play wizards etc. I'd rather not see limits. especially as to put it bluntly Larian seems to be expecting us to rest frequently. if they didn't they'd not toss the kind of combat encounters at us they're doing

It still allows an infinite number of long rests with minimal effort - personally I wouldn't call that an inconvenience, more a nuisance/annoyance.
There needs to be some real restriction to doing that - maybe respawning (nameless) enemies so that you loose a chunk of process (this would also require removing EXP gain from these "respawns" to avoid grinding). Given that 5e is balanced around the idea of dungeon crawls, I think this would be the most logical solution, even if restrictive to progression, however, would at the same time allow a lot more engagement - opportunities to try out new strategies and such.

How about diminishing returns for rests taken within x amount of time, kills, xp or new interactions from eachother? i believe allowing for a combination of any (which ever happens first) eliminates potential problems with parties getting stuck at boss/ final encounters with no other enemies to smite in order to trigger the full rest. Doing enough of any of those options in my mind would make a rest seem more beneficial.

I'm confused about people saying there is no limit to long rests. I've had several occasions in which the game told me it was not safe to rest here, so I had to leave a zone before being able to take a long rest. Did this not happen in your play throughs? I'm thiking maybe it was a bug that this feature simply didn't manifests in your safes for whatever reasons.

Personally I rather missed being able to have more than a single short rest. Two or three times I wanted to take a short rest and realized I was only allowed to take a long one.

Only happened to me once, when my party was surrounded by clouds of poison.

Now think what happens when they implement Sorcerer and you get access to multiple Fireballs every fight.

My humble question is: How?

I do not have a large game library to "prove my experience" in combat video games, but I like to think I'm not too shabby of a tactician. Most (not all, but most) fights kill my entire party several times. And even though I've hit the hihest archieveable level as of now, I still for the love of god cannot win the fight against the spider matriarch and her two accompaning phase spiders. This game, of course, leaves a lot to luck since everything is based on dice rolls, but still...
Care to share your superior game combat knowledge?

I pulled the Spider fight off at level 3 without any prior knowledge or preparation, but it was a nailbiter. There was a lot of shoving, pushing and shooting web-bridges involved
Mobility, versatility and environmental awareness are generally the key points for controlling an engagement. Lots of people make the mistake to commit to a crappy position and just hope they can brute force the enemy to death but that won't work if you're at a tactical disadvantage.

As for topic: I feel like increasing the game resource drain somehow, limiting long rest opportunities somehow, and making more than 1 short rest possible in-between long rests are the 3 key points to balancing out the resources/encounters/rest balance. Maybe difficulty levels will help too.