Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General BG3 is not a bigger departure from D&D than BG was

Prior to Baldur's Gate, many games were made based on D&D, and most of them were VERY faithful adaptations of the 1st and 2nd edition rules. Including the 10+ Gold Box games and the two Dark Sun games, all of which hewed quite closely to the parent ruleset and gameplay style.

Then BioWare got their chance to make a D&D game. And they decided, based on their own personal opinions as video game designers, to make significant changes to the system because they felt that it would be more fun (or sell better, some of both probably) than keeping their game as tight to the 2e rules as the prior D&D titles. And now Larian is doing the exact same thing.

But on Reddit and on the Larian forums, we've got a lot of people pretending that Baldur's Gate 1+2 was some kind of deeply faithful adaptation, and Baldur's Gate 3 is a wild departure. I think people are kidding themselves.

Baldur's Gate took a game in which each character takes their turn individually, in order, and changed it into a wild melee where everyone acted at the exact same time. That is a HUGE change. The impact on how fights play out in such a system is quite significant, and they way it FEELS to play it is even more massive. The ability to pause and issue commands does not change the fact that any time you have it unpaused, everyone is acting simultaneously. That's the single biggest change to D&D in a video game of all time.

In addition to this, Baldur's Gate 1+2 changed the way a number of spells worked, to fit better with their new system. I can't tell you exactly how many, as I'm not prepared to comb through all the spell descriptions for an hour to gather that data. But it was a not insignificant number.

This is not, by the way, a "turn-based is better than real-time-with-pause!" argument. I'm not in any way saying that what Bioware did was BAD. I'm not in any way saying that the system they pioneered, and which was subsequently used by many other excellent isometric RPGs, is BAD. If they had stuck with turn-based, Baldur's Gate 1 might have been a WORSE game for it. I don't even know. I'm only saying that it is a BIG, highly impactful change to D&D-as-simulated-by-a-computer. Bigger than any change that Larian has made. And it wasn't Bioware's only change, either, so let's not pretend that it was.

Bioware didn't HAVE to make Baldur's Gate that way. There was already plenty of precedent of beloved, successful D&D licensed CRPGs out there which stuck much closer to the tabletop rules. But they were the video game designers, and they were making a video game, and they felt/judged/decided that their game would be better if they made these changes. They made that decision because they were the ones adapting D&D to THEIR game. And now, Larian is just doing the SAME thing.

And I'm not gonna say that "no one complained about that at the time" because no, people definitely complained about it at the time. But NOW, you got a lot of people who seem to ignore how significantly Bioware altered D&D to make Baldur's Gate 1+2. Now, you have a lot of complaints that suggest that the old Baldur's Gate games were super close to actual D&D and Larian's sequel is just changing the rules willy-nilly with no reason and with no justification. But no, they are not doing anything more than Bioware did. To my reckoning, as a player of D&D for 35 years, they are changing D&D LESS than Bioware did.


TL;DR: Making some developer decisions to creatively alter the D&D rules in order to make what they believe and hope will be a more fun video game is not some new, unique crime of Larian Studios. It is, in fact, core to the Baldur's Gate franchise legacy.

I don't think anyone has complained about BG3 not being like PnP, the biggest complaint is how much of a departure it is from BG1&2, and this is mainly from people that don't understand that the games are based on completely different rulesets.

For example I remember when I first stepped into playing games based on D&D 3 / 3.5, I went in thinking they would be like Baldurs Gate but was surprised to find them to be so different based on all the rule changes. Then I realized that there won't even be anymore games like BG1&2 because no one is allowed to make any more games based on the 2.0 ruleset.

I think all of this would have been much better handled if Larian and WOTC had made an official statement prior to the EA launch explaining as such that the game would be hugely different from its predecessors due to being based on the latest rulesets.

In relation to PnP vs cRPG, of course there need to be differences to make the experience better suited to a video game setting.

True, that doesn't change the fact that the player who want a faithful adaption will dislike the game.

I haven't seen many complaints or even one about this game not being like PnP, the main complaint is that it is nothing like BG1/2.

This is the key difference for me:

BG adapted D&D rules where they weren't feasible in a CRPG and, in the case of RTWP, to speed up combat.

Larian have adapted many D&D rules to accommodate their own systems and rules carried over from Original Sin, not because the D&D rules were infeasible to implement.


Obviously there's more to both cases than these generalisations, but it summarises how I feel about the way they've adapted it. I don't mind that it's not the same as BG1 and 2 (which remain my favourite games of all time), I mind that we're getting D&D flavoured Larian, not Larian flavoured D&D. They should let 5E speak for itself and drop the obsession with obnoxious surfaces.

Are there any examples of such things?

You could for example perfectly adapt spells with a 10 minute casting time into BG3, but nobody is going to enjoy spending 10 minutes to cast a spell.

I agree that there are sensible changes like instant Prayer of Healing outside of combat. I'm talking about things like the changes to cantrips so that they create and interact with surfaces, such that their intended purpose and damage limitations are completely changed. I'm talking about the jump/disengage bonus action debacle.

True, it is massively different from BG 1+2. Like, utterly unrecognizable compared to the previous games. So I think you're right, it would have been good for them to communicate just how big a gap there is between this and its predecessors in the series.

That's fair, certainly.

See, I really disagree with that. I think there's a LOT more D&D here than "Larianism" here. I mean, clearly the Larianism is present and quite apparent. But to me, it looks like just one relatively thin layer on top of a very solid core of D&D.

I see it the other way: the mechanical core of BG3 is Original Sin, with D&D rules draped over it.

Have fun trying to define what Larianism is, what D&D really means, etc. That's the problem with these conversations is that rarely does anyone actually sit down and ponder long and hard as to what makes D&D a thing and what makes Larian a thing.

How come there were no such complaints when Bethesda made Fallout 3? It was made using the exact same engine as Oblivion, but it was universally a hit with little to no complaints about it being different to Fallout 1 or 2.

Larianisms:

- heavy emphasis on ground surface effects and various interactions with such
- high prevalence of special throwable items and arrows that cause elemental effects for both PCs and NPCs
- high prevalence of barrels in the environment which can be broken open to cause special effects
- heavy emphasis on gaining high ground in combat for both PCs and NPCs
- significant emphasis on moving and interacting with objects as a means of problem solving and battle strategy in lieu of using characters' actual abilities
- alteration of a few spells and abilities to conform more to the principles listed above

D&D-ness:

-everything else in the game

There were resounding complaints about Fallout 3 from all the old Fallout grognards. If you went to like, pre-existing Fallout-specific spaces on the web, the salt and rage was biblical.

Uh, one of the biggest fan sites for Fallout - No Mutants Allowed - pretty much revolted.

There were plenty of complaints.

And that's fine. Many of the rule changes are more fun and towards a better game. The Ranger class, for instance, is changed for the better. Niche spells like Speak with Animals/Dead lasting until long rest or concentration is broken is good.

Many of the things people are complaining about are not because they are rules purists, but because some systems uses PHB rules, and other systems use Larian's modified rules, and that has a clear impact on the game's balance.

You get the Hit points, the magic spell slots, magical healing, and your base chance to hit and be hit from the PHB rules, but the surfaces have additional effects and damage, and chance to hit or be hit altered by effectively, +/- 4 to hit because of advantage to high-ground attacks and disadvantage to low ground attacks.

Here's the thing though about your Larianisms, that just sounds like a D&D world that's similarly teched like Eberron (lol artificers) or some whacky plane in Planescape.

D&D is filled with shit like that such as flaming arrows, exploding acorns of death, etc.

Barrels? Let me introduce you to kobolds carrying.. barrels (LOL DDO).

Ground surface effects have also always been a thing such as grease, web, illusionary terrain.

For some it's going to be a writing style and animation style, for others it'll be the fact that DOS uses an AP pool and uses cool downs rather than spells per day / ability usage per day etc.

What I am trying to point out is that a lot of the times when people accuse BG3 of being Larianized it doesn't really make sense.

You are, of course, aware that elemental arrows predate Larian, and were predominate in early adaptations of D&D games? I was running through BG the other night, a fresh new game in the EE, and got an explosive arrow as a drop. The real kicker, that arrow was a drop from the same encounter in the base game. Explosive barrels, et al, have been a thing forever as well, and Grease was a thing, all the way back in BG/BG 2 forward, and probably a lot of the other D&D based games in that era that I never got around to playing. That to indicate environmental effects aren't a "Larianism", they've been around a long time.

Interacting with the rest of the environment goes all the way back to Table Top. Players could climb stuff, jump over stuff, if they had the scores for it, light oil slicks on fire, use Entangle spells to control enemies, or party members... Jumping on stuff has been a thing in PC games for longer than Larian's been making games too.

Precisely this. I personally prefer the rules/systems in 5E to those of OS, but rather than using one system or the other we've got a mix of the two, and there are areas (such as the changes to certain cantrips) where that either doesn't work very well or mangles the original intent of a rule to the point where it does something substantially different.

Part of the point I was trying to make earlier is that the inclusion - nay, prevalance - of OS things like surfaces means the 5E rules have had to be drastically changed in some ways, and I don't believe that's to the benefit of the game. If they insist on surfaces being part of the game, the surface mechanics should be changed to accommodate 5E instead, as this is a D&D game.