Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Game mechanics are set, apparently

https://screenrant.com/baldurs-gate-3-dungeons-dragons-spells-classes-changes/

I don't believe in coincidence when it comes to business. That the gaming press is praising this means Larian will go full steam ahead with their current direction. Strap in, folks.

That's a good thing, for the most part.

Wow. Talk about rose-tinted glasses in that article. It simply praised a few changes that the community by large seems to like but left out any critique against changes the community by large seems to dislike,

So it's not D&D?

For my own sanity I'm thinking of it as an alternative D&D. Kind of like alternative facts.

The gaming press is bought if any one believes the crap they write and tell you are not mentally healthy at all.

D&D has mutated and changed a great deal over the years, originally there were only three classes: fighters, magic users, and clerics. Is any game with other classes therefore not D&D? Did you know that in one edition being an elf was your character class? BG3 is just as much D&D as any other edition or interpretation that has come before. At some point we will see a new version of D&D come along and silly children will jump up and down and stamp their feet and tell everyone that version is the only proper version of the game.

So like homebrew?

I must have missed the part of the article that claims (and even less proves) that mechanics are set in stone.

So, yours is the *proper* version then? Enlighten me.

It's a read between the lines situation.

The problem here isn't that they changed so many of the rules per se, it's that they changed them badly. Tweaking the rules to make it fit a video game depiction is to be expected, and tweaking other things to make them play better is welcomed. But they did it so badly that it feels like they more or less just tried reskinning their previous game, which is not what was promised. We were promised an adaption of D&D 5e rules as faithfully as possible, and instead they flipped them on their head and basically said "sike, we're playing Divinity now bitches!". A few touches of the Divinity series were obviously expected, but I didn't buy this game expecting a Divinity game with a few touches of D&D in it because that's not what was marketed and sold to me.

Basically this game is starting to feel more and more like a bait and switch.

Playing the game feels like they are not entirely sure what to do with the rules. It feels like a bad DOS, like they had to compromise on some D&D things but refused to change their design philosophy when it comes to encounters and surfaces and now we have this barely working amalgamation of rules and ideas. I have around 25 hours in the game, and each time I play I want to ether just play DOS or the old BGs.

The title is misleading clickbait.

No one from Larian studios is quoted in it, and the article does not even imply that anyone from Larian told them anything. It was a waste of time to read, in fact.

No, not at all, I don't know how you came to that conclusion except by substandard reading skills. I blame cuts to the education budget.

I play the version that the DM runs, or the game is written for. There is no proper version.

I think that is a gross overstatement, the bulk of the game is 5e, with changes. Saying that this is just DOS with a glaze of D&D is clearly false, but these claims happens with every computer game interpretation of D&D. People were upset with changes in BG1, NWN1 and 2, DDO, etc. These complaints have become the unavoidable background noise of game development for this genre.

I can totally believe this. For me, I just want some closure on the topic. Either way I want to know the kind of game to expect.

If the bulk of the game was 5e, even with changes it would feel like I was playing 5e instead of Divinity. But it doesn't, it feels like Divinity with a different action economy during combat. Barrels all over the place so you can make flashy Michael Bay explosions all the time, tons of surface effects that last for stupid amounts of time (acid being a permanent effect it seems), puzzles and traps that seem to be balanced around the way things worked in DOS2 but don't work well in this game because of the 5e action economy. At this point the game actually feels like it's being held back from what they wanted to make by the 5e rules. If they had used the cooldown timer on skills instead of the 5e action economy, this game would play a lot smoother...but then it would literally just be Divinity with a few dice rolls tossed in. And that is kind of the point here.

So you just came to ad hominem and double post, you sure showed me Chief! Hope it's paying well.

I expect you're playing it now, with some minor tweaks in the mechanics before release and no massive changes.

Early Access has muddled the traditional software definitions, where a Beta test USED to mean "Feature Complete and we're just squashing bugs now." Clearly there are some features not complete, like the additional companions and anything past Act 1. But I think we're mostly in the bug-squashing stage as far as the basic game mechanics go, with a few tweaks here and there before release.