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

This. It's an opinion piece. Game mechanics can change and some will. we'll see what they do.

A good RPG that will be able to entertain you for several hours.

If that's true I'll be let down.

Man, that article sure used a lot of words to only reveal these tidbits of information: rangers are better, true strike is changed, mage hand is changed, and thaumaturgy is changed. That's all it actually tells you!

Yup...I will still always think of both original blue box and original "Advanced D & D" so all these variants and proficiencies and weird tweaks are ... not exactly D&D to me.

As for how much will the game change from now/early access to full Launch? Don't know. But the few folks I have known that have participated in "Beta" type stuff haven't ever reported huge changes.

I enjoy this game...I'll likely enjoy whatever it turns into.

Seems basically D&D to me-
-D&D classes instead of DOS classless system.
-D&D move, action and bonus action system instead of APs.
-D&D rolls to hit (and crit) instead of DOS almost always hitting (always for spells and skills)
-D&D weapon and spell damage dice (mostly)
-D&D armour system to reduce hit chance instead of stripping physical and magical armour.
-Status effects resisted by saving throws instead of armour.
-D&D spells and skills (mostly)
-Spell slots and skills per rest instead of cool downs.
-No weapon and armour levelling.
-Advantage snd disadvantage system.
-Rolling for initiative.

Outside of combat there are a lot of proficiency and speech checks which DOS didn’t have, and you don’t have to spend half the game trying to keep your equipment leveled up.

In terms of rules, it’s waaayyyy more D&D than DOS. There’s a few things that make it seem a bit more Divinity, such as the overuse of surface effects, but they aren’t fundamental to the gameplay and given the reaction, I’m confident they’ll be toned down a lot.

Most of the rest of the DOS feel seems to be either engine related (which there’s nothing much to be done about) and interface (which could use some work both for quality of life and to help differentiate the games).

Did you not watch any of gameplay demos before buying it? What were you expecting from the first few days of early access if not the game pretty much as presented in the videos leading up to it?

Agreed. There are definitely some changed I would like to see, but this is still a great game and a pretty good start to what I am sure will be a great DnD game once it releases.

The surface elements and some of the other Divinity port stuff needs to be toned, but that's what early access and feedback is for.

A lot of the other issues are bugs that are obviously going to be corrected or reimplemented, or they're direct ports from Divinity that haven't really been touched yet.

Understandably because the systems themselves work in their current state for the most part although suboptimal and they were low priority as opposed to getting the early access into our hands.

You clearly completely misinterpreted Libertine's original comment.

An article without official sources and without a single quote of the developers is hardly something of a guideline.

Simply hearsay and clickbait at most.

I am not familiar with the processes at Larian, I am however familiar with AAA game development, I worked as a game designer and I am working in the software industry right now, in total thats about 10 years of experience.

From what I can see as a 5e purist, the changes required for the game to resemble what I would consider a proper 5e implementation are simply unrealistic in the timeframe they have given and that just takes into account a rework of the core mechanics, that doesn't even take into account additional systems or finishing the product.

So while you are entitled to that opinion, I am very doubtful about that.

The fact that no community manager has entered this conversation between our factions yet also indicates that they are unsure how to handle this, if they expected this, their representatives would have a couple of statements prepared.

Strap in for what? Are you implying it's a bad idea? Full steam ahead for me /shrug.

Nonsense.

So why didn't you wait for some reviews before diving straight into an Early Access game? You were forewarned by the Game Producer himself, right?

That was barely an article

By your own admission, you are unfamiliar with the processes at Larian, therefore you have no basis for knowing their community management style, and no basis for jumping to conclusions based on your lack of information.

They do not have moderators and developers jumping into every thread which goes "Larian, answer this:", so a lack of immediate response is not damning.




I don't know what basis you have to say that either, given that Larian has freely admitted to doing many different internal changes before even getting to the point of EA. We've already seen two of them based on the feedback from the first gameplay demo: The dialogues were changed from third-person distant to direct, and the team initiative system was changed to a more standard one with adjacent allies being able to share turns.

See this interview (skip to 26:15), and it discusses that the've been doing lots of varations on the systems already.

https://www.usgamer.net/articles/ax...-on-baldurs-gate-3s-early-access-release


EDIT: And there was no chance at all that this game was ever going to be a pure, 1:1 following of the 5e rules, because those rules are written for interpretation by a human DM who has complete control and is able to adjust things on the fly to adapt to the current situation. A videogame does not have that amount of flexibility possibly, so some changes are necessary.

Ehm isn't that obvious? Of course they won't change the core gameplay one year before release. Anyone who ever thought that really knows nothing about games development.

So allow me to read between the lines:

They didn't do what I wanted, and so no matter what, it's going to be bad.

A pure implementation is impossible, w/out requiring a human at the helm, since that's how D&D works out here in everyone is flesh and blood instead of pixels land. I've watched a few streams of OXventurers playing D&D, and the follow up video by the guy that DMs them, talking about how players can mess up your campaign w/out even thinking that's what they're doing. There are an infinite number of ways that an encounter can be handled in a table top setting, and those variables cannot be baked in. Even in my tabletop days, we had situations that the GM couldn't foresee, all within the rules of the game, but not something that was accounted for.

It's funny to read about barrels and such. It's like people honestly believe that these things never existed until Larian magically implemented them. As far as how items we find in game bear a striking resemblance to items in DOS, I had a twinge about that yesterday, and then realized that rather than spend the money remaking every asset they had available in engine already, they just used them, and you know what? I'm fine with that. If people really want to be down on a game developer for allowing things like oil slicks to be lit on fire, then they should really start with Obsidian. I mean, you could literally lay traps like that out in the castle defense in NWN 2. I'd suggest maybe Obsidian stole that idea from Larian, but I'm fairly sure that NWN 2 came first... I'm just going to pretend that I'd never seen exploding barrels in any other games, or genres, before that.

To further reinforce Stabbey's point, there are also a lot of other balancing factors like game play pace and flow as well as the restrictions of having a party size of four (versus six -- there are pros and cons to both), party composition (you need to be able to complete the game with missing resources), accommodating a wide fan base (look at all dem copies!), etc.

I would be less forgiving of Larian if they stated this was going to be for specific fan base like Owlcat did with Kingmaker (but lol they also took liberties when it came to certain things).

Basically, context matters.

You are correct I am NOT familar with their processes, I am however, very well aware of what is realistically achievable for a team that works full time on a title and that one year is nothing in games development, whether you have a team of 800+ people or 20+.

So while you are correct, I am missing some pieces, I have enough experience to tell you the core mechanics will not change in a year when they still have a game to ship. Will there be adjustments? Yes, will there be a big rework of already existing mechancis? Simple anwser; no. Why? Because 1 year is not enough time.

The examples you gave are very likely about 2-7 lines of code, depending on how complicated their direction engine is. As for the initiative, while that would be more involved, its not a big change, certainly nowhere near the level of change required to even get close to other PC adaptions of 5e.


I can give you the reasoning behind my interpretation of the CM situation. I have worked at two very big companies with extensive CM departments (dev studios of 400+ people + support personal). If a company predicts there is going to be backlash, they have prepared statements. If not, they tend to react within a week because usually everything longer than that affects public relations and thus the bottomline. So either, their team is not sure how to answer yet, or they lack resources. Or and I admit that freely, I could be wrong about this. However, in regards to the time needed to overhaul the core mechanics, I will maintain my position.

You should expect a turn based game based on the current edition of D&D, the way movies are "based on true events", which means liberties will be taken with the rules as the developers see fit. The final judgement of BG3 should be whether you had fun playing the game, not how closely the game hews to the canonical 5e rules.

The people complaining about the game not following the 5e rules exactly are just looking for reasons to reject the game so they can part of the cool kids clique, they want to drive a pin into one single point of the D&Ds 40+ year history and claim that single point as the only true version while ignoring the fact that the game has changed constantly with every iteration as a published book or computer game.