Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback If you want to compare a game that does 5E to BG3

Try Solasta. It is the best adaption of DnD and/or 5E that ive ever played from a a studio of 17 people. The way they have implemented the 5E mechanics shows me that Larian can make a 5E game if they put some effort in as opposed to reskinning DOS or dumbing down 5E for the masses. So yeah Larian, go have a look at Solasta. Either you are making a DnD 5E game or not.

I’ve really enjoyed Solasta and would recommend it to anyone who feels that BG3 isn’t scratching their 5E itch. I’d be happy if Larian kept BG3 a bit friendlier to the masses as I’ve watched streamers struggle more with Solasta (who are not familiar with 5E) – but there are definitely a lot of things they’re doing right.

Honestly I couldnt give a F^%&k about streamers. I don't watch and don't care. Solasta is a DnD game, BG3 in its current form is not. It's obvious from playing, Solasta EA focused on getting the mechanics right first and the fluff second, and they completely nailed it. BG3 in its current form, doesnt deserve to have Baldurs Gate or DnD in the title.

I looked into it but the ability to reroll abilities or just set them all to max with infinite point buy was offputting and i lost interest seeing this kind of thing.
A shame because some of the mechanics look better implemented

I'm always a bit curious with reactions like this. Why would that make you lose interest? Not trying to sound dismissive I'm just curious. My thought is if you don't want to reroll infinitely just roll once and make yourself stick with it, and no reason you can't impose standard array or standard point buy rules for your own characters.

I'm hoping BG3 adds both standard array and rolling in addition to point buy, and had people arguing against it. Just seems strange to me that people argue against additional features to avoid the temptation to use them.

I think you can reroll nonstop because if after 6 roll and people don't get the roll they want... they can just restart the character creation (will be tedious, so they just remove the roll limitation), this also apply HP gain per level, instead of rolling for HP it will just set the HP for you (otherwise people will just save before they roll for HP and just reload until they get the highest roll for HP).

It demonstrates a certain disposition that makes for bad games overall.

This is fundamentally a balance issue. There is an an interplay between the game and the player. In the most basic sense a game is an objective and a set of rules. This is what distinguishes it from other kinds of amusements. The game guides the player by telling it what it needs to do and what it is allowed to do, and the player works towards accomplishing this, and that effort is the playing of the game. Any game, from the most simple to the most complex, fundamentally comes down to this basic principle.

Some surely will attempt to dispute this, let us examine deeper. Why do people at level 4 take their primary attribute bonus or, in some cases, a key feat? Why dont they take something absolutely useless to their build instead? Its because they do not randomly act on whims, but rather follow a reason, a logic, and that logic is 'what makes me stronger?' which is dictated by the mechanics and the objective. Some people might alter this to a slight degree - They might decide to do something slightly less optimal because they want to try something new or they like the resulting character idea. This is not evidence to the contrary of my assertion however because fundamentally this is always balanced against that pressure towards optimal. Its always 'is this too much of a sacrifice or can i get away with doing this'? Indeed how far it deviates from what the player assumes is optimal is the first part of consideration. The orientation towards optimal is ever present in the mind, it is inescapable and even those who seek to defy it are playing by its rules. If it is mere vanity they want to take suboptimal then whether its too big a price is the concern, if its the question of exploring new potential, then analyzing future possibilities starts with assessing what you have lost from the accepted standard. You can not escape the relationship.
People will use this simple interplay between the game and the player, the objective and the rules, as part of their decision making even when they do not consider themselves optimizers. It is inseparable from game playing.

So then when people say "why not just ignore it", there is no end to this reasoning, it is no different from saying 'if a certain powerful item breaks the game, just dont use it' or 'why not attack allies instead of enemies'? Its all chaos! If a point of balance doesnt matter then no point of balance matters because it has shifted the responsibility away from the game, and towards the player, and now you have the player setting the rules and you have lost what makes a game a game, no longer are you framing your perspective along the objective and the rules and wandering the maze of possibilities the game provides, a thing those who even seek to defy the optimal are forced to give them something to react against. You enter an entirely unstructured nongame where there is nothing but aimlessness

The game should oppose the player, the player should oppose the game. Never should anything depend on them cooperating because the motion of experience of playing the game, its harmonious concord, is created from this discord.

So you don’t like the earlier Baldur’s Gate games, then?

Honestly thinking about picking up Solasta and checking it out. Found out about it through these forums in fact.

As for the commentary on rolling vs point buy stats while off topic here I think it's best they give us both options. At the end of the day if you want to sit there and roll for hours until you get 6 18s then that's your choice. Honestly, it's not going to make a 'massive' difference to the game overall. You're still subject to the limitations of random dice rolling. You get a 1 and you fail in most cases, you're just stacking the odds slightly in your own favor. Taking these options away from us is just the seemingly common Dev mentality of "You're not playing our game the way we want you to". I want to play the game the way I would like to and there simply is no viable argument to not include all the various stat creation systems here. At least for single player. I somewhat understand if they wanted to create a limitation for 'multiplayer' characters and lock them in to point buy so everyone is on equal ground. At the end of the day if Larian doesn't put this in I'd give it about a day before mods appear for it.

Very well put, thank you for taking the time.

I can definitely see where you are coming from, and agree in parts, though I believe we differ slightly in how we view games which is obviously subjective and therefore understandable.

While I do believe that there is naturally interplay between the game and the player, setting the level of challenge and therefore to some extent how you wish to interact with the game relies on the player in most games, which is typically reflected in difficulty selection, or other optional settings that can be enabled. This is obviously not a universal truth, as I would not think the same of a Soulslike game, however it tends to apply to CRPGs almost universally, at least based on the ones I've played.

Though I will say for the purposes of testing balance, as in the Early Access period we have here for BG3 having Point Buy makes sense as it allows for the developers to create a baseline experience that they can then adjust into difficulties for release; I would just like to have more options available when release happens. For Solasta I can't speak too much, I bought it because of all the talk here but haven't had time to really try it past the tutorial, but it seems less logical that they would not have some kind of restriction considering they are still in early access to find that balance.



I won't outright dispute this, as I believe this comes down to the individual player, and I do believe that most people want to be more powerful. Personally my issue with point buy is that you have to pay closer attention to Race/Class combinations to get decent stats. A +2 to your STR on a Fighter is pretty important to disregard if you are limited with the point buy system, but I like to roll characters without worrying about what the optimal combination would be. If I get the chance to roll a 16+ and can dump that into STR it doesn't matter if my race doesn't give me a good ability for it, I'll still be effective in that role. I think this opens up more possibilities for fun characters without suffering too much disadvantage for it. That's really what I look for, the ability to create freely so that I don't have to worry about being punished for not being completely optimal.

Additionally I feel like having slightly better stats (I'm not talking straight 18s) actually makes me want to play with feats more, with point buy I almost never end up getting a feat as ability scores seem to be more universally important, so not having to worry about my stats as much opens up more possibilities for me. I think having some negative stats can add interest to your character though, as long as you have a decent primary stat that's all I really care about.

I personally feel like it's better for the onus to fall on the player, particularly when we aren't talking a PvP game where everything must be equal, as long as a baseline difficulty is already set for each encounter. I don't feel like being able to roll your stats will create the chaos that you seem to envision, it just serves to give people the choice of how they wish to play, but again that's perfectly fine.




This again to me comes down to the idea of difficulty and expectation. As someone who typically plays games to have fun and for a bit of escapism, and who doesn't typically play games above "Normal" difficulty, I prefer not to find too much opposition from my games. Everyone has something different that they want out of games though, which is why I oppose the idea of limiting these options; by imposing more limitations you start to narrow the scope of appeal away from a broader audience.

Personally I'm hoping that we end up with a robust selection of difficulties, which I believe Larian will have based on DoS2, so that as many people as possible can play how they want.

In one of their videos, they suggested if they didnt add the option to reroll people would create a cheat to do it anway. You dont have to reroll!, I didn't. I used standard array. Its on you to not min/max etc. All the options are there, point buy, standard array, roll. So yeah your kind of completely wrong. Edit: if you want to cheese the game thats on the individual. Why would you care how other people play a single player game. Really weird.

Solasta looks terrible though, it's aesthetics are just bad. I get it's a small studio, I just don't care for the style at all. In addition it's story is all kinds of weak. With practically zero character development. If you are going to compare it to BG3, the comparison is not in Solasta's favor. In BG3 you get an actual complex story, with developed characters, in a great looking game. The trade off for that is some barrels explode, it's really not a big deal.

I think the game overall has its charm, but budget or not bloody hell if these characters models don't seem to be come straight from 2001.
I'm not even sure why even their old demo had better ones.

Earlier BG games weren't based on 5th edition though, which is what's the topic here is. Different time different version of DnD.

Guess you were not reading when most people used it for mechanic implementation comparisons. If they had the budget i'm sure it would be a million times better than just being a near perfect translation of the 5e ruleset. Having good graphics, passable writers and better sound department is not exactly an accomplishment when you actually have the money and license to do it, it should be "The Standard" in 2020, specially if you went for a "AAA Price Tag" on EA.

This was a problem with earlier games. Back then i played them, i remember sitting and rolling. I remember some earlier games even had built in rollers for you, you would set certain parameters to meet and then set it rolling over night. People will say "why do this instead of simply using some kind of save editor or other cheats" but this missess the point, the point is that the auto-rerolling system was built into the game, thus it was even a sanctioned mechanic. This illustrates the depths of absurdity this sort of thing lead to and the general state of the culture around the games before people realized it was far more sensible to just make point buy standard. Now its standard in videogames and to my understanding is even the most commonly used tabletop method.



If you take difficulty into consideration, you should consider what you always end up with in games with difficulty levels. You might find people discussing the game and its strategy and they are naturally discussing the hardest configuration in most cases because if something works there it works everywhere, but if something works on an easier difficulty it may not on higher ones. This demonstrates the general tendency for people to think in terms of the hardest settings. In effect then the community decided the hardest setting is the baseline, and the rest are simply degrees more easy. This only really changes in my experience when you are talking about an adaptation. In those cases the community might have simply come to an understanding that the 'standard' difficulty holds the actual base line. Such a thing might end up being the case here, depending on what difficulty options we receive.


Concerns like this i see as problems with the game itself. It is true for example that using point buy or standard array makes feats less of a fun and interesting customization mechanic than in earlier editions. Classess tend to get more features now that somewhat compensate for this, but overall when it comes to races and feats and builds in general you do certainly feel a little more shoehorned to follow less flexible paths. I would not say the solution to this is just to throw attributes at things but rather i would say this is something that the system should fix.

What does this attribute overload solution do but in fact reduce the distinctness of races and other options? A mere +1 to a stat, when using point buy or standard array, means that that race has a certain shape to it, what you can do with it is encouraged. Too strong an encouragement leads to restriction, but no encouragement loses distinctness. So in the past when point buy systems might make a certain race having +1 simply mean they have fewer points to work with if they want to start with the next modifier, now it means they are stuck at 15 instead of that critical 16 which plays so well with the +2 attribute modifiers.

This again seems to be a problem with the design of the system, which just trades one problem for another using a high rolled stat solution. You go from certain races needing to be used for certain things, to the race not really mattering at all.



Its not so much difficulty. It goes beyond this, as i tried to show even someone who is not trying to optimize, is still going to inescapably by aware of the direction of optimal. You have demonstrated it yourself, for why would you be restricted in what race and class you pick in point buy if you didn't mind starting with only a +2 modifier in a main attribute? The problem of low stats is a problem because you know what the ideal is. Whether you try to optimize or not you are still trapped within the frame of reference of the optimum. If you want to do something that is bad then you feel upset, if you want to do something thats really good, then you are happy that the character you have already birthed in concept will be good and strong.

Challenge of a sort is ever present in all things. You can not assess anything at all with out comparing it, and comparison is a sort of competition. When it comes to a game people often think in terms of difficulty as in 'what can be done in the game', and measure success or failure by what singular feats they are able to accomplish - beating a game being the most straightforward example. But this is not really the correct line of thinking. Games, mostly, are designed to be beaten. How do you compare two victories then? You can. You can watch two runs of a game, both of which obtain victory, and say that one was better than the other. In the early days of electronic games this was mostly done by a score system, the high score. It was not a thing that could ever have a definite finish, only be better or worse relative to what it was before. Players may compare their own abilities between each other as a form of competition, or may refrain from it. But what you cant escape comparing yourself to, is yourself. Humans will naturally do this, you learn by trial and error and reason. So when you play one thing for fun, and then play another thing for fun, you are comparing them, you are smashing them together in your mind, judging their value in countless ways to come to basic concepts like 'this abilities quite good' or other simple observations. This is competition.

Its introspection i think. People get upset about things, or happy about things. They will complain about elements of the game or praise others. These simply come from them having good or bad experiences. The targets of their complaints may often be misdirected, because people do not look past the buzzwords they extol. In the end its all about conflict and resolution, internal, external, they are the same things on different perspectives. So going back to before, when you explained why you like the idea of higher stats, you were resolving a conflict that existed in the games system itself with the feats being limited in this edition of the game. You do it with a readily available method - such attribute rolls are not a new concept and though out of favor of late they are a mechanism that already exists but does not exist here. So if this mechanism can fix the problem surely it is the correct solution, and the lack of this solution must surely be the cause of the frustration you experience. It makes sense, but it does not address the problem and only compensates for it. Perhaps this is a correct method, it will produce new problems being an imperfect solution that must be fixed and on and on we go forward. but unfortunately i doubt we will get that amount of system modification in this specific game. If we get stat rolls i doubt they will rework 5th edition to compensate for the now effective meaninglessness of racial bonuses, at least +1s. So we will be left with the blandness of freedom, which removes choice in the guise of giving it, for when all choices are the same you only have one, and have lost even the ability to be sub optimal.

If they had the same budget, the game would be completely different.
The bigger the budget, the more copies they have to sell, which means they have to attract as many players as possible.
Unfortunately, the game requires changes that will attract players unfamiliar with D&D.
The smaller the game require less compromise. If TA sell 100k copies, it will be a huge success for them.

Except, that is pure speculation. Some people just have a clear idea of what they want to do with the money they are given, some never do. You can't talk in behalf of Larian either, they have to make their own statements for any projects/ideas they are working on, at least when you claim you want to be honest and transparent with your customers. False publicity and advertising is when you claim that something is what it actually isn't just to lure more people in. So i could claim something is "Based on X" just because i say so, i have the license or because it is my own perception but calling it a factual statement that should be accepted/adopted by every single person on the planet, well....

I just can't pretend that D&D rulesets never existed like many kids around here, so i apologize in advance.