Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback [Suggestion] "Fog of War"

Eh, I did say that the performance was a majority of my concern. The rest of what's here just naturally evolved in that direction and I realized that good points were being made.
But anyway, I definitely don't want to impose harsh flat changes across the board. It's my fault that my rig is behind, not everyone else's, and my suggestion isn't intended to make them suffer for the sake of my convenience.
I want everything to have an option, but that's just wishful thinking, I know.

One thing I really like in BG3 is that when you climb up to some high point, you can see farther away. You can move the camera a greater distance when you're up high. Which I think is super cool. But yeah, when you're NOT elevated, they should reduce the max camera movable distance some.

They only logical reason I could see for them not changing this is because they want to preserve the zoomed in camera view that's more level with the ground where you can see out into the distance, as adding a fog of war would ruin the effect that they're trying to achieve by being able to see 40 miles out. Which honestly, I would only ever use for screenshots anyway and I don't believe that being able to do that is more important than both improving performance for people and keeping some of the mystery in the adventure.

I haven’t been able to check out Patch 3 yet, but has there been any progress on fog of war? Or can we still send the camera right into secret rooms?

I haven't put in a ton of time with the new patch, but it seems like neither of these things have been addressed and nothing has been done to remedy these two major problems.
And whatever "performance" and "optimizations" were done are nowhere to be seen on the low-to-medium end of specs.
Some people with brand new setups and hardware have mentioned seeing some gains in performance though.
I'm really happy that they went from 120fps to 140 or whatever and I'm not bitter at all.

Yeah I really hope they fix this. D&D is all about exploration and the DM keeping things secret from the players. All the VTTs I’ve used have fog of war for this very reason (MapTools, Fantasy Grounds, TaleSpire).

I'm still really upset about seeing behind the fireplace at the hag's cottage. I saw it pretty much right when I walked in.
It didn't just tell me that there was something back there, it told me that there was a REASON for something to be back there, which told me that I should be extremely cautious with her.
I didn't get the opportunity to explore that through dialog or by gauging her reactions to the conversation, the lack of what should have simply already been there spoiled that entire scenario for me.
There was no mystery about where to go or what I would end up doing.

It is a two-part issue with me, and both performance and not having things spoiled are equally important to me and a reason that a fog of war option should be available, if not baseline.

Totally agree, and the fireplace is a perfect example, I noticed it immediately too

No news on this front in Patch 4, still a long road to go though… there’s still hope.

I've always felt a bit like being in cheat mode when playing Larian games, because you can look anywhere, even inside hidden rooms.

Yeah that’s exactly it. I’m not too worried about the performance gains OP is mentioning – it’s more that the characters are all clairvoyant right now. As mentioned earlier here, you can see behind Ethel’s fireplace way before you should be able to. Secret doors and hidden areas are totally obvious.