Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Please allow blood/dead bodies to decay/disappear overtime

Fresh blood under fresh dead bodies that youve killed early in the game after several nights of rest feels a bit jarring and a little messy. Especially when its in your camp. Is it very difficult to implement some sort of decay feature? The blood turns brown, the bodies turn into skeletons then eventually disappear. Or just disappear after a while. Also explosives and materials destroyed tend to linger around battle areas. I sort of understand this one, but its still odd to see all of it still there as if it happened moments ago, like the battle infront of the druids cove. All that crap is still there along with the dead bodies.

I feel that corpses should become draggable.

There is this wierd desire I have... to make art ouf of my victims...

Having suggested this myself (here), I'm 100% in agreement with that.

The only "problem" is that before solving this, Larian must find a way to account for time in the game. Everywhere throughout the game. And consistently. Currently, the game has no time. Well, almost. Whatever little time it has is broken.

- You can take a 1-hour short rest during a round in turn-based mode, which is supposedly 6 seconds.

- You can have two characters who received the same Bless spell (10 rounds duration), the first one is in combat, the other is out of combat and losing rounds of Bless at an alarming speed. When the second character joins the fight, their Bless might have expired while the first one still has 9 rounds of Bless.

- If you haven't made a note for yourself of how many times you used long rest, you have no way of knowing how many days have passed since you crashed on the beach.

So at the moment, this problem cannot be solved. But it definitely should. And time should definitely be accounted for.

Interesting stuff. Yes you are right about all of these things, I have not thought of this. So they are all interconnected with time in the game, and time especially matters and should be measurable in a tactical rpg if you are not using tiles. Decay as a whole should apply to all things in combat during actions and out of combat, at a consistent/constant speed

It would be nice to have night cycles if not just for the ability to play a rouge properly. When it comes to D&D I think long resting, short resting and day and night play a major factor in gameplay as well as immersion. I understand they never had to worry about it in a game like divinity but this is a totally different franchise and many of the rules are all interconnected and depend on eachother.

I think the most important thing right now affecting the game is sleep, camping. Usually in a D&D setting, getting a long rest is very infrequent and would be not available if you went out to dungeon crawl or adventuring. Which in turn makes preparation so much more important and exciting. You prepare your spells that day, you buy food and supplies and stock up because your journey will be long. You cant just teleport back to base at any given moment.

I personally think not having time and proper sleep cycles and hit dice removes the major fun factor from the D&D aspect and makes the game way too easy/skyrim like. I truly hope they make long rests very limited and once in a while / once a day abilities.

Solasta did a great job on this. In that game you have limited hit dice that you use to restore yourself during short rests. Short rests are infinite but your hit dice are not. Long rests can only be done at inns and fast traveling may encounter a battle along the way so it truly makes preparation and saving items very important.

Hope they listen!

I see this sort of feature as pretty low priority. Larian still has much to do with building out races and classes and balancing what is already there. I can only see emersion stuff like this being prioritized after the game is in a more complete state. Bodies disappearing with items left behind is my best hope for something being implemented soon.

There is a game timer. It is not implemented for everything though. It is easiest to see on surfaces: hover over a surface and some of them will display a translucent popup with time in it. Fog Cloud, for example, starts at 3600 I think. Ash starts at 600. Fire generated by spells/alcohol/etc. starts at 3 or so. Those numbers are in rounds within combat, and I think they count 6-second intervals outside of combat too. When the timer runs down, the area clears - ice turns to water, fire turns to ash, ash vanishes.

But I definitely believe that it should be implemented for bloodstains and bodies, especially since the underlying mechanism is already implemented. Maybe bodies could attract scavengers and you could start all over... nah, too exploitable. In order to stop player 'lost my loot' rage, the timer on bodies should only start after a player opens the body's inventory. It would probably help save file size/speed too.

Short rest is available in combat?! Oh, new exploit to use. That's a serious party heal available for free - who needs a cleric?

The simplest solution would be all blood map-wide disappears on short rests, all bodies disappear on long rests (presumably some scavengers or good samaritans dealt with them).

With the new patch they started to try a way to manage dead bodies (blood stains are another problem): the cadavers of the mobs killed in the battle at the gates of the Druid's lair disappeared.


(On a side note: a world full of dragons, vampires, demons, immortal beings, gods, but people decides that being able to teleport to a safe camp is not acceptable because somehow irrationale, there are magics able to create deflective shields, to create explosions, fire, that allow to speak to animals, and said animals have brains able to formulate phrases like that of the more evoluted humanoid races, still the existence of a booyah able to teleport someone into a safe area is a no no because supposedly incoherent or irrationale).

To your side note, there’s no real issue with the ability to do so – it just needs to be explained/handled better. D&D is built on rules and mechanics. If those are ignored, then anything is possible – meaning there is no real tension or stakes. Imagine playing a game of D&D where the DM has put a huge amount of effort into developing a challenging dungeon crawl but the players (without any access to teleport magic which is much higher level) just say they’re going to ‘port back to camp’ every time things get tough. Ridiculous.

Yes. The fact that there's magic in the world isn't incompatible with good world-building and doesn't mean "everything goes". Most fantasy books and video games understand that pretty basic fact. Also, leaving immersion aside, DnD 5E is a game with rules, and among other things it is built around the idea of managing resources and resting. Granting insta-rest after every fight breaks it. It's like taking loans in Monopoly.

Coming back to time,
It might be a quick and cheap fix, in terms of coding it. It could do the trick if the goal was to solve the bodies issue as soon as possible. But I think the goal should be to make the game overall good for when it's released in full, and such quick fixes now might end up having to be undone later on. What I'm saying is just that I'm wary of quick fixes, and I would rather have the core issues be addressed and solved first. Then, the other pieces should fall in place naturally.

The game should probably figure out how to really account for time. Or do so better. There should be a way to know what day/time it is.

A short rest should probably take about 1h, as per 5E rules. And then, blood could disappear after 1h too, regardless of whether we use short rest. A long rest should probably either take about 8h, or push us forward in time to "next morning at 9am". Then, bodies could disappear after 24h, or the next long rest after 2 mornings (or whatever seems appropriate), regardless of how frequently we long rest.

It's probably more of a performance issue than an immersion issue in the end. Every instance of a body and blood is something the game has to remember. Now how big a factor that is depends a lot on the engine, and I don't know enough about that to say it's going to have a big impact, but we can say for sure that it is going to add up.

Isn't every instance of a body and blood already something that the game has to remember? It has to actively display them every time you get close. I would think that having less of those to remember by periodically removing them from the game would actually be helpful from a performance standpoint.

Edit: Re-reading what you wrote, we might be saying the same thing. I'm not sure if you're talking about keeping track of bodies is a performance issue or keeping track of decay is a performance issue. I wrote assuming the latter.

It was the former

Great! Let's agree to agree.

its immersion breaking. Its not the teleport its the fact that its apart of the RP and the game, and they remove it to hand you things on a silver platter, like how games get easier and easier over time because newer players are lazier and have no imagination. RPGs now have minimaps that give you a golden path to your location you dont even have to think just walk in a direction and fast travel. This is not like D&D. Sleeping is a huge reward, especially long rests which make you think twice about wasting your best spells and you prepare thoughtfully your spells in the morning. Fast traveling in a game like Solasta for example shows you walking along the map and you may be randomly stopped by bandits. The rest of the walk you are crafting food and camping in between depending on the trip length.


Some people want steak for dinner, others want greasy potato chips blended with milk, sucked down by a straw thats directly hooked into their stomach. What can I say.

Like Ray of Frost can turn blood into ice and then evaporate, I suggest Acid Sprinkle which would dissolve bodies and get bones instead.
In my first topic, I proposed an area effect cantrip spell to disintegrate the empty bodies on the ground.

[quote=Bufotenina]With the new patch they started to try a way to manage dead bodies (blood stains are another problem): the cadavers of the mobs killed in the battle at the gates of the Druid's lair disappeared.[/quote]
Indeed