Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Larian's vision of combat or deep gameplay ? One doesn't exclude the other.

Larian has their vision for how combat-and-adventuring should feel like, I have mine, you have yours. That's just tastes, nobody's more right. And Larian is the one making the game, so they'll make the game according to their vision. I've not only said that this is how it should be (and they should not make the game by popular demand), but I'm also happy to help the best version of this vision see the light of day.

So what's the point of this post ? As as I was saying there, it occurred to me that one can discuss some things about Larian's vision.

But first, let me make preferences and visions explicit.

My preferences can be summarised as : a deep, meaty/crunchy combat experience. A bit more precisely :
- Planning long term (strategy), knowing the rules, sharpening your character sheet and having the law of large numbers work for you is fine. Tactical thinking is just as great.
- Attack action and End Turn is fine. That's what martial/melee classes are meant to do a lot of the time.

The way I understand Larian's vision :
- "Ka-boom". Fireworks and damage.
- Out-of-the-box thinking. Creativity. "Omg this worked, lol, epic", and "ok, so in that world you can do that, cool".


What I've come to realise lately (and if this was obvious to you ages ago, please be kind to my slowness) is this simple thing : these are not mutually exclusive.

a) For there to be a meaningful out-of-the-box gameplay, there needs to be a meaningful inside-the-box gameplay.

Without a satisfying inside-the-box, basic, core gameplay, the out-of-the-box gameplay becomes the default. And it loses its "aha" value.

b) Out-of-the-box grows stale faster than a deep, core gameplay does.

The first 10h-20h are full-of-wonders, but once you've gotten used to the universe, the mechanisms, the gameplay, etc, combat currently becomes a bit stale. When a clever, funny, outside-the-box idea is designed as the expected way to play, it becomes a repetitive gimmick. And when a basic, core strat has a big "Use me" label on it that over-incentivises its use, it doesn't encourage the use of other strats.

Deep and meaty games, like Chess (but also Hive, Terraforming Mars, etc) are massively replayable and replayed. I understand that Larian wants to please the people who'll play the game once (and maybe not even in full), but there are people who will probably play through BG3 at least 3-5 times. So the combat should probably be good and interesting at this time-scale as well.


Seeing as making the outside-the-box combat thrilling isn't incompatible with making the inside-the-box satisfying, Larian, can you please make the basic combat un-broken, deep and balanced ?

Fundamentally, I think it should probably be equally interesting to play exclusively with the Larian-strats as it should be to play fully along a basic, inside-the-box strat.


Note : I'm by no means saying that it's possible to cater to all audiences all the time. Just that, on this particular point (combat), the game can cater to two styles simultaneously.

It certainly could be done, but I just cannot see there being any 'political will' to do so.

As usual, I agree. The sentiment that "when everything is special, nothing is special" has been voiced on these forums repeatedly.

I want the core of the game to be engaging and recognize that attack + end of turn is what I'm going to do a lot of the time. That still gives me plenty of room to think about who I'm going to attack, where I am going to position myself, whether I am better off charging through the front line to put pressure on the back line instead of attacking, whether I need to focus on defending for a bit. These decisions are meaty and engaging all on their own.

I don't mind adding a little flash and glitz, but you have to have the meat there first. The way they talk about, e.g. the bless spell being boring makes it sound like they assume that I am a toddler with a 10-second attention span and that I'm not going to be happy unless everything is explosions. If that's what they're committed to, then this game just isn't for me.

On the other hand, if they can get the meat right and vary the challenges in each fight, we can create our own glitz. Coming up with clever ways to use environmental hazards to your advantage, for instance, feels much better (to me anyway) than being handed the same box of firecrackers in every fight. But those environmental hazard have to change - we can't just have a race to the high ground every time.

Amen!

Honestly, the stream didn't give me much faith on this topic. Larian doesn't seem to be interested in making any changes to rein in things like jump/disengage and high ground advantage/low ground disadvantage along with the lack of proactive defensive options like ready actions and dodge, judging from the idea that they just completely dodged literally any mention of these. This, despite the community giving them about 2 months worth of focused feedback since the last patch. They were more interested in showing off the flash rather than going into a deep dive on the mechanics and showing that they actually understood how everything they were creating worked and interacted with each other.

I mean, let's be real, adding in stuff like reactions and the dodge action wouldn't detract from the out of the box design at all, if anything it would give more variety and an extra layer of strategy to the combat. I legit don't understand why a portion of the community and even Larian themselves appear to be resistant to this topic. The game as it is now is too reactive, there's hardly any proactive planning besides pre-battle setup or coming up with a way to cheese the fight in the first 2 turns, because otherwise the absurd action economy that everyone has access to means your party is most likely to be completely overwhelmed in longer fights unless you're taking advantage of choke points or high ground or something.


At this point, this is probably the most accurate reason as to why certain concerns are just seemingly ignored.

Watching the hag fight go sideways in the stream was rather entertaining, and some would say it's rather endearing to see 'realistic' gameplay. At the same time, it also gives off the impression that they don't really know how to balance things, because their core design philosophy has always been about letting players experiment and figure it out for themselves, which may have lead to one of the lead directors themselves forgetting certain basic mechanics in their live demonstration mid-fight. But at some point, that endearment should turn into actual concern.

The sandbox 'cobble everything together enough to have a working combat system and then let players figure everything out for themselves, and hopefully enable out of the box strategies' philosophy has now only become a shield to deflect criticism, as one can see from a portion of the community just straight up refusing to care about our feedback and deflecting any and all criticism on this topic, without the introspection needed to see that the game CAN be better if the design were to be a bit more focused. As it is now, the combat just looks like a lot of disconnected ideas coming together to form quite a mess, hence one of my earlier comments basically considering the game's combat to be akin to a puzzle game that just happens to have RPG mechanics, rather than an actual strategic RPG in its current state.

+1 to this sentiment. tbh i was really disappointed in the panel content - i know we got some speakers and that some ppl enjoyed watching swen 'play' the game, but i would have preferred more discussion addressing the hot topics cited in these forums and in other community spaces instead of hearing swen blaming the 'loaded dice' for not being able to game the hag encounter with the shapeshifted druid or gales flaming sphere. and did anyone else know that you could heal someone by throwing a potion at them? lol wut?

I was also a little disappointed after the panel. As much as I like the new additions I was really hoping they will at least hint at how they are planning to approach the issues a lot of people have with current combat and resting. Im okay if its something they dont want to rush to tweak but it would be nice to know whether they are looking into these or they dont have in plan to make any changes (or to give the option to change) to the current rules because of any reasons.