Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Larian's gimmicks are like an invasive species to an ecosystem

100% makes sense.
Hence I doubt Larian cares.
Sadly their target base for this game isn't D^D or previous Baldur's gate players. Its just there for marketing.

Um...if they are not targeting DnD players or previous Baldur's Gate players, what is the point of the marketing? They just spending the money for the Hell of it? You don't like the game? Cool. No need to tar two massively diverse communities with your brush.

Most likely because they made a significant sum of money on DOS/DOS2 sales; it makes sense that they'd rather cater to fans who enjoy barrelmancy, superhero jumps, and surface-spam-boogaloo.

Though it does fly directly in the face of Larian's earlier statements that they didn't want to make a 'reskinned DOS'.

That's the point I'm making. I keep seeing people claiming the Baldur's Gate tag is just a cynical marketing ploy at the same time as saying DnD and BG players are not the target market. It's a literal non-sequitur.

I can't tell you that there's no logic to it. They want to attract a NEW audience to the old franchise. That's why game has cut scenes and many features are simplified. To make it easier for people who are not familiar with BG and DnD to understand. If they wanted to please old BG fans, they wouldn't even think about the cutscenes, obviously. Many new players have not even heard about such a game as BG, they literally learned about its existence thanks to BG3. Imagine, it's been 20+ years. People who are now 20-25 years old may never have heard of this game, because it is very old. Even if they heard about it, they probably weren't playing. This has its own logic. You were attracted by the name, and others were attracted by everything else.

In theory, Larian can revive franchise, but, of course, not for you, but for a new generation of players.

Well, the problem is that they made conflicting statements about their vision of the game prior to EA. They talked about how they all loved and played the original games, and were huge fans of DnD, and then released BG3 into EA, which is basically a DOS skeleton with some DnD trappings, and then in the Panel from Hell, they basically said they didn't understand 5E rules, and didn't even bother trying to implement most of them.

In it's current state, I doubt they are going to really satisfy any group, it plays like a DOS game hampered by having characters that are built around 5E, and then had their class skills nullified by DOS game features.

And? Did they lie? They can love original BG and DnD, but still see them in their own way. Larian never said that they would comply rules 100%, Swen said this in his interview, they would do everything their own way. It wasn't a surprise.
Judging by the reviews in steam, BG3 is already liked by a huge group of players, but yes, these are more new players than fans of old games. By the way, these players didn't even play DOS. I've noticed that more often they come from other RPGs, like The Witcher or Dragon Age, it's definitely influence of cutscenes, сompanions and romance, not gameplay. Larian, of course, tried to attract attention of the old players too, but they never said that this is their main audience, right?

I have no idea why you're saying that old BG fans wouldn't like cutscenes. Unless you're arguing that old BG fans want only the mechanics and game features that were in BG 1&2 and no more, which is such an incredible strawman that there's not much more to say.

Reviving the franchise isn't mutually exclusive with making a game that's true to D&D 5e, and the presence of cutscenes even more so isn't mutually exclusive with D&D.

Yeah as an old BG player I like the cutscenes. But I don’t want a ton of them at the expense of solid gameplay and that’s what we are getting right now.

I don't believe that one can use "love" to describe one's feelings for something that one doesn't actually understand. So no, I don't believe Sven was being truthful when he said that they "love DnD" considering that they don't seem to understand the rules, or their significance to being what makes it "DnD".

"The cool thing we found is that a lot of what makes D&D, D&D, actually survived the translation, so I think that if you like Dungeons and Dragons and you want to play BG3, you’re going to be happy."
-Swen Vincke
https://www.pcgamesn.com/baldurs-gate-3/larian-interview

This is a very inaccurate statement as it stands, since very little of "DnD" has survived Larian's attempt to translate it. He should replace DnD with DOS2, because the game is far more like DOS2 than it is Dungeons and Dragons.

Honnestly I think everyone agree that the game has a huge potential but it's strange to see (some) D&D and DoS fans dissapointed.

The game has it's ass between 2 chairs and is not fully satisfying whatever you like more one or the other.

I really think that they should try to keep the whole balanced (their mechanics + D&D).

Choices for fun are 100% fine (like barrelmancy, unlimited items to stole,...) but a lot of players also enjoyed DoS because it's a strategy TB game. On the other hand a lot enjoy D&D because it has hundreds of possibilities.

Not sure how combats could be satisfying if those hundreds of possibilities are close to useless and if at the same time, the strategies to use are always the same.

"Don't like it, don't use it" works for fun choices like barrelmancy but not with the main features of the game. By main feature I mean verticality, close combat rules, how magic works, etc.... But ofc i.e even dipping and throwing items are main features of this game (we have a specific bonus/action) and I'd love being able to choose them among many other possibilities rather than "using it (or not) because it's OP".

The problem is that DOS mechanics are inimical to 5E. Couple that with Larian's cavalier rule changes, and you've just got a poorly balanced game, that plays like DOS2 with characters built for another game.

The problem with just saying "barrelmancy and the other Larian tropes are optional", is that they really aren't. Barrels litter the landscape, and if you don't use them or at least acknowledge them and plan around them, then the AI will. Same with push, same with height for automatic Advantage.

If their goal was to make a game that differentiated from DOS, and didn't feel like a 'reskin', then at the moment, they've failed.

I played the old BG games and still love BG3. But you can like a game and still point out it's flaws, that's not a contradiction.
I agree with the op about this topic and hope, that maybe it gets changed a bit in the final game.

My judgment is based on what people say "I don't need cutscenes, they should have invested in something else" and "look at Pathfinder" where there are no cutscenes either. It all comes down to the fact that at least the cutscenes for BG fans are the least important. But cutscenes will 100% attract new players from other, more action RPGs. I was talking more about old fans, not about DnD.
Wut about DnD, I was talking about simplifying the rules. Many people here are convinced that everyone who plays video games has played DnD and knows the rules. This is not true. This is why simplify rules to reach a larger audience is logical.



This is your personal, very subjective opinion, not an argument. BG3 have DnD elements u know, world itself, dice system and much more, maybe they were talking about it? There IS NO WORD in this quote THAT THEY WILL 100% FOLLOW THE RULES.

Vincke said the creators approached the project by working out “the rulesets very meticulously and then seeing what worked and what didn’t work. For the things that didn’t work, because it is a videogame, and D&D was made for playing as a tabletop game, we came up with solutions”.
https://www.pcgamesn.com/baldurs-gate-3/dungeons-and-dragons-fifth-edition

At what point does simplifying the rules take it away from the very thing it purports to be though? Whatever happened to learning something new? The insinuation that you have to dumb down DnD to appeal to a broader audience does not seem to make sense to me, given the huge rise in popularity of the PnP game.

The sad reality is they marketed it as a 5e DnD game but in the end what we will get is DOS:3 with some DnD mixed in. I dont see anything from Larian that suggests the contrary.

While I like DOS series, I was expecting a DnD game this time. I guess Solasta and Pathfinder(wich is basically 3.5 in another universe) will have to do it.

Cant help but feel cheated.

The most common argument I've heard against cutscenes is that every single NPC (especially those with one line that you can't actually respond to) shouldn't be cutscene dialogues because that just wastes time. Or, similarly, that there are too many cutscenes and gameplay has been sacrificed. Not that there should be 0 cutscenes.
And most people say "look at Pathfinder" because its faithful rules implementation has led to a fun game, which means that Larian could do the same for BG3/D&D. Yes, Owlcat's Pathfinder games don't have cutscenes, but this lack isn't what makes them good games.

DnD 5e is already the simplest version of D&D to ever exist. In fact, I'd argue that Larian has made the rules more complicated by adding their homebrew. Jumping+disengaging, prevalence of consumables and their additional surface effects, plethora of additional bonus actions, food, all serve to add bloat to the system. Plus, Larian just doesn't do a good job of explaining either the 5e rules or their homebrew. The game can be confusing to new players and D&D veterans alike, because the tutorial doesn't introduce all the necessary concepts, and tooltips/combat log don't explain enough. So the argument that "Larian wants to ensure everybody understands all the mechanics in our game" is not that great of an argument.

Whilst I take your broader point, I have seen old BG fans arguing exactly that. Had an entire Youtube comment argument with someone claiming that a Baldur's Gate game shouldn't call itself Baldurs Gate unless it's RTWP...

Go to SteamDB and compare pre-release sales, concurrency figures and average playtime for BG3 and Solasta and you have your answer. It might not make sense to you but it's an out-and-out fact of the modern gaming genre. The PnP game may have increased its following significantly, but computer gaming has exploded in the last 10 years and now for the first time console players exceed PC players.

I've not seen a single person argue anywhere that Solasta isn't a much better, truer adaptation of the DnD ruleset to a cRPG format than BG3. It even has higher ratings from its players than BG3, probably as a direct result.

But BG3 has sold more copies, more people who bought it played it, they played it for longer, and are still playing it. Of couse that's an over-simplified perspective, but it's compelling all the same...

There are of course extremists, but I think (I hope) that these are in the, possibly loud, minority. As a BG and crpg fan, it's obvious to me that it is not one specific mechanic that defines a game. BG3 can be a faithful sequel to the BG franchise without perfectly recreating its mechanics.

In fact, it is impossible for BG3 to perfectly recreate all of BG1&2 because there is no way that WotC will allow Larian to use older versions of D&D. Changes are required, and even can be good, while still retaining the spirit of BG, whatever that is.

A more useful metric would be comparing the ratios of (# of copies sold)/($ spent on development and advertising). Of course BG3 is going to sell better; it's the game from the company that had a huge hit with DOSII, it has a much larger development team, and has had a much higher budget. Whereas Solasta is the first game from a development team of ~12 people.

Also, BG3 selling better than Solasta doesn't mean that all of Larian's decisions are justified. If Larian had made BG3 more faithful to 5e, it could be selling 50% better...or it could be selling 50% worse. But I argue it'd probably be selling better, given the near ~universal praise for Solasta's mechanics, and the decent chunk of negativity for BG3's mechanics