Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General If we are to go from scratch with each patch ,how about a character pool ?

At home we own three copies of the game and commonly play a family run with each patch. The only annoyance is really to recreate your chars in details every single time. How I wish I could have a character to prepare some chars in advance and simply pick from everytime I want to make a new run... funny thing is , I'm pretty sure it's gonna be there eventually after release but it's during the EA where you start and restart a lot that it would be most useful.

Agree or disagree in answers below

+1
Character import and export would be a great feature. I've seen a thread regarding this topic a couple times before, so you're not alone.

It'd be even better if BG3 also supported conversion to and from PnP character sheets, though exporting BG3 characters to pdf character sheets is likely much easier than the reverse.

+1 to have a pool of characters that you could have saved.

At least their basic starts attributes and etc as level 1 fully created. I am not seeing this as saving character as level 4 with all items, gold and experience carried over that would be wrong I think.

You could have examples saved a few favorite characters builds as level 1.

+1000000 YES! It's driving me crazy trying to remember how I created my plethora of characters each time.

+1 this thing is demanded for quite some time by now.

I'd love this as well, currently I'm writting down the details of the characters I make to recreate them later but this would save me a lot of time.

There was an article about this issue in my feed the other day. I don't tend to read to them anymore and would struggle to find it now, but the player made the point that in D&D traditionally its important to be able to bring a new character into the campaign on the fly. Not being able to do this in BG3, but being forced to roll up your group for the entire campaign at the start is problematic for a bunch of reasons.

In BG and BG2, Icewind Dale etc this was handled pretty well, as you could import/replace characters at any point when loading up a Multi-player session just by clicking on a portrait at launch.

You could even do it as a single player, playing a LAN session in MP, which is how just about everyone played the game regardless of how often they actually intended to play as a group. It was convenient, and even allowed the host to switch their protagonist Character at any point during the session. There were also simple methods for a new joiner to level up/down one of their pregen PCs, to match the rest of the group.

The main thrust of the article was that, in D&D, people really don't want to play as "your character" or as some rando preset companion when joining a campaign. They want to play as their own character!

Many people who have been playing for D&D for ages, have a personal back-catalogue of favorite Characters. That's who they want to play. Not Lae'zel or Shadowheart or whoever. But as I understand it, right now you can only do this if everyone is on board from the start. As mentioned above, this doesn't work all that well if you have a family or group of friends who may want to hop in at some later point.


For me Baldur's Gate has always been a single player game, so this is not the most important thing for me personally. I have like zero interst in co-op or the MP experience for this game, but I can totally understand why it would be frustrating for people who come into it from the table top and have certain expectations that in D&D they will be able to play their own custom characters. That's like the whole point of Dungeons and Dragons as a role playing game and a major part of the appeal.

"Importing" a favorite character in group play is not just a nice feature to have, its the beating heart of the thing for a lot of people.

I don't think this is a feature that should be prioritized as I do not think this will be an issue once the game is out of Early Access. The reason for the starting from scratch now is that each patch introduces changes into the story and mechanics that can outright invalidate the character files you had previously played with. Once the game has gotten settled into a stable form, that won't be an issue until DLC story content becomes a thing and even then that would only impact the beta/early access testers for said DLC content and once it's a stable, finished form, it won't be a problem again.

This is an early access reality, not a final game design.

I remember back before patch 4 (where they introduced the druids) someone from Larian said that update would be the last one where our old saved games wouldn't be playable after the patch. (Unless you kept the old version of the game.) They were doing that up until that patch because so many things were changing in the game, it would have taken too much work to convert the save files to be usable in the new game. But after that patch it should be stable enough to be able to keep save games after patches. Apparently there must have been enough changes in patch 5 that they couldn't keep to that.

I'm okay with this because it is early access, and I'd rather they focus their energies on completing the game and fixing problems rather than converting saved games. But at the same time I hope they got things to the point where we won't lose saved games after the next big patch.

I can't imagine that they won't include some mechanism to allow characters to be created at higher levels, to facilitate forming parties in multiplayer. It could be a thing where you still create a level 1 character, but as soon as you join a group with a higher level character everyone is brought up to that level. That mechanic is already in the game. It happens whenever you leave a character at camp for a while. Next time they join your party you have to level them till they match you, which could be 1 to 3 levels. The same mechanic could be used for player characters in multiplayer. But they probably have other things that are more pressing to work on right now.

I always use the LAN game trick to create a 4-person custom party, and what I do is create each character and their love interest one at a time and carefully write down in a text file all the details of their creation in one game, so that when it's actually time to create my party, I can just fill in the pieces quickly instead of spending many minutes in character creation while I have extra copies of the game running.

Something similar could be done if you're just making one character at a time. Create a character to your satisfaction, put the details down in a text file or on paper, then before confirming the character, go back and change everything. That way you can quickly just match the new character with your idea by reading your notes.



Citation needed. I'm positive they never said that. I believe what they DID say was that you could keep playing the old save on the older branch, and that their new patching process should require smaller-sized updates. Of course that there will continue to be updates which break save compatibility - there is so much missing in the game, loads of classes, races, features, and spells.

The full release will also break compatibility with the last Early Access patch.


Why can't you imagine that? The early game is balanced for low level characters. It would be quite difficult to try and scale the entire game (encounter size/type, enemy skills/spells, NPC stuff) to match variable levels, given the immense complexity of D&D.

I believe he only meant creating your character at a specific level and giving extra levels to your character, for multiplayer's sake, not scaling the game world. Honestly, I hope they would just enable console commands like many other games did (original BG, Bethesda games, DAO); that would make so many things easier.

Agreed ... i also dont recall them promising something like that. O_O

They said right from the start that no saved games from EA would be carried over to the full release, but I thought I read or heard something about not losing them after patches at some point. But I must be mistaken since I'm the only one who remembers this, and I can't find anything to confirm it at this point. I did find where they said in PFH 2 that patch 4 would be the last really big download we will need, because they will have code in place that will allow them to only download the parts that were changing, and not require us to download the entire game each time. Maybe I had a brain fart that caused me to confuse that with save game wipes?

I'm not sure. But I know I was listening to PFH 2 while I was working, so my attention was divided. So sorry if I made a false claim based on misremembering something!



I'm not talking about replaying the early game. I was referring to the issue of being able to have new players join friends who were at a higher level in their questing, and how that will be handled.

There is already a way to handle this in the game now. If I send Shadowheart to my camp after meeting her on the beach, she will stay there as a level 1 character. If as a level 4 I finally decide to invite her to an encounter in the Underdark, I will immediately be able to raise her to level 4 to match the rest of the party. The rest of the party is not required to replay all the content she missed out on to get her to level 4. The same thing could be done in multiplayer if you had a level 7 group and wanted to invite a friend to join who just installed the game. Once they join the party their new character could be bumped up to match the party they are joining. Then they just have to be ported to where the rest of the party is. Or to the camp that the party is using.

Since that is already done for NPC party members, it could be easily done for player characters in multiplayer.