Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Low pool of EA testers worries me

I think 60 gb and dropping a Sorcerer on us will have to qualify as meeting the moment hehe. I'm sure it'll pick up again after the new patch, as it tends to do. Hopefully they keep us on the hook for with a big Saturnalia follow up too!

The gloomhammer tends to show up pretty heavy towards the end of their update cycle here, like at the 4 month mark the weight starts to get real. I think its just a bit too long to wait, and the enthusiasm for the new only lasts about a month or so. Hopefully they can push stuff out at a more steady clip and it doesn't take another year to get the Paladins and Bards, UI upgrades and such. I try to remain hopefull. I'm kind of excited to check out the Sorcerer for the knock on effect with the Wizards. Like in the hopes that maybe they have created a new spellcasting UI beyond just the hotbar thing? That'd be nice to see. I also hope somewhere in that 60gb are couple new soundsets or models or even some splash loadscreens just to make it feel newish right from the launch

Pessimism certainly doesent help but can understand why some people get abit pessimistic with the game industry as a whole in its current state. Not that its Larian's fault but if youve been in 1 EA and seen something you found a problem (like lack of, or poor communication) I understand that people want to raise alarm bells.

Humans are wired to recognize patterns so if you think you are seeing something happen that happened before its understandable to want to raise alarmbells.

Not every company is the same though and I also dont find it very fair to give 1 company shit for something other companies did. BUt I see where people are coming from. If they dident care, they wouldnt be on the forums at all after all. We all want whats best for the game

Its a 2 way street. If they had demonstrated anything REMOTELY pretending to be engagement, responsiveness, communication, people would have continued.

I'll see what it looks like on release. A few hours into Wrath of the Righteous proved what an appropriate focus on a game's mechanics and feel can look like in 2021, instead of cutscenes and...whatever meme worthy additions Larian was up to 6 or so months ago.

I'm not really doubting that it will work out and end up a half-decent game. But will it have anything whatsoever with the franchise that lends its name to it? That I am not sure of.

It does take more than just throwing something together that more or less resembles 5E and touches the city of Baldur's Gate to actually make a Baldur's Gate game. Larian has the ability to make a proper sequel and would have been my studio of preference to make the attempt before this whole thing was announced, but whether or not they're actually going to manage a sequel remains to be seen.

Yes, that is a bit harsh, but that's how it has to be when you very intentionally decide to use the name of some existing and highly appreciated franchise. If we allowed any odd effort to fully be a sequel to anything decent, we'd end up with every franchise taking the turn of Far Cry or Serious Sam or the Ass Creed.

the game has a main villain called the absolute, whose symbol contains a piece of each of the dead threes symbols, A skeleton who is most likely Jergal, and a ritual site that resembles a Myrkul incantation circle, is in the game. If you're worried about the game not having any connection to the previous games, I'd say you have nothing to worry about.

I would have taken literally anything but what is essentially a re-flavored Wizard, but Larian has probably been working on multiple classes at once and Sorcerer is likely the only one in a good enough state to release. Probably because out of all the classes that had yet to be released, Sorcerers don't really care about reactions.

I think even Barbarians use reactions to a degree. Incidentally the classes with a heavier emphasis on reactions in the earlier levels are the ones that haven't been implemented yet. Though because Larian is pretty much out of classes that don't really need reactions to function, chances are that we're likely to be in the longest wait ever for the patch after this, since it kinda sounds like a decision on what to do with reactions hasn't been reached yet.

Either way, with the current timing, Sorcerer holds very little appeal for me. Maybe if a martial class had been released in between Druid and Sorcerer, I would have considered looking into it. But as it stands, I think I'll sit this patch out, especially since there's no hints of a new companion being available to offset this either.

We don't know much bout it still but Patch 6 is gonna be a huge update and I think it will introduce new areas, new quests. But I understand that. I am planning on taking at least a 6 months break from the game before full release.

Personally I was very pleasantly surprised by many of the changes of Patch 5, so my hopes for the game has been slightly raised again. Since the game is changing in a way I like, they clearly do listen to feedback along my thoughts, so some of my negativity stemming from the lack of communication can be said to have been misguided. But in a way that only makes the lack of communication even more aggravating, because if they had shown the least bit of interest in it maybe I wouldn't have gotten as disheartened in the first place. 'Tis disturbing to my demeanour!

Are we all testers in a sense?

My bud and I play every two weeks or so just to test our systems with the possible new builds and fixes.

Honestly, it is getting pretty lame.

I and we do not like the pace at all. A solid year.

Where the hell are the classes. Imo they should be out to test.

IDC what anyone says, adding a sorcerer is almost like just adding a skin and a few motions and a few new internal algorithms just to make a wizard skin and objects work like a sorcerer should in DnD.

Lame.

Gee, if only they warned upfront that the game is beeing worked on and isent finished :V

Sorcerers beeing simular but different to Wizards isent Larian's fault. Thats DnD.

What their internal workings look like I dont know. I dont code and would gain nothing by looking at it, because I couldnt read it. But Metamagic can effect alot of things to excisting spells and when you add possible multiclassing to the equation every single possible metamagic/spell combo has to be accounted for. Dont know if you know how many spells and combinations there are, but thats alot. If you need code for each and every single case its not hard to see why they need some time to make it work. Specially if things arent instantly working as intended and they need to tweak and bugfix a fair few of them. Which honestly I wouldnt be suprised if that was the case.

In pnp DND you say you cast a spell with x metagmagic and you play it out. That obviously doesent work in a video game. They need to account for everything we might want to do upfront.

Yes. You bought an Early Access game. We're not testers "in a sense". You literally signed up and paid to be a tester.

I know that I'm a bit demanding, but I'm going to have to actually feel that connection during gameplay rather than just know intellectually that actually the game sort of touches on the things that was also technically part of the plot in the previous games, before I feel comfortable declaring that this game actually managed to be a sequel rather than a new take that uses the franchise name for promotional reasons.

The first two games were about Gorion's Ward and I'd expect this game to be about something that relates to said ward or events set in motion by them. But simply going back to Bhaal and his dimwit friends and their lame followers is something that I don't necessarily see connecting directly to what happened in the last two games.

Suppose we had a Black Panther movie and then a pretty good sequel to that. In both movies we follow the title character do what he does. Then we get Black Panther 3, except it takes place in the 24th century, it has no black panthers of any kind, and it's about a 24th century hero team that runs into the aliens that once upon a time crashed and provided the tech used by the Black Panther in the first two movies. Wouldn't you reckon that this would be a fairly weird sequel?

Don't know what "most people" mean, but the state of the game for 4 years of development definitely isn't good. It still only has 1 act, lacks half the classes, a proper reaction system, day/night cycles and still doesn't play like 5e D&D. On GoG it has a score of 3.8/5, or 7.6 which in my view is a disaster for a game with this legacy. And most of the criticism in the reviews is the gameplay and comparisons do DOS, which the developers still insist in not addressing.

On one hand, there's one thing to be said about relentlessly doomposting. But I also think it should apply to statements that are so sure that the game's going to be a smash hit critically. People have reason to be rightfully wary, now that the honeymoon period has been long over for quite a while now.

Outside of the subreddit, I've noticed that the overall vibe in regards to the Sorcerer reveal has been rather muted. It feels like the changes to the rest system generated far more discussion overall, probably because again, it's something that affects everyone rather than a new class that's mechanically just a modification of already existing classes at the end of the day.

We have no idea how much of the game is done. Early Access will only contain the First Act, as previously stated. Day/night cycle was never promised, you are just expecting it for some reason (as if it were some crucially important element and not a vanity item). The game is missing Barbarian, Bard, Monk and Paladin. How is that half of the classes? For me personally, this game feels to closest ever to playing DnD on my pc, so that's your personal feeling probably and not an objective truth about the game. On that tired troll argument that "this is just DO in BG skin", with every update BG3 becomes more and more uniquely new and fresh as a title. If you don't want to see that, that's your choice.

And i really presume this will ever improve ...
From my experience, most people go rate only once ... if game dont meet their expectation (and this is important word, since it have nothing to do with what was promissed, advertised or what developers mean to deliver ... its just what people WANT no matter anything) they rate low, if it does, they rate high ...

But i honestly dont know much people who grab their own nose (czech expression for admiting your fault, dunno english equivalent) ... and admit that they made misstake and should see the product with more fresh eyes. And even less of them ever bother to adjust their initiate rating to more acurate numbers.

There is a case to be argued in that presumably developing the rest of the game while the classes aren’t even done yet should be a bit worrying in regards to future encounter balance.

Who knows how trying to implement reactions is messing with the development of the future acts behind the scenes. Because it sure seems like the original plan was not to implement them at all, until Solasta came out and demonstrated that such an idea would be rightfully taboo.

Maybe that’s why the development has seemingly focused on the narrative and cinematics. The combat basics aren’t there yet.

There is a case, but it's a weak one imo. Final tweaking of encounter balance should be one of the last things done by any game developer. I imagine Larian has rough placeholder encounters for Acts 2+, which will be a relatively small amount of work to adjust months from now to account for any changes to mechanics. Add or remove an enemy, tweak enemy placement or stats, use the new template for an enemy-with-reactions, etc

Your worry will only hold true if Larian never does a final pass-through on Act 2+ encounters after finalizing the mechanics, which would be idiotic of them.

And honestly, the removal of backstab Advantage and jump+disengage probably affected encounter balance way more than the addition of any new class will be. After all, is the sorcerer class really going to be make parties more powerful? We did already have the wizard class.

It better be! After seeing the photos of all the marketing dough they dropped at the convention in London this week, they clearly have big expectations. That was not cheap marketing spend!

Anyway, spacehamster95, the haters are always like that, always have been. Meh. I'm really, really stoked for patch 6 (I started playing I think two days before 5 dropped, so I don't have much basis for comparison), but it will be really interesting to see if it's *all* new stuff, or if there are any nods to some of the larger discussions that are grounded in reality, like Minthara's armor.

The day/night cycle and weather system were in Baldur's Gate I&II if I remember correctly, and not having those in Baldur's Gate III would be a definite loss.
The importance of things that only have an effect on what is seen shouldn't be downplayed.
Day, night, rain, snow, etc. all affect atmosphere, and in some games, they also affect gameplay.
Since Baldur's Gate III has environmental effects, I think that it would make sense for those to affect gameplay somewhat.

As for classes, there are 7/12, which is only one class beyond half.
However, I doubt that they'll wait until the game is out of Early Access to release the other classes.

About Baldur's Gate III being Divinity: Original Sin with a Baldur's Gate theme, trolls might also be saying that, but it doesn't seem incorrect.

Equipment names? Baldur's Gate.
Spells? Baldur's Gate.
Races? Baldur's Gate.
Combat system? Original Sin with Dungeons & Dragons elements.
User interface? Original Sin.
Party size? Original Sin.
Party management system? Original Sin.
Lack of a weather system? Original Sin.
Lack of a day/night cycle? Original Sin.
A lot of interactive objects? Original Sin.
A lot of environmental effects? Original Sin.
Story structure? Original Sin.
Party member names? Original Sin.
Party member personalities? Original Sin.

Some of the elements from the Original Sin games are definitely an improvement over the original Baldur's Gate games, but overall, Baldur's Gate III is far more like an improved Original Sin with elements from Dungeons & Dragons than an improved Baldur's Gate.