Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Community Engagement

Hotfix 12 :
"We will be back soon with a larger community update, that goes into some detail about how we process & parse feedback and data we get through talking with you, and the telemetry we have in the game. ‘Til then, sit tight!"

But maybe I have missunderstood.

Well ... this certainly require lot more imagination to be interpreted as i said ...
Its still possible tho.

But i must admit i allready forgotten they were THIS specific. :-/
Well ... what can i do, i stand corected.
And i apology for my misstake.

While a roadmap would be nice, I don't feel that it's needed. I would be happy if Larian could just spend some of their resources to actually engage and interact with the Early Access testers/community. And I mean interact, not just make announcements.
If they are strapped for resources then maybe scale back on the production costs on the panels from Hell and spend a bit more time and resources on engaging with the community instead?

They don't need a roadmap, they're driving off-road.


With warm regards
-Ben Thunder

EA engagement isn't a waste of resources on their part - the EA community is a resource. If it goes largely unexplored, then that's the waste.

Especially here, on their home boards, where the feedback is more long form and rather more generous than a little thumbs up/down or a disjointed one liner on discord.

I think it was really unfortunate that they decided to use their old DOS forums to handle their new BG3 game- that they didn't seem to do much work in advance to set up a distinct feeling community, or to build out a home base that could handle the kind of influx of feedback they were bound to receive when trying to bridge into D&D.

How many extraneous posts and comments and thread piles on these boards could have been avoided simply by migrating to better forums with more integration? Something that didn't feel like it's been around since before the dawn of the new millennium. Or I don't know. maybe just like hiring someone who's whole job it was to liaison between the developers and the community - to try to provide some modicum of structure to the Early Access wild west. I don't mean just promoting their existing unpaid moderators from Divinity boards to put out fires once they hit the 5 alarm scale, but like actually doing directed discussion prompts, or surveys, and little things like that which reward participation and continued engagement. Especially now, when people are all accustomed via new media to having a much more tailored and reactive experience.

Unlike simply gathering telemetry about whether or not people are playing with the dual wielding salamis or still insta merc'ing Gale or whatever, here people actually try to get somewhat analytical and explain their impressions (positive or negative) in more detail. Why, for example, they maybe don't actually care about the salamis and instead think the UI is way more important. Trying to outline what they really want that would make them smile and slow clap, and present their takes on whatever the controversial game topic de jour might be. The depressing part is that after a year of allowing things to get all overgrown and unkempt, even a very limited (but consistent) form of engagement would probably seem super attentive by comparison.

Most of my critiques have less to do with the game in it's current state, and a lot more to do with the EA in it's current state. I think it was acceptable for a time last year due to scaling up issues, and pandemic woes, but after a while it's hard not to catch the drift here. The curious thing is that when you read the various publicity articles, they usually have nothing but glowing things to say about their EA community and their appreciation for their players. They'll also say things like 'the most important thing is that the game be fun!' But it's like how would you really know whether that's working or not? They can try to intuit it I guess, based on whether or not people quit and reload or quit and don't, but come here and you can actually approach some real answer. Like "yeah I played through that for a few hours, but it felt like a slog and not really enjoyable. And here's the thing I did like, and can we please get more of that instead???" Sure you'll still run up against issues of people thinking they know what they want, when perhaps they don't, but at least here people are still trying.

The thing is, you don't actually need a roadmap unless you feel lost. When you're just enjoying the drive and the navigator in shotgun is good company, stressing off the final destination isn't such a big deal.

It's only when you suddenly realize you're out in the middle of nowhere, and probably made a wrong left at Albuquerque, that's when you start panicking and really wishing for a map or a road sign or anything to give some sense of reassurance that you're not going to die alone in the desert. At this point I don't know what they do. It feels like they already missed a bunch of opportunities here, but it's not too late. There's clearly still some gas in the tank, but they need to put on some better music or something, or hit some roadside attractions to keep us kids in the backseat from going absolutely insane hehe

Are we there yet? are we there yet? How long? That long!? Gah

So I work in public engagement for major project development. It's not videogames, but I suspect that, in terms of project management, there are a lot of similarities.

All that to say that I'm quite taken aback about comments saying that a roadmap or engagement will be counterproductive for Larian as it well create unmanageable expectations and what not... It's actually the complete opposite. Engagement not only helps you get qualitative and especially actionnable feedback, it helps manage expectations among the public, consumers etc., by offering predictability and advanced warning if things won't be as planned or previously announced. Its just good project management.

What's important is that you be clear as to what you will do, what you can't do and what you MAY be able to do, if the following conditions are met. It can be exhaustive or it can be short.

Overall, Larian would benefit from being more proactive and transparent with its plans, and we should all support that.

Collective planning and development for the win !

Assuming you're not telling tales about your experience, I stand corrected.

Question: in your field, is the engagement in an anonymous forum like this, or is it more personal/direct? I suspect that how people interact anonymously online could make a big difference in the value of engagement versus eg sitting down with customers at a trade show.

Good reflex to be sceptical, but I assure you that it is indeed my job (to be fully transparent, I have been doing this for less than 10 years, but what I mentioned above is generally considered best practices in my field).

Regarding your very good question, both are useful. Anonymous feedback allows for people to be more transparent with their comments and concerns. You are right though in that there is a risk that you get feedback shared in bad faith. In my experience, it tends to stand out though, so it can be easily identified. In person or direct feedback allows for a better exchange/dialogue and also builds trust between parties.

As for BG3's development, I honestly don't know why Larian chooses non-engagement. I've seen other studios take the opposite approach regarding game development (Obsidian and Owlcat come to mind), whether in early access or not, with success (at least, from my perspective). A little engagement goes a long way, but I may be biased

Well then, that invalidates my argument, which is largely based on idle speculation.

Let's be honest, I use this forum as a way to look busy during work hours. I'm glad someone with actual real-world skills could drop in and teach me something.

They definitely do have an incentive: attitude of consumers toward Larian Studios in the future, both relating to the company at large and any future EAs they want to release for player-testing.

I, for one, won't be participating in any more Larian EAs. This (lack of a) experience has soured me on Larian, whereas in Fall 2020 I was super excited to be part of the BG3 EA. Obviously I didn't expect my suggestions to be personally responded to, but I was expecting some back and forth with the community at large.

In contrast, I will support Tactical Adventures in practically whatever game they release next, because I enjoyed and appreciated how they interacted with the community. They had a twitch stream where the developers answered chat questions!!!

I think there is an expectations problem. Larian is building a game based on pre-defined story, characters, and has various project goals and milestones already outlined. The Early Access is designed to help Larian give customers a taste of the product they are making, identify bugs, and get feedback/suggestions on things not working well. However, feedback does not mean we are shaping the game. Some feedback will get incorporated while others will not. It all depends on what Larian developers can squeeze into their schedule and what is feasible.

We can say "Dice rolls are a little off or too unforgiving, which is killing the enjoyment factor for some players." Larian responded by adding the Loaded Dice option to the game. However, some EA players have expressed an interest in the tiefling bard Alfira being a companion. Larian is under no obligation to respond to making her a companion. Even revealing whether Alfira is or is not a later companion could be considered a spoiler. Data miners have already spoiled two companions who will join our party sometime after the EA period. There is also the question of what feedback can even be added without derailing the project.

For example, let's say there is huge EA player uproar to make Alfira a companion. The developers would need to adjust party banter, conversation interrupts, build extra side quests around her, determine approval/disproval choices, re-test party balancing when she is not at camp, and finally bring back the voice actress to record extra dialog not originally budgeted to the project. That work might make Alfira as a companion a good DLC option for later development. However, taking time to heed player demand for such change could easily derail efforts to get the game out sometime in 2022.

I think there is an expectations problem. Larian is building a game based on pre-defined story, characters, and has various project goals and milestones already outlined. The Early Access is designed to help Larian give customers a taste of the product they are making, identify bugs, and get feedback/suggestions on things not working well. However, feedback does not mean we are shaping the game. Some feedback will get incorporated while others will not. It all depends on what Larian developers can squeeze into their schedule, what is critical, and what is feasible.

We can say "Dice rolls are a little off or too unforgiving, which is killing the enjoyment factor for some players." Larian responded by adding the Loaded Dice option to the game. However, a few EA players have expressed an interest in the tiefling bard Alfira being a companion. Larian is under no obligation to respond to making her a companion. Even revealing whether Alfira is or is not a later companion could be considered a spoiler. Data miners have already spoiled two companions who will join our party sometime after the EA period. There is also the question of what feedback can even be added without derailing the project.

For example, let's say there is huge EA player uproar to make Alfira a companion. The developers would need to adjust party banter, conversation interrupts, build extra side quests around her, determine approval/disproval choices, re-test party balancing when she is not at camp, and finally bring back the voice actress to record extra dialog not originally budgeted to the project. That work might make Alfira as a companion a good DLC option for later development. However, taking time to heed player demand for such change could easily derail efforts to get the game out sometime in 2022. Would it be cool to have a bard companion in the mix, sure. Do I want that companion if it means delaying game release until 2023 or beyond, no.

This is exactly what we'd like to know. You know, to help them rather than talking over and over again about things that are not at all into their schedule, that are not critical or not feasible...

+1 I don't expect Larian to implement every suggestion we give. But some kind of feedback on our feedback would be nice: from the most basic of occasionally informing us of what is feasible to help constrain our conversations, to the more-advanced hosting regular reddit AMAs/twitch Q&As. Just something more than near-radio silence between the months-separated patches.

Larian did say which I suppose could be used to against Larian giving us a roadmap. Because Larian said they'd do a thing, and they still haven't done the thing, and I'm more upset than I would be had they said nothing. But that argument would be disingenuous - Larian is the one who decided to not follow up on their word, and with pure silence instead of saying "putting this feedback report together is taking longer than expected." I'd be perfectly fine with the latter, but the silence is just...disheartening.

If that companion were Halsin, it would 100% be worth it!

Probably the game won’t come out until 2023 anyways.

Haha

I think it’s a balance - this is a huge undertaking and unless we want to wait until 2025 for release date they need to get on with making the game.EAis a testing ground and in my experience after 250 hours is a really good one - we give feedback, get panel from hell every so often - that’s enough for me.

From what I gathered, Larian seems to only have this forum for feedback and suggestion as well as their twitter page. Those seem to be the only places where we can engage with Larian about Baldur's Gate. I don't have any issues with that and I think it's pretty useful as long as we stick to actually giving feedback about the game in terms or how we could make it better or report any bugs that we may find.

Why would community engagement make the EA process take significantly longer? Hire a single person to post tweets, do reddit AMAs, post on the forums, etc. Obviously they'll take some time away from development from talking to the devs, but I doubt this is significant on the grand scale of things. Maybe a month or two delay which is ~nothing over the course of 3+ years.

The Panels from Hell (aside from being bad) likely take up way more time and resources away from development than a community engagement spokesperson posting ~weekly tweets and ~bi-monthly twitch/reddit/forum Q&As would.

I do not follow the development of games as much as some here do... but what games do more than Larian does? Is there a template that anyone has that they could follow?

I just finished Early Access for the first time and was pretty blown away with what they gave us access to. I have tried to avoid the 'Panel from Hell' things since I want to avoid spoilers and experience things myself, but those also seem pretty big. I guess I have never been involved in a game that allowed players to get as hands on as Larian has with this game. There are some games that just release the whole game in Early Access... but those seem to be the games that stay in early access for an eternity and essentially treat it like a release.

I'd love to see some other companies/games that do a much better job than Larian does at this... because I'd like to pay attention to those companies and games if possible!