Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Suggestion for BG3 RE:DOS2

I enjoyed D:OS 1 & 2, but never finished them, and there's one reason why:

Every single damned battle was a white-knuckled, balls-to-the-wall fight to the death. I want my gear, leveling and rewards to actually mean something, so that just for a while, after finding a particularly awesome sword or armor, I can breeze through and have a sense of power, destroying enemies for a while. It was always that was in Baldur's Gate. It was *NEVER* like that in D:OS.
BG would reward your extensive and thorough searches with a spectacularly cool artifact or piece of gear - and the game was significantly easier for a level or two. On the other hand, I literally almost-died in every single trash-mob battle in D:OS2.

I also want to say that it's OKAY to not have every single fight triggera huge set piece war, with 17 varied enemies of all shapes, sizes and affinities. It just becomes such a slog, that when ANY fight is triggered (even the silliest of skeleton-fights), 7 skeleton melee fighters, 2 extra large brutes, 4 skeleton-dogs, 3 skeleton mages, 4 zombies who explode with acid, a lich king who teleports, and a lightning-shooting skeletal sorceress - all pop out at once!

And then 20 feet up the road, another battle is triggered with 6 lava dogs, 2 lava frogs, 4 lava snails, a molten queen magic-user, 3 teleporting ghosts, 2 armed soldiers, and 3 archers all jump out at the same time. Like, FFFFFF. Here we go, yet again, every single time. And we're all at almost-zero health at the end. Yet again. It just gets very tiring.

Sometimes, maybe I can just fight a couple trash mobs and kick their butts and feel powerful??? And then move on and kill a soldier by himself? Please???

TLDR: BG1&2 let you become/feel very powerful at regular intervals, and absolutely slaughter the bad guys. Larian RPG's tend to make every single battle a fight-to-near-death. It gets very tiresome after 20/30/40/50 hours. I hope you guys can... not make it "easier"... but make it so that there's a rollercoaster of power vs vulnerability.

I get where you're coming from. Remember the very intro fight in DOS1, in front of the tutorial dungeon? If you pick two characters with plenty of AoE cc's, you can breeze through that fight just fine. But if you don't, that intro fight can be one of the toughest fights in the whole game. At one point, I tried returning to DOS EE, made a rogue and a geo/pyro mage, and legit COULDN'T beat the intro fight. It was possible, but it was so tough I just gave up. That said, it was on highest difficulty. As much of a masochist as I am, it did feel a bit rough at times for me, playing the two OS games.

For BG3 though, we *probably* don't have to worry, because, hopefully, the strict DnD rules will keep character/equipment stats in check. There won't be a difference of thousands of points in HP and damage output between early game and late game. Item stats should be static now. So BASICALLY, you can totally beat the end game fight with a party using equipment picked up from chapter 1, if your strategy is solid. That said, I don't know much about 5e, so we'll see.

Love your response - thanks for commiserating with me! It's also reassuring that tighter rules in DnD rules may make for a better flow.

I want to be able to trigger just the guys we get close to in an area. Remember in D:OS2, where if you triggered one guy, it triggered the entire battle party? One guard sees you, so it jumps to absolutely everyone in the area, and all of a sudden you're swarmed with 6 guards, 4 archers on various levels, 2 mages and a pack of dogs? Man, it was just very overwhelming each time!

Here's hoping they veer away from that, this time around. It made me quite Pillars of Eternity, XCOM, etc.!

To be fair, in OS games, the fights in which you're outnumbered 4 to 1 are in most cases fights that either aren't meant to be fought (even though you *can* try, if you want), or at least not meant to be fought the typical way in which you just walk up to an enemy and start fighting. They are meant to be very tough or pretty much impossible if you tackle them the normal way. Encounters in OS games are mostly designed and balanced based on the premise that the entire enemy team fight together.

Even in the original Baldur's Gate games, there is a "shout" mechanics which signals enemies who haven't spotted you yet to turn hostile (if they are not hostile by default) and also to move toward the enemy who is being attacked. It was just limited by range and also not used all the time. The strategy in which we lure enemies one by one to a safe distance before dispatching them is a bit of a shenanigan: it is unrealistic and a flaw in AI - unless there is indeed a great distance between two enemies.

So ideally, provoking an enemy should drag their allies nearby into the fight too, unless there is a good reason for that not to happen, such as because of distance, or if the game implements some "stealth" elements that include vision cone and silent takedowns and all that, as if you're playing a top-down Hitman game (I would actually love to see a solid implementation of stealth approach to combat in BG3).

Also, in some cases, it is because of plot reason that an entire area or faction turn hostile as soon as one of them turns hostile. There's no helping this.

If you mean with that you want to breeze through the whole game like in Diablo and other similar games as pretty much a one man army, then... No, I don't agree, not the least.

But... I you mean that you don't want every god-darn fight to be the same like in DOS2, where every friggin enemy simply teleports to the 1 best position and starts nuking away with inflated "shield/armor" values that simply negate all influencing effects with just very few exceptions like webbing etc, nullifying almost all tactical aspects and diversion... then YES, a lot of YES!

The second one, lol... If I wanted an easy mode, I'd just play story mode or whatever. I just don't want every battle to be an extreme chore.

Well, for me, if combat is anything even remotely like the D:OS games, I want a way to either avoid combat altogether or to breeze through it.