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A few years? No, it doesn' t need a few years to fix some animations and come a final color palette. If they haven't even started on Acts II and III then sure, a few years away. But what you guys are complaining about is not years worth of work still needed.

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We don't need to go very far : the opening cinematic is really fantastic. Completely believable and mature. In my view, they truly captured the BG essence there. Why not continue throughout the game?

Just look the color palette in the cinematic: yellowish buildings, faded colors in armors and people's clothes, the water is dark. Even the red dragons are not that red (unlike the gameplay demons). It is just perfect.

This is what they should aim for themselves. If they made into the cinematic they can do the same in the gameplay too.

The artwork in the books tend to be cartoonish, but they know how to implement that in a mature way. The Mind Flayer in the real game is horrible compared to the one in the cinematic mainly, because of the colors and illumination. (Also believing that the textures will improve too).

Thats why I am so disappointed, because Larian can do it, but so far they chose to continue DOS style. Don't know if they don't have the courage to do a a different formula.

But let's see more, I still have hope.




Originally Posted by _Vic_
To be fair, the art of the D&D5e Forgotten Realms is what I assume you call "cartoonish" (Just make a search online) so I do not think Larian is to fully blame here. It would be different if the setting is Eberron or Ravenloft, I suppose.

If you are making a game based in a franchise, It´s usual to follow the design guidelines of the franchise, like in Mordheim and W40k. Mostly because WOTC will want his brand to be recognizable.



Originally Posted by IrenicusBG3
Originally Posted by _Vic_
Originally Posted by kanisatha
Everything continues to look exactly like a D:OS game and nothing like a Forgotten Realms game.


Taking a look at the WoTC official material from D&D beyond and the monsters manual anyone can see that they made a pretty good depiction of the creatures


[Linked Image] [Linked Image] [Linked Image] [Linked Image]


I sometimes wonder if people do know how D&D5E´s creatures, uniforms and the city of Baldur´s gate actually look like before making comparisons...


The problem is the color pallette that makes very unrealistic, unlike BG2. The demons are very cartoonish in BG3


I suppose It´s a matter of tastes. I kinda like it the comic vibe.
And as I said, the videogame versions of the creatures really look like the D&D5e counterparts.


[Linked Image]
[Linked Image]


[Linked Image]

[Linked Image]












Assuming 100 hours of RPG content and what they have shown so far it looks far away of being released.

Originally Posted by deathidge
A few years? No, it doesn' t need a few years to fix some animations and come a final color palette. If they haven't even started on Acts II and III then sure, a few years away. But what you guys are complaining about is not years worth of work still needed.




Last edited by IrenicusBG3; 31/05/20 09:59 PM.
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Originally Posted by Madscientist
What do you want?
That a new game looks exactly like a 20 year old game?


Show me where anyone has asked for this? Go ahead. I dare you.

Enough with your BS false representations of people's arguments.

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I think better lighting would solve a lot. Nearly everything is lit straight from camera or all around. There is very little (soft) shadows or global illumination / ambient occlusion. It gives everything very flat and unnatural look. However, the game isn't even in alpha yet and probably more than a year from release, so stuff like this is expected.

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Originally Posted by _Vic_
Well, as stated before the game uses the same palette as the designs in the manuals and artbook of D&D so technically it´s a very accurate (official D&D5e) Baldur´s gate.


All that the devs showed us pointed out that they are following the guidelines of the modern version of D&D so It´s improbable that they are going to change in the middle of the race.


You are probably right, but that doesn't mean its a good idea to slavishly copy if such action provides an inferior result. DnD artwork over the years has been of variable quality and frequently contradictory, and what looks good in print is not always ideal for other media.

I don't have a particular issue with the character models, but I do find it odd that comic-book excess seems to be creeping into the graphical presentation. I thought the original gameplay reveal was a perfectly acceptable graphical presentation, but this trailer really was not. I'm not sure how long I could play a game with that degree of overexposure.

Maybe it's just this trailer, not the game as a whole, but for me, it has certainly had the effect of questioning their direction rather than assuring their competence.

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Adressing the nonsense in this thread in no particular order.

>PoE has good artstyle
Opinion discarded
>Witcher
literaly a game thats based heavily of freal world inspirations versus forgotten realms which is THE quintessential kitchen sink fantasy.
If you wanted a grounded game, why do you want it set in one of the most ridiculous created-as-fapbait settings there is?

>Muh dark atmosphere
and more bullshit.
I swear every time one of you people spouts this nonsense i hope they put in another weresheep.
Its not true, its not based on anything youve actually seen, its just a value judgement based on nothing.
As ive demnstrated multiple times iwht screenshots.

SInce none of you (all 3 people of you with your 40 accounts with 2 posts each) has actually disproven anyhting of that with evidence of your own, its safe to assume that i can just discard all of your uneducated opinions.

>Muh Colours
should we get the screenshots again?
Dont make me humilliate you like that.
Your nostalgia addled brain still hasnt realized that Baldurs gate wasnt dark souls.
Baldurs gate had that exact colour scheme, just boot up the damn game and see for yourself.
The infinity engine games had THE most generic artstyle in RPG history. Dont kid yourselves.

You were children when you played those games and thats why they feel "mature" to you.

>oh no an isometric game doenst have perfect physics
You should know what youll get.
CRPGs arent tripple A video games and you would have to be stupid to expect that.
Now let me ask you, would you rather have the feature to let terrain fall on enemies but with suboptimal graphics, or would you not like to have that feature?
Come on, go discredit yourself.
For all the lapping up of the garbage that was the infinity engine, you suddenly sure all seem to be hung up on graphics of all things.
Almost as if all those low post count accounts are massive hypocrits.

>Muh character design doesnt match the enviroment
You mean the artstyle directly taken from the Source books?
The same thing baldurs gate did back in its day?

Oh and one particular gem i cannot help but comment on.

>Thank goodness owlcat didnt copy pathfidners official artstle
Hahahha! Did you miss the entire huge kickstarter blog post where Owlcat went into great lenghts of explaining how the game is meant to mirror Wayne Reynolds artstyle?
Down to the fact that there was a very deliberate descision to include all the equipped items on a given character BECAUSE thats how Wayne Reynolds depicts it in the official art.

Absoluteley delusional.

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I really hope there will be an old dwarf or an elf in BG3 who will Loudly complain on how better everything was back in a day, how people dress like idiots and how hardcore he/she had back in the day.

Come on, hundreds years have passed.

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@ Sordak,


I pretty much disagree with everything you said. Things like the dark atmosphere...the intro cimematic for BG 1 is an unknown individual getting his throat crushed by an as-yet-unnamed overpowering villain, and being thrown to his death on the cobblestones below. As for the art style etc, what I've seen so far of Larian's efforts reminds me of nothing so much as having the sun shined directly into my eyeballs for a prolonged period.

But really my objections are more of a sum of the individual issues, none of which taken on its own is sufficient to make the point. As someone said above, a lot of us want to see some meaningful resemblance to the originals so we can identify that connection, other than simply the setting itself. Plus I can't stand it when people say the setting IS what makes it BG. You could make a LotR game in the setting of Middle Earth but if you did it in the style of Pokemon it would be justly seen as ridiculous. On the technical front I don't care that it's not Infinity engine-esque because that would be irrelevant if the essence was correct. If you got that right even a first-person rpg would fit just fine.

There are five of us in my circle who are into BG. Four of us absolutely hate what we've seen so far and one of us thinks "it's not BG but it'll probably be a good co-op game." 0.5 out of 5 is not a good success rate for old fans. Each fantasy creation has its own particular flavour, whether it's Divinity, GoT, LotR, BG, Witcher...they all taste different, and for whatever reason or combination of reasons Larian's effort tastes wrong for this creation.

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Maybe the fans of the old games are not the game target audience anymore for reasons known by the Sales department. I mean, they are using D&D5e Assets, they are advertising modules of WOTC together (Descent into Avernus, etc), they are doing interviews together with WOTC CEOs, working with D&D5e creators, using the ruleset and the setting...

But I dont´remember them referencing the old BG games in any interview unless asked first (In one interview even Sven Vincke and Mike Merle didn´t remember the canon ending of the baalspawn crises), they didn´t make videos of "Sven Vinke playing the old bg games", didnt´hire any of the original game screenwriters, musicians,... didn´t use images of the old games and characters to advertise the game (Owlcat, for example, included two of the iconic characters of Pathfinder in the videogames, Amiri and Seelah),... didn´t take people from Black isle into the game-cons,... and they do none of the things that the PR department use to do to rally the old game fans.


Just food for thought.

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Originally Posted by _Vic_
Maybe the fans of the old games are not the game target anymore for reasons known by the Sales department.


You're probably completely right. The optimist in me would have thought that it should be possible to tie the old and the new together in such a way that didn't detract from the overall potential of the game as a financial prospect. And the purist in me says that if you're going to develop a sequel to a beloved pre-existing creation it would seem...honourable, or at the very least, appropriate to do so. The lack of that makes me view the entire enterprise very cynically.

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Forlorn hope you just keep repeating yourself i dont know how i should adress that.
Give me screenshot comparisons, because i already did that to prove my point , so its up to you now to do the same.


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Originally Posted by Sordak

Give me screenshot comparisons, because i already did that to prove my point , so its up to you now to do the same.



To be honest my man, I think because we're so firmly in different camps if I took screenshots for comparison we'd both see what we wanted to see while looking at the same thing. It might be more productive to look at BG3 side by side with DOS to see how ridiculously similar they are. Indeed, part of what rubbed me up the wrong way about the footage we've seen so far is not just that it doesn't feel like BG, but that it feels so much like Divinity instead.

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Originally Posted by _Vic_
Maybe the fans of the old games are not the game target audience anymore for reasons known by the Sales department. I mean, they are using D&D5e Assets, they are advertising modules of WOTC together (Descent into Avernus, etc), they are doing interviews together with WOTC CEOs, working with D&D5e creators, using the ruleset and the setting...

But I dont´remember them referencing the old BG games in any interview unless asked first (In one interview even Sven Vincke and Mike Merle didn´t remember the canon ending of the baalspawn crises), they didn´t make videos of "Sven Vinke playing the old bg games", didnt´hire any of the original game screenwriters, musicians,... didn´t use images of the old games and characters to advertise the game (Owlcat, for example, included two of the iconic characters of Pathfinder in the videogames, Amiri and Seelah),... didn´t take people from Black isle into the game-cons,... and they do none of the things that the PR department use to do to rally the old game fans.


Just food for thought.


Target Audience by priority IMHO.

D&D 5e fans
Forgotten Realms fans
Divinity fans
TBRPG fans
Traditional Baldur's Gate fans.

As both a 5e fan and even more so an FR fan and a TB fan its shocking to be in the target demographic for once because that nevet seems to jappen to me.


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Originally Posted by _Vic_
Maybe the fans of the old games are not the game target audience anymore for reasons known by the Sales department. I mean, they are using D&D5e Assets, they are advertising modules of WOTC together (Descent into Avernus, etc), they are doing interviews together with WOTC CEOs, working with D&D5e creators, using the ruleset and the setting...

But I dont´remember them referencing the old BG games in any interview unless asked first (In one interview even Sven Vincke and Mike Merle didn´t remember the canon ending of the baalspawn crises), they didn´t make videos of "Sven Vinke playing the old bg games", didnt´hire any of the original game screenwriters, musicians,... didn´t use images of the old games and characters to advertise the game (Owlcat, for example, included two of the iconic characters of Pathfinder in the videogames, Amiri and Seelah),... didn´t take people from Black isle into the game-cons,... and they do none of the things that the PR department use to do to rally the old game fans.


D&D
Forgotten Realms
Sword Coast
Baldur's Gate

These are all recognisable terms that could have been used in a game title to give the necessary marketing flavour to a new game not directly related to the original story. There was no need to actually call it BG3, and in doing so they were wilfully appealing to the goodwill associated with the original games.

It may well be true that they have made no other hires or references whatever to the original games, but in choosing a name that screams sequel, Larian made a rod for their own back.

Personally, I don't care if it is a sequel to the original story, and I don't have any desire to retain any of the implementation details of the original games, but at present it is really not clear what BG3 actually is, which leaves it open to criticism based on assumptions.

It remains possible that there are deep and satisfying links to the original story arc that might justify the sequal tag in terms of story-telling. And it remains possible that the game will be a superior single-person, party-based role-playing experience in the Baldur's Gate region that might justify the sequal tag in game-play terms.

But the evidence for either seems thin at present.

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Oh, I agree that the name BG3 gives a lot of exposure: They had lots of interviews, media apparitions, Wotc license and support, a Belgian videogame "indie" studio like Larian even made as a face for the launch of Stadia with a game that is not even finished, so they did it right.

What I meant is that the target audience of the videogame is not "old-BG-games-fans-only" as in "we are not doing anything reminiscent to the original games and it was never intended to be". I think they are making a game for D&D5e fans, Forgotten realms fans, TB fans, CRPG fans... first and foremost; as the screenshots, trailers, etc show and the OP @Omegaphalic pointed out; for múltiple reasons already posted in this thread (design, mechanics, colour palette, etc).

Not that I have anything against that, I happen to like D&D5e, TB, the forgotten realms... etc so I´m happy with plenty of what they show us so far (Even tho I found wierd some design choices) and, even I loved the old games I do not particularly care that much about the game to be similar to the old (and amazing) BG trilogy.

I mean, the story of the baalspawn is already finished, it´s a different studio, do not share plot or common characters that we know of, It´s a turn-based game, 20 years and 3 different editions of D&D passed and they are using D&D5e game mechanics, lore and Artwork; and a setting 200 years after the baalspawn crisis, so... Do you really think they are worried about "deep and satisfying links to the original story arc that might justify the sequal tag in terms of story-telling and game-play terms"?

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Originally Posted by Sordak
Adressing the nonsense in this thread in no particular order.

>PoE has good artstyle
Opinion discarded
>Witcher
literaly a game thats based heavily of freal world inspirations versus forgotten realms which is THE quintessential kitchen sink fantasy.
If you wanted a grounded game, why do you want it set in one of the most ridiculous created-as-fapbait settings there is?

>Muh dark atmosphere
and more bullshit.
I swear every time one of you people spouts this nonsense i hope they put in another weresheep.
Its not true, its not based on anything youve actually seen, its just a value judgement based on nothing.
As ive demnstrated multiple times iwht screenshots.

SInce none of you (all 3 people of you with your 40 accounts with 2 posts each) has actually disproven anyhting of that with evidence of your own, its safe to assume that i can just discard all of your uneducated opinions.

>Muh Colours
should we get the screenshots again?
Dont make me humilliate you like that.
Your nostalgia addled brain still hasnt realized that Baldurs gate wasnt dark souls.
Baldurs gate had that exact colour scheme, just boot up the damn game and see for yourself.
The infinity engine games had THE most generic artstyle in RPG history. Dont kid yourselves.

You were children when you played those games and thats why they feel "mature" to you.

>oh no an isometric game doenst have perfect physics
You should know what youll get.
CRPGs arent tripple A video games and you would have to be stupid to expect that.
Now let me ask you, would you rather have the feature to let terrain fall on enemies but with suboptimal graphics, or would you not like to have that feature?
Come on, go discredit yourself.
For all the lapping up of the garbage that was the infinity engine, you suddenly sure all seem to be hung up on graphics of all things.
Almost as if all those low post count accounts are massive hypocrits.

>Muh character design doesnt match the enviroment
You mean the artstyle directly taken from the Source books?
The same thing baldurs gate did back in its day?

Oh and one particular gem i cannot help but comment on.

>Thank goodness owlcat didnt copy pathfidners official artstle
Hahahha! Did you miss the entire huge kickstarter blog post where Owlcat went into great lenghts of explaining how the game is meant to mirror Wayne Reynolds artstyle?
Down to the fact that there was a very deliberate descision to include all the equipped items on a given character BECAUSE thats how Wayne Reynolds depicts it in the official art.

Absoluteley delusional.


Hahahah

This kid needs some serious therapy.

Just look at the BG 3 opening cinematic and the current gameplay and you can see the discrepancy.

Last edited by IrenicusBG3; 02/06/20 12:48 AM.
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Originally Posted by IrenicusBG3
Just look at the BG 3 opening cinematic and the current gameplay and you can see the discrepancy.


No game has ever looked like a cinematic trailer.

You seriously cannot compare BG1 and 2 to BG3 in terms of aesthetic. The resolution alone kills any comparison that you might try to make. I bet if they had today's tech 20+ years ago, BG1 and 2 would have been A LOT different, probably unrecognizable from what they are. They didn't have access to what Larian has access to.

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compare the colour palette :^)
you have already faileda t that in another thread.
Compare the character design.
OH no you already failed at that in another seperate thread.

Compare the writing! OH NO! Its minsc ruining your entire narrative!

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Originally Posted by Sordak
Adressing the nonsense in this thread in no particular order.

. . .

. .

. . .
.
Absoluteley delusional.


I totally agree with you.

I think the main issue is the name: Baldurs Gate 3.
Things would be less dramatic if they called it "Divinity 3: the gate of baldur" (now with DnD 5E licence)
They called it BG3 to get as much attention as possible.
Lots of people talking about their product ( including several people who talk nonsense or who complain that the game does not look exactly how they imagined the successor of their favourite childhood game)
is way better for them than nobody talking about it.


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Hi, I actually reckon that's a Harpy. If you look at the feet and compare them to other pictures throughout DND lore, you'll see what I mean.

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