Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Reloading the game on failed checks?

How is Larian going to handle players from constantly reloading the game on failed checks or saving the game right before doing one. Some people call this technique scumsave. Baldur's Gate 3 is about making choices that will affect your character in many ways so if people can just constantly reload the game on failed checks it takes away from the game. Even worse in co-op a player may say "hey guys, stop everything for now, imma reload the game cause I just failed check. Now that can be very annoying.

Simple: They'll allow it. It's up to the player to decide if they want to save-scum or not.

In co-op, it will be up to the host to decide if the game is reloaded. If that's an issue, perhaps that's something to discuss very early on with fellow players.

The simple answer is to make the game a good enough experience that you don't care if you fail a check. Most games are quite shallow once off the critical path of successful checks, but if the game has many ways to progress, it matters less if you fail a check. Obviously if you then proceed to die because of the failure you reload anyway; and if you are on a replay ( or following a guide, or want to min-max ) you may reload to experience a different path or follow a particular path.

While I don't like DnD 5e combat, Larian do seem to be building a game I will want to play, partly because they want to build variety into the basic engine.

If the player wanna save scum, is player's problem. I don't save scum or re roll stats.

I read an interview where they said that passing checks doesn’t necessarily give you the best outcome. Eg. When you try to pursuade someone to do something you’re only rolling for what you think is a good idea at the time. It might turn out to be a disaster. And when something does go wrong, new opportunities can open up. It’s be interesting to see how it works in practice.

I think they want to encourage people to just keep trucking, but if some players do want to re roll every failure, there’s no reason to actually stop them.

Why should it be something Larian care about ?
Players are free to play the way they want to.

I think not allowing players to save and reload whenever they want would be a huge mistake. People should be able to play their game however they want. For co-op, yeah I can see some rules being agreed upon by the group, but in single-player there is no justification for not allowing the player to play as they see fit.

For myself, I absolutely will reload my checks however many times it takes in one particular situation: any check involving an attempt to avoid combat and follow an alternate path around combat. Because I so dislike the combat system I will seek out any and all alternative paths to combat every single time. And if getting that alternative path involves a check roll, then yeah I will be reloading as often as it takes to pass that check.

Not sure why one would purchase a D&D 5e game if they despise D&D 5e combat.

That's, generally, why I prefer flat skill checks, rather then dice rolls in cRPGs.

I think that when playing Coop, players will generally less willing to reload to get the "perfect outcome". This might not apply to everyone, but generally if I play with someone I tend to be less of a perfectionist. Another way, is to not make succesfull and negative skills checks simply a good and bad outcome. It negative outcome is in some way unique or satisfying I think there is a good chance players will stick with it. Disco Elysium had a system when players would fail checks regularly, but they were so entertaining most of the time, I didn't feel disappointed that I failed the check.

That also happens in Tides of Numenera, sometimes it´s better to fail the check.

But those are different games: BG3 will be much more battle-oriented than ToN or Disco Elysium, two games where you can beat the game without fighting. And failing a save or an attack sucks.

Because that is the FR game that is being made, perhaps? I generally don't play RPGs for the combat at all; so I dislike TB systems because they tend to extend the part of the game I don't find enjoyable, and I loath things like contrived boss fights which are generally the worst aspects of videogame RPGs.

I'm probably not as anti-TB as Kanisatha, and I think Larian are mostly doing a good job with the game. So, I will play it as intended, and see how it goes. If the combat turns out to be as mind-numbing as it could be, then I will also look to avoid it as much as possible; if combat turns out to be relatively quick to progress through, I'll continue to play as intended.

Oh, sorry, I thought we talk about skill checks, rather then combat rolls. If Larian wanted to prevent savescumming one way would be to have rolls be predetermined by seeds like in XCOM1 - so rolls are determined before you make them. You can reload whenever you want.

I think a better solution would be to not allow saving during encounters.

It was more: dealing with saves during exploration (ex, saves vs traps or vs webs, etc) or surprise attacks/coup de grace...


It would be strange that you can save in the middle of the combat, I do not think I´ll use it but If people find it useful,...ok let them do what they want.

@etonbears, your RPG preferences and mine are exactly alike. I couldn't have put it better.

@Stabbey, if your question was meant to be sincere, then my answer follows what @etonbears said. It is because I love the FR setting and I love FR and D&D lore. That's the very reason I am here and why I am passionate about this game not being what I would've liked (I only registered on this forum after the BG3 announcement, and had no reason to post anything here prior to that). If games set in the Realms were being made right and left, then I wouldn't care about this particular game. But I don't get anything from the Realms anymore, including no longer even the novels that I love, so I very much miss having FR lore to consume.

D&D mechanics/ruleset, on the other hand, I really don't care for much. I find D&D mechanics to generally be lousy, and it sucks that because D&D has been around for so very long, everyone has this mindset that D&D rules are it and there cannot possibly be anything better, which in turn keeps RPG studios from coming up with different mechanics. And when someone tries to create something different (like PoE for example) a lot of RPG gamers won't even give it a chance because it is not D&D/D20 and they cannot wrap their brain around something that isn't at least similar to D20.

Some people argue that in a SP game players should be a ble to play as they choose, it is true, but I totally dismiss that arguement as patently flawed. The reason for that is that players find it incredibly hard not to cave in to the temptation to cheese a game (in whatever way) and in doing so effectively ruin their experience of it. Making it too easy for themselves, hating themselves for that, making it boring, taking all the drama and tension out of it, any number of other negative consequences. A game can be ruined because of this.

But the temptation is often too much. It's why we don't let supermarkets stack sweets by the checkouts.

The biggest challenge with D20 skill rolls by far is balance and transparency. How many should I be passing? In PF: Kingmaker you had many, many DC rolls in kingdom management. You found people save scumming these all the time because they got panicked about failing them. In reality the game was balanced such that so long as you passed better than 50% of them you were fine. But folks didn't know that. So they save scummed these DC rolls and then found the kingdom management to be a boring chore (because it became too easy and had no drama to it, no gameplay to speak of) and complained about it.

That's the kind of syndrome I am concerned about for BG3. Some kind of reasonably hefty anti-save scum measure would be very welcome, pretty much necessary I would think (basically something to replace that horrid DM)

The other concern is folk's insatiable curiosity about "what if..." leading to save scumming.

This is one thing PK: Kingmaker dealt with fabulously well. You simply could not save scum the story events because a lot of outcomes were determined by numerous micro-decisions you made when you didn't even know you were making them over the previous two to three hours. You had to live with the consequences of your own decisions/actions or faced two, three, four hours of replayed material without any idea of what the alternative outcomes would even be. You couldn't really find out "what if....." (unless you Googled it of course.)

This is I would say the best way to do it I have ever come across. But...........there were no dice rolls involved, just pure player choice and consequence. If things didn't work out the way they wanted players had to accept that it was their own decisions that directly led to that, nobody to blame but themselves. What concerns me about the DC rolls for main story events in BG3 is that players will not easily accept, or in fact refuse to accept at all, their fate being determined by RNG in that way. I think a lot of folk will see the dialog DC rolls as little more than a time wasting annoyance while they re-roll the numbers they need.

So I would say some pretty strong anti-save scumming systems would vastly improve the game, as I say, simply to reproduce the role of the DM, nothing more than that.

Oh right. You need to save people from themselves. They are too stupid to know what's best for them and you are doing them a great service by forcing onto them what's best for them. Sure.

i dont get this.
If people want to ruin the game for themselves let them. its a single player game, not a competetive one

Right. If a developer tries to force the player to experience the game "as intended" you will piss some people off and they will review the game badly, but if a player can cheese and ruin the game for themselves, the same ones will probably still complain.

Best not to waste developer time.

It's not na bout people being too stupid, it's about what playing games is all about which is (usually) seeking advantage to defeat your foe against the odds. When you are presented with an opportunity to do that which ought not be there (or is unintentionally there) it is almost impossible to resist the temptation to use it. That is the nature of games and gamers.

In exactly the same way children, because of our evolutionary heritage, find it virtually impossible to resist sweets and chocolate bars and will eat as many as they can lay their hands on because they are programmed to (which is why sweets are banned from supermarket checkouts, and why I used that analogy.).

Let me give you a classic example of this:

Quill18 did an LP on Motorsport manager recently. It turns out that in this game if you have a fraction of a unit of fuel (defined as a lap's worth) left in your tank at pitstop it is rounded up to a full unit. So for example if you have 0.18 units left coming into the pits and you need 8 laps worth to finish the race you can put in seven and the game will round the 7.18 up to your required 8 for you. This saves you about 1s. It is a bug that can be used as an exploit.

Quill is by no means a stupid person. He wrested with this exploit issue for many episodes of his LP. He complained bitterly about the fact the game put him in this horrible dilemma situation. In the end he could not resist using this exploit - because it was there, because it gave him an edge. Even though it made him feel bad about it.

Or let's examine the big flaw in Dragon Age: Origins - the lyrium potion exploit.

The DA:O game economy is s7uch that there are a number of very choice items to buy at various shops but they are so expensive that you can only really hope to buy three of them over the course of a game, you cannot earn enough gold to buy more than that (and there are a lot more than that). You have to choose.......

.....except you don't. There is this one trader who sells the ingredients for lyrium potions so cheap that you can craft them and flog them to the wizards at a nice profit per potion thereby mint as many gold coins as you heart desires and buy ALL of the nice items in the shops. All of them.

Nobody knows whether Bioware put that exploit in deliberately or not, they've never said. But equally they've never "fixed" it. Should you use it? Definitely not, it's game breaking. Would you use it? Probably if you knew about it. It's extremely hard not to. But it breaks the game, the game was not balanced for your characters to have all that uber-gear, just two or three pieces. Use that exploit and your game is degraded.

So no, with respect I totally disagree with your position on this. Firaxis prevent save scumming individual shots in XCOM for a good reason. It is dead right that they do. It makes XCOM much better for most players. It's the right way to go.

Uh-huh. But sometimes, as a player, I might WANT to do things like that, especially after the first game or two. You mention XCOM, which I played and enjoyed without ever thinking about exploits because it was pretty good as a game. But I've never played it second time, because I don't think I would want to go through the motions for the bits I might want to experience again.

OTOH, there are plenty of games with exploits that I have played many times simply because I know I can shortcut and manipulate things I don't want to do again.

So, I wouldn't say it's that simple a choice, even if you think it is.