Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Suggestion on how to improve the games appeal.

Would it be possible to add a configuration menu for the game for us players to tweak some of the more or less controversial choices about the game? i know it would take some resources to do so but wouldnt it make a better game for everyone ?

As an example put in a check box for things like the following.

1. No non 5E aoe effects on cantrips and spells.
2. Turn off healing by eating normal food.
3. Scale down Inviromental effects
4. Turn off long rest Camp rest from anywhere but mapjumping points
5. Turn on resorce cost to use mapjumping option.
5. Turn on ambush/ attacks at short rests
6. Turn off dialoge between player created characters.
7. Turn off jumping outside 5E ruleset include disengage choice.
8. Scale down magical item droprate and vendor magic items including potions/scrolls etc
9. Turn on Rolling for stat at the character build
10. Scle down push mechanicas pr 5E rules.

Aka make it like DnD 5e there are a lot of posts exactly like this including mine but I don't go into too much detail because I know most of these posts just get ignored anyway

That would make it less appealing for me.

Two things:

1.) I would like to report bugs in game. Maybe that would be a data overload for Larian, but it would definitely increase feedback.

2.) Integration of the our created player's backstory into the game seems to be lacking. Others have mentioned that maybe someone with a criminal background would not look away from violence in cutscenes. Also you don't feel a connection to your players history. It would be nice to have a cutscene or narrated monologue about your characters origin based on race+backstory (ie. Criminal Lolth-sworn Drow - Narrator: "Growing up on the streets of Menzoberranzan you had to steal to survive." *cut to scene of young Drow getting chased by authorities after stealing* Narrator: "And with that came hard lessons and sharp skills on the street." - and so on for each combination of race + backstory)

I really think this would draw you further into the story and add some personalization to it. And if you're too busy, crowdsource some of the work out to us! I think we all love fan fiction enough to draft stories and scenes for Larian to do its magic with. Seriously you guys are magical.

@RumRunner151 and thats why you have dinivity origonal sin 2, to play something dnd style without the DnD rules, we dont need another seperate title that is just a clone of DoS

It's either make it more appealing for purists or make it more appealing for D:OS groupies. I think it's just that Larian didn't expect a backlash from D&D community.

They would have to be really shortsighted if they didn't see this coming. They changed a lot of things to lean closer to D:OS rules instead of the 5e rules they had been advertising, and then are surprised that the D&D fans aren't happy about how little this feels like a D&D game? They had to either see this coming and simply figured the DOS fans would outnumber the D&D fans for some reason, or they just didn't care.

There were listed as checkbox options, so there is no loss of appeal, just more options. I like them for the most part.

@Rumrunner151
I fail to see how it could possibly make the game less appealing to anyone that you get more choices of how to play the game? i'm not suggesting to enforce anything , only to give more choises like a GM could/would do.

First thing is, if a company brings in a consultant to help them improve their product, the very first thing the consultant will ask is "who is your target consumer?". And the first mistake many companies do is answering "everyone".

You simply can't design a product that fits everyone and by not acknowledging that you often come up with a product that doesn't really fit anyone.

If I buy a game, I don't wanna start filling in a A4 filled form with checkboxes to evaluate what I want to play, that's practically asking me, the consumer, to design the game for them. In fact, such a maneuver would put me off.

Secondly, he would ask "How have you marketed/pitched this product so far? Your product have to stay relatively close to that pitch/marketing as to not confuse the buyer or be perceived as a hoax. You can ofc completely change the marketing if you during development realize that your product would be better aimed towards another market. As long as you're transparent with that decision.

So, what has Larian done so far? Well, I conclude that through out their whole marketing campaign they've been very clear that this is supposed to be Baldur's Gate 3, a D&D franchise, based on 5th edition rule set. Not inspired by, based upon. If Larian simply would have announced that they are producing the next Baldur's Gate, and letting us know nothing more, a lot of the current controversy could have been hindered. But they didn't do that.

And as they didn't do that, I'm honestly baffled with people asking them to not make this a d&d 5e game, mostly with the argument that they just want a new really good rpg game from Larian. Now, what people find being a really good game is subjective and why can't those that don't like 5e or even d&d wait for Larians next project. Trust me, D&D fans has waited quite a while now compared to those that really enjoyed the divinity series.

With that said. Larian has imho done quite a good job with some nice homebrewing improving i.e the ranger. But went horribly wrong in other design choices diluting classes by giving spell scrolls to everyone, disengage and hide as bonus actions to everyone, changing cantrips that didn't need changing (true strike is a fair improvement though) and balancing the combat around those changes messing up the rest system etc. And I can agree with the check box idea for a very select few options, absolutely no more than 5 though.

In who’s opinion is this not like a d&d game ? This is a d&d game pure and simple.
D&d spells, setting, characters,magic items, rules, races, combat..etc

D&D games do not stop being D&D because someone adapts for a video game medium.

D&D games do not stop being D&D because there are some slight rule changes...( yeah yeah the surfaces thing I don’t disagree with that & many other comments people have) ... but declaring it’s not D&D is just utter garbage.

I feel like the game does a good job of adapting the 5e ruleset into a video game format. The core classes, abilities, saves/attacks etc are recognisable.

Is it a direct copy - no, and neither should it be because 5e is a different medium with its own set of problems. Plus, 5e streamlined many mechanics to make the game more accessible for both players and more importantly - DM's. And that is good, since I was introduced to DnD 4e and hated that thing.

Saying that, some features can be brought back in a video game because they don't make the game harder for the players - for example burning damage.

Furthermore, the game can play around with features that are less prominent in DnD games and that is vertical combat. I don't know about you, but I design 5e encounters mostly on flat maps, where keeping track of height is a pain. Furthermore, I don't think busting out Pythagoras theorem to figure out whether your spell can reach an enemy is fun. And 5e is built around encounters being flat, which BG3 thankfully does away with.

Also, I am sure Larian knows what it is doing and judging by the numbers of Early Access sales and Twitch streams BG3 will perform well.

Well, as you might have seen on the forum there are several threads declaring that the ea doesn't feel like a true d&d game and that its too similar to Divinity. And also stated in several threads is the understanding that some changes has to happen for the adaption i.e some divination and illusion spells that doesn't really cary over well without an active GM. And other homebrewing ideas has been welcomed as well, where it mainly improved the game without drawbacks, But many of the changes that has happened is completely unnecessary as the original rule set would work just as fine if the combat actually would have been designed around the original rule set instead of the new additions.

Also, there are several players on the forums that actively asks for the game to be more like DoS2 or even completely remove the d&d format as they don't like it. They are a minority so far, but they exist.

Yes, it's certainly a D&D game, but because of a few design choices it doesn't have some of that same D&D feel so much as it does a Divinity feel. And I don't think anybody is actually saying it's not a D&D game so much as they are saying it doesn't really feel like a D&D game because of some of the decisions that Larian has made to change things around so much. All they really need to do, in my opinion, is to change the cantrips to stop making surface effects and rebalance them a bit, balance the enemies better (they seriously made too many enemies that get 3 attacks in 1 turn), remove some of the grenades/special arrows/barrels from the game (not all of them, just tone it down a little bit Michael Bay), and stop making everything a bonus action.

The main problem here is that the game seems to be balanced around the Divinity style play more so than a D&D 5e style of play, such as some of the puzzles involving ground effects and poison clouds and such. They have these massive areas full of poison clouds or other effects you have to get around, and the answer most people seem to find is the one that was used in Divinity: set the poison on fire and then put out the fire with water, running past before the poison comes back. Problem is, this is a rather hard feat to pull off if you don't know any spells like Create Water or if you're out of spell slots. In Divinity you had a cooldown timer on abilities instead of spell slots, but D&D has a limited resource spell slot instead, so balancing it around cooldown timers as it seems to have been just doesn't work.

The game is good, I rather enjoy it, but it needs some tweaking and some things they simply should have left alone. It seems that rather than mess around with a few things to fit them into the game better, they messed around with everything and made it feel like a weird mashed together Divinity D&D homebrew that just doesn't work as well. It's still EA, and very early in EA at that, so I'm sure they'll take the feedback into account and make changes as needed. Considering the amount of people asking that cantrips be tweaked a bit more and have ground effects removed from them, I hope they'll listen and improve upon it. I like some of the ideas they have, they just implemented them a bit wrong is all, if they can tweak it a little bit more to help balance everything out then fantastic!

Side note though, who hopes they make a GM mode similar to what they tried to do with DOS2 (but more streamlined hopefully) for BG3? I always thought that was a killer idea for DOS2, but having it in a literal D&D game would make running a D&D campaign pretty interesting.