Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Why do we start out at level 1? [SPOILERS]

Well that's because in this day an age it's all about making the most "moneys" with the least of invesment, time and effort as possible. Just hope the next BG4 EA is twice as expensive.

Larian already said it will be in the region of lvl12-14, they haven’t quite decided yet.

Just think of it as the tadpole scrambling your brain and temporarily weakening everyone. You start gaining levels quickly anyway.

Being abducted by mind flayers at a low level and thrust into an adventure well beyond their capabilities sort of fits what seems to happen in the prologue. Complaints like this make me think you aren't actually paying attention to events happening in the game. You're not a famous hero. Neither are any of the companions.

So. 2 things.

1. Level 1 adventurers are not ordinary people. In a world where the average stat for a person is a 10-11 me having 16 in probably one or two abilities makes me a pretty extraordinary dude.

Citation from the PHB:



A 16/17 are "power levels" half of divine beings. So that whole shtick about that level 1 means = weak is just not having any merits.

2. Not every story needs to start in a low stakes environment.

On topic though: Wyll and Gale both mention they've been considerably weakened by the whole ordeal. I guess the rationale is the whole gang kinda got an unstandard treatment with the spaceship crash and all.
From the Duke abduction we can probably deduce they don't go around abducting farmers but people of certain talents and/or influence.

Now on a personal note I agree I'd much rather be running around with this lot than a bunch of random farmers/shepherds/miners.

The only companion who really gives the impression of more than level 1 character bis Gale. What else we got? A very young and inexperienced gith girl, a Shar priestess that right now we know nothing about how experienced she is but I think she is much less experienced than she wants us to believe, we have a so called "hero" that his biggest nemesis is a fucking goblin (you can even comment about how lame it is), and a vampire spawn that in theory could be very experienced, but based on what we learned about him he was just a strange kink slave for all the time he was alive. Their life situations are interesting, but none of them seem like very experienced adventures when you stop to think about that

IIRC 5th edition has 'compressed' things quite significantly, so a level 10 character in 2nd edition is actually noteably weaker than a level 10 in 5th edition.

Astarion was a noble ... he never needed to pick some locks, they always invited him in, because his very presence meant an increase in prestige among the social elite.
And Gale probably was until now focused on magic, that dont involve combat.

There.

Besides what good would lockpicking do to a vampire anyway, no matter the age? "Excuse me I picked your lock, invite me in?"

And imagine the uproar if we had actually gotten the companions with higher levels - just look at all the threads dedicated to them being "incorrectly specced" at level 1

In general I feel like there was a real disconnection between the mechanics side of the game and the story side of the game.

For example, the realization that Shadowheart is a Priestess of Shar - and that Wyll is a Warlock - is supposed to be a big deal for the PC. But as the player, we can see that the second they join.

I don't understand the aim of this post honestly. A background story and level 1 is what you get when you start a D&D campaign, even if you play an elf who's 200 years old. I don't see the point in arguing about this at all.

That... that is an excellent point which I had completely overlooked.

There are players who feel cheated if they have to start at Level 1 (actual or the equivalent on other games), in PnP and CRPGs. Some player just want to dive straight in a 'Uber-Mega Level' without having to go through all the tedium of building up to it.

It's a different style of gaming, but one I am glad BG3 is not all about. I enjoy the story of earning those XP and levels, of facing ever-more difficult tasks and stronger enemies. For me, starting at higher levels is as unsatisfying as using a cheat God-Mode to power through the game to the end. I have, after all, invested money for a game. I want playing that to the conclusion to be a long and leisurely experience.

Each to their own, but I'll stick with the slow route.

I have to make Will, Shadowheart, Laez'el, spill the beans about their past but if Gale is an example of what happened they all didi something that brought them back to level 1. The archmage messed up with Mystra ending up killing her and with the need of powerful artifacts to avoid him to explode and erase half of the map with him and unable to use magic as he was used to.

Furthermore the really big and epic enemies can not be killed (like the demon lord in the flying squid), and the mobs in the area are at max level 4.

For our character, well the mindflyers kidnapped pratically any sentient living being they could (ehy, they implated a tadpole in a Gnoll!), so they toke a mr/mrs/miss nobody without any exceptional backstory.

Like I said (and for some reason everyone ignored it), what makes you think that any of them (aside from Gale perhaps) deserves more than level 1?

I just want to add that level caps are dumb and I look forward to the mod that will fix that (I know there is a mod for it now in EA, but I mean to go beyond lv 10 when the game is released)

Level caps are needed in games because the challenge for each level dinged has to be programmed. You don't have a human DM who can respond in a creative way to an arbitrary number of levels.

Every time the party levels up, the game needs to offer an appropriate challenge that isn't either too easy or too hard. It involves gating off higher level enemies with both story triggers and map design, so the player doesn't get whomped too early. Ten levels in a D&D game is already a lot of work to program this way. Asking for higher levels is basically asking for a larger game with more time put into it, and a further release date. Instead, we're getting a decent-sized game with 10-ish levels and possibly a DLC.

A mod that increases the level cap for the final game isn't going to give you the additional content you'd actually need to make that level challenging and worthwhile. I don't see the point, unless the goal is just to continually level up and roflstomp the existing game content because you can't be touched.

To me, Gale and Astarion are the two that are out of place. Gale because if he can survive wandering the planes looking for forbidden magic and Astarion because he'd have to get some experience doing something for 200 years as a vampire or else he'd starve to death.

Wyll's boasting about his abilities I can chalk up to the PnP background example given before. Shadowheart and Laez'el don't offer up enough of their background (at least in any of my interactions with them yet) to form an opinion.

If they want to chalk this up to the tadpole messing with their heads, then a simple solution is to have the main character complain about missing memories or something like that when they first wake up on the mind flayer ship. I'm ok with that. What bugged me was it wasn't that obvious in the dialogs I remember having that said each of them was missing something from their previous life.

Gale kept saying that when he lost the favour of Mystra his magic suffered, then he went out and just bought that book with it's bubble dimension before having the magic claw his way into him. I think we're supposed to believe that losing the (raunchy) favour of Mystra AND having a weave eating magical parasite in him made him weak as a newborn kitten. So I will raise my eyebrow and play along with that.

Otherwise level 1 seems fairly appropriate for the rest:
We have a somewhat lazy vampire who sounds like he did housework (or also sex work, who knows).
A folk hero that did some stuff we've apparently heard of but aren't super impressed by. Also he has a demon patron that could've given him an extra little boost to put him in the right circles if it was something impressive.
A Shar cleric that's core competency is being surly and acting like we should be surprised she worships Shar.
A Githyanki that spends all her time talking about how she's going to prove herself and how she followed protocol like it's her first day on the job.