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Played a lot of hours, but that's normal for this genre.

That said, there's a few issues I can see sticking with this game that I do not like, some of which are purely opinions, such as not wanting all followers to be so "playersexual", I think your gender, as well as race should matter for some followers
for example, Shadowheart should never get along well enough with a Githyanki character

(Yeah I know you want to play who you want and not feel hindered, but this is an RPG, I expect immersion, and no I don't want to hear the excuse that this world has magic so how dare I expect realism.)
as well as the pacing of the romance being too fast for most characters, this is the start of Act I, calm down, dude.

Or how I think Gale is a bit of a Mary Sue, given his.. past, perhaps not for d&d standards, but it is kind of insane to me.

Then there's stuff more people agree on, like too many surfaces, missing too often, failing rolls does NOT feel fun at all. (But to be expected with a d&d computer game, I suppose)

Is it worth my money? Eh, not yet, no, I hope they improve on these things, and I hope the full game will be very big indeed, and less letdowns than the Early Access, but it's not too bad, so not all hope is lost yet.

Last edited by GloriousZote; 28/10/20 07:45 PM.
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Worth the $60? Oh, yeah.

I've never played anything by Larian before, and my last big fantasy computer game was Dungeon Siege, but I'm a huge D&D 5e fan, and I love turn-based games. I love the (admittedly unrealistic) ability to survey the entire battlefield, contemplate my options, and finally select a choice... before moving on to the next turn.

As I mentioned, I'm a huge D&D 5e fan, and I think this adaptation is superb. There are a few differences (ranger abilities, surfaces, height --> advantage/disadvantage) but they're well thought out and I see them as an improvement on the 5e rules, rather than spitting on them. Mostly, I think the conformance is superb -- and my near-obsessive analysis of the combat logs during some fights bears this out, even if my d20 doesn't roll as well as I want it to. The spells, so far, are wonderful (I love the totally-satisfying slam of Eldritch Blast). I think the flavor and appearance come through great. (My only complaint here: I wouldn't let wizards learn clerical spells.)

I think the monster AI does a great job. Their tactics (particular regarding capturing high ground, clerical buffs, and using area-of-effect bottles and arrows) have taught me a lot about how to fight more effectively. Between the combat AI and the many branches of the storyline, suspension of disbelief is easy. I *believe* in my opponents.

There are some scenes that glitch during the render; I've had a crash or two. Save early, save often. We *were* warned about this. It's part of what you should be expecting for "early access."

For my style and my preferences, this game is nearly perfect. The $60 was well worth it for the more than 140 hours of play I've gotten so far (and I haven't even reached the underdark yet), not to mention the hundreds more hours to come.

-- What? They're going to be releasing even MORE in a year? And I'll get it for free? I'm speechless.

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Guys it's not just about the hours, an especially invalid point where one relatively small fight can take 10 minutes, given how slow the gameplay is.

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Originally Posted by GloriousZote
Guys it's not just about the hours, an especially invalid point where one relatively small fight can take 10 minutes, given how slow the gameplay is.

I think the point is, that if we are BG3 for playing 60+ hours then presumably we are enjoying the experience (or a masochist). And any experience I enjoy that costs less than $1 an hour falls clearly into the 'Worth it' category.

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On the other hand, the point of EA is presumely to make sure the game will be good on release, and a €60 game should be very high quality, so far, this game has been medium-to-good, so wile I've enjoyed it quite a bit for the.. about 200 hours I've played it, I can't say it meets the standards of a €60 game, even acknowledging that this is Early Access and has bugs and is, naturally, unfinished, only giving critique to things that I can imagine remaining until launch.

Last edited by GloriousZote; 29/10/20 12:53 AM.
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Originally Posted by trengilly
I think the point is, that if we are BG3 for playing 60+ hours then presumably we are enjoying the experience (or a masochist). And any experience I enjoy that costs less than $1 an hour falls clearly into the 'Worth it' category.


You can't just equivocate it like that. That's like saying if you bought a meal at a restaurant and finished it, you must have liked it and cannot possibly have anything negative to say about the food. It's not like someone would buy the EA, play for 45 minutes and declare that they didn't get their money's worth. Once people have actually seen what the EA contains, they'll say how they feel about it.

The worst thing about insular communities like these is how the fans will incessantly invent reasons why people who criticize the game don't actually deserve the right to do so. What, so the people who played 60+ hours and come here saying they don't like it... they're lying or what? They actually enjoyed it because of the amount of hours they spent on it, despite saying the opposite? Really...

Stop trying to make criticism unwelcome. That's the worst part of gaming culture. Anyone who actually wants the game to be as good as it can get should not contribute to a "only say positive things" atmosphere.

Last edited by Clawfoot; 29/10/20 12:58 AM.
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I’m really disappointed. I feel there’s just not enough playable content. Yeah, you can create a couple different characters and choose a couple of different paths to follow in the game, but realistically there’s only about 10 hours of fresh gameplay where you don’t know what’s coming around the next corner.

I know people are going to hate on me (I don’t care. I won’t read your post anyways) but I think it was an ingenious shady scheme for Larian to launch the game in its current state and get people to pay them to work out their bugs. Yeah, I know, people have logged 100+ hours playtime. That’s good. I’m glad you feel you got your money’s worth, but I feel there should be more (much more) when you pay $60 for a game. Again, I know I know, Larian was quite forward in stating the game was incomplete and yeah, I bought the game anyway. But, I feel like I bought a cheap car that I didn’t get to look at before I bought it. Now I’m stuck with a car that has everything it needs to be a car I can drive except it’s missing a tire, the seats and the steering wheel, and it won’t start and I have to figure out why. There’s a word for that, lemon.

Inevitably the way it will play out is every couple of weeks they’ll fix some bugs. Every couple of months they’ll release new playable content which will of course have bugs that will need to be worked out. Wash, rinse, repeat until the game finally launches and everyone who bought the prerelease will already have done everything, and know everything about the game but will have to start over from the beginning.

Oh, if anyone reads this, a word of advice. If you’re making multiple characters to play as updates are released don’t run them through all of the playable content. Stop when you max xp at level 4. Otherwise, depending on how Larian increases the level cap, you may lose out on a bunch of xp.

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Yes I have.

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So far no. Larian promised a DnD game but so far have produced another Divinity game. It plays like Divinity and feels like Divinity. They got some of the DnD rules correct, but so far haven't bothered to address the hundreds of threads asking why they changed so many of the rules. Why Jumping around like it was a Mario game is so important in their game. Hook horrors and Minotaurs just look to goomba stomp you instead of playing like a minotaur should. You can shove as a bonus action when it is supposed to be an attack action. Giving advantage for high ground AND disadvantage for having low ground. And many more issues you can easily find on the suggestions forum thread. These are not trivial things, they change the entire feeling of the game to make it feel less and less like a DnD game. these things would all have to be addressed and made to conform more with proper 5thed rules before I could say it was worth it. If it doesn't then I simply feel lied to and cheated. Since they hyped and promised a DnD game then gave us this.

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Originally Posted by Dreygor6091
So far no. Larian promised a DnD game but so far have produced another Divinity game. It plays like Divinity and feels like Divinity. They got some of the DnD rules correct, but so far haven't bothered to address the hundreds of threads asking why they changed so many of the rules. Why Jumping around like it was a Mario game is so important in their game. Hook horrors and Minotaurs just look to goomba stomp you instead of playing like a minotaur should. You can shove as a bonus action when it is supposed to be an attack action. Giving advantage for high ground AND disadvantage for having low ground. And many more issues you can easily find on the suggestions forum thread. These are not trivial things, they change the entire feeling of the game to make it feel less and less like a DnD game. these things would all have to be addressed and made to conform more with proper 5thed rules before I could say it was worth it. If it doesn't then I simply feel lied to and cheated. Since they hyped and promised a DnD game then gave us this.


Yeah, and the biggest issue to me is just the overall cartoonishness of the game. The animations, the behaviour of NPCs, the general atmosphere of the game is just so overwhelmingly camp. It completely lacks the fundamental believability of DnD and BG. Apart from the mathematics under the hood, this game is Divinity. Why can I leap fifteen feet from a standstill without any magical assistance? Why does activating Dash cause my character to wave his arms around like he's casting a spell? Why are mundane actions accompanied by flashing lights and arcane sound effects? Why does literally every sentient being in the game speak the common tongue and with a British accent? This game is so unimmersive and filled with so many layers of silly, pseudo-comedic nonsense that it's like a playable cartoon.

The rule deviations from DnD is something I can forgive during EA, because I think they'll fix most of that before release. But the cartoonish vibe of the game, the weird and unrealistic behaviour of characters, the total lack of any sense of different cultures because everyone speaks the same language with either an English, Irish or Scottish accent, the superficial "epicness" that covers every part of the game even from the very beginning... these aren't products of Early Access. These aren't issues that get ironed out over time, they're simply how Larian want the game to be, and I find it so off-putting. It's the McDonald's of RPGs, just like DOS was.

It's clear that Larian didn't even intend to make BG3 feel any different from DOS. It was never in their plans. They didn't try but fail to make this game feel like its own thing, they tried and succeeded to make the next Divinity game, just with DnD lore and mechanics. And they were extremely loose with both of those things as well, so it isn't even a good DnD experience. It's like DnD as perceived by someone who learned about it a couple of months ago, skimmed the books, and went with their first impression. There's no sense of pacing or nuance to it, it's just all the most fantastical things in the DnD repertoire crammed into a tiny space.

Hell, it's even more boring than DOS because excruciatingly slow turn-based combat with one action per turn is awful for video games. At least in DOS you could do multiple things per turn. When you have just four characters and one action per turn in a battle against a dozen goblins, you spend 90% of a 20-minute fight just waiting for the enemies to go through the motions. It's so tedious.

Last edited by Clawfoot; 29/10/20 03:35 AM.
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Paying for EA to help Larian develop the game is a two way favor. The player gets to taste the cake while Larian gets much needed data in the hopes of creating a great legacy title. Larian have made great titles and I am sure they are working on the D&D rule issues bothering many players. I myself trust the devs as outside other game devs as they were genuinely giddy about the idea of creating BG3. The support and after care they shown DOS2 after release was above and beyond imo and I am sure they don't want to go down in history in destroying one of the last legacy franchises that haven't been chucked in the SJW underdark.

Listening to the players and showing them they genuinely care about creating a D&D title to rival the BG of the past will endear the playerbase. As such "can do no wrong" in the players eyes should be the goal of all devs, with dedicated fans comes $$$$$$$$. I never pay for a product before it is finished but to support a BG game I have been waiting on for 20 years? There you go!!! Make it great or Ill lose all hope in gaming.

Am I hopeful I will get my money's worth? 100%

Spoilers.

Just looking forward to the next big content update. I don't care about romance dialogue options, I already smashed the clerics head in....then ate her. The gith is on thin ice and the vampire has already been sold to the bounty hunter so I don't have to listen to the clowns melodrama. Gale ate my book so I killed him and knicked his scroll. The blade guy I left with the druids as 5 seconds into convo I was like.....narr he would be dead faster than shadowsplat. Give me a 7 foot tall half-ork barbarian lapdancer or a Drow pale master with an aim to kill her matriarch or something. Mmmm maybe a Drow druid that can shapeshift into a Lolith spider.....

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It’s worth it to have EA Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s just kind of frustrating to have to now wait to finish it....

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Not a chance not yet.. $100 Australian is a lot for a level 4 capped pretty broken alpha.. Not saying it wont be better at launch but as it is now i don't believe its given me back my money spent. Plus the homebrew content needs to be removed imo.

Originally Posted by Dreygor6091
So far no. Larian promised a DnD game but so far have produced another Divinity game. It plays like Divinity and feels like Divinity. They got some of the DnD rules correct, but so far haven't bothered to address the hundreds of threads asking why they changed so many of the rules. Why Jumping around like it was a Mario game is so important in their game. Hook horrors and Minotaurs just look to goomba stomp you instead of playing like a minotaur should. You can shove as a bonus action when it is supposed to be an attack action. Giving advantage for high ground AND disadvantage for having low ground. And many more issues you can easily find on the suggestions forum thread. These are not trivial things, they change the entire feeling of the game to make it feel less and less like a DnD game. these things would all have to be addressed and made to conform more with proper 5thed rules before I could say it was worth it. If it doesn't then I simply feel lied to and cheated. Since they hyped and promised a DnD game then gave us this.


Well said this is very much my opinion so far as well. Too much Divinity way to watered down D&D.

Last edited by DanteYoda; 29/10/20 06:21 AM.
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A lot of you have a really low value of a unit of your respective currency.

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I think it's a great D&D game, and I've played almost every D&D video game ever made. Sure it has some adaptations, some house rules. So do I, when I DM tabletop D&D. I usually use more house rules than Baldur's Gate 3 does, and my players never say "this isn't D&D".

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Originally Posted by Firesnakearies
I think it's a great D&D game, and I've played almost every D&D video game ever made. Sure it has some adaptations, some house rules. So do I, when I DM tabletop D&D. I usually use more house rules than Baldur's Gate 3 does, and my players never say "this isn't D&D".


I mean, it would be pretty rude of them to say that when you're all sitting there with character sheets in hand.

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Originally Posted by Firesnakearies
I think it's a great D&D game, and I've played almost every D&D video game ever made. Sure it has some adaptations, some house rules. So do I, when I DM tabletop D&D. I usually use more house rules than Baldur's Gate 3 does, and my players never say "this isn't D&D".

Not to be rude to you, but if you did that i would say something.. to much homebrew ruins the game.

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Originally Posted by DanteYoda
Originally Posted by Firesnakearies
I think it's a great D&D game, and I've played almost every D&D video game ever made. Sure it has some adaptations, some house rules. So do I, when I DM tabletop D&D. I usually use more house rules than Baldur's Gate 3 does, and my players never say "this isn't D&D".

Not to be rude to you, but if you did that i would say something.. to much homebrew ruins the game.


It can ruin the game, or it can make it better. Depends on how good the DM is. It's not like the system as designed is perfect, especially given the variance of desires of different groups.

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Originally Posted by Firesnakearies
I don't know about anyone else, but I already feel like I've gotten my $60 worth out of this game, even if they never added anything else to it. This is the best unfinished game I've ever played, and I think there's a lot of content here too if you go hunting for it. I can't believe there's still SO MUCH MORE to come, and we don't even have to pay any extra for it.


Yep...I'm happy. It always amazes me that some people see the "EA" tag and the prominent admonitions splattered all over the web sites and the game itself about how "early" and "rough" this alpha-level game is-- and yet at the same time seem to believe all of that is really just a fib and of course the EA game is actually code for "Excellent Already," polished and practically finished--like maybe a release candidate or better!....;) They say, "I know it's an alpha but...but...but...but...I didn't really expect it to be an alpha!"

Then there's the crowd that formed a detailed mental picture of what the game was going to look like the moment they heard about it. The EA doesn't look like that to them--and so they can't quite quit thinking of what they *thought* it would be long enough to allow Larian to show them what Larian decided the game would be...and etc.

In terms of all things computerdom, dashed expectations--even if there was never a basis for those expectations--top the list of what disappoints people the most! The people who most enjoy the rare game like BG3 or Witcher 3, etc., are people who "go with the flow" and leave their preconceived notions at the door, imo! Same thing is also true of movies and books. When we don't hem the author/game dev/director in with our own notions as to how things should go the chances exponentially improve for our enjoying the game/movie/book much more than we thought possible...;)

My favorite thing about EA is watching the huge improvements in the story, the animations, the graphics, the voicing, the game world itself, that take place as the game moves towards official release!


I'm never wrong about anything, and so if you see an error in any of my posts you will know immediately that I did not write it...;)
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Yeah, imagine how great the game is gonna be in a year, year and a half.

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