Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Best thing about BG3: Pathfinder & Solasta

Oh I love those kind of descriptions.

On the opposite end from environmental descriptions, the weather effects and animations in Pathfinder Kingmaker are really cool. Torrential rain slowing your party to a crawl, lightning storm terrifying you as you walk behind your fighter in full plate armor.

After spending so much time in BG3 it's easy to forget that weather, time of day, and other environmental effects can greatly increase immersion.

yes, day/night cycles plus weather effects are a big thing, getting more of that stuff in these new games would be lovely.

By "environmental descriptions" do you guys mean the storybook portions of the PF and PoE? I love those! They're a nice way to change up the pace and present challenges without combat. Plus you get to see some cool hand drawn art. 🙂

Not that, all the other description during normal dialogue. Personally I just found it to be exhausting.

I thought I liked walls of text, but then I played Disco elysium and that pushed me to the limit.

*

I disagree. The problem with day/night cycles in most games is they're much shorter than a real day/night cycle - sometimes as quick as a few hours. Given you do not walk around in the game extremely quickly, this breaks immersion for me. Particularly in some of the Elder Scrolls games I remember playing where you could walk around a city for a very short period of time and all the merchants went home for the night. If you're not engaged in fast travel, game time should proceed identically to RL time.

In contrast, the BG3 "camp" system works in my mind. You start adventuring at dawn, and virtually no one will adventure for 12 straight hours in game without a rest, so the lack of night outside of camp does not break immersion. The teleporting to an identical camp kind of does, but that's a different issue.

I started my career as a RPG player with Kotor so I tolerate walls of text. But the game has to be really good and the story better be really interesting. I think that's part of the reason I never finished POE1

If your position is that Disco Elysium is anything short of amazing, I am afraid that we must have a duel. Pistols or swords?

Hmm I have to play the game still, but I can see how it can be a bit much if that would go on in excess. If there are cues its trying to convey, "the character seems pensive or distracted when they reply to you." or the like would be fine. Not sure what a full description like RR Martin got involved would be needed for, other than say, accessibility though I wouldn't know how a visually impaired person would do a game like that.

Kotor has walls of text? It's the first Bioware game that was catered towards a bigger cross-platform audience, therefore it didn't have that many. (It was also fully voiced).

https://kotaku.com/how-knights-of-the-old-republic-pulled-off-a-voice-acti-1833889388

What I meant was that because Kotor is fully voice acted, I prefer my games voice acted but will tolerate walls of text if the story is worth it.

Disco Elysium was an interactive book. Just walls of text everywhere. It's a shame they paid off so many reviewers.

As soon as Solasta comes to GoG I'm going to give it a try.

ToEE was perhaps the best game to ever capture 3.5 combat but it just didn't have story and the looting system was broken. That game really needed an EA so fans could have told them how much they hated looting and that the romances were, well, not really romances. The company was deaf to criticism even as it continually patted itself on the back for having the first gay male romance in D&D game.

Hordes of the Underdark was forgettable and I'm always surprised to find people who enjoyed it. I mean it wasn't bad but I can only vaguely remember the plot and I hated the engine itself.

So it seems a good analogue in that ToEE has the right engine but I think to compare Hordes to Bg3 is a comparison that isn't kind to BG3.

Now the game that got everything wrong was POR: Ruins of Myth Drannor.

A dialogue tree is also a game system. First half of DE is 10/10 RPG - definitely the best one in many many years. And the first one, to really expand on what Planescape introduced. Too bad, that it really drops in quality halfway through. DE only works because of sheer amount of content and reactivity available - and that is simply not true of the latter half.

I like those depending on game. In a game with limited visual presentation they can enrich the game a lot. Something like BG3 doesn’t need so much of it, as it has a lot more to work with presentation wise. They will have some of those, though- narrator bits.

I don't think I can agree with a single word of this post.
Not with the general idea, and even less the specific examples of what works and what doesn't.

The idea that "a day too short" that doesn't match an actual 24 hours cycle is somewhat worse than a world frozen in a single moment in time (which is what BG3 offers) is utterly ridiculous to me.


I had zero problems with DE. It's rarely verbose for the sake of it. Maybe I groaned just a bit when it tried a tad too hard with these edgy "introspective monologues", but that's pretty much it.
Same with Torment. When it forces you to read is rarely wasting your time.

Conversely, I absolutely despised most of the "walls of text" in Pillars of Eternity. I mean the first, specifically. Long-winded without anything interesting to say or a good reason to be, more often than not.

I also wished someone warned me upfront that these goddamn yellow NPCs were just regurgitating shitty fanfictions written by Kickstarter backer when I started it for the first time.

@OP: Dude what do you expect? They don't have a magic wand where they can just change game mechanics every couple of weeks. Stop being so impatient and try to understand how incredibly hard it is to make a good game - let alone a huge, ambitious game like this one. How about you give it a try? Create a little side-scroller game in one month and then come back and complain about how they don't listen to you poor guy. Larian Studios has a good track record of listening to their players. How about you in return have some patience and trust in them? Play your Kingmaker in the meantime. Just stop complaining about them not being superhumans.

OP:

Also OP

Also Also OP

Also Also Also OP

Alrik:


That said, OP I can't forgive you for your dislike of DE. That game was brilliant. So I'm going to have to side with Alrik

Considering the system has short rests that last an hour and 8 hour sleeps (4 if you're an elf) they could easily have fairly long day/night cycles. It doesnt need to match our time because typically the characters are in fact moving faster than we do -because distances between canon places are hugely reduced.

E.g. distance between mournhold and red mountain is 250 miles iirc. But you can travel that distance in not many day/night cycles at all in morrowind.


P.s. my word, yes Pool of Radiance was bad. I remember playing that with my step dad. Lol