Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General A relatively fresh article from Techradar with S. Vincke; IGN article added.

From what I understand, there'll be both a custom party system (like you can get with multiplayer), where every character is (I presume) a tadpoled "protagonist", and mercenaries, who are going to be completely soulless and fully customizable random Joes recruited somewhere later.



This is something I'm often repeating. That's 3 levels of companions. Origins with rich stories and interactions; less involved non-origin companions for variety (I suggest ranging between BG1 and BG2 in character depth); custom characters or mercenaries for full control over your party. Ideally, 12 origins + 12 non-origin companions (1+1/class), but that's probably unrealistic. Would be great, though.



I think we should provide feedback on everything and let Larian decide what they need from it. It's not like we can decide, anyway. And again, I think modding is no excuse for the base game being flawed - although yes, if I had to choose, I'd go with better story and characters.

I agree. But it's much easier to get some changes on mechanics and gameplay than story and characters. Because story and character arcs are subjective matters. They are time consuming to write and not so trivial to modify. It can be very difficult to get a consensus on what to keep or not compared to gameplay features. And also, players won't agree much on what a good character is either.

Let me beat that horse some more. NWN 2 OC/mask of the betrayer/mysteries of westgate had a viable evil path and it worked well. They were set in a D&D setting. BG2 had an evil ending (the path it self could have used a bit more work but it was there). Just because you don't like to play as evil is no reason to cut other people off from what they enjoy in a -roleplaying- game. And nobody forces you to only play a game once, you can replay it and enjoy different paths. As for Tyranny it sounded not very evil to me, I played it for a short while and everywhere there were options to work around being evil and actually be good. I found that very disappointing and somewhat embarrassing. If you say you're going to make an evil focused game then stick to your guns. On top of that I didn't found the setting very appealing since you basically start at the ending where evil has already won. It's the journey that interests me, the rest is just bureaucratic drivel.

Sure. Did you see me saying anything different? My points were: 1) this is an example where beating a dead horse worked and 2) be careful with calling things 'niche' because such arguments are easily turned against you. Devs devote that much attention to content that interests 10-30 percent of players because they fear backlash from fans and no other reasons.

And I want evil paths in the game -- otherwise my good actions are meaningless. I don't like it when writers try to keep things so open that there is no main narrative. So far BG3 has gotten it right -- the hag is perfect. You can rescue the innocent and kill the evil doer. You can take revenge on the hag that ruined your eye and gave you nothing in return. You let her continue to torture and exploit in exchange for an stat score boost.

Glad you liked NWN2 Didn't like it myself, never finished the main campaign. Actually I don't think I spend more that 10 hours on it before I said "that was money wasted".

You are not even playing evil path in tyranny, you are playing predictably the rebellious little protagonist who got mysterious boost of power to develop like a thousand million other rpgs. Lawful evil was only added like 2 years after the game was released (as in you did your job and you call your lord to finish the game).

I feel like you entirely missed the point of my post. My point was (in as few words as possible), the experience Larian is trying to create is their subjective opinion of what makes a good RPG, it is not yours or mine, which means that there are going to be some things which they do not budge on and nor should we expect them to. It would be helpful if they would tell us what those things were though, so we could stop with the speculation.

Some of the popular topics, probably are not niche, I imagine the camera controls are one of the ones that are not a niche complaint. Incidentally, I have had an argument with some of the senior developers of another game over the camera in the past where their response was (I am paraphrasing here), "I understand you do not like it, but we are trying to portray the game in a certain way and changing the way the camera handles would detract from the intended experience." I very much hope its not the same case here, because I am also in the, "I want the camera controls changed," camp, but if the camera controls here are not changed, I would not be surprised if they have a similar reason as this.

Complaints like 5e purity I imagine are likely to be quite niche. Whilst there is some cross over between people who play tabletop and people who play video games, the market for video games is much, much bigger than the market for tabletop games. There are individual games whose value dwarfs the entire of WoTC, the obvious one that comes to mind being minecraft for example. Whilst I evidently cannot conclusively prove that the majority of people who would play BG3 are actually going to be gamers and not players from tabletop, what we do know is that people are far more likely to post about something that they do not like than about things that they do like. This forum illustrates this very well, especially since there were at least 3 crowds with preconceived expectations of what they would get from this game before it even hit the early access. The first being the Tabletop 5e fans, the second being the BG 1 and 2 fans, the third being the DOS fans. The point being, it is very, very likely that the people who are on the forums (myself included) do not represent the average player and their wants, because only outliers look to start providing feedback to begin with.

A strong argument can also be made that the average player does not know what they want and will accept almost anything they are told is good. An excellent example of this is this story here, but even making these arguments is ignoring the fact that the game that Larian is trying to make is obviously not driven entirely by popularity or even by feedback from a focused group, but by what they want to make.

Incidentally, I fall into all 3 camps to some extent, I still have the disks for Divine Divinity from when it first released, the same is true for Baldur's Gate and I am familiar with the D&D rules. In some cases, I feel like the game would benefit with sticking closer to the 5e rules, in others I do not. I don't believe in following traditions for the sake of it, if something can be done better, then go for the improvement.

I understood quite well. I just think you are mistaken and gave a concrete example that udercuts your point. Understanding /= agreement.

To the contrary, you have simply repeated your point about 'niche' without acknowledging any of my points. One of my points -- one backed by evidence -- is that devs do indeed cater to vocal minorities. So even if we were accept that people who would prefer a more faithful port of D&D ruleset are a niche market -- and they are not -- that doesn't mean they cannot have an impact. Lovers of evil paths have an outsized influence on the decisions of devs.

If you are saying that feedback on the forum has no chance of influencing Larian you are making a far more sweeping critique of the Early Access model than I am willing to make at the point. I'm taking Larian's offer at face value. "You pay for early access, help us quash some bugs and by participating in the forum you have a chance of influencing the final outcome."

If you were right and Then EA is a sham and the promise to listen to feedback is meaningless hype -- I don't believe that. I'm not willing to go there yet.

As for the market I think we already have good reason to believe that the market is something other than the typical gaming market -- the extra sales are not coming from DOS fans but from people who tune into critical role and people who loved BG. Indeed I only played DOS when I heard Larian got this contract.

Also, count me allergic to elitist appeals like "people don't know what they want". If you decided to come here and share your opinion it's because you have one and that goes for both the l33t and the hoi polloi. *Beams with pleb pride*

Now we do agree that it would be nice to have better communication. And I want a poll of the forums so we have a better sense of the numbers.

Yeah but I never said my issues are more important. Moreover, I explained in my big "Larian's biggest oversight" post that I think it's not issues per se, but a design philosophy I strongly disagree with, but perhaps there are people who find appealing (and if you read the comments. All I can do is give my feedback and hope Larian will consider it. And like I said, again, from here on out it's a matter of how much Larian is willing to do things differently. But I don't think it is a matter of completely ignoring me because they don't find my comment valuable.

This is an assumption. Prove it. I will wait, since you cannot. The entirity of Husbro (the owner of WoTC, as well as a number of other companies) is valued at ~12b USD. Of that, WoTC is only a fraction. The largest part of WoTC is Magic: The Gathering, it is not D&D. When WoTC was bought out by Husbro, it was bought for ~325m USD. Even if we estimate today it to be worth ~1B USD, my point still stands, as only a fraction of this (and a fraction smaller than 50%), is made up by D&D. For comparison, Minecraft sold to Microsoft for over 2 billion $ and it is a single game. Just recently Bethesda was purchased for 7.5 Billion. In comparison to the number of people who play games on either a PC or Console, the number of people who play any tabletop game at all, be it D&D, Pathfinder, or anything else is tiny. Of those people who do play tabletop, how many of them do you think care that a port is 100% faithful. I would hazard a guess and say, not all of them. Probably not even most.

They cater to vocal minorities when what the vocal minority wants does not go against their core design pillars. There is a very active vocal minority in Path of Exile which has been asking for an auction house since the game first released, its been 8 years or so now and they have not only been told no, the developers have written very long essays explaining why, in detail, they will not add one. Maybe, just maybe, if a development team is not entirely opposed to implementing something then it gets included into the game.

I didn't say that, I just said that the type of feedback they likely find valuable is not the type of feedback many people are giving. The evil path is actually a very good example of this. Saying, "I dislike this game because I want to roleplay as an evil character," tells them exactly why you do not like it, it does not tell them how to go about implementing one. This is useful feedback for them, because understanding why someone dislikes your product helps a great deal in going about addressing the dislike. An analogy to explaining how would be you, as a player, writing your own fan fiction evil path and then expecting the developers to implement that. This is similar to much of the mechanics based feedback which has been given, which is very much, "this is how I want the mechanics to be," and not, "this is why I dislike the mechanics." This is, I suspect, why they commented on the dislike of missing (not something i personally mind at all), because the feedback surrounding missing was focused all on the why and not so much the how. I can give lots of examples of how you could "alleviate the strain of missing," for example counters, but this was not the type of feedback which was provided in much of the missing discussion.

The extra sales are likely coming from the heavy marketing and pr campaigns the game is running, this game has featured almost everywhere, from stadia, to the recent apple unveiling, to gaming conventions, etc. Skyrim or Diablo 3 have both, on their own, sold more than D&D 5e. These are both games which have a similar target audience to BG 3. There is some increase in sales from the tabletop fanbase, but you would be absolutely deluding yourself if you thought that most of the sales would be coming from anything other than the gaming market itself. The gaming industry is valued at ~90 billion USD. Its the 4th biggest entertainment industry in the world. Tabletop games are not even in the same ball park as it, they are sitting outside somewhere on the street, looking in jealously.

The people who I have seen making this argument so far on this forum are those most strongly in favor of 5e, "we know the system the best, clearly our opinion is the most important, random purchaser will buy the game anyhow - A few, unnamed 5e purists." Glad you are not in that boat, but best to make sure.

Here it is for you. It more or less confirms exactly what I said in terms of what the forums want. Here was my comment on said poll.

The problem with the survey is the problem I keep repeating, over and over again. The forum has a very clear and obvious sampling bias.

Very useful and insightful comment @Sharp. Most of it is something I always suspected but didn't have much to base it on other than "If people in this forum were the majority Solasta was a million copies success and not BG3" logic conclusion, but numbers are always better.

I talked before and said that I'm no Larian employee, so it's not my job to find a solution, only to point at the problem, and this is true.

Well said but problematic. A. I'm not sure how you were able to divine this criteria and B. I think you are ignoring or dismissing the many reasons given for the changes to the mechanics. Reasons like "I think this game plays more like DOS than BG2" is a reason for a 6 person party. I want to use a buffer cleric and melee cleric and still have room for a thief, mage and fighter is a reason. I miss the BG2 multi party banters . . . and I could go on for pages. I think the proposed changes are backed by plenty of reason for the dislike.

Likewise, I want the combat in D&D game to feel like D&D combat is the "feeling" and the elimination of the homebrew is the solution.

I'm glad we agree that things can be changed via feedback but I am less certain than you are that we are able to divine their core design philosophy.



Yeah that's a straw man and pretty badly draw caricature. It's really asking that game provide what it's offering on the tin. It's labeled as D&D, it's face of D&D and I want it to inspire a new generation of D&D games. And I can do so if its not representing the ruleset accurately.



I get the sense you don't understand why that statement is unpersuasive -- it's trivially true. And problematic in others ways. Of course you have sampling bias on any forum -- that much is obvious. But how is biased? It's biased because you only sample the most dedicated fans of the genre. The question then becomes whether or not that is bad group to poll. Clearly you think it is but I really don't -- those fans understand the genre best and they will do the best job of spreading the word about the finished product.

On the popularity of the rulese t-- Forbes tells me that WotC sales grew by 53 percent last year. And this is to say nothing of the revenues coming from the popularity of the youtube and netflix series. I think Larian is smart to try and ride that wave of enthusiasm. And "the unexpected bump in sales numbers" that Larian reported is the same thing that other devs have experienced. Beamdog's servers crashed and crashed again for months because they were so unprepared for the number of downloads (sadly, the first of a set of mistakes) The second set of mistakes was not understanding how popular the BG EEs were with non gamers. The graphics wouldn't work on integrated intel video cards this despite the fact vanilla version did. Their beta testers all had gaming machines and the devs lost months of sales rewriting program to accommodate crappy laptops. The lesson -- non gamers will buy it because of the D&D and BG labels. It's why I'm here. Hell, I haven't played the Witcher which I think in enough to get me excluded from the gamer club.

There was reason so many devs made a bid for rights to make BG3.

I'm actually more or less in that field and let me tell you: it has nothing to do with being a "5th edition purist" or not. In fact, perfect adherence with the rules of the 5th edition are quite possibly on the of the topics I discussed about the least.

It's just a matter of fact across all genres and styles: the general, casual audience has nothing more than casual expectations.
Give them a neat package, production vaue with enough polish, and they will never question the minute details of what you are selling them, if not months later in hindsight.

Of course, you two are purposefully putting it in the most unlikable way, as if being "causal" about something was some sort of shame or mark of infamy, but that's disingenuous, because it's meant to be a generic consideration, not a qualitative judgement.
I don't really blame people who aren't that much into a topic for not being able to make distinctions on nuance, but that doesn't make that nuance meaningless.

I mean, I can't understand shit about motors, I don't see why MY opinion about what's the best motorcycle on the market and what feature it should offer should be valued above the one of an expert in that field.

EDIT- Oh well, look at that, I didn't even remember we basically had this very same topic discussed in the first page of this same thread. So, there's that too.

You seem to agree on the point that dedicated fans of the genre are a better source of feedback than casual audience.





And I'd agree with that. Tuco gave a good example.

It's not useless to hear what "the masses" say - casual players can point towards certain problem areas perfectly well ("I'm not enjoying this part of the game" - maybe worth a look). But casual audience won't give you detailed feedback, won't try to carefully analyse the source of the problem and won't suggest (potentially) viable solutions. There's also the matter of "good enough". A casual player is likely to say "it's good as it is", while a veteran of the genre might go "yeah, it's good, but this and that part could be improved; game A used approach X and I think it could work in this game as well".

It's the good old principle "Your audience is *generally* great at spotting where there's a problem in your product AND absolutely terrible at suggesting what exactly is and what's a practical, viable solution".

A perfect example is something both of us already discussed: the awkwardness of the MC during dialogues.It's a problem that exist and a lot of people are pointing at, but what's often the suggested solution?
"The MC dialogues should be fully voiced, acted and directed like in a Hollywood movie/Naughty Dog triple A linear game".
Yeah, no shit that would improve things massively. It would also cost a bazillion dollars with all the permutations required.

Which is why we went and discussed how you can keep a silent character and make it far less awkward instead.

Yeah, exactly. I even had the quote in mind as I wrote my post. I generally consider it a very wise principle, although it is also where I'd make the distinction between "casual" and "veteran/dedicated" audience, as you described.

I have, in the past, held this view. Its what I call the, "expert argument." You assume that you (or someone else) is an expert on a particular topic, then because you (or they) are an expert, you assert that clearly the weight of expertise makes your opinion more valuable. To quote myself when I made this argument, "you would not go to a guy on the street for medical advice, you would want to speak to a specialist." This begs 2 important questions, the first is how do you know you are an expert? The second is, does the expert argument hold up under all scrutiny.

So, to address the first question. Have you made any games? How many years in game development do you have? When did you study? Also, while you are at it, define what metric you think is applicable for expertise here and explain why we should use that one. I can tell you with certainty, many of the people at Larian have made games before and they do have some time in game development. They also studied it and I am sure some of them have a background in D&D as well. They are, almost without a doubt, experts. Does that mean they get to make the expert argument and dismiss your feedback? Does this mean that your feedback has no value?

Now, to address the 2nd argument of, "does it matter?" In some cases, I would say yes. Evaluating when though is difficult, subjective and would take more time than I care to dedicate to this post. In many other cases though, I would say the answer is no. A mantra I personally live by is, "if an argument cannot stand on its own 2 legs I do not care who makes it, be it Stephen Hawking or the guy on the street." If the reasons given for taking a path is good and elucidated well, then it does not matter who said them, all that matters is the argument itself.

When I made this argument, it was on a topic which I do consider myself an expert on and I had written a fair amount of material on, with a large body of evidence to back it up. It was still probably a mistake to do so, because, as I said in the above paragraph, a good argument is able to stand on its merit alone.


Its not a straw man because, I never wanted you to, "attack it" to begin with, I was just explaining why I was asking (more to determine whether or not its an argument I should engage with). There are actually people making this argument on the forums and I am more or less paraphrasing them, but I consider it bad form to demean others, so I am not giving their names.


I was able to "divine this criteria" because many developers in the past have said that this is the type of feedback they find valuable, both in blog posts and to me personally. I made the assumption that if this is something which is true for many of the developers that I am aware of, it is likely true for most of them. I cannot prove whether this assumption is true or not, but there are good reasons to take this, "leap of faith," and for now I will do so. If you like, I can find some of those articles and link them to you to read.


Reasons, "why I think the party limit should be 6 and not 4," is not entirely the same as, "reasons why I dislike the current party size," although there is some overlap between both. If you like, I can provide examples of why this is the case, but I think you are able to understand this without me illustrating it.

The, "expert argument." See my above post about it. In addition, lets say you were to make a game for experts of the genre. People who know the ins and outs of every PC RPG and the D&D system. If this is your target audience, they have markedly different expectations than that of the general public and there are a LOT of things they likely want, which the general public does not. If you made a game to appeal to experts, it would not be played by the general public, because the learning curve would be too steep and the game would likely be very unforgiving. I am not saying it would be a bad thing to make a game for experts, but if you do so, you do so knowing that you are severely limiting the pool of people for which the game is appealing to.

My point was that, tabletop gaming as a whole is a niche genre. Take a sample of 1000 people on the street. Ask them if they play any PC or console games. Then ask them if they play any tabletop games. Then, if you like, ask more in depth questions like if they can name the games, what are their favorite games and to name some characters. You will find in doing so, that gaming has a much bigger audience than tabletop.

Yeah, cool, WoTC grew 53%, its still tiny in comparison to the gaming market. I can also bet you that the bump in sales was anything but "unexpected." They spent a lot of money on advertising the game during early access. It was for a time, the banner on the front page of steam. Being featured in the release of a new flagship apple product is likely also not cheap. I was completely unaware that they were demoed at apple, I do not watch apple presentations, but a friend of mine, who does not play games at all, neither tabletop nor pc games and had no knowledge of either told me he was excited for Baldur's Gate 3 because he saw it at an apple presentation. Widescale marketing like that, has a much bigger impact than whether or not a game happens to be from a popular tabletop franchise.

If you think about it, there actually were not many devs who made a bid for it. There were 3 or 4 companies including Larian, Obsidian and Beamdog. Bethesda did not make a bid for it and if they did, you can bet they would have got the rights to make it. Nor did Bioware and they were the ones that made BG 1 and 2 to begin with. The companies that made a bid to make BG 3 were companies which had other reasons to want to make a sequel to BG aside from sales, they were companies which are heavily invested into making RPGs and likely have people passionate about those games to begin with.

When I see another big post by Sharp...

''Experts' are good for some things in EA, but isn't the sole game audience to be listened to. The mistake I see in this thread is: I am an expert in this genre and therefore my opinion should count more than anyone else. Games need a variety of audiences of different abilities to work well, without diluting the spirit of the experience, and in some instances non-experts can be actually better for feedback. "I'm struggling to understand this", or "why is this like this?" is often better feedback than "I don't like this because it's not how I like it", or "it's like this because it's how it's always been/should be." Games in EA need both, and both are just as valuable. And from a financial angle, it makes no sense just to cater to the hardcore. That's not how games sell.


Either way, gatekeeping is really not a good look.

Well, yes, that's EXACTLY the claim. Except the part about claiming I'd be the expert.
Even if, let's be honest here, I totally am.

And no, I didn't make videogames, but I am familiar with software development. I was even my path of study at some point, even I ended up quitting and moving in a completely different direction in life (I manage a boxing gym, imagine that. Currently closed for lockdown because of COVID-19, too. Fuck that).
Then again back to my example most expert about motors didn't engineer one and doctors didn't genetically engineer bodies from the ground up either; in the same way most critics in most fields aren't expert practitioners on the that matter.

But that's not the point. Is it? I never claimed that my credibility (or the one of any other "game expert" on a studio or forum) should come from an authoritative resume, as much as from the reasonability and specificity of the suggestions I brought so far.

And yes, expertise (or if you actually want to be that fastidious about it, let's call it INTIMATE FAMILIARITY WITH A TOPIC) totally DOES matter.

Because if you have no clue of what it's technically feasible, nor you can mention a broad range of examples that addressed a given issue in the past, what does your suggestion matters, exactly?

Is "We should totally have mounted combat and be able to hire armies like in Mount & Blade" a pertinent suggestion, when it comes to the type of game BG3 is trying to be?
Is "Well, I don't think this is too bad. I know no games that did it better" when there are dozens THAT valuable as an opinion?

Then again, "the opinion of experts matters" and "Whatever any expert suggests should be automatically held as a Gospel" are two very different things, aren't they? Especially since experts have conflicting opinions about a given topic all the times.
Saying that competent and well argued opinions should have certain weight and claiming that unless you have a life-long list of achievements in a field to have right to suggest something seem very different things to me.
Because the latter is what you are attempting to argue for rhetorical points, while the former was my suggestion all along.

Dismissive handwaving as "Oh, well, the experts are just a few, while most of our audience doesn't know shit and is happy anyway" doesn't strike me as that much of an argument in favor of lousy mechanics, and... Is it really any LESS condescending that the alleged crime of "gatekeeping", anyway?

But do you have expertise though? There is a big difference between studying a topic and being an enthusiast of it. You could play BG 3 for 1,000 hours and never think much about it, you could also play it for 10 hours with a notepad and pen and write down lots of minutiae, noticing things 99.99% of players don't and be an expert on it. My point being, usually if someone is an "expert" on something, they have some body of work they can show which proves their expertise. Do you have a body of work to show this expertise to me?


And this was something I also said. "What matters far more is whether a piece of feedback is good or not, rather than who said it." If a casual player comes here and provides some good piece of feedback, does it matter that they are a casual player? No, what matters is that there feedback is good.

There is a cavaet there that, to an untrained eye, how do you know the quality of the feedback on sight. If someone came to me with 2 papers written on gene folding and one was complete garbage but the other was a legitimate paper, if the garbage 1 was sufficiently well faked, I would not be able to tell the 2 apart because I am not an expert on it. This is why you do go to and trust experts, because we don't have the time to study everything and become experts on all topics ourselves and thus we need to put some faith into someone else. When it comes to feedback about the EA however, the situation is different. There are very clearly some experts who are involved and are (hopefully) reading the topic. Those experts, are the people making the game. They can (hopefully) tell the difference between good feedback and bad feedback, using whatever criteria they have to determine what good and bad feedback is.


I don't think it is bad if a game is made and advertised entirely towards a hardcore audience. There are some niche games like this and its perfectly fine for them to do so and I am sure the developers of those games are aware that their games have a much smaller appeal as a result of this, but so long as both them (and their audience) is happy with what they are getting, everything is going just fine. Roguelikes are an easy example of this. BG 3 has not marketed itself as being that game though, its trying to have broad market appeal. This means that, as you said, it needs to appeal to a variety of different player types. These player types enjoy different things and in some cases there is a conflict between these player types over what they enjoy. Magic: The Gathering has a good article on what they see as the different player types for their game over here, I am sure, without thinking much, it becomes obvious where the different conflict between these types arises.