Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Feedback and Critics

It's true inventory management is very unrealistic but that's been true forever, in BG 1 and 2 you had limits based on weight and inventory slots, but size was uniform, 1 potion took up as much 'space' as lugging around someone's body. The difference between that and now is you'd only be doing that under rarer circumstances whereas in BG 3 they've loaded the world with very useful barrels, that still are only limited by weight not of size, I'm sure they've hand waved it with magic pockets and endless bags but it's still ridiculous.

They should also have NPCs react to you not so subtly seeding the battlefield with explosives.

Longer battles are only less fun if they're repetitive. If they designed battles to have problems that changed and forced you to refigure out how to 'solve the puzzle' they wouldn't be a problem.

I have no problem with longer combat sequences in an of themselves, but if every fight was prolonged that would become a problem for me. I found combat in DA2 especially tedious and unrewarding because of the excessive enemy count used to pad out the game’s length and increase the difficulty. I don’t have any empirical data to substantiate this claim, but I’m pretty sure that there are many people out there who would agree with me. If this is a narrative you have heard frequently, that is evidence to support my point.

Goldilocks Zone ... can't be too hard, can't be too soft. D&D used to have a lot of instant-kill magic, which works fine when there are a lot enemies. But in a lot of CRPG's including the old Baldur's Gate, many times your whole party is up against just a single foe, so the developers decided to put in spell immunities which were never contemplated in the classic D&D. That was also when a high-level 8 HD monster had only about 40 hit points. A lot has changed over the years, but you still have to find that optimal challenge spot ... nobody likes cold porridge.

@Warlocke I'm a casual so I can't claim to have my ear the ground as far as gamer's preferences but from the places I tend to hang out -- here, obsidian, beamdog, reddit 4 party members seems to a narrative particular to this game. In fact on Obsidian people were upset that the game only had 5. I suspect that '4 party keeps combat from dragging on' is narrative that started with talking points from the devs.

So yeah, we agree that were speaking in the absence of data and such. And this is also response to @danieldba --

When I think of the battles I've really like in turn based games -- second level of TOEE, the demon doctor from DOS2, the pirates in POE2 (turn based) I think that they were much longer than the battles in BG3 so far. In BG / DnD the tactics should come from the party.

A good IWD party was 1 fighter, 1 ranger, 1 thief, 1 cleric, 1 buffing mage, 1 striking mage Tons of fun. Then you could replay with putting bards, buffing clerics and the like into the slot. Felt like D&D and not DOS.

Using Argyle's metaphor. 4 party members feels like cold porridge, 6 like cold ice cream. Dunno what that does with his Goldilocks analogy but it gives me an excuse to talk about oatmeal and ice cream

As the OP said, 4 party formations work best in a classless game. In DOS2 I just went back the mirror whenever I wanted new tactics -- not something you can do in BG. In BG a diverse party is the equivalent of the respec mirror.

6 member party is essential if the devs want to end the DOS3 complaints.

I cannot see the problem with Difficulty or duration of Combat......

I guess its because i realy played all the DnD games long BEFORE even Baldurs Gate came.
I tell you something..... at the very SECOND you are NOT able to Rest anywhere and anythime the DnD difficulty spikes right into the sun. Even a bunch of stupid goblins you start to fear at lvl 5 when you know you CANT rest here. And trust me it totaly changes the way you build partys and what spells you make rdy with the classes. No old DND games had issues with difficulty.

You will suddenly realize that high damage classes arent that good anymore as you wanted more consistency in your party instead of MR. super crit 1-Hit wonder.
And thats how DND was build around from the Beginning. If you went into a Tomb for example you would never ever even think about doing this without a Cleric. Not because of Heal..... because of Turn Undead! And not because you couldnt kill all the undeads with your mage. But because they will rise and attrition you down and you cant Rest in that tomb as UD never rest andtend to rise again.

Its just people got used to having NO resource management and are all about BOOM BANG CRIT!
I can tell you that a experienced Party in DnD3.5 sits about for an HOUR sometimes only to discuss and Prepare spells and quipment for a Dungeon decent.

Actually, a common complaint I’ve seen about POE2 turn based is that many have found the encounters, even minor ones, too long. I haven’t tried it out myself, though.

I’m okay with there being only 4 slots but 12 classes in BG3. I find that when I am forced to make tough choices I enjoy them more, and I’ve had a lot of fun party building in BG3, even though we only have half the classes to play with.

The last game I finished was with:

Fighter
Rogue
Ranger
Cleric

And that was a very different experience than my current game of

Warlock
Warlock
Rogue
Cleric

Swen has said respecing will be in the game, and along with multiclassing there should be plenty of room for tactical experimentation.

I strongly prefer smaller parties. Especially in pen-and-paper, but also in video games. More characters makes everything more complicated and unwieldy. It makes everything take longer. It increases the amount of boring logistics you have to deal with. It reduces the amount of spotlight that each character gets. It reduces the importance of each character's individual contribution. As a DM, it's just harder to run the game for more players instead of fewer. You have to cater to more people, come up with more special things for each party member. As a player, more players means you get less time to actually do anything, and more time spent sitting there waiting for your turn to act or speak. In a video game, more characters means more inventories to manage, more gear shuffling and equipment upgrading and stuff to constantly have to deal with. It means characters getting in each other's way more often, a bigger crowd of people not fitting into narrow spaces, etc. To me, bigger party size almost never makes the game better, in either tabletop or video games.

About the duration of combat.

First the obvious.... if you feel that combat too long there can be 2 reasons:

1. the combat is boring. When you Play a Chess game is the combat also taking too Long? You Play a Game because its fun. If Parts of the Game feel boring then Solution can never be to shorten or skipping that part but instead making it fun. So i tanslate your complaint into more partymembers make the game unfunny. Wich is abit of paradox for a Party based rpg.

2. it feels too Long because you dont wana fight at all. The feeling of accomplishments and loot is Not coming fast enough to be satisfiying. It feels like work to get to the loot. Again this hasnt to do with partymembers but with Game design and the generation of players (younger generations are more used to easy and fast progression in anytthing Not just games).



In fact Most turnbased rpg are taking ALOT longer than bg3 in combat. Basicsally all the former turnbased DND games take longer than bg3 in combat. The whole reason to make it turnbased is giving you more time to think about options and having more options. Saying combat takes too long means you would rather prefer realtime combat. I can live with that too of its fun. But in no way duration of turns can ever be an issue of the combat is fun.

Welcome to the forum!


Ground effects are a topic of discussion by many users here - most of the players agreed that ground effects need to be reduced down. We are not 100% sure if Larian will listen to this feedback - but this is something that a lot of people talk about, I would expect that ground effects will stay - but they will be tuned down.


In my opinion, this is way too soon for that conclusion - yeah sure, it seems that way that we could make our team however we like, and it could work - but I see it as a + for the game. But we just don't see the whole picture here, I'm 100% sure that there will be encounters that will require a different pack of skills - so one team will be better at something specific than the other - but possibility that you can build your team however you like and it will works (for better or worse) is definitely a +


This was talked about in the topic on remove backstab and high ground advantage - Larian took a creative decision to boost HP due to other decision - AC for goblins are lower, so you will hit them often, but they boost their HP so fights are not a 1 shots.
In my opinion, this works better for Computer Game - there is already a few topic about high % of miss... if AC of monsters would be bigger, % of misses would go up and most of the players would be unhappy. (X-COM flashback of miss miss miss) So they downgrade AC, and upgraded HP - is this work? For me yeah - for others not so much.


I think he would love it! and he would be disappointed by people who don't understand what it means a work in progress...

Increase ok Hp vs Armorclass is a incredible Bad Solution and in no way a compensation.

If i do a statistic over 10.000 goblins each having 5 hitpoints (average)and an armorclass of 15. attacked by a lvl 1 warrior with an average attackbonus of 4. means he will have a Chance to Hit of 45%. Hiting with longsword for 7 (Average). ——> after 10000 attacks he killed 4500 gobos


Now 10000 goblins with 30 hp and 1 armorclass (to make it even more obvious how bad it is we even assume 100% hitchance). After 10000 attacks he killed 2000 goblins. It’s totally out of balance.


However I can of course kill 10000 with a couple barrels in Current balance state

A lot of what you wrote there was wildly incorrect.
I’m not going to bother explaining why point by point, but if you want to have engaging conversations you should ask questions rather than make incorrect assumptions.

Nobody likes tedious battle activities. The larger the party, the more risk of tedium and mundane repetition. That is perhaps the big advantage of real-time play, that the computer handles the blow-by-blow details quickly so that you can watch and enjoy the swooshing sounds and exploding bodies. In tabletop D&D, the combat process is tedious, but it is still fun because there is a lot of live interaction between the players sitting at the table. D&D is a social game, but in a single-player computer game, the social interaction is hard to simulate. That is why I advocate the increased use of NPC's who may fight with the player character, suggest courses of action, complain, etc., but who are not controlled by the player. The Narlen Darkwalk quest was my favorite out of the entire BG series thus far for precisely this reason, oh and uh, also the hilarious Cant dialogs, eh?

I don’t think NPCs outside of the player’s control would be an adequate solution, but would rather amplify the problem. The danger of bloating the number of characters in a battle is increasing turn length and creating long stretches where the player is waiting for their turn. I would say the only fight currently in the game that approaches this is fighting all of the goblins outside of their camp. If you added a few NPCs to fight alongside the player these goblins would die more quickly, but each round of turns would also take longer. Having the battle potentially end sooner doesn’t do much to get rid of tedium if it means more time spent waiting for your turns.

I think the OP has it right -- long battles are only boring if the battles are boring.

This applies to both RtwP and turn based game. In DOS2 the battle coming into Arx and the demon doctor fight took forever and both were fun. PoE1 wasn't a turn based game but the endless paths of trash mobs were tedium itself. Battle length wasn't an issue -- it was just that both the enemies and the ruleset were teh suck.

Oh and yes, I love the thieves cant -- would be great to see that in the game.