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To begin with, I know this idea is more suited for MOD than game suggestion.

Anyhow, it's not hard to agree that level 1-4 characters surviving in an environment full of Mindflayers, Red Dragons, Hell, Underdark, not to mention a level 1 archmage NPC, level 5 archdruid... (ridiculous is the only description I can give)

For the sake of (lore) coherence alone, the starting levels should be way higher (or given a choice for player), along with adjusting monster levels to be more "realistic".

The way I see it is the beginning of the game will be filled with NPC/monsters with lower levels (from the bandits to the goblin and gnolls encounters) then their levels would increase to match the player's level (hag and Gith patrol etc.)

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I've made this suggestion as well. Other than a side conversation Wyll has with Gale about feeling weaker than he used to be, there's no mention why we're all level 1 given the background each of the companions has. It feels like we should be several levels higher. Or at least as part of the opening sequence, show part of our life force being sucked out or something more obvious on why we're starting out from scratch.

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Umm, no, fully disagree.
You should work for every level you obtain, period.
And getting to level 2 is cake. 3 is not hard at all, and 4 is not hard at all, just takes a little more time. I would expect that same for each level afterwards.
But you want to start at level 10? How about Larian just give us God mode?

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I do love to overpower bosses (it's the only way I can overcome both my really bad coordination and luck in dice rolls). Even in my first run it was an easy tasks. In my second run I reached level 4th without even finish the Thiefling/Goblins quests.

Obviously if you aim to reckless attack the goblin bosses, the pack of gnolls, the Hag, the minotaurs, you'll get flattened in a blink of the eye.

So, no. There's no need to have an higher starting level. (And I say this as a casual player who does not strategize on wich position make the pary members take, what order to use spells, but one that run in the enemy and just start hitting, and as a player who enjoy a easy ride).

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Originally Posted by bullse
But you want to start at level 10? How about Larian just give us God mode?

NWN1 - HOTU has you starting at lv 15.
NWN2 - MOTB I beieve thta you start at lv 18(not sure)
BG2 - Has you starting around lv 7~8 (different classes required different XP to level up on 2e)

None of then give "God mode".

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Levels in a videogame will differ from levels in a tabletop game.
That is not immersion breaking and the encounters are designed to grow in challenge over the cause of the game.
Just like in any other game.

Looking at familiar numbers being different is of no use. Lets focus on the big picture rather.

Easy for me to say maybe.
I am not a player of the "usual D&D".
But I must say I find the concept of certain beings bound to certain levels pretty uncreative, lazy and meaningless.

There is no reason a normal Waitress cannot kill any other Mindflayer if said squiddy does not see the femme fatale coming from behind with a Knife in her hand and she sinks the blade hilt-deep into its neck.
" B-but the challenge rating, th-the numbers, th-th... "
Dude they are just a wierd form of monster-mutation Humanoids and their armors looks like sh°°. grin

Their biggest defense are their psionic abilitys. Slip by that and they are WEAKLINGS.
Look how much they sweated when entering Avernus. Mindflayers too cannot escape the law of positioning. And their positioning was trash. grin


Even so, the Mindflayers are powerful in contrast to our starting characters.
So their glamour of might and power is well preserved I think.

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Originally Posted by bullse
Umm, no, fully disagree.
You should work for every level you obtain, period.
And getting to level 2 is cake. 3 is not hard at all, and 4 is not hard at all, just takes a little more time. I would expect that same for each level afterwards.
But you want to start at level 10? How about Larian just give us God mode?

If you want to start at level 1, have beginner adventurers as characters and not vampires and chosen.

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Originally Posted by SorcererVictor
Originally Posted by bullse
But you want to start at level 10? How about Larian just give us God mode?

NWN1 - HOTU has you starting at lv 15.
NWN2 - MOTB I beieve thta you start at lv 18(not sure)
BG2 - Has you starting around lv 7~8 (different classes required different XP to level up on 2e)

None of then give "God mode".

All the games you cited were sequels and/or expensions that had a previous game that you should/could play before playing that one. BG3 stands on its own.

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Originally Posted by Ixal
Originally Posted by bullse
Umm, no, fully disagree.
You should work for every level you obtain, period.
And getting to level 2 is cake. 3 is not hard at all, and 4 is not hard at all, just takes a little more time. I would expect that same for each level afterwards.
But you want to start at level 10? How about Larian just give us God mode?

If you want to start at level 1, have beginner adventurers as characters and not vampires and chosen.


Astarion: not a full flegged vampire but a minion who was enslaved and tortured by his master until he was kidnapped by the ones that are diseminating tadpoles all around. Pretty sure a master vampire woudn't allow a toy he uses to please his own sadism to rise level [All things that came from the game back story of the pale elf]

Gale: he fuc*ed up the weave causing Mystral to abandon him, him to become unstable necrotic nuclear bomb who needs powerful artifacts to not explode, and he admitt how his meddling with the weave has costs him his might and his powers [again all in the game]

Wyll: he has a conflictual relationship woth his patron, furthermore said pathron has been kidnapped possibly by the culprits that are messing with netherese magic to make the tadpoles something able to resist the habilities of an arch druid and a powerful hag, again he complains how now, with the tie to his patron weakened, his powers are far from those that allow him to adventur and gain the name of Th blade of frontiers.

Laez'el: she is not special in anyway, she is a gith with due arrogance but we get that she is not so much when the githaky patrol is finally found, the leader of the patrol treats her like a low rank.

Shadowheart: her memories have been suppressed, what could made her forget part of her training [on her I don't know much because the way my toons act make her to close on hersef and not to open about her history]

The player character: it has a custom background so its up to you to decide why they are at level one.


From the facts above I don't get the complaining about the levels, nor from a combat point, nor from a narrative point of view. Indeed in both cases there's a solid case for the party starting at level one (in one case is how easy is to get to a level you can fight th ebosses easily, in the second case there are narrative reasons of why the companions are low level instead of powerful like the seasoned adventurers they are).

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A vampire spawn is still a challenge 5 monster with build in regeneration, ect.
And Gale still would have all the knowledge he gained as chosen and as he can still cast magic at all he still would have his full spellcasting ability which would be a lot higher than level 1. Arcane magic is different from divine magic where the deity has to give you each spell.

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From a game design standpoint, starting at level 1 (or possibly 2 or 3) makes a lot of sense. You start out without a lot of decisions while you're learning the basic mechanics of the game. As you level up (quickly, at first), you get to make choices about how you grow and add more abilities/spells depending on your choices. It's easy to understand these new abilities and spells because you're learning one or two at a time. The tools are simple, but that doesn't mean that they aren't interesting.

On the other hand, if you're starting at e.g. level 7, you have to make a ton of decisions right out of the gate, before you even understand how to play the game. A level 7 wizard has to choose 4 cantrips and 12 spells and an arcane tradition without having a good way to evaluate the differences between them. You can have defaults, but that doesn't help you when combat comes around and you have to choose between spells and cantrips or understand how spell slots work and why you might choose to upcast.

I get that people want to feel powerful. Folks who already know D&D and/or RPG video games (and these forums certainly select for that, by their nature) might feel comfortable bypassing that early learning. But when we hit release and the player base gets much wider, a lot of people are going to get frustrated and overwhelmed when you throw them in the deep end with a ton of options and insufficient experience to weigh those options.

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I don't like the idea of a beginning at level 10.
Level 10 characters are totally different in comparison with lvl 1. They are OP, have many features, powerfull spells, abilities and proficiencies.
They also had chosen their subclasses...

We have to start at level 1 to feel this character is pur character, to learn how the game/classes works and to feel out progression from no one to hero.

On the other hand, I hate what you describe and have the same feeling about the consistency of the experience.

I agree with your statement but not with the solution.
Anyway nothing about this will change so talking about this is not constructive (I don't mean that you shouldn't of course... But I personnaly won't write lines and lines about something that is totally definitive)


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And I want a starting character level of 40. I would be a better God for Minthara than the Absolute.

And this Shadow Heart, if she pisses me off I'll just kill Shar. This will force her to be more obedient.


Minthara is the best character and she NEEDS to be recruitable if you side with the grove!
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Originally Posted by grysqrl
a lot of people are going to get frustrated and overwhelmed when you throw them in the deep end with a ton of options and insufficient experience to weigh those options.



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Originally Posted by Gt27mustang
Originally Posted by SorcererVictor
Originally Posted by bullse
But you want to start at level 10? How about Larian just give us God mode?

NWN1 - HOTU has you starting at lv 15.
NWN2 - MOTB I beieve thta you start at lv 18(not sure)
BG2 - Has you starting around lv 7~8 (different classes required different XP to level up on 2e)

None of then give "God mode".

All the games you cited were sequels and/or expensions that had a previous game that you should/could play before playing that one. BG3 stands on its own.
You are blatantly wrong. By definition, BG THREE is a sequel to BG1 and BG2.

I fully agree with the OP and have made this exact point myself some months ago. The starting point of this game is completely unrealistic. As someone else mentioned in another forum, BG3 is attempting to recreate the player experience of playing BG2, but without BG1 ever having existed. Just as it would've been utterly ridiculous for a bunch of level 1 characters to awaken in Irenicus's dungeon in BG2, so too it is equally ridiculous for a bunch of level 1 characters to awaken on that nautiloid. Furthermore, the character backstories of every single one of the five origin companions is way beyond what would be realistic for a level 1 character.

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I have the feeling Larian simply lacks the skillset to make engaging low level and simplistic content. And its something that definitely can be done, you don't need all superheroes combined to make something interesting. They always graps for the 'exciting' and 'uncommon' for anything they have been doing in this game. At the same time starting at a higher level would mean more development work for them (just think EA only having the game ready for 4 levels per class top and this would be not even enough to truely represent the origin characters - yeah, yeah, I know tadpole makes them weaker - doesn't sound at all like the cheapest ass excuse to make up for the discrepancy between lore and game), but it would also be a bad introduction to the story and especially for new players (face it most players won't have played BG1&2 or even D&D).


I don't think this is going to be addressed by Larian. I don't think they can change the story at this point and actually the leveling speed is probably the only thing I liked about BG3 besides art. It gives the right amount of leveling to quickly adjust your character. Once more classes are available and you add multiclassing it would be a interesting system to develop your characters in game. I really don't need a D&D game going for level 20... the best parts of D&D to me are up to level ~12... and once I kick out the origin characters and replace them with a custom party, I will have a lot less issues with this game.

Last edited by biomag; 31/12/20 05:12 PM.
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I think it’s been well handled so far for levels 1-4. Would have expected a few kobolds, orcs etc but they may be still to come - then again they may get skipped.
Under dark could have come later as could the hook horrors, bulette etc minotaurs are ok if not a little overpowered (I’m not across 5e maybe they are right).
I just hope as we progress monsters and encounters are level appropriate- loving it at the moment.
I’ll save my judgement on the story etc until the full release as we are only in ea and that’s yet to be developed significantly

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Originally Posted by Tarorn
I think it’s been well handled so far for levels 1-4. Would have expected a few kobolds, orcs etc but they may be still to come - then again they may get skipped.
Under dark could have come later as could the hook horrors, bulette etc minotaurs are ok if not a little overpowered (I’m not across 5e maybe they are right).
I just hope as we progress monsters and encounters are level appropriate- loving it at the moment.
I’ll save my judgement on the story etc until the full release as we are only in ea and that’s yet to be developed significantly

I think it's been okay. They need to fine tuned some of the encounters. The encounters that are really hard right now (not hard if you use Larian combat) is probably due to the level cap. At level 5, I don't see any encounter being an issue.

I think the main issue is, if our characters are starting at level 1 (which is fine and I like it) then our first exposure to world shouldn't be mind flayers. The problem is the story. Larian went big and threw a bunch of newb characters into a higher level scenario. Perhaps they could have started with all the characters in BG, leveling up through encounters in the city where we'd meet some of the companions before the tadpole. Later on, we can all be abducted by mind flayers and meeting some of the companions wouldn't be so odd since we already met some in the city.

To me, that would have been a more organic way to introduce the world. But alas, it bit too late for that now so we have to deal with what we have.

Last edited by spectralhunter; 31/12/20 06:56 PM.
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Completely agree with the premise that we're getting high CR encounters, with low level characters. However, instead of starting at level 10, I would argue to make pre-scenarios to level up our characters to around 5 before getting captured on the ship. Maybe like a prison island, haha.

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The game could definitely use a prologue to get to level 3-4 before being captured. Not just to get more reasonable levels, but mainly because the custom character would need at least some basic storyline within Baldur'S Gate to have any kind of background besides a oneliners. Also actually playing these origin characters it would make sense to experience their story instead of just reading it... and once again the reason of us having origin characters is the reason why we won't see it happen or they would have to make several completely different prologues and that costs too many resources so here we are with this half-baked result.

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