Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback New material wouldn't be bad.

i know that being this a sort of mass beta testing for gameplay and narrative bugs, glitchs and so on Larian programmers are focused on that (and may be in realign the full game to the changes they're doing based on the various feed back they receive), still I think it wouldn't be bad to add some new material to the Early Access, specially since the full realease is scheduled in future that is not so near. I don't mean classes or races (though that wouldn' be a bad thing) but new quests, new areas, new dungeons.

To me, once I learned the mechanics of the game, a third run starts to get boring because I'm already know how things will evolve, how to manage the fights with the most pernicious bosses and so on [I know that there's the evil route, but as player I'm unable to play evil doers that go far from lockpicking and pickpocketing, and I'm pretty sure there are players that can not afford to play a good doers].

Unfortunate, because 644.5 hours later (and counting), I am still having a blast testing SOLO 'lonewolf' builds, how the varying race choices work in those builds, equipment and weapon/weapon set load outs, etc.
And I am still finding little things within the Act - that is the hilarity of it all given those hours played...those little bypassed or missed things such as a dialogue with a ragin' bull, or rat, etc., etc.

Yeah I don't think I'm doing another replay beyond this upcoming patch unless there's major additions. It's not a knock against Larian - maybe they already anticipate a drop in the playerbase and that's fine with them? But a new area would be nice!

Yeah, I'm also hoping for act 1B stuff to come out soon. I understand the need to fix the stuff that out there but I like to do another do another run and some new content would be nice.

I personally have no idea how the gaming industry works, but I do know a little about developing SW products. IMO fixing, without developing products, is not good business. I like to use the contractor analogy, you build a house, sell it, if you have to fix problems you are now doing work but not getting paid. SW is weird, in that there are always going to be bugs, and as a result need to find ways to deploy new content, and fix problems. I think MMOs recently have been so successful in that they have got really good with deploying new content, and fixing bugs. Don't know if it's possible but I would like to see new content created as well as bug fixing happening on an incremental time frame vs one big release.

New material huh?
Well I really don't want to see Larian trying to be fast and presenting us with a glitchfestival.


What I would like to see for the next big patch would not necessarily be that much more stuff appart from Act I but

° the ability to find a less story-burdened character as a groupmember
° waaaaay more different looking armors for classes and gear in general
° other way to kill a bunch of enemys, like poisoning the Goblinparty and kill at least every Goblin on groundlevel where Volo was first forced to entertain the Gobs

° Have the Drow's talk after defeating the Beholder
° And warn the Myconid Souvereign about the incoming coup from Glut
° Or the ability to RAID the Goblin's party with a big group of 'Flaming Fist' as backup

A lot of the things that we're having issues with are fundamental building blocks of the game:
-How do actions/bonus actions work and why are we deviating from 5e in certain places?
-How does conversation work with multiple party members?
-How does conversation work with social spell effects?
-How does resting work?
-(How) should enemies scale with player level?
-Is time a thing?
-etc.

Depending on what Larian is planning to address/change, it may not make sense to roll out more content until more of the fundamentals are ironed out.

The point is how long people can or will wait? I get, indeed it was my opening statement, the issue about the problems, bugs, glitches, narrative incoherences, plotholes. But Larian made the decision to launch the Early Access with a very small part of what the final product would be.

Thus now is up to them to get engaged the players, something that won't come only from the resolution of tech and narrative problems but also with creating new content. I get that there are players than can sum up thousands of hours of play exploring in different ways the map, but are those players the majority of the full ensemble of players?

We are not in the nineties or early 00s when videogames were somehow a niche, now they are widespread, that means a bigger percent of casual players that crave, and are used, due to how smartphones games are, to have a constant flux of new content.

Larian has made a bold choice and took a risk (differently for example to Paradox who will release Bloddlines II, probably, this spring) that has different aspects (from the tech issues to the content through the narrative).

However long they have to ...
Im not sure about other stores, but Steam refund only until you have less than 20hours played, and i bet that most people managed to play as much in first week from release. We were specificly told that we will be able to only play limited EA ... and if we cant work with that, we should wait for full release.
If anyone "cant wait any longer" (whatever that means) he should and will simply stand with "waiting for full release" group ... i cant find any other consequence.

Lets look at this a bit more realisticaly, what would they do if they "cant wait any longer"? Simply go play something else, until something new and interesting will be added here.
So what exactly change if they "cant wait any longer" ? Larian will have a thiner amount of feedback data, that would be unfortunate to be sure ... but also im quite certain that they allready recedive much less data for patch 3, than from release ... that is just part of the proces, and even amount of data is valuable in some way, it can help them understand what additions are poplar for gamers in global scale, wich is something this forum can never provide.

So those are reasons why i cant agree with OP ...
Yes, it would be nice to get another level to see all those sweet power-ups and feel like total badass ... yes, it would be awesome to get to some new places, meet new people, work new quests, and screw new groups of incopetent lowlives ...
But i just cant see it as good idea, to expect Larian to move development of EA to next phase, since this one still have so much work to do. :-/

You may not like it, but in mine opinion ... when you have Early Acess, you should be working by schedule, and that schedule should look like this:
- First solve major problems you curently have (those are optimalisation problems, crashes, gamebreaking bugs, etc.) ...
- Then solve minor problems, that still anoys most of people (those are conversation options that are missing, or need reworking, allowing alternative using of some spells or items in certain situations, etc.) ...
- Then while checking if those solutions dont cause another problems (like spellcasting did -_- i still dont understand why cant we get both systems), add another content to what you allready have and its working (those are classes, races, spells, specialisations, companions, etc.) ...
- And when this whole will be done, properly tested and concidered as at least acceptable, then is first time you should start thinking about expanding your content (and those are new areas, incerasing level caps, quests, etc.) not a second sooner. :-/

I am sorry for people with cancer in a very advanced status - unironically.
Appart from that, I can wait for a long time.
Tbh when I signed up for this EarlyAccess I did not expected such a well made job. It impressed me a lot.


But in my semi-optimist-semi-pessimistic worldview I expect Larian to at least need half a year to prepare something like this.
And we are... only half the time by now, or something? Yeah too lazy for looking back.
I hope they take as much time as they need.


So that we can "Beta test" an Act 2 with comparable fluency and depth like Act 1.

Next patch sounds like some new stuff - but they clearly said from the outset only Act 1 .....Im 104 hours in and still loving it myself....

True ... but we dont even have whole Act 1 yet, so eventualy there should be some additional content.

Personaly im stuck on 262,1hours ... curent casting system proved itself to be too much anoyance to continue with caster, but even so in my last (7th if i count right) gameplay i once again find something that i didnt notice before.
And that is amazing. :3

Nice ! - I finally finished the end of ea today but have missed a couple of under dark areas which I’m now looking for ...this game is large & if this isn’t complete act 1 then the game complete will be huge