Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Panel from Hell feedback

Thanks



Agreed. I'm glad the people upset by misses will get what they want but, like you, I think the people asking for this change were a pretty small group.


I am hoping that they will address these issues that come up time and time again in forums in the near future.

They clearly underdelivered for the hype they created.

And they still look amateurs when handling streams.

We are approaching the 6 months mark and they addressed almost nothing of the feedback from the forums.

There are plenty of really amazing ideas here that have been actively ignored and the game is going to a very worrisome direction.

EA media reviews were pretty mediocre and I don't see it improving with the current changes.

You should really count the number of players in those topics and the number of individual "+1".

You'll probably be surprised, even if obviously, a few players keep those threads alive even when there's nothing more to say.

Well I’m still a fan - it’s d&d and to me that’s all that really matters. I would like to see some of the major gripes addressed or changes ruled out. I don’t think they will address some of the majors until they get the game along the development path further & work out how much cash they have to spend & then decide which are the best bang for the buck.
This is a huge project & Larian are clearly growing in size - so hopefully they have the horsepower & the dollars in the business to finish the project to the standards the majority want.

I still think it’s early days & we will be in for some surprises - hopefully the right ones - I think we are still a year away from release depending on how much time they are getting back with the new studios - it sounds like quite a lot by the way Sven was talking.

+1 to all your points, @KillerRabbit!!

Thank you for saying it ! At last someone has a clear mind here !

Of course you can always argue about sample sizes. I don't know how experienced you are with conducting polls but taking a margin of error of 4% with a confidence level of 95% into account, a sample size of 500-600 is actually quite good to represent a population size of 1 million.

That alone probably doesn't mean the results can be dismissed, in fact it is very much the contrary (and I'm speaking as someone who doesn't know what the poll is about).

When doing a poll to get an estimate of the percentage of the population who thinks A (and the percentage that think not-A), you want to sample, uniformly from the population and without replacement, a number of people that is large enough, and you generally want this number to be a small fraction of the population. This is because, if you want to do your poll right and deliver confidence intervals (i.e. do the poll right), the computations are way easier this way. It's not super intuitive, but it has to do with whether the % you are measuring changes as you sample people. So you can certainly criticise the poll :
- For not having a large enough sample. 1 000, 5 000, or even 10 000 participants would be better.
- For having a non-uniform sample. Here, people are self-sampled, among a crowd that is probably different from the all-players crowd, which introduces a bias in the data.

But dismissing a poll, because the sampled population is a small fraction of the general population, is wrong. If you want to measure the % of the population of a country that has long hair, you want to sample a number which is simultaneously large, and small compared to the country's population (which means you want a large population).

And that mega thread does not even take into account forum posters with multiple accounts. They would have a better luck proving that there are aliens on earth than proving they have some sort of majority agreement that represents the bulk of forum posters. There are too many variables to skew that information.

I'm going to wait until the patch notes have been released, until I make any judgements. But it seems they may of fixed Arcane Ward. It was stated that the HP bonus will be 2x level + Intelligence bonus. That's a definite improvement for the Abjurer subclass. Hopefully the Ward stacks with temp HP as well. The handling of the Abjurer was my #1 concern. So yeah ... maybe.

Now if they would change height high/ low to a +2/ -2 bonus, backstab to a flanking bonus (maybe +1), implement Dodge, separate Jump and Disengage, and add my preferred subclasses; I would be very happy with this game.

I'm sort-of coming to term with the realization that when it comes to "make the best Baldur's Gate game ever made" it may not even be an issue of Larian having the talent or not. It's that they are not even trying.

Just ot be clear: I'm not joking, not whining, nor asking for my money back. I'm just commenting on the realization that the tells are fairly clear.
They are already setting their mind from the get go on some massive compromise as their final goal, before deciding if they'll have to cut something else along the way.

"Day/Night cycle and notion of passing time? A LARGE cast of unique character that can join you in your adventure? A party of six adventures AND a control system simple and intuitive enough to make it effortless to manage?
All things the previous games had, but I'm sure we can do without most of them because we need to cut corners somewhere".

Well, I'm sure the end result will be a somewhat enjoyable game, probably even with some GREAT setpieces and moments.
But my confidence that it will be the best possible Baldur's Gate that Larian could make? How could I have it, when they are giving up on it from the starting line?

Completely agree. The disappointment is strong and the lack of hope only makes it worse.

I would never imagined that a sequel 20 years later would have dropped so many concepts that are universal in cRPGs and many other games nowadays for no apparent reason other than stubbornness.

It was not for lack of feedback. And that will be remembered.

Do you have any evidence that there are users with multiple accounts? Most forums have checks in place for multiple accounts.

Ah yes of course. Dissent is due to bot accounts, but game design is due to the silently approving million players...*nods sagely*

Voter fraud. Of course! Barrelmancy won in a landslide!

People can't be dismissive of the polls just because the responses don't please them. Yes, 500 is a small sample (it might be able to represent 100000 players though, depending on confidence interval and error margin) and I'm all for updates of this poll with larger samples.
But it is the ONLY evidence up to now, and according to this evidence the majority does not like the homebrews and prefers a more faithful adaptation. Another interesting result is that the overwhelming majority also prefers turn-based, which is surprising to me.

These people seem to live under the delusion that if you leave this forum the love is universal and unconditional.

I can get on pretty much any internet board someone could think of, voice my complaints about the game and I can tell you before even doing it that there will be a certain numbers of users willing to agree with me, some of which didn't even think about the issue until it was pointed to them.
There will also be people with other grievances on their own and different priorities.

And then of course there will be a large portion of people that are pretty much "the ground zero of expectations" and that they will always be basically fine with anything that looks sufficiently nice and doesn't explicitly BREAK APART during a gameplay session.

If anyone wants them to be their target audience, be my guest. Just don't be surprised when everyone else will comment that the result blows asses as if blowing ass was no one else's business.

A fairly realistic complaint about the poll is that there probably is a fair amount of selection bias in who chooses to respond. Most people aren't going to bother with a survey like that (I didn't). Note that if I *had* it would have been one more vote on the complaint side, since I am rather unhappy with the current state of afairs.

In any case, it is probably wise to take the poll with a grain of salt. Do keep in mind however that it does provide at least a small amount of evidence in favor of the proposition that many people are unhappy about the way some of the rules are being handled.

I tend to agree with you. But I have to wonder if Larian is making the right decision to basically cater to the masses with "ground zero of expectations"? It's the easy way out and probably the most profitable. I mean, can the vocal complainers, who may very well be in the minority, truly change the direction of a game? Has there ever been a case?

At that new office they just opened they really need to hire someone who's whole job is just communications, or some kind of dedicated dev to EA community liaison. I'm sure the pandemic has created many unforseen challenges that are contributing to delays and managed expectations. I'd almost rather watch an hour long stream of some random rank and file dev discussing that sort of stuff than watch the CEO play lol. I'm not sure putting the chief up front is really the best approach, since it just kind of turns him into a lightning rod for whatever ire is sweeping through the halls at the moment. These forums could also use a revamp for sure, (the load time is very slow and it lacks the functionality of other similar spots). Even if things are moving away from forums to stuff like discord these days, their home turf feels a bit neglected.

Usually the house forums are more for boosters and keeping a generally upbeat tone, but they've kind of allowed this place to get mired in negativity by not attending to it. Maybe that was a given, cause we're all old d&d curmudgeons who will gripe and dive off the deep end at the first opportunity hehe. But I think they could have shored that up a bit more, even if just by providing something else to concentrate on the daily. My disappointment was pretty foreseeable since they're trying to make a follow up to my favorite game ever, playing around with the limited wish on that one. But still they could be doing more to take stock of their returning fanbase. I'd have thrown 60 bucks at just about anybody based purely on the tease of a BG3 possibility. But now that its real, the next 60 is a tougher sell. I don't think I'd be hopping into another EA anytime soon. Its like all the wait and see downsides of a kickstarter campaign, but without the upside of feeling particularly special or involved for jumping in early lol.

I still hope for the best and a long long period of development before its released, but that's mainly because my sunk costs on this one are strenching put into decades now. I want it to be glorious in part to help justify how big a deal I've made it in my head hehe