Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General What are your worries for the complete game?

After replaying DOS1 and 2, i noticed few similarities both games had that i disliked.

Such as:

Both games were somewhat linear in nature. Map seemingly being divided in leveled areas where you had to proceed in certain order or be obliterated by enemies (or is this simply"git gud" moment i failed?). A single level up seemingly making all the difference in the encounter difficulty. Hopefully this is avoided with DnD rules in place.

Quest lines seemingly leading nowhere. Like the comatose little girl that could be found in the tomb. Before the definitive edition she simply disappeared after 3rd(?) act. I think there was a mage in the first game, after killing 4 totem demons, that lead nowhere. Or just are underwhelming: Anathema.

Some plot holes/choices not mattering. Mostly from DOS2, i chose to vampirise the souls of main villains that i killed. I was under assumptions that they were obliterated during that, but no ,final boss summons them anyway.

Difficulty spike during last act. This was a huge problem for me. After i got to last act of DOS2, before the fight where difficult, but manageable, Then i had my ass handed by everyone.

Poor endgame sequences. From having to babysit NPC in first game to being obliterated without even getting a turn when faze 2 started in the second. I consider both to be somewhat poor bossfights.


These are my gripes that i hope are avoided in Baldur's gate development.

Also i wanted to know what do kind of thing you dont want to see when the game is complete?

Limits placed on Mods. If the whole engine is opened up to Mods then the potential for the game skyrockets to a whole different level.

That they aim for their DOS Homebrew instead of implementing the 5e rules despite the evidence that the players that care for gameplay prefer a faithful adaptation, not so much for being purists, but because the homebrew makes the game worse. So Larian will be missing out on D&D players.

1. What @Danieldba said

2. "We gotta finish this" pressure leading to only 8 companions

3. Core mechanics like movement unchanged or only improved via buffing the AI

1. That the "evil" companions are just the companions and no others will be added.

2. That I'll dislike this game as much as I dislike DOS2.

3. That it'll have nothing to do with Baldur's Gate other than a forgotten realms paint job.

4. That they'll tweak the xp so perfectly that you have to do almost every quest/kill everything/steal everything to stay at an appropriate level, like they did with DOS2.

I think everyone so far has hit on my main worries.

I can't really compare this to DOS 1 or 2. I had never heard of either of them before buying this EA. I bought them solely to see what everyone was talking about when they were making the comparisons between the 2 games. I never even tried DOS 1. I was unable to go deep into DOS 2 as the backstories of the NPC companions being so Gale-ishly overpowered for their introduced level broke it in a way that I simply could not continue beyond 3-5 hours of total gameplay (and about 15 restarts during that time). I think I made it off of the island twice before I just said, "Screw it. I'm done with this $#!t!"...

I fear that those of us who are long time computer RPG players and D&D purists will be left completely out in the cold. I pray that they'll take our critiques to heart and listen to our suggestions on things like party limits, the ability to run without the built in companions, and core rules implementations.

The "We gotta finish this" angle is a REAL concern... We all know that the COVID shutdowns greatly reduced their progress. I just hope that they aren't rushing to play catch-up to meet some deadline that was never disclosed to those of us outside of Larian studios now.

I really enjoy mods. Most of my other games that have been finished once unmodded and are still active for me to jump into whenever I need a fix have 200 (Skyrim) to 400 (XCOM2) mods running on them. They keep games alive for me well beyond the initial thrill and they greatly enhance my gaming experience (even if the load times are murderously slow). Right now, the game is not very mod friendly (go figure, it is still in EA and they kinda need to focus on finishing the actual game first), but I'm really hoping that it will become more mod friendly as time goes by.

I could seriously do without the romance options... like seriously... but if they're including them, then open it up a little and let the thirstier players drink deep and quench that thirst. I get it. I get a little horny too, from time to time. Sometimes it's fun to run through a game just seeing who you can bang and how. I fear that the romance will be there with too many frustrating limitations on who you can romance and how you have to go about it. I'd rather see it scrapped all together than see it remain so constrained.

I fear that the options for which path you can take and what decisions you can make will remain decidedly vanilla, Disneyesque, and watery. If you want to give us an evil option, go to those dark places that no-one likes to talk about and give us true Evil... not just wasteful, stupidly destructive, and rude. I hope that they don't force just a good or evil path either though. Let us pick a few options that are whimsical... funny even. Maybe even throw in a few options that are completely out of left field and will have us players thinking, "Why the hell did they even make that a choice?" It'll keep us on our toes.

I fear that the emphasis on the multiplayer experience will eventually leave those of us who prefer to play solo twisting in the wind.

My biggest fear is that the city of Baldur’s Gate isn’t going to feel epic enough. It needs to be at least as big as Novigrad in Witcher 3 to feel like a ‘city’. And If Larian continues doing full cinematics for each NPC interaction, that’s going to be a HUGE amount of work. I found Arx kinda disappointing in DOS2 after all the build up during the game to get there.

Novigrad should be tiny compared to BG, the whole (top side) Act 1 map feels appropriate for one one district.

My biggest worry is that combat won't change from patch 3, it'll still be a stale shell of what it could be.
(Whether it's better homebrew or more true to 5e, I hope changes are made).

followed by:

With a population of 42,000 – around 10K dwellings and other buildings doesn’t seem inappropriate. But there’s no way at all that’s going to happen in a game.

Apart from what's already been mentioned, the whole camp and quick rest system. The former's so convient it's jarring, and the latter i just don't like too much.

I'd like it all much better if the camp was a fixed location on the map, like in DA:O, while rest on the field worked like in Pathfinder:Kingmaker.

But it was opposite for dos2 and i worried about it in bg3. You can leave act2 way earlier than clear the whole island (you just need 3 source points). So they design difficulty, keeping in mind that someone really may leave it with unveiled areas\unfinished quests. But if you cleared everything (which is normal as for me, why skip something in new game), you 1-2 levels above of your enemy on act2, and you will stay with this advantage to the end of game. Which ruins any challenge\difficult, and game start being easy from this moment. There special mods on steam, which raise enemy levels to your\reduce xp to prevent this. But first playthrough was ruined.

So i hope they change it in BG3. I don't wanna skip Hag or druid rescue fights to make my underdark fight interesting.

My biggest concern is that the game will not keep getting updates in the long run, which will ca use it to be a "play through it once on each toon and quit". I am investigating steps for larian to take to prevent this, but i think the biggest potential here is that looking at a multi-player system that can potentially turn it into an diablo styled-mmo with out requiring massive amounts of network code, and development resources.

i had a different experience. I felt very constrained in where I could go because quest/monster levels were always so strict. I couldn't just explore and enjoy the experience. it was basically a very specific order i had to follow to progress. different playstyles maybe

Here's a silly one: since Sven said the Sword Coast was based in a real world location in my country, and that Larian had even scanned that same location into the game, I'm hoping to recognize my city in-game. Yeah.

You do realize that in DA:O you could quick travel to camp just the same is this game right? The only difference is you could have a random encounter porting to camp.

Its been a little while since I played DA:O, but I don't think it was *quite* as convenient as BG3. The primary difference was that you did have to find a zone exit before you could travel to your camp. That placed the inconvenience of back tracking a barrier to infinite rests. Also... resting didn't have the same benefit in DA:O anyway, because skills and abilities were limited by cooldowns and stamina/mana rather than spell slots.

I would also like to see the BG3 camp system be tweaked a bit, but I don't really have a strong opinion about what would be best.

Nah, you couldn't. You had to access the map by reaching the area's edge/traveling point, and then you could go to camp. Couldn't teleport to it from the middle of a city, or from the deeproads.

In BG3 you press M from the Underdark and bam, you're there.

My biggest worry is that the combat will not be good.

Note that I like what I see in the story so far... so that is not a problem, and even if the combat is not improved I suspect that I will still enjoy the final game.

If the stuff I don't like now can be changed by mods then I'll be fairly happy with the end product.

Fixed camps are always going to be immersion breaking if there's considerable distance to cover on a map.
DA:O was particulary bad - I mean it's ridiculus to think that the party is walking halfway across a kingdom to do a quest, then walking all the way back again to the same camp to sleep! They're spending more time travelling than there are hours in the day!
That said, the map isn't so huge in BG3. Except for the underdark, we could have a temporary camp there rather than climb a mile long ladder twice each day!