Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General BG3 current situation

I agree with the people here saying, that combat could be better. Currently it relies heavily on 3 or 4 strategies and the gameplay felt nearly the same, no matter, which class you play.
I really like BG3, but there is a lot of room for improvement.

If I truly believed like you do, I would have little hope for the game. Fortunately, BG3 is so much more than nice visuals! The audio, in particular the voice acting is absolutely first-rate. The story (roughly), most of the writing, narration and character and -interaction is also not only generally good, it is reminiscent of the original saga. Just better in many regards, though it can never be the masturbatory wet dream of power gamers when the focus and power is shared with arguably more interesting origin characters. The use of D&D skill system layered in a way to disincentivize savescumming (which is objectively shitty gameplay) is unique, at least something I've never seen before. In short, I while most areas can be improved upon, I only consider gameplay a major issue.

I very much agree on the criticism of Larian cheese, which is so prevalent they go from being situational tactical options, to being core gameplay mechanics revolving around legal exploits that makes a mockery out of many combat encounters. On excessive loot focus that subtracts from player/build focus and where unique loot is so common it stops feeling special. Other big issues is the brokenly unbalanced resting system, no day/night cycles, unimmersive static camp and overuse of conversations here in a way that feels artificial. Pickpocketing being a brokenly unbalanced way to easily acquire near endless supply of loot and money basically without risk, no law system.

That's a feature of Larian. Having played DOS1 & DOS2, especially the sequel with the armour system, you could only use certain strategies and compositions to win the encounters. Your first 2 or 3 turns each battle were spent doing the exact same thing in the exact same order regardless of the enemy because it was simply the most effective thing.

In BG3, Larian "conveniently" placed lethal high ground shove spots in nearly all named mob encounters. Dror Ragzlin, Minthara, Gekh, etc. can all be killed by sneak/invis shove cheese for insta-gib LOLOLOL strategy. The most obvious one is Gekh being placed with his back turned to you right over a huge open bottomless portion of the Underdark when the rest of the area on all other sides has actual ground. It's just poor game design.

The other encounters that don't have a "convenient" environment trigger where you can destroy something hanging from above and make it fall on them or break a structure so it crumbles.

Now some of these things aren't all bad when used in moderation and can have useful effects, but not when it's something in every fight. It's almost as if they are looking to pride themselves on a YouTube compilation of people just shoving high-level, deadly enemies into the unknown for insta-kills or baiting an enemy into a specific spot where you shoot and drop a boulder or fire pit on them.

The game right now is so meta'd and almost goads players into falling for the cheese traps. Not to mention there is high ground conveniently in nearly every single fight you have and you'd be stupid not to use high ground because of its advantage and the fact that the AI will.

What I love the most in the game is that they gave us so many choices and so many things to discover.

After 3 or 4 full playtrough + dozens of others, I'm still discovering new things on the maps and dialogs.
I just found the entrance of the kuo toa's lair in my last playthrough... I've been spoiled but I know that I haven't done the full arcane tower yet... I just found for the first time the item to have 8 friendly spiders (I have interracted with the thing more than once)

This is amazing and they totally suceed with their will to offer us "choices/surprises"... Except for combats.

I guess every players that are interrested in the game because it's also a tactical turn based game are going to be dissapointed before the end of their first playthrough.

They won't be able to balance things arround D&D and arround their OP mechanics at the same time because one is way over the other.

D&D = many choices. Larian's homebrewed are probably made to create even more choices but it's a failure. They are LESS choices because they're now the only usefull choices. The game is balanced arround them and I also include things like dipping in the equation.

Dozens of D&D things are useless but we also have so many powerfull tools the AI won't ever use that hard encounters are unfair.

(Don't get me wrong, It would be horrible if ennemies were dipping/shove/backstab/use highground correctly).

That's why so many players find the game is too hard.
That's why so many players find it too easy at the same time.

Play it how you want to play it and you'll be frustrated because it's hard.
Play it how Larian wants you to play it and you'll be frustrated because you won't have any challenge.

Combats have all the components to be incredible but they aren't and it's not a matter of difficulty level.... It's 100% a matter of balance.

Yep sums it up. Combat is so ridiculous bad that it’s hard to keep playing. I couldn’t get myself to start the game even after Druid update cause I know combat is still pathetic.

This is my first Larian game, never played DOS 1 & 2. I do really like the story and the characters (even the ones, I can't stand), but combat feels kind of wrong.

Because its heavily derivative of the DOS games, and thus deviates from what D&D combat should be. Even if you never played it you can tell there is something off.

Yeah, it definitely doesn't feel like a D&D combat. I do hope, they might adjust this, given, that there are so many threads, where people discuss the combat system.

That's pretty much the essence of it. It's a roundabout sign of respect, actually - people know Larian has the resources to do something about it, whereas most people wouldn't even bother for other cRPGs with massively limited budgets in comparison. Because let's face it, the only other cRPG with a moderately sized budget right now is Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, and BG3's budget is still absolutely astronomical in comparison to that. (But still, if you let people think about this even harder, you start going into toxic Pokemon-style territory, where half the fanbase starts thinking about what other studios would be able to do if they were given any chance at all with the same budget.)

One needs to understand that people don't want to be talking about BG3 in the end as a game that's great despite the combat, largely carried by a massive budget that has seemingly gone into its writing, visuals and voice acting. That's considering no other cRPG that came before, besides their previous game DOS2, will ever be able to compare in that department - and we probably won't even see anything similar after, besides a possible sequel or a DOS3 (unless Wrath of the Righteous really takes off like I think it will). There's a reason the vast majority of criticism has been solely focused on the combat.

The only other cRPG in recent memory from another company that actually tried to match DOS2 was Pillars of Eternity 2, and that franchise straight up died (and is getting resurrected as a first person RPG) because of hideously bad mismanagement. Mostly their mismanagement taking the absolute wrong lessons from DOS2's success, that pretty visuals and full voice acting cannot mask POE2's flaws in nearly every other department.

This current half DOS/half DnD design has largely worked to the detriment of both systems, and has split the community apart. These forums are largely occupied by people who want the game's combat mechanics to be a lot closer to DnD, while the Reddit page is dominated by people who are fans of Larian's games first and are largely new to DnD or have zero interest in DnD as a whole otherwise. Maybe Larian wants to maintain as big of an audience from both communities as possible, but it's only going to get worse the longer the EA period is and people start thinking about the actual design with each subsequent replay, unless they break this and take a stance somewhere. Even going full DOS, as much as it would not be my favored solution at all, would be better than the current status quo - because DOS2 at least had a lot of possible depth to it, and you had to put much more thought into it besides 'get to high ground as soon as possible or stealth ambush every encounter', even though what I described were still important aspects of DOS2 combat.