Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Looks like Larian cheese is here to stay

I would say that they are right, at least in a way.
They certainly know how to reach more players.
If you compare DoS2 sales to its competitors, it doesn't look too cheerful. Overall, DoS2 sold better than most of its direct competitors combined.
You can argue whether they were better or worse games than DoS, but it doesn't really matter.
If you look at it this way, Larian does know "what works".
It is not without reason that WoTC was chosen by Larian and not for example Obsidian, which had to be rescued by Microsoft after the last mishaps.

Comparing the ratings of the two games is completely irrelevant.
Solasta currently has 3,000 reviews and BG3 over 37,000.
However, let's ignore this fact.
The mass of negative BG3 reviews (I recommend reading reviews on steam) was due to the fact that it is not a BG2 clone.

Solasta having less reviews than BG3 doesn't mean that much. 3000 is still a pretty good sample size. In fact, even having only 500-1000 reviews would be fairly representative of the true population. So yes, let us ignore this irrelevant fact. Sample size links:
This is both an exaggeration and a strawman. Reading the most recent 100 negative reviews for BG3, maybe 1 or 2 of them are negative because it's not a BG2 clone. And that's reading their reviews in the worst light.
Most reviews are negative because of bugs, the fact that it's a full price EA game, high miss chances, too much DOS3 and not enough D&D (D&D, not BG1 or 2), bad pathfinding, too much micromanaging of party+items, the pace of combat, UI, controls, etc. Which are all (except for the whining about it being full price) are reasonable complaints.

I will be honest here. I am not sure that we would have been better served by a BioWare or Obsidian implementation of 5e. The flavor would be different, but I think BG3 is probably best served with Larian. Their management and team seem passionate about the project. I think we will see more diversity in combat and more balanced mechanics. As someone that has completed two play throughs, I don’t think the combat is poorly thought out. In my recent play through I used barrels once, just to make the ogre by the door to the temple go down quicker. I don’t rely on shove or surfaces. It does occasionally annoy me that there are few encounters where verticality or surface effects don’t come into play, but I can live with it. It will get better.

If a small indi can implement 5e, then no we didn't need Larian cheese to make the game work.

This is a SP dating sim, based on a DOS mod.

That's it. The team isn't passionate about d&d, they actively look for ways to avoid it!

I have zero hope currently for this game. Modders are the only shot at saving it from just being a flash in the pan meme.

Speaking as someone who learned of DOS2 around release period, it had absolutely insane word of mouth. It was released during a period of time where turn-based was seen as a gameplay format that was dying out and a relic of the past with open hostility towards most games that had it, so tons of turn-based enthusiasts flocked to DOS2 and began to champion it as a revolutionary game in tactical thought. Which, it pretty much was at the time, for field effects and so on were a really novel idea. The multiplayer helped a lot too, which was another huge factor - and no other modern cRPG that I am even aware of has had it due to the massive budget and coding framework needed to support such a thing.

It was kind of a phenomenon, one that any other cRPG would be extremely lucky to have that kind of attention.

BG3 now is benefiting from Larian's 'brand' and the DnD branding at the same time. Look at how much attention the gaming press is giving this game, while they won't give any other cRPG developer the time of day nowadays. Admittedly among the more hardcore cRPG enthusiast sites that I've been observing, there is a bit of resentment over this, that while there's a lot of new cRPG fans, the majority are only fans of Larian games rather than cRPGs as a whole. Otherwise, projects from even a celebrated developer like Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity 2 wouldn't have completely died in the water, and most other cRPGs still wouldn't be struggling to get any kind of audience at all. Even Solasta isn't really taking off even though one can easily argue that it can stand up there with DOS2 and the XCOM games in tactical thinking, largely because the graphics and lack of multiplayer are big stains on it. Things that a low budget cRPG can't have, and cRPGs in general have been inherently lower budget for a while.

The only other cRPG to come close in attention lately are the Pathfinder games, and that's largely because we're now seeing an opposite effect of RTwP being seen as the archaic gameplay format that's in danger of dying out, because DOS2 changed everyone's perceptions so much. Kingmaker also turned out to be an unexpectedly good game in a year where people thought PoE2 would dominate, with a unique premise and more grounded writing than what Larian is famous for. So those enthusiasts are attempting to champion that series to simply keep that style of gameplay alive. As time goes on, DOS2's success is looking more like a flash in the pan or branding thing that's not benefiting the rest of the genre as a whole - if anything, it's potentially done more to benefit jRPGs that are starting to utilize similar ideas to what DOS2 had, like the recently announced Triangle Strategy.

That said, absolutely none of this means that BG3 should be free from criticism though. It's really an irrelevant side topic at the end of the day. If there are flaws that are this noticeable during EA, they're all going to be stressed by the final release if the systems in place remain the same as is. The most contentious topic that I've heard of that existed during DOS2 EA was the armor system, and even the flaws for that did not really become that disruptive to someone like me who came in after the EA period, until it became obvious that it was the primary reason for the massive stat bloat and bosses being designed with rocket tag tendencies towards the second half of the game.

The best one could hope for by final release is that the higher level features and spells somehow swing the mechanical balance of power back towards DnD (which it inherently should, yet it would also depend on the encounter design for the rest of the game as well). But with us unable to test level 5 as is and all communications pointing towards the devs keeping everyone in the dark on this front until final release, one can only guess.

All I can say is that I hope a bunch of people here don't end up with surprised Pikachu faces if height advantage/backstab advantage/shove mechanics end up remaining completely dominant throughout an entire playthrough of a 80+ hour cRPG, and majority opinion on the game's combat starts to sour after release for it because half of the other mechanics are seen as irrelevant in comparison (except for some super niche situations that will undoubtedly be brought up in an attempt to defend the combat design). DOS2 managed to avoid that kind of perception for the most part, because very few base skills in that game really had niche applications, the cheese was actually not very obvious in actual practice, and the cheese wasn't worth the time it took to set up (though a lot of the source skills could have been balanced a lot better, the issues with those were really more about the source cost being tied to them than anything else, especially in regards to Bless). This, when a bunch of people here that are sometimes outright demonized by a certain content creator and the BG3 subreddit have been trying to warn everyone of the long term concerns with those exact systems, for perhaps an entire year or longer beforehand.

Scribe, you have been warned before for the unconstructive negativity nature of your posts, as well as insulting others. Keep to constructive criticism.

I insulted nobody. I'll avoid further negativity.

I sincerely would like some clarification here please. Insulting others should certainly be off the table. But what I have always loved most about this forum is that negative posts about this game and/or Larian have been accepted, and even defended by the mods. Is it new forum policy that negativity about this game and/or Larian is no longer allowed?

Constructive criticism is fine. Occasionally expressing more generalised and unconstructive negative opinions is fine.

However; some posters here feel the need to post almost nothing but unconstructive moans and negativity. This adds nothing to the forums and gives nothing back to the Larian team that they can take onboard for possible changes.

The tone of your posts affects the tone of the forum, and one of the tasks of the moderation team is to maintain a certain atmosphere. If this involves removing a poster's right to post then it will be done.

There was something in Solasta testing that is probably worth bringing up here. Right now, one of the biggest criticisms of the latest period of testing is that magic equipment is far too common, when they were very rare in the earlier phases. But the devs went out and said that they're only this common now for testing purposes, and that they'll be scaled back to their intended rarity in the actual release.

What if the same is happening in BG3 EA? That stuff like barrels and magic arrows/food/thrown flasks are this common because EA is seemingly strictly a testing environment? After all, the rarer something is, the more likely a player will just engage in packrat behavior and just... Not use them at all. If so, we can expect an overall reduction of those in the final game... Hopefully. But if this is the path Larian is going towards, they aren't making that clear at all.

Still, this doesn't really explain things like height/backstab advantage though.

Yeah, no. That might be true for Solasta, but the abundance of scrolls and items has been true for Larian in DOS1 and DOS2. There is always excess and overflow of consumables and impactful items in their games.

Dating simulator being used always makes me howl. I think someone else used that, too.

Yeah, this is true. The DOS games had an extreme abundance of that, and by having a million scrolls that ANYONE can use, independent on class, you are essentially making player classes feel FAR less special.

No need to worry, this is a Baldur's Gate and not a DOS game!

But that's exactly the problem here, isn't it? Despite being a D&D Baldur's Gate game, it is all about annoying cheesy gimmicks from the D:OS games.

I've had that thought / held out that hope myself. But isn't consistent with the communications. While I don't have the patience to go through the panel from hell and find time stamps but you watch the panel you find Sven expressing annoyance at the DnD ruleset on multiple occasions. At one point he complains about the concession we got -- the removal of surfaces from cantrips. The statement was kinda weird and possibly revealing -- "and now I can't do that anymore since they removed surfaces from cantrips" At the time I remember thinking "they"? Aren't you "they"?

So I hold out hope that we are seeing test balloons but I think the answer to "can these be changed" will depend on how much control the CEO has over the creative process and if any of these new hires are fans of the 5th ed ruleset.\

Now to confuse matters some. I have ambivalent feelings -- there are somethings I like about Larian's vision and some things I do not. I'm annoyed at the DOS combat and the breaking of the action economy but I am also happy that Larian got the project because I agree with them on two important issues: alignment and magic items. Alignment is just fun to play and I like finding magical items. "Let's see what the boss dropped" is just fun.

I ended ToB with something like 3 scroll boxes and two potion bags full of unused potions. I had enough spare weapons to arm a legion.

TL;DR --An abundance of scrolls won't threaten the game's status as successor to Baldurs Gate 2. The deviations from the ruleset will. I hope that the cheese tactics are test balloons but it's getting harder to hold onto that hope.

Adding to my large tangent above after giving it some thought...

I actually feel like Larian has been taking the wrong lessons from the success of their DOS games. They perhaps believe that the potential for cheesiness is the primary reason why those games became successful, when most people would actually argue that the DOS games were successful despite that. In actual practicality, the overall design of the cheese in DOS was rather insignificant in comparison to what you could already do with your core skills in those games.

Indeed, the community attitude to the same types of cheese mechanics in DOS is mostly just a 'neat, it's nice that we can do this', and then people go on with their day afterwards. People in the DOS communities generally don't have a weird sense of pride in abusing them like some people have done in the BG3 subreddit, besides maybe stacking a bunch of barrels at the bridge troll, because that troll deserves it and killing it early into Act 2 like 4-5 levels earlier than intended is a massive chunk of EXP. They're not treated as the only viable options in those games, because what matters a lot more is how you use your base skills, because the environmental design actually doesn't point at a cheese solution at every possible opportunity it gets. Some may actually find it almost insulting if Larian actually does genuinely believe that the DOS games are purely defined by the potential for cheese, because turn-based enthusiasts are much more sophisticated than just wanting explosions and finding ways to bend the rules. Indeed, I believe the DOS games are more defined by how the skills interact with the environment, not by how much of the rules I can bend and outright ignore.

The balance of the homebrew in BG3 has veered way too far from 'environmental interaction' into straight up 'bending/ignoring the normal rules', and that's what makes them so contentious. Stressing the cheese so much in BG3 to the point of making it really obvious that entire encounters are designed and balanced around them has only resulted in diminishing the viability of everything else. Which is to say that inserting fringe mechanics from DOS into a DnD environment has exposed how low level DnD at its core is either a much more imbalanced experience than DOS, or lower level DnD is a lot more grounded in tactical variety and can't really hope to compare with the DOS mechanics until maybe past level 5. That's when we actually get double attack and spells that might be able to actually compete with the cheese in overall viability.

The argument can be made that in DOS, the cheese can be marginalized because the base class kits are strong and reliable. In BG3, with the additional restriction of a single action per turn, hit % modified by several terrain and spell factors, on top of the concentration system makes you feel like an absolute wimp unless you play a fighter/rogue or rely on certain spell+magic item combos to not be completely awful (Wizard would be hot trash in EA if it didn't have access to Magic Missiles+Sapphire Spark necklace; the Wizard cantrip spells in particular are awful). Moreover, racial power differences were not as wide as wood elf/general elf/shield dwarf and the rest of the races. I could pick any race in DOS2 and not feel significantly gimped as I do playing a Tiefling druid or Tiefling Wizard compared to an elf/shield dwarf. The gap in racial power is humongous.

If you don't make use of the Sunwalker's Ring in the Underdark with your human casters, they essentially gimp themselves horribly by having to use up their concentration spell to make up the deficit, missing out on the Hex bonus damage and attack/save roll debuff, or CC capacity with any of the CC spells that require concentration.

I didn't have to cheese in DOS2 because I never felt like wet toilet paper in DOS2 if I was playing a certain class. All classes felt powerful from the early game and we didn't have this asinine power curve concept where "your character sucks at XYZ levels throughout the game". That never makes for a good experience. You want your class to feel good at all points of the game, not just some.