Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Some advice for BG3 after finishing Solasta

This is a difficult conversation to have because the charge of 'elitist gamer' starts getting thrown around, so I will take this in a different direction. There are some gamers out there that are what some would describe as "high functioning" - and people who are high functioning are constantly trying to stave off boredom by finding greater and greater challenges and things to occupy their minds. If they get bored then they get self-destructive.

In the gaming world there have only ever been a handful of games that are designed to have the challenge level necessary to keep the attention of a high functioning individual. Invariably these games - over time - have been nerfed into oblivion to allow for greater mainstream appeal. The most famous example of this is of course World of Warcraft. In Vanilla it was an uncompromising and incredibly fun experience. You couldn't just run around soloing anything you wanted. The world, especially in pvp, did not make any attempt to be fair. Like all great Art it mirrored the unfairness of life. It rewarded cooperation, and punished those who were anti-social and avoidant. It was easy to learn but hard to master. Only 2-3% of players even managed to kill the final boss before the expansion was released (although this was party because Blizzard released the expansion too early. I think it would have been much higher if they gave people a few more months).

And people complained. "Too hard" they said. "Why should we be forced to get better? Make the game easier." And Blizzard listened, and they proceeded to nerf the game until it because not a game, but a simple interactive experience designed for innocent unremarkables. No accomplishments were celebrated because no accomplishments mattered. And once everyone was standing side by side wearing all the same Epic gear they realized how hollow unearned accolades are and they simply stopped playing. Subscriptions plummeted so much that by the third "expansion" they stopped tracking them out of embarrassment.

But then an interesting thing happened, someone figured out how to run a vanilla server based on the original game. And so private servers started to pop up, and people flocked to them by the thousands. And they would run them for 2 year cycles and then reset them and everyone would start over. People just wanted a taste of that original difficult and uncompromising experience. The game was so complex and well made that people were still figuring out new things to do 10 years after the game was released. It was genius.

The gaming world follows the general model of not creating games, but instead creating "Interactive Experiences". An Interactive Experience does not force the player to learn and adapt to move forward. An Interactive Experience is simply meant to be consumed, you are not expected to learn or grow.

IMHO In a real game if you are not losing then its not challenging enough and you need to move on. When I started BG3 I made all the mistakes and had to learn 5E rules to understand what I was doing wrong (a lot it turns out). I lost a lot of fights and loved every second of it. What is wrong with New players losing fights? Good for them. You're welcome!

I cannot comprehend the mentality of a person who expects to win all the time and is convinced they were created perfect straight from God's hands and no additional knowledge or growth is needed. However, I don't need to. There is a whole world of "games" for people that just want to constantly win with no expectation of improvement. Meanwhile the rest of us don't have a lot of options. Sometimes the hardest difficulty setting isn't enough. Witcher 3 on Blood and Broken Bones? yes please! Honor mode, heck yes!

Larian does a great job of trying to make games that require you to adapt and learn. If people are coming to Solasta/BG3 and having trouble but don't think they need to learn and adapt whose fault is that exactly?

No one is ever forced to use Exploits. I never use them and never will.

One other small point. It is rare to see a game that creates so many optional encounters as Larian does. I want them to create more of these. I want there to be areas of the game that if you start a fight then you are going to die and you have no hope of winning. That's proper D&D right there! So many people that complain about combat difficulty are complaining about optional encounters. Can you imagine a world where you can't win every single battle? Where running is the only thing you can do? or successful dialog, or being sneaky?

So this is my ask, let us have THIS game - I am sure there will be nerfed AI settings/easier combats for new players. Meanwhile I will have my crew on Tactician/Honor mode getting occasionally destroyed by the jerk AI and loving every second of it.

Or in shorter words, the most overpowered things in BG3 in its current state don't actually have anything to do with your character builds (outside of maybe Great Weapon Master, and even then it's mostly the minotaur axes that enables that to be way stronger than usual). Most of the cheese consist of tools available to every single character from level 1. It's why some have the opinion that the classes feel homogenous, the cheese feels like an overwhelming factor in every facet of the game's combat design, and it's going to lead to combat feeling very stagnant later on.

I will keep saying that there may be people that are fine with everything as is, but I absolutely know a lot of people will quickly change their tunes once they realize exactly what all of this spread out over a 80-100+ hour cRPG actually means. Some people have a higher tolerance for this sort of stuff, but I figured out that I don't - I currently have about 60 hours in BG3 and have zero desire to go back to it until there's even a hint that some of the problematic mechanics are being addressed, Bard or Paladin is officially added, or reactions/ready actions are being put in. But I have 600+ hours in DOS2, 50+ hours in Solasta EA, and 250+ hours in WotR Beta, and none of those games have yet to give me the same feeling that something is extremely off with the balance like BG3 already has.