Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General So...is this game still being made, or what?...

Well, I wouldn't really argue that BG3 is a true open world, it's just inherently a lot more open than DOS2 ever was. There's already evidence that quite a few events change depending on the order you tackle them too.


Even experts are still constricted by this unless you use very specific alpha strike builds or go super all in on things like barrelmancy or throw heavily weighted chests with the telekinesis skill around, due to the inherent level-based damage formula.

If there are multiple directions for you to comfortably choose where to go in (different areas, pursuing different quest lines), then it's called, I believe, non-linear, not "open world". DOS games are not even non-linear because there are intended levels for each region, and there is one very narrow route intended for players to go. If you wander just a bit far from your current region you're guaranteed to run into only high level encounters that are not intended for your level. Not that it's impossible to beat higher-level regions, but it's much harder in a "not fun" kinda way, because the game was built against you doing this (stat bloat, level-difference modification to damage). This was the main reason why I could never find the motivation to replay either DOS game. There are too few maps in DOS, too few enemy variation, no surprise events. The feeling I had after completing DOS was that I'd probably seen most everything - I didn't feel like there was anything I wanted to know anymore. I was willing to give DOS2DE one complete playthrough, but that was it. The fact that you can get any skill you want and respec your characters anytime you want, one playthrough is about enough for you to try out everything.

I hope you are wrong about Attunement. Attunement is what keeps magic items in balance and prevents you from stacking things too much. thats why Artificers having double the slots is powerful and something unique to them at the 18th level. Being able to attune to 6 magic items at once can make one nigh unkillable.

All I’m hearing is more reasons for Larian to think it’s AWESOME.

on a semi-related note, been playing through BG 1 ee and man, sometimes adhering strictly to d&d rules is AWFUL. Fear? Poison? If you're not prepared ahead of time for those kinds of encounters, they're character/party killing situations. The Fear actually lasts a minute of real time(give or take some amount of seconds). so your character is just running around the map for a solid minute, aggroing everything on that map. I had one encounter where my party collected a conga line of like 20 enemies while they were feared. Also, poison lasts FOREVER, so if you dont have an antidote or a spell, you're done.

Those things work well on the tabletop game, but are awful in video-game form.

I don't think I'd call that "awful in video-game form". The fear effects are fairly easy to handle with a level 1 spell that has a long enough duration to cover you for an entire map. The poison is a bigger issue, especially at low levels, but emphasize the need for preparation.

I definitely struggled with the ettercaps and spiders in the Cloakwood on my first playthrough in 1998... but on subsequent play throughs I brought lots of antidotes and it just wasn't a problem then.

I like a game that rewards careful preparation. It would be a shame to lose that.

The fact that BG was a game where you could get stomped if you went in unprepared and/or with a poor understanding of its systems but you could also curb-stomp the encounter once you understood what was needed to deal with it was one of my favorite things about it, actually.

That said, EXTREMELY low level (1-2) has always been where D&D felt the most "MEH" in general, when it comes to balance (it's another story when it comes to immersion. In that sense it nails the "sense of danger" of "adventuring for the first time" perfectly).
it's just a matter of passing that threshold, really.

the issue for me is there's no middle ground. Either your prepared for it and it's not an issue at all or it's game ending and you're reloading the game. Having the fear last even just 15 seconds would be brutal and poison that lasts say 20 seconds would severely drain your resources but as it is, it's nothing or it's game ending, which doesn't seem like good design to me.

edit: to clarify, my party is level 2, in that nasty "ehhh..." d&d zone that Tuco is referring to.

I certainly agree that level's one and two are frustrating in BG in some cases. Forget poison... kobold commando's are one shot one kill wonders at that level.

This is a problem that still exists in 5e. This is why the first fight on the beach is so rough. IMO a level up immediately after the tutorial before that first fight would be welcome.

I forget where it came from but I think Mike Merles corroborated the concept of the character arc in D&D being broken up into four quartiles, with each one being it's own genre of fantasy. (1-5) grimdark (5-10) heroic (11-15) high fantasy and (16-20) superheroic/demigod heroic

I also think the other Baldur's Gate games had encounters that often were all or nothing, they were the most frustrating and fun parts of the combat in that game.

I personally enjoyed having a game that would grind to a halt as the wizards constantly tried to find the magic combination of debuffs that would allow the grunts to finally do the 10 hp that would kill him. but especially the final fights and ToB it got kind of messy, especially with masses of mobs spawning in.

you make a good point. The puzzle of "hmm, okay, i literally cannot fight against this right now" is making me rethink my strategy with fights. The vampiric wolf i fought couldn't be hurt by non-magical weapons. Turns out i had a wand of magic missile and a +1 long sword however, so i had to basically use one character as bait (good ol' khalid) and have him get chewed on while imoen blasted the wolf with magic missiles and my Kensai tried to get lucky with the longsword.

I do still think that some extremes are a bit too much, there's no real purpose for the fear to last as long as it does. If you're prepared, you're prepared, if not, you're almost certainly going to just get your entire party killed. fights in BG just don't last that long (i dont remember when i first played it years ago, so i might be wrong in later fights).

Very much this. Well, I can't say much about D:OS2, not having played it, but I hate this modern trend of coloured-rarity junk shower loot. Horrible. I'm sad and disappointed every time I start a game and realize it has this shit.

Also...


Varscona! My last Ward had it for most of BG1. Pretty much became this character's iconic weapon. And this is exactly it, you REMEMBER those items from BG1&2; they were special and some of them stay in memory for years, even if they aren't that important or used much.


Several people I know recommended D:OS2 to me, but the more I hear about it, the less I want to play, even though I already have the game. And the itemization is certainly a factor here.

As a side note, I was really surprised CDPR hadn't scrapped the shitty TW3 loot system and put something more reasonable in Cyberpunk... which apparently has a loot system that's even worse? Then again, at this point I'm hardly surprised at anything being bad in Cyberpunk.


Yes! It also rewarded actually scouting ahead instead of face-checking every room. (I may be biased though, I love Fighter/Thieves.)

And something related (depending on whether you mean "prepared" as in just "knowing systems" or also knowing the upcoming encounter by reloading or replaying) - I really liked that I could get into a room, start the fight, get stomped because I didn't know what to expect and wasn't prepared, reload, change approach, rinse and repeat until I find a strategy that works. Kind of feels like a puzzle. I know some people call it bad game design since you need metaknowledge to effectively tackle encounters on the first attempt, but I found it very fun. (And you can greatly reduce the "need" for metaknowledge by scouting and preparing for a variety of situations.)

It’s weird because from an abstract standpoint I’d be tempted to claim that the two DOS are in many ways very high quality games. High production value, loads of unique, non-repeated content, some fun and engaging combat dynamics, high reactivity, high environmental interaction, flexible quest design where multiple approaches work...

But once you start to go into specific mechanics and subsystems almost everything about them breaks down very quickly and turns into a mess. The itemization is downright bottom tier in the genre, the progression curve is terrible, the perk system is incredibly uneven (few very good ones, almost unmissable, while the rest is garbage) balance is a thing of dreams, gimmicks are over-used to the point of suffocating the rest, positioning becomes quickly meaningless because twenty different teleport/warp skills trivialize it, etc, etc.
And don't get me started about the armor system, for Christ's sake.

The problem with the armor system in DOS 2 is that it makes hardly any sense in principle and it creates way more problems that it solves.
Discouraging mixed sources of damage (which it factually does, it doesn't matter if you can work your way around it) is only the tip of the iceberg. There's also the fact that makes a certain amount of utility skills/spells utterly useless (not "unreliable" as much as literally 100% pointless to even attempt) until a certain threshold of damage has been passed, etc.

Basically it's a system of HP bloat (now in three different flavors!) that favors direct damage dealing above any other strategy. And conversely once that threshold of damage is surpassed the exact opposite becomes true, and some of these crowd controls become 100% reliable.

I mean, sure, you can learn to live with that. We all did.
But holy fucking shit if it doesn't go straight in the bottom tier among all the countless attempts at "simulating damage mitigation" I've experienced across the years in different rulesets.

...See? This is what I meant.
Every time I stop to think about it too much, at some point I almost need to stop and ask to myself "Wait, is it ACTUALLY a good game in the end or am I just forgiving too much to it?".



Incidentally I also think CP2077 is right there with DOS 2 and Oblivion as one of the worst itemizations I've ever seen in the entire genre.

What's even more aggravating about Cyberpunk is that they felt the urge to come up with their own Witcher-derivate flavor of bullshit (one aspect that was ALREADY detrimental to their past games, I might add) while adapting a pre-existing tabletop ruleset that was famously level-less and not affected by this sort of bloated garbage.
At least you could argue in Larian's defense that with DOS 2 they were starting from zero and had to come up with something on their own. CDPR can't even appeal to this excuse.

But what's really interesting about CDPR is that this isn't an "inexperience" issue on their part: their system got progressively worse at each game.
For instance in TW3 while most of the random loot was useless trash, you at least had unique and hand-placed Witcher sets marking clear milestones across the progression curve. Not in an ideal way (still too much stat bloat for my taste) but at least with some decent degree of reliable determinism.
In CP on the other hand the predominance of randomized trash becomes quickly almost suffocating.

I'd ultimately recommend DOS2, it is a good experience on its own. And one of the grab bags did a lot to fix itemization to where a unique set of armor or weapon can stay relevant the entire game. However, I think it is very different from what BG3 should be, both are good but wildly different properties with wildly different bases.

I think the weirdest part about the DOS2 armor system is that a fair number of people seem to be in agreement that simply having one combined armor system instead of a physical/magical split would have solved the majority of balancing problems it presented. It would have also removed the need to add armor values to accessories, which would have stamped down the stat bloat by quite a lot.

The devs could still differentiate physical and magical damage in an indirect way by putting a greater emphasis on elemental resistances in regards to magic damage (so more heavily armored enemies would probably have lower across the board elemental resistance or resistance into the negatives), which was very under-utilized outside of a few gimmick enemies with 75+% resistances.

Those are actually very important to me, I hold reactivity/flexible quest design in high regard. Regarding environmental interaction - is it really... well, "true" environmental interaction or just "create puddle, electrify"? I was very excited when I first heard Swen talking about "Larian systemics" because I love systemics, but what I had in mind was something more akin to immersive sims or BotW, yet it seems all that big talk was hyping up Larian cheese... That is, shallow interactions that are glued on top of the game world (surfaces?) and make it feel more gamey rather than more immersive.


Oh yeah, I've heard about the infamous armour system... Yikes. So basically you need all-magical party or all-physical party?


And I'm just wondering that; there's this supposedly interesting world with nice, flexible quests, good production values and all, but... What about the rest? Perhaps this is an impression that's far from reality, just based on random things people said, but there's a whole bunch of stuff in D:OS2 that's... not that great. All those broken systems, as you say; underwhelming story and characters(?), weak writing; underdeveloped, "meh" worldbuilding. And probably some other problems. I'm even pretty sure I personally wouldn't enjoy the "good" parts of combat, as I hate TB, so for me to (begrudgingly) tolerate TB in a game, it has to be very strong in most other aspects.

All in all, I'm kind of afraid it's going to be somewhat like Inquisition. Good production values, some nice ideas, some actually cool stuff that works... But oh gods is the whole game not worth the 150+ hours you waste on it. Many of those hours spent on things that are frustrating and decidedly not fun.


I would say in Oblivion the itemization itself wasn't that bad. It wasn't great by any means, but items, to my memory, were pretty consistent, so an elven sword would have the same stats each time. Well, plus enchantments. But no looter-shooter levels of random junk. I may be misremembering, but I think Skyrim was worse in this regard. I'm still disappointed by "Axe of Whiterun, a cherished relic for our hero and saviour!" which was just some random crap best used as a paperweight.

The problem with Oblivion was the utterly absurd approach to level scaling (which I'm not a fan of in general), where bandits eventually figured leather and iron are passe and dressed exclusively in glass and daedric, wolf populations were mysteriously replaced by bears and minotaurs started frolicking across the countryside (or, you know, main roads) en masse...


That's pretty much why I was surprised. Itemization in TW1 may not have been amazing, but it was made under good design philosophy, only executed as one would expect from a janky first entry. TW2 was... okayish, I guess, though the game as a whole, while I did very much like it, showed a concerning move towards "trending" mechanics/design. (My first impression of TW2 was "Whoa, it looks AAA! ... Urgh, it feels AAA...") And then the crap loot shower of TW3. If it's not green or at least brown, don't bother picking it up. Though maybe that's not the problem, having tons of crap "loot" is okay in the sense that a bandit can drop his low-grade sword, but for the items intended to be treasured by the player to be looter-shooter/MMO/Diablo-style... No. Just no.


Ah, thank you, armour system fix will be great if I do play the game. And yeah, Larian seemed to understand that BG3 should be an entirely different beast, but it appears they either don't care about the feel of the game or lacked proper perspective to see that it's too similar as it it now...

If you go on the highest difficulty levels than yeah, that's the best thing to do. You can still, on your first playthrough get a semi magi/ semi physical party and just have physical characters harass enemies with lower physical armor values and magical characters attack those with lower magical armour.

The thing is from level 14 +/-, if you optimized your party well...2 mages can whipe out everything. 4 mages can do very fucked up stuff too.... Regardless on the number of HP on the other side. Last boss included. But I won't tell you how. And discovering " how to make this work" is actually fun. My first 2 playthroughs were a blast. The 3rd one was pretty much my last vanilla run since I knew the spells combinations too well ^^.

The 4th playthrough I stopped in the midddle. Even 15 mods didn't help ^^.

If forgot the name but isn't there a highly regarded MOD that completely revamps the armor system of DOS2, getting rid of magic/physical defenses? Not sure if it also fixes over saturated items but I might give it a try if its any good...I think back in the days I did not get it because it changed way too many things for my taste. You didn't have the option to pick and choose certain components.

I forgot the name too. It gets rid of armour and is supposed to get rid of the CC meta by changing CC spells into debuffs. It doesn't exactly work as you can stack those debuffs to freeze the enemy anyways(even by accident) + you now do dmg over time with ice.

And to " balance out the lack of CC on fire spells " fire spells got new spells and are completely OP dmg wise. It's still fun to try them out, there's A LOT of new spells with animations and such.
But if you're asking " does it make it more balanced?" it doesn't.

I think they weren't sure of what they wanted to achieve so they balanced out CC, put it back in the game and added insane fire spells on top of it.

The mod was called Divinity Unleashed. It overhauled the armor system and nerfed the hell out of some crowd control options (especially teleport), but also made things like bless actually useful. I had one character running a dual wield/aeroteurge dodge tank build, something that wasn’t possible in regular DOS2. I found myself using special arrows a lot more often too.

It was still wildly unbalanced in different ways, and the game still turned into a rocket tag DPS race towards the middle.