Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General RIP the patch every 2 weeks

I have great hope in Larian and I continue to dream that they'll make this game into the best RPG ever <3

Larian : " We will need one more year at least but probably two to do everything that's needed to finish the game.
Fans : " You heard this? If Patch 5 doesn't add EVERY change I want clearly it's gg go next. "


Chill out boys, stay patient. Frustration and focusing on something you have limited influence on doesn't bring anything good to anyone.

No one is asking them to fix everything here and now.

But it’s not too much to ask for clear statements about what they intend to to about players’ feedback.

Are they under the impression that controls and UI are fine as they are?
Do they think their… peculiar flavor of home brew rules are enhancing the game for everyone?
Do they feel like cheesy mechanics are a fucking riot and they should stay as they are?

It’s not unreasonable to expect answers at some point.
We are almost a year into EA and “waiting patiently” is not going to do us any favor except being forced to take a “TOO LATE NOW TO CHANGE ANYTHING ABOUT THIS” several months down the line.

Yeah that's the reason I was on this forum from Day 1 ^^ Don't get me wrong, as everyone I expected way more two-side communication. Some comments on the last few pages here clearly have an " apocaliptic" and " final" vibe to them thought.

I guess you're right and people had enought of waiting for their answers. We'll see. 8th of july is closer and closer.

Amen! I feel they should be far better at giving their community information about their vision and what they perceive to be possible to change, and what they desire to change, for sure!

I agree with you here. I don't really understand what prevents Larian from saying "yes, we are working on these changes" or "no, we are not considering these changes".

I like their shows, I don't think it's something bad. This is a cool form of interaction with the audience, but it also does not always convey the information we need. These are two different types of interaction.

Shows are needed to attract and entertain the community, this is good!
But also need lists and short answers to simple questions "will you change this or not?".

Maybe they don't know the answer themselves, hmm.

You answer yes in 2021. You change your mind din 2022 or worse, in 2023 where you actually have to drop a feature to release the game in time with your internal schedule.

People call you untrustworthy. So I guess it's the lesser evil they are choosing.

Well, sure, but they don't HAVE to "promise" features or anything. THEY CAN JUST BE HONEST WITH US.
"Well, we know some people have been commenting on the X issue, and we don't feel it *IS* an issue, we want this to be the way it is."
"Yes, we know people want Y and we are trying to implement it, but we've run into various issues and can therefore not promise that it will make the cut."

The phrase "We are really trying to get this game out in 2022" really worries me.

Because either they really have no will to change and test things or they have a lot of changes in their secret roadmap under their sleeves that we will not know until launch.

If patch 5 is as underwhelming as patch 4, I think it is safe to say hope is gone.

Not too sure about that, honestly! They've made it clear many times that the EA is *NOT* the same version as the QA is running and that an EA is not a beta. It's possible they only want to test very specific things in EA and thus have no need to listen to our feedback at all, or implement many changes in the EA versions....

STILL: they should freaking listen to the community. We *ARE* still here and giving feedback, and they should communicate far more openly and honestly with us.

This is true; EA is a different branch than the development branch. Things aren't developed directly into EA, representing a live feed of current development progression. So what ever is / isn't added to EA doesn't reflect development progression at all, as that's just specifically hand-plucked from the development branch and moved into EA (otherwise you'd have to constantly retroactively remove bloat gamefiles from unreleased content to protect from datamining etc) so it just makes more sense to treat the two branches separately.

So pretty much spot on, it'd be misleading for oneself to view EA as a live viewport to peek in at current development progress. What ever is there is deliberately there. Larian has a considerable QA staff to handle performance profiling, bugs, verifying updates etc; The main purpase of EA is to provide a small tasting, like holding a finger in the air to feel where the wind is blowing, and use that knowledge of what people respond positively or negatively to for their advantage in developing the rest of the game. But the rest of the game isn't meant to be seen by us until it's finished.

That is what I meant about a secret roadmap. Unlike other EAs they really seem to be holding a lot of things to final release for that surprise effect.

... which is great! But... at the same time, they DO get valuable input from living people and commited players here, and they reaaaaally ought to listen to that, and ... also... communicate a bit? =)

I feel like the way Larian does EA is drastically different from the way most other devs do it. Most EAs don’t lock everyone into a carefully curated tutorial/beginning level test build with few changes for the entire EA period while developing literally everything else on a separate build. Most other EAs in comparison occasionally release content that eventually spans half the game or beyond that, so that the EA is generally more indicative of the final product.

The major disadvantage of Larian’s style is that it makes major changes extremely difficult to justify spending resources to implement, because now you have to test it across two or more separate and completely different game builds. All for the sake of being secretive to a questionable level of practical value.

Implementing stuff like proper reactions in the EA build is one thing. It’s another thing to import that into all the other secret builds encompassing the 70% or so of content kept under wraps until full release. To develop and hold an EA in this style gives off the impression that their ideas were already set in stone from the beginning, and they basically have to blast a mountain and clean up the resulting rockslide if they have to change course on anything systems related.

On another hand, this is meant to send a message that Larian doesn’t want us to trust that the EA will be any indicative of the final game, which makes sense. But the more cynical will point out that this specific execution of it combined with the utter vagueness in communication may also be interpreted as Larian not wanting to take responsibility for anything questionable and hide behind a constantly guessing community that doesn’t know any better, until said questionable decisions turn out to remain in the final game. Like DOS2’s armor system.

After a certain point, it almost looks like the EA is less about gathering feedback, and more about generating hype with a carefully curated press and a playerbase engaging in social media advertisement without realizing it. Each update of BG3 is a big show. Each update in Solasta and WotR were just business as usual with actual rationale behind what they’re doing in comparison.

It would definitely be accurate to say that most people would be justified in any thoughts about the potential final direction of the game depending on what the patch adds. And I still have some hope because all that silence has to amount to something, right?

Secrecy for the EA probably shouldn't matter much at all.

This is as I always understood it to be. Thank you for confirming it though.

So does Larian ever leave things in the EA for dataminers to find that is designed to mislead/misdirect them?

I know they are watching so blink twice for yes!

I think I can hear the X-Files theme playing from... Somewhere.

Minsc confirmed :|

Not only I don't doubt it, but I said pretty much the same thing few days ago on Discord.
It was in answer to a guy claiming that "probably more devs are working on the final game than on EA" and my reply was precisely that "Chances are ALL devs are working on the final game first and foremost and then a selected portion of content is picked to be part of the EA build".

This sounds quite simmilar to when i suggested people that they should not use mechanics they hate ... since then all their data will say that they are using it, and Larian might quite easily come to conclusion, they are liking it.