Larian Banner: Baldur's Gate Patch 9
Previous Thread
Next Thread
Print Thread
Page 1 of 8 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Joined: Oct 2020
Location: Savage North
addict
OP Offline
addict
Joined: Oct 2020
Location: Savage North
I'm aware it is probably early to give actual feedback on this, as the patch isn't out yet. But I'm kind of hoping that this thread can serve to centralise feedback on this topic, instead of having discussions of the new rest mechanism spread over multiple threads in different forum sections.

As described in the PFH3 and Community Update 13, the new system works like this :
  • Each food item has a nutritional value (well, Camp Supplies value).
  • When going to camp, you need to spend a certain amount of Camp Supplies to get a Long Rest.
  • If you don't have enough food supplies (or presumably if you don't want to spend them), you get a shallow(?) rest. (I'm not sure how this weaker long rest differs from a short rest.)

So with this system, we convert food to long rests. And we spend these long rests to recover all our combat resources (HP and all class abilities, including spell-casting). So we effectively spend food resources to recover combat resources.

Before diving in the general implications of this new mechanisms, I want to say that, at are level of implementation and quality-of-life, I feel like applauding Larian for having included an "Auto Select" button, which automatically selects from our food collection a set of items whose total Camp Supplies values minimally exceed the cost of a long rest. I now hope that this attention to detail and quality-of-life will next be turned to the inventory, the hotbar and the "spell-book" menu.


Exploration reinforced.

The first remark is that this ties exploration, one of the three pillars of many a good CRPG, to combat. Which doesn't sound bad at all.

I tend to think that roleplay is its own reward. Exploration is often its own reward too. I'm mostly thinking of lore books and harder-to-find areas. Exploration can also yield information which can affect our roleplay and the way the story unfold. But with this rest mechanism, exploration become more important.

On the flip side, since combat resources are spent in fights, and many combat encounters will be hard to avoid to progress the story, that means you now need to gather food to progress in the story. So exploration becomes a mandatory part of the game.

Players who engage in exploration and combat only will still be able to progress in the game. But Players in their 3rd playthrough who just want to try a different party and roleplay a different character, to see how the story changes, or generally players who want to focus on roleplay and combat, will be forced to engage in the food search. If Larian keeps their over-abundant containers, it will be harder to memorise where the food items are (in the same way that people may remember where the essential magic items are, and bypass the trash container-searching on later playthroughs).


Effective cap on long rests : difficulty implications.

The game may be locally easier or harder, depending on the exact distribution of food, combat encounters, how well we fared in the past few fights, etc. Standard resource management.

But globally, within a closed area like a whole Act, there will likely be a finite amount of food available. And thus a maximum number of long rests that can be taken in this area. That basically means : you must beat this area using at most this many long rests.

So this mechanism really has an impact on difficulty. I mean, that's quite probably one of the goals. But that means it should be accounted for in the difficulty options.



My suggestions and requests.


Gold for food ? Hunt renewable game for food ?

This is not a request but more of a question (which perhaps Patch 5 will answer, I don't know). Will it be possible to spend gold to get food ? Also, will the Survival skill allow to hunt for food ? (Not actively. Just assign someone at camp to this task.) The actual, underlying question is : how much will the amount of food (and thus long rests) available on a map/Act be limited to what we can find in containers ?


Camp Supplies cost of Long Rest : please not tied to a global difficulty parameter.

It is clear that, if this mechanism stays, the game's difficulty can easily be controlled by the cost of a Long Rest, measured in terms of Camp Supplies.

My request is that players can freely change this parameter, and some hypothetical global difficulty parameter (if there turns out to be one), independently.

It will not be true that a player who wants to reduce the Camp Supplies cost of a long rest (even down to costing 0) also wants easy fights. In fact, I can imagine players going for a high difficulty playthrough and not wanting to bother with finding food.


Time should still be a thing.

The resource management mechanism makes long rest harder to spam, which was immersion breaking.

But I hope the issue of time feeling like it doesn't exist at all will not be forgotten. Some things in the world should react to time passing. At the very least, our journal should properly account for the number of days past since the crash. Food For Long Rest doesn't change that.


What about the Danger Zone mechanism ?

Nick Pechenin outlined a Danger Zone mechanism in this interview. And it is completely compatible with the Food For Long Rest mechanism of Patch 5.

I hope it doesn't get ditched. Because having a long rest in a cave full of spider, or in a Goblin Fortress after having killed 1 or 2 leaders, is still going to make no sense. Food For Long Rest doesn't change that.

Last edited by Drath Malorn; 09/07/21 02:26 AM. Reason: patch number = 5
Joined: Dec 2020
old hand
Offline
old hand
Joined: Dec 2020
I'm going to just repost what I said in a different thread.

Long resting requiring resources now opens up the possibility of having narrative decisions based around this in the future, that wouldn't have had anywhere near as much of an impact under the old system.

Find a beggar asking for food on the road? You could give it to them, but you might need it for a long rest later too. Or one of your party members may know a spell that provides that food for them. Or there could be a situation later on where your whole inventory gets temporarily taken, and you'll have to go through a gauntlet of fights while scrounging only enough resources to long rest once or twice before you get everything back. The latter scenario would not be possible at all under the old system, outside of disabling the ability to long rest entirely.

On the other hand, this also opens up the possibility of introducing rewards that can alleviate any resource pressure rather than simply new gear. If you had a choice between something that lowered the supply requirement to rest by about half that would be useful for the entire game, or a new piece of equipment that you might end up replacing later, I wouldn't be surprised if more people actually opted for the former than the latter. DnD isn't exactly 100% about combat, which may seem ironic coming from someone like me who was laser focused on combat analysis before.

One has always gotta think about how the mechanics interact with each other, instead of examining them in a vacuum.

In actual practicality, I don't think this long rest resource thing will really change things all that much. You can probably still just steal everything you need from merchants. Some people who are really bothered by it should be thankful that they didn't go for the Pathfinder WotR solution, which was to take out rations entirely and replace it with a 'corruption' mechanic that results in stat penalties and an assumed immediate game over for resting too much in non-safe zones without returning to the main hub area for that chapter (and in actual practice, you'd hit the first stat penalty point for resting 3+ times in a single dungeon, which is pretty lenient).

Last edited by Saito Hikari; 09/07/21 02:30 AM.
Joined: Oct 2020
veteran
Offline
veteran
Joined: Oct 2020
I hate resource management, so I would like a toggle separate from difficulty to remove the requirement of having to use food for long rest.

Joined: Jan 2017
G
addict
Offline
addict
G
Joined: Jan 2017
D&D, ostensibly the core of what BG3 is based on, is a resource attrition system. Nearly every skill/spell in the game is based on the assumption that it is consuming some resource that will have some cost to replace. This is an attempt to implement that cost and I think it's great that they're doing it; without it, there's no way to balance the game's mechanics without tremendous amounts of rework. The points that Saito brought up about new narrative and mechanical possibilities are great. I'm excited to see what they do with this.

All that said, let's see what this looks like - there are ways to implement resource management to create pressure and interesting decisions without being particularly onerous. This isn't a wilderness survival game, so I don't expect extreme scarcity to be an issue. Hopefully, it can be tuned just enough to push players to see how much they can accomplish without taking another long rest, but not have to think about food all the time.

Joined: Oct 2017
old hand
Offline
old hand
Joined: Oct 2017
Originally Posted by Drath Malorn
Effective cap on long rests : difficulty implications.

The game may be locally easier or harder, depending on the exact distribution of food, combat encounters, how well we fared in the past few fights, etc. Standard resource management.

But globally, within a closed area like a whole Act, there will likely be a finite amount of food available. And thus a maximum number of long rests that can be taken in this area. That basically means : you must beat this area using at most this many long rests.

So this mechanism really has an impact on difficulty. I mean, that's quite probably one of the goals. But that means it should be accounted for in the difficulty options.
I don't mind resource management, but this isn't fun. The last thing we need is a shortage/limited amount of in-game food; this is not a survival sim. Give food to various merchants so you can buy and stock up before heading out, or allow you to craft food if you have the ingredients, which can also be purchased or gathered from the environment. Optionally, we can have "scrounging up food" as an integrated part of the resting UI, which allows you to make a dice roll and the result determines how much food you manage to scrounge up - so like a last-resort kinda thing if you've run out of food. Personally I don't need this optional bit but, it's just an idea.


"We make our choices and take what comes and the rest is void."
Joined: Jan 2017
G
addict
Offline
addict
G
Joined: Jan 2017
They could make it so you can only carry a certain amount of food with you. So, say, you could head into the dungeon with three days worth of food and there might be some more food available in the dungeon. You shouldn't need more than that to make it through, but if things go poorly, you can always leave the dungeon to restock - there doesn't need to be scarcity in the world if you're limited in what you can keep with you at any given moment.

Joined: Nov 2020
Location: Silverymoon
old hand
Offline
old hand
Joined: Nov 2020
Location: Silverymoon
Originally Posted by Icelyn
I hate resource management, so I would like a toggle separate from difficulty to remove the requirement of having to use food for long rest.

+1, with something tied to difficulty as a second-best option. The resource managers can have their fun while I won't have to worry about getting dinner for the party each night. (How does this work for Astarion, anyway? Do the trail ration bundles have little blood packets for him?)

Joined: Apr 2020
Location: Boston , MA
addict
Offline
addict
Joined: Apr 2020
Location: Boston , MA
I would prefer the danger of being woken by enemies (which they may implement later) or stolen.

Your main camp buddies could gather food for you from time to time, so you could take with you to dungeons.

Joined: Feb 2021
Location: Alaska
member
Offline
member
Joined: Feb 2021
Location: Alaska
I am also not a big fan of resource management, but I am willing to test out this implementation. I just don't want to end up micromanaging everything to play the game... because it's a game, and not a job. Sven also mentioned that as you level up, it would take more resources. To me that makes zero sense, because if one would compare that to real life.. I actually eat less now when I am more experienced in life than I did in my 20's. Food needs should not change to some unrealistic feast one is required to eat just to get a good nights sleep say at level 13 for example. Food needs if this feature is permanently implemented should remain the same quantities as they are at lvl 1 as they would be at lvl 20. Now I would not object to say preparing for a specific activity (like a long ritual or fast) where one might need to stock up a little on nutrients. But that should be the exception, not the norm.

Joined: Oct 2020
T
enthusiast
Offline
enthusiast
T
Joined: Oct 2020
Obviously, we're all just speculating here, but why do we think there is a finite cap on food/rests? Merchants refresh their stock on long rests, and it's looking very much like they'll be introducing camp supply equipment packs for the purposes of rest, so you're not scavenging the map for bits and pieces of food - see here from the stream:

[Linked Image from i.imgur.com]

Value of 40 (so will be higher in stores due to mark-up, but nothing crazy).


We haven't seen these yet, but there are potentially other ways resting will be introduced in an infinite manner where it makes sense. Obviously the new resting system is just in its infancy, but we aren't sure if food-resting is the only option. For all we know, food isn't required if we're resting somewhere deem civilized or safe (i.e. in the Druid Grove). Alternatively, Resting via NPCs dialogues (think Planescape Torment) or Inns might actually be implemented now because they'll serve a function.

Lastly, there are also spells that technically fulfill the function of food do exist (i.e. goodberries), so that's might be another potential unlimited resources of resting.

Joined: Jan 2021
addict
Offline
addict
Joined: Jan 2021
Originally Posted by Icelyn
I hate resource management, so I would like a toggle separate from difficulty to remove the requirement of having to use food for long rest.
I didn't see anything about limits on fast travel. So it seems that a player could fast travel back if they don't have the resources. Which is a modest incentive to use resource management, without really being punishing.

Similar to Pokemon where if the player runs out of pokeballs they can either A) fly back to town or B) walk back past each defeated trainer. If the player is properly managing their item inventory they won't have to retread any part of the map.

Overall it seems healthy for the game, but I still want to play test it out first.

Joined: Jun 2019
journeyman
Offline
journeyman
Joined: Jun 2019
I get that they needed a method to gatekeep long rests... this is, after all, a consequence of not having any time keeping (which would be the best way to gate long rests.) Unfortunately, this creates a Food Quest mini-game that doesn't sound all that appealing.

I suspect that the resources are either going to be overly abundant (undercutting the purpose) or overly scare (becoming an annoyance.) But they really painted themselves into a corner here so I guess we shouldn't be surprised that they are struggling to paint their way out.

Joined: Mar 2020
M
member
Offline
member
M
Joined: Mar 2020
I really like this change.
I agree with what Saito said. This obviously needs testing but i think the new system does sound light enough to work eventually for most people (i have the feeling it won't feel that punishing than it is in other games like PoE or Pathfinder). And if many people are against it, Larian can always tie it to difficulty, obviously.
But i cannot say how glad I am that they are experimenting with this, this can add flavour to the game without being annoying, if its balanced properly.
Cant wait to test it next week.

Joined: Jul 2014
Location: Italy
veteran
Offline
veteran
Joined: Jul 2014
Location: Italy
The lack of food is probably a hollow concern.
Even during the gameplay demonstration we can clearly see that pre-packaged "Camp supplies" are an alternative to just using random food. And these will most likely be available for sale from merchants.
I'm not worried in the slightest that Larian may make this "too punishing" and if anything I would expect the exact opposite given their track record.

While this is a NET improvement over the previous implementation of rest, I'm still vaguely confused at the way Larian over-complicated this aspect of the game with a lot of unnecessary roadblocks when Kingmaker/Wrath of the Righteous was already showing a perfect template to manage party rest/supplies/food.

Also, resource management is GREAT.

Last edited by Tuco; 09/07/21 07:31 AM.

Party control in Baldur's Gate 3 is a complete mess that begs to be addressed. SAY NO TO THE TOILET CHAIN
Joined: Feb 2020
Location: Belgium
veteran
Offline
veteran
Joined: Feb 2020
Location: Belgium
This new feature looks awesome. I'm very positive about it because it could really improve the lack of ressource management in BG3, which is a core concept of DnD.

Spellslots, short and long rest and features recovery does not have any sense without some kind of limitation, which is what food may bring.

But I'm waiting to see.

If there is so much food that you can long rest after every combats even if you burn all your ressources, it won't be usefull. Same if those supply bags costs 40 gold and if you can carry tons of them.

On the other hand of there's not enough, it's gonna be hard and tedious for some people.

The balance is hard to find in "open world" maps but different options for different people could easily be a thing, I guess.
That said it's a great step forward for the resting system and I'm sure we'll have tons of suggestion to improve it after we tried it (if necessary, it will maybe be perfect).

Still waiting for day and night cycle, random encounters when resting in "mini camps", and I have a lot of questions that will probably be answered the 13th.

Last edited by Maximuuus; 09/07/21 07:51 AM.

French Speaking Youtube Channel with a lot of BG3 videos : https://www.youtube.com/c/maximuuus
Joined: Mar 2020
addict
Offline
addict
Joined: Mar 2020
Originally Posted by Aazo
I am also not a big fan of resource management, but I am willing to test out this implementation. I just don't want to end up micromanaging everything to play the game... because it's a game, and not a job. Sven also mentioned that as you level up, it would take more resources. To me that makes zero sense, because if one would compare that to real life.. I actually eat less now when I am more experienced in life than I did in my 20's. Food needs should not change to some unrealistic feast one is required to eat just to get a good nights sleep say at level 13 for example. Food needs if this feature is permanently implemented should remain the same quantities as they are at lvl 1 as they would be at lvl 20. Now I would not object to say preparing for a specific activity (like a long ritual or fast) where one might need to stock up a little on nutrients. But that should be the exception, not the norm.
Actually Sven implies that is to do with the increasing size/complexities of your camp that you need additional food for, not YOUR character level. That said it will be interesting to see how that works if you game solo.

Joined: Oct 2020
addict
Offline
addict
Joined: Oct 2020
You guys realize the patch is not out yet right. Just playe the damn patch and then send entire pages of feedback :p


Alt+ left click in the inventory on an item while the camp stash is opened transfers the item there. Make it a reality.
Joined: May 2021
M
apprentice
Offline
apprentice
M
Joined: May 2021
Originally Posted by Icelyn
I hate resource management, so I would like a toggle separate from difficulty to remove the requirement of having to use food for long rest.
same. I am one of those players who value RPGs for the storyline and interaction with their teammates. not for combat or resource management. In order to feed and satisfy the needs of my character, I can have sims. in fact, even in the 2nd BG there was an opportunity to have a lot of rest. she didn’t need anything like that. except that sometimes the rest was interrupted by various monsters. I understand the joy of those players who want to immerse themselves in the process more. this is not for everyone. most of us I'm sure. I just want to have fun. so I'll say it one more time. such a function as resource management. should be part of the difficulty level. well that's sad. how much i liked the 4th patch. the upcoming fifth upset me so much. I think it's worth skipping this so as not to lose your final interest in the game frown

Joined: Oct 2020
Location: Liberec
veteran
Offline
veteran
Joined: Oct 2020
Location: Liberec
Originally Posted by virion
You guys realize the patch is not out yet right. Just playe the damn patch and then send entire pages of feedback :p
Oh they will ... you can count on that. laugh


If my comments bother you, there is nothing easier than telling me to stop.
I mean ... I won't ... but it's easy to say. wink
Joined: Oct 2020
S
enthusiast
Offline
enthusiast
S
Joined: Oct 2020
Quote
My request is that players can freely change this parameter, and some hypothetical global difficulty parameter (if there turns out to be one), independently.
Ideally you'll be able to make a custom difficulty with all sorts of sliders.

Page 1 of 8 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Link Copied to Clipboard
Powered by UBB.threads™ PHP Forum Software 7.7.5