Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Low pool of EA testers worries me

Yeah ... but what exactly that mean anyway?

I mean isnt that ultimate question?
And not just in games, but also movies, series, tabletop, books ... basicaly anything that do have sequel.
There will allways be some people that will claim that "this is no longer *XY* bcs it lacks *XYZ*" ...
But there is no evolution without changes. :-/
Sure, not all changes have to be good, but if we will be affraid to change anyghing, we could simply re-release the same Skyrim over and over with slightly improved graphic ... do we really want that? (Oh wait. )

For example:
I bet there is lot of people out there that will tell you that Fallout 3 were no longer Fallout, bcs that game was providing completely different experience.
But was that a bad thing? O_o

Actualy i believe that Fallout is quite good example, bcs that game gets quite simmilar overdo as Baldur's Gate did.
Both was isometric ... now both its 3D ...
BG was Real time with pause ... now its turn based ...
Fallout was turn based ... now its real time with V.A.T.S. (something kinda simmilar to pause, if you are not familiar) ...
I could find some more similarities, but im too lazy for that ... so google yourself. :P

My point is ...
Larian presented some vision to WotC when they were talking about using their trademark. (Or at least that is how things usualy work.)
Therefore, logicaly if WotC give them their permition ... they are okey with that vision, no matter what that is ...
Concidering how good sellings of this game was, i would dare to say that nobody will even notice that *some* people disliked Larian vision ... WotC did ... and people who buyed it obviously did too (or at least that is how companies usualy measure sucesfullness of their product) ... and that is what matters.

Basicaly i would agree ...

Problem here is in that point, where their advertising ends and our expectations begins ...
Main problem of this is pinpoint where exactly it is, since that is also quite abstract construct.

For example ...
Baldur's Gate III. is advertised as "based on DnD 5e" ... at least in my country it is.
And here are people complaining about things that are (quote) "not exactly as they are in tabletop rules" ...
Does that mean that advertising was wrong ... or their asumption that something that is "based on" actualy means "literal transcription of rules 1:1" ?

Another example ... a little more abstract:
As long as their point of view would be "anything from this universe is conciderable as sequel, no matter how well it fits to that universe" (yes, looking at you new so called "Star Wars trilogy" from Disney) ... officialy it would be a sequel ... and therefore their advertising, "we will deliver sequel", would be fulfilled ...
Of course ... they would probably piss off large amount of their fanbase and potentialy hurt both the trademark and studio that allowed such herecy ... but the question is (still looking at you, Disney) how much would copyright owner even care, as long it makes enough money.
(Spoiler alert: Not at all.)

Actualy Worms are great example ...
(and i still believe that Fallout was too)

Personaly i loved Armageddon ... but the new, 3D wersion seemed allways weird to me. :-/
So, for myself ... Worms 3D was no longer Worms ... doesnt seem like anybody care, if you know what i mean.

Dont get me wrong, i get what you were trying to say (or at least i believe i did) ...
Its just seem to me that if Larian would screw Baldur's Gate III. so much as you described with "Better Gardening 3" ... they would need to make first person shooter out of it.

I don't expect Larian to make an Infinity Engine game, but I do expect them to respect what the franchise was about. It was a single player party-based D&D experience. Most of those words should be reasonable descriptors of a modern sequel, even if they change some things.

But if they just want to make another DOS game then it is completely disrespectful to involve the Baldur's Gate franchise in that project. That would be rather much like making a solitaire game and calling it Fallout 5 because Fallout 4 is taken and the game uses Fallout motifs for the cards.

Predominently yes. But both games had Multiplayer and I for one loved playing this via TCP/IP with my friends. The limiting factor was the "chosen one" aspect which meant that for long conversations there was little to do but read whilst the main character did all the choosing. I think it's great that we will have a BG game where that aspect has been heavily improved. I would have preferred it without some of the sacrifices that are being made in the name of multiplayer (Night/Day cycle for example).

Also, until Larian fix the god awful Chain System, it's also much more fun to play in Multiplayer with each (or most) characters being individually controlled!!

That said, I too play these types of games in Single Player mode a lot, but I just wanted to point out that BG was never PURELY a SP experience.

It means that one can make changes but those changes have to respect what the core of the franchise was.

In the case of Fallout, sure, mechanically it was isometric, but it was also a game about a wacky post-apoc world, wacky people, wacky mutations, and a fair bit of grimdark humor. Did Fallout 3 get all of that right? No, not even close. It wasn't a bad game, in my opinion, but it was a bit lacking in the Fallout factor. What I felt it did pretty well, however, was depicting the world in pretty much the right colors. It had exploration, it had big empty areas, it had laughs, and it had a few dark bits too. It didn't get the dialogue right, though. And it didn't really do the job with companions either, did it? But it felt to me like they at least made a decent effort at a 3D first-person RPG set in the world of Fallout.

New Vegas did the dialogue a lot better, but the game world was too cramped. There was too much stuff in too little space and you practically couldn't toss a rock anywhere without hitting something moderately significant, despite supposedly being out in the Mojave.

Contrast with a game that takes the king of single-player D&D party-based experiences and then violates everything that is holy in D&D by focusing on living through the story of pregen characters, turns the game world into one very long cartoon networks moment, doesn't try to go for any kind of immersion, doesn't even try to get the ruleset right, and isn't actually designed for SP at all. In fact it's really primarily designed for DOS players to play wacky DOS multiplayer in Forgotten Realms and zero fucks are given about what the predecessors were about. Is that really a remotely serious attempt at a modern sequel? Or is it simply a hijacking of a respected name in order to push a DOS game without actually naming it DOS?

Mind you, I am intentionally overdoing the language a little bit to stress a point. There's no need to point out the hyperbole. I am aware.

You didnt answer the question.
What exactly *is* Baldur's Gate series? :P

A very long story about a pair of Golden Pantaloons

I understand that you are evoking hyperbole, but still...

BG3 is already much closer to 5e edition RAW than the original saga ever was to 2nd edition. Cinematic scenes were also a thing in the original series, except for they looked abstracted. And a lot of fans love the cinematic scenes, so I am kinda certain that they will be a net positive for the game. The pregen character thing is I admit a Larian thing, but these guys were chosen by WoC to carry out this legacy project and they have already been shown to be willing to let go some of their classic style elements (though origin pcs are obv here to stay which might be a cool thing, as they provide an excellent narrative anchor). I do hope Larian comes up with something that makes Custom heroes just as invested in the story. Also BG3 is much more a singleplayer experience than their previous games...

Correct

Not surprising at all. These kind of very slow pace combat, heavy handed cinematic games get boring VERY fast after a few playtrhoughs. You cant skip the dialogue quickly like the traditional BG1/2 games, or just quickly run away from a minor encounter...

From the first three months, overwhelming complaints were that the game is too much DOS2 not enough D&D/Baldurs gate. "Oh, dat just DOS2.5 with pretty faces..." People left.

And now nearly a year later, and WHOPPING 5 PATCHES, this hasn't changed. The few that likes the game for its cinematics kinky scenes are still here, and the rest few of us are wishingly hoping...praying...things turn out well ; more like traditional dark and gritty Baldurs gate atmosphere, more D&D and less <<Larianization>>.

How could it even change, when you people seem to be uncapable, or unwilling to pass the whole sentence? :-/
"It feels too much like DoS" or "It dont feels enough like DnD" ... dont help anyone. -_-

Claiming that all people who like the game are pervs who are obsessed with the explicit scenes is a bit rich. I can accept that people might not like BG3 as much as I do, but still this kind of attitude that says "we the normals despise this trash" is just wrong. Larian is working on something great here. A lot of people understand this. They just might be much more patient and positive bout this title than you are...

You want the game to be "more D&D" and yet complain the combat is "very slow pace," and that you can't "skip the dialogue."

The old BG1 was a shot in the dark, made by a fairly small team on a harsh budget and working with limited hardware capability. I can forgive them for cutting a bunch of corners in trying to come up with a game that actually felt a little bit like that D&D party experience. And it did feel D&D, even if some rules got bent in the process. It was not a full D&D simulator but contrast with what else existed at the time and it was a pretty solid effort.

BG3 is a rather different situation. Big team, big budget, incredibly strong hardware to work with, and they are not starting from scratch. Games have been made in 5E, and they also have the original games for inspiration. They made the choice to use the DOS engine in what seems to me like a fairly pure form, but that was not obligatory. They've made the choice to make the setting cartoonish, to have an intense focus on surface effects, and to make combat extremely long and drawn out whenever there's more than your party and a couple of hostile actors involved... That's all because Larian wants it that way, not something they had to do.

And they appear to be going for a discover-the-past-of-your-toon adventure and pretending that this is in tune with D&D rather than focusing on having players create their own character who goes on a D&D 5E adventure. That's a Larian choice, not something they had to do. They've chosen to massively compress the map instead of using activation points to load other maps, like the original games would have done. That's a Larian choice. This leads to homebrew upon homebrew, and again this is Larian's choice. They've chosen to have no sense of time in their game, to have everything essentially exist in a time-free zone and occasionally start little combat pockets with time. That's a Larian choice. Shared inventory, Larian choice.

And how many of these choices were made to create a great singleplayer D&D party-based experience? How many of those choices indicate a good faith attempt to extend the Bhaalspawn saga into the 5E ruleset using all the technology and game design ability of the twenties? Rather few, I suspect.

If Larian just wanted to set a game in Forgotten Realms then they could have done that without problems and received probably nothing but praise for the effort, but they made the choice that it wasn't just a game set in FR, it was in fact a sequel to the Baldur's Gate series. Not just a sidestep, not just something that would offer homage to that particular saga, but an outright sequel. I can also slap together some fanfic set in Tolkien's universe, but if I have the stones to call it a Lord of the Rings sequel then it better actually be worthy of that name, wouldn't you say?

What does BG3 do that makes it worthy of calling itself "Baldur's Gate" that isn't also done by a bunch of other games? It is a provocative question to ask, of course, but I don't think it is entirely unfair to do so.

The problem, Ragnarok, is that the question you are asking is one where you do not appear to accept any answer in simple terms, and if someone does write the novel presumably required to fully answer your question then I suspect you will nitpick the answer to argue that a comma here or there is out of place, and therefore the whole thing is not an acceptable answer. It's what you did in GM's story topic, isn't it?

What is the Baldur's Gate series? It's a series of games designed primarily around letting singleplayer computer gamers have that experience of party-based adventuring in the Forgotten Realms. There are a lot of flaws in how they tried to achieve that but combine a limited budget with limited hardware at the time and suddenly their achievement is more much impressive. What games at that time did a better job?

Now contrast with BG3. What does it feel like the design periorities were? The same as before or rather different from before? Keep in mind just how much more resources Larian has and just how much stronger computers are today, as well as how much better we are at general usability. And keep in mind that Larian had something to target and didn't start off in a complete void.

No, I'm not at all keen to reduce the originals to a checklist of technicalities that we can then spend a ridiculous amount of bandwidth discussing back and forth about. That misses the point entirely. There is an artistic element to games and art is largely based on feeling rather than hyper-rational thinking. So rather than throwing a giant book at you, so you can throw said book back at me, the simple question for me is how does the game feel? Does it feel like a sequel? And once we've searched deep within our bones for the answer to that, we can then try and figure out why the answer is what it is.

To me, no, I'm not getting any feeling of BG2 when playing this game. I'm discouraged from creating my own character. The story isn't about my character anyway. My character is at best just a lucky passenger. The world is fisherprice plastic and ridiculously compressed. The sun always shines. Time stands completely still. Once you scratch the surface, the world feels extremely dead, like nothing whatsoever is happening anywhere and nobody has any purpose in life but to handle one or two interactions with "the party" and then disappear.

Combat in the BGs is done in an arcade way that makes it entertaining enough to do many times but also fast enough that it doesn't dominate completely, and with an option for those who want to really put time into it, but here in BG3 it is freakishly slow without any way to speed it up. In BG2 there were tactics that made you feel smart rather than cheap, in BG3 there's stealth cheese and high ground cheese and the occasional surface effect cheese, but not really a lot of smart tactics.

I could go on but at this point I suspect you get the drift. I'm not a D&D purist and I don't play TT, but I did play the heck out of SoA back in the day. There are good things in BG3, definitely, but it just doesn't feel like it's got all that much to do with BG2. Or BG1, for that matter.

But it does. Just not necessarily as much. All sorts of feedback is to some degree useful. A general sentiment such as "It doesn't feel enough like D&D" might not mean much on its own, but it doesn't have to. If there's enough word going around sharing similar sentiments, that in and of itself is feedback for Larian. It is their job to assimilate and take feedback into consideration during decision making and revision, not the person making the feedback. In other words, no feedback requires an academic analysis of game design, philosophy and human psychology for perception and what ever else there might be. So don't be the arbiter of what is and isn't feedback please. That too, is Larian's responsibility to process. Very often, gamers know when they like or don't like something, but equally as often they may not know exactly why, which is fine. Few things in life is binary, there's nuance, context, the whole array of intricasies.

An example would be back before EA was even released, narration in the game was different. It was told in past-tense, like re-telling a story as if it had already happened. I immediately wrote in some feedback about this, though I also explained why, but I want to use it as an example either way.


In this feedback, Larian is made aware that some people aren't enjoying a design decision. The more this sentiment repeats, the bigger reason they have to considering revisiting it, and reflect on why that is. (And I can promise you, a writer would quickly jump to similar conclusions as the following example.)


This design change (in my opinion) pretty much reflects how a game feels, but either example is perfectly fine. One may be more worthwhile on its own merit, but that holds in no shape or form any relevance to the shorter variant.

This pretty much sums it all. Larian had plenty of opportunities, including one year of amazing feedback that I have witnessed in this forum. What BG3 will become is entirely Larian's decision. They have all the power to create the best RPG ever made, but what we have so far is far from that. They are excited to bring BG3's name and D&D 5th edition, but they never talk about the originals. And that is what is missing, to understand what truly made the originals special.

On a side note, people tend to invoke WoTC approval to justify Larian's decisions. I have to remind you that WoTC doesn't give a flying F to what Larian is doing. Just see what new Dark Alliance became.

Every major update saw that Larian is listening to the EA players. I just don't understand this fatalistic doomsday pessimism at this point. The surface effects were turned down, narration style changed, initiative system was altered, actions reconsidered. All due player feedback. And they talk about the originals all the time. But also they are making their own title. And bout this tired argument that "this is just a DOS clone because same engine". Look at how similar DOS2 looked to DOS in early development. BG3 is becoming more and more distinct with every patch, but the idea that Larian should start from scratch just seems ignorant about game development in general.

Story-wise, the Bhaalspawn story is over. Both Larian and WoC told us that. This is a new story where that story's aftereffects still linger. And u can already see that.

Cartoonish? Have u guys played any game set in the Forgotten Realm? It is a cartoonish setting...

This has been done several times here.

Once again you're just trying to deviate.

I think at this point, people are just waiting for a major gameplay update to dive back in. Something that would be equally important to everyone, instead of small tweaks or updates that are only really that appealing to a specific faction. Something like a new companion or a level cap increase to 5.

I've tried getting back into BG3 with each patch, but I've only ever managed one full playthrough shortly after patch 3. Every other playthrough since stalled around the time I reached the goblin camp, knowing not much has fundamentally changed afterwards, and the game's writing and party interactions are currently in a state where I don't find it compelling enough to sit through a bunch of unskippable cutscenes just to see how combat encounters have changed due to a few tweaks - especially when the combat balance at this low level is a bit gimmicky, though it's not exactly Larian's fault that low level 5E is as barebones as it is and admittedly some of their more questionable tweaks do make it slightly more interesting... Just maybe not in the way they intended or what people would consider good balance.

I would say the game's a bit slow too, although not in the way most people would think when most people bring up that word. CRPGs are by nature slower games, but when you really think about it... Solasta's pretty fast and snappy, Pathfinder is, uhhh, Pathfinder, and BG3 is getting faster in combat too. But things like unskippable cutscenes, almost every NPC having mini cutscenes for a one-liner, jumping not being automatic outside of combat, no shared inventory so you have to manage four separate inventories at once... That all adds up to constant interruptions in pacing that feels off enough that if there aren't any improvements in this category upon full release, I'd probably just do one full playthrough and then drop the game afterwards, something no other cRPG has yet to make me do as I usually commit to at least 2 full playthroughs (usually trying to optimize/perfect run the second time around).

Like honestly, when I think about exactly what I did in my sole full playthrough of the EA last year, I feel like I spent more time in cutscenes or walking around or managing my inventory rather than doing anything compelling.

Now that I think about it, my DOS2 playthroughs have usually stalled for similar reasons around the end of Act 2, though it usually takes a lot longer for me to get to that point there for entirely different reasons (knowing most encounters in the second half of the game becomes rocket tag extreme with how the stat balance becomes, and that the writing just falls apart around that point too).