Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Community Engagement

As I am still waiting for Patch 6, I have been reflecting on the EA experience.

I joined the EA as I liked the idea of helping to shape the game and looked forward to exploring different character builds.

I was expecting a lot more community engagement, such as: surveys, or regular Q&A sessions, or at least a regular newsletter with some mild spoilers of what is to come.

Instead all we seem to get is patch announcements and repeated use of the word soon.

Are people generally happy with the current level of engagement or does anybody have any ideas of how it could be improved?

I agree with you.
Larian is really really extremely bad at actually interacting with the community. I mean the EA build of the game doesn't even have a built-in bug report/feedback funktion. And I feel that their pride gets in the way lots of times when players criticize some of the more clunky parts of the game. Such as the completely messed up party movement controls, strange homebrew rules and the abysmal UI. But since some higher ups at Larian seems to firmly belive that these things are the best things ever to descend upon the gaming world they just sweep those criticisms under the rug.

Most people are complaining now.
It's been a long time since some of us started to ask for a better communication and a better engagement of the community in the process.

It's just a shame that they never give us any kind of "informations". They promised a feedback about the data they gathered monthes ago but I guess the community doesn't deserve it.
They analyse our data, they read our feedback and suggestions and even on small things : they don't answer. The community involved in the game doesn't deserve any kind of communication.

We're turning in circle talking about the same things again and again, trying to think about everything, racking our brains, to fine-tune our suggestions but they obviously just don't care.

We are just tools that they use at their convenience and nothing more

That is a great example of the sort of information the community would love.

I remember when Tav was born based on the average character that was created, Human, Male, Cleric from memory and of course called Tav.

I agree, please ensure that discussions remain useful. If people keep debating stuff until release it will backlash. Better to be plain and honest about it and perhaps do an Ama combined with the mega threads and most asked questions and themes (not just the absurd or weird ones) on all different platforms they can gather user responses ... Shouldn't be too hard to do and they could also explicitly address if they don't know yet if something will stay or change, or what they want us to focus our 'feedback' on , if on anything at all ?

There isn't any communication just announcements. They have changed certain things but the die seems to have already been cast and many aspects which have been consistently and heavily criticised have not been addressed at all, which leaves me to believe they will stay as they are. How many times have they changed Minthara's hairstyle now? Of all the things that need amending...

PS. Whatever happened to their announcement months ago stating that they would reveal how they approach and consider player feedback?

I was thinking about this, and the more I thought about, the more I figured there's no upside for larian to engage directly. No matter what they say, there will be pushback, etc., and it's just a time-sink that could well make people more frustrated.

It's a lose-lose position for both us and them, what we have now is an L for us, and if they did engage, it's probably an L for everyone. Not engaging, while frustrating, might be the least-worst option

Engagement could be better. We can't claim that they don't listen at all, they do seem to address common complaints with their patchnotes. I believe, a more guided moderation in this forum towards certain themes and problem-solutions would yield significant better feedback, and it would be fairly easy to implement, there are certainly volunteers on this board that would agree to do so for no cost. The administrative extra effort would be minimal. In other words, it would be very efficent.


With warm regards
-Ben Thunder

I agree with Colin18 that there’s no upside to direct engagement for Larian. Not just because it would take resources away from other projects, but because communication implies commitment.

At this point in the process, I don’t think the devs are sure what will be included in the final game. They’re probably trying out systems, re-writing story arcs, designing areas and charactes that could end up being cut. In a GDC conference about DoS2, Sven said Larian had to cut the scope of the game by two thirds in the final months.

Coming out now and making declarative statements about what will come in EA hampers Larian’s abilities to change their minds, which is a crucial aspect of game development. Especially (and I’m guessing, here) with a couple of years left in the development process.

Not saying I like it. Just saying I get it.

I'm also waiting for Patch 6, so I long for more communication. Right now, I feel like Larian underestimates us. As if they think we're not capable of handling the truth, so they say "soon" instead of leveling with us and saying flat out: it's looking like it's gonna take a couple weeks.

I'm sure there'd be groans, but we can handle hearing that. It's a heck of a lot better than checking in every day, hoping, an then getting disappointed all over again, day after day. At this point, I feel like "soon" is a little insulting.

*

Regarding how Larian takes their feedback, this is something I wonder about. How many people actually post here on these forums, on a regular basis? I feel like I keep seeing the same names over and over again. There can't be *that* many people here giving feedback. Compared to say, something like Youtube, where individual channels can get enormous numbers of comments, both in live chats and in the comment fields. I imagine Larian is probably taking a lot of feedback from those comments, if only because there's *so* many of them.

And surely Larian's taking feedback from how people are actually playing the game. Kind of a passive level of feedback, right?

Which leaves this place. Sure, there's probably more depth to the feedback here, but I don't know that it's inherently more useful to Larian than other sources they have at their disposal.

I try to imagine myself in their shoes. They've got a large production team, and that certainly has its own internal discussions where people have differing opinions. They've got some stuff they've locked themselves into, unless they want to spend to reshoot a bunch of motion-capture.

Then they've got all the telemetry they're collecting, and what exactly that is and how it's interpreted, we can only speculate. Then they've got crash reports, and bugs submitted through the bug form. All that is already a lot of additional information to inform a complicated, almost certainly fluid, jumble of priorities and goals.

So where does that leave this place? I think I've said this in another thread last week, but I'll repeat myself anyway for the sake of this discussion. Let's take Swenn at his word that they read everything. They know that humans are more likely to share negative opinions than strong ones, and that forums tend to empower the minority of cranks with strong opinions strongly held that won't be happy with anything (and thank our luck that tends to be a tiny minority here). They know there will be people that will rankle at any deviation from previous BG canon. So I try to put myself in their shoes. They see which topics are recurring, and which represent minority opinions. They see the (often) unhelpful negativity one expects to certain degree, and how it's reacted to (ignored? +1'd? pushed back on?), and all that information goes into chaotic miasma of product requirements.

I think the only way to stay sane and positive about the final product is to play a mental long-game, to trust that it may take a long, long time not just to complete, but to see common frustrations addressed. If that's naïve of me because I know nothing of Larian as a shop, and little of their other games, fair enough. But having worked in (non-game) software for almost 20 years, I'm very familiar with the feeling of "our users want this, we want it too, but x, y, and z are higher priorities at the moment."

It certainly seems that way.


There's a lot of very common complaints that haven't been addressed.


Why use Early Access then?
Community involvement is a cornerstone of Early Access, and collecting game data doesn't suffice.


There are things that very likely won't change in the final game, yet they won't improve them based on feedback, and apparently, people mentioned the same things when Original Sin II was in Early Access.

As for making statements about what will come hindering their ability to change their minds, they could just say, "We're thinking about doing this or that, but we're not sure" or "We might drastically change some things later".


Patch 7?


There are people giving feedback on the Steam forums as well, but they don't seem to be given much consideration there either.
Which brings up another problem: where should people be giving feedback on the game, or rather, which place is being mainly looked at by Larian for feedback?
Here? The Feedback link in the launcher? Steam? Twitter? Discord? YouTube?

As for Larian taking feedback from how people are playing the game, I doubt that's very helpful when there are problems with the UI, systems and dialogue.
It probably just tells them that few people are making certain dialogue choices, a spell isn't being used often, an action is being used a lot, an area is too difficult, etc.

No, Patch 6.

It still hasn't been released on Stadia.

I do wonder how much is being worked on but they're trying to use these patches to just test various things.

For example, Imps had resistance in earlier versions. Now they don't. Are they working on replacing a majority of imps with things like the new hellshog because imps are too OP for Level 1 characters?

Day/Night. They added rain and some other weather elements, and they made the opening sequence when you crash on the beach night.

Minthara armor is Drow Leather, but when you look at the Drow Leather you find later in the game, it looks different. Are the stats for Drow Leather just a placeholder until they code it properly? Are they testing out a potentially new build for her? She's now a Night warden, but her stats don't say Elite Drow.

We're capped at Level 4, but by the time we'd really complete EA, we're likely going to be level 6. So, is Minthara and company going to get level ups? Are they just playing with stats and so forth, tossing weaker versions of monsters at us to see just what kinds of monsters they really need?

Yes a little more communication would be a great and imo important thing. Right now giving feedback has the tendency to feel a little wasted, because we are talking to a stone wall. As I mentioned in a thread the other day: we need at least a roadmap. We don't know what things in the game are the intended versions of the systems and what are just things they did not come around to implementing how they would like to have them.

I don't see the issue in at least addressing the issues on the mega-threads, some seem to be fairly decided already (party size, real time vs. turn-based) , others might be more like 'containment' threads to not clutter the general discussions ( differences with Dnd RAW), as well as threads that are about things which might be more 'undecided' or in development still (party movement, reactions, etc.). What would it cost them to share their current views on these issues ? I mean I get it, they already have our money and they're aiming for a bigger audience than just the EA fools, but why not treat us with some respect or even better, direct the immense amount of time and energy fans are willing to invest into something actually useful. Also not addressing issues also risks setting wrong expectations, as long as some issues are not closed, people will continue to project their hopes and fears on the possibility of their wish to be heard or not. I don't see how from a human, community, marketing, sales, and PR perspective it can be a good thing to nurture a reservoir of potential disappointment and resentment that might out itself in bad reviews and negative animosity at release. Better tell us the bad/good news now - months/years - away from full release, no ? I would assume that this way, any conflict and negativity can be had, ensuring the community that stays engaged in this EA does so fully knowing where Larian wants to take BG3, what they still don't know or don't wish to share with us, and what they can or can not conceive themselves of doing. I mean that would be ideal, obviously I would settle for any half-baked attempt at anything better than this abyss of eternal silence only interrupted by larian's seasonal patchnotes, LARPs, and vague 'soon'.

Funny, I see it the exact opposite way. Communicating too early about any feature has far more potential to set wrong expectations and nurture a reservoir of potential disappointement than keeping it quiet.

Imagine Larian were to say :"We're exploring ways to implement a day/night cycle". Then, imagine that none of the solutions they found really worked, or they conflicted with other systems, or were too expensive compared their benefits. How does Larian announce they cut the feature without creating animosity?

DoS2 was supposed to have, in addition to the human lands, dwarven lands and undead lands. Then they crunched it all into human lands because of time and financial constraints :
Timestamp 21:50

I bet they were glad by the end that they had never announced the original scope of the game.

Quite simple actually, they say: 'we might consider a day night cycle, but we need to make sure it is within our possibilities to implement it. So for the moment consider it as if final release will not include a D/N cycle until we have gathered all the information and reached a final decision ourselves but at the moment is seems rather unlikely and depends on a lot of ifs'.

I'm not arguing that they should make fancy trailers and flashy gif animated promo material teasing possible features, i'm just asking for plain and simple communication, which to be fair - also includes 'we do not wish to address this issue yet as we do not want to raise expectations or disappoint either side of the debate as we need more time/data/planning to reach a decision on this subject'. They've done this with other things, so I don't see this issue. Multi-classing or the other PhB classes, for instance. We know they will come, but we don't know when and how. And that's perfectly fine. Now imagine they didn't say anything about multiclassing or their focus on PhB classes at all and how much speculation and potential disappointment that could generate ?

I mean ... as far as i know, and i would dare to claim that i do know ...
They only promised that "we will see how they are listening to our feedback" ... wich was understand by most of comunity (and i admit that myself included) as that they will show us the exact proces how our feedback is received and processed ... wich would really be great!
And i completely understand your frustration here, since i felt it too.

But as it seems in light of that Panel From Hell show we get, it was quite obviously ment as that we will see some of our suggestions implemented ...
And therefore we will see the actual effect of our feedback.

It dont seems fair to me to acuse them like this to. :-/

I agree with almost everything here, and with the need for better communication in general. I'd nuance one point in particular : there's a difference between "we don't know when" and "we don't know if". The former might be postponed, which is mildly annoying, the latter might be canceled, which is a huge bummer. As far as I can tell, Larian have told us only about the "we don't know when" category, in which the PhB and multiclassing fall. I wish they told us about the "we don't know if" category, but understand why they might not.