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Originally Posted by Drath Malorn
Well, not that it really matters that much at this point.
We are possibly a couple of patches away from release and everything must be pretty much set in stone.


But yeah, while I wouldn't really expect devs to have open debates with their users on their forum, I don't think it was irrational to expect some occasional report like "Feedback we are aware of (and conclusions about the design we are drawing from it)" or "What we are working on" between patches.
Instead here we go with thew secrecy, the pageantry, the attempt to build hype... And the LONG stretches of complete silence in between.

And the hype often translates in disappointment too.
As I said previously, I went in the EA under the DELUSION that we would get most of the basic classes in the first 6-8 months and we'd spend the remaining time waiting for fancier stuff (classes, significant mechanical changes, dramatic visual improvements, content, whatever...).
Instead we a trimester away from two full years of EA and still waiting for three of the basic classes to be included )well, two after the bard comes in tomorrow, I guess).


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Originally Posted by Icelyn
Another AMA would be great to learn more recent info about the game. In an early interview they did say they are not including a day/night cycle and why, however: https://wccftech.com/baldurs-gate-3...-to-fan-feedback-adding-raytracing/amp/.

Just 1 more day until PFH! celebrate

OK. Petition to the mods, or whoever reads this forum for Larian to close the day/night megathread and link to the following statement making it clear there won't be any day, night cycle or toggle. Perhaps also add this to the EA faq Q: 'Will there be a day night cycle in BG3', A: 'Unfortunately not.' Lets move on then to the next topic.

Edit: Here's the relevant section of the interview linked by Icelyn (thx for sharing btw):

During the original Divinity: Original Sin crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, the very last stretch goal mentioned a day and night cycle, NPC schedules and weather systems. All of these could have impacted NPCs, monsters and magic. Do you still discuss the possibility of making a truly simulated game world at some point in the future?

Adam: I do in my own head constantly. I think it's a very different game. One of my favorite games of all time is Ultima Seven and it was the first game that I played that had proper NPC behaviors. You could wait for someone to go to the pub and then you could rob their shop. I love stuff like that, but a game that's built like that does very different things. We are very, very story focused as well and there's things that you lose. Also: multiplayer. We're a multiplayer game and day-night cycles in multiplayer becomes incredibly complicated. We're doing so many really complex things already that we know are going to be really good that, on top of that, it wouldn't fit this game.

I love simulated worlds and we have a lot of that stuff in there. We don't do the day-night cycle but we do the things where things in the world happen because you caused them to happen and they can happen off-screen. So, there are things happening off-screen. The world isn't just what you see on your screen. There are events that happen and things that will, because of the choices you've made, things will happen elsewhere. Those are real, those are systemic. Our systems are running in the background the whole time. There are incredibly deep systems. Some of them don't make sense for this game, but yeah, we think about it and we've talked about it.

Last edited by SerraSerra; 06/07/22 01:38 PM.
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Originally Posted by GM4Him
.... I see the ingeniousness behind it and the PFHs. All this hype and pageantry keeps BG3 alive. Even after a year and a half, every PFH produces scores of articles and posts on Steam and here and Reddit, etc. People get excited about it all over again, and the next thing you know, more people are buying.

I wonder just how quickly we'd stop posting out here if they actually gave us answers to our questions.
^This here says all that needs saying. You can literally predict when a PFH event is going to be scheduled by carefully observing the point at which people have stopped talking about the game (including right here on the Larian forum where we've recently been at a lull in people posting anything new related to the game).

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Originally Posted by SerraSerra
OK. Petition to the mods, or whoever reads this forum for Larian to close the day/night megathread and link to the following statement making it clear there won't be any day, night cycle or toggle.


Edit: Here's the relevant section of the interview linked by Icelyn (thx for sharing btw): [CUT}

?

This is NOT a new reveal. That interview was PRECISELY the starting point of the entire discussion.
We have known for two years what Larian said about day/night cycle.
The problem is that many of us do NOT agree with that explanation. Even the excuse that "multiplayer would create design issues" was already debated dozens of times, with suggestions on how to sidestep the problem entirely.

Same goes with their past explanation on why they are sticking to a 4-characters party. it's not like we never heard about it, it's that we don't agree with it. Not to mention that would be orders of magnitude less complicated to solve.

Last edited by Tuco; 06/07/22 01:52 PM.

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Originally Posted by SerraSerra
We don't do the day-night cycle but we do the things where things in the world happen because you caused them to happen and they can happen off-screen. So, there are things happening off-screen. The world isn't just what you see on your screen. There are events that happen and things that will, because of the choices you've made, things will happen elsewhere. Those are real, those are systemic. Our systems are running in the background the whole time. There are incredibly deep systems. Some of them don't make sense for this game, but yeah, we think about it and we've talked about it.

Good lord, that sounds like a Donald Trump quote.

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Originally Posted by Boblawblah
Good lord, that sounds like a Donald Trump quote.
I find it somewhat amusing because even taken at face value, it's some sort of humble brag that boils down to "We love to over-design secondary systems of minor relevance while ignoring the foundations of our world building".


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It's funny to read the different opinions on what is/isn't important or wanted in a game.

For instance I actually prefer the four person party as it is enough to micromanage as it is and day/night cycles are largely irrelevant to me - although it would be neat if they were added in.

Though at the same time I agree with Tuco's general sentiment and signature that the party control in BG3 is abysmal.

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Originally Posted by Lake Plisko
For instance I actually prefer the four person party as it is enough to micromanage .
I mean, as long as we are sticking with the current control scheme even two can already feel too much.
But with a decent UI, I never had a single issue with larger parties. In fact I VASTLY prefer larger parties for a long list of "gameplay implications" that goes well beyond just doing battles.ù
There's the "flexibility with the party setup" angle, the "loot distribution" angle, the fact that larger groups are less prone to the swings of RNG systems, etc, etc, etc.

When it comes to day/night cycle is not even a matter of taste for how I see it. the implications of its absence are far too heavy to ignore.
From the believability of the setting to the credibility of the simulation and the sense of immersion, passing through the implications that the lack of "proper passing of time" has on the rest system; without forgetting all the scenarios that are implicitly precluded (i.e. nocturnal creatures and encounters, experiencing both the daily and nightly life of a big city, etc) by the asbsence of this type of core mechanic.

Generally speaking I'm admittedly incline to doubt that anyone who downplays the impact of a day/night cycle actually invested a lot of time thinking of the implications in depth.

And for the life of me, I will never be able to accept the "it takes work to do it" excuse as legitimate, not for a production that dwarfs in budget basically the entire genre so far. And not for a feature that became a staple in most of the genre since 1985.

Last edited by Tuco; 06/07/22 02:35 PM.

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Originally Posted by Larian Interview
During the original Divinity: Original Sin crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, the very last stretch goal mentioned a day and night cycle, NPC schedules and weather systems. All of these could have impacted NPCs, monsters and magic. Do you still discuss the possibility of making a truly simulated game world at some point in the future?

Adam: I do in my own head constantly. I think it's a very different game. One of my favorite games of all time is Ultima Seven and it was the first game that I played that had proper NPC behaviors. You could wait for someone to go to the pub and then you could rob their shop. I love stuff like that, but a game that's built like that does very different things. We are very, very story focused as well and there's things that you lose. Also: multiplayer. We're a multiplayer game and day-night cycles in multiplayer becomes incredibly complicated. We're doing so many really complex things already that we know are going to be really good that, on top of that, it wouldn't fit this game.
Yeahhhh this is completely terrible reasoning, way overcomplicating a possibly simple implementation.

Larian could
- Put all players on the same clock. If someone is in combat and someone isn't, it's not the end of the world times passes the same for both (I vote either tie it to the host or have time slow down for all players if any player is in TB)
- Not have a real clock. Have the day progress based on clicking a button (1st short rest -> afternoon. 2nd short rest -> night) or by milestones (entering a new area, etc)
- Not have complicated cycles for NPCs. A subset of NPCs simply disappear at night, and others come out. Easy.
The story can be enhanced with day/night cycles. Story and day/night aren't mutually exclusive..???

So sure, Larian is not going to implement Day/Night in exactly the unnecessarily overcomplicated way Adam describes. But they could---and should, in many of our views---implement Day/Night in a simpler way.

Last edited by mrfuji3; 06/07/22 03:09 PM. Reason: added an "or"
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Originally Posted by mrfuji3
Yeahhhh this is completely terrible reasoning, way overcomplicating a possibly simple implementation.

Larian could
- Put all players on the same clock. If someone is in combat and someone isn't, it's not the end of the world times passes the same for both (I vote either tie it to the host have time slow down for all players if any player is in TB)
- Not have a real clock. Have the day progress based on clicking a button (1st short rest -> afternoon. 2nd short rest -> night) or by milestones (entering a new area, etc)
- Not have complicated cycles for NPCs. A subset of NPCs simply disappear at night, and others come out. Easy.
The story can be enhanced with day/night cycles. Story and day/night aren't mutually exclusive..???

So sure, Larian is not going to implement Day/Night in exactly the unnecessarily overcomplicated way Adam describes. But they could---and should, in many of our views---implement Day/Night in a simpler way.

Bingo,

In a way mirrors (and it's the direct cause of) what they did with the rest system:

they could have a contextual one that either allowed the player to place camps in some patches of ground (Pathfinder method) or an even more basic one where the player was allowed to make use of camps already placed here and there along the map (Solasta method), but instead they chose to have this convoluted "instanced system" where your camp is in some separate, magical pocket dimension, which is something that
- breaks the sense of continuity of the world creating a strong disconnect between where you are and where you are supposed to be.
- becomes a bizarre pre-requirement for dialogue progression between party members for some weird reason.
- requires a large (and at the same time clearly insufficient) amount of custom assets to differentiate between the countless areas and regions to not come off as completely jarring.

To be clear, these are NOT issues that I expect to see solved (I pretty much gave up on most of the issues I'm bitching about, at this point), but man, I DO hope they'll learn from their past mistakes when the time to work on their next title (which is probably ten years away) comes.


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The day and night cycle doesn't really matter (my opinion).
If you feel it is necessary then its your opinion, but for me no game will get worse the moment you remove it.
After all, it's cosmetics anyway, unless it's not then that it can be annoying.

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Originally Posted by Rhobar121
The day and night cycle doesn't really matter (my opinion).
If you feel it is necessary then its your opinion, but for me no game will get worse the moment you remove it.
After all, it's cosmetics anyway, unless it's not then that it can be annoying.

That is one of the reasons I am not a big fan of the day/night cycle. I actually like it more if it is just cosmetic. It's cool, but not necessary.

But stuff like... "Come back at night so you can do X" or "Character Y only comes out at night, come back and search for them!" is more annoying than it is entertaining or fun... nor do I really think it adds to the immersion of the world.

But again - that is a preference thing.

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Yeah, being able to stealth better at night would be annoying... expecially for rogue !


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Originally Posted by Rhobar121
The day and night cycle doesn't really matter (my opinion).

Well, that's an opinion I vehemently disagree with.

Quote
If you feel it is necessary then its your opinion, but for me no game will get worse the moment you remove it.
Yes, I do, and it is. And I can't think of ANY CRPG that wasn't inherently worse (as in: more mechanically limited) for the lack of a day/night cycle.
At best one could sensibly argue that they weren't worse to a sufficient degree to become necessarily BAD, which is fairly different from claiming it made no difference.

Quote
After all, it's cosmetics anyway, unless it's not then that it can be annoying.

And no, it's not just cosmetic.
Paradoxically, it happens to NOT BE just cosmetic even if implemented just on the most superficial level with the intention to make it just cosmetic, because it defines fundamental aspects of the simulated world regardless of how deep you want to go with it.

It may feel "just cosmetic" only for people who think about it only at the most superficial level, without any insight on how it affects core design.

The fact that the world has proper passing of time and an alternance of days and nights, alone, is already a substantial differentiator on a mechanical level.

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Originally Posted by GM4Him
By not telling us anything, it drives us fans crazy, and we just can't stop talking about everything we want. The topics and discussions keep going, and the more they keep going, the more new people are likely to read them and want to get involved. It keeps the discussions alive as all of us crazy fans wait eagerly for the next PFH for them to reveal just a small portion of what they're doing.

And, yeah. I imagine they're eating it up.

Maybe in the first few patches when people that were active still had hope. This forum has died over the past year, except for around patches and no one plays or streams the game much on Twitch.

The entire EA has dragged on far too long (some of it isn't Larian's fault) and many people have put the game down and are bored of it all. It's not that much activity around here anymore when we're far removed from a patch.

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Originally Posted by Tuco
Originally Posted by Drath Malorn
Well, not that it really matters that much at this point.
We are possibly a couple of patches away from release and everything must be pretty much set in stone.

Yeah, I fear as much.

We're still as free to spend our time giving feedback if we really want to. But, assuming it makes it to The Composer's feedback letters, and from there to an email box at Larian, it may well be moved directly to a trash bin. Release date is approaching, there are probably hundreds of things to finish or polish, and there is quite possibly no more time for actually, fundamentally thinking about improvements and changes. Of course, I don't know what stage of development Larian is at internally, as of today. But the value of feedback has always been strictly decreasing with time, and I fear it's probably next to worthless these days.


Originally Posted by Tuco
[...] I don't think it was irrational to expect some occasional report like "Feedback we are aware of (and conclusions about the design we are drawing from it)" or "What we are working on" between patches.
Instead here we go with thew secrecy, the pageantry, the attempt to build hype... And the LONG stretches of complete silence in between.

Not only some communication like that would not have been irrational or unreasonable, but it would also have been quite useful. Indeed, the process of gathering feedback would have been made easier, since a good chunk of the "feedback noise" and irrelevant requests would just not have been posted. And those who would have continued posting feedback would have turned their energy to where it could be useful. (*)

But hey, as I've said before, Larian must have had a pretty solid rationale for choosing to go along the minimal-communication route. So solid that the benefits of this communication policy still outweighed the costs, such as all the criticism they received for feeling out of touch with their player base (**). It's just a shame they never shared their wisdom with us. Who knows, it might have convinced some of us —pretty solid reasons can do that with reasonable people— and they would have received less negative feedback on their lacklustre communication. (See above paragraph about making feedback easier to process and focused on more useful areas.)

* : By the way, is anyone vaguely hoping that a new community manager, or whatever related news is coming, has a chance of finally going into "some detail about how we process & parse feedback and data we get through talking with you, and the telemetry we have in the game" (as Larian announced in Hotfix #11, on 12/5/2021).

** : Fun fact, in a GDC talk about the making of D:OS1 (at about 6:50), Swen said "during the time of Ego Draconis, we had lost touch with our players behind a corporate wall of press releases and so we didn't really communicate with them anymore". Which sounds fun to me, because I feel this is exactly what's been happening during the BG3 EA, with "press releases" renamed as "Community Updates".

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Originally Posted by Drath Malorn
* : By the way, is anyone vaguely hoping that a new community manager, or whatever related news is coming, has a chance of finally going into "some detail about how we process & parse feedback and data we get through talking with you, and the telemetry we have in the game" (as Larian announced in Hotfix #11, on 12/5/2021).
This was such an exciting announcement but it was then followed by silence...7 months later, Larian still hasn't given us that info or even mentioned their commitment to do so.

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Originally Posted by Doomdrake
My 3 biggest hopes for this:

4) A new Companion - frankly, after we have had to endure them for so long in EA, if I every play this game I am going to kill each and every one of those starting 5 the moment I see them.

I don't even pick up Gale or Wyll anymore and I suffer Astarion because of the electric boots or whatever they are so when you dash you get the elect damage bonus ShadowHeart and Laezel don't worry me to much

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Originally Posted by gaymer
The entire EA has dragged on far too long (some of it isn't Larian's fault) and many people have put the game down and are bored of it all. It's not that much activity around here anymore when we're far removed from a patch.

I think this is the biggest problem with this game, the fanbase and hype around it. 2+ years, potentially even 3+ years in Early Access is just too much.

But Baldur's Gate 3 being in EA so long has kind of made it feel like a 'game as a service'... only that game is completely unfinished and lacking polish for the 2+ years it has been running.

They are also clearly saving a ton of stuff until release and because of that it makes the patches for the 'game as a service' feel underwhelming since they clearly aren't showing us everything they are completing (even in Act 1, with classes, races, character models, spells/skills, quests, companions, etc) - but just little glimpses. They are also mostly revealing things people already know are coming or are going to be in the game itself - nothing they are revealing is a very big surprise at the moment. So it is like a game as a service... but you are only getting about 10-20% of what the devs are actually completing.

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That wouldn't make things particularly better. Even assuming the best case scenario.

"Oh, we actually fixed a lot of the things you people complained about in the last two years. We just aren't telling you because it's fucking hysterical to have you all suffering".


Which is part of the problem with how they did things so far in terms of communication.
I don't even particularly care about when things are coming in EA, as long as I can get a feeling of HOW they are coming along.

If Larian told me that an entirely new control scheme would be coming at release, for instance, I would question the wisdom of NOT testing it now that they have the chance, but I would surely stop complaining about what a mess the current one can be.

Last edited by Tuco; 06/07/22 10:38 PM.

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