Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General New PFH announcement.

And yet, we're all still here, many of us posting more than once a day. Same with Steam and Reddit and so many more.

No. I don't think it's dead by far.

From May 2021 to July 2022, it has been 14 months.

When it was announced, it was meant to happen in the next Community Update, which was Community Update 13 on the 8th July 2021.

At this point, I am definitely of the opinion that Larian just decided that, in fact, they wouldn't tell players details about how they process and parse feedback and data coming from us. They just didn't deem it necessary to let us know that this highly anticipated communication was no longer a plan. Which, I am sure, greatly improved how some of us think about Larian's communication.

Larian has been crystal clear about their intentions. In almost two years of patches, they have consistently spent development time on their priorities, and made their vision of the game obvious. Larian is not making a D&D game! They don't like 5E, so they took a few pinches of the PHB and sprinkled them over a mountain of DOS graphics and scripted teen drama.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me seven patches in a row, shame on me.

Oh, sorry yeah. I ready 12/5 as December 5th, not May 12th. 14 months is a LONG time. I agree with your take that Larian just won't at this point.

I don't know if I would say that they don't like 5e. I'm sure they like D&D 5e well enough. However, I think it was easier to implement a hybrid 5e system because, well, DOS 2.

I'm playing DOS 2 for the first time and am seeing now why so many thought BG3 was DOS 3 especially at the beginning of EA. My goodness. SO many gameplay elements from DOS 2. It was like they took that game, tweaked it with some 5e elements and released it for EA because, well, it was easier.

I'm noticing:

- food heals
- bedrolls allow you to sleep (Side note: What the heck! Even DOS 2 let you camp on the game map with bedrolls, and they didn't let you rest with enemies nearby! I'm just saying.)
- lots of dramatic actions and special abilities. The spore elf fortifying herself reminds me of druids wild shaping.
- surfaces are vital to combat - like you can't win without them
- barrelmancy
- camera won't let me freaking look up. When zoomed in, I can't see where I'm going
- advantage of high ground is critical to combat
- backstab
- lots of items (but they all seem to have purpose, giving me hope yet for BG3s endless supply of absolute junk
- campfires you find in various places that you can light just for fun but they really do nothing
- surfaces... Did I mention this already?
- chain system - which I might add is WAY worse in DOS 2. Ugh! I can't get them to ever separate
- individual stealth - the giant bushes crack me up. It's like a Looney Toons cartoon.
- stealth cones
- no day/night
- companions who treat you like inferior trash. Not even trash. Inferior trash. And you don't have options to make witty comebacks.
- party of 4 and "Sorry. You're full up" comments when you try to add another
- have to constantly ask party members to leave and then ask others to join - so no quick switch companions

Now take all this and slap some basic 5e mechanics to it and you have BG3 EA prior to patch 1. 7 patches later, it's looking less like this and more 5e, but it's certainly still got a TON of the above and plenty of missing 5e mechanics.

But, come on. You try taking an engine and reworking the whole thing to accommodate an entirely new rule system. That can't be easy.

My point? It REALLY seems clear to me that it has nothing to do with whether they like 5e or not, and whether it's impossible to translate tabletop to a video game. I think it all boils down to it was just plain easier and more cost efficient to take DOS 2 and tweak it a bit to make it fit some sort of quasi-5e gameplay. Then, because certain things were more dramatic and volatile, they made other things, like shove, more dramatic and volatile to try to compensate to fit their DOS 2/5e mechanics hybrid.

On a positive note, I am finding myself not minding DOS 2 gameplay mechanics. It works for their world. It takes some definite getting used to, but it works well for that game. Geez. I had to do several fights multiple times to get the hang of combat. The first fight took me out like 3 times before I realized I could steal a fireball scroll from a dead corpse and create a massive fiery surface to kill the voidwoken bugs. I could not beat them otherwise.

Welcome to 2020. This game is DOS3, not Baldur's Gate.

I wonder if 14 months isnt enough to start concidering we might actualy missinterpretted their intentions. O_o

I mean right in that PFH Swen himself pointed out things that were litteraly based on our feedback topics ... maybe they didnt mean (and if that is the case, yes they expressed themselves poorly) that they will actualy tell us how our feedback is processed ... but will just show us in specific cases that our feedback is processed and some of our ideas are allready implemented.

So I haven't played patch 7 massively, Barbarians not hugely my thing. What would be on my wish list?

Class: Paladin, Bards (assuming party expands to 5, otherwise not sure I'm fussed)
Level up to 5 (since you hit 4th in about an hour's play it seems)
More armour and weapons of at least basic types: halberds, half plate?
More Feats from 5e
Variant Human race?

Would LOVE to hear feedback on prior Black Isle developers on what they think of this ...Baldur's Gate <3> game.

I'd bet most of them would have nothing but praises.

Both because it's considered poor form to criticize other people's work (especially other people's work outselling the things you did) AND because I noticed a lot of "old school" designers tend to go completely senile as the time goes and speak ill of their previous work.
Like when Richard Garriot claimed Diablo was "the perfect RPG" that summarized all that was essential in the genre while purging out the unnecessary bloat.


Not to mention that bitterness for the wasted potential aside, BG3 DOES have occasional moments of genuine excellence.

Thank you for the compliment! Your posts are always so smart and welcomed. I can't wait to see more of them.

- Not anymore.
- They don't do anything in BG3, no?
- D:OS combat has been built around you having a classless mass of abilties from the beginning. Here the biggest remainder of that are probably only the universally useable scrolls (which I really hope they'd reconsider) and throwables (which aren't too powerful and are used mostly for tactical purposes, except for bombs).
- They aren't really all that impressive in BG3. They don't damage-scale and the truly dangerous ones are part of the actual effect of the actual spell that creates them (web, entangle). I highly doubt you'd be able to surface-swap lava onto enemies in BG3, and if they are an existing part of the engine, why take them out?
- Agreed on that one, albeit it's far less prevalent with the weight limitations (and I am hopeful for a setting that makes picking them up impossible).
- It's isometric, duh. A far-off viewpoint for anything except looking at things up close is kind of a given.
- Not anymore. +2 to attack rolls is 10% extra to-hit chance. And even before it was *just* advantage it provided instead of D:OS2's ridiculous damage bonuses which made Huntsman the more or less mandatory skill to pick with anyone that used ranged attacks or magic.
- Again, not anymore. Only 5e's very dumbed-down flanking for sneak attack remained. Which is one of the reasons why I find 5e inferior to 3.5e, with how its combat is basically barebones-simple apart from the reactions (lifted from MtG's instant spells mechanic, in a way). Not only do rogues get sneak attack basically without much effort, undead and such are no longer immune to it. Stupid.
- Lots of them will probably be used for crafting (like the plants). Otherwise, I have no clue why people have the squirrel instinct in RPGs and strip every building of every piece of junk that's in there. Some level designer worked hard on that.
- Crafting, again? Maybe cooked food will make an appearance. Plus, in D:OS they were a source of warmth and helped counter freezing, rather than "did nothing".
- Yep. See above.
- I don't get why people hate the chain system. Considering the complexity of the terrain and the focus on the bunch of individual abilties that each character has (plus the multiplayer aspect), it's perfectly serviceable as a party control scheme. Never had trouble with it, myself, apart from the occassional jank when trying to unchain people.
- Well, no more bushes. They were there because the Divinity setting was never taking itself seriously from all the way back in 2002.
- They make sense for modelling visibility. And now, with the lighting system, you can even stay hidden even if you do get caught in one. Stealth is kind of overpowered though, I think characters should have a hearing radius as well and make perception checks of that nature.
- If they don't affect anything except visuals, they are kinda pointless. Day/night was one of the missed stretch goals for D:OS1's Kickstarter campaign, and they didn't do it because they didn't want to half-ass it and instead desired to have NPCs with different day/night routines if they were gonna go down that route.
- Lohse, Beast, and Ifan are all cool with you. Fane and Prince are arseholes for their own reasons, and Sebille is a recently de-slaved assassin on a revenge mission, and she does mellow down as you proceed with her storyline.
- A party of 6 would slow the bigger fights to a crawl and reduce the potential number of meaningful party configurations.
- Again, why switch them? For completionism? The whole point of the "pick a party and go with it till the end" is to increase replayability. You make a different character and pick companions that suit them better. Dunno about others, but in both BG1 and BG2 my party always remained mostly static once I'd found everyone I wanted to have with me, with the only decision in that regard being whom I'd leave behind to take Imoen with me. I don't think being able to see and do everything in one run is a good thing for an RPG. The Bethesda philosophy is detrimental to the idea of role-playing and experiencing the game from a different angle. It's supposed to be a story to engage with, a good choose-your-own-adventure book that can be read in a few different ways rather than cheated through with a bookmark to see everything in one sitting.

Boy, that was a mouthful.

- Because we played other games, so we know it can be done better.

- No, it absolutely wouldn't. Both claims are false. Case in point: one could test the feature right now through modding and verify first hand how that's NOT the case.

Brainer,

I think you maybe missed my point:

Now take all this and slap some basic 5e mechanics to it and you have BG3 EA prior to patch 1. 7 patches later, it's looking less like this and more 5e, but it's certainly still got a TON of the above and plenty of missing 5e mechanics.

But, come on. You try taking an engine and reworking the whole thing to accommodate an entirely new rule system. That can't be easy.

My point? It REALLY seems clear to me that it has nothing to do with whether they like 5e or not, and whether it's impossible to translate tabletop to a video game. I think it all boils down to it was just plain easier and more cost efficient to take DOS 2 and tweak it a bit to make it fit some sort of quasi-5e gameplay. Then, because certain things were more dramatic and volatile, they made other things, like shove, more dramatic and volatile to try to compensate to fit their DOS 2/5e mechanics hybrid.

Yay for PFH today!!!

Personnaly I'm replaying DoS1 and yeah, you definitely understand where Larian is coming from.

The chain system is really a bad system. Characters always walk in surfaces and die. It's worse than in BG3 with surfaces ofc, but it's really a suboptimal system especially in a hard game (chain/unchain very often to place your characters).

The UI is really unresponsive. Better in BG3 too but still really not optimal.

I feel the same with their "no pause" system.
I understand that it would be hard in multiplayer to pause the game but you have tons of buffs in DoS, combats may be extremely hard even in normal mode... and you cannot buff yourself at all before any combats. Their solution to go turn base in BG3 is probably better than nothing but you never really have to buff in BG3 and it creates other issues (hide/ambush being particularly OP).

On the other hand, I think that the map of DoS is much more coherent than the BG3 one (theme park). I don't know why they choose to create small areas pasted together rather than a coherent big map.
Same with dungeons. There are a lot of choke points you can use in DoS while it's really complicated and very open in BG3.

It could simply be of course that they were waiting for more to be cemented before engaging.
It won't be as if they've ignored all the feedback and comments since release of EA, but other than the "...from Hell", they've perhaps simply felt it was too early in the process (rightly or wrongly).

For example they might have toyed with drag and select vs chain for movement, but have decided to stick with Chain due to console constraints (just an example) and rather than update us constantly and get hopes up, they wanted more systems to be firm before having that level of engagement.

Not saying any of that is true, just trying to provide a counter argument.

Does anyone think we get a release date today?

Or still too early in the game for that?

We already know they are aiming at the first half of 2023.

That makes the release date far enough that it doesn’t really make any difference getting any more details.

And anything more specific than that would be a tentative estimation and subject to change, anyway.

Though many game companies over the early summer have been bringing release dates for their 2023 games, so it certainly isn't implausible that Larian might want to follow suit. Agree with you though in general.