Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Turn Based vs. Real Time With Pause Poll

I genuinely don't see how multiplayer being an option makes single player less good.
BG3 is literally the best game I played in 12 years and I thoroughly enjoy it both in single player and multiplayer.

I am glad you like it.

As someone who plays RPG in singleplayer only, I find quite a few perplexing designs in BG3 that can only be explained as "but multiplayer". I also find some usual RPG features that I value very much - quality of custom protagonist dialogue choces and writing, companions, immersion - to be below a standard I grew accustomed to. Some of them might not be result of multiplayer but just quality of the content, but for example I am convinced that companions are affected by being NPCs, playable characters and coop buddy avatars. Similarly custom character's content will likely serve as a basis for origin content as well, which would explain why it's so bland and non-discript.

BG3 is impressive in terms of much it does, but I personally value games that do fewer things very well, over a game with multiple underdeveloped ideas. The problem that by reaching for such a wide audience, I don't care for a lot of what BG3 offers, while what interests me is of mixed quality.

Just throwing my agreement behind Wormerine.

+1

My hope was this was due to it being EA...

+1

And to emphasize, the issue is not that it has MP. The issue is that many game design decisions have been made explicitly for the benefit of MP at the expense of the SP experience, for example how party movement is handled.

I didn't mention party controls as I am doubtful if this is a choice that favours multiplayer. I can't see how it would make multiplayer experience better. In the best case scenario (full on 4 player coop) one controls one character and the game plays about as well if the game used the classic system. Also most post KOTOR Bioware singleplayer RPGs used similar control scheme - I suspect Larian is just following the newer trend.

I would invite you to consider that the problem isn't multiplayer -it's RTWP. RTWP is just a bad system overall and completely incompatible for multiplayer. Or another way to put that is IF you are going to make a RTWP game then you should only make it single player.

OR if you are going to make an RTWP game then you have to remove the pause ability in Multiplayer. Although I can't argue that was the only problem with bg1 and 2 multiplayer. It was just bad on so many levels I mean you have to all stay on the same map AND you have to transition together. Ugh.

It's just a little ludicrous to me that people think Multiplayer is the problem. I don't think singleplayer is the problem - I love Single Player as well*. I am going to play Bg3 in both multiplayer and single player because in single player I will be able to go slower and read everything properly and enjoy all the lore and atmosphere.

Meanwhile Turn-based and full Real Time work great with both single and multiplayer and one doesn't detract from the other.

*I retract my earlier statement about D&D meant to be played as multiplayer. Sometimes you just want to play by yourself and that's fine.

Okay, folks, I just want to point out that the comments that this latest set of posts are responding to were a couple of months old.

As always, I have no problem with necro-ing threads on an old topic rather than starting a new one if someone has something new to say, but would suggest we’re clear on why we’re reopening the discussion so we don’t inadvertently resurrect every strand of conversation and digression in the thread.

Not that I’m saying that’s what’s happening here, just thought it was worth flagging the age of the original comments in case anyone hadn’t noticed.

It’s an elvish post age is of little concern 😂j/k

The way I see it, in the classic way of controling the whole party (click a button or gather by drawing a box with the mouse) one person could conceivably take control of the whole party, whereas with this chain method a person has to manually link their character to the party for someone else to gain control of their character. But there ought to be very easy ways around this in MP, so I dunno. The abomination that is the uniquely-Larian chain method just seems like Larian's being cussed: "We invented it so we're gonna' stick with it no matter how utterly stupid and horrible it is."

Why is this such a big deal? I'd much rather have thread necroing than people creating new duplicate threads willy-nilly or the mods merging threads into ridiculous "mega" threads.

Perhaps read the message of mine that you quoted again, as I feel I’d just be repeating myself and thought I was clear that it’s not a big deal

I don't know if anything changed in BG3 but in D:OS1&2 who controls who is a separate UI from the chain system. You would assign what characters are under whose control and that's it. Chain was used to managed character who are already under your control only.

Well that's good to know.

But that still leaves the question of why Larian would insist on using this party movement mechanic instead of an existing widely-used one that works perfectly well.