Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General What was purpose of Early Acess?

To the people seeing here changes were necessary to make the game more accessible or palatable to casual players, we have evidence that you're just wrong. 5e is already the most popular version of d&d. It is the first system of a huge number of people. A lot of folks seem to just equate RAW with a hardcore experience but 5e is the system that made d&d mainstream. There is no reason to think that changing it is going to meaningfully boost sales to people who don't like complex rules, because those people probably aren't looking at this game to begin with. And I do not get why so many people are giving Larian the benefit of the doubt with these changes when they are entirely in line with every other design decision they've made up to this point.

Wrath was really buggy and under done. Especially the back part. Trying to hold owlcat up as some standard of integrity is silly when wotr is basically the horse drawing meme.

Wotr let you destroy all semblance of rules and balance with the mythic paths

Now I am curious about what you guys would consider as a good early access. Do you think it is inherently a cashgrab or have you already experienced an early access that answered all your prayers?

5e is very popular, yes, but 5e wouldn't work in single player videogame form and most who will play BG3 will either play single player or with other new people who have no idea what D&D is. At a D&D table if you catastrophically screw up your character there are experienced people around you and a human DM who will tell you why your character isn't working...that doesn't work in a videogame. If you are a new player and you don't know D&D and make an inept character you are just screwed and there is nobody there to explain anything to you. Larian can't(and really shouldn't) treat a videogame like a tabletop pen and paper RPG. They are entirely different mediums that work in entirely different ways. There is also a limited overlap in audience...most videogame players don't play tabletop RPGs and vice versa.

I generally agree with your points here, particularly about the danger of making an inept character without anyone around to explain to you why, but I'm not convinced that was all of Larian's concern with these changes. For instance removing the stat requirement for multi-classing. In my (admittedly limited) view that actually makes it easier to fall into a trap because now new players don't have the guard rail of at least having a +1 in the new class's primary stat. I think their motive, as it seems to be with a lot of their decisions, is just that they think these changes will be cool and they don't care about balance beyond the most technical considerations required for a playable game. I also disagree that 5e wouldn't work as a video game because Solasta exists. And I'm not particularly a fan of D&D but I've felt far more interest in replaying Solasta than I've had to replay BG3,at least in early access. Hell, I've played BG3 for 141 hours and Solasta for 126, and I've owned BG3 since basically the start of early access. So 5e can totally work in a video game and they didn't need to change as much as they did, even though BG3 absolutely was right to make certain changes. I just don't think that a lot of these changes were made to accomodate new players so much as to indulge Larian's whims.

Also, this is a nitpick but your last point I think is substantively wrong. Maybe most video game players don't play ttrpgs, but that's just down to scale since the number of video game players really is huge compared to ttrpg players. But going vice versa, I don't think I've ever encountered a ttrpg player who doesn't also play video games. On that end the overlap is such that ttrpg players are probably just another circle inside the video game player's circle.

I am 100% convinced that the change WAS made to make it easier for players. Not easier to create what they want. But to not create it, click venture forth, and still not suck. Why won't they suck? Because +2/+1 stat preset is now defined by the class and it means the class, which defines gameplay, will always be more effective than before.

I admit I don't understand the removal of the minimum stat requirement being dropped for multiclassing. It does seem catastrophically bad for new players. The only reasons I see here are that the multiclassing prompt is relatively small and hard to notice if you're not looking for it and the loot in the game seems far more powerful than in D&D. In act one there is a piece of headgear that rises your intelligence to 17 and that would enable someone who basically dumped intelligence to effectively multiclass into spellcaster classes. How they expect new players to figure that out without help I don't know...my guess is they simply don't expect new players to multiclass but that can backfire.

As for Solasta, that is irrelevant...Solasta had such a tiny market it was essentially nonexistent. All time peak players on Steam barely 8k. If BG3 had those kind of numbers Larian would shut down and never make another game. It would be a terrible idea to do what Solasta did.

This is a rather myopic argument. Sure, these changes aren't going to make or break purchase for anyone; but they could well affect other important metrics like engagement, play time, replayability. For an upcoming, one-title-at-a-time studio like Larian those things are just as important as they potentially increase sales on the next project. They ran a 6-month internal beta with players from all backgrounds gathering data and feedback on what people enjoy/don't enjoy; understand/don't understand; care about/don't care about. The EA is about metadata, not individualized feedback. That can be rough to deal with but it's how the EA was sold and it's how it played out. Expecting to have a large impact on the outcome of the game without being an actual employee of the studio is, IMO, naive.

Solasta didn't not sell huge numbers because of its system and mechanics. It sold small because it was the first project of a small indie studio made on a small budget. If they had Larian level resources and marketting, they absolutely would have sold better because they would have had the money to make an even more robust version of the game they were making and it would have been able to reach more people. BG3 has a set of tie-in magic the gathering cards depicting all the companions. Saying Solasta didn't sell well because of how loyal it is to 5e ignores all the far greater factors that influenced its sales. Maybe their loyalty to 5e played a part, but I think that compared to other facters, it's not that big a part.

If the developers of Solasta had a budget the size of BG3's they would have had to make compromises similar to Larian, when the game has such huge hype, such huge player numbers just in early access they would have been forced to consider that the vast majority of their player base would have been far more mainstream and new players. But whatever the case the game did not do well even for a small sized game. It might not have made even the budget that was spent on it back...less than 10k all time peak players. I'm not sure that it did well enough to keep the studio alive, much less allow them to elevate to bigger projects.

And yet more people still play DoS 2 than Kingmaker, Wrath of the Righteous and Crown of the Magister combined. And more people have bought BG3 already than all of those games according to Steam data.

I don't follow stats and sales numbers so I don't know what place Tactical Adventures is in at the moment (they've said they're already moving to their next project so I dunno) but more to the point, I don't think Larian has actually compromised at all. I think this game, with all the 5e changes is exactly what Larian wants. I don't think WotC has had any meaningful impact beyond pointing out changes they were making to the system that Larian actually liked and decided for themselves to put into the game. Larian has never shown any reverence for 5e, even from the very beginning of early access. If anything, I think making the game more 5e would have actually been them compromising.

Early access has been a wonderful ride and the game has progressed so far from where it was.
Only a few days to wait until we get version 1.0 in our hands and experience the true scope of this game.
Without early access Larian may not have had the financial clout to achieve what it has …I think people may be forgetting that …

Whilst this is undoubtedly true to an extent, wasn't it also a Kickstarter? In which case if the concept was so popular they would have secured more backing?

I did not know they funded this on Kickstarter but now that you mentioned it I looked it up and oh man. They only raised 240k euros from nearly 6k backers...that's even more troubling considering the game only had an all time peak of 8k because it means a large portion of that peak were their backers...they really didn't find much of an audience outside of their backers which they didn't have very many of.

I didn't know what I was paying for or signing up for with EA.

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Early on, it became CLEAR the game was configuration to the lowest common denominator. A lot of eyes on this game were from Divinity players with little to no experience in 5e.

These people have been vocal about what they expect and want in a Larian title and make up a significant portion of the player base.

Larian sullied and diluted 5e to be inclusive to these players at the expense of 5e purists and Baldur's Gate legacy players.

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The problem is: if you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one.

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A lot of changes being made have upset people. Some things I do believe Larian always intended to do but held them out of EA because of backlash potential.

And now it's like, the game is already here now lolgetpwned.

Though these actions did not break any unofficial contract of EA, this isn't the first time Larian has sort of bait and switched.

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Honestly, I'm exhausted and demoralized. Larian made the game they wanted to make.

I'm going to play it... eventually...and I'm sure I'll have a lot of criticism, but I've learned that the majority of people won't and that will be considered a success for them.

Solasta is in a weird sport where most d&d players are playing tt simulator or some other varient with friends on discord.

Then we have solasta which is kinda ok for solo play I guess? But raw d&d sucks for solo play

The overall rating on Steam based on reviews is "Very Positive" based on over 60k reviews. I'd say they have done a great job pleasing players. In spite of the the gripes you may see floating around these forums the game is doing VERY well and barring something like a buggy launch the game will do extremely well critically and commercially as well.

Because they were a new and untested studio? Because by the time Solasta's kickstarter started BG3 was already a known thing so it's not as though people thought it was their only chance? Because it just didn't get a lot of reach? Because record-breaking kickstarters are an anomaly and not every good or great idea is going to break records? Even Larian when they did their kickstarters, they had already been making games for years (though I had never heard of them before personally) so it's not like they were literally unknowns with no body of work to look at and say "yeah, these people could make a game." I feel like the question of "if this was a good idea, why didn't it make tons of money?" is an inherently flawed one because good ideas fail all the time for loads of reasons, good and bad. And Solasta didn't even fail. It was popular and successful enough that the devs clearly felt confident in putting out three or four more DLCs for it and a lot of free content updates.

Okay, this is a slight tangent from the rest of the thread and conversation. I feel like in gaming there's this expectation now that if a game is really good then it'll explode and be super popular and everyone will be raving about it, and if that doesn't happen then the game wasn't actually that good. And I hate that idea. People were talking about Hi-Fi Rush and that game just dropping from nowhere and being super successful compared to the big budget Forespoken. Well Hi-Fi rush was still made by a really successful, popular company that had put out lots of great games in the past. The fact Solasta didn't become the biggest thing in crpgs doesn't mean that its premise is inherently unfit for the mainstream or that it's at all inferior or anything like that. It just means that it was a game built with a small scope, by a new company making their first game. Using that as an example of why BG3 being more loyal to 5e because it didn't catch fire is an unfair comparison that implied widespread validation is an inherent mark of quality, when really a game can just have its niche, be in that niche and even if it's good, even if its concept could be expanded and made mainstream, that's just not what the devs tried to do, so it's no one and nothing's fault if it doesn't get talked about a whole bunch. Hell, look at Owlcat. Their first game, Kingmaker didn't get all that much talk relatively speaking either. But their second game? Even bigger, it got more buzz and discussion and even now it's more talked about and regarded than Kingmaker.

I'm sorry, I kinda went off on a ramble, this might not all make sense, but I had to put these thoughts somewhere so I don't explode.

Or people are just that desperate.