Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Mega-threads and Guides Camping and resting.

What I'd like to discuss here is what we should expect regarding rest, why the rules for resting are still not satisfying existing, and how Larian is communicating on this.

In particular, the purpose of this post is neither to make a suggestion about how rest should be handled, nor to explain why (or if) the current absence of any restriction on long rest is a problem.


There was this interesting Rock Paper Shotgun interview in July 2020 with Nick Pechenin, Lead System Designer.
- part 1,
- part 2 :

This interview is actually quite interesting and I thought about making a topic about "all of it" but that would completely go in all directions from the start. So this post is just about rest, which is discussed in the 2nd video, from 16:19 to 18:41 (see timestamps in the description).

One striking thing is that in the BG3 play footage running as a background, we can see the game saying "Cannot travel to camp right now. Do you want to take a short rest ?", presumably when the player asked for a long rest. Nick also said "short rest is a resource". He even says, "your decisions about your resources have a bit more weight" (than Divinity : Original Sin). So there's at least one person in Larian Studios who is, or was, thinking in terms of resource management. Finally, Nick said that some zones are "set up as danger zones, where you cannot just teleport out, and walk off all of your injuries".

So it appears that Larian clearly has a given some thinking to how rest should work. However, in the current EA build, we don't have any rule regarding long rest. What could explain that ?

• (a) The window in the video is the equivalent of "functionality not available yet". Larian still doesn't have the system in place, so they gave us direct access to camp, no restriction.
• (b) They had the system working with a previous build, but they have difficulty getting it to work again in the current version.
• (c) They wanted to experiment and see what the players would say if there's no rule restricting access to long rest.
• (d) They've changed their mind. They've decided that rules on long rest, like many other 5E rules, are boring.

I'm short of ideas. Anyone sees something else ?

I hope it's not (c). I'm absolutely fine with experiments, even or especially un-announced ones (I mean, you probably want not to announce it if you want certain data). But at this point, they've probably had more than enough "no rules for long rest is bad" feedback and "yay, free long rests" feedback. They could probably have made up their mind. By not communicating, I personally feel they're not really gaining much. (Yes, I know, at the end of the EA, it won't matter that much what EA players think of Larian's communication, only how enjoyable the game is. Still, I thought a developper doing an EA would want to reduce the noise in the feedback. Communicating your plans is a good way to cut short the pointless feedback.)

Now, in view of this, what do you think the full release rules for long rest will be ?

I'm not going to organise the bookmaking activity. The only prize for getting it right is bragging rights.

I won't be a wild gambler here : I would bet on a "no long rest zone" system, since that's what they described (of course, they can change their plan).

If implemented, that system raises a question : if an area has, say, 6 small encounters, and you backtrack to camp after 2 encounters, will there be encounter respawning, or will you be able to continue through the other 4 ? For the sake of the game, I'll bet on "no-respawn". Given how badly the passing of time is taken into account and the fact that so far every encounter is a hand-crafted puzzle, I'm not sure they would generate a random replacement encounter.



Note : I searched for the threads on rest to see if there was a main one I could continue, but I found 41 threads with rest/resting in the titles. @Vometia/Sadurian : I'm wondering if it would be worth opening a Mega-Thread for this topic. EDIT : also wondering if this is better in General or in S&F. Feel free to move if more appropriate in the other subforum.