Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Please let me be immersed

@Maximuus: With "physical sense", I mostly meant immersion that is derived from how lived in(irrespective of player interactions), whole, complex, beautiful and enjoyably interactive the game world feels. Though you can't really entirely separate this "physical" immersive aspect from the plot/lore, since the places are built around it. Usually only in detailed "open world" RPGs, the world can in this sense be immersive for me, since immersion seems to also require actually traversing the areas inbetween important areas(exploration empahsis), and a "lived in" world with NPC routines. Traveling to locations via the world map could possibly be immersive, if there were enough interesting events(rng and otherwise) that highlight you're traveling in a specific area, but generally I've not experienced this way of travel very immersive in cRPGs.

But the game could certainly be better in this respect. For example, If in BG3 the goblin army were actually somewhat far away from the Druid grove and nautiloid it searches for, and that it at least seems active: meaning the scouts it sends actually roam the wilderness area that separates these two strongholds. As it is, I've experienced just the 3 scripted encounters with "active" gobbo and true soul scouts.The cutscenes and encounters at the village aside, mostly the whole gobbo camp seems rather inert and after the first playthrough, predictable and just "waiting" for the player to wreck them. Do they still not even react to you piling explosive barrels next to their leader at the temple? Heck, on my Druid run, the human traders inside the temple even kindly moved into the room with all their gunpowder wares after I killed the True Soul leaders and most of the goblins, just kindly(yet hostile, willing to die for... what?) waiting there for me to light them up.

I didn't spend that much time following around NPCs in Ultima 7, nor do I do so in games in general, but it was immersive that they were also going about with their daily business and that the world was build to accommodate this. Lack of this liveliness was jarring when I started playing the original Baldur's gate series. This, coupled with the lack of portraits for most of the characters, made it feel too much like you were interacting with just figurines. For me the dialogue is the main lifeline of immersion, so the physical stuff like character potraits and character animations during dialogue matter a lot. While I enjoyed BG2 and its storyline for the most part, it just didn't seem to have much of this kind of physical immersive element in it. Everyone who wasn't hostile, was just mostly idling about, passively "waiting"(or sometimes calling out to you, if you passed them by, like our beloved Noober) to interact with you. And while the nightime in BG2, at least in the city of Amn, was markedly more dangerous due to all the predators up and about, the NPCs and the world around them felt for the most part static. And the sense of danger that darkness had, was still a far cry from say being lost in a forest after fleeing from hostiles, without a readily available nightvision.

A lot of the immersion derived from the D/N cycle depends on how well the mechanisms feeding into it are implemented. I'm rarely pleased with how stealth/sneaking is handled in RPGs, though I do seem to recall Pillars of Eternity 2 having a passable heist mission where you were expected to do a bit more than just show up at night with a lockpick to evade the guard's vision cones. Still, the stealth gameplay in PoE is mostly just a chore you do for the loot. Open world game like Skyrim does have NPCs with routines and lived in environments, which is good base to build interesting stealth/thieving gameplay on. But in Skyrim the non-magical stealth mechanism is kinda erratic in regards of how you get detected with a ludicrous emphasis on stats/gear. Also, the fact that the outside and the inside of structures is split into two separate worlds, connected usually by just one or two doors, means you can't really very well scout ahead(peek through keyhole, or the window, listen on the door etc.) before entering, or engage in any interesting entrances through windows etc. In terms of stealth mechanisms and immersion it also feels like a significant downgrade from anything the original Thief series delivered during late 90's early 00's.

I can see why most of the stuff you and others have listed is unimmersive and it's interesting to learn what kinds of things are more immersion breaking to others, and I hope Larian accommodates your wishes by fixing the issues you have with the game. But for me basically RPG games, that are not "open world"(or at least are big and sparce enough not to feel like interconnected quest hubs or tubes) and otherwise "complex" in the sandboxy way I've been decribing, are to me by default unimmersive in the physical sense anyway.