Baldur's Gate Baldur's Gate 3 Pre-Release Thread [EARLY ACCESS RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Mustawd]

After catching up with the last 10 pages I am struggling to see what most of it has to do with Baldur's Gate III.

Infinitron time to move posts

Don’t be a retard. We’re just saying that BG3 is best if it was turn-based. RTwP has and always will suck donkey dick.

 

[Ramnozack]

I'm starting to wonder more about how itemization is going to be done in this game. In 5E DnD, magical items are a lot more rare, they are an optional 'rule' and encounters are designed with no magical items in mind so even a +1 longsword is kind of a big deal. Wonder if that is gonna carry over into BG3.

 

[Chippy]

Assuming I and everyone else wait until it's a few bob in a sale years ahead - how many millions would need to do the same for it to be a success?

They need to earn more money than they spent, by a good margin. So plenty of people. But if everyone waits, there will be a bob very soon after release! The majority will not wait, however.

Taking into account what is being produced today, with the exception of Kingmaker, and Larian at the helm; yes I would say BG has good combat and if Larian can get it half as good, it will raise my eyebrows. Manage thy expectations, doesn't mean accept decline.

But if something equal is half as good, it has quite clearly declined from the source, and by buying it, the decline is accepted, yes?

It depends on the level of decline. If it's to BG what the latest Star Wars films were to the original, I wont get it. If it's Rogue One / Shadows of Mordor, I'll rent it for a fiver or buy it in a sale. Yes it will be glorious if they make a shit game with a BG3 title, and get their teeth kicked in in the initial sales. But I honestly don't get this Codexian expectaion for a TB prestigious RPG from Larian.

I would have had greater hope from Owlcat.

 

[Lacrymas]

I'm starting to wonder more about how itemization is going to be done in this game. In 5E DnD, magical items are a lot more rare, they are an optional 'rule' and encounters are designed with no magical items in mind so even a +1 longsword is kind of a big deal. Wonder if that is gonna carry over into BG3.

Short answer: no. Long answer: noooooooooooooooooo.

It won't have the item fever Swen is so fond of if magical items are rare. I wonder how they'll manage to cram their favorite generic sword of randomness type of items in this game.

 

[smaug]

Assuming I and everyone else wait until it's a few bob in a sale years ahead - how many millions would need to do the same for it to be a success?

They need to earn more money than they spent, by a good margin. So plenty of people. But if everyone waits, there will be a bob very soon after release! The majority will not wait, however.

Taking into account what is being produced today, with

This whole Codexian infatuation with TB really shows a certain level of entitlement. It's like walking into a gay bar with your ass-cheeks exposed through those cowboy chaps (or whatever they're called) and then being suprised if you get fondled. In all honesty, if Larian keep it RTWP, manage 1/10 of the tone, 50% decent combat on the originals and a half-decent story...I'll probably buy it in a sale.

Feel free to pile on the retard tags - but every one counts as a butthurt one in reply, cause you know it's the best you can hope for.

 

[Corvinus]

It depends on the level of decline. If it's to BG what the latest Star Wars films were to the original, I wont get it. If it's Rogue One / Shadows of Mordor, I'll rent it for a fiver or buy it in a sale. Yes it will be glorious if they make a shit game with a BG3 title, and get their teeth kicked in in the initial sales. But I honestly don't get this Codexian expectaion for a TB prestigious RPG from Larian.

I would have had greater hope from Owlcat.

It is good that you have standards, but decline is decline. I don't expect it to be an

atrocity

however. Just worse than before.

 

[FreeKaner]

Yes, and blindly following tradition is a good thing. I'm up for burning some witches, anyone care to join?

You identify as a German now and follow German tradition?

I'm starting to wonder more about how itemization is going to be done in this game. In 5E DnD, magical items are a lot more rare, they are an optional 'rule' and encounters are designed with no magical items in mind so even a +1 longsword is kind of a big deal. Wonder if that is gonna carry over into BG3.

Don't expect anything beyond Diablo 3 / MMO itemisation.

 

[Lacrymas]

You identify as a German now and follow German tradition?

German to the DNA.

 

[anvi]

My theory on why there is no footage yet is the same for Skyrim 2 and most other games. There is no game yet. There are no good game designers working at any of these companies, so they make the game world first, they throw in a bunch of characters and animals and shit. And then at the last minute they throw in some hacky slashy shooty sneaky copy paste garbage. They hire a bunch of chinese beta testers, and 80% of them say, "Dis game reery bad". So they ask around the office and someone says mebe u cud maek it so dat u pres a buton and sumthink orsum hapens?! And the "executive senior head producer director of systems" says OMG why did we not think of this sooner?! So they add Fus Ro Duh thing and suddenly the "dis reery bad" comments are down to 49%. Time to ship it and spam the internet with videos.

 

[Morblot]

So I just jumped over like 150 pages. Do we know anything of the game yet?

Also, what the hell, are there people here defending the Beamdog EEs? Fuck off :D

 

[luj1]

My theory on why there is no footage yet is the same for Skyrim 2 and most other games.

There is no game yet.

 

[smaug]

So I just jumped over like 150 pages. Do we know anything of the game yet?

Also, what the hell, are there people here defending the Beamdog EEs? Fuck off :D

There are people defending RTWP. This thread has certainly gone places. :D

 

[hivemind]

larian never made a good game

 

[jungl]

Im guessing what they going to do is release another cinematic trailer much more cooler then the previous one with more hints too what gameplay. Preorders will skyrocket then after 2 months after that they release the subpar JANK gameplay. Sound familiar?

 

[LESS T_T]

http://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=653199#Post653199

Currently the focus is shifting back to hunkering down and working on the game. There will be more details 'soon', but for now I think the various interviews covered most of the information we are ready to talk about.

FWIW August has GenCon, Gamescom, and PAX West.

 

[luj1]

larian never made a good game

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

Oh yeah plate armor is bad and you're not mobile in it at all meme... There is such thing as footwork mate, it's not matrix dodge but even sidestep can make opponent blow just graze or miss you.

Plate armour weighs about as much as a modern soldier's harness. 40-60 lb. Given that modern soldiers can run in the damned things, it is an old and tired myth that plate armoured knights are like turtles on their back.

https://www.livescience.com/15128-armor-drained-medieval-knight-energy.html

A new study that put armor-wearing volunteers on treadmills finds that wearing a full suit of armor (which might weigh up to 110 pounds, or 50 kilograms), takes more than twice the energy of walking around unencumbered. Even lugging around a backpack of equal weight is less energy-intensive than wearing armor, the study found, because wearing 17 pounds (8 kg) of steel plates on each leg requires no small amount of extra exertion.

I see the thread has moved on, but every time someone posts this study I feel compelled to correct the record.

That 110lb plate harness is jousting armor. No one would’ve worn it for anything other than a joust, certainly not a battle. It’s meant to withstand a lance that’s attached to 2,000 pounds of man and horse, traveling at a relative velocity of 60mph. It’s not meant for combat. Just mounting your horse without assistance was considered an achievement in jousting armor. That’s not gonna fly on the battlefield.

A normal Milanese or Gothic plate harness would have weighed 60 pounds at most. You could absolutely do gymnastics in plate. We know this because there are primary sources—fencing manuals, training guides and biographies—that explain exactly how knights trained in armor.

Jean le Maingre, known as Boucicaut, was perhaps the best warrior in Europe, certainly in France, in the mid-fourteenth century, until his son Jean II (also known as Boucicaut) displaced him. We have a written account of their training regimen, which includes gymnastics and even dancing in armor.

A re-enactment:

You can also look at fencing manuals like Fiore dei Liberi’s Flower of Battle, which has great illustrations. Most of the moves you can do unarmoured you can also do while wearing plate; he shows examples of both side by side.

Chain actually hampers your movement more than plate, because it’s not articulated—all the weight falls on your shoulders and your hips (if you’re wearing a belt, and you’d always be wearing a belt). With plate, it’s distributed across your whole body and there’s nothing constraining your joints.

The idea that dodging in armor is much more tiring than dodging in no armor doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny, either, because the guy wearing no armour needs to do a lot more of it.

 

[anvi]

Amazing what men could do before they were filled with microplastic, estrogen, and soymilk.

 

[Lacrymas]

Soy doesn't increase estrogen in men. If you train as much in armor today, you'll be able to do the same things they did, perhaps even better due to our more advanced understanding of the body. I.e. don't look for scapegoats.

 

[Viata]

Soy doesn't increase estrogen in men. If you train as much in armor today, you'll be able to do the same things they did, perhaps even better due to our more advanced understanding of the body. I.e. don't look for scapegoats.

t. soymilk seller.

 

[AwesomeButton]

It's dying off now, and it's getting negative/toxic on Steam, retardit and even Larian's forums

Here is a favorite of mine from Larian's forum: http://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=653106#Post653106[URL]http://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=653106#Post653106[/URL]

Spoiler

Hey everyone, I just wanted to share some of the reservations I have about Larian taking over the project. A couple of my posts have been deleted so far... I hope Larian will recognize that criticism is important to advancing their art and that my words are worth keeping around, even if most people disagree with them (which seems to be the case). Anyway, here are the big concerns I have about Larian taking over the BG franchise:

Tonal Whiplash: Now granted, I only played the first Divinity: Original Sin, but I felt it really suffered from some storytelling blunders. The player is introduced via an ultimately pointless murder that immediately gets interrupted by a brief glimpse of some cosmic horror, interspersed with lul-random, wink-wink, genre-aware slapstick comedy. All these competing tones were woven together really inelegantly, and it really hindered my own engagement with the plot.
Baldur’s Gate as a series, by contrast, has an extremely consistent tone. It’s a story about loss, death, and destiny. Granted, the game is humorous, but its humor is largely incidental, where it works. There are moments of outright silliness, but they’re some of the weakest moments in the games. The real depth comes from the narrative, and the real comedy comes from the characterization: Edwin’s sarcastic, breathy asides, Minsc’s classically heroic overexuberance, Viconia’s complexities that contrast the values of her people with the starkly different culture of the surface.
Not a Spiritual Successor: I didn’t understand when critics described Larian’s games as “spiritual successors” to Baldur’s Gate. I only played the first Original Sin, but in my mind it didn’t match the gameplay, mood, storytelling, themes, or characterization at all. DOS places emphasis on puzzle-tactics that over-emphasize elemental interactions and incorporate a lot of conveniently-placed gunpowder barrels. Its mood is light-hearted and wacky. It features almost no deep characterization: companions are mere cyphers with no personality and NPCs are vague sketches that aren’t given much time or consideration. The Baldur’s Gate franchise, specifically SoA, featured historically deep characterization of a type that hadn’t yet been seen in video games… real, deep relationships with fleshed-out characters who would chime in to contradict and make demands of the player. Most were given their own quests, windows into rich backstories, lives that didn’t just revolve entirely around the Bhaalspawn… what exactly were those critics referring to when they described DOS as BG’s spiritual successor? They are both party-based CRPGs? That’s pretty shallow.
Full Voice-Over: The increase of voice-acting in games negatively impacted the depth of storytelling and narrative choice. Games like PS:T and BG2 were able to tell really rich stories and engage in deep, thorough dialogue and characterization precisely because they weren't expected to spend tons and tons of money on full voice-over. Quality of storytelling has declined since it became bog standard in RPGs. How is Larian planning to deal with this?
Real-Time-with-Pause vs. Turn-Based: The Baldur's Gate series is the definitive game franchise for real-time-with-pause combat. It's how the games were made to be- a real-time adaptation of turn-based D&D mechanics that a few clever people realized could be automated for a video game. I'm very concerned that Larian is at the helm because they are known for turn-based games. You can already observe a big rift forming in the game's prospective community around this issue... the old Infinity Engine system is hard for new players to grapple with, and games using it will never be as popular as a simple turn-based system, but for me, it's crucial to the identity of the series and the fast-paced excitement of the gameplay. For me, the fact that's it's even being debated is sacrilegious.
Too Much Freedom?: I am really concerned that Sven Winke keeps playing up the open-ended nature of Larian’s games in regard to BG3. He and Mike Mearls really seem on the same wavelength about the fun in D&D being derived from being able to say whatever you want to the DM and the DM adjusting to suit your decision. From the recent interviews, Sven really thinks meaningful choice in a video games means “if you see a chair you should be able to light it on fire and throw it at someone.” Sorry, but all the moveable cheese and baskets in the world can’t make Skyrim a successful story-driven RPG.
DOS offers a lot of choice, but it’s mostly superficial. It garnered a lot of praise for being open-ended, when really all the environmental interaction boiled down to obvious elemental combos and a tons of cartoonishly big gunpowder barrels placed all over the battlegrounds for no real reason.
BG2 gave you freedom in overcoming challenges in the sense that you had 300 spells at your disposal and a crazy number of magical items and consumables… you could die in a fight, reload, cast Clairvoyance to survey the surrounding rooms, find a better angle of approach, swap out some useless potions in your quick slots for the ones you need (plus that Wand of Summoning you’ve been saving for a situation like this) and then try again, READY AS FUCK. When you won after that, you felt great; you got that awesome satisfaction of knowing you found your own unique way of overcoming a challenge, playing with the full range of toys that the game gave you. Didn’t matter if you totally circumvented an encounter- the gratification came from knowing that you found a valid, easy way around it.
I never got the same feeling from a DOS encounter. It was always more like, oh, I’m dying, I should try again and use one more of those barrels, and put it in that big gaping hole where they want me to put it. I’m glad these barrels are all over the place!

Calling It Baldur's Gate "3": I'm already nervous about this game being a cynical, shameless cash grab banking on nostalgia, and the fact that they named this game Baldur's Gate 3 isn't reassuring. The story of Baldur's Gate is over… it ended formally with Throne of Bhaal. Granted, some of those souls were working on the Black Hound a few years later, but it never came to fruition, and who can say what it would have dealt with?
The pertinent question that no interviewers have asked is, in what sense is this going to be a third installment of the franchise? The off-chance that Boo or Viconia might show up is not enough to warrant giving the title that 3.
There have been other spinoff games set in the same universe – Dark Alliance, for example – that used subtitles to distinguish themselves from the actual series. This was because although they take place in the same geographic region, they don’t engage heavily with the narrative of BG1 and BG2. So why are they calling this game BG3 and not, oh, Baldur’s Gate: Attack of the Mind Flayers? (lol) Because they’re cashing in on the name.
Mind Flayers?: The illithid: a classic monster of D&D and a wonderfully frightening, strange, alien being. It is precisely that alien nature that makes them so frightening. In the abstract, you only ever need one mind flayer in D&D: a player character has only got one brain… and that brain being eaten is enough to kill that PC… and a session where one PC dies is still scary as hell!
An illithid’s ‘fear factor’ is derived from its alien nature… it is less and less scary the more commonplace it becomes… once you’re fighting a hundred illithid, they might as well be zombies or orcs… that should be obvious to anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of horror. The fact that the story beat they’re leading with for this game is “the whole city becomes mind flayers” really raises red flags for me.
I know this teaser isn’t the opening cinematic, but just as a point of contrast, BG1’s opener, which this trailer consciously imitated, immediately introduced us to a really daunting, compelling villain: Sarevok. His spiked armor, glowing yellow eyes, and orgiastic chuckle at the prospect of killing that fellow Bhaalspawn really sold him as a villain and got us all wondering, how the hell are we going to take that guy down?? It didn’t matter that he was basically a human; he was brought to life in that cinematic, and a mundane villain with good characterization will always be more impactful than a villain who’s defining characteristic is that he’s weird looking.
Summary: Basically, I’m really concerned about this project. I’m a huge, huge Baldur’s Gate fan, and a fan of all Infinity Engine games. But I’m really, really, worried about whatever this is coming down the pipeline, because Larian has not proved itself to be aware or competent with the design or storytelling principles of the original series. I need some assurance that Larian is serious about this project, and the legacy they have inherited.

TLDR: It’s very possible that the next Baldur’s Gate could be a lul-random, turn-based puzzle-fest where you drop chandeliers on hundreds of mind flayers. Be afraid.

Surely Larian, who are turn-based "connoiseurs

tbh I don't see why should we care if it's TB or not because there are many TB games now.

For one thing, we should not equate TB with optimisim, because Larian have proven themselves capable of turning a TB system into a worse popamole shitshow than the IE games could ever be.

It’s funny that I’m a newfag/zoomer and I have more common sense then people here twice my age. ROFL.

I felt exactly the same way in 2002!

 

[Jezal_k23]

Well, they should've ripped the band-aid off and just said which way they're going, because almost every forum discussing this game has just become a cancerous clusterfuck of insisting Larian go either RTwP or TB, or else the game is ruined.

 

[Chippy]

Well, they should've ripped the band-aid off and just said which way they're going, because almost every forum discussing this game has just become a cancerous clusterfuck of insisting Larian go either RTwP or TB, or else the game is ruined.

Most people could have seen that happening - the whole marketing department for this game should be fired. Let's say they now announce it'll be like Skyrim, or whatever the Divinity games were like (AFAIK they had different styles) then it'll be an uphill battle to explain to whoever their audiance is - that the game is for them.

 

[smaug]

If this game doesn’t give me an option to create my own party, I’m not buying it.

 

[Lacrymas]

The audience is some kind of imaginary potentiality that they hope will come into being if they keep the secret of the combat system long enough.