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Game News Baldur's Gate 3 Community Update #13: Patch 5 revealed, coming July 13th

Infinitron

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Tags: Baldur's Gate 3; Larian Studios; Swen Vincke

In last month's interview with GameSpot, Swen Vincke revealed that Larian were planning a third Baldur's Gate 3 Panel From Hell event. What they announced a couple of weeks later was really no panel at all, but rather an elaborate livestreamed "LarPG" in which viewers got to direct the actions of a party of costumed Larian employees tasked with locating a mystic artifact in a Belgian castle. In between segments in which he inevitably got members of the party brutally killed, Swen revealed details about the next patch for Baldur's Gate 3. However, that information was much more effectively summarized in the community update video that was showed at the end.

As promised in the interview, Patch 5 is focused on features rather than new content. There's actually some pretty cool stuff here, such as a new skill check interface that allows you to apply bonuses during dice rolls. You can now select a background for your character, with associated side quests which in turn allow you to earn inspiration points that grant said bonuses. Instead of your party always returning to the same generic forested area to camp as in Dragon Age: Origins, Larian have created a whole bunch of mini-camp areas that match the location the party is currently in. Furthermore, you now require food in order to replenish your health and spells fully when resting in camp.



Active Roll: A new way to die (as in dice, it’s a dice pun)

One of the biggest improvements coming in Patch 5 are Active Rolls, our new dice mechanic. In addition to a full upgrade of the old UI, the biggest change here is in how you can influence dice: While previously, the accepted method for attempting a skill check was to tightly cross your fingers ahead of a roll, now you have the option to apply spells and bonuses to these checks to help increase your odds.

So what does that mean exactly? Well, let's say the chances of you passing a certain check seem pretty slim. Rather than leaving you at the mercy of the RNG gods, you now have more agency in the outcome of those rolls. For example, cast Enhance Ability to add an Advantage bonus to the skill check in order to roll twice, or you can cast Guidance to bump that number up for good measure. You can also cast spells from your other party members, although in multiplayer your teammates will have to decide for themselves whether they'll let you use their spells during these rolls. You’ll be spending a spell slot any time you do this, so use them wisely. That is, unless the skill check relates to recruiting the Owlbear cub, in which case we’d recommend you let your heart guide you.

Get rewarded for roleplaying

In this patch we also wanted to find new ways to really celebrate roleplaying. Enter, Background Goals.

You know how the character creator includes an option to choose your character's background? Folk Hero, Acolyte, Urchin, and so on. Now every character will have their own series of secret miniquests based on these roles. Finding out how to complete them is part of fun, but for each you complete you’ll receive an Inspiration Point. Players will get a maximum of four Inspiration Points which can be put toward rerolling dice whenever they wish. Or alternatively, if you’ve already reached your IP cap for the moment then any further point becomes XP.

Camping 2.0

One of the main comments we've received about our resting system has been that it's far too lenient. Before Patch 5, you could initiate a Long Rest and recharge all your spells and HP between every fight without penalty. A lot of players felt this just didn't feel right, and we couldn't agree more. So we've fully revamped how camping works.

Camp Resources are a new feature that will make you think a little more strategically about when to activate a Long Rest. Now in order to make camp, you first need supplies. You know all the food and scraps you find around Baldur's Gate 3? Starting this patch, those can be used to unlock camp for the night. So if you ever wondered to yourself “how much Waterdhavian cheese wheels could one person possibly need?” the answer is as many as you can physically carry, for cheese is now one of the sacred doorways to sleep. Alternatively, you can still initiate a Partial Rest without using any resources but this won't recharge you fully.

Another new addition are Mini Camps. Previously, any time you camped for the night, you would return to your HQ down by the river regardless of how far away it was from the area you were exploring throughout your day. This made us feel sorry for all the characters who were being forced to partake in marathon hikes just to go to bed. So we’ve now introduced smaller localized camps. From the Chapel near the Ravaged Beach to the Underdark, we've recreated every landmark as its own isolated location that can be accessed when you’re ready to hunker down for your Long Rest.

Those are the highlights, but there's plenty more stuff in Patch 5 including improved enemy AI, a dedicated jump ability, and the option to inflict non-lethal attacks. Plus there is some new content as well featuring the companion Shadowheart. The new patch is releasing on July 13th. According to Swen, Patch 6 is already in the works and will be out sooner than people expect.
 

Kruno

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Camp Resources are a new feature that will make you think a little more strategically about when to activate a Long Rest. Now in order to make camp, you first need supplies. You know all the food and scraps you find around Baldur's Gate 3? Starting this patch, those can be used to unlock camp for the night. So if you ever wondered to yourself “how much Waterdhavian cheese wheels could one person possibly need?” the answer is as many as you can physically carry, for cheese is now one of the sacred doorways to sleep. Alternatively, you can still initiate a Partial Rest without using any resources but this won't recharge you fully.

I remember Pillars of Eternity doing this with supplies. Even though you are using food scraps found everywhere if you measure out how much you need to camp over the quantity you can find, this will give you a hard limit to how many times you can rest, which is much like PoE. How is this system any different in the long run?

In combination with mini-camps it could be fine. The alternative is a cool-down system?

The dice changes are nice, but what about praying to your god? I remember Nethack had an interesting system, or was it Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup? I would like for this to be expanded. Having your god more involved in the game.
 

Shrimp

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Camp Resources are a new feature that will make you think a little more strategically about when to activate a Long Rest. Now in order to make camp, you first need supplies. You know all the food and scraps you find around Baldur's Gate 3? Starting this patch, those can be used to unlock camp for the night. So if you ever wondered to yourself “how much Waterdhavian cheese wheels could one person possibly need?” the answer is as many as you can physically carry, for cheese is now one of the sacred doorways to sleep. Alternatively, you can still initiate a Partial Rest without using any resources but this won't recharge you fully.

I remember Pillars of Eternity doing this with supplies. Even though you are using food scraps found everywhere if you measure out how much you need to camp over the quantity you can find, this will give you a hard limit to how many times you can rest, which is much like PoE. How is this system any different in the long run?

In combination with mini-camps it could be fine. The alternative is a cool-down system?

The dice changes are nice, but what about praying to your god? I remember Nethack had an interesting system, or was it Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup? I would like for this to be expanded. Having your god more involved in the game.
I assume that there either will be vendors selling food or you will find food in such large quantities that the technical hard limit never becomes an issue.
 

0wca

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Camp Resources are a new feature that will make you think a little more strategically about when to activate a Long Rest. Now in order to make camp, you first need supplies. You know all the food and scraps you find around Baldur's Gate 3? Starting this patch, those can be used to unlock camp for the night. So if you ever wondered to yourself “how much Waterdhavian cheese wheels could one person possibly need?” the answer is as many as you can physically carry, for cheese is now one of the sacred doorways to sleep. Alternatively, you can still initiate a Partial Rest without using any resources but this won't recharge you fully.

I remember Pillars of Eternity doing this with supplies. Even though you are using food scraps found everywhere if you measure out how much you need to camp over the quantity you can find, this will give you a hard limit to how many times you can rest, which is much like PoE. How is this system any different in the long run?


I'm pretty sure he said you can rest either way, but with food you get a proper rest and without food you get a shallow rest.
 

luj1

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Active Roll: A new way to die (as in dice, it’s a dice pun)

One of the biggest improvements coming in Patch 5 are Active Rolls, our new dice mechanic. In addition to a full upgrade of the old UI, the biggest change here is in how you can influence dice: While previously, the accepted method for attempting a skill check was to tightly cross your fingers ahead of a roll, now you have the option to apply spells and bonuses to these checks to help increase your odds.

Idiotic
 

luj1

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All stats factoring into a dice roll are already present via ruleset. But we need more awesome buttons for the normies to feel good. Sawyer philosophy.
 

Corvinus

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All stats factoring into a dice roll are already present via ruleset. But we need more awesome buttons for the normies to feel good. Sawyer philosophy.

Yes, it is the magical "RNG" which makes them fail, not their poor decisions.
 

Dr Schultz

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All stats factoring into a dice roll are already present via ruleset. But we need more awesome buttons for the normies to feel good. Sawyer philosophy.

Except they aren't.

You can ACTIVELY boost your chance of success via spells in D&D and with this addition they are giving you the opportunity to cast said spells during the actual check, instead of forcing you to precast.

It's a quality of life improvement in short. But, of course, you need to know D&D in order to get this fine point;)
 
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Tyranicon

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Now every character will have their own series of secret miniquests based on these roles. Finding out how to complete them is part of fun, but for each you complete you’ll receive an Inspiration Point. Players will get a maximum of four Inspiration Points which can be put toward rerolling dice whenever they wish.

Uuuuuuuuuuugh. Whyyyyyyy.

Why didn't they spend the time and effort put into this in something else?
 

Falksi

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Every character featured has got a face you just want to fucking punch.

And Swen needs to realize his hair has lost all it's save rolls.
 

Dr Schultz

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Now every character will have their own series of secret miniquests based on these roles. Finding out how to complete them is part of fun, but for each you complete you’ll receive an Inspiration Point. Players will get a maximum of four Inspiration Points which can be put toward rerolling dice whenever they wish.

Uuuuuuuuuuugh. Whyyyyyyy.

Why didn't they spend the time and effort put into this in something else?


Because this is something VERY typical of a P&P RPG: Players rewarded by (good) DMs for actually roleplaying their characters instead of threating them as a bunch of walking stats.

If you ask me, this is something that all CRPGs should have in some form. Also, this is something that costs zero in terms of resource allocation. "Interpretation points" are basically achievements. Nothing more, nothing less.
 
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Self-Ejected

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I'm very into cock and ball torture
Now every character will have their own series of secret miniquests based on these roles. Finding out how to complete them is part of fun, but for each you complete you’ll receive an Inspiration Point. Players will get a maximum of four Inspiration Points which can be put toward rerolling dice whenever they wish.

Uuuuuuuuuuugh. Whyyyyyyy.

Why didn't they spend the time and effort put into this in something else?

It sounds worse than it is. Those are basically achievments, tied mostly to quest resolution. So a noble will get bonus inspiration for convincing the ogres in the first camp to work for him, while a soldier would get inspiration for killing them. It will have taken some work, but no extra assets or script lines to be voiced (the expensive stuff) were made for this.
 

Tyranicon

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Now every character will have their own series of secret miniquests based on these roles. Finding out how to complete them is part of fun, but for each you complete you’ll receive an Inspiration Point. Players will get a maximum of four Inspiration Points which can be put toward rerolling dice whenever they wish.

Uuuuuuuuuuugh. Whyyyyyyy.

Why didn't they spend the time and effort put into this in something else?


Because this is something VERY typical of a P&P RPG: Players rewarded by (good) DMs for actually roleplaying their characters instead of threating them as a bunch of walking stats.

If you ask me, this is something that all CRPGs should have in some form. Also, this is something that costs zero in terms of resource allocation. "Interpretation points" are basically achievements. Nothing more, nothing less.

I mostly have a bad experience with what real-life DMs consider "roleplaying." Inspiration points are mostly a carrot for DMs to progress campaigns in a way they want, I don't need a game trying to replicate the same thing.

Imagine trying to reward a player for roleplaying in a video game. It's a failure of gamemaking if your player is not immersed. This essentially creates a situation where you can "roleplay" wrong because you're not completing some arbitrary character miniquest.

Decline.
 

Dr Schultz

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Now every character will have their own series of secret miniquests based on these roles. Finding out how to complete them is part of fun, but for each you complete you’ll receive an Inspiration Point. Players will get a maximum of four Inspiration Points which can be put toward rerolling dice whenever they wish.

Uuuuuuuuuuugh. Whyyyyyyy.

Why didn't they spend the time and effort put into this in something else?


Because this is something VERY typical of a P&P RPG: Players rewarded by (good) DMs for actually roleplaying their characters instead of threating them as a bunch of walking stats.

If you ask me, this is something that all CRPGs should have in some form. Also, this is something that costs zero in terms of resource allocation. "Interpretation points" are basically achievements. Nothing more, nothing less.

I mostly have a bad experience with what real-life DMs consider "roleplaying." Inspiration points are mostly a carrot for DMs to progress campaigns in a way they want, I don't need a game trying to replicate the same thing.

Imagine trying to reward a player for roleplaying in a video game. It's a failure of gamemaking if your player is not immersed. This essentially creates a situation where you can "roleplay" wrong because you're not completing some arbitrary character miniquest.

Decline.

If you are not invested in the story or in your character, you can safely ignor these goals. You don't loose anything vital, after all. Just a one time reroll.
Enough to please an invested player not enough to piss off someone who doesn't care.
 

Corvinus

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Kalin said:
lol.png

:hero:
 
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NeptuneGames

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All of these updates are killing me :deathclaw:
Want to play the game so hard, but I really can't stand early access. Well, while I wait my patience is getting over 9000, so it's one of the best training on the planet.
 

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