Baldur's Gate Baldur's Gate 3 Early Access Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

The autism is becoming absolutely unbearable.

 

[Storyfag]

astartes guy, even though no space marines are in this game.

You mean Astarion, the second worst vampire companion since Hexxat and I have faith that Larian will manage to on chapter 2/3/4 make a him worse than her.

But back to discussing BG3. Can any larian cultist give me a reason which BG3 is great, except by graphics? Doesn't need to appeal to a gamer with my taste ie - old school high lehtality game where mechanics and narratives are in line. Can be a good reason for a storyfag to like the game. Or a combatfag. Anything.

Game seems to have high reactivity, even including quest timers.

 

[Larianshill]

But back to discussing BG3. Can any larian cultist give me a reason which BG3 is great, except by graphics?

Sure, why not, I have time. To clarify, I play games for the story. And while I like BG3 being a 5e adaptation, I would prefer if it was a little more faithful (where it's necessary) to the source material.

1) What I value the most in RPGs are freedom and the amount of choices and consequences. BG3 has an incredible amount of that. Let's just look at the central conflict of act 1 - druids versus goblins. You want to slaughter refugees and druids for absolutely no reason? You can do it. You want to cause a race war, and then support one of the sides? You can do that. You want to attack the goblin fortress head on, and slay everyone inside? Why not. You want to infiltrate the goblin fortress and kill all their leaders through deception and stealth? Sure. You want to kill everyone and get information from their corpses? You can do that too, you fucking sociopath. You want to side with the goblins, sleep with their drow leader and then murder her post-coitus? Here, at Larian, we pander to those people too. You want to just ignore the whole conflict and do your own stuff? You can progress the plot by not involving yourself too.

2) The companions are interesting, in that they all seem to have potential for good or evil, and it's obvious you'll be able to push them one way or another. This is what KOTOR2 tries to do, but mostly doesn't succeed. Even Lae'zel, an evil dogmatic alien, isn't absolutely irredeemable, while Wyll and Gale, the most traditionally good, are not without darker sides as well.

3) I like battlefield interaction and verticality. I'm not talking about barrels here, I'm talking about dropping people into a hole you've made, only to later jump down that hole and find out that it leads to Underdark, and corpses of your enemies are there.

4) What little I've seen from the story is pretty good. The dreaded "Larian writing" is much better than anything I've seen in Pillars or Tyranny.

 

[Cryomancer]

Amazing post Larianshill. One question. Does Warlock repealing blast invocation has any limitation on the creature which can repeal? Or you can push even a terrasque with that invocation? I an sad that Gust Of Wind which could made use of verticality is not in the game. Nor in solasta. The unique game which I saw with that spell is KoTC2. Other aspect which BG3 is undeniable good is AI. Not a masterpiece like kotc but still much better than other games.

 

[Yosharian]

Worse than Hexxat? That I fucking doubt. A turd on legs would be a better companion than Hexxat

 

[Efe]

whats wrong with hexxat? thats the black vampire on enhanced editions right?

 

[rusty_shackleford]

whats wrong with hexxat? thats the black vampire on enhanced editions right?

arguably the worst companion in any cRPG
zero redeeming qualities, stereotypical and mary sue

 

[Yosharian]

She's a fucking terrible character. She's got a personality like a black hole.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

summary of EE companions

neera: waifu
wilson: bear-tier
monk guy: ok
rest: absolute dogshit, including all the SoD ones

beamdog's writers are some of the worst and that says a lot. Their second best companion is a bear that doesn't talk.

 

[Larianshill]

Does Warlock repealing blast invocation has any limitation on the creature which can repeal?

No.

Or you can push even a terrasque with that invocation?

Yes. Not that you would need to, tarrasque is pretty pathetic in 5e, a huge downgrade from its terrifying 4e version.

 

[NJClaw]

rest: absolute dogshit, including all the SoD ones

beamdog's writers are some of the worst and that says a lot. Their second best companion is a bear that doesn't talk.

The goblin shaman in SoD is ok, and I'd say the cleric/thief gnome is almost acceptable, either a 6- or a 5+.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

But back to discussing BG3. Can any larian cultist give me a reason which BG3 is great, except by graphics?

Sure, why not, I have time. To clarify, I play games for the story. And while I like BG3 being a 5e adaptation, I would prefer if it was a little more faithful (where it's necessary) to the source material.

1) What I value the most in RPGs are freedom and the amount of choices and consequences. BG3 has an incredible amount of that. Let's just look at the central conflict of act 1 - druids versus goblins. You want to slaughter refugees and druids for absolutely no reason? You can do it. You want to cause a race war, and then support one of the sides? You can do that. You want to attack the goblin fortress head on, and slay everyone inside? Why not. You want to infiltrate the goblin fortress and kill all their leaders through deception and stealth? Sure. You want to kill everyone and get information from their corpses? You can do that too, you fucking sociopath. You want to side with the goblins, sleep with their drow leader and then murder her post-coitus? Here, at Larian, we pander to those people too. You want to just ignore the whole conflict and do your own stuff? You can progress the plot by not involving yourself too.

larian quest design/world design is top-tier and nobody can convince me otherwise. They're the only dev that consistently impresses me with "huh, that actually worked"
there's something like 4 different ways to get into the underdark btw, I played through the EA a couple times before I found all of them

if you just play the EA in a straight forward fashion you probably miss most of the content tbh

 

[Larianshill]

Compare and contrast with Disco Elysium, by the way, the "saviour of RPG genre", where there's just one way to solve the murder, the central plot of the entire game.

 

[jackofshadows]

Compare and contrast with Disco Elysium, by the way, the "saviour of RPG genre", where there's just one way to solve the murder, the central plot of the entire game.

Still a great game though and as for BG3 - that remains to be tested. Also the former has

Spoiler

are you sure?

Spoiler

day/night cycle

 

[Thac0]

Compare and contrast with Disco Elysium, by the way, the "saviour of RPG genre", where there's just one way to solve the murder, the central plot of the entire game.

Disco Disco is not hailed for the reactivity tho, it is the first rpg to create gameplay and progression systems centered around dialogue which are not completely aids.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Compare and contrast with Disco Elysium, by the way, the "saviour of RPG genre", where there's just one way to solve the murder, the central plot of the entire game.

Still a great game though and as for BG3 - that remains to be tested. Also the former has

Spoiler

are you sure?

Spoiler

day/night cycle

reminder that daynightfags care more about cosmetic day/night cycles than actually having combat

 

[Cryomancer]

reminder that daynightfags care more about cosmetic day/night cycles than actually having combat

The shadow mage mod for BG1/2:EE, while exposed to daylight gives massive penalties to casters and your minions. Night affects vampires, if you side with vampires on ch 2, you can only access certain parts of the graveyard at night.

there's something like 4 different ways to get into the underdark btw, I played through the EA a couple times before I found all of them

On Gothic 2 which you consider "overrated", there are like 8 ways to get into Khorinis city

whats wrong with hexxat? thats the black vampire on enhanced editions right?

The problem is that she is a mary sue and beamdog could give the option of being sired by the vampiress if they wanna include vampirism, but no...

 

[Desiderius]

Compare and contrast with Disco Elysium, by the way, the "saviour of RPG genre", where there's just one way to solve the murder, the central plot of the entire game.

Still a great game though and as for BG3 - that remains to be tested. Also the former has

Spoiler

are you sure?

Spoiler

day/night cycle

reminder that daynightfags care more about cosmetic day/night cycles than actually having combat

Both works.

Or did last century.

 

[Harthwain]

Except that most of the "138" posts are on this and previous page, unrelated to the complain about hp bloat.

You got memory issues or something?

edit : Also, if you type spider and 138 hp on search bar, I an not even close to the guy who most ranted about hp values. Which is part 5E fault and part Larian fault.

I put in "138" and the results are:

Meredoth - 6
NJClaw - 5

Hey, I'm there only because I quoted posts that contained "138".

Oh fuck, now I'm at 6. Oh fuck, oh shit.

His point was that he was "not even close to the guy who most ranted about hp values". Yet he had the most posts and you were the only person close to the second place. So who is he talking about?

 

[Desiderius]

His point was

Nobody gives a fuck.

Any updates expected? What's going on behind the scenes Infinitron?

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

Any updates expected? What's going on behind the scenes Infinitron?

Infinitron doesn't know shit. I'm the man you have to ask to if you want to know what's going on.

Spoiler

Fuck nothing, that's what.

But no, seriously, there's allegedly a fifth big patch imminent, but last official word from Larian was "We'll psot an update soon" one month ago and the last patch was in February.

Also, absolutely no word about what's supposed to add/change, so far.
Because Larian is just THAT bad with their communication skills.

 

[The_Mask]

It's not that they're bad with comm skills, it's just that the playerbase sort-of stopped playing the game. There are ~1500 players according to Steam. Might be more on GOG, or whatever, so let's say ~3000, to be nice. Streamers have dropped to double digit views.
It's simply nobody beta-testing their game, so they have to work to test it. And work takes time.

Of course this is all speculation on my part.

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

I guess that's what tends to happen when:
- your updates are very sparse
- you speak no word of what's coming or what you are working on, in general
- the people who were playing and testing your game get the clear impression that whatever they kept suggesting for the past nine months has been consistently ignored, if not even looked down with contempt.

EDIT - That said, in all fairness long-ass slow-paced RPG aren't particularly streaming-friendly in general.
And it gets even worse when they are not fully voiced the the poor bastard playing has to read everything aloud for his audience. But that's not BG3's case here.

 

[CodexTotalWar]

My hypothesis is that Larian actually got way more feedback than they ever expected - they sold way more than expected in the EA (something like 1 million copies in the 1st weeks) - and thus were never properly set-up to parse through OR action feedback adequately.


As someone who has done market research as a part of my job, just analyzing the shit a 20 person focus group takes quite a bit of man hours. The amount of input that Larian must have received through their in-game tracking data, the feedback system, and the essays people wrote online was probably absurd. Also, the latter two (forums and feedback forms) are completely free-form and not set-up in any way to easily let them extract focused information. This is probably why in the first couple of updates, all Larian talked about in terms of mechanical feedback were information gleamed from their in-game tracking tools - because that was the easy stuff. Bug fixes are also relatively easy (no analysis or debate really needed), which is why we see that implemented way faster.

Not excusing Larian here of course - the feedback systems were ultimately set-up by them, and this might show their lack of experience dealing this and the troubles of scaling to an AAA company and trying to keep their previous feedback approach.


In terms of actually implementing feedback, Larian's rapid expansion probably hurt it there too. Bureaucracy is inescapable in large companies, especially one that is expanding so rapidly. There's probably a department for everything now, and implementing any major mechanical feedback probably involves multiple meetings with multiple departments, with the feedback team needing to convince a bunch of people with fancy titles why their idea sucks and need to change. I.e., most mechanical complaints like high-ground advantage is probably pretty easy to code in, but the difficulty part is selling that to the mechanics team, and likely also the encounter-design team as they will probably have to adjust a whole bunch of stuff they've already done. Knowing how most meetings go, they probably often talk around in circles for hours without coming to any productive resolutions.


The lack of communication is a bit baffling to me - seeing as even more frequent, non-committal updates like "hey guys, we're working on X and Y this month", would appease the more vocal parts of the community. I must assume they probably just ran the math and said "fuck it".

1) Anyone who's desperate for an update have already purchased the game
2) It's a minority - of the 1 mill + EA players, most simply played and moved on. If you look at the various forums and reddit, there's maybe 1000-ish people actively, constantly discussing the game? Even adding a factor of 10 to be safe, these 10,000 customers is just 1% of the people who have already purchased the game
3) Within this group of "update seekers", most of them are already firmly in one camp of another of "Larian can do no wrong" or "Larian BAADDD"


There's a reason why most the EA process is far less common with AAA games. I get why Larian went for it - as a standalone studio it's very nice to get an early cash injection during development cycles, and it can be both a good marketing and market research tool. But in this case, I suspect they were woefully equipped to handle the process simply due to the unexpected scale.

 

[Desiderius]

Dunbar's number, man. Learn it, use it.

Know thy species.