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

[Reinhardt]

Put on a happy face and argue things happily. Happy thoughts. I'm so happy. Are you happy Tuco?

NIGGER!

 

[BarbequeMasta]

Honestly defending the shitty DOS games is one thing, defending the atorcious itemzation is a whole other level of being brain dead. IIRC that was by far the most objectively shit aspect of those mediocre games.

 

[Swen]

Honestly defending the shitty DOS games is one thing, defending the atorcious itemzation is a whole other level of being brain dead. IIRC that was by far the most objectively shit aspect of those mediocre games.

"Shh..shittty DOS gamezzz!! Hururrdduurrr"

 

[rusty_shackleford]

codex is still in denial that swen singlehandedly saved the rpg genre and brought back turn-based RPGs

 

[Reinhardt]

Well, to be honest, if you compare Larian games to usual codex rpg of the year, like Witcher 3 or Disco Furries, then yes - DOS games are not that bad.

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

It’s weird because from an abstract standpoint I’d be tempted to claim that the two DOS are in many ways very high quality games… High production value, loads of unique, non-repeated content, high reactivity, flexible quest design…

But once you start to go into specific mechanics almost everything about them is a mess. The itemization is downright bottom tier in the genre, the progression curve is terrible, balance is a thing of dreams, gimmicks are over-used to the point of suffocating the rest, positioning is meaningless because twenty different teleport skills trivialize it, etc, etc.

 

[Delterius]

codex is still in denial that swen singlehandedly saved the rpg genre and brought back turn-based RPGs

much like the original baldurs gate saved rpgs. coincidence? i think not.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

codex is still in denial that swen singlehandedly saved the rpg genre and brought back turn-based RPGs

much like the original baldurs gate saved rpgs. coincidence? i think not.

that wasn't baldur's gate, it was fallout

 

[Delterius]

codex is still in denial that swen singlehandedly saved the rpg genre and brought back turn-based RPGs

much like the original baldurs gate saved rpgs. coincidence? i think not.

that wasn't baldur's gate, it was fallout

fallout was released in 2008 what are you talking about

 

[Thac0]

On a side note, I’ve spotted a bunch of guys on the Larian forum who boldly claimed PoE II was their favorite game EVER.
Didn’t know this was a thing, either.

This is not that small a faction for some reason, on 4chan both POE's are held in fairly high regard aswell. Another reason why that board is trash for the discussion of Western rpgs.

Apparently arguing publicly that the itemization in DOS 2 was absolute trash tier (and the steep power curve that followed wasn’t any better) will get a lot of people bizarrely defensive about it and it will be labeled as “disruptive behavior in a public space” or something.

Retards gonna follow the hypetrain, since thinking for oneself is too hard and makes brain go ouch. DOS 2 has exactly one fun item, the gloves of teleportation. Rest is garbage.
I wonder what the context was tho? Since BG III has pretty good itemisation from the little I have played, arguably better than Solasta even, which has some real problems in its crafting system requiring primed items, which is deeply interlinked with the itemisation.

 

[ADULF HITLOR FAN KLUB]

the atorcious itemzation is a whole other level of being brain dead

Gotta love finding unique legendary items in D:OS 2, that become obsolete after five minutes through a higher level common item.

Larian are true masters of their craft.

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

I wonder what the context was tho? Since BG III has pretty good itemisation from the little I have played, arguably better than Solasta even, which has some real problems in its crafting system requiring primed items, which is deeply interlinked with the itemisation.

The context was precisely that we were talking about how BG3 in that sense was ALREADY an improvement over DOS 1 and 2 (and to be fair, some of the people in chat agreed on that). We were talking, among other things, about the problem with systems that introduce a lot of stat bloat, why that is bad, why randomized items work poorly in a game with a finite set of encounters (I don't like it in general, but that's another story), why requiring a frantic pace of "equip refreshment" may work in a single-character hack'n slash like Diablo (still don't like it, though) but it's simply awful busywork in a game where you have to dress up a whole party, etc.

Then a couple of users in particular started at first to make few timid dismissive comments about how "it wasn't really that different from how much more powerful you become in D&D (?) or XCOM 2 (??)" and when I pointed to them how both actually have very little stat bloat (and that the problem is NOT becoming powerful over time, which is absolutely fine) things degenerated quickly.

"Well, that's still just your opinion; it's not bad, just different", "A lot of people like it this way", "Why do you want to impose your opinion over them" (still nto sure how expressing my opinion is "imposing" anything, but hey...) and all that tired tune you start to expect after few years on the internet, about how you are monster if you are opinionated about things they like etc.
And when exasperation kicked in and I went for a rebuttal along the lines of "Of course it's my opinion. But what other opinion should matter to me, YOURS?" a few more jumped in to take offense on the intolerable sin of being "arrogant" and I was slapped by the mod.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

itemization just wasn't one of larian's strongpoints so they copied what everyone else did
doesn't mean DOS1/DOS2 are bad games, it means not everything about them is perfect

the difference is that the parts I dislike about DOS1/DOS2 can easily be fixed with mods, most games aren't that easy to fix

bg3 has good itemization so far, btw

 

[fantadomat]

Rusty,me boy,why are you such a massive retard? It seems that in kwan the water turns the frog gay and the 'umans in to gay retards.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Rusty,me boy,why are you such a massive retard? It seems that in kwan the water turns the frog gay and the 'umans in to gay retards.

I'm surprised you're even capable of using a computer tbh

you must be the village genius

 

[Gargaune]

Gotta love finding unique legendary items in D:OS 2, that become obsolete after five minutes through a higher level common item.

Larian are true masters of their craft.

Shit, for a second I thought I'd clicked on the Cyberpunk thread.

 

[d1r]

Gotta love finding unique legendary items in D:OS 2, that become obsolete after five minutes through a higher level common item.

Larian are true masters of their craft.

Shit, for a second I thought I'd clicked on the Cyberpunk thread.

Yeah, I also thought I was in the Witcher 3 thread for a second.

 

[BarbequeMasta]

A lot of what's wrong with DOS2 mechanics comes from the retarded way that levels scale stats extremly, a common level 15 item is probablly stronger than a legendary unique level 14 one, especially weapons. On the other hand if you struggle with an encounter you can go to a different part of the themepark zone and get a level, and that encounter becomes completly trivial. If levels made less a difference in terms of raw damage overall, I think it would have been a better game.

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

Gotta love finding unique legendary items in D:OS 2, that become obsolete after five minutes through a higher level common item.

Larian are true masters of their craft.

Shit, for a second I thought I'd clicked on the Cyberpunk thread.

Same issue, really. Incidentally I also think CP2077 has one of the worst itemizations I've ever seen in the entire genre.

What's even more aggravating about Cyberpunk is that they felt the urge to come up with their own Witcher-derivate flavor of bullshit (one aspect that was ALREADY detrimental to their past games, I might add) to adapt a pre-existing tabletop ruleset that was famously level-less and not affected by this sort of bloated garbage.
At least you could argue in Larian's defense that they were starting from zero and had to come up with something.

But what's really interesting about CDPR is that this isn't an "inexperience" issue on their part: their system got progressively worse at each game.
For instance in TW3 while most of the random loot was useless trash, you at least had unique and hand-placed Witcher sets marking clear milestones across the progression curve. Not in an ideal way (still too much stat bloat etc) but at least with some decent degree of reliable determinism.
In CP on the other hand the predominance of randomized trash was almost suffocating.

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

A lot of what's wrong with DOS2 mechanics comes from the retarded way that levels scale stats extremly, a common level 15 item is probablly stronger than a legendary unique level 14 one, especially weapons. On the other hand if you struggle with an encounter you can go to a different part of the themepark zone and get a level, and that encounter becomes completly trivial. If levels made less a difference in terms of raw damage overall, I think it would have been a better game.

There are countless reasons I always preferred the way D&D handles itemization compared to a lot of these loot-focused computer games.
Let's take two examples here with Baldur's Gate 2 (which is pretty close to my golden standard when it comes to itemization) and Divinity Original Sin 1 and 2 (but especially the second).

In BG2:
- items have a very narrow range of stat scaling between early game and top tier, meaning you go from basic weapons to +2/3 at most, then you adventure into +4/5 when you go in the insane top levels where you are basically a demigod.
- Consequently you have a limited amount of tiers for weapons. A common sword will always be the same, consistently, wherever you'll find it, a +1 magic weapon or armor will be relatively common but expensive, +2 will be a luxury, +3 a valuable artifact or so, etc. Every time a bandit will drop a iron sword you won't have any need to check it and compare it with the inventory, it will just be the same iron sword. And they are worth so little at one point you can even stop picking them up as vendor trash.
- Most of the difference between magic items in the same tier comes from special skills and properties enchanted on them ("attack twice in a turn", "does double damage against enemies of this group", allow you to self-cast celerity once a day", "negates this sort of debuff", "raise this stat to value X", etc, etc.).
- items are designed one by one, the valuable ones are unique, hand-placed in the game world ad when you find them you can confide on the fact you'll carry them for a long time, if not for the entire adventure.
- Merchants also have a defined set of more or less valuable possessions in their inventory and they can occasionally add few more unique items after some specific circumstances.

Conversely, in D: OS1 and 2:
- items range is insane. You start from weapons doing 3-4 damage to end game shit dealing 600 or so. That's a more than 100X scaling factor.
- You drop them constantly, they are randomly generated and stats are ever-changing. This means every time you kill some shit it will be time for a busywork of comparison in your already crowded inventory.
- The above mentioned item range also implies that every time you are finding something cool, it will INEVITABLY be obsolete barely a couple of levels later. While I'm not a fan of this sort of system even in games like Diablo, it can work there because you pay attention to a single character and loot is the whole point. When you are managing a full party of four characters or more, on the other hand, the frequency at which you'll need to compare items and the one at which you'll be asked to replace them become WAY too much busywork to keep up with in an enjoyable manner.
- The randomized nature of item stats and their random placement works actively to damage the reward system in the game, especially when you have god tier stuff (for the next 15 minutes) dropping out of a random crate you inspected with "Lucky Charm" or popping up casually in a merchant inventory, while bosses drop useless garbage with stats misaligned for your needs or that will stop being useful in minutes, if you aren't out-leveling them already.

I could go on, but these are the salient points on why I feel "Diablo-styled" loot has absolutely no place in this subgenre.
And I can't overstate how glad I am we are AT LEAST past it in BG3.

P.S. and before you ask, yes, I'm copy-pasting entire paragraphs from some old shit I wrote. Fuck if I'm going to bother coming up with new ways of repeating the same shit 200 times.

 

[Cryomancer]

itemization just wasn't one of larian's strongpoints so they copied what everyone else did
doesn't mean DOS1/DOS2 are bad games, it means not everything about them is perfect

Itemization on DOS2 is Diablo 3 tier of shitness. Mostly stat stickie lackluster items.

codex is still in denial that swen singlehandedly saved the rpg genre and brought back turn-based RPGs

No, even I an forced to admit that Larian did one amazing thing. Re popularized turn based games. If wasn't by the success of dos2, we would't get turn based modes for Pathfinder Kingmaker, Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous and Pillars 2. That is something which even I have to thank larian for.

If levels made less a difference in terms of raw damage overall, I think it would have been a better game.

Strongly agreed. On 5E, is the extreme opposite. When you get fireball, at lv 5, it deals 8d6 damage. When you get cone of cold, at lv 9, it deals 10d6 damage. Mere +2d6 damage for 4 levels of character growth. meanwhile, monster tripled his hit points. Same for martial classes. From lv 5 to 11, a fighter just get one more attack per turn.

I could go on, but these are the salient points on why I feel "Diablo-styled" loot has absolutely no place in this subgenre.
And I can't overstate how glad I am we are AT LEAST past it in BG3.

You mean, Diablo 3 loot, right?

Because on Diablo 1, the numbers was much smaller. The final boss, the Diablo himself had 666 hit points. DOS2 fells like Diablo 3 nonsensical mechanics in a turn based game. I only played dos2 for about 6 hours. Meanwhile, I have 712 hours on kingmaker. On BG3 EA, 27 hours. So far, BG3 EA seems way better than DOS2, but still far bellow a game like Temple of elemental Evil.

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

I mean Diablo-like in general. Diablo 1 wasn't really that much different in that sense, at least conceptually. The scale was just marginally narrower.

 

[fantadomat]

Rusty,me boy,why are you such a massive retard? It seems that in kwan the water turns the frog gay and the 'umans in to gay retards.

I'm surprised you're even capable of using a computer tbh

you must be the village genius

Is that the level of banter a kwan could give back? You kwans are so fucking repeatable that it is not funny anymore,all of you just use the same kindergarten level "insult". At this point i am beginning to pity you guys. How can you wipe your arses without a map is a mystery.

 

[Gargaune]

Same issue, really. Incidentally I also think CP2077 has one of the worst itemizations I've ever seen in the entire genre.

Absolutely, damn thing feels like it scales on individual XP rather than level. And it did feel even worse than TW3's itemisation, yes. Now I dunno just how terrible D:OS is relative to that, but with the Diablo comparison I think there's a significant distinction that goes beyond core loop - Blizzard's RNG, unlike CDPR's, still threw some rocking gear at you every once in a while, stuff you'd hold on to for a wee bit longer.

 

[agris]

just thought i'd peak in to see how the fire is raging. few questions:

• is camping still this weird, abstract "going to a camping zone" rather than taking place in a real space, in the map you're currently on?
• are there day/night cycles yet?
• has larian demonstrated it "gets" IE-style itemization, or is it divinity original shit-tier itemization?
• how is the writing?