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

[Heroic Liberator]

What else is there?

I can tell you what isn't there.

Spoiler

Still no playable Duergar.

 

[NecroLord]

What else is there?

I can tell you what isn't there.

Spoiler

Still no playable Duergar.

You can play as a Duergar in Icewind Dale 2.

 

[Mikeal]

What else is there?

I can tell you what isn't there.

Spoiler

Still no playable Duergar.

You can play as a Duergar in Icewind Dale 2.

And in NWN2.

 

[Gargaune]

You can play as a Duergar in Icewind Dale 2.

And in NWN2.

You can also click-and-drag in those games.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

You can play as a Duergar in Icewind Dale 2.

And in NWN2.

You can also click-and-drag in those games.

point and grunt*

learn to use hotkeys

 

[Gargaune]

point and grunt*

learn to use hotkeys

Great idea! So which hotkeys can I use to chain/unchain characters to the current selection in BG3?

 

[rusty_shackleford]

point and grunt*

learn to use hotkeys

Great idea! So which hotkeys can I use to chain/unchain characters to the current selection in BG3?

"Toggle Group Mode" under controls.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I'm curious, did you guys ever stop to think how people with controllers played the game if you could only do party management with a mouse?

 

[Gargaune]

"Toggle Group Mode" under controls.

Toggle Group does exactly what it says, it's a Chain/Unchain All function, it doesn't add or remove individual characters from the current selection.

So, again, imagine you're a Frenchman and I'm an American tourist talking to you very loudly and slowly - which hotkeys can I use to chain or unchain a character to or from my current selection?

I'm curious, did you guys ever stop to think how people with controllers played the game if you could only do party management with a mouse?

Which, as I've said, is only half the solution, you still need a way to add/remove characters from the current selection. The console controller will need this when it comes, and the PC interface needs this right now - the simplest solution being to Shift + Click portraits and/or 3D models to chain or unchain them from your current selection. Either way, the current implementation is no more suited for controllers than it is for the mouse.

 

[AwesomeButton]

You can also click-and-drag in those games.

But you can't on consoles, so sorry but no.

 

[Aarwolf]

imagine paying for a game in early access

I found my copy at chomikuj, great potato-speaking site full of lustrous wonders, and all free of charge. Sue me Swen!

 

[Swen]

imagine paying for a game in early access

I found my copy at chomikuj, great potato-speaking site full of lustrous wonders, and all free of charge. Sue me Swen!

Thanks to you many people at Larian will be starving tonight, hope you're happy now...

 

[Fedora Master]

imagine paying for a game in early access

I found my copy at chomikuj, great potato-speaking site full of lustrous wonders, and all free of charge. Sue me Swen!

Thanks to you many people at Larian will be starving tonight, hope you're happy now...

I thought you people live off an exclusive cum diet.

 

[Aarwolf]

imagine paying for a game in early access

I found my copy at chomikuj, great potato-speaking site full of lustrous wonders, and all free of charge. Sue me Swen!

Thanks to you many people at Larian will be starving tonight, hope you're happy now...

I can send them potatoes, want some? But don't you dare turning them into belgian fries!

 

[Desiderius]

imagine paying for a game in early access

I found my copy at chomikuj, great potato-speaking site full of lustrous wonders, and all free of charge. Sue me Swen!

Thanks to you many people at Larian will be starving tonight, hope you're happy now...

The Belge have a fat, milky government teat. Let them suck on that.

 

[CodexTotalWar]

New patch coming December:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1086940/view/3390674748272624524

Hello everyone,

Like a team of infernal reindeer, the next major update for Baldur’s Gate 3 is coming in for a smooth yuletide landing — yes, new features will be live before the year is out, accompanied by a festive Panel From Hell that will give you a peek at what’s to come in 2023!

In the Community Update accompanying that Panel From Hell, we’ll go into detail about some of the most discussed topics in the community. The good news is that we’re on track for release in 2023 – and we’ll have more on that in December. Acts 2 and 3 of the story are being actively playtested to ensure they’re up to the same level of polish and you’ll soon discover that there’s much more in the works (or already complete) than what you’ll encounter in an Early Access playthrough. Our goal is for even the players who have repeated Act 1 over and over again for hundreds of hours to feel like there’s a whole new experience in store for them at launch.

We're still paying close attention to all your feedback, bug reports, comments, your fan art and jokes – they sustain us, so please keep them coming or we will grow desperate and you’ll discover us consuming pigs’ blood in the middle of a Belgian motorway like a certain vampire spawn. Whatever it takes to get the game out, you know?

In all seriousness though, it takes time to tell a great story, implement feedback, and iterate on such a large game, so we want to thank you for your patience as we get closer to Patch 9.

We’ll see you in December – the dress code is “Christmas from Hell”.

Behind the Scenes: Motion Capture

We’ve just opened up a new, dedicated motion capture space in Guildford, so while we have you here and we’re telling you things, we thought we’d give you a little peek behind the betentacled curtain into one of the most important tools in our storytelling arsenal: our motion capture tech.

A typical day at work at Larian Quebec

We have been working with motion capture for years, with mocap-ready studio spaces constructed at our offices in Ghent, Kuala Lumpur, Quebec and Dublin.

Having multiple locations has meant that each team could be empowered to try out new ideas, experimenting upon and refining animations without having to wait for another studio to come online. Having spaces across the globe also meant we could capture data anytime over the 24 hour period, allowing for continuous development.

Our team in Kuala Lumpur passionately discuss whether Gith are in fact more similar to platypus than humans. “They’re both egg-laying mammals.”

Early on, we began using XSens’ full-body motion capture which allowed animators and designers to quickly monitor and review data even when working from home — something that proved pretty helpful during lockdown. We integrated StretchSense gloves to improve the speed we can get finger data into the engine and completed major overhauls to our pipelines to allow the Optical Performance Capture data to be quickly imported into our build.
But as we first began development on Baldur’s Gate 3, we knew in order to achieve a truly cinematic feel we’d need to improve the quality of our technology and the speed of our mocap pipeline.

Larian Studios’ motion capture studio in Ghent, Belgium; AKA a discotheque for people who dress like weird burglars. (All digital character models are placeholders by the way.)

So we decided to expand on this idea last year with the launch of Larian Guildford; our first studio in the UK.

England has a wealth of talented performance capture artists and we knew we wanted to start working with them, but the biggest challenge would be to find a space large enough for the kind of choreography we require. Many locations were visited, measured, and considered before we finally settled on our current office* — an ideal location nestled in between a bustling high street and a place that sells 12 different kinds of sausage rolls.

Our Guildford mocap team tries to comprehend the physical feasibility of the Buthir/Grukkoh love scene.

The Larian Guildford Mocap Facility is big. This is the largest mocap space we have at Larian, measuring 14m x 12m, and currently features 40 Vantage V16 Cameras and 3 additional reference cameras, all running through our VFX motion capture software.
With a studio of this size we can easily record a dozen mocap actors at once — capturing everything from complex movements and gestures to stunt work with props.

The actors when lunch arrives.

A man in full mocap regalia thinks back to the time someone insulted his character build.

Bringing Baldur’s Gate 3 to life has been an incredible experience and we can’t wait for you to see the results come launch.

If you want to be part of this story, we are looking for new blood to help run the studio, producers and tech. Keep an eye out for listings.

And until then, we’ll just say see ya soon — there’s more information about the next patch still to come. Watch this space!

The illustrious Neil Newbon (voice of Astarion) directing a team of 12 in our Guildford studio, while wearing a beautiful kimono.

*Of course, no Larian studio could be complete without an induction into our grandest tradition of all: soggy carpets. Yes, like our Belgian studio in 2020, our new Guildford office got a light baptism of its own this year in the form of some pretty insistent British weather. Luckily it was only a very minor hiccup and we were able to seal the leak using a pie barm.

A moving interpretive dance performance representing Larian’s feelings on pipe leaks.

OK OK here's a bonus video -- please name this dance move:

 

[Swen]

 

[AwesomeButton]

Acts 2 and 3 of the story are being actively playtested to ensure they’re up to the same level of polish and you’ll soon discover that there’s much more in the works (or already complete)

 

[Tenebris]

I look forward to the 2024 release.

 

[CoronerZg]

I look forward to the 2024 release.

 

[Shrimp]

With a planned release date in early-mid 2023 or whatever they originally said you'd assume this is the final patch, right?
I was under the assumption they'd want to eventually release all the classes into the EA version for free QA feedback purposes but at this point I wonder if they're deliberately saving some of them for the full release.

 

[vortex]

I look forward to the 2024 release.

And Out-of-beta Enhanced edition in 2026.

 

[just]

hope they cut the game into part1(act1, act2) and part2(rest of the game) and charge $60 for both

 

[Grunker]

The year is 2079. Man-kind is on the verge of economic and climate collapse. In the wake of the bioleak of '43, a new race of Jaguar-Insect hybrids is waging war on Eastern Europe. The UN has been usurped by The Krajina Empire under the glorious leadership of Cyborg-Emperor Volodymyr Zelenskyj. The Social Justice Front in charge of The American Remnant is making its last, violent stand against The Rapefugees streaming into the former US territories in an attempt to escape The Drug Cartel Coalition of cocaine-mutated latin-americans swarming the south. The phi variant of the Corona-virus has killed every single human-being in China and on the African continent, while the tech-utopia of neobuddhist Tibet is attempting to quarantine the remainder of the Asian nations. Putin's bastard children are in exile in Siberia while the civil war that broke out in 2023 still rages in the rest of Russia. The Game of Thrones-reboot is on its 29th season.

Larian releases Early Access Patch 93 for Baldur's Gate 3, which consists of two new combat voice lines for an enemy type as well as tweaks to barrel physics.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

The year is 2079. Man-kind is on the verge of economic and climate collapse. In the wake of the bioleak of '43, a new race of Jaguar-Insect hybrids is waging war on Eastern Europe. The UN has been usurped by The Krajina Empire under the glorious leadership of Cyborg-Emperor Volodymyr Zelenskyj. The Social Justice Front in charge of The American Remnant is making its last, violent stand against The Rapefugees streaming into the former US territories in an attempt to escape The Drug Cartel Coalition of cocaine-mutated latin-americans swarming the south. The phi variant of the Corona-virus has killed every single human-being in China and on the African continent, while the tech-utopia of neobuddhist Tibet is attempting to quarantine the remainder of the Asian nations. Putin's children are in exile in Siberia while the civil war that broke out in 2023 still rages in the rest of Russia.

Larian releases Patch 93 for Baldur's Gate 3, which consists of two new combat voice lines for an enemy type as well as tweaks to barrel physics.

Well nice of them to keep supporting the game.