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

[Smashing Axe]

Spoiler

 

[gurugeorge]

I guess hate for bg3 cause amnesia.
In Kingsmaker we had half elf and half orc, their cringe level was no different from Astarion. In Wotr we have Nienio, Ember, Camelia and Arushae

All of them are better than this shit. And if you are going to go into random NPC behavious, this thiefling chick is also worse than all those mentioned by what they shown us. I can only guess the level of cringe other BG3 companions attain.

To write something like that you must either be retarded or not play any of these games. We have an entire Pathfinder thread, and nothing currently in EA even comes close to that level of cringe.
Maybe with the exception of Astarion, in WoTR we have Nienio instead, which easily tops him.

Nenio is kind of irritating at first, but if you give her a chance, she's an amusing character with a unique and interesting backstory. I will stand on this hill

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

Elaborate pls: why a regular warlock would be much better?

For a start, because basically every single one of his stats is not "evened out" and he wastes points for no benefit on all fronts.

EDIT- Here:

Str 9
Dex 13
Con 15
Int 14
Wis 11
Cha 16

This is ABYSMAL.

 

[Dodo1610]

Such degeneracy, where is my cute stay-at-home dragon wife Swen?

 

[Rhobar121]

The game is doing better and better despite the fact that we are in the middle of a sale. I guess it's time to bow before the genius of the great Swen The Bear.

I guess hate for bg3 cause amnesia.
In Kingsmaker we had half elf and half orc, their cringe level was no different from Astarion. In Wotr we have Nienio, Ember, Camelia and Arushae

All of them are better than this shit. And if you are going to go into random NPC behavious, this thiefling chick is also worse than all those mentioned by what they shown us. I can only guess the level of cringe other BG3 companions attain.

To write something like that you must either be retarded or not play any of these games. We have an entire Pathfinder thread, and nothing currently in EA even comes close to that level of cringe.
Maybe with the exception of Astarion, in WoTR we have Nienio instead, which easily tops him.

Nenio is kind of irritating at first, but if you give her a chance, she's an amusing character with a unique and interesting backstory. I will stand on this hill

The whole story takes place in one dungeon which is not even a good one.

 

[La vie sexuelle]

I had returned after a day. And what sees my eyes? Ten pages about bears.

Codex is truly the gayest site on the internet.

Oh no, in gayest places like Redditt or Reserera bearsex is desired, so Codex is not the worse.

everyone here is a repressed self hating pervert. except for me.

Hey, I'm not repressed nor self hating. I'm PROUD pervert.

They updated Wyll's Bio on the official page in accordance with his background apparently being rewritten. I guess this also explains why he apparently wants to kill Karlach if you run into her.

What exactly was changed except this part abut "chasing Mizora enemies"?

 

[Jermu]

Elaborate pls: why a regular warlock would be much better?

For a start, because basically every single one of his stats is not "evened out" and he wastes points for no benefit on all fronts.

EDIT- Here:

Str 9
Dex 13
Con 15
Int 14
Wis 11
Cha 16

This is ABYSMAL.

you can change companions attributes though posted picture about that earlier

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

Elaborate pls: why a regular warlock would be much better?

For a start, because basically every single one of his stats is not "evened out" and he wastes points for no benefit on all fronts.

EDIT- Here:

Str 9
Dex 13
Con 15
Int 14
Wis 11
Cha 16

This is ABYSMAL.

you can change companions attributes though posted picture about that earlier

Well, you can't NOW and while I read rumors about the possibility at release, I have yet to see a credible confirmation.

 

[jackofshadows]

Elaborate pls: why a regular warlock would be much better?

For a start, because basically every single one of his stats is not "evened out" and he wastes points for no benefit on all fronts.

EDIT- Here:

Str 9
Dex 13
Con 15
Int 14
Wis 11
Cha 16

This is ABYSMAL.

Idk, abysmal would be something like cha 12 imo but they've confirmed you can respec companion's stats

(and that's assumed for play on tactician I guess) so that's no issue. I'd thought there's something really wrong with his subclass.

 

[Jermu]

was there any perma attribute increasing items in EA guess it could make sense if that was the case

 

[Reinhardt]

this bear thingy reminded me old joke verse

если б я имел коня - это был бы номер
если б конь имел меня - я б, наверно, помер.

 

[Rhobar121]

I honestly don't understand why game developers like to give crappy stats so much.
In Kingsmaker, the statistics of half of the companions were simply tragic (19 constitution on Valerie was supposed to be a joke)

 

[Jermu]

her "original" stats

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

her "original" stats

Yeah, they were atrocious as well. Especially since she's a trickery cleric with rogue-ish support skills and a MALUS in DEX.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.gamesradar.com/baldurs-gate-3-preview-july-2023/

Baldur's Gate 3 preview: the closest we've ever come to a full simulation of D&D​

You'll never see everything that Baldur's Gate 3 has to offer – just as it should be

This heist has gone very wrong, very quickly, much to the embarrassment of Baldur's Gate 3 game director Sven Vincke. Two guards have remained stalwart at their posts, so the plan to create a distraction with one character and stroll through the bank's open doors with another has resolutely failed. Now, a chaotic battle is unfolding on multiple fronts. In the end, it's a combination of a poisonous cloud, a resilient panther, and a couple of sly teleportation spells that get the party into the vault.

The initial plan was genius, albeit heavily rehearsed. Splitting his Wizard from the party, Vincke multi-classed to take advantage of a Sorcerer ability; Metamagic lets you augment the range of spells, and now his Wizard can fly three times as far as he could before – far enough to reach the roof of the bank he's targeting. From there, a Scroll of Gaseous Form lets him travel through the building's pipes and into the bank's offices.

After that, the aim was to lead every guard in the building on a merry dance, leaving the vaults undefended. If it had been a success, it would have been a perfect realization of the strengths that D&D systems have brought to Baldur's Gate 3. As it is, it's still a pitch-perfect encapsulation of the chaos that unfurls when even a single dice roll doesn't go your way.

A tale of one city​

I am, already, in awe of Baldur's Gate 3. Even at the very most surface level, it's impossibly dense. The titular city teems with life, but so does every other settlement you come across, each town an entire soundscape of babbling voices weaving through streets packed with NPCs, every one of whom has a potential part to play in your story. At one moment, I picked a stranger out of the crowd at random, only to find that they had the information to help me on a major quest, but if I hadn't had a specific character in my party, they might never have given it up.

The density of the world is very impressive, but what most struck me is the density of the game's structure, and the freedom that comes with that. In his demonstrations, Vincke was keen to show off the extent to which actions can spiral and solutions can vary wildly, depending on not only how you tackle the problem at hand, but also how you've conducted yourself in the past. I lost count of the number of times I was told that a certain action might lead you to miss an entire NPC who might be pivotal to a certain quest.

The number of branching paths is so great that lead writer Adam Smith describes it as a spiderweb: "It's not that you start at point A, and then you keep branching and branching and branching. You're always heading towards the same point, but what happens when you get there is very different." Smith points to one major character who was accidentally killed in an early playtest: "The game reacts, the game can let that happen. You can always pull yourself out of it and get back onto the plotline."

Fast-forwarding to the game's second act, Smith and Vincke show off two paths that diverge relatively early in the game. As each progresses, they draw ever closer, until two narrative threads are perpendicular to one another, temporarily overlapping so closely that it's possible to hop from one strand to another. It might seem a big jump, but as the two stories draw together, the logic behind that change of heart seems almost flawless.

Dishonored evil​

Baldur's Gate 3 might seem like a game destined to be broken apart every which way, but Larian appears to have thought of everything. Smith recounts the time the team first made it to the rooftops of Baldur's Gate itself: "What we realized very quickly is that people will get everywhere. And then we need to put invisible walls up and we need to take away Flight. But we weren't going to do that." It was at that point, he says, that he felt he was no longer making an RPG. Instead, Baldur's Gate 3 had become an immersive sim in the vein of Thief, Deus Ex, or Dishonored.

Smith adds: "It was only when we got to the city that we realized we had to go from 'what's behind this waterfall' to 'what's in these 50 houses?', or 'this person came up through the sewers, so how do people react?'" My favorite examples were the newspapers available around Baldur's Gate, which will react to your actions – albeit not always truthfully. Those sensationalist headlines will shape how the people in the city react to your presence, further dictating how certain quests play out.

In many ways, this is the perfect homage to D&D, a game designed to offer the player almost any freedom they can imagine. That totality remains beyond the scope of a video game, but it's clear that it's what Baldur's Gate is trying to emulate, and it comes staggeringly close. You can feel the hand of a seasoned Dungeon Master at the helm, steering conversation, character, and quests into this spider's web of narrative.

Larian has spent six years creating Baldur's Gate 3, and three of those in early access. Without that period of public testing and feedback, Smith says, it's almost impossible to imagine the game existing; responses have helped shape entire narrative threads, but they've also given the developers the opportunity to demonstrate the richness of their simulation. Smith says that players needed to be invited into the "choice space," but that it was just as easy to scare them away from investing in the game's freedoms.

As much as you invite someone in to experience as much as the game has to offer, however, it's clear that no one is ever likely to see everything that Baldur's Gate 3 has to offer. Laid end to end, there are 174 hours – more than a week – of cutscenes, more dialogue than the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy put together. For every choice, five conversation options might appear on the screen, but there might be as many as 30 alternatives hidden away, each one only available as part of a story entirely different to the one you're currently being told.

Smith said he was once asked whether, as a writer, it ever made him sad that a player might only see 20% of what he'd written, and his answer encapsulates the depth, breadth, and deep player understanding at the heart of any good D&D campaign, and of Larian's entire philosophy: "It's the same as with level design. You've got this problem, a checkpoint on a bridge. Sven [Wincke] would get himself arrested and get across the bridge systemically. If you were smart, you might fly across with a wizard. Some people might say 'oh they just skipped…' But they enjoyed it. And they'll come back, it's ok. Just let them do it."

 

[Gargaune]

Also, I've made up my mind and I don't like the art direction. There's a steady supply of outlandish material, but the Silent Hill surgeon at the end really drove the point home, everything is just way too... "baroque." If this were Planescape, maybe, but the Forgotten Realms? I get it that this is WotC's new general aesthetic for the setting and that's fine, but it's not my cup of tea.

P.S. Remove Dragonborn.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/baldurs-gat...t-starfields-lunch-when-it-comes-to-romances/

Baldur's Gate 3 looks like it's gonna eat Starfield's lunch when it comes to romances​

Whether you're all about enormous druid guys who can turn into bears or going on dates with hellspawn, there seems to be something in Baldur's Gate 3 for everyone.

"Have you ever considered the joys and pleasures of sexual congress with a wildshaped Druid?" propounded Baldur's Gate 3 lead writer Adam Smith alongside today's showcase. "Because at Larian, we have, and ultimately landed on the side of giving the people what they want: tender, consensual romance with a man temporarily transformed into a grizzly bear." Alright man, you know what, sure.

The joys and pleasures of sexual congress with a wildshaped Druid are not quite for me but I keep an open mind, and watching Larian demo one such romance scene at its final Panel From Hell preview presentation of Baldur's Gate 3 between fan favorite elf vampire Astarion and the hunky druid in question, Halsin (who eventually goes full grizzly bear mode), I was struck by the sheer amount of effort put into the scene.

The lead-up features a tasteful sprinkling of Austin Powers-esque scenery censorship when our duo gets in the buff, the second time we've witnessed this "king of all gags" in gaming in less than a month⁠—thank you, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. There seem to be a myriad of ways the scene with Halsin can play out, including vanilla, bear mode, and "sorry, I think I've got a headache tonight," which can be opted into or out of at various points in the conversation.

At the final moment of ursine coitus, the camera cut away to a nearby squirrel watching from a tree branch⁠—the little guy dropped his little acorn, mouth agape like something out of Shrek, and let me tell you, I was hooting aloud.

The earlier demoed date in downtown Baldur's Gate with tiefling barbarian companion Karlach Demonsbane was a little bit more familiar and tame, though she does seem to have some manner of hell-bomb surgically inserted in her torso. Just like the grizzly scene we saw earlier (badabing) this sequence looks both impressively bespoke and well realized, but also open ended. Do you request a bottle of wine from your grumpy half-orc server, like a regular Don Juan, or opt for tea for the table like some kind of fuddy duddy? Getting lucky with Karlach Demonsbane hangs in the balance.

That's what has me excited for BG3's romance storylines, just like the wider game: this promise of über high production values coupled with a classic RPG sense of choice and reactivity. In the presentation, Larian's writers described how its romance subplots have a large number of permutations depending on how you approach them, the main quest, and side stories, with some companions even being open to polyamory and others wanting to stay exclusive.

Look, I'm not trying to dunk on Starfield here, I'm really excited for it, but romance has never been a strong suit or even really a focus for Bethesda. Remember how in Skyrim you'd just wear the amulet of "I'm single and ready to mingle," then bring an NPC back to your house where they'd just kind of hang out and sleep in your bed? At least Skyrim seemed to know what kind of game it was, but beginning with Fallout 4 Bethesda started chasing more authored companion love stories that just never landed super well.

Starfield's got plenty of its own selling points, but in terms of those four dopey astronaut employees you'll get to start workplace relationships with, buddy, there's just no chance⁠—they are gonna get annihilated by Larian's stable of demon girl mommies and freaky bear druid daddies.

I sense a change in the wind: the great slumbering masses of Tumblr-core BioWare romance fans, the type of gamers who made fan cams of Anders and Fenris in Dragon Age 2 have been reawakened. CD Projekt has offered something similar on occasion, but with BioWare having gone dark for so long, this sardaukar has wandered the wastes of the internet with no unifying cause. If BioWare was Rob Stark (I guess Anthem is the Red Wedding maybe?) Larian is Jon Snow. Baby, there's a new King in the North. Get ready for an unprecedented economy of Astarion-fueled fan cams and fanart.

https://www.pcgamer.com/baldurs-gat...s-to-really-experiment-with-what-is-possible/

Baldur's Gate 3 will let you respec your characters: 'We want the players to really experiment with what is possible'​

Larian confirmed that respec is on during today’s BG3 livestream.

Baldur's Gate 3 has a lot going on, and that applies to character classes and subclasses as much as anything else. That kind of choice can be intimidating, especially when the unknowable consequences of a poor decision has the potential to leave you unhappy (or straight-up screwed) 40 hours in. The good news for anyone worried about being hung up by a bad call is that developer Larian Studios has confirmed that players will be able to respec their characters if they want to.

"We wanted to avoid players having to restart the whole game, because it's a very heavy narrative experience," Larian's Nick Pechenin said during today's livestream. "There's a character you might meet—you will most likely meet—that will allow you reset your class, and reinvest all of the levels."

And it's not just about recovering from mistakes in character creation. Support for multiclassing in Baldur's Gate 3 will enable players to mix up classes pretty much as they like—if you've ever wanted to be a berserker-bard, here's your chance. Multiclass characters can be extremely powerful, but they can also be, well, the opposite of that. Pechenin said support for respeccing gives players an opportunity to be really creative with their builds, because if their cool idea turns out to be not so cool after all (like, say, a berserker-bard), they've got an escape hatch.

"In multiclassing, there are a lot of really cool combinations, there are some combinations that don't quite work, and we want the players to really experiment with what is possible," Pechenin said. "And respec really helps with that."

Personally, I don't think respeccing belongs in Dungeons and Dragons: You put thought into who and what you want to be, and then you carry the consequences of your choices through to the very end, no matter how bitter it might be. But I'm also of the opinion that six classes—fighter, mage, thief, cleric, monk, bard—is more than enough, and frankly I don't think the monk really needs to be there. I mean, he's just a fighter who forgot where he left his sword, right? So let’s call it five.

But this is new D&D, I guess, and I have to admit that it's a little more complicated than it was back when I was following Gorion through the forests outside Candlekeep in 1998.

The question of whether Baldur's Gate 3 will, or should, allow respeccing has been kicking around amongst fans for quite a long time. This three-year-old Reddit thread, for instance, goes deep on the topic, and while the OP is generally against the idea, there's real thoughtfulness to their opinion, and in the discussion that followed—which was mostly in favor of a respec option.

"I grew up playing BG1 when it launched WAY back in the day on CDs (so I'll admit I'm biased)," Maz437 wrote. "In those games, and in tabletop, you play the character you create. There's no switching half way through to something else, and personally I think BG3 should be the same. My vote is for no respec in the game.

"There is a beautiful simplicity to that decision. Your characters are set in stone, and you truly can get inside the mind of each character you play ... If you play as a fighter, you're going to take different companions with you than if you play as a wizard. If you do an evil playthrough, you're not going to have Minsc in your squad. By locking the characters you add to the replay value of the game, and that is what always kept me coming back. The game just played so differently if you ran a melee focused party, vs a magic focused party. If you can respec your character and companions during the game, you'll never experience that."

Redditor FlamingoBasher countered that point with what I have to admit is a pretty convincing reply. "This isn't DnD—I find the option to respec in a videogame pretty much a must-have in 2021, especially in a game where a build is so important," they wrote. "A huge benefit on [Divinity: Original Sin 2] was the respec mirror that you could access early in the game. It encourages builds, playing around with the game, and getting EVERYTHING out of a party composition.

"[Tabletop] is a lot more forgiving and a DM can work around a shitty build with specific encounters, cheering rolls, and other stuff. If I want to tank some stats and make Gale a glass cannon, I should be able to do that."

Now the matter is settled: You'll have to put in the effort to find the relevant NPC, but aside from that, respec is in. And, my own reticence notwithstanding, that's probably a good thing. Baldur's Gate 3 comes out for PC on August 3.

https://www.pcgamer.com/baldurs-gat...-break-into-the-office-and-control-the-press/

Baldur's Gate 3 will have an in-game newspaper that will react to your choices⁠—but you can also break into the office and control the press​

I don't think anyone's tried doing something quite like this in a big RPG in over 20 years.

There were a lot of things in Larian's final "Panel From Hell" preview of Baldur's Gate 3 that have me more excited than ever for the upcoming RPG, but the top spot may very well go to the funny papers: Baldur's Gate 3 will have an in-game newspaper, "Baldur's Mouth," that will change based on the decisions you make.

I don't know what else to say but that this is a rad as hell idea. It's such a small, strange detail to put development effort into, but I think a good videogame paper can really ground a fictional world. I loved the broadsheet "The Black Horse Courier" from The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion⁠—that one had special issues that would appear in the world on completion of certain quests.

The Deus Ex series has similarly had papers and news terminals that change as you progress through the game. More recently, Tears of the Kingdom's Lucky Clover Gazette quest was a very fun spin on the idea.

Baldur's Gate 3 is promising something altogether more involved though. "We've got a newspaper system in this city⁠—it's gonna react to your actions, it's gonna talk about stuff that you've been doing," explained Larian creative director Swen Vincke.

"What I really like about the newspaper is that you can manipulate it. You can basically break into the printing house and start swapping stories around⁠.

"There'll be a big surprise when you do that, and the game's gonna react to that. The stuff in the newspaper affects what the citizens of the city are gonna think about you."

Whereas The Black Horse Courier or Deus Ex's papers would just provide a neat reflection of side quest completion or main story progress, Baldur's Mouth seems more like a full-on, highly reactive system. That quest Vincke described sounds delicious, and the prospect of the paper reflecting not only quest completion but your choices really caught my attention.

Fallout: New Vegas could do this to a limited degree with Radio New Vegas: I particularly remember the quest where you pick a town's sheriff, and the one you went with would get their own soundbite neatly inserted into the radio report on the story. Equally in-depth was cult classic Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscura's newspapers, which could change to reflect a myriad of quest outcomes.

Former Troika Games developers like Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky have spoken of the Arcanum system as a labor of love that added further challenge to an already difficult development, but hopefully Larian has more of a sense of what it was getting into when it started work on Baldur's Mouth. I'm especially curious to see how the paper impacts your reputation in the city, and if you can find new quests or opportunities based on good or bad press.

 

[Larianshill]

They updated Wyll's Bio on the official page in accordance with his background apparently being rewritten. I guess this also explains why he apparently wants to kill Karlach if you run into her.

I really hope Wyll has become a better character with the rewrites. I really do.

The Jacob Taylor of BG3.

I didn't think the character was THAT bad. In fact I was vaguely interested in his backstory (aaand especially in anything concerning Mizora).

It's just that as a "build" he currently sucks ass to spectacular degrees. There's "Not min-maxed" and there's "We trained him wrong on purpose, as a joke".

Wyll was pretty atrocious. He is supposed to be (acting like a) this larger-than-life, loud, bombastic figure, and I just never bought it. Then there were his constantly shifting motivations - first he wants to kill goblins so he can save the little tiefling children, then he wants to kill goblins because he hates goblins, then it turns out he actually has a problem with just one specific goblin, then it turns out that it was not even a revenge mission, he's just after a demonic waifu that he never mentioned before, then it turns out he's perfectly willing to torture an innocent refugee prisoner to fish for information about said waifu. I get that some fakeness is intended, because Wyll is only kind of the hero he is claiming he is, but Wyll was just a mess.
I also don't like the voice actor. I think he is bad, and can not believably act out any emotions. But I don't think they'd switch the voice actor.

 

[Peachcurl]

And people bitch about an obvious joke with a party member that was meant as a joke in the first place.

Which part are you talking about that was an obvious joke?

Is not the first time they use Astarion for silly suff. The whole character in the game is basically an half elf, snobbish noble wanna be pompous character. Once they used him in a valentine day clip and the video was so hilariously bad. Astarion is pretty much a meme character and was always like this.

Even the way he talks in game is designed as a meme.

Call me old-fashioned, but I don't think 'serious' RPGs should have meme-characters.

But I guess it's a standard for Larian.

 

[Rhobar121]

And people bitch about an obvious joke with a party member that was meant as a joke in the first place.

Which part are you talking about that was an obvious joke?

Is not the first time they use Astarion for silly suff. The whole character in the game is basically an half elf, snobbish noble wanna be pompous character. Once they used him in a valentine day clip and the video was so hilariously bad. Astarion is pretty much a meme character and was always like this.

Even the way he talks in game is designed as a meme.

Call me old-fashioned, but I don't think 'serious' RPGs should have meme-characters.

But I guess it's a standard for Larian.

Actually it's not just Larian, Owlcat did the same, Obsidian did too (only here was probably just crappy writing)

 

[ADL]

I have the best avatar on this forum.

 

[NecroLord]

I have the best avatar on this forum.

 

[Tyranicon]

I feel like the best way to play this game is to go full murderhobo and treat it as a dark comedy.

 

[Swen]

I like this bird cat

 

[NecroLord]

I like this bird cat

Fluffy.