Baldur's Gate Baldur's Gate 3 RELEASE THREAD

[Swen]

Anyway, a threshold system as in Underrail is better.

Thankfully Larian disagreed and BG3 has dice rolls

Dice is worse. Flat skill checks in New Vegas are better than percentages in Fallout 3, I thought we all agreed.

Nope

Yep. Dice is okay in combat, its not okay in conversation. In combat, you can do damage control after you fail, and make a comeback, and win anyways. In conversation, failing a dice roll, ESPECIALLY in something you specifically built your character to succeed in, feels terrible, often you can't do anything to get the outcome you wanted, and you just reload. Its bad game design.

"muh feelingz"

 

[Grauken]

Anyway, a threshold system as in Underrail is better.

Thankfully Larian disagreed and BG3 has dice rolls

Dice is worse. Flat skill checks in New Vegas are better than percentages in Fallout 3, I thought we all agreed.

Nope

Yep. Dice is okay in combat, its not okay in conversation. In combat, you can do damage control after you fail, and make a comeback, and win anyways. In conversation, failing a dice roll, ESPECIALLY in something you specifically built your character to succeed in, feels terrible, often you can't do anything to get the outcome you wanted, and you just reload. Its bad game design.

Wrong, you just roll with whatever you got and move on. It's far funnier this way

 

[Mebrilia the Viera Queen]

Dice helps a lot to keep thing interesting. I am totally fine to fail a roll even if you are competent of something. Happens in RL too.

 

[Vic]

Dice helps a lot to keep thing interesting. I am totally fine to fail a roll even if you are competent of something. Happens in RL too.

I'm totally fine to fail a roll too because I can reload

 

[whydoibother]

"muh feelingz"

Bruh its a video game, mechanical proficiency and feeling compelled to play is literally all there is to it. A game has no purpose other than feels.

Wrong, you just roll with whatever you got and move on. It's far funnier this way

If the game had fail-forward, yes. Often failing a conversation is translated into game terms as "you don't get to play that content now". Which sucks, especially if you specifically build a character to pass that check and do that content, and then ooops you rolled a 2, sucks that your entire purpose and identity of the character is denied lol
In combat, you can fail-forward. You missed, sad. You got critically stricken, sad. But you can hit next turn, you can burn consumables, heal, rise the character. You can invst more in the fight and come back on top. The fight is 100 rolls, it will average out. A conversation is 2-5 rolls, some of which very heavily weighted. Bad design.

 

[Grauken]

The people who want flat stat checks are those that can't stop themselves from obsessively reloading instead of rolling with what the game gave them. Neither way is wrong, but dice rolls keeps things more dynamic and entertaining and makes sure replays are more interesting because you can see new things

 

[Grauken]

Which sucks, especially if you specifically build a character to pass that check and do that content, and then ooops you rolled a 2, sucks that your entire purpose and identity of the character is denied lol

Normal people go into a game, make characters that sound cool and go with them. You already establish a meta before you've even started the game. That's okay if you want to power game, but its not exactly how most people do it

 

[copebot]

The game gets a lot better in the extended periods during which there is no dialogue and no NPCs.

"muh feelingz"

Bruh its a video game, mechanical proficiency and feeling compelled to play is literally all there is to it. A game has no purpose other than feels.

Wrong, you just roll with whatever you got and move on. It's far funnier this way

If the game had fail-forward, yes. Often failing a conversation is translated into game terms as "you don't get to play that content now". Which sucks, especially if you specifically build a character to pass that check and do that content, and then ooops you rolled a 2, sucks that your entire purpose and identity of the character is denied lol
In combat, you can fail-forward. You missed, sad. You got critically stricken, sad. But you can hit next turn, you can burn consumables, heal, rise the character. You can invst more in the fight and come back on top. The fight is 100 rolls, it will average out. A conversation is 2-5 rolls, some of which very heavily weighted. Bad design.

Not really. In fact, success is usually worse than failure in this game because it means you don't get combat. The only time it's really relevant is in disarming traps or lockpicking.

 

[perfectslumbers]

The people who want flat stat checks are those that can't stop themselves from obsessively reloading instead of rolling with what the game gave them. Neither way is wrong, but dice rolls keeps things more dynamic and entertaining and makes sure replays are more interesting because you can see new things

You can see more things anyway by having a different built that passes different thresholds

 

[Alienman]

Damn, the evil path really made chapter 1 short as hell.

Spoiler

Talked to Minthara (really liked her, voice and appearance). Accepted the mission to destroy the grove. Did so together with her. It was a fun fight, but not very challenging. Had a small party at the camp and she tasted the salami as a reward. Decided to go back to the Absolute camp, and they cleared out already? Wtf. I was hoping to do missions for them, talking to a few, but nope. None there. So much content gone, like tears in the rain and the whole experience gave me a strong suspicion that the evil path might not be as interesting as I hoped it to be since I didn't actually get to join them. Even if I did their dirty deed. It seems I did the deed more for myself than actually joining anyone. For some reason, the game treats the Absolute as the enemy, when I don't even know much about them. This in turn makes me think chapters 2 and 3 will play out the same, however, with small narrative differences. Oh well. In my good playthrough, I was able to walk freely among the cultists as well, which I think will be exactly the same as the evil path.

There's really only a few quests there and it's not missions.

There are a bunch of encounters:
chicken chasing
killing or being branded by Priestess Glut
the hobgoblin ritual to speak to a dead creature
a pervert goblin that wants you to kiss his foot
the pervert priest who wants to whip you
an optional prisoner interrogation
optionally freeing Halsin (who, I think, will die if you help Minthara)
freeing Volo
robbing the treasury (not a quest, just an option)

All of this can be done and still take the evil path, and most of it is just a simple one-off encounter. Most of your time here will be spent in dialog, and the only satisfying 'quests' are the ritual, Halsin and Priestess Glut, but they're still just a conversation or to and not doing anything unless you engage in combat.

So, basically, you're just not exploring enough before committing to a path. I took the evil route and I was close to level 8 by the time I finished Act 2. I explored everything I could and I still missed content. So there's plenty there.

Yeah, but I had already done all that in my good playthrough. I thought it was going to be way different since I wanted to join them this time. The only difference was the battle.

 

[whydoibother]

Normal people go into a game, make characters that sound cool and go with them.

You mean like "I will be the Bard who talks his way out of trouble", except whoops actually there's about a 15-20% chance that your prior hot headed berserker character will be better at talking his way out of trouble than your bard, in the first few cases where this is possible. Nice character fantasy, though. You thought you were the thief with quick fingers, sacrificing combat ability for skills in stealth and thievery? LOL in the first hour of gameplay you will fail to open all the big doors you see, trigger the meaningful traps you fail at, and get robbed by children at the Druid Cove. And as someone with big proficiency at NOT being robbed, you only are 20-30% less likely to get robbed than someone with NO similar skills or proficiencies, because at that point the dice is always a much greater percentage of the outcome than your actual character ability.

 

[Grauken]

The people who want flat stat checks are those that can't stop themselves from obsessively reloading instead of rolling with what the game gave them. Neither way is wrong, but dice rolls keeps things more dynamic and entertaining and makes sure replays are more interesting because you can see new things

You can see more things anyway by having a different built that passes different thresholds

Like I said, I don't have much interest in buildomancy, I usually play a fighter even on replaying games

 

[whydoibother]

The people who want flat stat checks are those that can't stop themselves from obsessively reloading instead of rolling with what the game gave them. Neither way is wrong, but dice rolls keeps things more dynamic and entertaining and makes sure replays are more interesting because you can see new things

You can see more things anyway by having a different built that passes different thresholds

Yeah, seeing a different part of the game is going evil after going good, or going caster after going fighter, or going with different companions. Its not rolling a 2 where you previously rolled a 14. This is not a genuine argument.

I usually play a fighter even on replaying games

Translation: I am arguing for random skill checks in conversation, because I only play a class with no proficiencies in conversation.
What are we even doing here, mate?

 

[Lyric Suite]

Guys, just fucking quick save and reload. It's vydia who gives a fuck, save scum the shit out of all the checks and move on.

 

[Grauken]

Normal people go into a game, make characters that sound cool and go with them.

You mean like "I will be the Bard who talks his way out of trouble", except whoops actually there's about a 15-20% chance that your prior hot headed berserker character will be better at talking his way out of trouble than your bard, in the first few cases where this is possible. Nice character fantasy, though. You thought you were the thief with quick fingers, sacrificing combat ability for skills in stealth and thievery? LOL in the first hour of gameplay you will fail to open all the big doors you see, trigger the meaningful traps you fail at, and get robbed by children at the Druid Cove. And as someone with big proficiency at NOT being robbed, you only are 20-30% less likely to get robbed than someone with NO similar skills or proficiencies, because at that point the dice is always a much greater percentage of the outcome than your actual character ability.

It's not really an argument you present but a position. I see things differently because that's how I play. I understand you prefer games where you have flat checks but there will always be games like BG3 with dice rolls because some devs see things more my way than yours. Just accept it and move on

 

[whydoibother]

In fact, success is usually worse than failure in this game because it means you don't get combat.

8 INT fighters, please stop responding. You just don't know. You didn't even know there was a skill check that you failed here.
Some people WANT to do the conversation, and do it well, and skip the combat. That is the character. That is the roleplay. That is the desired outcome. I don't want murderhobos telling me how cool it is to fail conversation checks, because they only play characters that can't speak or have any skills other than hitting things with axes.

Just accept it and move on

Nigga.... like.... no. You aren't correct, its wrong, its bad. Just accept it and move on.

 

[Alienman]

Damn, the evil path really made chapter 1 short as hell.

Spoiler

Talked to Minthara (really liked her, voice and appearance). Accepted the mission to destroy the grove. Did so together with her. It was a fun fight, but not very challenging. Had a small party at the camp and she tasted the salami as a reward. Decided to go back to the Absolute camp, and they cleared out already? Wtf. I was hoping to do missions for them, talking to a few, but nope. None there. So much content gone, like tears in the rain and the whole experience gave me a strong suspicion that the evil path might not be as interesting as I hoped it to be since I didn't actually get to join them. Even if I did their dirty deed. It seems I did the deed more for myself than actually joining anyone. For some reason, the game treats the Absolute as the enemy, when I don't even know much about them. This in turn makes me think chapters 2 and 3 will play out the same, however, with small narrative differences. Oh well. In my good playthrough, I was able to walk freely among the cultists as well, which I think will be exactly the same as the evil path.

well, you did dirty job for a fucking gobbos. how many times you kissed gobbo feet? probably joined threesome with bugbear and ogre.
i despise you too. 0/10. would not ally.

The gobo feet guy never asked me to kiss them because I was a drow. And for some reason, the bugbear and ogre attacked me on sight. The only thing I did was talk to Minthara and do her quest and the thing was over. I got to say though, this path of evil feels weird, if it truly is the path of evil and not the path of stupid. Why even join the goblins? They have no solution to my brain problem. You can't actually join the cult, which was my intent. You can't order the goblins to do your bidding, even as a drow. Seems there is no power to gain here. The assholes even left you behind, lol.

 

[darkpatriot]

* "Roll with failed checks" gameplay - provided! Show me another RPG that does that, in the last 20 years.

Skill checks in conversations should be thresholds so there is no such thing as save scumming them. That way they can reward certain character builds in a meaningful way without someone just being able to save scum their way through every check no matter how bad their character is at those skills/actions.

Fuck off, it's retarded design , and also part of the reason New Vegas is steaming manure.
Accept failing and don't savescum, simple as.

Here's the thing, I have always reloaded conversations and gone through them multiple times to see what all the different dialog is for different options. I have always done that in RPGs, and most of them have few if any skill checks. That is because I am not going to replay most RPGs, especially long ones, multiple times. So I try and squeeze as much content out of a single playthrough as I can.

Often, this reveals that a lot of the choices are fairly illusionary. They are just 3 different ways of saying please continue to the next conversation node, even if they are cleverly written to seem like they are actually taking the conversation in 3 different directions. Sometimes a few questions for additional lore/information are sprinkled in. BG3 is still full of these.

BG3 also poorly delineates between what options are move the conversation forward, which are options that provide additional lines of dialog then go back to the same node, and which ones are actual meaningful choices. In general I can say that often the lower options are more often ones that provide more information and return to the node while higher ones tend to be ones that move the conversation forward. But which are which isn't always so clear, often because options to gain more information may be phrased as a statement rather than a question, while options to move the conversation forward are often questions rather than statements.

Add on top of that the tendency for many conversations to just move the conversation forward if you ask too many questions for additional information arbitrarily. And many conversations cannot be revisted by talking to the NPC again if you inadvertently exit the conversation of move it past where you were still seeking more information.

The way conversations are written in BG3 are a mess.

Now I can see that maybe they are designed that way deliberately. They probably wanted you to play it a particular way. Where you just pick an option and keep going forward, no matter what happens. I assume with the idea of improving replayability. But it is just bad design.

If you happen to have decided to have sex with a bear, even though that isn't what you wanted to do and the way the conversation option was written didn't really clearly indicate that is what you were gonna do, then the designers want you to accept your bear fucking and keep playing.

But the developers can fuck off whenever they try to design a game to force you to play a certain way. I am going to reload many of the conversations and see what the different dialog is for different options. Often that is helpful where you think a poorly written dialog choice meant one thing when the writers thought it should mean something else.



Now that is all before we even talk about the skill checks. And reloading conversations reveals a lot of problems with the skill checks, too.

The problem with the skill checks is that a lot of the time, maybe most of the time, they are largely meaningless.

Just like most of the time you are given a series of 3 choices that seem like they are different but are really different just different flavors of "please continue", for a lot of the skill checks it doesn't matter whether you pass or fail them. Sometime literally, as both pass and fail lead to the next conversation node with literally no impact. Other times they end the conversation in different ways, but the conversation itself was largely just flavor for the world with no impact.

There are still some marginally meaningful skill checks. Some provide ways to skip portions of quests, although they almost never give you any kind of exclusive outcomes for quests. There are almost always alternate ways to get the same outcome, often not needing any particularly greater amount of effort.

The most common skill checks that have meaning are the ones to skip a fight or not. But this is D&D, a combat centric system. So a lot of the time that means you still attack them anyway for the loot, exp, and enjoyment of combat. Just that you have more control over initiating it and positioning.

And that is how they largely achieved the impression that you can just play through failure. By making success or failure in skill checks for conversations not particular consequential the majority of the time. This is not good design, this is bad design.



I assume the intention is to try to "improve replayability", but I have no idea whether I am ever going to replay a game, and I always play through the first time as if I wasn't going to ever replay it. So I will reload most conversations to see what all the different dialog choices do, even if it turns out most of the time they do the same exact thing in order to create the illusion of choice.

 

[Modron]

The people who want flat stat checks are those that can't stop themselves from obsessively reloading instead of rolling with what the game gave them. Neither way is wrong, but dice rolls keeps things more dynamic and entertaining and makes sure replays are more interesting because you can see new things

The severity of single check failures in crpg design is probably the biggest issue, should have degrees of failure checks afterwords (and/or partial and critical success differences). Roll a critical failure on a diplomancy check with some lord/chieftan/king, then there should be another roll to determine just how much you are able to assuage his anger. Two critical failures and you find yourself fighting a massive flood of guards as every single one in the capital comes charging in as the alarms raise.

Granted I know this is a shit ton of extra work but it would be nice if there was such a thing for at least a scant few pivotal moments.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Anyway, a threshold system as in Underrail is better.

Thankfully Larian disagreed and BG3 has dice rolls

Dice is worse. Flat skill checks in New Vegas are better than percentages in Fallout 3, I thought we all agreed.

The options boil down to either an if/else check "Did you raise your skill enough", or "Random number + did you raise your skill enough". The Difficulty rating is static. Whether or not the designer provides you with a quest branch if you lack the skill leve, or respectively failed the check, is up to the designer.

So how is "dice worse"? It seems it's down to the designer providing alternate paths for those who fail the check.

 

[Eisenheinrich]

Normies on suicide watch:

 

[whydoibother]

The options boil down to either an if/else check "Did you raise your skill enough", or "Random chance + did you raise your skill enough". Whether or not the designer provides you with a quest branch if you lack the skill leve, or respectively failed the check, is up to the designer.

And in the case of D&D, and Baldur's Gate 3, its mostly dice and very little character.
If you try to read the arcane symbols in the tutorial, you roll a d20. If you are an expert on these things, you get, what, +2 to the roll? +4?
So the difference between someone who has no idea, and an expert, is +10-20% chance to succeed in the task. Nice "role playing" game, which almost entirely ignores the role you want to play. Which is stupid, retarded, objectively bad, I'm right, everyone else is wrong. Its math, you can't argue against it.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Normies on suicide watch:

Technically, the steam achievement considers you to have finished "Act 1" as soon as you go through the Grymforge elevator towards Moonrise tower. I don't know what other paths lead into the tower, but I guess they also trigger the achievement. So the guy *was* in Act 2

 

[whydoibother]

Normies on suicide watch:

Technically, the steam achievement considers you to have finished "Act 1" as soon as you go through the Grymforge elevator towards Moonrise tower. I don't know what other paths lead into the tower, but I guess they also trigger the achievement. So the guy *was* in Act 2

Reads like he activated Gale's tactical nuke, and thought this is the canonical and intended ending to the game.

 

[AwesomeButton]

If you are an expert on these things, you get, what, +2 to the roll? +4?

Reminding you that 2 is 10% of 20, that's not insignificant. You can stack serveral bonuses and end up with a total of +8 guaranteed. Add at least 2 from the die roll - because 1 is auto-fail - and you have the DC 10 covered. That's not a little.