Baldur's Gate Baldur's Gate 3 RELEASE THREAD

[Swen]

Hahah I do hope they are making a space RPG next. I would love to see the look on Todd's face when they fucking beat annihilate them at their own game

 

[Crichton]

I'm so glad you asked!

It's because Respecs are being used by players to create builds that specifically switch ability scores around mid-game to benefit from items such as Gloves of Dexterity. Effectively a respec becomes part of the build. Respecs should be used to explore different build concepts, fix mistakes in character creation, that kind of thing. Using them as part of a character build is huge decline and should not be a part of any mode that calls itself 'honourable'.

Respecs are also used to bypass critical story moments such as the moment where you use the creche machine. Instead of your build choices mattering for such moments, you respec just before the moment in order to guarantee success - the mirror of loss is another such example, simply respec to a bard/rogue before activating the item, boom build choice doesn't matter.

I also don't buy that this is something that 'only cheaters do' or 'only a tiny number of players do'. Bullshit.

I think this is the heart of the "don't use it" question; why does it matter to yhou how many other players are reducing their dexterity to 8 after acquiring those gloves instead of playing through Act 1 with a Dex of 8? This is the definition of something that doesn't affect your life. How would Larian putting a stop to this make any conceivable difference to you?

You just contradicted yourself. You said 'not using it' doesn't work well for things that simply aren't balanced correctly. Haste potions are simply not balanced. They allow you to replicate one of the best buffs in the game (more for casters now but still very very strong for melee also, with a +2 to AC and an extra attack) with almost zero penalty - it only costs you your bonus action every few turns to keep Haste up, with no concentration. Then you are only limited by your supply of potions, and we've already established how they can be farmed infinitely with ease - they're also extremely cheap.

This may be a difference in how we use the word balance. I think we agree that haste effects in BG3 are poorly balanced; they shouldn't be able to add 3 attacks or another spell. And that's something the player really can't do anything about; his only recourse is to foreswear all haste effects. The potions being too plentiful, on the other hand, is a completely artificial problem. You don't have to use them at all; if you do use them, you're free to set limits. No RPG player in the history of mankind has ever been satisfied with the consumable economy and none ever will. But the solution is simple:

 

[Swen]

I'm so glad you asked!

It's because Respecs are being used by players to create builds that specifically switch ability scores around mid-game to benefit from items such as Gloves of Dexterity. Effectively a respec becomes part of the build. Respecs should be used to explore different build concepts, fix mistakes in character creation, that kind of thing. Using them as part of a character build is huge decline and should not be a part of any mode that calls itself 'honourable'.

Respecs are also used to bypass critical story moments such as the moment where you use the creche machine. Instead of your build choices mattering for such moments, you respec just before the moment in order to guarantee success - the mirror of loss is another such example, simply respec to a bard/rogue before activating the item, boom build choice doesn't matter.

I also don't buy that this is something that 'only cheaters do' or 'only a tiny number of players do'. Bullshit.

I think this is the heart of the "don't use it" question; why does it matter to yhou how many other players are reducing their dexterity to 8 after acquiring those gloves instead of playing through Act 1 with a Dex of 8? This is the definition of something that doesn't affect your life. How would Larian putting a stop to this make any conceivable difference to you?

You just contradicted yourself. You said 'not using it' doesn't work well for things that simply aren't balanced correctly. Haste potions are simply not balanced. They allow you to replicate one of the best buffs in the game (more for casters now but still very very strong for melee also, with a +2 to AC and an extra attack) with almost zero penalty - it only costs you your bonus action every few turns to keep Haste up, with no concentration. Then you are only limited by your supply of potions, and we've already established how they can be farmed infinitely with ease - they're also extremely cheap.

This may be a difference in how we use the word balance. I think we agree that haste effects in BG3 are poorly balanced; they shouldn't be able to add 3 attacks or another spell. And that's something the player really can't do anything about; his only recourse is to foreswear all haste effects. The potions being too plentiful, on the other hand, is a completely artificial problem. You don't have to use them at all; if you do use them, you're free to set limits. No RPG player in the history of mankind has ever been satisfied with the consumable economy and none ever will. But the solution is simple:

+ you can customize your difficulty now with custom campagne from the latest patch.

Most importantly, game needs to stay fun.

 

[abija]

That's the thing... for a tactical game, doing random shit and winning doesn't equal fun. There wasn't a single fight in the whole game that required you to play well, so it feels rewarding when you beat it.

5e could very well be the culprit but then Larian should have adjusted a lot more the encounters in order to require at least some thought. Higher stats isn't where the difficulty in a tactical game should come from.

 

[Swen]

Interesting, seems BG3 is also dominating in many asian countries like South Korea for the GOTY awards.

https://m.ruliweb.com/news/523/read/191809

Bg3 first CRPG hit in asia?

 

[Yosharian]

I guess this is just a philosophical difference we have, but for me, it doesn't feel rewarding to beat a game if its trivial to do so. It also lessens my desire to make builds for it etc.

Luckily mods exist and they will save the game for me in the long run, but still it feels like a design flaw to me.

I get that other people view options that trivialise difficulty to be a good thing but it feels like pure decline to me.

 

[Konjad]

BG3 won GotY (as well as story) in Steam Awards:

 

[Swen]

BG3 won GotY (as well as story) in Steam Awards:

https://twitter.com/larianstudios/status/1742244603355333066

...More than 40 million votes for BG3

 

[Fedora Master]

Interesting, seems BG3 is also dominating in many asian countries like South Korea for the GOTY awards.

https://m.ruliweb.com/news/523/read/191809

Bg3 first CRPG hit in asia?

Coomer + Romohomo game appeals to Coomers and Romohomos
Also it's easy enough so even the average bugman can enjoy it

wow

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Bg3 first CRPG hit in asia?

The first CRPG hit in Asia was Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord

 

[DemonKing]

BG3 won GotY (as well as story) in Steam Awards:

Starfield Most Innovative Gameplay?

 

[user]

How to fix the game in like a week's worth of coding, max:

1: introduce scaling hp bonuses that start off soft and start scaling hard towards the endgame. Raphael should not have 666 HP for fuck's sake. That's like, half an action for a well-built monk. (Hyperbole but you get the idea). At endgame most enemies should have at least double their current hp and bosses should probably have about 3x, maybe more.

2: long rest costs should increase with level, maybe 3x-4x current costs towards endgame.

Scaling is absolutely the shittiest way to address difficulty.

Why block the possibility of respect?
If you're a retarded idiot who can't help but use it before every fight, whose fault is it?

Games are environments that enforce rules. That's what makes a game. Having to enforce our own to make the game fun, is what is retarded.

The game isn't easy because one never loses a specific fight, it's easy because there is little beyond deliberately fucking up a build or massively bad rolls that prevents progress. You don't need to understand the mechanics involved well, you don't need particularly involved approaches to any fight. The overwhelming majority of encounters can be brute-forced on Tactician.
Honour Mode doesn't sound particularly smart either, since the one save limit is entirely arbitrary.

Seriously, yes. Can't remember the last time I was less excited to level up in and replay a crpg.

 

[Yosharian]

I didn't necessarily mean scaling based on level for the hp thing. I just meant that enemies in act 1 have about the right hp currently (maybe a little too low) while act 3 enemies need *way* more. Like at least double. Raph is getting one rounded by solo builds for fucks sake.

(For reference, in the base Tactician game there's a build that can do 7000 damage in one round without any party assistance.)

Long rest costs also don't need to scale by level specifically that was just my lazy fix for game Devs who don't have time to design proper game systems.

A proper way to do it would be to intelligently limit the amount of supplies that the player can buy in each act based on how much testing the balance team thinks would create a challenge..

 

[Kiste]

Interesting, seems BG3 is also dominating in many asian countries like South Korea for the GOTY awards.

https://m.ruliweb.com/news/523/read/191809

Bg3 first CRPG hit in asia?

Coomer + Romohomo game appeals to Coomers and Romohomos
Also it's easy enough so even the average bugman can enjoy it

wow

Oh no, a game that a shitload of people can enjoy and are entertained by. What a horrible product.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Oh no, a game that a shitload of people can enjoy and are entertained by. What a horrible product.

For RPG Codex, a game that achieves popularity by appealing to the lowest common denominator is more or less the definition of a horrible product.

 

[Fedora Master]

Interesting, seems BG3 is also dominating in many asian countries like South Korea for the GOTY awards.

https://m.ruliweb.com/news/523/read/191809

Bg3 first CRPG hit in asia?

Coomer + Romohomo game appeals to Coomers and Romohomos
Also it's easy enough so even the average bugman can enjoy it

wow

Oh no, a game that a shitload of people can enjoy and are entertained by. What a horrible product.

Making CRPGs appeal to normies is how we got into this mess in the first place.

 

[BruceVC]

BG3 won GotY (as well as story) in Steam Awards:

https://twitter.com/larianstudios/status/1742244603355333066

...More than 40 million votes for BG3

Well deserved award, well done Larian. The hard work paid off

Sven you are completely vindicated with your years of support on Codex for BG3 in its development phases but many of us also knew it was going to be a success

Now the question is " when will we see a BG4 "

 

[BruceVC]

Interesting, seems BG3 is also dominating in many asian countries like South Korea for the GOTY awards.

https://m.ruliweb.com/news/523/read/191809

Bg3 first CRPG hit in asia?

Do we know accurate sales number yet?

 

[Swen]

BruceVC no we don't have sales numbers yet, doubt we will ever get them since Larian is private

Great old blog post:

https://web.archive.org/web/2015071...to-the-very-big-rpg-that-will-dwarf-them-all/

"The route to the very big RPG that will dwarf them all

Posted on January 16, 2012


Reading this blog, you might get the impression that the only thing I deal with is the financial side of development. Yet, when you look at the credits of Larian Studios games, you’ll discover that I used to be both lead designer and programmer of games like Divine Divinity.


Me selling some of my games - every little bit helps

What happened was that in the early 2000’s, I could get away with me being in charge of most things. But as productions scaled up and teams became larger, I was forced to (very reluctantly) release several of my roles as I was doing more damage than good. My main job became that of being the one outlining the general vision, and overcoming any obstacles encountered during executing that vision.

Since it turned out that financing topped the obstacle list, I ended up focussing a lot of time on the cash aspect of the business. But to be honest, I hate this part of the job, it’s not the reason I founded this studio. There really are days when I say, the hell with it, I want to program again, I’m not dealing with this stuff any longer (today is one of those days

)

But then I remember the ultimate goal, the making of “the very big RPG that will dwarf them all”, and I get on with it, realizing that the side-quest of finding of what Hollywood calls “Fuck-you money” is realy becoming urgent.

The problem is, every time I think we’re close to achieving that point, costs go up, and we need to find more cash, which doesn’t really help.
So, a plan was formed…

Here’s a break-down of what it cost us to make the Dragon Knight Saga

• 4M € employees
• 900K€ freelancers
• 270K€ outsourcing of artwork
• 200K€ hardware
• 700K€ software licenses
• 400K€ localisation

for a total of 6,5M€. That’s a lot of money and as the Dragon Knight Saga was released via co-publishing deals , it also meant that we needed to take care of the majority of this investment ourselves, since the publishers only contributed partially to the funding.

Our modus operandi was to make cash with kids games like for instance Monkey Tales or Adventure Rock, and then spend it on the RPG. This approach obviously worked since we managed to release the game, but in hindsight, I’m sure we could’ve done it for a lot less and with a lot less frustration.

Knowing what I know now, I think we could’ve brought down costs by 2M€, and had this game been made in another country (Belgium has notoriously high labor taxes), we could perhaps have made all of The Dragon Knight Saga for less than 4M€.

So part one of the plan is to try to use our financial resources in a more clever way, applying lessons learnt, allowing us to put more stuff in our future games.
Part two is that instead of spending a lot of effort on non-core games to earn money, we focus on making more core-games.

The reasoning there is quite simple – we noticed that good sales on The Dragon Knight Saga are correlated to good sales of the other Divinities, with people in general enjoying the games. More good Divinity games should therefore make the entire series stronger, and an added advantage is that we are working on making more RPG technology, rather than non-RPG tech, which will help bring down costs in the future, and further accelerate our development cycle.

That’s why in addition to Dragon Commander, we’re also working on an unannounced RPG (which btw is closer on the release horizon than most people think J )
Part three is to earn more revenue per game sold. That’s why we’re going the self-publishing route, cutting out the middle-men, as outlined in a previous blog post. Here too there are extra advantages, because not only do we make more money to fuel our future ambitions, but we also have more control of how our game is released, something we’ve had quite a lot of issues with in the past.
Now if you read of all that, have you noticed what I’ve become ?

I’m a guy that started a game development company because he was inspired by Ultima VII to make huge RPGs, with a vision of a free systemic game-world coupled to a strong storyline and powerful character development mechanics. But all I talked about here was more cost-efficiency, more company focus and higher margins.

Still, I don’t think there’s any other route. To be able to fulfill the ambition of the “very big RPG that will dwarf them all”, we need to cash-rich enough to disappear from the planet for a couple of years, and focus on doing only that. We need to enter that development with plenty of RPG experience and technology, and we need to know that upon release, we’ll be able to recoup our investment so we don’t go down immediately afterwards because some publisher tells us “so long and thank you for all the fish”.

So we’ll try to make two very good games that will be released in 2012-2013, do this as cost-effective as possible, ensure that what we build will help us in the future, and fight to maximize our revenue from these games, so that perhaps in 2015 you might see the game this company was created for.

At least, that’s the plan. Between that goal ofcourse and where we are today, there’s a huge obstacle course, which brings me back to my current job-definition a.k.a. acting as either a bulldozer or a kangoroo."

 

[Darkwind]

Like at least double. Raph is getting one rounded by solo builds for fucks sake.

(For reference, in the base Tactician game there's a build that can do 7000 damage in one round without any party assistance.)

This says WAY more about the fucked up version of 5E they implemented at Larian vs. the system itself. Hitpoint bloat is -a- way to deal, but not thee way to deal with this. Because all you are doing is masking a broken system. In no universe can you do 7000 dmg under level 12 in 5E tabletop with a single character. Hell man, you can't even do 666hp of damage (Raph's hitpoints) in one round. From a tabletop POV something is comically broken if you are putting up those kind of damage numbers.

 

[Crichton]

I'm opposed to using HP bloat to counter all the exploits that troon speed runners have found. But I'm also opposed to taking out all the weird shit to try to leave no extra damage packets for autistic troons to find. Again, no one's forcing the rest of to play this way.

 

[Yosharian]

People keep saying 'HP bloat' but if a boss doesn't have enough hit points to survive one round from a meta build I'm not sure that's the right word to use

Like that's not what that phrase means

 

[Crichton]

I think the phrase is apt here. Zariel (a CR26 encounter, way way past anything a level 12 party should ever face) has 580 hit points (https://media.wizards.com/2019/dnd/dragon/26/DRA26_Zariel.pdf). I like Raphael having 666 hit points because it's cute, but even that is a little bloated. I don't know what bullshit the autists are using to hit these sky-high damage numbers you mention, but I agree with Darkwind that if you really want to balance things, closing off those exploits should be a higher priority than blowing up HP numbers even further. At what point would players be forced to exploit this limited range of bugged combinations to keep up with the new huge HP numbers?

However, having seen the efforts by Larian in D:OS2 and Owlcat in WotR to close off exploits, I'm not sure balance should be such a high consideration. Example: Is it worth removing an item with an interesting effect because someone figured out that you could combine it with another item, and a feat, and a consumable to get some ridiculous multiplier? Sure, you fixed that vtuber's wagon, but what about all the other players that were using the item by itself and are now left with a lump of coal in its place?

 

[Yosharian]

You cannot compare BG3 to tabletop 5E, they are not the same.

 

[luj1]

character building is really poor in this game

classes dont feel unique, low level cap, shit ruleset

really feels like a dating simulator with paper thin RPG mechanics

class flavor and class exclusive skillsets are SHIT