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No_one  8mo ago (text post)   2759 thread views

Baldur's Gate 3 thread (no spoilers outside of spoiler tags) - reviews, technical matters, griping etc.

Intro

Baldur's Gate 3 is a sprawling, slightly kitschy, long-winded,accessible yet also quite challenging[1] role-playing game with fairly high production values that apparently pissed off other CRPG devs.

A sort of interactive pulp swords & sorcery novel. It's a flawed if IMO provisionally worthy yet lesser sequel to Baldur's Gate 2. Lesser but still rather good.

It is like heroin to CRPG types despite a slight tinge of woke, the dumb and optional romance system, and some flaws which are going to be rectified by mods fairly quickly or solved by the time you get to Baldur's Gate and can actually buy a fucking quiver, gem pouch or potion case. Romances are optional, the personal quests of party members are fairly interesting and quite decent afaict.

It allows up to 4 people to play what's essentially a D&D campaign without someone having to be GM. Perhaps some people would like to play it together in the evenings and it might strengthen this community? If playing thrice weekly for 4 hours, you could probably clear it under half a year even with a bit of save-scumming that's necessary for some of the tough fights.

Don't rush- perhaps Larian will give it paused realtime or FPS play or just speed up the computer turns which should be instant but sometimes (5% of the time) take 200-300 ms to decide per enemy mook.

As it's a significant cultural artifact and probably of interest to enough people on this forum, I believe it deserves its own thread.

For mods: ||It's not related to 'science, politics or philosophy', however, I feel it maybe deserves an exception due to its high profile. Factorio, a decade old game popular with Motte kind of people has 29 hits in search, BG3 has 25 mostly from the last 2 weeks. All argument and no play makes Jack a dull boy, no ? ||

Rules:

  1. Please post in the appropriate subthread. I'm going to start with 'reviews, technical issues, rant & gripe, gameplay advice, lore'. Feel free to make another top-level subthread if it doesn't fit into the other categories.

  2. For story and lore discussion not known to people familiar with general D&D, use spoiler tags, which are doubled pipes = '|' repeated twice without the quotes. Spoiler tag end is another set of doubled pipes.

  3. Story discussion only in the 'lore discussion' thread.

  4. Please report any comments spoiling the plot outside of the stuff that's in the intro cinematic.

[1]: I'm at around +2sd of ice people mental acuity and a disgusting minmaxing scrub who almost cleared** the infamous 'tactics' mod for BG2+ToB and I'm being challenged by the high difficulty fights in BG3. Even a run-of-the mill fight turns deadly if you're not paying attention, and certain fights are positively malicious.

And I'm just in chapter 2 atm. Yes, if you want you can re-roll PC and every party member for every dungeon but in essence that's just like save-scumming but worse. You don't have to do it, and I only re-rolled main char because I was unfamiliar with the ruleset and wanted to try a few different options. The dungeon puzzles, so far, seem mostly bloody obvious, I've encountered some mildly challenging treasure related ones, surely there's going to be a few good ones too.

**am not sure I ever cleared the final fight of the entire game with the tactics mod.

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Griping

Fighting my way through a dungeon and it's really irritating not being able to coordinate your characters to attack all at as a surprise round. In BG1 & BG2 you could pause the game, queue up an action for each party member, and unpause, and let 'er rip. But I can't do that here since BG3 doesn't have an actual pause function. Nor, weirdly, is there the ability to delay / ready an action.

Best work-arounds I've found are putting my entire party in stealth, having one character attack, and the introduce the rest of the party character by character. You're still at the mercy of the initiative rolls here though so focused-fire efforts are a crapshoot. I've tried putting it into turn-based mode but that also seems to be a crap-shoot for turn order. Anyone having better luck on bring down a world-of-hurt all at once?

Most enemies can be surprised, which means you can attack all at once, effectively speaking...

Imo, best way to bring in a world of hurt at once is have your sneaky fighter throw a barrel of water, followed by some nasty cold or electric based spell..

Maybe I'm not just quick enough on the mouse, but I can't seem to get my party to attack simultaneously even from stealth/hiding. The closest I've been able to achieve was snuffing Dror Ragzlin from the rafters in the goblin basewhich took a fair amount of positioning to get just right.

Edit to fix spoiler tags.

You don't need to be quick, I believe.

First person attacking from stealth causes enemies to be 'surprised', which means they don't do anyhting on their first turn. A few rare types (early to mid game) can't be surprised, but generally they can be.

Once someone is in combat, someone else can move in and iirc (almost certain) attack the enemies in the same turn as the first player who triggered the battle by joining in.

Finally got it to work on the gnolls nearby the Risen Road. Then got TPKs 4 times in a row because fuck gnolls and their goddamn multiattack bullshit.

  • I hate rests as a resource system. It feels like it breaks power fantasy when a character can only do things a few times a day that they ought to be able to do at will, especially the weapon maneuvers. There's no believable reason why my character can only do a flourish with their sword once an hour. It certainly wouldn't cost them more energy than leaping 5 meters, which they can do every turn.
  • Related: The game expects you to rest a lot, and weaves in story progression during each night. .. but it also rewards you for not resting. There are incredibly powerful buffs that get applied once to your party during various story events and then last until your next long rest, and then you can't get them back. (Eg. +1d4 radiant damage on weapon attacks, +1d6 to attack rolls, ability checks, saves)
  • Some builds and features are so good/broken/fun that they make everything else feel lacklustre. Eg. Tavern Brawler (+str to attack & damage for unarmed + throwing). Eldritch Blast (The best damage cantrip for only 2 levels in warlock, long range, deals 1d10 + cha, pushes enemies, and gets extra beams scaling with character level without any more investment).
  • Common for CRPGs like this: Items and ability features are a total clusterfuck. With the exact same rules text, some items work on all weapon attacks, some only on melee. Some apply to throws. Some don't. The only way to know for sure is to test. There are some bonkers interactions where one effect procs another, which procs the first again and so on.

I was hoping that bonkers interaction would have been fixed from EA. I didn't actually test at launch. It's definitely a glitch.

One of the reasons I've spent so long on the game is that I like to drag out each period as long as possible so I end up in a lot of fights without spell-slots.

I don't mind requiring rest, but I'd like it if time were actually passing and the rests were in-game.

E.g. in Icewind Dale, you had to find a good spot to rest and even then you got disturbed now and then..

So far I just think there's too much dice rolling. I'm fine with combat having tons of dice rolls under the hood, but there are just too many occasions in dialogue where you have to roll for outcomes, sometimes for things that shouldn't be left to chance, or situations where someone with 18 in an ability simply should never fail the check unless they're dead drunk. It encourages savescumming which I'd rather not engage in.

Absolutely agree that this is a big problem and the game would be substantially better without it. My party's rogue has a 95% chance to unlock almost every single lock I encounter, and anything that is possible to unlock for anyone else is near impossible for him to fail. Every single chest or lock is just a 5% chance for me to lose an item through chance. On the flipside, there's no actual punishment for making different choices either. My twig of an elven sorcerer can frequently just pass strength/dexterity/religion checks with the help of guidance/savescumming, so there's no real reason to care about the tradeoffs.

What having dicerolls for checks like this means is that you just emphasise being good at rolling dice and de-emphasise character-building and the choices you make in it. Competent RPGs have known for a long time that social rolls/skill checks like this should just be flat prerequisites rather than random rolls, because making it random is bad for the game. I can't really blame someone for savescumming when their super-strong barbarian can just, through random chance, end up actually being an erudite scholar who can't do basic athletic tasks because of a funky role distribution. It reduces the distinction between playthroughs and makes your choices in character creation/levelling that much less impactful. Game will be a lot better when a mod comes out that just replaces all of the rolled checks with flat bonus requirements. I also think a cheat mod which gives you guidance at all times when there's a caster with it in the party would be a net improvement along those lines as well.

I think dice rolling on screen is immersion breaking, you don't need to remind me your game is a toy every 5 minutes, it's like a movie zooming out every half hour to show the director shouting instructions to the cast on a soundstage.

In general hard stat-checks are preferable to dice rolls. On tabletop there's a communal gambling element to it, which can be fun, but in single-player games (and I'd guess 90%+ of BG3 players will primary or entirely play single-player), stat checks reward you for building your character in a certain way without subjecting you to the arbitrariness of dice throws. It doesn't make sense either, you either have the charisma to be charming or the strength to lift an object or you don't.

Yeah, that's a big complaint for me. It should happen instantly, you should see the dice roll like in BG2..

Especially because my FPS tanks during the dice rolls.

I think if the game (a) removed the "nat 1/20 is an auto-fail/success on skill checks" and possibly gave you the option to "take 10" 3e style on a bog-standard check (or take 20 outside of conversation at the cost of a short rest), that'd go a long way to solving the problem.

That drove me nuts when I played paranoia, since the more you roll, the more 5% chances you have to have something horrible happening to you. It makes you never want to do anything, since even opening an (untrapped) door can be hazardous.

removed the "nat 1/20 is an auto-fail/success on skill checks"

Note this isn't actually a rule in 5e for skill checks, only for attack rolls automatically hitting/missing. It wasn't a rule in 3.x either. It's just people keep misapplying the attack-roll rule to other rolls and inadvertently houseruling it even though it's a stupid change, sometimes including D&D developers and now apparently including Lorian Studios developers.

In 3rd edition it only applied to attack rolls, but then in the Deities and Demigods supplement they added a special rule for gods:

Deities of rank 1 or higher do not automatically fail on a natural saving throw roll of 1.

Yes, if you attain godhood you don't automatically fail saving throws on 1, just like everyone else. Then in 3.5 they actually did add automatic success/failure to saving throws (which I would argue was a negative change) but still didn't have it for skill checks. (3.5 came out a year after Deities and Demigods so they could have been consciously trying to make it backwards compatible, but I'd guess they just forgot it didn't work like that and then in 3.5 rewrote the rules to match the way they played it.)

Yes, agree.

My biggest gripe is the jank. It's like the country interaction menu in EU4 that has like fifty options. It has buttons you want to press often: declare war, offer alliance, fabricate claim; some that are situational: ask for fleet basing rights, send warning; some that are clearly in the wrong menu: sell ships, charter trade company; some that are completely useless: support rebels, surrender. When you first start playing this game you are completely overwhelmed and you need someone to show you that you need maybe 10% of this menu to start, 20% to succeed and the rest is situational fluff or just useless actions.

I feel the same about the hot bar of actions in BG3. Some of them sound like something I would want to use every turn, except they have a cooldown that is even longer than "once per fight". Some of them sound like something situational, except maybe perhaps I should be setting up these situations. Some sound completely useless. All of them are on the same bar, most of them take up the whole turn. People have complained about one of DA2's designers wanting every skill to be "press A for Awesome", but he was not completely wrong.

One can remove the buttons and change it up. I haven't bothered to, mostly added common ones.

Interface janks is jarring though. How come 3 years of EA didn't fix the problem of cumbersome inventory management, or enabling automatic "wares" assignment to loot items.

I guess it's just me getting older. I loved classic Fallouts and Infinity Engine games when they came out and still enjoy them, and they are full of jank. Or perhaps the game industry as a whole didn't know any better back then, so something that was fine in 98 is no longer so a quarter century later.

Are they? They were cheesable before mods and tweaks, but.. not really janky.

Unless you looked under the hood. Entire BG1-2 story and quest system was tied together with thousands of 8 letter variables. Lol, lmao, silent thanks to whomever made it all work.

Fallout 1 had five useful skills (small guns, energy weapons, speech, repair and science) out of eighteen, ten useful perks out of fifty, three useful traits out of sixteen. Maxing out agility was necessary for practically any build. The obvious way to use a stimpak required six AP, the best way required only two. Or four to use as many as you needed.

My kids are finally all old enough for coop BG1 and BG2, and coop BG includes some of my fondest memories so I'm excited ... but from what I'm reading it'll still be quite some time before my youngest is ready for BG3.

I suppose I should be patient, and be thankful BG3 does have coop mode. So many otherwise great CRPGs have a party with multiple characters to control but assume the gamer has no friends or family to help control them. That's just a hurtful stereotype, guys.

I'm excited ... but from what I'm reading it'll still be quite some time before my youngest is ready for BG3.

All romantic and sexual situations can be avoided by shutting down all approaches from the companions. The hysteria over the romancing is greatly exaggerated.

I mean, the game's fairly scary, frontloaded to the start and some of the companions bring up sex, but mostly tbh I'd say the scare factor is way stronger.

On one hand, I'm probably never having a family, but the only mercy there is that I'm never going to have to worry about aby children getting a porn habit.

Highest profile gripe thread from the CW one..

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