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Announcement trailer (https://youtu.be/OcP0WdH7rTs)

Made by Larian Studios.

Looks like it's going to be a watered down version of 5th Edition.  Online multiplayer.  Set 100 years after BGII.  On Google Stadia for reasons.  Mindflayers.

https://www.usgamer.net/articles/larian-studios-shares-its-vision-for-baldurs-gate-3-interview (https://www.usgamer.net/articles/larian-studios-shares-its-vision-for-baldurs-gate-3-interview)

I must gather my party before not giving a shit.

Note: it's not a Stadia exclusive.

Larian is great, but I'll reserve judgement until there's something other than just a cinematic teaser.

As long as it's not a Stadia exclusive.

Now I want to fire up BG.  Where did I put that Enhanced Edition...

Useful contribution.

I love the BG games and really like D:OS, so I'm very excited. I hope they make a great game.

Holy shit, I love those crazy belgians so much  :awesome_for_real: :awesome_for_real: :heart:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LI4v6hC_rjM  (BG 3 Community Update #1).

Anyways, we might get something more pretty soon, specifically during PC Gamer's "Gaming Show" at E3 (Monday June 10th, 1pm EDT/6pm CET). Sometimes, those gaming show segments are just interviews, but hey, they might sneak in at least 2-3 screenshots (I would be pretty surprised to see some gameplay already).

Hmm, so its not going to use any edition.  It’s going to be Larian creating their own ‘D&D’ inspired system. Which sure, can be fine, but for me a big part of playing the Baulder’s Gate games is getting a chance to play with PNP D&D in all its wonky glory in video form, though all 20 levels (especially since I will never in my life sit down long enough to do that with the actual PNP game).  This sort of sounds like they are making D:OS 3, with a D&D re-skin.  Pretty bummed.

Edit:  Ok, maybe stand corrected.  One article I read said they had tried to translate the rules, but it didn’t work, so they were just doing their own interpretation.  But then I found another with more info about that response:


Missing a rat 15 times in a row with your giant club is a BG tradition!

Playing the original Baldur's Gate in the last few years convinced me that the D&D rules are really really shit. They were great in the vacuum of the '80's, but generally speaking, they are just shit. There are so many better systems for PNP, and especially for video games.

LOL, yeah :).

There is another interesting interview that goes a little more in-depth when it comes to the transition from 2nd to 5th edition and the translation to the computer screen:

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/06/06/baldurs-gate-3-announced-from-the-creators-of-divinity-original-sin/
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Their approach makes sense: they take a look at the various PnP game systems the 5th editions offers and see what can be translated to a *modern* computer game and how. *Modern* in the sense that, at least by reading these first interviews, WoTC gave them much more flexibility and "carte blanche" than expected, or so it seems.

If you think about it, in 1998 those of us who were 20+  and played CRPGs since the eighties were excited because BG was seen itself as a "renaissance" of the Gold Box games, which were sometimes a 1:1 translation of the PnP modules.

Totally agreed, the games are unplayable given the advances we've made in the genre today.

If any other company was doing this I wouldn't give a shit but the Original Sin games are far superior isometric rpg's than Baldur's Gate 1+2.

I never played them. In what way are they superior to BG? Graphics, gameplay, story, all of the above?

They're really good games that were clearly inspired by Baldur's Gate. Calling them far superior is silly other than the fact they take advantage of tech advances. Story-wise they're probably roughly on par with Baldur's Gate. Gameplay, each of the games has pros and cons in my opinion but generally, I didn't feel like there was a huge difference on the gameplay side minus some QoL stuff that, once again, is primarily due to tech advances and lessons learned in the 30(?) years since the BG games were out.

They are really, really good games and easily the best modern isometric RPGs and in the top 5 RPGs of the last decade or two. But far superior to Baldur's Gate I & II? I think not.

D&D should always be turn based.  The Infinity engines all suffered from their real time/pause command combat.  To be honest I preferred the old SSI games than the Infinity Engine ones.

I was never able to finish an IE game, no matter how much I wanted to like them the combat was never fun.  I tried the hardest in BG2 and got pretty far but they also never got the trash/boss balance right imo (working on very old memories) and the spell slot system and having to rest all the time because entering any fight without your dispel magic and other counter magic for the inevitable casters in every fight just pulled me right out of the game.

The turn-based combat in Original Sin is excellent, so much better than the IE games, the action point system and powers design are better than D&D spell slots too.  The encounters are just paced better too. 

If BG3 isn't turn-based though and they try to make it more like 1+2 my interest will dwindle very quickly.

100% agreed about turn-based being superior for this kind of game, especially from a tactical combat perspective. Most enemy AI in BG1/2 is way too dumb, but if anyone played the 'Chosen of Cyric' encounter in the BG2 rogue rebalancing mod, it showcases this problem pretty clearly -- the enemy scripts are advanced enough to respond to basically everything you do, including repositioning themselves on-the-fly, switching targets to deal with spellcasters, etc. I can't see anyone beating that encounter (outside a ridiculously overpowered party) without pausing literally every 2 seconds, at which point a TB system would be waaaay better.

(Incidentally, I think the SSI Dark Sun games are superior to the BG games on a design level, despite the simplistic graphics... and the bugs. oh god the bugs)

DoS has a much better turn based system in many ways, but the skills and attributes systems were still flawed and unbalanced in significant areas.

And their equipment systems were less fun than BG. I'm not a fan of the Diablo style loot.

DoS2 has a much much worse companion and quest system than bg2. But the main stories and plots were fairly equivalent in execution I'd say.

Larian improved a lot between dos 1 and 2 though, there's no reason to think bg3 won't be a better game again.

DoS2 suffers from a lot of the mechanics being half baked and from being an 80 hour game with about 30 hours of content.

I hope they stick with turn based, I really enjoyed DOS:2 except for the loot system, which was horrible.

Original Sin 2 is a great game in many ways but even the remastered edition feels like unfinished Eurojank a lot of the time.  It's very easy to break certain encounters, be allowed to save in the middle, and then be forced to spend hours watching npcs around or start over - I'm thinking of the trainer in the swamp who's fighting the soldiers and the ghosts who can't be killed if there's fire around towards the end of the game in particular, but there are more. I'm also not a fan of how the high difficulty levels are balanced on a knife's edge so that enemies a single level higher than you can be completely unkillable and then pushovers after you level up.  It makes the game into a search for which content is completable at your level, which really undermines the open world quest structure. All that said, the combat is still really satisfying most of the time.  Unlike a lot of people, I'm not a fan of the story because of the wild swings in tone and the repeated failure to establish the personalities of important characters, but the game does have a lot of interesting role playing decisions. I'd really like Baldur's Gate 3 to be slightly more accessible and polished.

I had a fairly overpowered party, and not only did it take about five hours worth of attempts and reloads to beat the Chosen of Cyric party, I had to do a not-insignificant amount of pre-planning and pre-fight setup of spell sequencers and contingencies. I even had to look up how certain mechanics actually worked in BG2, because you would never have them used against you any other time, like that one guy who casts Mislead and runs his clone off into the fog of war.

Of course there was also a ton of pausing, and I had to eventually set auto-pause to fire at the end of every single round after a single missed pause at a critical moment caused me to be a half second too late to react to something that started a death spiral.

Does the Rogue rebalancing mod change missile combat to something less unbroken? Because once you found out that it works for everything, its really hard to not cheese your way through the harder passages of the game.  :awesome_for_real:

Lots of recent news on this one - and a big announcement for June 6 which many think will be the prerelease version going live.

The preview videos do not follow D&D rules everywhere, but a lot of the variances feel like DM administration of a player asking to do something not spelled out in the rules.  It will bethe first PC game that I've made time to play in a long time. 

You can play pregens or make up to 4 PCs.  You'll also be able to add to the party with NPCs,  henchmen and hirelings. It is real time, but you can slow it down to round by round combat.   It will run through 10 levels, so you can be sure there will be at least one sequel.  I expect two - one to add more classes, races and bckgrouns (as well as a little adventure content - side quests) and another to take you from 10 to 20.  Mike Mearls was banished to help them keep this game in line with D&Dlore and mecanics wherever possible.  It looks good.

Article with link to video (https://www.pcgamer.com/amp/larian-drops-baldurs-gate-3-gameplay-teaser-reveal-coming-on-june-6/)

One thingt to note: They think that something in this will discourage the save/reload techniques.  We'll see.

It looks super generic and boring from everything I've seen so far.

Well, it's Larian.

Hmm with only 10 levels I'm wondering whether it's going to be a big enough game to justify paying AAA prices for on release.

Ugh, the first Baulders Gate was 10 levels (BG2 going from 10 to 20), and it was plenty long.  D&D leveling is slow.

You're right! I've only replayed BG1 a couple of times because first level Dnd characters are so horribly tedious to play. The first playthrough was fun though I admit.

But yeah, in your defense, the first 10 levels are way more boring/shitty than the second 10 levels in D&D.  Which is one major reason why BG2 was so much more enjoyable to play.

So hopefully they craft a good campaign, but only being the first 10 levels will hurt it.

BG 1 and 2 were also three editions of D&D back.

Is it truly round by round turn-based combat, or is it 'spam spacebar every 4 seconds' pause bullshit?

Every edition of D&D since 2nd has had an explicit focus on making the low level experience not suck.

We're a long way from 4 HP wizards with a single spell and a 5% chance to hit with a physical attack.

Hah 2nd edition is the version I've been playing with my university buddies for the last forty years. We usually minimize the suckage by starting new parties at 7th level.

I never did PnP D&D in those early editions. I do very clearly remember playing BG1 and desperately recruiting party members because they kept dying for the first week or two of attempts before I started figuring it out.

According to D&D Beyond, 90% of campaigns end by level 10 in 5th edition.  That makes a lot of sense to me as well.

Characters had far too few abilities/options at low levels in 2nd edition and it was boring.  But in 4th/5th edition characters can also become bloated with too many abilities at higher levels.  So the goldilocks zone of character development starts much lower with 5th edition.  Most one-offs/campaigns I run start at 2nd or 3rd level.

Tangentially related, but in a recent article about what a potential 6th edition could be (https://www.enworld.org/threads/the-last-edition-of-d-d.670519/) someone did a breakdown of how long each edition of D&D lasted:

We used to run early levels are more of an rp theme with very light combat (town is haunted by a single skeleton, for instance). Most of the xp was from exploration and dialogue/story stuff.

I've only ever played 1st edition, though I did use a lot of 2nd ed stuff adapted back. My first D&D was the original basic set.

For the guys that liked combat only (self-proclaimed macho men aka fragile egos), we would run higher level stuff (and usually stick to modules so nobody had to get offended by thinking too much).

It is real time until you elect to enter round combat.  Then, everyone on your side goes, then everyone on the monster side goes.  You can choose to enter this 'round combat' whenever you want, which will make navigating certain types of traps easier.

I think that's the big thing--you have to run the early levels like a Scooby-Doo adventure, whereas I think most people have in mind Bilbo Baggins dealing with trolls without remembering that he's a level 1 burglar in a party of high-level dwarven fighters and a super-high level wizard. It's got to be story-forward and the situations where characters are going turn-by-turn doing stuff have to be really minimal.

That said, the imbalance in basic D&D between early-level fighters (utterly necessary as damage absorbers) and late-level everything else is a basic design flaw and a lot of Western rpgs (computer and pnp) got stuck on it.

Whoa, I guess it's AD@D First Edition I've been playing all these years.

Yeah - have you played 5th edition?

The balance between the classes is a lot closer than you describe, and in many ways is reversed.  A 20th level wizard can cast meteor swarm and deal about 140 damage to anything in a large area. A 20th level fighter may deal 250 hit points of damage to a single target.  There are a lot of mechanics that make it harder and harder for powerful wizards to impact their foes (legendary resistance, the prevalence of damage type resistance) while they buffed the weapon classes a lot.  The wizard is a master of a breadth of abilities at high levels, but the fighters, paladins and their ilk are the heavy hitters. 

And your comment about Scooby Doo adventures seems to imply that low level play can't have in-depth storylines or broad power dynamics present.  Frankly, if that is a problem, the DM needs to learn a bit more about how to run a great game.  Go listen to Season 2 of Critical Role for an example where they is not the case.  And before you toss around the cliché that it is not real D&D - D&D takes a variety of forms.  That game is being run substantially how it was before the streaming, and is not too far off of what I've tried to do for decades. 

If you do not want turn by turn, picking a game that attempts to implement a version of D&D is perhaps not the right game for you - but a lot of people will like it. 

It's interesting that they've gone the real-time by default route, considering that 5e combat doesn't usually last many turns. Combat can be an issue at lower levels, maybe the ideal thing to do is handwave it and just level characters very quickly initially, especially to level 2.

I believe the assumption is that you'll switch to round by round for every combat.  Trying to control multiple PCs with different abilities in real time may be unreasonable.  However, in a multiplayer game, a PC in one map might be real time while a PC on another map might be in round by round.

Really? No roll for initiative or turn queues? Lazy.

That's interesting about the MP functionality (though I'm only interested in SP).

There is an initiative roll, but it is side initiative.  Not lazy.  Intentional.

They talk about why they do it - to speed up the game compared to OS2 (allowing you to move everything then the enemy to move everything takes less total thinking time for the human side - and apparently, in multiplayer the humans can all go simultaneously), and to allow PCs to coordinate (fighter pushed the enemy into position for the wizard to fireball).  

A discussion on how this upgrades on DOS and incorporates D&D core mechanics. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-q5B9mblTGI)

Yes, thinking is bad.

BG2 combat was real time. You could select an option to pause the game when combat started and then choose to play turn by turn, but if you didn't, your characters all ran around and did their attacks without your assistance.

Mmm, I know, but I was wondering considering the low number of turns common in 5E why turn-based wouldn't be a better option, apart from historical consistency or audience expectations. And turn based is supposed to be Larian's bread and butter? I've not played D:OS2 (or 1) yet.

I was not disappointed watching it in the preview gameplay.

You always have the option of walking away now and never playing it.  Not much point coming here is you've already decided it is crap.

You've been on f13 long enough to know that's not how it works around here.

No, it's a fair point. I give people shit for sticking around in threads for games I enjoy just to rag on them. Sorry!

Look, I've given feedback on the upper left hand corner enough.

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It is all fair game and expected to a point, but yeah, at some point just ragging on a game for no reason becomes dickish.  That’s what the Star Wars threads are for!

For those that care - whatever announcement was planned for this weekend has been pushed a week in honor of BLM.  The event where it was going to be released is pushed that one week and being replaced by a livestream on June 7 highlighting Black contributions in the game industry. 

Early Access is today, for anyone interested.  Starting at 1 PM Eastern / 10 AM Pacific.

So much of my coming free time will be spend on this!

Yeah, I am definitely buying this.  I think Steam is getting slammed, my transaction is stuck.

I got the dreaded "you've tried to purchase too many times, so sit on your thumbs for a few hours" message.  I'll have to wait until this evening.  It may clear in the next 30 to 120 minutes, but I'm going to be tied up.

Mine was listed as Pending, but then it disappeared.  Re-attempted and the transaction when through no problem.

I'm really interested to see what you folks think of this. After playing Divinity:OS 2 I'm not sure that Larian is the best fit.

D:OS was their attempt to do D&D without the license, so I get the hesitation.  However, this time around they not only had the license, but they also had WotC working with them to make a fairly authentic 5E translation.  From the preview videos I have seen, I am excited to give it a try … in a few hours when I get a chance and the download is finished.

Impressions so far:

1. It is extremely buggy and crash-prone. That is to be expected.
2. The UI is vastly improved from the PAX gameplay demo earlier in the year. It's a bit on the cluttered side, but it's better than looking exactly like D:OS2.
3. Graphically it looks fantastic. A big step up from their previous titles, and the in-game cinematics are solid.
4. It still has more emphasis on Original Sin-style environmental shenanigans than I'd prefer, but at least I haven't seen any conspicuously-placed explosive barrels in the middle of the wilderness yet.
5. The companions seem fun from the little I've played so far. I want to see some of the non-asshole ones soon though.
6. The camera is a nightmare that I am having to consciously fight at all times. This is the third Larian game in a row I've had this problem with, so I don't foresee it being fixed.

Early Access has satisfied all but one of my concerns, but that concern is a big one:

Based on the intro and the interactions I've had with companions so far, it is looking increasingly likely that the game's story is going to be in the same vein as D:OS2: your player character has little to no personal story or stakes beyond Immediate Problem That Must Be Addressed unless you choose one of the companions to be your protagonist (that is not an option at this stage of Early Access, but the UI elements for it are there). If this is the case throughout the whole game, I will be monumentally disappointed almost to the point of it being a total deal-breaker. I don't want my character to be a complete blank slate who sprung forth from the head of Zeus the moment I hit New Game - even BG1 gives you just enough vague details to establish you as a person with a history prior to the start of the game - and I certainly don't want to be some passive vehicle who is only there to see the stories of my companions through.

Yeah, this is definitely a pretty early beta test version.  Lots of graphics issues and control issues, and the storyline options are pretty weak so far for the 'build your own' PC.  You'll likely be best off running the prebuilds for the first time you really play the game.

That's how I remember DOS II, you definitely got more story by playing the pre-built characters.

Unlike most sites, a reviewer on Ars Technica really rips this one apart. Some of his beef is nitpicky complaints about it basically being too faithful to 5e mechanics, but the vast majority of his points are about style and substance. According to him, unless you are interested in playing an evil (or at best amoral) and despised asshole in a grimdark world with an asshat/incompetent DM and a lot of really ugly grimdark no-win situations, this incarnation of Baldur's Gate might not be for you.

I'm really jonesing for a good classic-style fantasy RPG with modern production standards so had high hopes for this one, but it's not looking so good.  Possibly this is a slanted and largely inaccurate portrayal due to Early Access limitations and/or reviewer ignorance or bias, but my hopes are fading.

Larian have said they frontloaded the Early Access with some of the jerkass companions to get them some visibility, and likely encourage the players to try out the more amoral/evil stuff to get it tested. I imagine that's what's causing a lot of the bad vibes at the moment.

That Ars review is silly.

I gotta say that sounds a bit like "there's a magic patch coming later" logic. I cannot imagine why any RPG designer would frontload jerkass/evil characters and grim/evil plots in a game that wasn't built around that (like Tyranny, etc). Would any of you have kept playing a Bioware game where your first playthrough required you to play Evil Shep etc? In most western RPGs, the evil playthrough is what you do on replay, unless it's an especially well-implemented branching system with a more subtle idea of evil/jerkass than the usual.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I dunno how much Larian adds/changes during their early access stuff, all I know is what Larian have said and that I've acquired all the party members on the title screen and they're all pretty evil, except for the Wizard who is just as jackass.

Dude can only “review” what’s there. Not what might be coming.

this is kind of late but we have new information.

One of the biggest pains in modern turn based RPG is how long turns take. Playing (and replaying) when you have interspersed turns can take absolutely forever.

Wasteland 3 did the same thing BGIII is doing and it made playing it compared to wasteland 2, on functionally the same system/mechanics, far far better. Side based initiative let’s players move/plan/select as animations are being done and lets the enemies movement/attack phase occur simultaneously in animation.

There are definitely downsides (combat is swingy, it’s hard to balance for ideal difficulty) but the upsides are turns that take half the time as normal

Do most people actually play the Good route first? I play Evil almost always, and only occasionally replay as Good or Neutral. Jerk Shep not being evil enough was one of the biggest reasons I couldn't get into Mass Effect, honestly.

Don't know about most people, but I for one certainly do. I can't bring myself to being evil really. I know, its only a game, but it still makes me feel shitty and I don't enjoy it.

I think I always do Good Guy first.  My FemShep had a rough spot during ME2, but she came back around. 

The only comprehensive stats I've seen were for Mass Effect, and I think it was around 80% paragon.

For a game like this, I usually play it through with a remake of an established RPG character. As such, they're usually not just 'good or evil', but characters … and I find it frustrating when the dialogue options do not align reasonably with something he'd say or do.  I'm not talking about exactly what he'd say or do, but just something in the ballpark. 

I think with evil being "dickface jerk who needlessly pisses people off" it's mostly not fun to do on first run, and also it's typically really really hard. When we encode "good" as "naturally inclined to cooperate and mutually support" and "evil" as "self-centered, relentlessly hostile, etc." any game that is about team-building FTW isn't going to work well. If "evil" was "smooth highly functional sociopathy" or "rational pursuit of a malevolent ideology", then that might be more fun/same difficulty.

This is not the politics forum.

I think Khaldun is making a point about how "evil" is represented in RPGs, and whether people enjoy playing them. It's mainly a social and gaming point.

Exactly - in most RPGs the 'evil' route is the 'be needlessly rude to everyone you are trying to get stuff from' route.

Most RPGs an actual psychopath would play the 'good' route first.

Yes. Exactly. Thank you.

I was making a joke.  It's mainly a bad one.

Hah, sorry. I can see the joke in retrospect.

I think Disco Elysium ruined dialog-based rpg for me. It set the bar so much higher than the rest.

If the incentive is strong enough and I have a specific build planned that needs a certain item which can only be aquired through evil deeds, then I can play as an evil character. Otherwise it gets boring or too conflicting.

I am not a good roleplayer...

I like Ars, but they are absolutely not my go-to gaming review site. It's not that they suck, I'm just not their type of gamer.

That said, really mixed feelings about this one. The stunning look of the graphics is a big draw for me, and gameplay is something I just adapt too, usually.

But the fact that there doesn't seem to be any way to play through without having to murder innocents -- that's a problem. This isn't a Dark Side/Light Side thing, it's just a shitty DM. One who won't even let you run, or strike to disable or stun.

But boy it all looks pretty. Maybe in a year or three on sale.

It is not looking that pretty on my screen.  Lots of graphics issues.  Their attempt at hair looks like flies buzzing around the faces.  There are large patches of ground that are just black because the texture did not load.  It has a ways to go.  

With regards to the story - For nostalgia sake I'll be playing this, but I feel like you need to play their premade PCs to get the story, and they're all grimdark psychotics.

Tyranny was honestly a good attempt at making a RPG that was basically the Black Company novels--the people making it just ran out of money so the game finishes ridiculously abruptly.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker has some sort-of-evil pathways that kind of make sense that aren't just "I'm a dick and I do dickish things hah hah" but still they mostly don't work that well. The basic trade-off the game proposes is "evil gets you stability, whereas good gets you community and loyalty".

It can be done! But it's hard. It is definitely not what I'd showcase in a Western RPG that's intended to be open to lots of play-styles that is also based on a beloved prior series. That suggests some really "we don't know what we're doing" vibes.

If you’re using melee there should be an action to knock people out instead of killing them

Interesting. If that is an option in the specific encounter that the reviewer is talking about then that would take away my objection.

As I said, Ars reviewers can often focus on things that don't matter a lot to me. I actually, er, trust the experiences of folks here to get a better idea of the enjoyability of a game...

Finally got around to putting a couple of hours into this.  First impressions>

-Definitely feels like DnD.  They did a pretty impressive job adapting the 5E rules. 
-Thank you thank you thank you thank you for the Turn Based mode.  Actual initiative rolls on turns.  Phew.
-Looks like a Larian game for sure, visually, though a notch or two improved

I could never really get into Divinity, but this pulled me in immediately.  Very cool opening sequence.  I have very recently started playing DnD in real life for the first time at 47 years of age, so I am pre-disposed to like this.  But that said, it is already better than what I was expecting.

Welcome to the Jungle.

Does anyone else have a pet intellect devourer?

"I'm not evil, I'm efficient, this is a war for survival and you are in my way".

Context (and writing) matters a lot. The Larian writing was like a GM way too impressed with themselves. Though even then I would not be surprised that most people trend towards not being or putting up with evil characters unless that is the explicit focus of the game.

But yeah, this sounds way too close to DOS to tempt me.

So I think this is pretty good so far. It feels like tactical D&D in the combat in a good way. There isn't a lot of absolute nonsense with poisons and elemental effects. The cut scenes are good. The characters are so far pretty good. I'm enjoying it.

Is this some reference to Larian's other games (which I have only barely played)?  I find that the elemental stuff here is more or less true to how it should be, although there is a lot of fire being splashed around - doing AOE and leaving a big fire puddle - by early level mobs.  I think they are just throwing little fire bottles at me all the time.

There are a lot of ways to pump out damage using the environment.  For example, in the first 'big battle', you can actually bring a huge number of explosive bombs with you and drop them in the battle area, resulting in a huge explosion and lots of damage to the big combatants.  Later, you might light a crease spell on fire, or do some other things that don't normally spell put to work in D&D as written, but kind of make sense.  

So far, it is like playing with a bipolar DM that is super permissive in certain ways, but is sticking to a railroad script and won't let you deviate from his grimdark tale of woe.

There's a lot of flexibility in the tactical set up, at any rate. You also don't have to kill everything to progress, in fact, you can just skirt along a lot of fights. No need to interrupt a certain bugbear and ogre, for example.

I do find the contrivances on "you can't go this way or that way" sort of annoying but that is bog-standard D&D/RPGs.

There is also a lot of content, and the content changes meaningfully if you have different people in the party. 

I'd suggest they add a combat tutorial that covers things like "how can you target creatures that are within range, but hard to get on screen" or "how do you add upcast spells to your toolbar so that you can cast a higher level version of a spell"?  They're simple to do, once you figure it out.

This is certainly standard for video game RPGs but the complete opposite of actual PnP RPGs.

Yes. But so far I'd say the game does a good job modelling as many things as possible in the combat in a fairly PnP way--terrain is destructable, you can climb a lot of places to set for a fight, you can use spells in some creative ways, etc. You're never going to be able to fully model the wackier side of PnP creativity in terms of combat and class abilities in any solo computer game. The only thing I'd say is that it reminds me a bit of how stupid tactical AI in RPGs usually is, because so far in BG3, I've had a number of combats where the enemies relentlessly target the wizard and the cleric, which is smart but also frustrating in that you have just got to set up a fight where they're way back or hard to get at if it's not a single target. I am hoping that if there are animal/monster opponents that aren't smart, they're not quite that tactically adroit--a bear shouldn't know to try and get at the squishy wizard in the way back. But so far it's all intelligent enemies, I think: goblins, gnolls, ogres, bugbears, an enemy party. Even intellect devourers are arguably "intelligent".

I was worried at first about the time element w/the brain parasites but now it's kind of clear that there's something going on such that the parasites aren't doing their usual thing and you can kind of go at your own pace...

After reading a recent article where developers admitted that the AI that had been lauded for being so smart was highly random, I was curious about how random the monsters were acting.  I picked a combat at third level against an unintelligent, but beefy, enemy and played it through a few times. My conclusion - there is a mix of plan and chaos in their tactics.

The monster had some clear instructions on how to start the fight, as the first two things it did were pretty much always the same regardless of how I approached the combat or what I did in those first two rounds.  Then it went into a random frenzy.  Sometimes it went after the fighter, sometimes the warlock, sometimes the cleric, and sometimes the wizard.  I think there is a lot of randomness.  There is a shoreline combat against 4 of the same creature (all of whom can fly) that I also played through a few times while trying to figure out the targeting tricks.  Those combatants seemed to use great tactics the first time through, but then reversed those approaches and acted entirely different in subsequent run throughs. 

Hm! It really felt to me like the goblins were going after the squishy.

One thing I do hope they fix is the pathfinding, which is goddamn perverse sometimes--trying to manage a party through a jump is a serious pain in the ass, but also sometimes characters will take off in the opposite direction because they somehow think you can't get from one place to the next.

Also am I missing it or is there no way to order an entire party to stealth, etc.? So far I only seem to be able to do it one character at a time.

I do it one at a time. 

I tried to have the majority of a party wait at high ground and then start a combat with the last PC entering into the conversation that triggered the combat, but that magically teleported the entire party to the spot where the conversation took place.  There is a lot of navigation issues for them to improve.
 

I think you cannot preset a combat that's triggered by a dialog, yeah. But you can separate the party and put them on high ground out of sight range and then send in Lae'zel to set it off.

Honestly, there are very few combats where you can just rush in and smack shit, and that could get tedious if they put too much trash in the later parts of the game (as I feel Larian has done in the past).

The other thing I kind of hate is the camera, which needs serious work. I'll be going along thinking it's basically fine and can handle a lot of Z-axis stuff and then suddenly I'll be camera-locked on the inside of a mountain or something.

Same.  I had the entire party die because I couldn't get the camera to see what terrain they'd entered. 

Anither navigation issue is sudden height changes.  More than once I've had the group teleport to the ceiling and then fall (taking damage and ending up prone).

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So I found another thing that they need to think about. They allow you to knock out NPCs rather than kill them but they are 100 percent not ready for what happens if you do that. I found one encounter where it's completely plausible that you would want to knock someone out rather than kill them due to a complicated misunderstanding but even when you've made everything completely right, that NPC is still aggro much much later and it aggroes the entire camp of NPCs.

There are a lot of EA rough edges. Considering how much polish there is otherwise--the voice acting is genuinely good to great, the cutscenes are good, the characters are interesting--they aren't going to be able to dawdle on this for years, I think. This had better be one case of EA being about getting the cash to finish well fast rather than to finish in dribs and drabs.

And yeah on too many low-level mobs having a big supply of really damaging attacks. Getting really sick of goblins who can throw endless alchemist fires at you, or goblins who have a bunch of spells or trash enemies who are fully stocked with poison and acid. Also I wish they'd clarify when you can kill mobs and not alert the whole base and when you can't. I killed the goblin torturer and his pal without a problem, killed the S&M priest without a problem, then killed all the goblins in the worg kennels to free the druid without a problem. Then when I snuck up on the drow priestess and broke the war drum first and whacked the three guys there, every mob in the place was aggro to me, though they didn't come running (that's another interesting and sometimes confounding thing--when mobs know where you are and what clusters they come in.) But I really hate when something that is this tactically built doesn't have a consistent set of rules about something like "the whole base is on alert" vs. "you killed two enemies and hid their corpses from patrols, no problem".

I did a bunch of reloads in that same place (sometimes technical issues, sometimes because I did something retarded early in the fight or whatever).  Sometimes is played out like you suggest.  Other times I was able to control the aggro.  Not sure always what I did differently, but my conclusion coming away from it was 'this could easily be the way a DM might let it play out'.  I don't want it to follow video game norms.  And why shouldn't level 3 goblins have tons of shit?  You can have tons of shit.  This is how it is supposed to work.

Well, it does explain why the people back at the grove are freaking out. I tend to fall into an expectation that goblins are kind of cannon fodder, one step above kobolds, as opposed to throwing alchemical fire and casting spells cunningly and all that. But sure, no reason why not except that if the AI has pretty much every enemy behaving more or less the same with the same sets of powers/capabilities as the PCs, it is somewhat monotonizing. Kind of like when an MMO so overdoes class balancing that every class does exactly the same damage over time to all the same targets, etc.

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Yeah, that was as they say immersion-breaking. They really need a camp-in-the-dungeon mechanism.

And it is certainly very Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 to be smacking the shit out of some group of disposable trash only to have one spellcaster in the back suddenly fuck the whole party up, or to decide to uncover the whole map in one grid and suddenly get totally pwned by something.

Been interesting to see the probable companions around the map--both tieflings, if the one on the bridge near the gith is as well as the one down the river. I almost thought the goblin in the cage in the druid area might be too. I wonder if the "evil" nature of most of the characters is an attempt to fulfill the new announcement that they're not doing "evil races" per se any longer--to show that even "evil" can be rounded and complicated and have a character arc. So far I haven't really felt that the dialog options for you yourself go much beyond the Bioware:

1--"How can I selflessly help you?"
2--"I have a mission, but if I can, I'll help out."
3--"Give me some money and maybe I'll help."
4--"Feel that warm wetness on your leg? That's me pissing on the very thought of helping you in any way."

Also interesting to find the places where you can explore onto another map that aren't enabled yet where that happens *before* you complete the plot arc of this material and advance the questline.

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I'm the rogue. Which is great so I don't have to take Astarion out.

I kinda wish they'd do what Pathfinder Kingmaker did, which on skill checks is find the party member with the strongest check on it. But I get on dialogue checks why it's always you, I suppose. Leads to a LOT of savescumming, though, considering how dire failure on some checks can be.

I'm running without a rogue.  I have a Warlock with a 16 Dex and 16 Chr (starting) as my build PC, and he has the criminal background.  I don't miss having Astarion around at all.  I'm running Fighter, Cleric, Wizard and my Warlock as the face. 

Supposedly the other companions (based on data-mining);

Minsc (yes, apparently bringing him back)
Karlach (the wounded tiefling you meet by the bridge)
Helia (thought to be a dwarven/gnomish werewolf? and a druid)

For a total of 8 companions. There's also a couple 'camp followers', like the skeleton resurrection guy; a drow, Volo, someone referred to as 'den leader', Sylvira, Daisy.

Personally, the number and type of companions are.. lacking, imo. There's a lot I like about BG3, but I also have a lot of issues with it (most are minor, some are not). Things like enemies having infinite spells/special arrows/flasks/etc is troubling. The changes to a number of the spells are making the game very DOS-like in terms of surface affects (which are way too numerous in those games, along with an abundance of conveniently placed explodables and such -- which are fewer so far in BG3, but still number way too many; hell, you can eliminate the entire big goblin siege with a single exploding flask because they bring exploding barrels with them and stand right beside them). The camera is shit (just as it was in DOS, but made worse with the terrain issues). Party control is also shit and jumping is a disaster, imo. Shove is one of the most OP things there is, and so on.

My biggest issue is, well, it doesn't 'feel' like D&D to me, really. More like a mod of DOS 2 the sorta exists in the Forgotten Realms, but without the atmosphere of the actual setting.

Likely the EA will last 12 months or so, based on Larian's history, so maybe things will get tweaked enough to solve some of my biggest issues (and mods the more minor ones). I do not have much hope, however, for it to feel like any kind of D&D game to me. I'm also not a huge fan of Larian's writing, so.. most likely this game is going to be a miss for me (unfortunate, but hell, they can't please everyone).

I'm kind of ok with the writing so far. Kinda. I knocked the bugbear boss in the goblin camp into an apparently bottomless abyss with the druid's knockback, which felt sort of dumb and sort of great at once.

It's a funny mix of great touches, good stuff, bad ideas and might-get-better-I dunno.

I'd say at this point it is a pretty fair representation of D&D with a bad DM that doesn't read anything under the headers in the rulebook.  I'm a little disappointed here and there, and the storyline as a whole is a bit groanworthy, but I will not regret dropping the cost of the game and plan to play it through.

I'm still hoping they implement everything so that I can drop my favorite recent PCs into the game, but I expect some of the options we want won't come until an expansion at the earliest.

I enjoy the checks and always (so far) accept the consequences, but it appears that it only does straight rolls.  Like it doesn’t add the modifier.  I sorta wondered if this was because it was evening things out because it is the Face character always making the roles, and not other party members who might have better stats for a particular roll.  In any case, I wish they would figure that out.  Make the person doing the dialog apply his or her stats to the roll, period.

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That is correct.  The modifiers are applied and it leaves you with just the roll you need to make.  So, if you save, do a social encounter with a high charisma PC proficient in persuasion, and then reload and do it with a character not proficient in persuasion with a low charisma, the DC required may shift by 6 or 7.

They covered it in a video - kind of annoying to not have the transparency.  I wish they'd put a popup in the lower right showing the calculations, especially so that we can see the advantage and disadvantage rolls when applied.

Ah, cool.  Although why on earth you guys would reload on a fail is beyond me.  Doing it wrong, IMO.

Part of it is that I want to see, by way of evaluating the writing and game design, how dramatic the branch points are for some of the choices. I was curious, for example, about whether you could even get through the gith encounter without fighting (you can but it's hard and interestingly enough Lae'zel isn't happy about it--she'd rather throw down with other gith than have you order her around). Normally you might save that for a second playthrough, etc., but that's not for EA, in my view.

I got down to the Underdark map and decided I'm not really interested in trying to figure out how to beat the first mobs you run into, who are pretty hard for a party of four level 4 characters. So stopping for now; I may wait until they're close to launch to try again.

IF you're interested in 5e games. Solasta just went early access. Its a more linear tactical game and has been pretty good for me. (It has some quirks i don't like but still runs pretty well). Might be worth keeping an eye out of BG 3 doesn't end up working for you.

Lots of people comparing it in the discussions on Steam, sometimes angrily (I can't always tell what they're angry at).

The RNG in BG3 so far really does seem off, just to cite another major Steam discussion. I understand all the pompous shit people say about probability when you question a probability model, but it really does feel like my guys are missing attacks that show 75% or better a lot.

I'm looking at this as a playtest, so trying to see the breadth of the content is part of the 'job'.  I tend to save it, run through something, save a new save file, load up the first save file, play around then go back to the save file I made after my first attempt.

I have either been decidedly unlucky, or the probabilities shown are not reflecting accurate chances.  I logged percentage chance on saves/attacks for 100 and saw an average percentage of 71% and effective percentage of 48%.

Anyone have a problem where Lae'zel walks up to attack someone and gets attacked instead?  Not sure why it happens, but it happens every few combats.  I just assumed it was bad movement and an OA, but she is not getting her attack.

Yeah, I get little oddities like that as well.  Have also used her Action Surge a couple of times on to not actually get to use it.

A bit disappointed level maxes out at 4 at this point.  I only just got to the Underdark, and am well past the point where I would have made 5.

It took me a while with Lae'zel to realize that she was getting baned everytime because I equipped those Absolute gloves.

BTW, who is the priestess-looking person in the loading screens? Is that supposed to be Shadowheart? Doesn't look like she does in the game.

Yes, that is Shadowheart. 

No, nothing like her.

I made the same mistake with those Gloves.  Then I gave them to Shadowheart as having her Bane an enemy is often better than having her cast her cantrip.

Alright so she's probably a character who switches back and forth between the good god and the bad god, etc. Sort of a boringly familar trope.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaJFP9v-ztk&list=PLrDx_gq2DCNK5ycc6YpOfFFpaPs80cIGn

This is a very interesting run through the game, that gets around that annoying group actions having to be done for each character bullshit.

That looks like a Wizard in heavy armour and yet somehow his cantrips hitting super hard and all the physical attacks are hitting almost every time.  In other words, broken.  Or is it because the dwarf has automatic proficiency?  Odd stuff.

I was a bit surprised that the Dwarf using a Greatsword was hitting so often, but I think he's mostly using tricks to get an advantage on the enemies, so that kind of makes the "to hit" not such an issue.

I used the Gith on my Wizard run and used that Paladin Sword all the way through with no issues.

By the way, I found that paladin encounter super-confusing. Are they paladins or not paladins? On one hand, they seem to be demon cultists; on the other hand the game still kind of treats them like they were actually paladins.

Kind of adds to the alignment weirdness of the whole early setup. There is really not a classic Dudley Do-Right character in the whole mix except maybe the big-shot druid and even he isn't really. The tiefling head sort of is? I guess Rath, the nice druid who doesn't want to kill little girls is? But otherwise it's kind of a real messy moral landscape. Which I'm fine with except that I get no real feel for the actual area or region that the EA takes place in. It's super-vanilla except for the goblin base and the Underdark. Well,  and I guess for the crashed ship.

One thing I do want to say about the cutscenes that open it and the storyline afterwards is that it's a great example of a level 1 campaign that doesn't stick the level 1 characters with grinding rats and kobolds. You're dealing with mind-flayers and Avernus and an actually dangerous goblin army and a hag right from the get-go. So yay for that.

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I would really like them to enforce LOS on everything, yes. Otherwise what's the fucking point of having war drums all over the goblin base and so on? Basically what I think they've done is define "groups" and when one enemy in a group is attacked, the whole group is mobilized regardless of LOS and they all have perfect knowledge of where everyone is--they essentially have a group AI rather than agent-based AI. That feels lazy and it produces fights that are much less interesting than they should be.

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Yeah. It's fine that the premise is that the tadpoles aren't the usual thing etc etc. but also the idea that you gotta find one of several exceptionally skilled healing solutions pronto is kind of ah well.

Is there multiple solutions ton the tadpoles in your head?

As an aside, as someone who's on the fence about BG3 I really appreciate the discussion and feedback you folks are having.

On the fence how?

I guess it depends on what you are interested in, but it is a pretty damn good 5e video game experience.  Well worth my 60 bucks already, even unfinished and imperfect.

Most important thing is probably that I'm not a big fan of Larian's storytelling so far, and I'm hoping that it improves.

There are also a lot of D:OS mechanics which BG3 seems to make a big deal of. Line of sight is probably a good example, I found it finnicky and annoying to deal with in D:OS2. Surfaces are probably another clear example. There's other stuff I've seen, such as the mob HP, or how experience is gained, but that's all second hand information for me.

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Except that does not work. 

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Just in case anyone still cares - BG3 has released patch 6. It includes the new Sorceror class and a new area in the Underdark.

I just don't want to play it again until it's ready or nearly so, I think.

I don't mind putting a few hours into it after each big patch, but I've never even come close to consuming all of the content in Act 1.

I stopped at the Underdark on my first runthrough because it was plain I was underpowered (and that the combat model was badly tuned).

Same for me - although I think it was more because you are clearly ready to be at level 5 when you get there, which is a massive power difference in 5e.

The leveling process still feels all wrong. I get to level 3 in just a few hours and then it takes forever to get to level 4. I've never actually gotten that far. The feeling of being underpowered drives me away.

But that is exactly how 5e is.  Not something they should be messing with, IMO.

I went back for another round of this.

Not worth it yet imo. And the performance in this current patch is really bad for me.

The chained group movement system continues to be the worst part of the game. But it doesn't look like they're going to fix that.

Otherwise, I'm still looking forward to playing the final release, they are mostly moving in the right directions (though I have no incidence in their ability to stick the overall plot).

I just started again too. Is it my imagination or have they drastically improved Shadowheart's stats?

I almost started another playthrough, but I think I'm inclined just to wait for the final release. I don't want to stop with half the actual content yet to come.

I keep going back and forth on this with Baldur's Gate 3.  Not sure if its the feeling that I am underpowered or I am just transitioning badly to the system that is getting me.  I find myself unable to reconcile the utter worthlessness of a lot of the battles as risk versus reward ratio doesn't seem to be where it needs to be.  I also find myself completely bored and unable to see any multiple solutions to things other than hulk smash, but maybe that is on me.

I've played a Bard and a Ranger up to level 4 at this point. They've either made the jump from 3 to 4 easier or I've gotten better at the game because I know how to do the major fights from repeating them a million times. Both classes are fun BTW.
In my latest playthrough, I've actually brought Laezel along instead of Shadowheart and I must admit it's nice to have a meat shield standing between Asterion and me and the monsters we're shooting arrows at.

I've never had much use for bards before. I was put off by Rognar the Gnome in NWN2 and I never bothered with any of them again.

Well, Patch 9 has been released on Steam. It has the Paladin class as a significant new addition. They also announced an official release date of August 2023. There are teasers about what happens once you get to Baldur's Gate up now, which I was pleased to see.

I'm downloading right now and I think I just might roll myself up a Paladin.

August release date for the whole thing btw.

So, is this actually good without making allowances for omg Baldurs Gate and D&D nostalgia?

I can tell you just from 400 hours playing the prerelease version that it's very good. From what I've heard, the release version that I'm downloading right now is significantly better.

They've made all of the main companions playable just like they were in DOS2. I liked that feature but I'm going to do a custom character the first time through. And it'll be fun seeing all the missing cutscenes that most of you will probably skip.

Is it worth picking up if I totally missed the prior BG games or do I need to go back and play those first?

I think it's likely better if you've never played the previous BGs, which are better in the nostalgic imagination than they are to play these days. There's a fair amount of Easter eggs in this one but I think it's fundamentally a different kind of game.

Also, you can have sex with a bear. https://www.polygon.com/23793804/baldurs-gate-3-halsin-bear-sex-scene-memes-romance

You're fine without, at least by my current impression. This feels like a cool blend of old infinity engine with modern Larian driven touches.

What I've played so far is quite impressive.

Definitely do not go back and play BG2.

It's not worth it for the pain of battling the UI alone.

Other than being set in Baldur's Gate (I assume! I'm not there yet!) it doesn't have any explicit ties to the older games. I think there might be a couple of character cameos and some of the books you can pick up and read reference events in those games but if you didn't play it, it's just kind of "hmm...history." and if you did it's like "Yeah, I remember Sarevok, I was so glad to kill that A-hole!"

tl;dr It's the third game set in Baldur's gate but is not a direct sequel to 1 & 2 from a plot and story perspective.

Any recommendations on classes, etc for a first run through?  Want to make sure I don't end up in a party that can't pick lock or make certain important skill checks.

Your initial companions are a Cleric, fighter, warlock, mage and rogue. So the basics are covered. I like melee characters with a touch of magic so I usually play a Paladin or a Ranger.

If you want the basic background story, that long series of posts from WindupAtheist from back in the day should cover it pretty well.
I'm sure Schild or Trippy would remember where it's been squirrelled away.

I played Early Access when it first came out and then set it aside because I was sure I would enjoy the rest and didn't want to spoil it with a lot of incremental, creeping playthroughs.

But I will say this about Larian + modified 5th Ed D&D: it's peculiarly tiring. Like, it's sort of like X-Com and Bio-Ware had furious sex and their baby is a very precocious, amusing but also exhausting toddler. You not only have to worry really hard about all sorts of dialogues with NPCs (party and non-party) but also most encounters are either disasters or winnable depending on a lot of decisions you make in advance about positioning, preparation, etc. It's like playing D&D with a very exacting GM who has great storytelling skills but is pretty precise about mechanics and is also not very loose about party dynamics. Unlike a lot of the games in the genre, I can only take a few hours at a time. Or maybe I'm just getting old.

Wow, I was thinking about getting this, and your description completely turned me off (and is what I find tedious about tactical games).  Is there an easy mode?

Yes. And in this case, I could see someone doing it, because the companions are pretty interesting, the locations are pretty involving, etc.

There are a fair number of fights you can avoid, also, even on Balanced mode. You have a lot of options, most of the time. But Larian's approach to combat is definitely "all spells and powers have tactical uses, and all tactics need to be considered in tougher fights".

That's good info to take on board as I've been hesitating over buying the game. I'll still buy it I suspect, but I'm happy to wait for it to get a discount on Steam

I mean, it's really good, but I don't feel quite that "just one more turn oh my god it's 3am" pull, because you really do have to pay attention throughout.

You could download the mod that gets you all companions in the party at the same time. Lets you breeze through the game without paying attention too much (because you fight the the battles tuned for half the partymembers) and you get all the companion stories and banter in one playthrough.

It doesn't get more easymode than that.

I will say that I wish the default party size was at least 5 without the mod, because at four you're basically having to make some ridiculous choices on party composition--I'm doing a player-created wizard, I gotta have a rogue, I have to have at least one fighter/barbarian, so that leaves me with either another fighter or the cleric, and never the warlock. It's kind of annoying, because it really pushes you towards a player-created character who can do frontline stuff.

It's called Explorer mode and it's what I'm playing on actually. I'm old enough and have enough stress in my life I don't play games for "challenge." (It's why I will never touch a From Software game)

It gives you a small bonus on skill checks, makes enemies hit less hard and makes NPCs in your party much less likely to die. I can mostly brute force my way through the combat with that mode on and enjoy the extremely deep story. (seriously, my best friend is playing too and merely based on our companion choices we're branching apart in our experiences already in a fairly major way.)

Thanks all, appreciate it.  It's funny, I played and loved (and was very obsessive) about Elden Ring, but for something like Baldur's Gate, I just want to be the Chosen One(s) and steamroll through the combat so that I can focus on the story, characters and dialog.

It's a pretty big departure from most games, where I appreciate a bit of a challenge.  I think the reason is because I hate the way that turn-based-tactical devs make encounters hard - by making it so  you need to figure out what abilities you need to use (and therefore have) to cheese the encounter.  I find that is a huge turnoff.

And, like Riggswolfe, I simply am too old and have more than enough stress in my life to put up with that shit in a game.

I think the frustrating thing with Larian's games is:

a) they don't build enemy groups that can just be ground up by a well-constructed party--even gnolls and goblins and so on have spellcasters, archers, etc., so you can't just send one character to trigger them and then run them back into a well-situated ambush
b) they don't build environments with choke-points
c) it's very hard to control LOS and isolate one group of enemies from another fairly nearby; you aggro one member of a group and most of the time, you're going to have a big mess of them down on you
d) the enemy AI is pretty good: they know how to self-buff, they will find ways around an environmental obstacle you put in their way to try and crowd-control them, they target the squishies;
e) a lot of enemies in Larian games have way more HP total than the party

So some encounters take massive planning--you have to cast the right spells, drink the right potions, position everybody just so, and you're still going to be save-scumming to get it done because the RNG will screw you occasionally in a way that is fatal. So far in BG3, on the middle difficulty setting, the gnoll encounter is driving me nuts with a party of level 4 characters, no matter how I try to set it up. There's no way to pick off one or two of them effectively beforehand, there's enough gnolls to overwhelm a four-person party no matter how you go about it, etc.  I haven't even tried the githyanki encounter yet because I remember that being nightmarishly difficult.

The goblin base is not so bad if you get in there without aggroing them outside--you can sneak around and pick off several groups in isolation, especially if you're careful to destroy war drums when you can. That sometimes depends on Astarion being able to one-shot kill from stealth, which is often an RNG coin flip. But even there, a few fights are aggravating again because enemy AI is good. If you're standing near the pit with the spiders in it, for example, all the enemies know they can sometimes shove you in it, which is more or less a guaranteed party wipe.

I might switch to the easiest mode myself: I just think otherwise it's not going to be much fun having to replay certain encounters too many times. I'd like to have at least a party of five too just because that's more fun.

This is exactly why I bounced off of Divinity: Original Sin 1 in less than three hours, and never touched another Larian game.

The Explorer mode really does remove a lot of those frustrations and gives you skill bonuses for conversations and lockpicking and such as well. The only downside seems to be it disables multiclassing for some reason but that doesn't bother me. Also some of these fights can be made massively easier by finding stuff to help you in unexpected ways. For instance in the goblin lair:

Yeah, you can talk your way through a lot of things and not murder-hobo everything, though sometimes it's not obvious how to do that or you lose a roll that you should win and you're off to the races. One thing you have to like about the game is that there is an insane variety of ways objects, characters and environments can interact. You can throw health potions at downed characters and they'll be healed (if you don't miss, or if the thrower's strength doesn't actually kill the downed character with a health-pot missile). You can pick up a barrel of firepowder and toss it like a giant grenade at bad guys.

But basically I switched to Explorer mode in the Underdark and started having more fun right away.

I'm not even going to pretend I don't save-scum past bad rolls when I should clearly win the roll. "Ok, with my stats and bonuses I only fail this roll on a 2 or less..." *fails the roll* "Eff that." *hits quick load button and retries*

I mean, a DM who wasn't a psycho would let you roll it again. And a DM who wasn't a psycho would find ways for quick-thinking players to try and recover from a bad role that was more 50-50, which no matter how well done this game is, that's a bit beyond its reach.

One thing I'm surprised by and don't like at all is that all the NPCs are just a little bit too horny--it feels almost like a bug, you can't have any interaction at all with some of them without them assuming you're looking to sleep with them--in some dialogues there's no option between "I hate you and want you to leave" and "Let's fuck".

You can just use Inspiration charges to reroll a missed roll.

I'm not finding it all that difficult as of yet, but I'm not playing on Tactician or anything like that. I'm kind of getting carried by Karlach, however. She can do an absolute (heh heh) ton of damage.

This is not true at all. A good DM would make failure just as interesting as success, if a roll was called for at all. If the players need to succeed for the story (or the task would be trivial), don't make them roll.

Sure, yes. What I mean by letting quick-thinking players do something is "making failure just as interesting as success", in some way. You never want to do a roll and be told "sorry, everyone just died", unless it was one of those rolls where the players insist on doing something like casting fireball at Odin while he's delivering a prophecy and the DM has said multiple times, "That would be a bad idea".

Dammit, I missed that quote and I want to play a Warlock/Bard.  Why do dev's do stupid shit like this?  So frustrating.

I honestly have no idea why it disables multiclassing. Maybe they think people playing at Explorer difficulty are unfamiliar with D&D or something. It seems kind of arbitrary though.

Failing rolls in BG3 is often fun and funny. Larian has a pretty good feel for this I think.

Yeah you still get a bunch of ones that just take you to combat, but you can probably work those out in advance and use inspiration rolls (which you rack up quickly) if you don't wanna fail those.

Personally I don't get the appeal of Larian games unless you love TB combat. Their system has its flaws but it wonderfully creating and fun.

Game does need a harder setting though, some good fights but none if them really challenging.

The best thing so far for me is the number of times you can roll up Lae'zel or Karlach and push the big bad into an abyss. What I especially love is that if the bad has something you really need, generally their corpse will be obligingly re-deposited back in the play area when the battle is done.

Of course, the bad guys can do it to you too...

The first time I went into the underdark, I got ambushed by a bulette and it automatically yeeted one of my characters to death.  Had to reload that fight six or seven times before I was able to get out of it without any permadeath.

Yeah, I learned with the bulette that you just gotta dash until you're in a safer area where it won't yeet you off. If you try to fight it where it typically emerges, somebody's permadying.

I must just suck. Even on Explorer some of the fights damn near wiped my party.

 
You can just have Withers resurrect the character if you have the coin for it no body required. I had to do that in my first playthrough because a bad guy yeeted my sorcerer into some lava during a big fight in the Grymforge. Also, if you have those revive scrolls you can also rez most of the time. It'll put a little blue orb by where they were yeeted and you can target it to bring them back.

I play on tactician too, and I think it's an OK setting for a blind playthrough if you're used to harder difficulties in tactical games*. There were a handful of challenging fights where I had to pull out all the stops - usually the main challenge in them is not the party getting wiped (though that happened once or twice), but an optional objective failing -- usually some suicidal squishy NPC getting murdered by the enemies since the AI feels pretty damn vicious. For example:

I think the encounters where the environment itself is the enemy (and there's an implicit/explicit turn limit) are the most fun/tense by far... that underwater jailbreak was insane.

* That said, I looked into some builds people are using online and there's some crazy broken nonsense out there. Like, martials doing 300+ damage per turn nonsense... I should've taken Tavern Brawler on Karlach apparently

Has anyone played Dark Urge?

Realistically I don't play 100 hour games twice, and 'the internet' seems to suggest it's fun even as a first blind play through.

I feel like I'll probably do one more playthrough on Tactician but only after they (maybe) patch in some of the content cut before release.

Dark urge is fine for a first playthrough.

I would suggest it in fact, the origin classes should just be companions really, and Tav is pretty empty.

It's still a Larian story tho.

I did Dark Urge, it's neat. It goes places, but largely expected places. It adds a lot of flavor to Act 3.

I'm interested in starting a new game at Tactician, but I don't like to sweat too much playing these game. I can get by playing un-optimally and still feel a sense of accomplishment when I get past a tough encounter. Plus, you know, Starfield.

Game is soft locked for me at the very end. I cannot initiate a dialogue with a crucial character, thus I can never finish the game. Fan-fucking-tastic.

Happened to me a once or twice while initiating dialogs as well. Changing from DX11 to Vulcan and vice versa solved that for me in those instances.

I had a character that happened with. I don't remember how I fixed it but it wasn't anything to big. I think in my case I may have gone back to an older save and replayed to that point or something.

There are a lot of small bugs that I can imagine terminating in a soft lock in Act 3. Your companions sometimes react to things that haven't happened yet, for example.

My main thoughts playing this are ....

"My god D&D character development is still fucking convoluted"

But also...

"Wow bg3 is good enough to make me properly understand D&D character build and combat mechanics for the first time in my life"

Amount of effort visible in encounter design is also great.

I'm kind of in awe at how relatively complicated some of the character interactions and story choices can be. Halsin, no--he's just there for sex, otherwise he's really not a companion; Jaheria, no--she's just there for the nostalgia. But the others have distinct personalities and there's a lot of texture to how things shake out. (The major exception I've seen so far is that incidental dialogue between characters in Act 3 reflects that none of them 'know' if La'ezel has decided to go against Vlaakith, but if you stop to talk with her, it's still very clear.)

Just finished my first playthrough, 200 hours, tactician, gnome bard, Will Shadowheart Karlach.

Kinda stupid how much leeway charisma based mains give you, can't imagine passing 25dc persuasion checks with a non charisma based class.
Fights are puzzles, DOT death zones and black hole/shoving are the way. I find that enormously satisfying but definitely not for everyone.
The story is amazing, VA amazing, choices a bit much but not too much like other Larians (DOS2 I was fireballing both sides and screaming I DONT FUCKING CARE at the screen at the end and didn't finish because fuck all those assholes)
Ending gave me a daylong glow where I was smiling stupidly and doing dishes and making food for the GF.
Now starting playthrough 2 with Monk/Gale/Lae'zel/Astarion. Gonna fail checks and roll with it, or at least gonna try to.

Love this game. So good.

My main in the first playthrough--almost done--is a wizard. I'm now running with Gale, Shadowheart and La'ezel and fights are fucking hilarious at this point, we just fucking melt and annihilate everything in a couple of rounds in a way that I really enjoy, and yet I'm also using some of the utility spells now and again, including Seeming. I'm enjoying being very sassy now in confrontation dialogues whereas I kind of had to grovel a fair amount up to about halfway through Act 2. Now it's like "oh hai chief servant of a deity--and hey, you, deity I'm talking to YOU ALSO, you can fuck right off and suck this disintegrate spell down your yap." I am REALLY LIKING that in a couple of cases where I figured a cutscene would start and say "no, no, you can't win here, the NPC has plot armor", I get to just fucking crush crush. I even experimented with just taking care of Foozle McGortash the first time I met him but that's not on (no cutscene, he's just got too much muscle in that first meet-up.

I think there's a chance you could funnel everyone through those back doors and make enough of a killing zone, need max lightning.

But my main worry would be if you take Gortash down first that homeless girl might cook and prepare her cat for you.

This is an insanely good game but I really don't need 80% of encounters to be elaborate puzzle boxes that I'm intended to solve with environmental objects and massive wombo-combos of throwables/magic/etc. Like maybe just let me do some more straight-forward encounters and don't put me up against stuff that's *just* higher level enough to effectively have 1.5-2 rounds of actions and damage to my own constantly. I have no idea how you deal with the Githyanki Patrol if you lose the roll to make them fuck off. I made the roll but tried the fight for the hell of it and the one fighter quite literally gets 5+ fucking attacks on their first round. I asked around about it if I wanted to try killing them all for loot and the general answer was the kind of boring-ass shit I've seen where it's just "lol stack a bunch of explosive barrels around them and blow the entire encounter up on round 1". Lame.

In my experience, 'barrelmancy' isn't needed for any of the encounters. I've gone through the game without abusing barrels -- I *did* use the hell out of my own characters' soft and hard CC, summons and consumables (grease flasks and various damage/control arrows for the main part), though...

The act 2 gith patrol was basically a lot of soft cc and kiting while my melee ground down their archers, I don't remember much from it. Fighting the patrol in act 1 didn't even cross my mind since they had a bunch of super high level dudes* and a fully grown red dragon with them. I figured that even if I killed them, there's no way I could get into the creche later without having to murder everyone... so I helped Lae'zel bullshit her way out of the situation instead. If I had to fight them, I'd probably initiate combat from the fortifications to have high ground and then just unload cc from range via grease, hold person scrolls, and once they blow their 1/day misty step to get to my position, use more soft cc as well as shove / eldritch blast knockback / thunder arrows to drop them back down (if they use misty step, they can't shove in the same turn).

* I assume they have a level 5 fighter who'd indeed get 2 attacks + action surge to get 2 more attacks once in a fight, which is pretty bullshit yeah. Get your own dudes to level 5 and do that right back at them! :awesome_for_real:

Githyanki patrol from act 1 is really just an exercise in F5-F8. If you fail the roll to avoid the fight, or try the other options, you get a fight where 1 if not 2 of your characters (depending on dice rolls) are dead before you can do anything. I am sure these fights exist to make some people happy with their Fortnite kind of bullshit stuff, but for me they are a let down. It's fine having to reload sometimes, and even realize that you picked the wrong answer in a given situation, but the whole interaction seems ripe for opportunities if you have Lae'zel in the party while it actually is just a murder box that you have to reload a few times to fully understand.

I'm not as far in as some of you, bit I'm finding simply not barrelling in and starting out of position is enough most of the time.

There aren't many fights that can't be solved by choke point management and a carefully placed ghost cat.

I do agree though, that consequences of bad rolls or not spotting an ambush are far too extreme and it's not cool that reloading becomes an inevitable mechanic.

I've played the heck out of it and love it but really wish there was a higher difficulty mode and they fixed a bunch of the overpowered bugs and such.

Kinda bored with my solo play as even without cheese it's not that challenging when you know the skills and such, and solo plays are also narratively boring.

Act 3 is still a bit of a mess of bugs and triggers firing wrong at times.

I might just leave it for a while now and come back in six months or so.

The game is really good. Better than I thought Larian could pull off. Hopefully they make some even better DLC and sequels, and we get more companies willing to make turn based party cRPGs as a result!

There's a fight near the end that has its own theme music that's really epic-feeling in part because of the music.

I LOVE that fight mostly because of the music and the fact the music is 100% diegetic as far as I can tell. I almost wanted to drag the fight out to hear more of the music!

It took me awhile to figure out how sneak leaves those that haven't been discovered separate from those who have (who enter into turn-based mode).  It's super important to not end the turn of those in turn-based mode until all the other folks are engaged (possibly by launching an attack as the way they enter tbm).  Until then, sneak seemed to be a giant disadvantage to entering a fight.  After that, fights got much easier.

I was also frustrated by that for a long while.

Just playing this well into act 2, my main complaint is the combat difficulty drops way down and, because it mirrors tabletop where turns take a long time, very few combats even take two full rounds - so I don't really get to use my cool toys.

I think this, and the experience people have finding combat hard, is two sides of the same issue. Some of the tough early encounters feel bad because you get ambushed and can hardly react before it's over, easier late encounters you find yourself winning before you even unload a full rotation of abilities.

Its still very good ofc.

That's also a bit of an issue with the design of the D&D 5e ruleset where your characters experience a tremendous power spike at level 5 and then again around 10/11.

I'm curious to see how you'll react to Act 3. The level of polish drops pretty noticeably in Act 3. It's still great but you can definitely tell a difference.

Fwiw, my initial reaction to act 3 is that act 3 and act 2 are the wrong way around.

Walking into act3 feels like side quest city. I would have enjoyed that at the start of act 2 which felt too linear.

Whereas I kind of want to get on with shit at this point but I am psychologically incapable of walking past optional content.

Yep.

The density of stuff in Act 3, when you get to Rivington, is overwhelming. But then you get to the Lower City and holy shit. It's weird to complain about a game being packed with three games worth of content, especially in the age of DLCs and shit, but this is frankly too much. As Eldaec said, it's all skippable in theory and that's probably the way to go, so one cannot truly complain. Just, fuck me, it's like they were trying to prove a hundred points and make a thousand statements, and managed to be right on all accounts.

Incredible.

As I read various BG3 forums I've realized how much I missed in my first playthrough--I didn't rescue the prisoners in Act 2 because I did the Temple of Shar first, so there's a bunch of stuff that depended on that which I didn't see in Act 3. I didn't even meet Minsc even though I bumped into the two groups fighting about the Stone Lord. I also buggered off a few things in Act 3 that I just found too annoying--the house with the ghosts is a rare piece of bad design on their part.

But that's great--I'm looking forward to a second playthrough to a greater extent than I normally might. The game is a fantastic achievement, really.

I'm not quite at the end, but my issue with all the 'content you might need another playthough to see all of', is that with the exception of the goblin/tiefling/druid standoff in act 1, its all very bioware. You miss a conversation or cutscene because you missed a specific character on your content grid search, but it's not really different paths.

The endings, as far as I can see, are endings you pick from late in the day, rather than endings you earn by achieving things in the world.

And it's exacerbated by the game turning into a point and click adventure, there really is no threat after act 1. The last battle I had to think in was when I accidentally aggroed the entire goblin sanctuary and village at once.

I find it hard to even justify casters at the moment because they run out of spell slots no matter how much I ration spell use, and martials are barely using up their short rest resources let alone long rest stuff. I've got into the habit of swapping casters had way through a 'day' just so I can use spells.

Long rests are mainly things I do to trigger plot events.

That said, it is a really good point and click adventure. And the power fantasy is fun sometimes. Once I'm done I might well go back and do a playthough intentionally aggroing every military encampment in the game

I particularly want to see if I can face roll the Gortash ordination ceremony that Karlach of all people told me was too much.

I hope I can finish this before December 7th when Rogue Trader comes out.

Rogue Trader is due out in less than a month and you can't pre-order it?  Weird.  But also, it's an Owlcat game so you'd be well served waiting 6 months to a year before actually playing it.

You can, from the official website. That's where I bought it, because it gave access to the beta too (not anymore).