stopthatgirl7Why did Baldur's Gate 3 blow up? Larian lead writer says it's thanks to "a big gamble" with CRPG standards
"We believe RPGs are big ... So we always believed the audience was there," says Adam Smith
Ulu-Mulu-no-dieThis game gives me the same vibes as Bioware games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age, I was craving for something like this, without the microtransactions and gambling bullshit infesting most modern games.
I’m not fond of DnD mechanics but it’s ok, it’s worth it nonetheless, BG3 is truly spectacular.
tissekDnD 5e mechanics works ok-ish, nothing really wrong with them. But 4e would have been waaaay better. Imagine more battlefield manipulation, more pushes and pulls. And a bit more dangerous ground, not DOS levels but a bit more. 4e would shine then.
genoI do agree with the person you’re replying to, in that I’m not a huge fan of how DnD mechanics work in BG3 - “works ok-ish” is what I would also say about them. But it does do its job just fine, so this isn’t a big issue by any means.
My personal issues are as follows:
Heavy reliance on RNG in combat. In turn-based games, I always prefer game mechanics which work as I planned, maybe with small variance (i.e. look at Advance Wars). Basically I prefer when my planning is the part determining how the combat flows (damage or cc? Which target? Where do I move to?) - there’ll always be some “I’m not sure what happens on next round” due to just not being able to know what the enemies will do on their turn, so I don’t really need even more RNG in the form of hit/miss (& save) rolls.
- I do think that RNG in some abilities is fine (i.e. I could live with all crowd control being dice rolls), but I don’t like that there’s just so many layers of RNG in all things. Damage abilities: first roll if you hit or miss, and if you hit, then the damage variance is often like 5d6 (5 to 30) - it’s almost like doing two rolls to figure out if you actually deal any notable amount of damage or not.
Practically everything related to the resting mechanic. I really feel like the game would be better if you just had fully recharged spells (and other stuff) in the beginning of any fight - and obviously then balanced with that in mind. Where needed, devs could tag a certain area as “no resets here” so you know you’ll be forced to do a couple of fights in a row without resets.
- One reason making me think this way is just the amount of available food, since get more than enough resources to do a full rest after practically any fight anyway - so now it just becomes a QoL issue. It’s not “do I want to use my resources to reset here?”, in practice the choice is just “do I want to spend a couple of minutes going through loading screens?”.
- If there was less food available so that you’d need to be careful about when/where you do a full rest, progress through the game would be: go forward until you fail a fight, load the game, do a full rest, fight with full resources - this really doesn’t sound fun in practice. I don’t think there’s a way to make this sort of a resting mechanic in such a way that I’d personally like it (at least without changing a lot more about the game as a whole).
I do want to finish this with another disclaimer that I do think BG3 is a great game, and these are really just minor issues - I completed the game yesterday and enjoyed my time throughout the game. But my two biggest issues that I can point out about the game’s mechanics are both just base mechanics of DnD.
Pillars of Eternity 2 took a different approach to resting by making pretty much everything encounter based, except for some “ultimates”. Was a while since I played it last but boy was it refreshing to not “needing” to rest after every encounter. The first game was more traditional with most things returning on rests. Two classes though were entirely encounter based and I used them in pretty much every run. Chanter (Bard) and Cipher (Psyker). Also Larian’s two previous cRPGs (Divinity: Original Sin 1 and 2) don’t use rests.
But resting is a core feature in D&D and in the tabletop there is the trope of the five minute adventuring day for a reason.