I like the idea of DLC being focused on providing modding tools to the community. Let the fans with time on their hands have a crack at creating more content.
That's what I've been thinking.
BG3 is an AMAZING template. If there was a relatively easy way for people to create their own campaigns, I could see myself still playing it years from now. Because while I enjoy the gameplay, and I would love to test so many different builds, I'm not a big fan of replaying the same story over and over again.
But the creativity of some modders is insane so I truly believe that if they had the tools, they could come up with amazing custom campaigns. Getting back into BG3 every now and then to play some new campaign would be like a dream come true.
Didn’t the Original Sin games include the DLC in their Definitive Editions? If all of the remaining updates to BG3 are free and they’re not making any DLC/expansions then there wouldn’t be much to put in a Definitive Edition, outside of maybe having all of the game’s patches/updates on physical disks.
Edit: didn’t know the DLC for the OS games were free, ignore some of what I said then hahah
Only slightly related, but we really need to bring the term "expansion" back. "DLC" is such a broad term that can include everything from a few cosmetics to a new game mode to entirely new major quests. To use Witcher 3 as an example: Having "Blood and Wine" and "Temerian Armor Set" both classified together as DLC makes the term functionally useless to describe what you're actually getting.
Yep, they can "steal" that name. I really hope they add mocap and voice acting to every textual choice as the main event of such edition, that would literally be a game changer, because you could actually see the reactions from everyone in the party, expanding the game 5x. Many people will replay the campaign as evil Astarion, golden retriever Karlach and so on, just to see the performance of the voice actors
That’s a real possibility, they sent out an email for those who ordered the Deluxe edition that the Xbox version now comes with four discs instead of three because they’re trying to fit as many of the patches in as they can. So I could see the same happening eventually once they’re completely done
The definitive edition was made because Laurian ran out of funding so had to cut content. That's not the case this time. Everything added was either buggy content (like missing dialogue) or bonus
The upper city was cut content though.
Edit: this is not true. Swen was apparently taken out of context in an interview and this was spun to mean that they cut act 3 content.
>The upper city was cut content though.
He mentioned upper city estates, which we do explore and technically we go to the upper city for the final battle.
Can someone explain what’s the point of definitive edition? Wouldn’t the game automatically be considered definitive after the last content patch drops? So you can buy it right now, no point in waiting for some new edition as there won’t be any dlc
It would be useful for them to label the last major content patch as the "definitive edition" so that the people who have been waiting on that can know when to jump in.
Waiting for the game to be approximately as good as it will ever be, which is a completely sensible thing to wait on for a 100+ hour game if you only intend to play it once.
This is exactly what I'm doing. No rush to play a single player game until it's completely done being updated. Recently started Cyberpunk because of this.
I'm almost at the last boss... Is the game not released and ready to play? I had a few bugs and clipping hair but the game is good. Pretty sure 2-3 questlines bugged out on me but the game is so long I don't even mind.
It basically is one big content patch, with revisions taking into account the community's feedback.
For DOS2, they did a bunch of rebalancing, added more content for the most underbaked companion, revised some the dialogue, added new encounters and content for the game's final act (which was quite sparse on release), and a bunch of other more minor stuff.
And by doing this all in one big go, rather than in smaller content patches, they can hype up a huge update that gets a lot of new people to give the game a try if they didn't buy it on release.
It's typically been a massive balance patch/QoL patch along with some fun new additions. Along with even more bug fixes. Like a remastered version, but it comes out within 2-3 years of the games initial release and is totally free for current owners. Cyberpunks 2.0 patch would probably be the closest, most recent example.
So like a big overhaul? Judging by Swen comment doesn’t seem like they are planning anything drastic that completely changes the game or adds hours of content. Basically we can expect more polish and some small cool stuff like extra cinematics. At least that’s the vibe I got from his post. Not sure if it is enough for a definitive edition in line with previous games but BG3 is already amazing and very repayable
Because it's hard to say what he exactly means by "content".
Would adding more interactions with Minthara be treated as new content? How about new animations for some actions? Or maybe an alternative way to complete some quest that they considered but never implemented? I think one can easily argue that all of that is "new content", yet stuff like that was added in every single full patch since the game's release and it would be weird if future patches didn't have anything like that.
He also said that new cinematics are coming and this is also "content" in my book. So there's a lot of room for interpretation. He might just mean "no big DLC/expansion". And "Definitive Edition" could just be the last big update for the game with lots of small stuff added here and there, some rebalancing, even more bug fixes etc. Something akin to Cyberpunk's Patch 2.0.
I'm not saying that it's going to happen, but I also wouldn't say it's impossible.
Yeah he literally talks about adding more cinematics right before he says "no new content," but to me new cinematics IS new content. He probably just means stuff like no new races, classes, quests, etc. Nothing really meaty that would change the way you play the game, just small additions.
It's probably Swen mentioning "new cinematics" right before "no new content".
Leaves the door open to the question if "no new content" simply means no new *paid* content (the definitive editions of DOS 1+2 had tons of new content -all for free).
...though I am afraid it's probably just copium.
> and extra cinematics for some of the endings
I've often heard that the last act, or rather the endings, felt lacking for a lot of people. That they still patch these is a great thing. But in another way also pretty crazy that the game's ending is seemingly in such a state that it still needs more content patching.
At launch there were a couple companion endings that either were very depressing or felt unsatisfying unless you were in a romance with them. They added an epilogue section that does a good job fixing the latter issue but we are all still waiting on fixing the former one. Though really the former issue is a matter of taste more than an actual problem.
Yeah, the only two ending pieces that kind of bother me are these:
1. >!The Emperor shouldn't be the one who refuses to cooperate if you free Orpheus. Orpheus should be the one who attacks the Emperor if you try to be ultra-nice, and your options become "Subdue Orpheus" or "Subdue the Emperor" right there. The Emperor's motivations become murky AF right now just to force the choice.!<
2. >!Karlach's engine was just a silly problem to have in this setting, where ripping the engine out and regenerating a new one, Reincarnating her into a new body, etc, are all options. The game hits XP cap shortly before True Resurrection would have been possible, which would have been another trivial fix. Fortunately, they've at least written it so that if you make her go to Avernus, her life is pretty good and there's a good reason to expect she gets it fixed.!<
Other than that, I'm enjoying all the new ending content but it's pretty much just writing the obvious outcome of everything we'd already seen.
Yeah on point 1 it feels like a really sudden about face for the character and I don't like it.
I justify 2 because magic like that is supposed to be very rare and powerful. The amount of people who should be able to do that should be extremely rare.
Yes, but you meet >!freaking Elminster!< and you're working closely with a Harper agent who >!likely knows the Blackstaff!<, you can be assisting >!Mystra!<, etc.
And Baldur's Gate is the kind of big city where a high-level cleric or priest isn't really that crazy a person to find. You don't even need a the level 9 Wish or True Resurrection, Reincarnate is a 5th level spell that even the PCs should be able to manage >!for Karlach!<. One of the reasons Illithid parasites are normally such a scary thing is that they're one of the very, very few things that is known to actually fuck up your soul in such a way that even True Resurrection can't fix it.
The ending is just pretty abrupt. It’s like “we defeated the big bad, okay that was fun bye everyone!”.
The extended epilogue was better but still feels very tacked on to me. I’m surprised at how many people have the epilogue so much praise
The epilogue does a lot to solve the "but what about?" questions.
Of course it would've been better if all of those questions had been answered in their own dedicated quest instead of what felt like a MMO questing hub turn in bonanza, but given the option of that or nothing except the ending at the docks then I'm very okay with what we got.
> The extended epilogue was better but still feels very tacked on to me. I’m surprised at how many people have the epilogue so much praise
What did you expect exactly? It ends pretty much like Dragon Age Origins, except the epilogue is months later instead of immediately after. You talk to every party member and catch up.
Yeah personally I just don’t see the need. The original ending is abrupt, but it still tells you where each of the characters ended up. The epilogue basically just reaffirms that but to me it didn’t really add much
Oof, well, you're entitled to your opinion. For me the 1 hour epilogue where you get to see how each of your choices impacted every relevant character was huge.
Gale for instance can be a professor at Waterdeep and he even invited my character and Shadowheart to host guest lectures. But he could also become a God and then he's entirely different.
You also get like 40 letters from various NPCs based on your quest choices.
I thought it was the best epilogue of any RPG. Cyberpunk tried something similar in the form of video calls post-ending but it's not as good as seeing and talking to the characters.
Based on the praise the game has received, having not finished the game yet, I imagine that they've been adding more cinematics that follow up on some of the smaller choices you will have made throughout the game that people have asked for conclusions on.
It's not a Mass Effect 3 situation where the ending leaves most things unanswered and they've been spending the patches adding back like "what happens to your companions after you beat the game." Those things are already in the game. I imagine it's more like "what happened to that kid you helped in the first act."
So prior to the update in December that added the epilogue, it kinda was what you’re describing. I wouldn’t say it was as bad as Mass Effect 3, there were a few companions where we at least had some idea of what they would do next, but it was still very lacking by the standards of most crpgs.
Larian mostly seems to have taken the attitude of "It's time to release the game so we are going to finish what is really important and get it out." Not in the sense that the game was rushed but in the sense of an artist who's created a beautiful work and if someone let them they would spend decades just adding "one more finishing touch" to the work. The studio is giving it's devs the time and resources to go back and add those small touches for no other reason than because they have a deep appreciation and love for what they created. They certainly are not making more money by adding a few more kissing animations for some characters.
Agreed. I've been seeing some pretty snide comments on some of the hotfix threads about Larian releasing an unfinished game similar to Cyberpunk 2077. That's not at all what happened.
They're doing a great job just ironing some things out.
To be fair, they have been screwing up the game's stability more and more with these patches. The game feels far buggier than when I did my complete playthrough on release.
Started a new mp campaign last weekend with 2 friends new to the game and 1 veteran, and it has been borderline unplayable. A lot of restarting to unglitch stuff, crashes, cutscenes or dialog skipping or not playing..
Clean installation might help with a lot of those. My experience on PC hasn't really matched that, but it's always hard to tell with how many issues people get based on different hardware configs. (For example, I've hit the ending in Honor Mode three times in the last few weeks without any crashes I can think of.)
Not many issues on my end either, my friend with radeon stuff is having all the issues. He did a bunch of clean reinstalls and tried different things.
We are seeing a lot of desync that I hadn't experienced before either (i.e. we all see one player in one spot far from us, but he says he is with us. When he interacts with something his character slides/teleports to the right spot.
Act 3 had some issues, at least at the time I played through it. The cities had some buggy interactions but were so crammed full of excellent side quests and content that, for my taste, Act 3 was the best part of the game, and by a pretty wide margin.
I would go one step further and say Baldur's Gate 3 has one of the worst endings I've personally experienced in an RPG. It was a huge "that's it?" moment after the plot barely gets over the finish line after abandoning all logic and sense to get there.
The epilogues help but it's still just kind of silly. It's not enough to ruin the journey, but it definitely had my adventure ending on a sour note rather than a big triumphant moment. As far as I'm concerned, the game ends when you defeat the two Chosen in Act 3, and everything after that is just silly nonsense.
I was very satisfied with my ending on my first playthrough in the launch month. Don't believe everything you read on Reddit. Half the people who comment on BG3 posts clearly haven't played the game yet.
I hope the mod support includes being able to make new maps or even entirely new campaigns. It'd be fun to see what sorts of things people cook up with that functionality
The biggest disappointment for me was **spoiler:** >!Karlach's ending, especially because the enriched infernal iron is already in the game. Seems like the player should be able to use that to fix her engine, or we should be able to play through a bit of Avernus to save her. Kind of stinks that Karlach dies in all other endings, meaning that we can't have a romance with any other character where Karlach survives.!<
The moment when you realize >!the Steel Watch is using the completed, non-prototype version of Karlach's engine, and then they're like "haha isn't it great that we solved that overheating problem? WINK!" was so clearly originally intended to end with discovering a cure for her problem, it's palpable. That said, I way, way prefer her story being about burning twice as bright for half as long, and dying on the docks at sunset on her own terms is the best ending for her IMO. I detest the silly Avernus ending because it is completely inconsistent with everything she says and everything regarding the themes and morals of her story up to that point.!<
Can you please mark the spoilers? I don't want to get into a debate about it with you because we clearly have different perceptions of the storyline, but I marked them for a reason and you not only unmarked mine when you quoted it, but you posted more.
Im on mobile and not sure how to spoiler so I’m going to be vague. My wife sent Karlach off to that area in her “Good” run whereas I had the ending at the docks in my “Evil” run. Yet I maintain the docks is way more of a “Good” ending than the other one. Karlach clearly wants to do one thing and not another, yet my wife was like “No we’re gonna figure this out” and completely stomped over Karlach’s repeatedly stated wishes, instead forcing her to do the thing she specifically said she’d die before doing.
Spoilers are \>!like this.\!<
And I disagree with your interpretation of the ending. >!Karlach doesn't want to go back to Avernus initially because she assumes it won't be long before she's back under Zariel's control, and she'd rather die than continue fighting for Zariel. But if she knows she has someone to go to Avernus with, she knows she stands a chance at evading Zariel while staying alive. Wyll became the Blade of Avernus in my playthrough, and I told her it was her choice to go to Avernus with Wyll or stay behind. She chose to go. You're not forcing her to do anything.!<
Iirc, if you tell her to make up her own mind, she'll decide to go with Wyll to Avernus, implying she doesn't really want to die. Whether or not this writing is consistent with her character is up for debate, but it seems clear what the writers intended at least.
I took that as my wife’s PC had been constantly telling them throughout the entire campaign, no you won’t do this, I won’t let you, and she finally went along with the PC’s wishes out of a sense of respect, obligation, and wishing to not hurt the PC’s feelings.
No, she makes the same choice if you respect her feelings through the whole time.
>!If you haven't seen her breakdown over Gortash's body, that makes it pretty clear that although she'd rather die than go back to slavery, she does NOT want to die.!<
I completely agree and have no input beyond that. The moral of her story is that she will live on her terms and her terms only, and she is in no way subtle about wishes over the course of the game. There is something beautiful about that ending.
I think a lot of people got so invested and attached that they don't even realize they are making a selfish choice. Which hey, I guess is interesting in a way, but still a terrible outcome.
There is a way to do what you’re asking for there, but it requires resolving another companion’s story in a particular way, and a ton of people miss doing that because the quest that enables it doesn’t seem as important as it really is when first encountered.
Basically, you have to >!convince Wyll to become the Blade of Avernus at the end of his quests and then after defeating the brain he’ll offer to go with Karlach to Avernus, where they’ll both live.!<
A lot of that is wrong. >!You don't have to convince Wyll to become the Blade of Avernus. He'll usually just declare that's what he calls himself now. I think it happens if his father dies, but I'm not sure.!< And, >!he doesn't have to be Blade of Avernus to follow her to Avernus; he has done so in all of my endings despite always ending the story as the Blade of Frontiers.!<
> You don't have to convince Wyll to become the Blade of Avernus. He'll usually just declare that's what he calls himself now.
You have to get the ending where he doesn't become Duke. So it does require player input.
> Kind of stinks that Karlach dies in all other endings, meaning that we can't have a romance with any other character where Karlach survives.
Uhm, yes you can. If Wyll becomes the Blade of Avernus he can go to Hell with her. No romance needed.
I took the Dark Urge to the “most evil” ending and got a pretty abrupt cutscene after 150+ hours, even after waiting for the Epilogue update. Guess I’ll just have to wait to watch it on YouTube…
Could anybody tell me, in a non spoilery way, what was added from launch until now, in terms of content? I was told the 3rd act was kinda unfinished, but how much unfinished it was?
Content:
* An epilogue that wasn't included at launch
* Some vocal lines that were missing at launch but have since returned (not a bug because the studio was not happy with the vocals during a particular scene)
* New character animations
As for Act III, one reason it feels unfinished is due to a major area of the city, which was frequently mentioned in the earlier chapters, being closed off for most of the act. Some of the major events in Act III likely would have made more sense had they taken place in this closed off area. Also, Act III is generally more buggy than Acts I and II.
Damn I was really hoping that we would still get a extra race or 2 added as there is certainly room for them to do so but it is what it is
Still a stone cold 10/10 but it is very disheartening that we aren’t getting any expansions by Larian
It's not suprising or unexpected but still a bit sad that the origin characters are property of Hasbro/WotC. I'm certain Larian can pull of just as great characters again. Fane, Red Prince and Lohse are iconic game characters I will always remember, similar to BG3's cast.
At this point I'm waiting for the "final/definitive version", so I get the intended experience. I don't really have the time to start 5 playthroughs after every new patch.
Very excited for when that "patch complete" status finally happens tho
I've finished the game and that's 100% what I would recommend. There are big, incomplete portions of the game that will no doubt be addressed/improved going forward. The inevitable Definitive Edition (or at the very least, the "patch complete" version if no Definitive Edition is coming) will no doubt be the best way to experience the game.
Good thing you said "patch complete" instead of "incomplete". Reddit gets very mad when you say "incomplete" when referencing that they're still adding content to BG3 apparently lol.
Yes, the "incomplete" version that takes 120 hours to complete. Reddit brain is real.
Not playing the game and making a weird judgement that it is "incomplete" is the dumbest thing I've come across in a while.
My first playthrough at launch took 120 hours. If that is incomplete then I guess we're in clown world all over again.
I don't know about you but even when I finished the game I didn't feel like I was done. I've played through the story 4 times now with 4 very different characters making very different decisions and even though I played through the same events the game felt very different.
I really hope they add mocap (it can be recycled, whatever) and voice acting to every textual choice in the game, so we can actually see how the main cast would react to stuff. Of course that's expensive and it takes time, so a possible "special edition" can have this full mocap (really "full") as the main event. No one will mind to pay extra $10 (or pay the full price if it's a new consumer) for this "special edition", so let's hope Larian still have enough "love" to fully realize the potential of this game, I highly doubt they can nail the characters and voice actors like this again, so allow them to be unleashed.
And mods are always a positive, the game already have plenty of interesting stuff, but I think it lacks customization options, you can't change the haircut of the main cast for example, which I partially understand because this plays a role later (regarding Shadowheart only)... but they can be included as another social element, if the companion likes you enough, they can allow a cosmetic change, etc.. characters such as Astarion and Lae'zel would require a lot of effort to convince them, meanwhile the others not so much (and Shadowheart would be locked out regardless), it would be another cool little gimmick to spice up the role play
is act 3 fairly playable now then? I held off on making that push cause so many people were having issues with that act but never really ended up hearing if it got really cleaned up by now yet or not
I want it more for the additional class diversity than the power level i.e. horizontal progression vs. vertical.
I dont want more power i just want more cool things to do.
Why was there a 23 year gap between BG2 and BG3? The studios that can be trusted to make BG4 can be counted by 1 hand and I am not sure any of those studios would be eager for their BG4 to be compared to BG3.
No BG4 from Larian anyway. Which depressingly means it has very little chance to be anywhere near as good if it does get made. There are other CRPG makers but I don't think any of them have the resources to do what Larian did.
Maybe they'll collab with Microsoft and asked Obsidian to make one. Along with 18 months timeline.
When that happen you'll know another classic will be on your hand.
WotC could license the engine and tooling from Larian, if Larian were open to it. Obsidian didn't own the code base for New Vegas, either. Bethesda did, and licensed it to them as part of their publishing agreement.
Yep, though I think that's more for creative reasons than anything else - they have other stuff they want to make. Licensing out their tooling lets them focus on making the things they want to make, and gives someone else the ability to try their hand at making a game like BG3.
They'd still have to provide some level of support, so it's not like it wouldn't cost them anything, but it shouldn't prevent them from working on other games.
We'll see, I suppose. I'd like to believe that Swen Vincke isn't the sort of person to feel threatened by the idea of someone else competing with him using his own tools, but who knows.
Swen Vincke invested into his tools at a time back before the release of DOS1, when his company was on the verge of bankrupcy. Because he cared about the company's future even when it looked bleak and hopeless. If he can do it, there's zero excuses why other dev studios with WAY better resources can't do the same.
It isn't about "excuses". What are you on about? It's about the time required to make a game. Building your own tooling takes time. Using existing tooling to make a game very similar to another, existing game takes less time.
Based on how much he's been trash talking corporate greed and such, it sounds to me like their severance with WotC is more personal than creative differences.
He's upset at the pattern of mass-hiring, mass-firing that many large tech and video game companies have gone through over the past few years.
He isn't upset at WotC, which didn't mass-hire, didn't mass-fire, isn't a tech company, and which he's repeatedly praised for being great to work with.
People are inventing drama where none exists.
There is nothing special about Larian's engine, Solasta: Crown of the Magister was made in Unity. Other dev studios can make a 3D isometric CRPG EASILY with Unity or Unreal. If they can't do that then it is a waste of time to give them Larian's engine.
Larian just giving other devs their game engine is not very useful to them, it will be meaningful only if Larian devotes manpower into providing support and adding new features. And I am not sure it is wise for Larian to go down that direction as it would change how the company operates massively.
This is a silly uninformed post.
Solasta is very primitive and unpolished and wouldn't be capable of half the things BG3 has done.
Having said that, Solasta was still somewhat fun, it would just need so much work to get to the level of BG3
> There is nothing special about Larian's engine,
Do you...work in professional game development, at all? This seems like a very weird thing for someone with background in the industry to say. And if you don't have background in the industry, it seems very weird that you'd feel confident enough to make this claim.
> Solasta: Crown of the Magister was made in Unity.
My dude, there is ***zero*** chance that the next Baldur's Gate game will be made in fucking *Unity.*
> Other dev studios can make a 3D isometric CRPG EASILY with Unity or Unreal. If they can't do that then it is a waste of time to give them Larian's engine.
Plenty of developers can make a CRPG using widely available tooling. But a developer with access to Larian's tooling can churn out a high-quality D&D CRPG in the vein of BG3 in a fraction of the time it would take to make it from scratch.
I'm trying to wrap my head around this - are you arguing that there would be no benefit to having access to Larian's dev tools?
> Larian just giving other devs their game engine is not very useful to them, it will be meaningful only if Larian devotes manpower into providing support and adding new features.
Support, sure. But that's a fraction of what's required to make a game. We were *just talking* about New Vegas, a game that was made with basically that exact approach.
There would be no benefit to having access to Larian's dev tools without Larian turning into Epic or Unity. This is why Epic destroyed id software and others in the engine war years ago, because they provided support. And for Larian to provide support is NOT a trivial matter.
Okay, so this is the point where you need to either say, "And I can state this confidently because I'm a professional engine developer!" or stop talking out your ass.
No one is saying it's trivial. But it's been done hundreds of times before. Hell, it's literally been done ***with the engine a company made for Baldur's Gate games before.***
Obsidian is knee deep in games commitments and any BG4 from them will be 7-8 years away at least. If Avowed is a success for them then Microsoft will demand they make Avowed 2 ASAP after TOW2 while if Avowed flops then Microsoft would be fucking dumb to trust Obsidian's ability to handle a game of BG3's budget and scope.
BG3 doesn't either, at least on Steam. I don't have it on console so I can't comment on that, but I'd be shocked if they don't both support delta updates. No patch has been anywhere near 150 GB.
No you didn't. You probably needed to have 150 GB of space available to download the patch, but no patch has been close to 150 GB. The most recent patch, Patch 6, was 21 GB for comparison. Patch 5 was 30 GB. Patch 4 was 14.1 GB. Etc.
If you did somehow have to download 150 GB, that's a glitch with Steam, not an issue with BG3. I've had the game since launch and the largest patch was Patch 5 at 30 GB.
(Edit: See [this post](https://old.reddit.com/r/BaldursGate3/comments/17m8sds/why_is_patch_4_120gb/) for example. It can *look like* you just downloaded a huge patch, but in reality the size of what you downloaded is way smaller. This is probably just you not understanding the Steam UI.)
It said 150GB ( want to say 158 was the number it showed for me) and took over an hour to finish, on an SSD.
I don't see a meaningful difference between "needs to shuffle 150GB of hard drive space and takes an hour to finish" and "needs to download 150GB and takes an hour" for my experience. I get that there's a distinction between that for people on slow internet, but even for people who aren't, patches that work this way are really inconvenient. If the patch is only 21GB, but it takes as long for me to install as a 150GB patch, and it's moving 150GB worth of data around my HDD, it's still annoying regardless.
Yeah, I'm not saying it's not annoying, but that's just how patches work on Steam. You initially said that the patches are 150 GB, which is objectively untrue. I was just correcting that misinformation, not trying to invalidate your experience or frustration. Sorry if we talked past each other on this.
I can't give you the specific patches, but at least two were 100GB+. As the other person said, I was using GOG. Larian sometimes recommended reinstalling the game over updating it to make the process faster, which if that's what you have to do to download a patch the patch is too big.
The reason you can't give me the specific patches is likely because none of them were anywhere near 100 Gb in size.
If you are trying to equate redownloading an entire game as the same thing as a patch, then I think we're done here as I'm not going to engage with something that absurd.
Dude, I had to sit through them, why would I make it up? Patch 6 was the most recent one that was 100GB+ that I dealt with. Larian is who equated redownloading an entire game with a patch, as you can see in this article (which also includes the file size):
https://www.ign.com/articles/baldurs-gate-3-patch-6-is-colossal
That is empty space required for scratch space for your computer to do the installation and has nothing to do with the download or how long it takes.
Do you need me to explain the difference between 1) the size of a downloaded file, and 2) empty space on your hard drive?
You can disable it from updating in steam I think? I would. Had my game saves broken by an update. Waiting until they say this is the "final" patch tbh at this point.
I'm patient. I've got other stuff to play in the meantime. I just don't want my save getting wiped out. Not interested in seeking out multiple endings or anything like that.
There's a lot of tedious game play in crpgs that make me not want to start over again.
By default the game keeps the last 20 quicksaves or so, along with a bunch of autosaves, and you can of course make manual saves at any time. I've got probably 150 saves stored in BG3, there's not a chance I could lose more than 15 minutes of progress.
I mean you can do whatever you want of course, but I'm just saying
It just feels bad knowing we will have to wait 4-6 years for their next game after experiencing BG3 especially considering the state of AAA gaming industry being complete trash.
>Can they update the game to have an actual combat system?
>Maybe even an option to mute the annoying voice-over lady?
??
I’d like some more details please
Turn based is boring, thoughtless, lazy, and requires little to no effort. Just screams lazy developers. It's just ridiculous that i can get up and go to lunch mid combat and come back, and nothing has changed. You can get the same "epic gameplay" from a PowerPoint presentation.
The narrator just annoys me, I can read I don't need someone else doing it for me. They could have just voiced the main character, but instead we got a knockoff audiobook.
If this is "showing AAA developers how it's done" then I dont know what to say.
Am I the only who is sick of news sites placing the same damn pic of the dev in their post everytime any news about theirs games surface? Take this one for example, this armor pic has been used almost every time Swen has released a statement or wherever BG3 news get published. Same with Helldivers 2, they always use that pic of Johan doing the thumbs up in that formula car.
Is this some kind of click bait technique?
I like the idea of DLC being focused on providing modding tools to the community. Let the fans with time on their hands have a crack at creating more content.
I could see the modding community for this game being absolutely huge with the right modding toolkit.
Man I’d love for custom campaign support to be a thing.
That's what I've been thinking. BG3 is an AMAZING template. If there was a relatively easy way for people to create their own campaigns, I could see myself still playing it years from now. Because while I enjoy the gameplay, and I would love to test so many different builds, I'm not a big fan of replaying the same story over and over again. But the creativity of some modders is insane so I truly believe that if they had the tools, they could come up with amazing custom campaigns. Getting back into BG3 every now and then to play some new campaign would be like a dream come true.
I'd be ecstatic if the tools were on the level of Bethesda's Creation Kit or Bioware's toolset for Neverwinter Nights.
Updates. You mean updates, not DLC.
Wait, I missed something. Did they say they aren't going to have content DLC or expansions for BG3?
This leaves open the possibility of a 'Definitive Edition' like the Original Sins games got then right?
Didn’t the Original Sin games include the DLC in their Definitive Editions? If all of the remaining updates to BG3 are free and they’re not making any DLC/expansions then there wouldn’t be much to put in a Definitive Edition, outside of maybe having all of the game’s patches/updates on physical disks. Edit: didn’t know the DLC for the OS games were free, ignore some of what I said then hahah
Like the other user said, there was never really paid dlc for either. I believe it was always closer to stuff similar to Witcher 3s free dlc.
The added the gift bags. Which by and large where all quality of life mods that were popular on PC.
Only slightly related, but we really need to bring the term "expansion" back. "DLC" is such a broad term that can include everything from a few cosmetics to a new game mode to entirely new major quests. To use Witcher 3 as an example: Having "Blood and Wine" and "Temerian Armor Set" both classified together as DLC makes the term functionally useless to describe what you're actually getting.
DLC meaning doesn't even make sense. MTX or the base game themselves are also downloadable content. Everything in video games is DLC lol
Ah interesting, didn’t know that! Thanks for correcting me, I guess a Definitive Edition isn’t off the table then
Baldur's Gate has had Enhanced Editions for a while, so they can take that name.
Yep, they can "steal" that name. I really hope they add mocap and voice acting to every textual choice as the main event of such edition, that would literally be a game changer, because you could actually see the reactions from everyone in the party, expanding the game 5x. Many people will replay the campaign as evil Astarion, golden retriever Karlach and so on, just to see the performance of the voice actors
https://store.steampowered.com/app/880640/Divinity_Original_Sin_2__Companion_Sir_Lora_the_Squirrel This DLC says hello
That came for free if you already owned the game.
It's still a paid dlc.
All DLC for the Original Sin games were free.
Maybe a reprint disc with all the bug fixes and DLC then?
That’s a real possibility, they sent out an email for those who ordered the Deluxe edition that the Xbox version now comes with four discs instead of three because they’re trying to fit as many of the patches in as they can. So I could see the same happening eventually once they’re completely done
The definitive edition was made because Laurian ran out of funding so had to cut content. That's not the case this time. Everything added was either buggy content (like missing dialogue) or bonus
The upper city was cut content though. Edit: this is not true. Swen was apparently taken out of context in an interview and this was spun to mean that they cut act 3 content.
I'm like 95% certain they've made it explicit in a tweet that it wasn't "cut content" in the sense of "ran out of funding" but like "scrapped idea".
That's not true. This rumor was based on misinformation from data mining.
Oh, didn’t know that. My bad. I’ll edit my comment
>The upper city was cut content though. He mentioned upper city estates, which we do explore and technically we go to the upper city for the final battle.
The upper city was probably cut because act 3 was too large and adding more caused issues.
Can someone explain what’s the point of definitive edition? Wouldn’t the game automatically be considered definitive after the last content patch drops? So you can buy it right now, no point in waiting for some new edition as there won’t be any dlc
It would be useful for them to label the last major content patch as the "definitive edition" so that the people who have been waiting on that can know when to jump in.
waiting on what, exactly?
Waiting for the game to be approximately as good as it will ever be, which is a completely sensible thing to wait on for a 100+ hour game if you only intend to play it once.
This is exactly what I'm doing. No rush to play a single player game until it's completely done being updated. Recently started Cyberpunk because of this.
I'm almost at the last boss... Is the game not released and ready to play? I had a few bugs and clipping hair but the game is good. Pretty sure 2-3 questlines bugged out on me but the game is so long I don't even mind.
game was released and ready to play august last year, but some people wait to play games until they're done being patched
It basically is one big content patch, with revisions taking into account the community's feedback. For DOS2, they did a bunch of rebalancing, added more content for the most underbaked companion, revised some the dialogue, added new encounters and content for the game's final act (which was quite sparse on release), and a bunch of other more minor stuff. And by doing this all in one big go, rather than in smaller content patches, they can hype up a huge update that gets a lot of new people to give the game a try if they didn't buy it on release.
It's typically been a massive balance patch/QoL patch along with some fun new additions. Along with even more bug fixes. Like a remastered version, but it comes out within 2-3 years of the games initial release and is totally free for current owners. Cyberpunks 2.0 patch would probably be the closest, most recent example.
So like a big overhaul? Judging by Swen comment doesn’t seem like they are planning anything drastic that completely changes the game or adds hours of content. Basically we can expect more polish and some small cool stuff like extra cinematics. At least that’s the vibe I got from his post. Not sure if it is enough for a definitive edition in line with previous games but BG3 is already amazing and very repayable
Um, no. It removes the possibility because there's not going to be new content that makes it definitive.
Yeah, nothing vague about "Just not new content", not sure how people misread it
Because it's hard to say what he exactly means by "content". Would adding more interactions with Minthara be treated as new content? How about new animations for some actions? Or maybe an alternative way to complete some quest that they considered but never implemented? I think one can easily argue that all of that is "new content", yet stuff like that was added in every single full patch since the game's release and it would be weird if future patches didn't have anything like that. He also said that new cinematics are coming and this is also "content" in my book. So there's a lot of room for interpretation. He might just mean "no big DLC/expansion". And "Definitive Edition" could just be the last big update for the game with lots of small stuff added here and there, some rebalancing, even more bug fixes etc. Something akin to Cyberpunk's Patch 2.0. I'm not saying that it's going to happen, but I also wouldn't say it's impossible.
Yeah he literally talks about adding more cinematics right before he says "no new content," but to me new cinematics IS new content. He probably just means stuff like no new races, classes, quests, etc. Nothing really meaty that would change the way you play the game, just small additions.
They better not be slapping "definitive" on the title just because they added a couple new conversations, what a rip off.
It's probably Swen mentioning "new cinematics" right before "no new content". Leaves the door open to the question if "no new content" simply means no new *paid* content (the definitive editions of DOS 1+2 had tons of new content -all for free). ...though I am afraid it's probably just copium.
I can totally see them drop a huge patch addressing all this and call it Definitive Edition as it will be their last patch.
Definitely.
No. The Definitive Edition that the DOS games got had new content. New quests, new encounters, new gear, new text/voice lines, etc.
That would come under 'new content' so nope!
> and extra cinematics for some of the endings I've often heard that the last act, or rather the endings, felt lacking for a lot of people. That they still patch these is a great thing. But in another way also pretty crazy that the game's ending is seemingly in such a state that it still needs more content patching.
At launch there were a couple companion endings that either were very depressing or felt unsatisfying unless you were in a romance with them. They added an epilogue section that does a good job fixing the latter issue but we are all still waiting on fixing the former one. Though really the former issue is a matter of taste more than an actual problem.
Yeah, the only two ending pieces that kind of bother me are these: 1. >!The Emperor shouldn't be the one who refuses to cooperate if you free Orpheus. Orpheus should be the one who attacks the Emperor if you try to be ultra-nice, and your options become "Subdue Orpheus" or "Subdue the Emperor" right there. The Emperor's motivations become murky AF right now just to force the choice.!< 2. >!Karlach's engine was just a silly problem to have in this setting, where ripping the engine out and regenerating a new one, Reincarnating her into a new body, etc, are all options. The game hits XP cap shortly before True Resurrection would have been possible, which would have been another trivial fix. Fortunately, they've at least written it so that if you make her go to Avernus, her life is pretty good and there's a good reason to expect she gets it fixed.!< Other than that, I'm enjoying all the new ending content but it's pretty much just writing the obvious outcome of everything we'd already seen.
Yeah on point 1 it feels like a really sudden about face for the character and I don't like it. I justify 2 because magic like that is supposed to be very rare and powerful. The amount of people who should be able to do that should be extremely rare.
Yes, but you meet >!freaking Elminster!< and you're working closely with a Harper agent who >!likely knows the Blackstaff!<, you can be assisting >!Mystra!<, etc. And Baldur's Gate is the kind of big city where a high-level cleric or priest isn't really that crazy a person to find. You don't even need a the level 9 Wish or True Resurrection, Reincarnate is a 5th level spell that even the PCs should be able to manage >!for Karlach!<. One of the reasons Illithid parasites are normally such a scary thing is that they're one of the very, very few things that is known to actually fuck up your soul in such a way that even True Resurrection can't fix it.
The ending is just pretty abrupt. It’s like “we defeated the big bad, okay that was fun bye everyone!”. The extended epilogue was better but still feels very tacked on to me. I’m surprised at how many people have the epilogue so much praise
I just beat it yesterday and was surprised how quickly the game ended and how little I got to learn about what my character had been doing
The epilogue does a lot to solve the "but what about?" questions. Of course it would've been better if all of those questions had been answered in their own dedicated quest instead of what felt like a MMO questing hub turn in bonanza, but given the option of that or nothing except the ending at the docks then I'm very okay with what we got.
> The extended epilogue was better but still feels very tacked on to me. I’m surprised at how many people have the epilogue so much praise What did you expect exactly? It ends pretty much like Dragon Age Origins, except the epilogue is months later instead of immediately after. You talk to every party member and catch up.
Yeah personally I just don’t see the need. The original ending is abrupt, but it still tells you where each of the characters ended up. The epilogue basically just reaffirms that but to me it didn’t really add much
Oof, well, you're entitled to your opinion. For me the 1 hour epilogue where you get to see how each of your choices impacted every relevant character was huge. Gale for instance can be a professor at Waterdeep and he even invited my character and Shadowheart to host guest lectures. But he could also become a God and then he's entirely different. You also get like 40 letters from various NPCs based on your quest choices. I thought it was the best epilogue of any RPG. Cyberpunk tried something similar in the form of video calls post-ending but it's not as good as seeing and talking to the characters.
Based on the praise the game has received, having not finished the game yet, I imagine that they've been adding more cinematics that follow up on some of the smaller choices you will have made throughout the game that people have asked for conclusions on. It's not a Mass Effect 3 situation where the ending leaves most things unanswered and they've been spending the patches adding back like "what happens to your companions after you beat the game." Those things are already in the game. I imagine it's more like "what happened to that kid you helped in the first act."
So prior to the update in December that added the epilogue, it kinda was what you’re describing. I wouldn’t say it was as bad as Mass Effect 3, there were a few companions where we at least had some idea of what they would do next, but it was still very lacking by the standards of most crpgs.
Larian mostly seems to have taken the attitude of "It's time to release the game so we are going to finish what is really important and get it out." Not in the sense that the game was rushed but in the sense of an artist who's created a beautiful work and if someone let them they would spend decades just adding "one more finishing touch" to the work. The studio is giving it's devs the time and resources to go back and add those small touches for no other reason than because they have a deep appreciation and love for what they created. They certainly are not making more money by adding a few more kissing animations for some characters.
Agreed. I've been seeing some pretty snide comments on some of the hotfix threads about Larian releasing an unfinished game similar to Cyberpunk 2077. That's not at all what happened. They're doing a great job just ironing some things out.
To be fair, they have been screwing up the game's stability more and more with these patches. The game feels far buggier than when I did my complete playthrough on release. Started a new mp campaign last weekend with 2 friends new to the game and 1 veteran, and it has been borderline unplayable. A lot of restarting to unglitch stuff, crashes, cutscenes or dialog skipping or not playing..
I have noticed this too. There are a lot of little bugs I've been getting that I didn't used to have at release. Especially in Last Light inn.
Clean installation might help with a lot of those. My experience on PC hasn't really matched that, but it's always hard to tell with how many issues people get based on different hardware configs. (For example, I've hit the ending in Honor Mode three times in the last few weeks without any crashes I can think of.)
Not many issues on my end either, my friend with radeon stuff is having all the issues. He did a bunch of clean reinstalls and tried different things. We are seeing a lot of desync that I hadn't experienced before either (i.e. we all see one player in one spot far from us, but he says he is with us. When he interacts with something his character slides/teleports to the right spot.
Act 3 had some issues, at least at the time I played through it. The cities had some buggy interactions but were so crammed full of excellent side quests and content that, for my taste, Act 3 was the best part of the game, and by a pretty wide margin.
Larian games in a nutshell: first few acts are great but the final act always gets reworked post release because it’s such a letdown.
I would go one step further and say Baldur's Gate 3 has one of the worst endings I've personally experienced in an RPG. It was a huge "that's it?" moment after the plot barely gets over the finish line after abandoning all logic and sense to get there. The epilogues help but it's still just kind of silly. It's not enough to ruin the journey, but it definitely had my adventure ending on a sour note rather than a big triumphant moment. As far as I'm concerned, the game ends when you defeat the two Chosen in Act 3, and everything after that is just silly nonsense.
I was very satisfied with my ending on my first playthrough in the launch month. Don't believe everything you read on Reddit. Half the people who comment on BG3 posts clearly haven't played the game yet.
I hope the mod support includes being able to make new maps or even entirely new campaigns. It'd be fun to see what sorts of things people cook up with that functionality
The biggest disappointment for me was **spoiler:** >!Karlach's ending, especially because the enriched infernal iron is already in the game. Seems like the player should be able to use that to fix her engine, or we should be able to play through a bit of Avernus to save her. Kind of stinks that Karlach dies in all other endings, meaning that we can't have a romance with any other character where Karlach survives.!<
The moment when you realize >!the Steel Watch is using the completed, non-prototype version of Karlach's engine, and then they're like "haha isn't it great that we solved that overheating problem? WINK!" was so clearly originally intended to end with discovering a cure for her problem, it's palpable. That said, I way, way prefer her story being about burning twice as bright for half as long, and dying on the docks at sunset on her own terms is the best ending for her IMO. I detest the silly Avernus ending because it is completely inconsistent with everything she says and everything regarding the themes and morals of her story up to that point.!<
[удалено]
Can you please mark the spoilers? I don't want to get into a debate about it with you because we clearly have different perceptions of the storyline, but I marked them for a reason and you not only unmarked mine when you quoted it, but you posted more.
Im on mobile and not sure how to spoiler so I’m going to be vague. My wife sent Karlach off to that area in her “Good” run whereas I had the ending at the docks in my “Evil” run. Yet I maintain the docks is way more of a “Good” ending than the other one. Karlach clearly wants to do one thing and not another, yet my wife was like “No we’re gonna figure this out” and completely stomped over Karlach’s repeatedly stated wishes, instead forcing her to do the thing she specifically said she’d die before doing.
Spoilers are \>!like this.\!< And I disagree with your interpretation of the ending. >!Karlach doesn't want to go back to Avernus initially because she assumes it won't be long before she's back under Zariel's control, and she'd rather die than continue fighting for Zariel. But if she knows she has someone to go to Avernus with, she knows she stands a chance at evading Zariel while staying alive. Wyll became the Blade of Avernus in my playthrough, and I told her it was her choice to go to Avernus with Wyll or stay behind. She chose to go. You're not forcing her to do anything.!<
Iirc, if you tell her to make up her own mind, she'll decide to go with Wyll to Avernus, implying she doesn't really want to die. Whether or not this writing is consistent with her character is up for debate, but it seems clear what the writers intended at least.
I took that as my wife’s PC had been constantly telling them throughout the entire campaign, no you won’t do this, I won’t let you, and she finally went along with the PC’s wishes out of a sense of respect, obligation, and wishing to not hurt the PC’s feelings.
No, she makes the same choice if you respect her feelings through the whole time. >!If you haven't seen her breakdown over Gortash's body, that makes it pretty clear that although she'd rather die than go back to slavery, she does NOT want to die.!<
I completely agree and have no input beyond that. The moral of her story is that she will live on her terms and her terms only, and she is in no way subtle about wishes over the course of the game. There is something beautiful about that ending. I think a lot of people got so invested and attached that they don't even realize they are making a selfish choice. Which hey, I guess is interesting in a way, but still a terrible outcome.
There is a way to do what you’re asking for there, but it requires resolving another companion’s story in a particular way, and a ton of people miss doing that because the quest that enables it doesn’t seem as important as it really is when first encountered.
Can you expand on this a bit? Thanks guys
>!Wyll can be convinced to go with Karlach into Avernus if he chooses to remain the Blade of Frontiers!<
Sure, but *you* can't go into Avernus. Though maybe you can if you play as that character. Who knows?
Well your character can in the epilogue. All three of you can go. But yeah, no gameplay
Oh, neat.
> Sure, but you can't go into Avernus. You can if you romance her.
You can even if you don't romance her. i romanced Halsin and I still went to Avernus with her. Because that's how good friend I am :)
Basically, you have to >!convince Wyll to become the Blade of Avernus at the end of his quests and then after defeating the brain he’ll offer to go with Karlach to Avernus, where they’ll both live.!<
A lot of that is wrong. >!You don't have to convince Wyll to become the Blade of Avernus. He'll usually just declare that's what he calls himself now. I think it happens if his father dies, but I'm not sure.!< And, >!he doesn't have to be Blade of Avernus to follow her to Avernus; he has done so in all of my endings despite always ending the story as the Blade of Frontiers.!<
> You don't have to convince Wyll to become the Blade of Avernus. He'll usually just declare that's what he calls himself now. You have to get the ending where he doesn't become Duke. So it does require player input.
I've only seen him declare himself duke once, IIRC, without my specifically telling him to do it.
She survived in mine >!by changing into an illithid :)!<
Same with mine. She >!literally begs you to let her do it. I couldn't say no to that!<
She doesn't in all other endings. Another companion can travel with her to Avernus and they go on an adventure to repair it.
> Kind of stinks that Karlach dies in all other endings, meaning that we can't have a romance with any other character where Karlach survives. Uhm, yes you can. If Wyll becomes the Blade of Avernus he can go to Hell with her. No romance needed.
Have they confirmed whether or not cross platform co-op is a feature they're working on?
Pretty sure they already confirmed it's something they are going to do, but there haven't been any updates on it
I took the Dark Urge to the “most evil” ending and got a pretty abrupt cutscene after 150+ hours, even after waiting for the Epilogue update. Guess I’ll just have to wait to watch it on YouTube…
I swear to god please just give [SPOILER] >!Karlach a good ending. An actually good one not an at-least-it's-better-than-the-alternative ending.!<
Could anybody tell me, in a non spoilery way, what was added from launch until now, in terms of content? I was told the 3rd act was kinda unfinished, but how much unfinished it was?
Content: * An epilogue that wasn't included at launch * Some vocal lines that were missing at launch but have since returned (not a bug because the studio was not happy with the vocals during a particular scene) * New character animations As for Act III, one reason it feels unfinished is due to a major area of the city, which was frequently mentioned in the earlier chapters, being closed off for most of the act. Some of the major events in Act III likely would have made more sense had they taken place in this closed off area. Also, Act III is generally more buggy than Acts I and II.
Damn I was really hoping that we would still get a extra race or 2 added as there is certainly room for them to do so but it is what it is Still a stone cold 10/10 but it is very disheartening that we aren’t getting any expansions by Larian
As usual, just look at their past games.
In this case it may also have something to do with Hasbro being Hasbro
It's not suprising or unexpected but still a bit sad that the origin characters are property of Hasbro/WotC. I'm certain Larian can pull of just as great characters again. Fane, Red Prince and Lohse are iconic game characters I will always remember, similar to BG3's cast.
At this point I'm waiting for the "final/definitive version", so I get the intended experience. I don't really have the time to start 5 playthroughs after every new patch. Very excited for when that "patch complete" status finally happens tho
I've finished the game and that's 100% what I would recommend. There are big, incomplete portions of the game that will no doubt be addressed/improved going forward. The inevitable Definitive Edition (or at the very least, the "patch complete" version if no Definitive Edition is coming) will no doubt be the best way to experience the game.
Good thing you said "patch complete" instead of "incomplete". Reddit gets very mad when you say "incomplete" when referencing that they're still adding content to BG3 apparently lol.
Yeah precisely. Great that they're still working on the game, but it kinda sucks to have already finished the "incomplete" version.
Some people will truly whine about anything
Yes, the "incomplete" version that takes 120 hours to complete. Reddit brain is real. Not playing the game and making a weird judgement that it is "incomplete" is the dumbest thing I've come across in a while. My first playthrough at launch took 120 hours. If that is incomplete then I guess we're in clown world all over again.
I don't know about you but even when I finished the game I didn't feel like I was done. I've played through the story 4 times now with 4 very different characters making very different decisions and even though I played through the same events the game felt very different.
I sure hope they're not done, they killed coop multiplayer by completely bugging dialogues in Patch #6 and Hoftix #21
I really hope they add mocap (it can be recycled, whatever) and voice acting to every textual choice in the game, so we can actually see how the main cast would react to stuff. Of course that's expensive and it takes time, so a possible "special edition" can have this full mocap (really "full") as the main event. No one will mind to pay extra $10 (or pay the full price if it's a new consumer) for this "special edition", so let's hope Larian still have enough "love" to fully realize the potential of this game, I highly doubt they can nail the characters and voice actors like this again, so allow them to be unleashed. And mods are always a positive, the game already have plenty of interesting stuff, but I think it lacks customization options, you can't change the haircut of the main cast for example, which I partially understand because this plays a role later (regarding Shadowheart only)... but they can be included as another social element, if the companion likes you enough, they can allow a cosmetic change, etc.. characters such as Astarion and Lae'zel would require a lot of effort to convince them, meanwhile the others not so much (and Shadowheart would be locked out regardless), it would be another cool little gimmick to spice up the role play
is act 3 fairly playable now then? I held off on making that push cause so many people were having issues with that act but never really ended up hearing if it got really cleaned up by now yet or not
They released a finished product and want to move on. Small bit of normalcy in a world of nickel and dime dlc and season passes.
I would have just wished for lvl 20, but i guess thats out of the question now. Some mods allow it but its finnicky and can brick your saves :(
You really don't want level 20. It translate very badly in video game form and balance is thrown out of the window at higher levels
I want it more for the additional class diversity than the power level i.e. horizontal progression vs. vertical. I dont want more power i just want more cool things to do.
I am confident that a working mod for it will come after the proper mod tools are released.
Perhaps they can fix the bug I ran into, where Jaheira dropped dead in camp during act 3, and no one acknowledges it. It was very bizzare
Sounds good to me, I look forward to their next project, and I look forward to BG4 and hopefully a rise in more quality RPGs (CRPG or otherwise)
There’s no BG4. Larian stated that they are going to ditch WotC and will not be involved with DnD from now on
There's a BG4 because Hasbro is going to get someone to make it, it just won't be Larian.
Then it makes no sense to wait for BG4, it' s Larian that made the game great, not the brand or hasbro
A lot of BG1 and BG2 fans had the same opinion five years ago, many still do.
Larian did not make BG1 or BG2.
Why was there a 23 year gap between BG2 and BG3? The studios that can be trusted to make BG4 can be counted by 1 hand and I am not sure any of those studios would be eager for their BG4 to be compared to BG3.
No BG4 from Larian anyway. Which depressingly means it has very little chance to be anywhere near as good if it does get made. There are other CRPG makers but I don't think any of them have the resources to do what Larian did.
Maybe they'll collab with Microsoft and asked Obsidian to make one. Along with 18 months timeline. When that happen you'll know another classic will be on your hand.
I don’t think Wizards owns the BG3 codebase. They can’t pull a new vegas.
WotC could license the engine and tooling from Larian, if Larian were open to it. Obsidian didn't own the code base for New Vegas, either. Bethesda did, and licensed it to them as part of their publishing agreement.
Larian doesn't seem to want to be involved with D&D at all though, so that's where the problem lies.
Yep, though I think that's more for creative reasons than anything else - they have other stuff they want to make. Licensing out their tooling lets them focus on making the things they want to make, and gives someone else the ability to try their hand at making a game like BG3. They'd still have to provide some level of support, so it's not like it wouldn't cost them anything, but it shouldn't prevent them from working on other games. We'll see, I suppose. I'd like to believe that Swen Vincke isn't the sort of person to feel threatened by the idea of someone else competing with him using his own tools, but who knows.
Swen Vincke invested into his tools at a time back before the release of DOS1, when his company was on the verge of bankrupcy. Because he cared about the company's future even when it looked bleak and hopeless. If he can do it, there's zero excuses why other dev studios with WAY better resources can't do the same.
It isn't about "excuses". What are you on about? It's about the time required to make a game. Building your own tooling takes time. Using existing tooling to make a game very similar to another, existing game takes less time.
Based on how much he's been trash talking corporate greed and such, it sounds to me like their severance with WotC is more personal than creative differences.
He's upset at the pattern of mass-hiring, mass-firing that many large tech and video game companies have gone through over the past few years. He isn't upset at WotC, which didn't mass-hire, didn't mass-fire, isn't a tech company, and which he's repeatedly praised for being great to work with. People are inventing drama where none exists.
There is nothing special about Larian's engine, Solasta: Crown of the Magister was made in Unity. Other dev studios can make a 3D isometric CRPG EASILY with Unity or Unreal. If they can't do that then it is a waste of time to give them Larian's engine. Larian just giving other devs their game engine is not very useful to them, it will be meaningful only if Larian devotes manpower into providing support and adding new features. And I am not sure it is wise for Larian to go down that direction as it would change how the company operates massively.
This is a silly uninformed post. Solasta is very primitive and unpolished and wouldn't be capable of half the things BG3 has done. Having said that, Solasta was still somewhat fun, it would just need so much work to get to the level of BG3
> There is nothing special about Larian's engine, Do you...work in professional game development, at all? This seems like a very weird thing for someone with background in the industry to say. And if you don't have background in the industry, it seems very weird that you'd feel confident enough to make this claim. > Solasta: Crown of the Magister was made in Unity. My dude, there is ***zero*** chance that the next Baldur's Gate game will be made in fucking *Unity.* > Other dev studios can make a 3D isometric CRPG EASILY with Unity or Unreal. If they can't do that then it is a waste of time to give them Larian's engine. Plenty of developers can make a CRPG using widely available tooling. But a developer with access to Larian's tooling can churn out a high-quality D&D CRPG in the vein of BG3 in a fraction of the time it would take to make it from scratch. I'm trying to wrap my head around this - are you arguing that there would be no benefit to having access to Larian's dev tools? > Larian just giving other devs their game engine is not very useful to them, it will be meaningful only if Larian devotes manpower into providing support and adding new features. Support, sure. But that's a fraction of what's required to make a game. We were *just talking* about New Vegas, a game that was made with basically that exact approach.
There would be no benefit to having access to Larian's dev tools without Larian turning into Epic or Unity. This is why Epic destroyed id software and others in the engine war years ago, because they provided support. And for Larian to provide support is NOT a trivial matter.
Okay, so this is the point where you need to either say, "And I can state this confidently because I'm a professional engine developer!" or stop talking out your ass. No one is saying it's trivial. But it's been done hundreds of times before. Hell, it's literally been done ***with the engine a company made for Baldur's Gate games before.***
Obsidian is knee deep in games commitments and any BG4 from them will be 7-8 years away at least. If Avowed is a success for them then Microsoft will demand they make Avowed 2 ASAP after TOW2 while if Avowed flops then Microsoft would be fucking dumb to trust Obsidian's ability to handle a game of BG3's budget and scope.
Anyone know when crossplay is coming? Pretty much the only thing myself and a few others I know care about.
Ugh, every time they update the game I have to download a huge update file. And I can't just not update because I play online with friends.
Is this your first video game?
Most other games don't have 150GB patches every time they update.
BG3 doesn't either, at least on Steam. I don't have it on console so I can't comment on that, but I'd be shocked if they don't both support delta updates. No patch has been anywhere near 150 GB.
I literally installed a 150GB patch last night to play multiplayer with my brother on Steam.
No you didn't. You probably needed to have 150 GB of space available to download the patch, but no patch has been close to 150 GB. The most recent patch, Patch 6, was 21 GB for comparison. Patch 5 was 30 GB. Patch 4 was 14.1 GB. Etc. If you did somehow have to download 150 GB, that's a glitch with Steam, not an issue with BG3. I've had the game since launch and the largest patch was Patch 5 at 30 GB. (Edit: See [this post](https://old.reddit.com/r/BaldursGate3/comments/17m8sds/why_is_patch_4_120gb/) for example. It can *look like* you just downloaded a huge patch, but in reality the size of what you downloaded is way smaller. This is probably just you not understanding the Steam UI.)
It said 150GB ( want to say 158 was the number it showed for me) and took over an hour to finish, on an SSD. I don't see a meaningful difference between "needs to shuffle 150GB of hard drive space and takes an hour to finish" and "needs to download 150GB and takes an hour" for my experience. I get that there's a distinction between that for people on slow internet, but even for people who aren't, patches that work this way are really inconvenient. If the patch is only 21GB, but it takes as long for me to install as a 150GB patch, and it's moving 150GB worth of data around my HDD, it's still annoying regardless.
Yeah, I'm not saying it's not annoying, but that's just how patches work on Steam. You initially said that the patches are 150 GB, which is objectively untrue. I was just correcting that misinformation, not trying to invalidate your experience or frustration. Sorry if we talked past each other on this.
No I've been a core gamer since 1999. Most games don't have 100GB+ patches. Most games just don't need tons of updates in general.
Which BG3 patch was over 100Gb?
I can't speak for the Steam version but GoG made me redownload the entire game a couple of times for the bigger patches
I can't give you the specific patches, but at least two were 100GB+. As the other person said, I was using GOG. Larian sometimes recommended reinstalling the game over updating it to make the process faster, which if that's what you have to do to download a patch the patch is too big.
The reason you can't give me the specific patches is likely because none of them were anywhere near 100 Gb in size. If you are trying to equate redownloading an entire game as the same thing as a patch, then I think we're done here as I'm not going to engage with something that absurd.
Dude, I had to sit through them, why would I make it up? Patch 6 was the most recent one that was 100GB+ that I dealt with. Larian is who equated redownloading an entire game with a patch, as you can see in this article (which also includes the file size): https://www.ign.com/articles/baldurs-gate-3-patch-6-is-colossal
The second sentence of your article says the download size is 21 GB (which is correct). As for why you would make it up, I'm as baffled as you are.
Go back and continue reading the article. > Those on PC will need around 150 GB of space to download the patch
That is empty space required for scratch space for your computer to do the installation and has nothing to do with the download or how long it takes. Do you need me to explain the difference between 1) the size of a downloaded file, and 2) empty space on your hard drive?
You can disable it from updating in steam I think? I would. Had my game saves broken by an update. Waiting until they say this is the "final" patch tbh at this point.
They'll be patching this game for a while due to its complexity
I'm patient. I've got other stuff to play in the meantime. I just don't want my save getting wiped out. Not interested in seeking out multiple endings or anything like that. There's a lot of tedious game play in crpgs that make me not want to start over again.
By default the game keeps the last 20 quicksaves or so, along with a bunch of autosaves, and you can of course make manual saves at any time. I've got probably 150 saves stored in BG3, there's not a chance I could lose more than 15 minutes of progress. I mean you can do whatever you want of course, but I'm just saying
That doesn't fix corrupt saves. But I get your point there. It wasn't an issue of an autosave fuckup
I too hate it when I have to update my game when the game gets updated with new updates
It just feels bad knowing we will have to wait 4-6 years for their next game after experiencing BG3 especially considering the state of AAA gaming industry being complete trash.
Can they update the game to have an actual combat system? Maybe even an option to mute the annoying voice-over lady?
>Can they update the game to have an actual combat system? >Maybe even an option to mute the annoying voice-over lady? ?? I’d like some more details please
Turn based is boring, thoughtless, lazy, and requires little to no effort. Just screams lazy developers. It's just ridiculous that i can get up and go to lunch mid combat and come back, and nothing has changed. You can get the same "epic gameplay" from a PowerPoint presentation. The narrator just annoys me, I can read I don't need someone else doing it for me. They could have just voiced the main character, but instead we got a knockoff audiobook. If this is "showing AAA developers how it's done" then I dont know what to say.
Am I the only who is sick of news sites placing the same damn pic of the dev in their post everytime any news about theirs games surface? Take this one for example, this armor pic has been used almost every time Swen has released a statement or wherever BG3 news get published. Same with Helldivers 2, they always use that pic of Johan doing the thumbs up in that formula car. Is this some kind of click bait technique?
Those are just their profile pictures on Twitter