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The problem with BG3 [CRITICISM ONLY THREAD]

Rik_KirtaniyaRik_Kirtaniya Member Posts: 1,742
edited October 2020 in Baldur's Gate III
This thread is solely for civil criticism regarding BG3. This is the place to voice your grievances and dissatisfactions regarding BG3 and the shortcomings that it has without being called out. If you cannot tolerate negative criticism about BG3, this thread is not for you.

Regardless, ALL FORUM RULES STILL HOLD VALID HERE, and the discussion must be kept civil. Thank you and enjoy the discussion.

Debate thread here: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/80569/bg3-worth-it-or-not-debate-thread

Positive Only thread here: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/80567/why-bg3-is-amazing-positive-only-thread-no-criticism/

EDIT: Updated thread title to "CRITICISM ONLY" as per popular demand that asked for parity with the "POSITIVE ONLY" thread.
Post edited by Rik_Kirtaniya on
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Comments

  • WarChiefZekeWarChiefZeke Member Posts: 2,669
    edited September 2020
    I want BG3 to attract a new generation of DnD players. I think it would be better served trying to make itself into a timeless classic, like the originals, rather than spending development time cementing it as a product of the Current Generation, like having Twitch Streaming Features on day 1. Many things bothered me but nothing told me their priorities were misplaced as much as that did.

    But I haven't seen it yet, and I hope i'm wrong, and it's great. Maybe it WILL be fondly remembered, with active modders still creating content 20 years later like BG is. I sure hope so anyway.
  • modestvoltamodestvolta Member Posts: 108
    WarChiefZeke wrote: »
    I want BG3 to attract a new generation of DnD players. I think it would be better served trying to make itself into a timeless classic, like the originals, rather than spending development time cementing it as a product of the Current Generation, like having Twitch Streaming Features on day 1. Many things bothered me but nothing told me their priorities were misplaced as much as that did.

    But I haven't seen it yet, and I hope i'm wrong, and it's great. Maybe it WILL be fondly remembered, with active modders still creating content 20 years later like BG is. I sure hope so anyway.

    I think Twitch integration goes hand-in-hand with attracting a new generation. Old farts like us already play D&D. I think Larian is betting on the Twitch integration to lead to more exposure to a younger audience who can then discover the game and D&D.

    For what it's worth, I'm old/grumpy enough to want the kids to get off my lawn, but young enough that friends my age use Twitch.

    I'm curious as to how much work Larian has to put into the Twitch integration compared to the core game development. I assume Larian is using APIs created by Twitch and making sure they work in the game with whatever tweaks/graphics they need to make. My guess is the Twitch features don't overlap with the rest of the game's development (meaning that time spent developing the Twitch stuff doesn't take away from the core game development). In other words, I think we would get the same game if Larian didn't add the Twitch features.

    What I'm getting at: I don't think the Twitch stuff really tells us what Larian's priorities are. My thought process is that Larian started with a goal of making the best game they can. If there are optional features (like Twitch) they can add that make the game more fun for different audiences, then that's even better.

    But yes: we haven't seen it, so a wait-and-see approach is about all we can do. If the game's a dud, I don't think it will be because of the Twitch stuff.
  • AerieAerie Member Posts: 226
    The problem is I'm not going to be in the game, am I? It's disgusting. Appalling.
  • byrne20byrne20 Member Posts: 503
    @Aerie such a travesty ?
  • AerieAerie Member Posts: 226
    byrne20 wrote: »
    @Aerie such a travesty ?

    Yup. I was hoping to be the main bad guy in the game :s
  • sarevok57sarevok57 Member Posts: 6,002
    holy moly, 150 GB? at this rate i will only be able to fit like 5 or 6 more games on my 2 TB m.2 drive yeesh
  • megamike15megamike15 Member Posts: 2,666
    this is why i don't play modern games that much and stick to indies and older stuff. they are way to big.
  • megamike15megamike15 Member Posts: 2,666
    yeah larian has issues being serious. baldurs gate 1 may have been silly but it never got divinity silly and 2 had a nice balance.

    larian just has a tone issue in general that may effect bg 3 as a whole.
  • kanisathakanisatha Member Posts: 1,308
    Dunski wrote: »
    I played both of the Divinity: Original Sin games, and while I could see that there was a lot of quality and features, the games just didn't satisfy me. There was something wrong with them that I couldn't put my finger on at first, but slowly I realized what it was: everything in Larian's games has to be funny, quirky and bizarre. Everything is an intentional all-out cliché on traditional RPG tropes, like a deliberate parody of the genre. Everything has to be crazy and over the top, nothing's allowed to be mundane and believable. It's not a serious setting, it's RPG comedy.

    Baldur's Gate had isolated pockets of comic relief and the occasional thematic exaggeration, but the games aren't completely saturated in fantasy troped cranked up to 150%. D:OS is what you'd get if you took BG but every companion was Minsc and Boo, every NPC was Noober, and every quest was the Machine of Lum the Mad. Larian's games completely lack the grit and believability of the BG series. When it was announced that they would make BG3, I was a little worried but prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt.

    Then we saw the previews and my worries grew. What they showed us came off more like Divinity 3 crammed into the Forgotten Realms. Here I'm not talking about the UI skin or the tooltip font, I'm talking about the tone and theme of the game itself. The cartoonish gameplay, the over-the-top visuals, the non-stop RPG clichés and the craziness of the game's fundamental concept where you're someone with a friggin' illithid tadpole implanted into your brain so you hijack a githyanki spaceship and crash it.

    It gave me no indication of the grounded, realistic-within-Faerûn nature of BG. Punting a goblin thirty feet into the distance, killing an enemy by throwing your boots at it, spell-like visual effects from the mundane act of jumping... it was just more of what I didn't like about Divinity. While we didn't get to see a whole lot of the game, what we saw did not feel like a Baldur's Gate game at all. It felt like they wanted to boost the sales of their Divinity 3 by hijacking the beloved Baldur's Gate name, without any genuine intentions of living up to the legacy of the series.

    I'll be watching streams on Tuesday to see if I was right, and if I was, I'm not buying it.
    Oh, I wish I could give five big gold stars to this post.

    Your critique of the Rivellon setting of the D:OS games is especially spot-on, and the foundational reason why I cannot stand the D:OS games. It's because I just hate Rivellon as a fantasy RPG setting.
  • megamike15megamike15 Member Posts: 2,666
    this is why i always saw people seeing larian as the 2nd coming of bioware weird. their games are popular yes but not to everyone tastes. they never want to tell a serious story it's always over the top goofy.

    so we have a real big issue in terms of current rpgs. on the one side we got larian who are to silly. then we got say pillars of eternity which is to serious. there is barley a middle ground.
  • kanisathakanisatha Member Posts: 1,308
    megamike15 wrote: »
    this is why i always saw people seeing larian as the 2nd coming of bioware weird. their games are popular yes but not to everyone tastes. they never want to tell a serious story it's always over the top goofy.
    Yeah my take has been that if you're a big fan of Disney/Nickelodeon shows then you love Larian games. They are essentially the cartoon show equivalents of video games. And from a purely marketing standpoint that is a very good business decision, because we now have at least two generations here in the US of kids raised entirely on Disney/Nick cartoons. But it's just not my thing.
  • megamike15megamike15 Member Posts: 2,666
    i like disney movies. heck i like rpg that have a sense of humor. but you need a balance. mabey it's me getting older but i much prefer a serious story with snarky dialogue then it being full on comedies.

    same issue i have with modern adventure games. prefer the serious ones.

    like i enjoy disco elysium it has a dark sense of humor but it has more to it then that.
  • ThacoBellThacoBell Member Posts: 12,235
    kanisatha wrote: »
    megamike15 wrote: »
    this is why i always saw people seeing larian as the 2nd coming of bioware weird. their games are popular yes but not to everyone tastes. they never want to tell a serious story it's always over the top goofy.
    Yeah my take has been that if you're a big fan of Disney/Nickelodeon shows then you love Larian games. They are essentially the cartoon show equivalents of video games. And from a purely marketing standpoint that is a very good business decision, because we now have at least two generations here in the US of kids raised entirely on Disney/Nick cartoons. But it's just not my thing.

    As someone raied on Disney, Nickelodeon, CN, and Kids WB....I don't see the correlation, frankly.

    @megamike15 I find full serious all the time exhausting. There needs to be a good amount of levity to balance it out. But unless you're making a parody game, the absurd and humor should not be the majority tone.

    I think the Dragon Quest games have a good balance of absurd/serious in an RPG. The main narrative is always treated a serious, and can even get dark or downright tragic at times. But the world of the has so much more to it. Absurd situations and people dot the land. You can have a tale centering around a family broken up by the violence and corruption in the world......and have a mid-tier villain named "Ballzack" in the one game. The series loves it puns btw.

    The Yakuza series is another that does a great job with mixed tones. Gritty crime dramas that don't pull any punches, but the side content is an excuse to dabble in the absurd. Like winning a bowling contest to win a chicken. But instead of cooking the chicken, it becomes a member of your real estate company. A normal chicken.
  • WarChiefZekeWarChiefZeke Member Posts: 2,669
    edited October 2020
    ThacoBell wrote: »
    kanisatha wrote: »
    megamike15 wrote: »
    this is why i always saw people seeing larian as the 2nd coming of bioware weird. their games are popular yes but not to everyone tastes. they never want to tell a serious story it's always over the top goofy.
    Yeah my take has been that if you're a big fan of Disney/Nickelodeon shows then you love Larian games. They are essentially the cartoon show equivalents of video games. And from a purely marketing standpoint that is a very good business decision, because we now have at least two generations here in the US of kids raised entirely on Disney/Nick cartoons. But it's just not my thing.

    As someone raied on Disney, Nickelodeon, CN, and Kids WB....I don't see the correlation, frankly.

    @megamike15 I find full serious all the time exhausting. There needs to be a good amount of levity to balance it out. But unless you're making a parody game, the absurd and humor should not be the majority tone.

    I think the Dragon Quest games have a good balance of absurd/serious in an RPG. The main narrative is always treated a serious, and can even get dark or downright tragic at times. But the world of the has so much more to it. Absurd situations and people dot the land. You can have a tale centering around a family broken up by the violence and corruption in the world......and have a mid-tier villain named "Ballzack" in the one game. The series loves it puns btw.

    The Yakuza series is another that does a great job with mixed tones. Gritty crime dramas that don't pull any punches, but the side content is an excuse to dabble in the absurd. Like winning a bowling contest to win a chicken. But instead of cooking the chicken, it becomes a member of your real estate company. A normal chicken.

    Yeah, Dragon Quest is great. Almost everything has a name that is a silly pun, but the story is relatively serious.

    And the full-party customization of IX is very addictive. So is the fact that they don't just sit around standing there when it isn't their turn. Makes battles at least interesting to look at.
  • CloutierCloutier Member Posts: 228
    Turn based combat.
    WTF
  • DorcusDorcus Member Posts: 270
    Wow, Baldur's Gate 3 is pretty meanspirited and unpleasant! I miss the constant low key Canadian humour a lot, guys.
  • AmmarAmmar Member Posts: 1,297
    Have bought it by now. As I feared elemental surfaces are both overpowered and overused. And out of combat pathfinding has your character walk right through them.
  • JuliusBorisovJuliusBorisov Member, Administrator, Moderator, Developer Posts: 22,754
    Ammar wrote: »
    Have bought it by now. As I feared elemental surfaces are both overpowered and overused. And out of combat pathfinding has your character walk right through them.

    Try playing more than Avernus. Fire and other surfaces are not overused in this game. The prologue zone is full of fire but it is not as often present later. See this comment for example.

    Also, a tip: when you start getting vines and your characters will run into them, just use fire on the vines - they will burn and won't trouble you any longer.

    That said, since any use of elemental surfaces is getting heavily criticized by a portion of players, there might be quite a few tweaks to it during Early Access.
  • kanisathakanisatha Member Posts: 1,308
    Since there is a "positive ONLY, no criticism" thread, shouldn't this thread be "criticism ONLY"?
  • AmmarAmmar Member Posts: 1,297
    I have watched later fights and they are still overused - with Goblins tending to bomb you with Alchemical Fire and even Fire Arrow leave patches of fire.
  • kanisathakanisatha Member Posts: 1,308
    I also saw a recent stream in which the party was fighting a bunch of goblins, and there were something like 17 enemies in the battle. What happened to "no trash mobs, y'all"? And don't try and tell me a battle like that will go quickly with TB combat. That battle alone would be sufficient to drive me crazy and to utterly hate on the game.
  • sarevok57sarevok57 Member Posts: 6,002
    i was thinking about getting this game until i realized the "release date" was an early access, so thats a big nope for me
  • elminsterelminster Member, Developer Posts: 16,317
    edited October 2020
    80-90% of the containers in the game are empty. It gets to be a bit tiring frankly to look in a crate and find nothing. Especially when there are so many containers .

    Undoubtedly someone will bring up BG1 or 2 here, but I would argue there are even more empty containers than those games. It's especially glaring when they have tons of generic items, a multitude of different types of food, forks, spoons, plates, cups, etc they could use.

    Whoever is making all these crates and selling them, or just selling the lumber, must be making a fortune given people seem to be buying them up and not using them :p

    It also applies to monster corpses as well as well as any eggs they may have (or at least in most cases).
    Post edited by elminster on
  • DorcusDorcus Member Posts: 270
    sarevok57 wrote: »
    i was thinking about getting this game until i realized the "release date" was an early access, so thats a big nope for me

    this is both a gross understatement and 100% correct
  • megamike15megamike15 Member Posts: 2,666
    kanisatha wrote: »
    Since there is a "positive ONLY, no criticism" thread, shouldn't this thread be "criticism ONLY"?

    well this thread is the only place criticism is allowed. we arnt allowed to do it in the annocement thread. and we have to have played the game to do it in the spoiler thread.
  • CahirCahir Member, Moderator, Translator (NDA) Posts: 2,819
    Maybe it's coincidence, maybe something is wrong with the character creation system. First time I created (unintentionally) character who was a copy paste of Shadowheart, mechanically-wise (the only difference was patron deity). Now, I rolled a human warlock who... has almost identical look as Galę. Like a twin Brother. It was also done unintentionally. So either, with all those options available, character creation is limited, or I'm seriously in bad luck here :p
  • AmmarAmmar Member Posts: 1,297
    To be fair I think all the characters feel like they just came out of cosmetic surgery, they all look extremely well groomed and sort of appeal to the same beauty standard.
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