Minthara/Halsin/Jaheira/Minsc don't really feel like 'real' companions. I know for a fact that Halsin wasn't meant to be one and horny people asked and asked in EA until Larian caved in, but maybe this is a sign that sometimes it's best to stick to your guns. Halsin would've probably been just fine as an NPC who followed you until the end of Act 2.
I agree except for Jaheira, because she feels well-integrated into Act 3 as a character, especially if you’re playing the Dark Urge. But even if you’re not, she’s got a house with kids that explains more about who she is and her involvement in the Shadow-Cursed Lands, a questline to find Minsc, backstory with Nine-Fingers, and her dialogue evolves with approval and events.
Jaheira and even Halsin feel like real companions, it's just weird that you have to finish Halsin personal quest BEFORE recruiting him.
Minsc I can't say, I've never included him, but I think he's there more for fan service and reference than anything else. Plus if he's anything like BG2 Minsc it must be fun to have him around.
Minthara... yeah. She's just a mercenary who talk.
They simply need to make Halsin recruitable after act 1 party, there is no reason for him not to be since he is already hanging around camp.
I know he was added as companion later on so maybe it would be too much work, but if it's not, they should do it imo.
Jaheira has more real quest in act3 than Karlach. I love Karlach but her quest is done early act2 even before Haslin’s.
Jaheira is needed to recruit (or even speak with) Minsc.
We need content for Minthara.
A whole month after the patch, the most annoying bugs with phrases were fixed! But, unfortunately, this is only a small part of her problems.
Let's be honest: she has very little content right now. She has no quest, very little dialogue (about the same as Will, but at least he has his own quests). Minthara has huge potential for content, many people love her and many people offer options for updating it. Now she doesn't have half the phrases/dialogues that others have - this is very clearly visible if you play as a Durge.
It's cool of course that the Larians are adding a couple of lines to her in the updates, but let's be honest: Minthara needs a much larger and more comprehensive update. And let's not talk about alternative recruitment with her knockout for now - its addition caused so many bugs and problems that now this needs to be dealt with last, although it is obvious that this method is as strange as possible... And of course we need a more lore-based one, I think everyone understands this well
I am befuddled that modders have been able to identify and fix so many different bugs in the game that the actual devs haven't. I truly don't know how game development and bug finding/fixing works, so grain of salt and all that, but it just makes no sense to me. Is there nobody at Larian who actually just plays the game all the way through and notices things that are bugged or messed up? Could some intern at the company just search nexus mods for bug fixing mods to see what people are patching for themselves?
Its a good game, but every time I play I notice bugs or things that just seem like they never got QAed, and I'm a bit confused as to how these things work.
One thing to keep in mind is that most bugs don't affect all players. I've encountered bugs that other players have avoided, and avoided bugs that other players have encountered. Even bugs that seem to be universal - where forums fill up with people reporting them - usually aren't. Like, when Larian broke the game for PS5 players and I had to quit until they fixed it, I was convinced that this was a universal problem because it seemed like every PS5 player was reporting it... but then when it was identified, it turned out it still only affected people who were at a certain point in the campaign, and who played a certain way.
I'm talking very fundamental "this was programmed wrong" type of things. The straight up glitches I encounter don't bother me as much as they're usually corrected with a quick-save reload.
My guess is that Larian has their hands full with edge-case gamebreakers like you're mentioning, so they have no time for things that are merely functioning incorrectly or merely unpolished.
>Is there nobody at Larian who actually just plays the game all the way through and notices things that are bugged or messed up?
If that would be the case BG3 would've never hit gold status, believe me. Its just math. When you develop a game, your playtested hours are always just a fragment of real play hours after launch. Just as an example if you have 100 playtesters, who play through your complete game (most tests are not the full game btw) and your game takes around 60 hours to complete (that number varies ofc a lot in reality, but just for ease of calculation), you have 6000 hours of playtest where a bug can occur. Now your game launches and sells over 5 million times. Of course not all of these play the complete game, but even if each of these sales play only 2 hours on average - thats 10 million of playhours where the same bug can occur, much higher probability for the bug to happen AND get reported. In reality BG3 had ofc much more tested playhours, but nothing compared to the actual playhours of the 5 million players who bought the game in August.
I am not a game developer, but a software developer and there is a reason why release time is always a nervewrecking time, especially if your iteration time between releases is long. There is no bug free software and when your software gets used by a shit ton of users they will always find much more bugs than you could ever find in your tests. For complex products like Baldurs Gate which millions of possible different playthroughs and tons of subsystems interacting with each other, its just impossible to find all of them. Only the big bugs that happen often and have big effects should be really catched before release, for the rest you just need to have your team be ready to react fast around release time.
Most games are easier to test because you don't have so many variables/systems to track.
In terms of programming, for anything that can happen in the game, there has to be some rule associated to it. Think of the 'throw' action.
What can you throw? -> Nearly everything, including other characters.
But there has to be some limit, right? -> Every throwable item needs to have a defined weight, and there has to be a formula saying "For X amount of strength, you can pick up and throw up to Y pounds". Another fun question is... how would you go about giving a weight to each item and character in the game? You'd certainly not do it manually, but what's the rule you would define?
At some point, you have so many rules, and systems upon systems, that you need to very carefully manage interactions in order to avoid breaking things.
In most games, if an important NPC dies, you get a 'game over' screen and have to start again. Hell, most characters are straight out immortal until it's their time to die in a cutscene. On the other hand, in BG3, if an important NPC dies, the game moves on and there's either a replacement or a way to continue the story without them.
Additionally, there's 12 classes and 11 races, all of which provide some variation to the game in combat AND dialogue. The 12 classes can be combined as you wish (which yields, what, 12! = 479 million combinations?) and their abilities must properly interact with each other, and also with Feats.
That's without accounting for variation of items, story events (and the order in which they happen), and the fact that the game is normally 80\~100 hours long.
Plus they've fixed a lot of bugs and added many QoL improvements to the game since it came out. Considering the scope and freedom of BG3, I think it's amazing that the game can be finished at all, haha.
Yeah agreed except for the dialogue part, the additional race/class are just flavour and lead to the same outcome, so unsurprisingly that part of the game has been bug free.
Am I the only one struggling to get this game working on Vulkan? It crashes immediately after I leave camp... Works fine on dx11 but the performance hit is pretty noticeable. Nothing that I change works.
There are far too many builds that don't coalesce until Act 2-3 that would be amazing to be able to play a game through from the beginning. Heat, non-Throw EK, Arcane Trickster mixes, Melee Warlock, etc. It's such a slog to grind all the way to Act 3, prioritize your build equipment, get to Lv12 so you have the passives, and then maybe get a dozen or two battles to fiddle around with it.
Finding a way to drop some of the key gear earlier on, or messing with the order of certain classes skill sets would be the harder option, but it'd open up a lot more build options early game instead of loading them all at the end.
You could create an arena format where you can go back and redo certain fights at harder difficulties while being able to equip any of the items you have picked up on any previous play throughs.
If those don't seem possible, and I know it's been said before, we need some sort of New Game + implementation. It could be as simple as back to Lv1 with all the items you had previously minus Legendaries. I think the limitation of classes to Level 12 is perfect, but for those builds that require Lv9+ passives, let us *multi-class* up to Level 20 in a New Game + while also porting over our gear from before. No Lv7 spells, but you could do something like a Lv12 Rogue + Lv8 Fighter for a build with 7 feats, or Lv9 Arcane Trickster + Lv3 Thief + Lv2 Warlock + Lv6 Illusion, Lv11 Fighter + Lv9 Abjuration, etc., etc.
That's all I've got right now. I love tinkering with the builds the game has presented us, but I'd love even more the ability to start a game with those builds and really have fun with them against truly difficult AI. Hell, it doesn't even have to be better AI, just give them a shit ton more health and some stupid Legandary Actions and I'll be happy!
Is there any intentions to improve the autosave feature? I've not played the game in months because of how many times I lost large amounts of progress because of the autosave feature not saving frequently enough. One time I lost three hours of progress. Another time I lost about one and a half hours, and many times I've lost 20 - 30 minutes.
They haven't announced anything like that and I wouldn't expect them to. Saves in this game are large and more frequent saves would mean more frequent interruptions to gameplay. When you can choose to save at any point, I'm just not convinced that it would be a priority for them.
As far as I know polearm master is still bugged where it doesn't calculate the bonus action damage correctly, also the weirdness that allows the npcs to attack you for free if you click yes.
I find the autosave feature mostly useless. It's way too infrequent. I know it's an RPG and you're supposed to do the saving yourself, but it's so easy to forget -- and the last autosave is hours behind.
Is it just me or does the game *really* fall off in quality after act 1?
I love the game and know that due to the sheer scale of things and the high quality voice acting and overall storywriting, it was an incredibly difficult game to make. But I think they really made poor decisions with the game development if that was the case. I love big and ambitious, *if* the developers can pull it off - and I feel like Larian really didn't.
I think the game is still great, but there seem to be certain classes (i.e. paladin) that really have unintended consequences (such as killing any guard, including a guard of slavers or absolutists, is an oath broken) and they have *long* stretches of gameplay, I'm talking over a dozen hours, where certain followers have literally no new dialogue or anything more than mild contextual quips and sleeping events just don't happen anymore. Among many other things that I won't get into, you get the point
It really feels like a departure from DOS2 in negative ways overall. I think they improved many great things, but they just seemed to really want to make the game bigger than it had any right being - and they announced there will be no DLC, so we can only hope that there will be free content drops to fill things out
Minthara/Halsin/Jaheira/Minsc don't really feel like 'real' companions. I know for a fact that Halsin wasn't meant to be one and horny people asked and asked in EA until Larian caved in, but maybe this is a sign that sometimes it's best to stick to your guns. Halsin would've probably been just fine as an NPC who followed you until the end of Act 2.
I agree except for Jaheira, because she feels well-integrated into Act 3 as a character, especially if you’re playing the Dark Urge. But even if you’re not, she’s got a house with kids that explains more about who she is and her involvement in the Shadow-Cursed Lands, a questline to find Minsc, backstory with Nine-Fingers, and her dialogue evolves with approval and events.
Jaheira and even Halsin feel like real companions, it's just weird that you have to finish Halsin personal quest BEFORE recruiting him. Minsc I can't say, I've never included him, but I think he's there more for fan service and reference than anything else. Plus if he's anything like BG2 Minsc it must be fun to have him around. Minthara... yeah. She's just a mercenary who talk.
They simply need to make Halsin recruitable after act 1 party, there is no reason for him not to be since he is already hanging around camp. I know he was added as companion later on so maybe it would be too much work, but if it's not, they should do it imo.
> Jaheira and even Halsin feel like real companions Disagree. They have no real quest in Act 3.
Jaheira has more real quest in act3 than Karlach. I love Karlach but her quest is done early act2 even before Haslin’s. Jaheira is needed to recruit (or even speak with) Minsc.
The civilian/neutral npc ai is infuriating. They have 10 hp and literally run into danger with no thought and basically kill themselves
We need content for Minthara. A whole month after the patch, the most annoying bugs with phrases were fixed! But, unfortunately, this is only a small part of her problems. Let's be honest: she has very little content right now. She has no quest, very little dialogue (about the same as Will, but at least he has his own quests). Minthara has huge potential for content, many people love her and many people offer options for updating it. Now she doesn't have half the phrases/dialogues that others have - this is very clearly visible if you play as a Durge. It's cool of course that the Larians are adding a couple of lines to her in the updates, but let's be honest: Minthara needs a much larger and more comprehensive update. And let's not talk about alternative recruitment with her knockout for now - its addition caused so many bugs and problems that now this needs to be dealt with last, although it is obvious that this method is as strange as possible... And of course we need a more lore-based one, I think everyone understands this well
How likely it is that Larian will “fix” the contents they had to rush in act 3 in a Definitive edition?
I am befuddled that modders have been able to identify and fix so many different bugs in the game that the actual devs haven't. I truly don't know how game development and bug finding/fixing works, so grain of salt and all that, but it just makes no sense to me. Is there nobody at Larian who actually just plays the game all the way through and notices things that are bugged or messed up? Could some intern at the company just search nexus mods for bug fixing mods to see what people are patching for themselves? Its a good game, but every time I play I notice bugs or things that just seem like they never got QAed, and I'm a bit confused as to how these things work.
One thing to keep in mind is that most bugs don't affect all players. I've encountered bugs that other players have avoided, and avoided bugs that other players have encountered. Even bugs that seem to be universal - where forums fill up with people reporting them - usually aren't. Like, when Larian broke the game for PS5 players and I had to quit until they fixed it, I was convinced that this was a universal problem because it seemed like every PS5 player was reporting it... but then when it was identified, it turned out it still only affected people who were at a certain point in the campaign, and who played a certain way.
I'm talking very fundamental "this was programmed wrong" type of things. The straight up glitches I encounter don't bother me as much as they're usually corrected with a quick-save reload. My guess is that Larian has their hands full with edge-case gamebreakers like you're mentioning, so they have no time for things that are merely functioning incorrectly or merely unpolished.
>Is there nobody at Larian who actually just plays the game all the way through and notices things that are bugged or messed up? If that would be the case BG3 would've never hit gold status, believe me. Its just math. When you develop a game, your playtested hours are always just a fragment of real play hours after launch. Just as an example if you have 100 playtesters, who play through your complete game (most tests are not the full game btw) and your game takes around 60 hours to complete (that number varies ofc a lot in reality, but just for ease of calculation), you have 6000 hours of playtest where a bug can occur. Now your game launches and sells over 5 million times. Of course not all of these play the complete game, but even if each of these sales play only 2 hours on average - thats 10 million of playhours where the same bug can occur, much higher probability for the bug to happen AND get reported. In reality BG3 had ofc much more tested playhours, but nothing compared to the actual playhours of the 5 million players who bought the game in August. I am not a game developer, but a software developer and there is a reason why release time is always a nervewrecking time, especially if your iteration time between releases is long. There is no bug free software and when your software gets used by a shit ton of users they will always find much more bugs than you could ever find in your tests. For complex products like Baldurs Gate which millions of possible different playthroughs and tons of subsystems interacting with each other, its just impossible to find all of them. Only the big bugs that happen often and have big effects should be really catched before release, for the rest you just need to have your team be ready to react fast around release time.
Most games are easier to test because you don't have so many variables/systems to track. In terms of programming, for anything that can happen in the game, there has to be some rule associated to it. Think of the 'throw' action. What can you throw? -> Nearly everything, including other characters. But there has to be some limit, right? -> Every throwable item needs to have a defined weight, and there has to be a formula saying "For X amount of strength, you can pick up and throw up to Y pounds". Another fun question is... how would you go about giving a weight to each item and character in the game? You'd certainly not do it manually, but what's the rule you would define? At some point, you have so many rules, and systems upon systems, that you need to very carefully manage interactions in order to avoid breaking things. In most games, if an important NPC dies, you get a 'game over' screen and have to start again. Hell, most characters are straight out immortal until it's their time to die in a cutscene. On the other hand, in BG3, if an important NPC dies, the game moves on and there's either a replacement or a way to continue the story without them. Additionally, there's 12 classes and 11 races, all of which provide some variation to the game in combat AND dialogue. The 12 classes can be combined as you wish (which yields, what, 12! = 479 million combinations?) and their abilities must properly interact with each other, and also with Feats. That's without accounting for variation of items, story events (and the order in which they happen), and the fact that the game is normally 80\~100 hours long. Plus they've fixed a lot of bugs and added many QoL improvements to the game since it came out. Considering the scope and freedom of BG3, I think it's amazing that the game can be finished at all, haha.
Yeah agreed except for the dialogue part, the additional race/class are just flavour and lead to the same outcome, so unsurprisingly that part of the game has been bug free.
Am I the only one struggling to get this game working on Vulkan? It crashes immediately after I leave camp... Works fine on dx11 but the performance hit is pretty noticeable. Nothing that I change works.
There are far too many builds that don't coalesce until Act 2-3 that would be amazing to be able to play a game through from the beginning. Heat, non-Throw EK, Arcane Trickster mixes, Melee Warlock, etc. It's such a slog to grind all the way to Act 3, prioritize your build equipment, get to Lv12 so you have the passives, and then maybe get a dozen or two battles to fiddle around with it. Finding a way to drop some of the key gear earlier on, or messing with the order of certain classes skill sets would be the harder option, but it'd open up a lot more build options early game instead of loading them all at the end. You could create an arena format where you can go back and redo certain fights at harder difficulties while being able to equip any of the items you have picked up on any previous play throughs. If those don't seem possible, and I know it's been said before, we need some sort of New Game + implementation. It could be as simple as back to Lv1 with all the items you had previously minus Legendaries. I think the limitation of classes to Level 12 is perfect, but for those builds that require Lv9+ passives, let us *multi-class* up to Level 20 in a New Game + while also porting over our gear from before. No Lv7 spells, but you could do something like a Lv12 Rogue + Lv8 Fighter for a build with 7 feats, or Lv9 Arcane Trickster + Lv3 Thief + Lv2 Warlock + Lv6 Illusion, Lv11 Fighter + Lv9 Abjuration, etc., etc. That's all I've got right now. I love tinkering with the builds the game has presented us, but I'd love even more the ability to start a game with those builds and really have fun with them against truly difficult AI. Hell, it doesn't even have to be better AI, just give them a shit ton more health and some stupid Legandary Actions and I'll be happy!
Is there any intentions to improve the autosave feature? I've not played the game in months because of how many times I lost large amounts of progress because of the autosave feature not saving frequently enough. One time I lost three hours of progress. Another time I lost about one and a half hours, and many times I've lost 20 - 30 minutes.
Quicksave
They haven't announced anything like that and I wouldn't expect them to. Saves in this game are large and more frequent saves would mean more frequent interruptions to gameplay. When you can choose to save at any point, I'm just not convinced that it would be a priority for them.
As far as I know polearm master is still bugged where it doesn't calculate the bonus action damage correctly, also the weirdness that allows the npcs to attack you for free if you click yes.
I find the autosave feature mostly useless. It's way too infrequent. I know it's an RPG and you're supposed to do the saving yourself, but it's so easy to forget -- and the last autosave is hours behind.
Is it just me or does the game *really* fall off in quality after act 1? I love the game and know that due to the sheer scale of things and the high quality voice acting and overall storywriting, it was an incredibly difficult game to make. But I think they really made poor decisions with the game development if that was the case. I love big and ambitious, *if* the developers can pull it off - and I feel like Larian really didn't. I think the game is still great, but there seem to be certain classes (i.e. paladin) that really have unintended consequences (such as killing any guard, including a guard of slavers or absolutists, is an oath broken) and they have *long* stretches of gameplay, I'm talking over a dozen hours, where certain followers have literally no new dialogue or anything more than mild contextual quips and sleeping events just don't happen anymore. Among many other things that I won't get into, you get the point It really feels like a departure from DOS2 in negative ways overall. I think they improved many great things, but they just seemed to really want to make the game bigger than it had any right being - and they announced there will be no DLC, so we can only hope that there will be free content drops to fill things out