With Baldur’s Gate 3 now days away from its PC debut, we’ve interviewed Larian to discuss some of the very last outstanding topics.
I’m not happy that they still haven’t figured out the “pick who initiates dialogue” problem. This has been a thing in Divinity: Original Sin 2, and continues to plague us into Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s really annoying to watch your party face Sorcerer or Bard sit in the background while the Barbarian gets to fumble all the dialogue checks with their 8 Charisma score just because they happened to be the first one to enter the room, or the one who was closest to the boss before they decided to plea for their life (looking at you, Hag…) There is also the dilemma of whether to pick the dialogue options you would pick or the ones the character speaking would. I would love to pet that puppy but Astarion happened to walk into the door first, so I guess I’ll have to pick the option to kick it instead or break character.
I can agree with you if I put myself in a “min/max” mindset, where you’re trying to get the best possible option in every situation - but in a roleplay sense, a tabletop sense, a story sense - it’s far more interesting if more than one character engages in conversation with the world around them.
Having played loads of tabletop, emergent narrative often pits characters against challenges they’re not well-equipped for - which drives the story in interesting directions. The Barb might have a higher chance of failure in persuasion checks, but does that really matter? I guess it comes to the higher level question of whether you’d reload a save if you failed a speech check - if so, I’d argue that it doesn’t matter who talks if the player is just gonna reroll (as low rolls occasionally plague even the most erudite).
I’m happy for mods to have a fix for the “No one talks but me” crowd, but my thoughts are that Larian has thrown in so many contextual responsiveness for each character/race/class that it’s honestly going to be interesting to see how different characters lead a conversation.
I kind of like the idea of “this person can be a liability if you let them talk to people”. D:OS 2 did something like that where party members would ask to take over the conversation and do whatever they wanted with it, and I thought it definitely added to the immersion. I definitely don’t think allowing you to magically control who’s party to a conversation is an improvement over letting it happen organically.
Even ignoring the story element, from a pure gameplay perspective, I don’t think getting a bad speaker trapped into a conversation is really different from having a glass cannon type character get caught out and killed because they can’t take damage. It’s part of your party construction.
I actually agree. I am replaying Divinity 2 and had this problem yesterday. Hope they fix it.
I bet you in a month we’ll see a mod that completely addresses this issue and we will all be left wondering why Larian didn’t fix it during the entirety of this game’s development. I can’t believe it would be that hard to just make it so only the character on top of the party list can interact and the others are just treated as NPCs and don’t initiate cutscenes/dialogue (or if they do, just swap their positions with the player character, I will take abrupt body swaps over save scumming to get the right character to initiate dialogue any day) yet here we are at almost release with this still being an issue.
I can’t remember what interview it was from, but IIRC, it’s not that it’s an unsolvable problem, it’s in the standard they wished to hold dialogue to. A swap is easy, a swap that feels natural is not. The exponential explosion of little tweaks and permutations was outside the scope they were willing/able to add before release. (Presumably they are under some pressure to release, not just from fans, but from WotC, and the logistics of keeping the company afloat.) Which I can respect, although I both anticipate and fully understand the need for mods to do the swap.
I respect their option, but disagree with it completely. I think accidentally triggering a cutscene with the wrong character, stumbling through it quickly only to reload a save and trigger it with your player character instead feels a lot worse than just always triggering the cutscene with your player character, even if it “breaks immersion” by teleporting them slightly (unless they are really far away/this is an Origin specific interaction). I’m not asking for the complex task of being able to switch characters mid dialogue, I understand how that can prove nightmarish to implement, just let me pick the default character to always initiate all interactions and I’ll be happy.
Did you take advantage of any of the DualSense features (adaptive triggers, haptic feedback)? If yes, are they available on PC as well when connecting the controller? If not, is there any chance of you adding support for them later?
We have rumble and lighting effects on the DualSense controller on PS5, and they’ll be added to DualSense on PC post-launch.
Will there be crossplay functionality for co-op multiplayer between PC and PS5?
We’re shipping BG3 with cross-saves between PC and PS5, and we’ll see about crossplay post-launch.
Cool!
Anyone else underwhelmed by the new tadpole mechanic? I mean, I liked the temptation of being given unique or powerful options during the adventure so that good or neutral characters would be tempted to use the tadpole despite the risks.
But instead the option is now to cram your head full of worms?!? I feel like that takes so much away. Only the most depraved characters would take that route. Sure that makes sense on a Dark Urge kind of play through but it leaves things kind of underwhelming for any halfway sane character.
Yeah, I’m not keen on this change. Will reserve final judgement until I actually play the game and we see the changes to the Guardian (the dream character) they made, but it felt a lot easier to “fall to temptation” when it was just an almost guaranteed beneficial dialogue option that you could pick instead of literally shoving more brain eating parasites into your eye.
I’m hopeful that both will exist, but who knows. Use the 'poles too much, get weird dreams and certain, pre-set powers. But you could have so much more if you were willing to speed the process along…
What’s the issue with multi class casters? They will have more spell slots than single class casters, while in tabletop they don’t? How does it work?
It’s odd, because what he described in the answer to the question in the linked article was exactly how multiclassing spellcasters works in 5e
It feels like there’s some miscommunication going on - my gut feeling is that spellcaster multiclassing is going to be very similar to 5e base.
I don’t plan to multiclass, but I thought the downside was you will not be able to get to high level in the classes you pick. I could be wrong. Anyone know?
The level cap is 12 for single class, so 2 classes picked for multiclass would be 6 for each and level 4 for 3 classes?
Anyone know?
Any other negatives for multiclass?
You don’t need to take the same number of levels in both classes, it’s common to take a single level from another class to get some proficiencies or class features.
The biggest negative is that you postpone cool class abilities, and you cannot get the best ones from higher levels. This also means that you could mess up the character if you don’t plan the build before starting, but this isn’t a big problem in this game as you can change everything later.
In the interview they mention a specific case of taking two spellcasting classes, that’s what I was wondering about.
Yeah it’s a departure from 5e and they have not made it clear how it will work exactly.
I’m confused how it’s a departure from 5e.
When multiclassing, the levels of your classes and subclasses that normally have access to spell slots are added together in a weighted formula, and then the overall spellcasting level is used to determine how many and which levels of spell slots you will receive.
Granted, we don’t know what that “weighted formula” specifically is, but isn’t that just how 5e normally is? A level 3 wizard + a level 2 ranger is treated as a level 4 caster when determining spell slots?
