this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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Baldur's Gate 3

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All things BG3!

Baldur’s Gate 3 is a story-rich, party-based RPG set in the universe of Dungeons & Dragons, where your choices shape a tale of fellowship and betrayal, survival and sacrifice, and the lure of absolute power. (Website)

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (24 children)

DnD 5e mechanics works ok-ish, nothing really wrong with them. But 4e would have been waaaay better. Imagine more battlefield manipulation, more pushes and pulls. And a bit more dangerous ground, not DOS levels but a bit more. 4e would shine then.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (10 children)

I do agree with the person you're replying to, in that I'm not a huge fan of DnD mechanics - "works ok-ish" is what I would also say about them. It does do its job just fine, so this isn't a big issue by any means.

Related to game mechanics in BG3, my personal issues are as follows:

  1. Heavy reliance on RNG in combat. In turn-based games, I always prefer game mechanics which work as I planned, maybe with small variance (i.e. look at Advance Wars). Basically I prefer when my planning is the part determining how the combat flows (damage or cc? Which target? Where do I move to?) - there'll always be some "I'm not sure what happens on next round" due to just not being able to know what the enemies will do on their turn, so I don't really need even more RNG in the form of hit/miss (& save) rolls. Basically: chess is a good game as it is, I wouldn't want to have a 50-50 coin toss determining if I can kill a unit or not.

    • I do think that some form of randomness is fine, but I don't like that there's just so many layers of RNG in all things. Damage abilities: first roll if you hit or miss, and if you hit, then the damage variance is often like 5d6 (5 to 30) - it's almost like doing two rolls to figure out if you actually deal any notable amount of damage or not.
  2. Practically everything related to the resting mechanic. I really feel like I would enjoy the game more if I just had fully recharged spells (and other stuff) in the beginning of any fight - and obviously then balance the game with that in mind. Where needed, devs could tag a certain area as "no resets here" so you know you'll be forced to do a couple of fights in a row without resets.

    • One reason making me think this way is just the amount of available food, since you get more than enough resources to do a full rest after practically any fight anyway - so now it just becomes a QoL issue. It's not "do I want to use my resources to reset here?", in practice the choice is just "do I want to spend a couple of minutes going through loading screens?".
    • If there was less food available so that you'd need to be careful about when/where you do a full rest, progress through the game would be: go forward until you fail a fight, load the game, do a full rest, fight with full resources - this really doesn't sound fun in practice. I don't think there's a way to implement this style of a resting mechanic in such a way that I'd personally like it (at least without changing a lot more about the game).

I do want to finish this with another disclaimer that I do think BG3 is a great game, and these are really just minor issues - I completed it yesterday and enjoyed my time for the whole ~120 hours. But my two biggest issues that I can point out about the game's mechanics are both just base mechanics of DnD.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Personally, I like the RNG. It means you can't guarantee much. You have to plan on what you might do if you fail. Some players won't like planning for possible failure, which I understand, but I think it adds depth. You can choose to use a spell like magic missile, which is a guaranteed hit but low damage, or you can choose to use a more powerful ability but it may fail, and what will you do if it does. It's one more thing to consider. If it's a guaranteed hit/kill then you don't need to think of how you may have to mitigate what happens on a fail. You can also never be totally safe. Even if you have a lot of armor/health/saves you can still fail, so you need to decide on equipment that might help you when you fail rather than stuff that will just keep you from failing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yup, I have to say that I completely understand why some people like it - it adds to the chaos, and your job is to mitigate/control the chaos (by eg. choosing to use Magic Missile like you mentioned). It's just not something I personally enjoy. :D

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