Multi Baldur's Gate III
- Thread starter cm2
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June is going to be a big month.
Looks like they are having fun making it at least.
Indeed. And I am curious on the not yet revealed companions...
Next stream really soon...
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They just posted more stuff:
Today we’d like to take a bit of time to discuss how Baldur’s Gate 3 gives you plenty of easy to understand systems which you’ll use to overcome increasingly more complex challenges. The way combat works and how you can use our brand new shiny forced turn-based to get advantage are good examples of this.
BG3 deploys fifth edition D&D rules and is class-based. We’ll go into what that means per-class later this year, but for now let’s focus on how BG3’s combat plays. It’s come a long way since the reveal in February. It’s now faster, and more responsive. And it works well in both singleplayer and multiplayer.
If you watched the gameplay stream, one thing many of you have noticed is how fluid combat in BG3 now feels. Despite being turn-based, which allows you to have an authentic D&D experience and really deliberate over your moves as a team, BG3’s combat is much faster than DOS2. But how? Magic? A rift in the space-time continuum? Currently, neither of those things. In fact a lot of it is down to how animations are both created and processed. We invested heavily into what drives our animation pipeline, and specifically made tweaks to improve the feel and motion in combat. The increased brevity and flow is down to many, many changes shaving off microseconds (and sometimes entire seconds). For example, another character’s turn will begin - behind the scenes - as the previous character is ending their animation. Even things as simple as combining move animations with the hit of a melee strike shaves seconds off combat.
Since the initial gameplay reveal in February, we totally overhauled the order of combat. Early Access means change, and change is shaped by feedback and testing over time. BG3’s combat is now set so that each combatant takes a turn at a time but there’s a twist. If multiple combatants of the same faction follow one another in the turn order, then you can simultaneously command each of them.
That means that based on the results of the initiative roll, you’ll experience a different tactical puzzle in each combat that really mixes everything up but still allows you to react to the “cards” you’re “dealt”, so to speak. (There aren’t literally any cards, sorry MTG fans!) Between the RNG of initiative, and the planning, you should be able to have a fresh experience with every combat while still being able to predict and plan with friends how to combine spells and abilities, and ultimately win the fight.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a party-based game that you can play alone, controlling each character, or as a party of up to four where each person rolls their own character. (It’s of course possible to also play as 2, or 3 people, with AI, etc).
In multiplayer, when your avatars and companions are next to each other in the turn order players can simultaneously control characters. This allows you to communicate with your friends and combine spells and abilities to take advantage of more brains on the battlefield, and more hands on the keyboard. This, compared with Divinity: Original Sin 2, drastically reduces the amount of time each player would have to wait between turns, since they’re able to move together.
Stealth is also a big part of Baldur’s Gate 3 - if you want it to be - and it goes hand in hand with the game's great sense of verticality, and ability to shove people. Sneaking is a really useful technique for positioning your party prior to the initiative roll, ensuring you get the first strike. Using stealth, it’s perfectly viable to sneak into a camp, avoid being seen, and roll crits to victory. With a little thought comes the perfect ‘shove’.
Using stealth to prepare for combat is even more fun due to the introduction of forced turn-based mode. This is a big new feature that allows players at any moment during exploration to switch to turn-based rules. Each turn equates to 6 seconds, allowing players to predict and navigate enemy movement, or solve puzzles that require clever navigation (for example, not getting hit by a fireball!).
Our stealth mechanics now also take light and darkness into account. You can be obscured or heavily obscured so that even when you are caught in the visibility cones of the enemy, you still have a chance to slip through unseen. Of course, that is if your enemies don’t have darkvision. Here’s a little table that summarizes how light, darkness and darkvision affect stealth.
Clear area = always visible.
Lightly obscured = stealth check.
Lightly obscured + enemy has darkvision = visible.
Heavily obscured = undetected.
Heavily obscured + enemy has darkvision = stealth check.
Things get even more interesting when you discover you can manipulate light by using spells or throwing water at a torch, as lighting is dynamic, and thus shadows are also.
To summarize, forced turn-based mode, allows you to switch to turn-based rules in exploration, to set up traps, bypass patrols, steal, and otherwise head on many other roguish exploits. But you don’t have to be a rogue class, of course.
These are all super useful techniques that, when used imaginatively, really help you to get the best chances during your initiative roll as combat starts. Baldur’s Gate 3 has high-stakes combat, so making good use of surprise mechanics will give you a leg-up.
Today we’d like to take a bit of time to discuss how Baldur’s Gate 3 gives you plenty of easy to understand systems which you’ll use to overcome increasingly more complex challenges. The way combat works and how you can use our brand new shiny forced turn-based to get advantage are good examples of this.
BG3 deploys fifth edition D&D rules and is class-based. We’ll go into what that means per-class later this year, but for now let’s focus on how BG3’s combat plays. It’s come a long way since the reveal in February. It’s now faster, and more responsive. And it works well in both singleplayer and multiplayer.
If you watched the gameplay stream, one thing many of you have noticed is how fluid combat in BG3 now feels. Despite being turn-based, which allows you to have an authentic D&D experience and really deliberate over your moves as a team, BG3’s combat is much faster than DOS2. But how? Magic? A rift in the space-time continuum? Currently, neither of those things. In fact a lot of it is down to how animations are both created and processed. We invested heavily into what drives our animation pipeline, and specifically made tweaks to improve the feel and motion in combat. The increased brevity and flow is down to many, many changes shaving off microseconds (and sometimes entire seconds). For example, another character’s turn will begin - behind the scenes - as the previous character is ending their animation. Even things as simple as combining move animations with the hit of a melee strike shaves seconds off combat.
Since the initial gameplay reveal in February, we totally overhauled the order of combat. Early Access means change, and change is shaped by feedback and testing over time. BG3’s combat is now set so that each combatant takes a turn at a time but there’s a twist. If multiple combatants of the same faction follow one another in the turn order, then you can simultaneously command each of them.
That means that based on the results of the initiative roll, you’ll experience a different tactical puzzle in each combat that really mixes everything up but still allows you to react to the “cards” you’re “dealt”, so to speak. (There aren’t literally any cards, sorry MTG fans!) Between the RNG of initiative, and the planning, you should be able to have a fresh experience with every combat while still being able to predict and plan with friends how to combine spells and abilities, and ultimately win the fight.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a party-based game that you can play alone, controlling each character, or as a party of up to four where each person rolls their own character. (It’s of course possible to also play as 2, or 3 people, with AI, etc).
In multiplayer, when your avatars and companions are next to each other in the turn order players can simultaneously control characters. This allows you to communicate with your friends and combine spells and abilities to take advantage of more brains on the battlefield, and more hands on the keyboard. This, compared with Divinity: Original Sin 2, drastically reduces the amount of time each player would have to wait between turns, since they’re able to move together.
Stealth is also a big part of Baldur’s Gate 3 - if you want it to be - and it goes hand in hand with the game's great sense of verticality, and ability to shove people. Sneaking is a really useful technique for positioning your party prior to the initiative roll, ensuring you get the first strike. Using stealth, it’s perfectly viable to sneak into a camp, avoid being seen, and roll crits to victory. With a little thought comes the perfect ‘shove’.
Using stealth to prepare for combat is even more fun due to the introduction of forced turn-based mode. This is a big new feature that allows players at any moment during exploration to switch to turn-based rules. Each turn equates to 6 seconds, allowing players to predict and navigate enemy movement, or solve puzzles that require clever navigation (for example, not getting hit by a fireball!).
Our stealth mechanics now also take light and darkness into account. You can be obscured or heavily obscured so that even when you are caught in the visibility cones of the enemy, you still have a chance to slip through unseen. Of course, that is if your enemies don’t have darkvision. Here’s a little table that summarizes how light, darkness and darkvision affect stealth.
Clear area = always visible.
Lightly obscured = stealth check.
Lightly obscured + enemy has darkvision = visible.
Heavily obscured = undetected.
Heavily obscured + enemy has darkvision = stealth check.
Things get even more interesting when you discover you can manipulate light by using spells or throwing water at a torch, as lighting is dynamic, and thus shadows are also.
To summarize, forced turn-based mode, allows you to switch to turn-based rules in exploration, to set up traps, bypass patrols, steal, and otherwise head on many other roguish exploits. But you don’t have to be a rogue class, of course.
These are all super useful techniques that, when used imaginatively, really help you to get the best chances during your initiative roll as combat starts. Baldur’s Gate 3 has high-stakes combat, so making good use of surprise mechanics will give you a leg-up.
Early access delayed:
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Early Access will be on September 30
Gameplay
A highlight of the Panel From Hell was the “lobotomy scene,” a new gameplay snippet shown during the stream. As players attempt to seize control of the nautiloid, they find a corpse with its brain exposed. The brain itself seems to address the player, asking them to free it. At this point, players can decide to get their hands dirty, extracting the brain from the skull, which leads to the discovery that it’s not a brain at all, but rather a trapped Intellect Devourer. These creatures feed on the intelligence of sentient beings, taking over their victims’ bodies on behalf of their Mind Flayer masters.
Scope of Early Access
Swen Vincke, Creative Director of Larian Studios, also showcased the scope of early access, giving details on how the size of Baldur’s Gate III‘s first act compares to Larian’s previous release, Divinity: Original Sin II, when it launched in early access. Here are a few numbers that will emphasize the depth of Baldur’s Gate III in comparison to Divinity: Original Sin II:
Through gameplay footage, and audience interaction, Vincke demonstrated how the game allows players to discover different permutations in encounters and dialogue depending on the characters they play and the choices they make. This depth of reactivity means that even in early access, multiple playthroughs will lead to different outcomes and developments not only for players and their companions, but for the many NPCs they meet and the world around them, too. In simple terms, playing “good” and “evil” will offer wholly different experiences with many twists and turns (all performance-captured) that other players may never see, depending on their choices.
Gameplay
A highlight of the Panel From Hell was the “lobotomy scene,” a new gameplay snippet shown during the stream. As players attempt to seize control of the nautiloid, they find a corpse with its brain exposed. The brain itself seems to address the player, asking them to free it. At this point, players can decide to get their hands dirty, extracting the brain from the skull, which leads to the discovery that it’s not a brain at all, but rather a trapped Intellect Devourer. These creatures feed on the intelligence of sentient beings, taking over their victims’ bodies on behalf of their Mind Flayer masters.
Scope of Early Access
Swen Vincke, Creative Director of Larian Studios, also showcased the scope of early access, giving details on how the size of Baldur’s Gate III‘s first act compares to Larian’s previous release, Divinity: Original Sin II, when it launched in early access. Here are a few numbers that will emphasize the depth of Baldur’s Gate III in comparison to Divinity: Original Sin II:
- Number of Combat Encounters: 22 in Divinity: Original Sin II Early Access vs. 80 in Baldur’s Gate III Early Access
- Number of English Dialogue Lines: 17,600 in Divinity: Original Sin II Early Access vs. 45,980 in Baldur’s Gate III Early Access
- Number of Characters: 142 in Divinity: Original Sin II Early Access vs. 596 in Baldur’s Gate III Early Access
- Number of Spells / Actions: 69 in Divinity: Original Sin II Early Access vs. 146 in Baldur’s Gate III Early Access
Through gameplay footage, and audience interaction, Vincke demonstrated how the game allows players to discover different permutations in encounters and dialogue depending on the characters they play and the choices they make. This depth of reactivity means that even in early access, multiple playthroughs will lead to different outcomes and developments not only for players and their companions, but for the many NPCs they meet and the world around them, too. In simple terms, playing “good” and “evil” will offer wholly different experiences with many twists and turns (all performance-captured) that other players may never see, depending on their choices.
delays pending of course 
Read some more stuff on relationships:
Relationship Building
So, what does it take to incorporate all these pillars of a classic franchise and deliver a sequel that fans will appreciate and Larian is proud of? According to Smith, it’s about doing everything they can to replicate the reactivity of the tabletop experience, harkening back to the idea that BG3 is a D&D game where Larian is your Dungeon Master. “We have some advantages over a flesh and blood DM in the sense of the things we can conjure and the way that we can display things.”
What they don’t have, however, is the ability to react immediately to players like an in-person game master. To rout this issue, the team relies on adding an almost absurdly complex amount of systemic story branches based on your decision-making. “If you play Tabletop,” he continues, “then you know that players will deviate from the best laid plans. So, as a DM – or as a writer on Baldur's Gate III – we're saying, 'I have a very clear story that I wanna tell. It has all these points that I wanna hit.’ and you're gonna trample through some of them, you're gonna deviate from some of them. You're gonna throw curve balls at me, so we're reacting to about as much as you can.”
The key is to blur the line between the quest hooks or planned moments and the choices that players are making for themselves. So Larian will offer players story beats, but (after the tutorial) avoids sections that feel like they’re on rails. “We never want to take away control and say, 'This is the story bit,'” says Smith. “The story bit is also the bit where [a player might say], 'Hey, I might wanna steal from this guy,’ or, ‘This guy's got a quest, but how does he react iif he suddenly wants to give me something, but one of my partners has stolen it from him?' So, you're always looking at these things and saying, 'How do we make sure that the characters react in a believable way to the crazy things that the players might have done? There are things that I am super proud of, personally, that if I look at the Venn diagram of who's gonna experience them, it's just so small,” he laughs.
The team is also very focused on maintaining the personal relationship players had with their companions and the NPCs throughout the world in the originals, hoping to immerse the player enough that they make choices that they normally wouldn’t. Not necessarily out of a decision to do a “good” or “evil” playthrough, but to affect their choices through the world and its characters. “I hope this doesn't sound like a terrible to say,” Smith starts, “but I’d feel very, very good about writing a situation or a character where people get into it and think, 'You know what? I don't want to be a vengeful person, but fuck that guy,' and they pull the trigger. I want people to get into those situations where the player thinks 'In all good consciousness, I think I have to do something that I wouldn't normally do’... and then seeing what those consequences are.”
We (hopefully) won’t have to wait too much longer to see how these situations play out. On the development side, it sounds like new ideas and changes to existing content (in addition to everything still listed as “work-in-progress”) are constant.
“We iterate constantly,” Smith says. “We never say, ‘Okay, that's good. Put it to one side.’ We're constantly looking at things and trying to improve them; every day we're better at making this game.”
Come October (and sure, technically the last day of September), Smith’s team - and the rest of the Larian crew - will start taking suggestions from players as they continue to refine the systems and develop the game beyond the first act that makes up the early access build. It’s the first time in nearly two decades that people will get their hands on a new Baldur's Gate – which amounts to a lot of pressure, to be sure. But Smith says the team isn’t worried, largely because of how far they’ve come already.
“We know that we're making something that we're already happy with,” he says. “Part of it is just being lucky that you work with incredibly talented people, and part of it is just being willing to adapt and to change when something doesn't work. To say, 'You know what? That one doesn't work. Throw it away. Start again. Do this one instead. Try it a different way.' And we're all really good at that.”
Relationship Building
So, what does it take to incorporate all these pillars of a classic franchise and deliver a sequel that fans will appreciate and Larian is proud of? According to Smith, it’s about doing everything they can to replicate the reactivity of the tabletop experience, harkening back to the idea that BG3 is a D&D game where Larian is your Dungeon Master. “We have some advantages over a flesh and blood DM in the sense of the things we can conjure and the way that we can display things.”
What they don’t have, however, is the ability to react immediately to players like an in-person game master. To rout this issue, the team relies on adding an almost absurdly complex amount of systemic story branches based on your decision-making. “If you play Tabletop,” he continues, “then you know that players will deviate from the best laid plans. So, as a DM – or as a writer on Baldur's Gate III – we're saying, 'I have a very clear story that I wanna tell. It has all these points that I wanna hit.’ and you're gonna trample through some of them, you're gonna deviate from some of them. You're gonna throw curve balls at me, so we're reacting to about as much as you can.”
The key is to blur the line between the quest hooks or planned moments and the choices that players are making for themselves. So Larian will offer players story beats, but (after the tutorial) avoids sections that feel like they’re on rails. “We never want to take away control and say, 'This is the story bit,'” says Smith. “The story bit is also the bit where [a player might say], 'Hey, I might wanna steal from this guy,’ or, ‘This guy's got a quest, but how does he react iif he suddenly wants to give me something, but one of my partners has stolen it from him?' So, you're always looking at these things and saying, 'How do we make sure that the characters react in a believable way to the crazy things that the players might have done? There are things that I am super proud of, personally, that if I look at the Venn diagram of who's gonna experience them, it's just so small,” he laughs.
The team is also very focused on maintaining the personal relationship players had with their companions and the NPCs throughout the world in the originals, hoping to immerse the player enough that they make choices that they normally wouldn’t. Not necessarily out of a decision to do a “good” or “evil” playthrough, but to affect their choices through the world and its characters. “I hope this doesn't sound like a terrible to say,” Smith starts, “but I’d feel very, very good about writing a situation or a character where people get into it and think, 'You know what? I don't want to be a vengeful person, but fuck that guy,' and they pull the trigger. I want people to get into those situations where the player thinks 'In all good consciousness, I think I have to do something that I wouldn't normally do’... and then seeing what those consequences are.”
We (hopefully) won’t have to wait too much longer to see how these situations play out. On the development side, it sounds like new ideas and changes to existing content (in addition to everything still listed as “work-in-progress”) are constant.
“We iterate constantly,” Smith says. “We never say, ‘Okay, that's good. Put it to one side.’ We're constantly looking at things and trying to improve them; every day we're better at making this game.”
Come October (and sure, technically the last day of September), Smith’s team - and the rest of the Larian crew - will start taking suggestions from players as they continue to refine the systems and develop the game beyond the first act that makes up the early access build. It’s the first time in nearly two decades that people will get their hands on a new Baldur's Gate – which amounts to a lot of pressure, to be sure. But Smith says the team isn’t worried, largely because of how far they’ve come already.
“We know that we're making something that we're already happy with,” he says. “Part of it is just being lucky that you work with incredibly talented people, and part of it is just being willing to adapt and to change when something doesn't work. To say, 'You know what? That one doesn't work. Throw it away. Start again. Do this one instead. Try it a different way.' And we're all really good at that.”
Early Access got delayed again and game will have hentai scenes lol :
It’s the year 2020! We’re launching an active development build, which means that things can go right, or they can go wrong each time we compile a new one. Live development different to “going gold” in that you never really have a “gold version.”
Our guiding principle for early access is that it’s fine for there to be smaller bugs or a few things that are lacking polish, but it needs to offer a fun gameplay experience with as few crashes as possible.
We’re nearly there but we had a few unexpected delays, and we still have some stability issues we’re sifting through. Because of the delays, our translations are also later than expected and we want to ensure localization for the announced Early Access languages is strong enough for our international fans to have a good time.
Thankfully, a week’s delay (to October 6) is all we expect to need to triple check stability, and triple check localization.
We say “expect” because the game still has to pass the “World Tester.” The World Tester is a sort of AI super-gamer that plays through the game at incredible speed, stress testing everything and pushing it to its limits. This super-gamer is currently playing through, and the results are looking good but not perfect yet. We know that if the super-gamer doesn’t break the game, there’s less chance you will. Not that we have any illusions you won’t try!
As a result of all the testing that’s been going on, we do now have our PC minimum requirements for day 1, and you can check those on the store pages.
Early Access is going to launch on October 6 on Stadia, Steam, and GOG. It is. It really is.
With love from Larian.
It’s the year 2020! We’re launching an active development build, which means that things can go right, or they can go wrong each time we compile a new one. Live development different to “going gold” in that you never really have a “gold version.”
Our guiding principle for early access is that it’s fine for there to be smaller bugs or a few things that are lacking polish, but it needs to offer a fun gameplay experience with as few crashes as possible.
We’re nearly there but we had a few unexpected delays, and we still have some stability issues we’re sifting through. Because of the delays, our translations are also later than expected and we want to ensure localization for the announced Early Access languages is strong enough for our international fans to have a good time.
Thankfully, a week’s delay (to October 6) is all we expect to need to triple check stability, and triple check localization.
We say “expect” because the game still has to pass the “World Tester.” The World Tester is a sort of AI super-gamer that plays through the game at incredible speed, stress testing everything and pushing it to its limits. This super-gamer is currently playing through, and the results are looking good but not perfect yet. We know that if the super-gamer doesn’t break the game, there’s less chance you will. Not that we have any illusions you won’t try!
As a result of all the testing that’s been going on, we do now have our PC minimum requirements for day 1, and you can check those on the store pages.
Early Access is going to launch on October 6 on Stadia, Steam, and GOG. It is. It really is.
With love from Larian.
They posted an update:
At launch, players will be able to create humans, githyanki, elves, drow, half-elf, dwarves, halflings, and tieflings, including subraces of each race. The early access release of Baldur’s Gate III provides around 25 hours of content, designed for multiple playthroughs. Players can create their own characters in single-player, or as a party of up to four players in multiplayer, each with their own character.
Races more alien to the Sword coast — like the Drow and Githyanki — are so rare to the average NPC that you’ll find their interactions to be unique, as well. The world of Baldur’s Gate III is a highly reactive one, so this single choice will have huge ramifications across your play experience.
Baldur’s Gate III’s character creation features photorealistic fantasy races based on 3D scans of actors and models (blemishes and all), selected because their features roughly resembled the direction for each race in the game, as well as, of course, for diversity and variety in the human-like races. Our team spent much of pre-production carefully selecting, scanning, and moulding these scans to become the base heads for character creation. Launching into early access is a total of 150 heads to pick from, across 16 races and subraces.
Alena Dubrovina, Lead Character Artist at Larian Studios, said, “When the cinematic dialogues were introduced for BG3, we realized that we needed to make a huge quality leap for the character art. We wanted to make characters look their best and put the bar very high. We had to be innovative to make such a large range of heads at the quality we wanted.
“We decided to use scanned faces in our production to create characters as realistic as possible. We scanned 40 people of different ages and ethnicity. While scouting for models we focused on features that would fit one of the fantasy races. We looked for faces that either had something unique about them or were very versatile to fit different characters. Eventually, we transformed that into approximately 150 unique heads of various races that you can see in-game now, and that number will keep growing. Some of the scanned heads kept their features, but others became a starting point for creating new faces. We also used scanned data as a learning resource because there is no better sculptor than nature.”
At launch, players will be able to create humans, githyanki, elves, drow, half-elf, dwarves, halflings, and tieflings, including subraces of each race. The early access release of Baldur’s Gate III provides around 25 hours of content, designed for multiple playthroughs. Players can create their own characters in single-player, or as a party of up to four players in multiplayer, each with their own character.
Races more alien to the Sword coast — like the Drow and Githyanki — are so rare to the average NPC that you’ll find their interactions to be unique, as well. The world of Baldur’s Gate III is a highly reactive one, so this single choice will have huge ramifications across your play experience.
Baldur’s Gate III’s character creation features photorealistic fantasy races based on 3D scans of actors and models (blemishes and all), selected because their features roughly resembled the direction for each race in the game, as well as, of course, for diversity and variety in the human-like races. Our team spent much of pre-production carefully selecting, scanning, and moulding these scans to become the base heads for character creation. Launching into early access is a total of 150 heads to pick from, across 16 races and subraces.
Alena Dubrovina, Lead Character Artist at Larian Studios, said, “When the cinematic dialogues were introduced for BG3, we realized that we needed to make a huge quality leap for the character art. We wanted to make characters look their best and put the bar very high. We had to be innovative to make such a large range of heads at the quality we wanted.
“We decided to use scanned faces in our production to create characters as realistic as possible. We scanned 40 people of different ages and ethnicity. While scouting for models we focused on features that would fit one of the fantasy races. We looked for faces that either had something unique about them or were very versatile to fit different characters. Eventually, we transformed that into approximately 150 unique heads of various races that you can see in-game now, and that number will keep growing. Some of the scanned heads kept their features, but others became a starting point for creating new faces. We also used scanned data as a learning resource because there is no better sculptor than nature.”
Early access will be for mac too: