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Sinking ship or not, word was that Wizards’ cut of BG3 was over $90M. $100M was the entire production cost of Baldur’s Gate 3. If you could fund an entire other massive video game for the cost of what you paid your partner for licensing, I’m sure anyone would be rethinking that deal. At this point, they don’t need the D&D license any more than BioWare needed the Star Wars license after KOTOR.
I agree, but Piazo seems like much better partners. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d let them make the game for no fee, just license out the rules to try to make the system more well known and popular. Pathfinder 2E is the better system without a doubt, but people are used to D&D5e, so having something out there to bring new people in would be huge for them.
I’ve played Baldur’s Gate 1, Baldur’s Gate 2, and Planescape: Torment on 2nd edition rules. I’ve played Baldur’s Gate 3 on 5th edition rules and started playing tabletop 5th edition. I’ve played Pillars of Eternity 1, as I understand it largely inspired by 3.5 edition rules, and the first 10 hours of Pillars of Eternity 2, which I assume is now iterating on its own offshoot. I understand Pathfinder to largely be D&D 3.5. If that’s the case, and it’s in the ballpark of what Pillars of Eternity 1 is, I’ll take 5th edition any day of the week, but if you’d like to explain to me briefly why I might be wrong, I’m listening. Compared to how the 2e games and the Pillars games handle spells of different levels, 5e’s upcasting seems like a godsend, for instance.
I understand Pathfinder to largely be D&D 3.5. Pathfinder 1E is essentially an improved D&D 3.5 that came to be the last time the licensing for modules became an issue. 2E is it’s own thing, and a large improvement.
One if the best changes for Pathfinder 2E is how actions work. D&D 5e has its a weird system of movement, action, bonus action, and then abilities that can add actions, but you can only cast one spell per turn regardless of if you have actions to use, except in some situations, and you can only use actions for some things sometimes, sometimes only once per turn. It’s just filled with exceptions because that’s not the original design intent but it’s tons of patches to make things function halfway decently.
Pathfinder 2E you have three actions per turn. Those can be used for anything always without exception. Every ability has a cost. For example moving is 1 action and can be done multiple times per turn, which makes things that displace enemies useful as they have to consume actions to get back into melee. Some spells may cost multiple actions, some very large ones can even require channeling multiple actions over several turns. It’s a very simple and intuitive system and you don’t need to remember thousands of exceptions like D&D5e.
Almost everything in Pathfinder 2E works like this. Things may be more complex to start with (which allows for choice), but you don’t need to remember tons of exceptions, so in total it’s simpler.
It doesn’t feel like a bunch of exceptions to me. It feels like you have a bonus action that’s basically always class-related, and everything else is an action. What you describe for Pathfinder doesn’t sound bad at all, but if some things cost multiple actions, that sounds like every bit the type of exception that you make 5e out to be full of. I don’t really find 5e to be unintuitive thus far such that I’m looking for another system to remedy it, I guess.
What you describe for Pathfinder doesn’t sound bad at all, but if some things cost multiple actions, that sounds like every bit the type of exception that you make 5e out to be full of.
The issue in D&D5e is that they are dependent on a bunch of other circumstances. In Pathfinder 2e it’s only dependent on if you have enough actions. It’s clearly listed how many actions anything you can do takes.
For example, here’s magic missile. The “Cast:” is the action cost. The squares are how many it takes. It can take anywhere between one to all three of your turn. Each action spent is another missile. It doesn’t matter if you’ve already cast a spell that turn or done anything else. As long as you have the actions available you can spend them on anything you want.
I started playing TTRPGs on Pathfinder 1e, but the vast majority of what I played is D&D5e. I never had too much issue with it, because I never saw a better option, but after seeing how Pathfinder 2e works it’s so much cleaner. Learning about how the action system came to be in 5e it’s pretty clear it wasn’t meant to be the way it is today. Because of that there’s stipulations to almost everything. I didn’t notice the issues until I was made aware of them, then you see them everywhere. For example, the Critical Role cast constantly fuck things up despite having played the game professionally for however many years it’s been now. If the rules were intuitive that wouldn’t happen, at least not as often.
I’m a recent convert to Critical Role as well, and even moments ago, I witnessed one of those fuck-ups (I’m still a long ways from catching up on campaign 3, so it’s an old episode), but I can’t seem to recall it having much to do with what’s an action or not an action and instead more about what the range of a thing is or what type of creature it can be cast on. I don’t know if there’s some equivalent solution to that in Pathfinder, but that would strike me as a harder problem to solve via systems changes to make more intuitive.
Another thing I respect about what 5e does compared to other D&D or adjacent games I listed above: they rebalanced the hell out of magic. In those other games, someone casts a spell that paralyzes your entire party with an AoE or massive cone, and you just have to watch with no recourse as everyone dies. In 5e, the equivalent spell has a finite number of targets, they scale intuitively with spell level by adding one extra target per level, and if it has an ongoing effect, it would require concentration so the person can’t steamroll by casting a bunch of them concurrently. Again, I haven’t played Pathfinder, so I definitely can’t knock it, nor do I have any negative reaction to the systems you’re describing (except for the part where some spells take longer than the actions you have in a single turn…that sounds terrible), but 5e isn’t the first RPG system I’ve played. It solved tons of problems with ones that I’ve played before. Advantage rolls another D20. Upcasting adds another die or another target. You get to move, and you get an action; everything else is an action, but your class gives you bonus action options. Resistances and weaknesses are simple halves and doubles. Armor affects your ability to hit or not, with no extra junk slowing down the calculations. That sort of thing. They’re all very smart changes. If I was going to nitpick things about 5e, it would be like how your ability scores are all out of 20, but your modifiers are every other point; and that’s something I seem to recall hearing through the grapevine that Pathfinder 2e does address, correct me if I’m wrong.
The action economy is just one example of the improvements of it. There are many. As for range and target types though, yeah I don’t think there’s a good solution to that. You either just have to get rid of it (which I think can and is done with some spells) or deal with the complexity that makes spells more useful only in the right situation.
As an example of making things simpler with spells, P2E’s Detect Alignment you choose an alignment to detect and can detect it. It comes out of older D&D’s detect good/detect evil which became the generic Detect Good and Evil in 5e which does not actually detect anything with alignment anymore in 5e. Pathfinder 2E generalized it to be more useful and simpler, D&D5e generalized it to be not what it says on the can anymore. It’s really strange what 5e decided to do with so many things. It just makes things not make intuitive sense.
As for the magic scaling, PF2e is similar. I don’t think you’re going to find many situations where D&D is more balanced than PF2e, at lead with the rules as written.
I definitely can’t knock it, nor do I have any negative reaction to the systems you’re describing (except for the part where some spells take longer than the actions you have in a single turn…that sounds terrible)
You can back out of the channeling if you need to. It’s a nice system for really powerful spells requiring a lot more risk and investment. Keep in mind, this applies to enemies as well. If you see them powering up something big, you will have time to try to interrupt them.
This is a good video for some more information about the three action economy. That channel has tons of other videos about the system too, a lot of which is focused on how it compares to D&D 5e. He has a lot more knowledge than I do, and he probably has a video on every question you have. I highly recommend checking it out if you’re interested.
Additionally, if you want PF2e content to consume, Tabletop Gold is a podcast using PF2e. I’m just over episode 100 I think and it’s pretty good. They aren’t the most knowledge about the system, most of them haven’t played TTRPGs at all before I don’t think, but it all flows very well, which is a testament to the design.
How about Wrath of the Righteous? Does that use 2nd edition? Is the game any good? I know it was built primarily for real time with pause, but is it any good in turn based mode? I don’t have the time for another tabletop podcast in my life, and I don’t see any world where I play it myself until at least my current D&D campaign reaches a conclusion. And to be totally honest, your pitch still sounds like it’s a cure for problems that I don’t have, but a video game would be a decent way to sample it.
I don’t know. The Owlcat games have a really deep system that Divinity and BG3 don’t have. Is that just because of the pathfinder ruleset? Or does Larian do better with simpler systems? I don’t have an answer to those questions. It might be cool to see a BG3 “version” of Pathfinder, but I think it would lose something in the process.
The visuals out of Larian run laps around Owlcat. But that comes at the expense of depth, as each asset takes more time to develop.
It’s two different design philosophies creating two very different kinds of experience. Owlcat makes more of a complex digital board game while Larian has muddled a strategy format with a dating sim.
Moral of the story: run proxies. Speculators and investors ruined the market, WotC just let them do it. (Also, fuck the secondary market and the reserve list. It’s cardboard. Some of us just want to play)
This is why I bailed out of Standard, finally. I’ve moved entirely into Limited.
I’ll still do pay-to-play with drafts of new sets here and there, but proxy Cube is where it’s at. My fun-to-price ratio with the game has never been better.
Ah, that kind of price churn has been the norm in (lower case “l”) legacy formats for as long as I’ve been playing the game (25+ years now). It’d be reprints, bans, or just plain old power creep. Those formats have been too expensive/volatile for me for a very long time now.
Reprinting some things, neglecting to reprint others, power creeping the stuff they did reprint out of the game, banning some stuff that was too powerful while printing other stuff that’s just as good for the same reasons. You know, standard card game stuff.
The rate of bans has dramatically increased since 2020. They even had to errata an entire new mechanic in the Ikoria set because some of the companion cards were crazy broken with the original design.
An extra wrinkle to this is that they are making bans due to how cards perform in online play, as best-of-one is a widely played format now.
Yeah, I’ve been moving over to Call of Cthulhu with my tabletop group. I find it far more enjoyable when the players are more careful about dying or worse.
Uglifcation of women in games, currently plus other shit. Also no more tomb raiding in tomb raider, Lara’s a truth seeker now. lol just another example of a franchise being sacrificed at the alter.
I know Lemmy hates it, but I really think AI could play a core part in the future of multiple choice RPGs.
I’m not saying let it be free and build the entire game, but if you train a model to be a certain character and add limitations so it doesn’t go too wild, then that could be massive imo.
Still have a human storyline and imagination behind the game, but use AI like the tool it is for certain parts.
Unless I see major advancements in the technology, I think AI will be a great tool in the toolbelt for developers operating on lower budgets, but Baldur’s Gate 3 is going to have people expecting the best from Larian’s games going forward, and that’s going to mean human writing and human performances. I think without those major advancements in the technology, it’s going to come off as lesser quality.
Seriously? You play a game like Baldur’s Gate 3 and your first thought was “damn, this game could really benefit from having less handcrafted, professionally written dialogue”
In the future I think it’s a really viable option to create more immersive and interactive games. The technology is pretty far away though, not to mention I don’t think most machines could handle the load while also running a game. It’s at best a dream right now, but a pretty interesting idea for 15 years from now.
That’s a pretty big assumption about where the tech is going. In my experience it’s really stupid to try to predict what tech will look like more than a year or two into the future, let alone over a decade.
You could have a fully man made storyline, but then expand the world in a way that is currently impossible.
Even if you train a model for main characters/stories, it would still be built off the work of writers, the model would simply be the character they’ve written.
I think the way video game devs/people are (from what I can see from outside) they are well poised to realize someone making an LLM or a finetune or whatever you want to call it – that produces master level dialogue/stories/whatever is (will be) a skill just like storytelling/writing is.
If I were a JRR Tolkien or Herbert with a universe in my mind, it would be so much more pleasing to make an engine that generates anything from that world that to just write out a few stories from it.
If I were a JRR Tolkien or Herbert with a universe in my mind, it would be so much more pleasing to make an engine that generates anything from that world that to just write out a few stories from it.
One of the foundational tenets of good writing is that worldbuilding is just masturbatory unless it serves the story. You don’t create a cool world and work your way backward into a story. You create a great story and craft a world around it which supports the story you’re trying to tell. The stories are the thing that have value, not the setting or the lore.
Telling a great story is a completely orthogonal skill to worldbuilding, and it requires creativity, emotion, and authorial intent. Star Wars and Harry Potter are both dogshit at worldbuilding, but they’re both some pretty rad stories. Avatar: the Legend of Korra is set in one of the best fantasy worlds ever created and it was a very mediocre story.
Not the opposite at all. Tolkien didn’t know what the One Ring was when he wrote about Bilbo finding it in the Hobbit. Good worldbuilding is iterative. Tolkien went way too obsessive for LOTR and a lot of the worldbuilding he did was purely for his own pleasure rather than serving the story.
Keep in mind he didn’t try to publish The Silmarillion while he was alive. And also that the vast majority of LOTR fans don’t give a shit about stuff in the Silmarillion if it isn’t also relevant to the story of LOTR.
I’m a DM, and I can tell you that as fun as worldbuilding is, no information about your world is real until players learn and remember it. And if you try to loredump on them, they won’t actually remember stuff.
Worldbuilding is fun, but it’s also masturbatory; it’s only fun for the DM until the game’s story makes it matter for everyone else.
If I were a JRR Tolkien or Herbert with a universe in my mind, it would be so much more pleasing to make an engine that generates anything from that world that to just write out a few stories from it.
Tolkien was a linguist with a deep fondness for nature and spirituality. He loved creating languages and building beautiful, natural worlds around them. I can’t imagine a single person who would be less enamored by the idea of machinistic language devices that people use to “generate everything”. I think he would be either bored by this possibility or deeply disturbed.
Tolkien also had a deep disdain for industrialism and automation, which is what inspired Isengard in the books. When he says Saruman has “a mind of metal and wheels”, it’s implied that the reader understands why this is a way of saying that Saruman is evil. He definitely wouldn’t be a fan of MindOfMetalAndWheelsGPT.
Perhaps but I can’t see anyone who is interested in creating and communicating fake worlds eschewing the idea too much. If you make a fake world, there’s no way you could ever ‘get it all out’ since you’re just one guy. This would open up that possibility to make a world bigger than yourself and what you can get out of your brain
Maybe now, but everyone was afraid to fund 100MM BG3 because they thought no one wanted CRPG and they want Fortnite or whatever. Hopefully Larian spawns more people who actually care about their users instead of just greed
Frankly I think that’s just recency bias. It’s new so it feels better. Before BG3 came out, most people agreed DA:O was the perfect CRPG, or Mass Effect, and just look at the sheer number of video essays on YouTube praising the quality of F:NV.
New games come along and old games look paltry in comparison. It doesn’t mean the older ones are actually worse. But you’ve had decades to enjoy DA:O, while BG3 still feels like it has secrets to uncover. It still is unexplored territory, and that’s exciting.
Personally I think that once the dust settles, it will be clear that, apart from limitations due to when each was made, these games are all equally 10/10 games in their own way. It’s not as though BG3 is without flaws. And it’s still actively being worked on.
But not me – None of them have ever reached my bar except for BG3 – I care less about video game stories and more about mechanics/freedom of choice to be fair
Chrono Trigger FF3 SNES (FF6) Final Fantasy Tactics FF7
I don’t know what that guy was talking about. There have been so many games released with amazing stories. It’s just the ghost of Jack Welch has slithered into gaming and rather than make great titles we get microtransaction shit games.
That statement in itself is quite sad, when one of the reasons everyone called it out as being an amazing game is because it was huge, well crafted, and made by a company that actually seemed to give a shit.
I don’t say this to diminish their achievements, because I’m 80 hours in and still not done, but it’s a spectacularly low bar that Larian absolutely launched themselves over. At a time where companies seem to be scraping the bottom of the barrel, Larian did the exact opposite, and reaped what should be the most obvious of awards (do good work, get lots of money).
I speak to enough dipshits at work spewing word salad, this is what I wanted with my escapism, people who follow the fucking conversation not some AI bot resume filling buzzwords about the plot.
Not less handcrafted, but AI enhanced on top of the already excellent written dialogue.
If I want my entire BG3 gameplay to be about grilled cheese, then I would be able to when talking to every NPC while still getting the excellent story about mindflayers. The cheese is just on top.
100% the future. Like has anyone put all the billion pages of lore from TES into a GPT finetune? Surely that would make better dialogue than HALT! for the 900000000 time right?
I have used AI to RP some stuff (don’t ask), and while the higher end models, and even the better self hosted models are really good at answering in a way that makes sense and works in context, it is pretty hard to make them do anything, new, interesting, or unexpected, without prompting it specifically.
Nothing that I’ve seen playing around with LLMs makes me think that a well-written work of fiction could be improved by including them, unless there is a significant leap in capability.
And this is ignoring all the discussion about LLMs and copyright/stolen content.
I think AI Dungeon proved that you could have a great Gen AI-driven campaign experience, but the novelty wore out really fast after it was used up as streamer bait and the ethical considerations are just too much of a risk.
If we are taking about battle mechanics I hope they come up with a new system all together. I think both the OS2 and BG3/DnD mechanics were serviceable, and it was fun to play out fights. But neither was much of a challenge and fights didn’t often feel like unique puzzles.
If you are going to play Divinity 2, start with Divinity 1
They both have differences in mechanics, but play about the same. The only main difference is that Divinity is only 2 player, while Divinity 2 is 4 player like BG3
Also, the mechanics of both Divinity games are build around it being video games. Meaning it is a better experience. In comparison with BG3, which was build as a TTRPG and only converted to a video game.
The only things I miss with Divinity are the cutscenes. Otherwise they would be as perfect (or even better) than BG3.
I’m gonna disagree with that other commenter. I’d recommend starting with DOS2 before 1. DOS2 is much more refined and generally less annoying to play. And they’re separate stories, so nothing in 2 would spoil the experience of 1
But they’re both good games worth playing, so don’t let that indecision stop you from trying either
I’m not sure I agree. DoS2 mechanic are cool, but the combat becomes way to chaotic for my liking. Also you do one mistake and now half your party is dead and the other half is on fire.
I really like the way that he thinks, with each game being a way to learn new systems / implement new tools / increase the studio's knowledge and skill. Such a great way to take on projects - it ensures that each game brings something new to the table, and it puts you in an even better position to tackle the next project.
My only request for the next game is: please don't have it start with the player imprisoned on a ship and for the ship to be attacked by monsters so the player can use the chance to escape into a deadly situation only to be rescued at the last second by an unknown powerful being before waking up on a beach. Twice is enough, thanks.
What if you’re imprisoned on a cart and attacked by a dragon? Or just released from prison on a boat and dropped off in a swampy beach town? The fantasy RPG genre requires starting as a convict or prisoner, you see.
Just once I’d like to start a D&D video game like a real D&D game: in a tavern trying to get wasted and then someone barges in saying something about goblins or some shit, and I’m about six deep so I say, “Fuck it, we ball.”
I love starting in a tavern and having some run in in a panic screaming “UNDEEEEEEAD!!” and just drop a horde on the table. No time to think, no time to explain. The story starts later, right now you have to fight for your life together with whomever is able to hold at least a table leg.
Allow me to introduce you to Solasta: Crown of the Magister. It was the OTHER CRPG releases based on the DnD 5e system. Much smaller budget and team, but a pretty faithful recreation.
Including the fact that the game opens in a tavern with your party throwing back beer one of them might refer to as a donkey piss (depending on which personality archetype you selected for them) while they wait for their quest sponsor to show up and tell them what’s going on. In the meantime, each character introduces themselves to the others by discussing the adventure they had on the way to the present location (as an excuse to run through some tutorials). Doesn’t get much more classic DnD start than that.
Yep, that was a good game too. Different focus, and a fairly linear story. Part of what made Baldur’s Gate 3 so good was of course the amazing characters and character development. Solasta is missing that, but still a very solid and complete DnD game.
For sure. My impression is that to focus on character work in the same way as BG3 (i.e. voice acting, mocap, cinematics, etc) would have been an impossibility for the studio that made Solasta. I would guess they did not have the financial support to make that happen.
Personally, I think of it as being of a piece with the old Infinity Engine games. There was the Baldurs Gate series, which, in classic CRPG fashion, was all about player choice and character. But, side by side with those games, you had the Icewind Dale series, which was almost completely devoid of the story focus of the BG games and entirely focused on dungeon crawling and seeing how far the ruleset can be pushed.
I disagree, and now think Larian should start every game like this. Next Divinity? Pirate ship. Games Workshop has them make a game? Escape from a Citadel.
They could turn that into a running theme, like how every Elder Scrolls protagonist is a prisoner to start with…
But Divinity already has a long history and so does Baldur’s Gate so…ehh, doesn’t fit in quite as well. Maybe with a new IP they make it a tradition for.
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