I just watched the trailer and I'm like, HOLY CRAP!
Now I guess I'll have to wait to play the Baldur's Gate games again, so I know how their endings influence the story in this one.
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I just watched the trailer and I'm like, HOLY CRAP!
Now I guess I'll have to wait to play the Baldur's Gate games again, so I know how their endings influence the story in this one.
So since BGIII is a real thing, what are we hoping to see? What are we afraid of?
For my part, I hope they let the characters and story breathe a bit. Blowing up the city is fun and all, but we ought to get time to look up to Baldur's Gate the city as lowly country folk first.
I also hope they manage to strike the right balance in tone. Baldur's Gate had a very serious story with some real dark aspects, but knew when to crack a joke or smirk at the camera in the smaller moments.
I'd love it if they did some permanent WOTC-sanctioned destruction to the Sword Coast. That region needs to be shaken up a bit. And hijacking a nautiloid would be great!
I mean, I was mostly joking about the illithid thing, since as people said we don't even know if they'll play a central part of just be one of many enemies. But D&D doesn't have a good history with mind control and the mind flayers were a pretty notorious enemy in BG2.
Maybe our main character really will have a tie to the current story.
Baldur's Gate 3: Rise of Cthulhu is coming to a digital store near you. Watch the gods duke it out as their earthbound minions do their bidding in a daring gambit for the lives and souls of the men of the Sword Coast.
Please excuse me while I run around flailing my arms and screaming in an equal mix of excitement and fear.
BG3 is coming. Developed by the same people who made Divinity: Original Sin II. Will use the 5th Edition ruleset. Opening cinematic had a Mindflayer, takes place after the Descent into Avernus storyline.
It's a frickin' alien invasion of the Gate! Right? I mean, that's what it looks like, anyway. Which is way more awesome of a plot than I would have ever guessed.
If you take MrRhexx's article on the matter seriously, and assume that the teaser ties to the overall theme of the game and not just a visceral moment, it presents two obvious stories:
Story 1) The Illithid have been hunted to near extinction by the Gith, forced to hide in dark corners in the deepest recesses of the planet, struggling to survive. But a shift in the balance is happening. Maybe the Gith are distracted. Maybe the Illithid have a new strategy in mind. Whatever the cause, the Illithid are forced into action, attacking the surfacers. Leave it to one lone hero, bearing the mythical sword Lilarcor, to fight the cthuloid horde.
Story 2) It is said the Aboleths remember everything, even the birth of the gods. They remember the birth of everything, in fact, except for one race: the Illithid. And they believe this is because the illithid haven't been born yet. They are a race sired in the future, who fled to the past to found an empire while there was still a universe to rule. Where they started, however, nobody knows. Until now, that is. The Lovecraftian gods of psionic might are about to be born, and it will a lone city on the Sword Coast that witnesses its glory. Why? Because the universe hates Baldur's Gate, that's why. Fortunately, a ragtag band of broken heroes will band together to save the day, and at their head is the lost daughter of Baldur's Gate, back and louder than ever before...
If they're front and centre in the teaser, it's a safe expectation they'll be the Big Bad for the campaign. There's plenty of scope in illithids and their various thralls and associated critters to make a nice level curve for the main quest (hands up who wants to fight a Braineater Dragon?), with the rest of the sword coast's fauna filling in the gaps.
As like as not they've been hiding from the Gith long enough to recover their strength and bravery and fancy their chances at re-establishing their old empire (or a colony has found the secrets of building Nautiloids again); and the sword coast, weakened by the inciting events of Descent into Avernus, is prime real estate for doing so.
So the storyline after this current one will be Call of Cthulhu.
There's an appprotection spell for that (Protection From Magical Weapons) and skeletons have no brains to lose and plenty of bone to pick.
Plus it's BG. There's plenty of precedent for a crucial bossfight or enemy to have a crutch item or ability somewhere in the game that trivializes any encounter against said creature type. :smalltongue:
I'm pretty sure devour brain works completely differently now a days so the whole 3-4 hits and you're dead isn't going to be the issue with mind flayers anymore. All their mind control abilities are going to be the real hassle now, which is going to be annoying enough I suppose.
Damn. Good. News.
Sounds good. I'm not sure if 5e is complex enough to justify being a video game, though. 3.5 and prior editions had a lot of moving parts, so managing all of that was actually pretty dang good to do within a turn-based computer game. 5e is simple enough that it could be a board game, and I'm just not sure that a PC version would have any mentionable level of challenge.
That is, unless the campaign ran from levels 1-20. High level campaigns can be complex enough for anyone. The problem then becomes balance. Well, we'll see how it goes.
The AD&D ruleset in the gold box games was far simpler than 5E, and it was a good CRPG.
You can do things in CRPGs that are really difficult to do at the table, e.g. information hiding (where are all of the goblins who successfully Hid last turn?) and 3D environments with floors, ceilings, bridges, vertical cliffs, etc. That doesn't mean Baldur's Gate will do those things, but there's plenty of potential complexity to justify automating it.
Interesting! I still play BG2 once every couple of years. That's pretty much all I play anymore lol
What they should do is use the Baldur's Gate title as a universe, with different relevant histories or sagas taking place there. The Bhaalspawn saga is over, but III could start a second saga with the similar style of plot, map logistics, story and NPCs, in a universe populated by the characters from BG and BG2. The PC could or could not be a child of the Time of Troubles too, maybe a depowered Bhaalspawn even.
Maybe I was weird, but whenever I fought Illithids I just treated potions of genius and potions of (increase dex and int) as health potions. My fighters became so brilliantly smart for about 8 hours
Divinity: Original Sin 2 did, and it's the closest any game like it has ever come to being a proper tabletop D&D experience in a video game. It was... really finicky and had a pretty high learning curve, but an updated version of this with a reasonable facsimile of 5e gameplay and a more intuitive system could make this usable as the best virtual version of D&D ever made.
Why yes I am extremely excited by this news, and fully believe my own hyperbole. D:OS 1 and 2 are some of my favorite CRPG's. I was just as hyped for the idea of a D:OS 3 as BG3. The only CRPG's I've ever encountered with the depth of storytelling Larian's managed are in the Witcher series.
Also, in the trailer, in the far off distance in the sky... Nautiloids.
(That’s legit been confirmed by the devs.)
Spelljammer ships!
SPELLJAMMER.
That isn't true at all. In the scheme of games you've got some 2 and 3 games that are a continuation of the previous story, but the vast majority are the same setting but a completely new story. It isn't even all that uncommon to have sequels that don't use much of anything that is the same, other than the general theme. Fallout 1, 2, and 3 (and probably 4 but haven't played it) had a similar theme, and a few call-backs but were effectively entirely their own stories. Final Fantasy is on #15 and there is only a few winks to the other games but nothing really tying them together. While Diablo shares a few characters and places, there is not really anything from the previous game that informs the next.
No matter how loved BG 1&2 is, you don't release a sequel 20 years later that only makes sense if you've played the previous games. The previous games are older than a sizeable part of their potential playerbase.
While the trailer was interesting, it really didn't do anything for me in terms of what we might see. While we can be sure it is going to be an "RPG" the label has become rather useless in telling us anything. I'm hoping for a Shadowrun/Wastelands style classic 3rd person RPG, and not a Fallout 3/4, or Mass Effect style first person action RPG, or Diablo style 3rd person action RPG.
Not sure between open world and more directly story-driven, though I'm going to say I've enjoyed story driven games a lot more than open world in the last decade or so.
That's not a hard and fast rule in video games. Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Divinity: Original Sin, Neverwinter Nights. Though they take place in the same worlds, they all have different characters.
Anyway, there's more information in this interview.
Ok.
Make that an Alien Invasion of Spelljammer Illithids!!
Thanks for the interview link.
I hope it's playable without Google Stadia. I try to avoid all Google products and services as much as possible (unavoidable with Android).