Baldur's Gate 3...confirmed!

[danzibr]

Maybe play as Balduran? That’d be fitting for the title. Well... maybe not III.

Actually, the title doesn’t make much sense.

[Aotrs Commander]

Spell jammer role-playing game would be ****ing awesome.

Hardest hell no I can think of.

I'd rather play a Vampire game.

Spelljammer offends me on so many levels, it isn't funny.

[Kaptin Keen]

Hardest hell no I can think of.

I'd rather play a Vampire game.

Spelljammer offends me on so many levels, it isn't funny.

But it's conceptually cool - right? I feel a lot of good work went into designing the setting. The rules for it are awful, however. If I remember correctly, I've not seen them in .. this millennia.

[Cikomyr]

Hardest hell no I can think of.

I'd rather play a Vampire game.

Spelljammer offends me on so many levels, it isn't funny.

I am curious to heard you say why.

Genuinely.

[Aotrs Commander]

I am curious to heard you say why.

Genuinely.

It replaces planets systems and Proper Space with that idiodic crystal sphere nonsense. It compresses the enormous size and majesty and boundless opporunties of even just the galaxy of billions of planets to a sterile mess of a interconnected fantasy planets. (Frankly, Pathfinder was absolutely right to make interplanetary teleport a 9th level spell, only they still didn't go far enough in making the range limited in light-years. "Infinite size," ha, D&D cosmology writers, you don't know what that actually means. There is a REASON Golarion is the ONLY campaign world in D&D history that I bought the source books to read the fluff.)

If that wasn't even bad enough, it commits the crowning glory of the highest atrocity of sailing ships in space. Which is the worst idea ever, and has never, ever, ever been done in a way that wasn't completely fracking awful. (Deep Space 9 once has a ship that had solar sails - y'know, designed proper, with sensible sail positions - which actually dubiously works, but that is entirely different to sailing ships in space.) Sails and masts DO NOT WORK like wet-navy stuff in space, even IF they are solar sails (and solar sails can't FTL). Sailing ships aren't even cool or good-looking! It looked awful in Jayce and the Wheeld Warriors, it looked awful in Rogue Galaxy and it looks awful in anything else you can think of. It is stupid, looks horrifyingly terrible and is offensive to every right-thinking starship person in existance.

Seriously, EVEN STARFLEET understood this better, and then they had their "sailing ship the Skull", the sails were metal and purely aethetic, because all the motive power was from the engines, and THAT show was so hilariously out-of-touch with reality, they had fire-with-rising-smoke-in-space, bases on Jupiter and flying through a black hole only being as serious an inconveniance as crashlanding on the moon! And THEY still understood that!



You did ask.

[Cikomyr]

It replaces planets systems and Proper Space with that idiodic crystal sphere nonsense. It compresses the enormous size and majesty and boundless opporunties of even just the galaxy of billions of planets to a sterile mess of a interconnected fantasy planets. (Frankly, Pathfinder was absolutely right to make interplanetary teleport a 9th level spell, only they still didn't go far enough in making the range limited in light-years. "Infinite size," ha, D&D cosmology writers, you don't know what that actually means. There is a REASON Golarion is the ONLY campaign world in D&D history that I bought the source books to read the fluff.)

If that wasn't even bad enough, it commits the crowning glory of the highest atrocity of sailing ships in space. Which is the worst idea ever, and has never, ever, ever been done in a way that wasn't completely fracking awful. (Deep Space 9 once has a ship that had solar sails - y'know, designed proper, with sensible sail positions - which actually dubiously works, but that is entirely different to sailing ships in space.) Sails and masts DO NOT WORK like wet-navy stuff in space, even IF they are solar sails (and solar sails can't FTL). Sailing ships aren't even cool or good-looking! It looked awful in Jayce and the Wheeld Warriors, it looked awful in Rogue Galaxy and it looks awful in anything else you can think of. It is stupid, looks horrifyingly terrible and is offensive to every right-thinking starship person in existance.

Seriously, EVEN STARFLEET understood this better, and then they had their "sailing ship the Skull", the sails were metal and purely aethetic, because all the motive power was from the engines, and THAT show was so hilariously out-of-touch with reality, they had fire-with-rising-smoke-in-space, bases on Jupiter and flying through a black hole only being as serious an inconveniance as crashlanding on the moon! And THEY still understood that!



You did ask.

I did ask, and I was wondering where you were coming from. I am genuinely happy to replied.

If you don't mind my asking a bit more; would you agree that 100% of your genuinely resented beef against Spelljammer is it's utterly nonrealistic, nonscientific, silly Space Fantasy nature?

I mean, everything you mentioned seems to be related to Spelljammer being a very, very, very stupid setting when you look at it from a sci fi pov. Or do I understand wrong?

[Cikomyr]

Btw, this isn't meant as criticizing your preferences. Clearly buying into a franchise's premise is paramount to actually liking that franchise, and there are things you just won't like in life. There's no way to like Star Wars if you dont like space magic for example.

Edit: added "no" to "there's no way"

[Archpaladin Zousha]

Is this...is this for real? This isn't some kind of hoax?!

[Inarius]

Is this...is this for real? This isn't some kind of hoax?!

Seems to of been unnoffically confirmed by people inside Larian at this point so yeah. They weren't ready to actually announce it but they forgot to scrub the copyright info from the image that listed Baldurs gate and Wizards of the coast and someone noticed that info when they downloaded the image.

[JadedDM]

Sails and masts DO NOT WORK like wet-navy stuff in space, even IF they are solar sails (and solar sails can't FTL).

Wait...just to be clear, you do realize that Spelljammer isn't supposed to be realistic, in even the slightest way? You almost sound like you think the game devs honestly didn't know how space travel works.

[Honest Tiefling]

Wait...just to be clear, you do realize that Spelljammer isn't supposed to be realistic, in even the slightest way? You almost sound like you think the game devs honestly didn't know how space travel works.

I have never played Spelljammer, but I get the feeling that expecting it to have any semblance of real-world science is like expecting good financial advice from that one guy who hangs out in the Walmart parking lot. No, not the nice Walmart, the other Walmart in town that no one wants to visit late at night. It might be amusing, but it isn't going to work.

Spell jammer role-playing game would be ****ing awesome.

The one game where the mods cannot be any more silly than the base game.

As for the actual topic, I am not sad that the Baldur's gate series ended. I loved the story, but all good stories deserve a proper ending. ToB did that for me. I have no interest in digging up its corpse to parade it around for the sake of nostalgia. I'm quite sad they haven't just tried to leverage the name to get a new story or idea rolling, actually.

...That, and I liked Rasaad. I wanted a romance for my female character, dammit. And Anomen doesn't count.

[TheStranger]

Spell jammer role-playing game would be ****ing awesome.

I insist that BGIII be this, and that you play as an intelligent miniature giant space hamster. In the epilogue, you decide to fade into obscurity and pretend to be the pet of a dimwitted barbarian.

[Anonymouswizard]

I insist that BGIII be this, and that you play as an intelligent miniature giant space hamster. In the epilogue, you decide to fade into obscurity and pretend to be the pet of a dimwitted barbarian.

I would totally sign on for a game about the origin of the most important party member in the original games!

[Aotrs Commander]

I did ask, and I was wondering where you were coming from. I am genuinely happy to replied.

If you don't mind my asking a bit more; would you agree that 100% of your genuinely resented beef against Spelljammer is it's utterly nonrealistic, nonscientific, silly Space Fantasy nature?

I mean, everything you mentioned seems to be related to Spelljammer being a very, very, very stupid setting when you look at it from a sci fi pov. Or do I understand wrong?

Less from "scifi" and more "from even a passing understanding of physics and Space," but yes, that is not entirely inaccurate. But on a very visceral level. Even as a small, living child, the idea of there not being space would have offended me. To look up at the stars and know they were not immense shinging light in an unfathomable distance, around which distant worlds might hang, waiting to be explored, but merely a patten of big lights on a ceiling. To take the wonder and majesty and grandure and size and depth of the universe, of all the boundless silent places, winds whispering on worlds seen by no-being and compress it down to be so... Claustrophobic... just as support for something as idiotic (and ugly, frankly) as sailing ships in space... No, it's something that grates against the very core of my being on two fronts.



(I had not missed this or anything, by the by - it is simply that I have had to be doing a lot of enforced rejuvenation this week - laser canons are not your friends, children, not even if you're an Epic-level Lich made of mithril alloy.)



For the same reasons, I reject the D&D's "infinite" sized planes - after all, why should planes themselves and whole comologies be their own metasphysical solar systems? After all, even if they weere "merely" half a light-year in diameter¹, how practicality, could anyone tell the difference between that and infinity? There should be space in the planes, between different planes of fire, between different divine realms, in beautiful symmetry to the material world, because that's what the planes are. The universe is nearly incomprehensibly massive, and slapping words like "infinity" on it because you can't comprehend numbers is... Diminishing the whole in an attempt, ironically to set boundaries, because most people read infinity as a BIG NUMBER.

(Actually, I consider all of D&D flat limitations to be nothing more than "arbitatily high;" a fire elemental isn't immune to fire, but its merely functionally immune to if its fire resistance is actually 5000 or 10000 or 500000.)



¹Enough space for 137 840 965 800 000 000 - a hundred and thirty seven quadrillion - Earth-sized planet's surface area - three hundred a fifty thousand times more Earth-equivilents than there are stars in the galaxy even by the most generous measure. A distance so large, it would take adventures literally hundreds of millions of years to walk across it. A number of world so large that it dwarves the number of every single finctional world ever created, published or otherwise, across the breadth of human history.

(Actually, half a light years is probably still grossly excessive now I calculate it out.)

And a size so small as to be nearly irrelevant to space itself.

[Pronounceable]

**** this ****. Make something original you goddamn cowards. And if you actually are making something original but still naming it BG3 then triple **** you.

[Anteros]

It seems to me that if you're not interested in the game then you don't have to play it.

Personally I don't have the nostalgia most of you do towards Baldurs Gate anyway. They're decent games but nothing special. I'm interested in what Larian will do with the setting. They've earned a measure of trust from me for their last games. Especially from their tendency to keep working on games after release and then release free definitive editions.

[Morty]

I do wonder what mechanics this game will use. An adaptation of D&D that's as faithful as possible, like in BG? Possibly more so, if they use turns rather than RtwP. Or will they do an approximation that keeps the spirit of the game, like Shadowrun Returns or Bloodlines? Or something new entirely?

If they do use D&D, I doubt they'll use AD&D 2E again, so probably 5E. I'm hardly a fan of it, but then I wasn't impressed by the balance and variety in DOS2 either, so we'll see how it goes.

[ArlEammon]

**** this ****. Make something original you goddamn cowards. And if you actually are making something original but still naming it BG3 then triple **** you.

I find it amusing that someone named Pronounceable is talking this way.

[Cikomyr]

It seems to me that if you're not interested in the game then you don't have to play it.

Personally I don't have the nostalgia most of you do towards Baldurs Gate anyway. They're decent games but nothing special. I'm interested in what Larian will do with the setting. They've earned a measure of trust from me for their last games. Especially from their tendency to keep working on games after release and then release free definitive editions.

Look. To be honest, I am making an absolute fallacy when I say "I don't know how they could continue the story without completely gutting the ending of ToB, therefore they can't do it".

It's just that I am afraid that either they won't make a good job out of it, or that they won't even make a continuation and Baldur Gate 3 will be a sequel in name only.

[GloatingSwine]

I do wonder what mechanics this game will use. An adaptation of D&D that's as faithful as possible, like in BG? Possibly more so, if they use turns rather than RtwP. Or will they do an approximation that keeps the spirit of the game, like Shadowrun Returns or Bloodlines? Or something new entirely?

If they do use D&D, I doubt they'll use AD&D 2E again, so probably 5E. I'm hardly a fan of it, but then I wasn't impressed by the balance and variety in DOS2 either, so we'll see how it goes.

I'm not sure about RTwP.

Larian's main squeeze for RPGs is turn based, so I'd sooner expect them to make a turn based game, probably not too faithfully taken from D&D mechanics but recognisable if you squint a bit.

My principle expectation for this will be a turn based game, set in and around the Sword Coast (because the point of the Sword Coast is it's a big bit of Faerun that basically just says "here be adventures" on all the maps), in continuity with the original Baldur's Gate games, taking their events as part of the setting, meeting some of their NPCs*, but revolving around a new character.


* Well, at least Minsc. You don't believe for one moment that the real main character of Baldur's Gate won't put in an appearance.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

* Well, at least Minsc. You don't believe for one moment that the real main character of Baldur's Gate won't put in an appearance.

Well, they're (don't forget Boo!) almost mainstream D&D's stars now, considering they're in those comic books now too.

[Morty]

I'm not sure about RTwP.

Larian's main squeeze for RPGs is turn based, so I'd sooner expect them to make a turn based game, probably not too faithfully taken from D&D mechanics but recognisable if you squint a bit.

My principle expectation for this will be a turn based game, set in and around the Sword Coast (because the point of the Sword Coast is it's a big bit of Faerun that basically just says "here be adventures" on all the maps), in continuity with the original Baldur's Gate games, taking their events as part of the setting, meeting some of their NPCs*, but revolving around a new character.


* Well, at least Minsc. You don't believe for one moment that the real main character of Baldur's Gate won't put in an appearance.

It'd certainly make sense to go turn-based, since Larian's previous big hit used it. I could imagine the game using RtwP if someone decides to go really hard on the nostalgia factor, perhaps. As far as the setting and events go, I think your guess is pretty likely, though obviously a lot can happen.

[GloatingSwine]

I expect we'll find out in a week or so with E3 and all.

[Erloas]

RTwP was a stupid mechanic and I can't think of a single game where they wouldn't have been better off going all RT or all turn based. It's the worst of both worlds. All the issues with AI companions and slowing down and complicating any actual tactics that were to be used. The only time it was good was when a fight was trivial enough that good tactics weren't that important but hard enough that special abilities were helpful. That is a pretty narrow and not ideal target for pretty much any genre.

[Winthur]

RTwP was a stupid mechanic and I can't think of a single game where they wouldn't have been better off going all RT or all turn based. It's the worst of both worlds. All the issues with AI companions and slowing down and complicating any actual tactics that were to be used. The only time it was good was when a fight was trivial enough that good tactics weren't that important but hard enough that special abilities were helpful. That is a pretty narrow and not ideal target for pretty much any genre.

Meh. Baldur's Gate games still captured the genie in a bottle and managed to squeeze out a compelling tactical experience out of the system, however imperfect it is, and it happens to be richer in that regard than many turn-based games on the market. Especially with mods.

It speeds up trash fights, which most RPGs throw at you constantly, and doesn't diminish the tactical side of combat all that much when important stuff happens, especially when you compare BG to its contemporaries like Fallout or Arcanum. I have no idea whether I've simply grown to stomach the arcane nature of the original systems as most RPG grongards do (considering how we exalt the virtues of games that are clunky as hell to play), but I'm never impressed by the hardcore turn-based player fanbase's arguments.

[J-H]

I liked RTWP... an all-fighter party can clear lots of fights, and an all-mage party has time to cast spells each round.
BTW - an all-fighter party was the easiest ToB final fight I ever had. Amelyssan the Black falls in a single round to 6 GWW fighter-types in each stage.

-As others have already said - the Bhaalspawn saga is over and done with.
-Anything involving a definitive resolution of CHARNAME's choices is going to be extremely controversial.
-2nd Edition D&D and variants thereof are dead and buried, but an adapted 5e ruleset would probably play well. Bounded accuracy means you never get up to demigod-tier, so it's actually easier to have a non-scaling world.

That said... a Bhaalspawn story set in another area gives plenty of room to play up until ToB and the final spawn come into play. I'm not sure how you'd handle that.

[Winthur]

BTW - an all-fighter party was the easiest ToB final fight I ever had. Amelyssan the Black falls in a single round to 6 GWW fighter-types in each stage.

Yup. Typical D&D wizard fetishization doesn't apply (...as much) to a game where most of the "WPL" goes towards outfitting your fighters. Even on modded setups or something like the EE's Legacy of Bhaal warrior-types get so much gear they just chunk stuff. Mages still do best for AoE and other utility, and they're way more survivable, but fighters make boss fights of all sorts a breeze.

That said... a Bhaalspawn story set in another area gives plenty of room to play up until ToB and the final spawn come into play. I'm not sure how you'd handle that.

Siege of Dragonspear tried to fit in between 1 and 2. Reception was somewhat divided. Idk how much Bhaalspawn can they fit "inbetween" with that in mind considering there isn't much of a blank drawn between any of the pieces of the saga at this point.

[Anteros]

To me, the game is called "Baldurs Gate" not "Bhaalspawn" so anything set in the same setting with a few references is enough for me.

It seems pretty silly to expect a direct sequel 20 years after the other game came out.

[fables.ink]

holy crap, can't wait for that...

[Scots Dragon]

To me, the game is called "Baldurs Gate" not "Bhaalspawn" so anything set in the same setting with a few references is enough for me.

It seems pretty silly to expect a direct sequel 20 years after the other game came out.

Yes, exactly this.

There's also some stuff in the tabletop material at the moment about cults of the resurrected Bhaal (who came back during the Second Sundering), and Minsc is still wandering about the place, plus you've got some longer-lived party members still about because elves and gnomes and dwarves and what have you, and you can do a lot with that even with a whole new protagonist. Hell, possibly a protagonist who is themselves descended from Bhaal more distantly, not a Bhaalspawn but the child or grandchild of one, and would in fact qualify as carrying the 'taint of Bhaal'.

There are so many ways to make Baldur's Gate 3 work that it's almost funny.