Baldur's Gate 3 - Panel From Hell 3 Livestream
 

Here's the Baldur's Gate 3 Panel From Hell 3 Livestream (-> Start):

More information.

Nice additions to the game. They seem to be really listening to the community. That's cool. The only bummer is that they confirmed that the game is going to be released hopefully somewhere in 2022 :-/ But better to have a good game than a rushed project.

The knock down (non-lethal attack) is the interesting addition of the list, I believe.

But those dicerolls are becoming ridiculous, I wish they stopped messing with that to try and reconcile action RPG and classic RPG fans, which won't work, and just offered an on/off option.

And supplies… no please, it's another mistake. Owlcat Games understood it and removed supplies from WotR fortunately, and Tactical Adventures made it optional. It's strange to see Larian coming back on that old annoying system.

Point and click was already there, I think what he means is comments from the main character.

Isn't that on the good side? It confirms what they said before, that they were aiming at 2022 (but no guarantee)

I really like that character barks are going to be a thing and context sensitive. They really added alot to role play in Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 for me. Ditto with the camp backgrounds and comments too. I thing camp management is a good thing to have and all those food items were just littering my backpack and being useless. It would be nice if you could combine or have them combined automatically into rations to reduce the inventory footprint of all those foodstuffs. I dislike inventory clutter in general and would like auto bagging of like stuff anyways.

I have no idea how it was before but how they sho it in the video is pretty cool.
It's according to P&P rules, it makes everything transparent and has the neat QoL feature to cast buffs directly from the dialog.

Before it was a simple dice roll (with about the same 3D effect), using normal randomness and according to the rules. People used to action games complained and didn't understand why they character, normally skilled in persuasion for ex, could miss a roll and fail to persuade. Or the old "I'm always unlucky, the randomness is wrong" syndrome.

And so Larian started to add non-D&D tweaks that allowed you to change the outcome of the roll: possibility to throw again, "improved" randomness too I think. And now this even more complicated system. :rolleyes:

I'm not keen on conversation looking like combat with improvised buffs and retries, I'd rather have just the normal dialogue with options to use skills and plain, normal rolls. Simple and according to the rules, not more Larian-ness.

1:44 - Camping and Long Rest Changes ,
Now that's very good, getting closer of the real experience.

The issue with the dice roll mods via spell is that it's not according to 5E rules - neither of the spells they mentioned can be cast as a reaction. Reactions are powerful in 5E. Guidance, for example, is an action and must be cast deliberately before some event and then maintained through concentration (forcing you to make tradeoffs, so you need to drop other concetration spells). I used it in Solasta quite a bit (for lockpicking etc) . Having it as reactive buff (to avoid people bitching about randomness) is not a good thing in my view - They shoud stick with adding a bias to dice rolls for those who don't like/understand RNG.

The camping changes may be goood, and I am glad that jump is not equal to disengage anymore. So clearly they are paying some attention to comments. The fights are still inherently dodgy though, with height differntials being overly punitive (unless they have completely removed adv/dis from height?) and the walk-behind-someone-in-your-turn-and-"backstab" them BS (this is something I did, because enemies did it to me too….but it's silly and super-overwpowered).

I played the EA content to death so won't likely attempt it begfore the game launches. I just hope people who care about turn-based 5E mechanics continue to nag at them in the forums :-)

This needs to go.

I think it's remarkable that the Panel From Hell Twitch stream attracted more than a third of the viewers of the currently running WitcherCon Twitch stream.
(But WitcherCon until know is really not interesting at least for me.)

The addition they talk about here, the "active roll" system, is a better representation of what the game is actually like. There ARE spells and abilities that allow you to influence dice rolls in the P&P game. All this does is allow you to use them.

The way that D&D 5e actually works is even easier to pull off. It you have "backstab" damage, all that needs to be true is that a friendly is adjacent to your target. You don't even have to flank them. Making it impossible to backstab by moving around behind somebody may appeal to your sense of realism, but it would absolutely not be closer to the tabletop rules.

Completely disagree with you here. The dice rolls are becoming more detailed and closer to the tabletop experience, and that is cool. Supplies for camping is a nice addition as well, it introduces a limitation to the resting system because now you have to think more carefully about when to rest, and it is a nice detail that makes camping more realistic and (again) closer to the tabletop experience. My only criticism of this is that at higher levels you have so much gold that camping supplies are not a limitation any more. I am disappointed to know that OwlCat removed supplies from WotR …

No … I was hoping for a late 2021 release, but I know that is not realistic at this point. The thing is that we simply don't know how far in the development are the rest of the chapters that come after chapter 1. So, we have no clue about how much is left to be developed in the game.

No, they can't, but in a computer game you often have no way of knowing that a roll is about to occur. It's a necessary concession to the difference between how a P&P game is played and how a computer game is played.

If I understand them correctly this new update in patch 5 has nothing to do with the randomness of the dice. It is a simple breakdown of the roll and now you have the possibility of using guidance before each roll.

Just to be clear I don't sympathize with those complaints that the dice are "too random". It sounds to me like those players want to have zero frustrations during the gameplay. The closer to the tabletop the better IMO.

My point is that Larian seem to make that once the roll has been asked, and not as a preparation for the discussion. That wouldn't be suspicious at all if someone started casting spells like Eagle's Splendor before answering a question ;)

We'll see how they actually implemented that, and whether they kept the other issues: the "adaptative" randomness and the possibility to re-roll.

To their credit, they finally decided to make rest camp realistic.

I know, as I said the modified randomness was done before, but here it's just another layer to try and make the loudest happy. Or maybe they removed their previous attempts, we'll see.

Don't worry, Owlcat replaced that with another limitation which is much better (the corruption mechanics), you don't have to carry those ridiculously heavy rations which are not really stopping from spam-resting: just take a strong guy or a magic backpack to carry enough of them, or a caster with a food-generating spell.

Solasta kept them for those who really wanted that but there's an option to make rations unnecessary (it was awkward with rations appearing/disappearing during travel anyway). They managed the rest-spamming differently anyway by fixing the camp locations, but that would probably be harder in a non-linear open-world map like Baldur's Gate 3.

The problem with the way they implemented it is abuse. If there is such a strong advantage and you can do it in any circumstance, everyone will have to use it or lose. That makes the feature uninteresting since it's not a tactical option anymore but a necessity.

In Solasta my fighter did more damage than my backstabbing rogue. So if backstab is roughly equally implemented in BG3 I don't think is OP. But then again, I haven't played BG3 yet… so you should know better.

And I'm telling you that the way it works in D&D 5e is an even stronger advantage which can also be used in any circumstances. No stealth rolls required, no flanking required. Your issue is with WotC, not Larian. You want them to nerf it, fine. But don't blame their implementation for being OP. Ya know?

Anywho, I like a lot of the changes they talk about in this update. Yeah, it doesn't have the pizzazz of "we added another chapter!" or whatever, but I doubt we'll get any more of the content before release, which is fine with me. But I like how much thought they're putting into broadening and deepening the systems and reactivity throughout the game as a whole.