Baldur's Gate 3 - Top Changes we want @ Fextralife

Originally Posted by Corwin
Daggerfall did; some were amazing in their complexity for the time in which the game was made. I do mean the fixed cities, not the randomly generated towns.

Yeah, Daggerfall has some massive towns and cities. To be fair though, it's a lot easier to have larger settlements when a lot of the assets are 2D.

Originally Posted by JDR13
So your concern is really about size not whether the settlements feel alive.

I can understand wondering where NPCs sleep when there are few houses, but, tbh, no city in any game has ever been close to realistic in that way.



Cyseal fits that description perfectly, so I'm not sure why you fear BG3 won't have that.

It's size and feeling. Cyseal felt to me like a village in the wilderness.
Perhaps that's a subjective thing.

It definitly didn't feel like a Baldur's Gate like city. And game that's called Baldur's Gate should have that.

If it doesn't, it won't be a deal breaker (same goes for the companion lock), but it would most likely lose fun for me.

Originally Posted by JFarrell71
By the logic of what we see is all there is, Amn from Baldur's Gate 2 is home to maybe 100 people. Unless you're going to base your entire game in a city (Cyberpunk) I don't think it's a good idea at all to try to make an RPG city look "alive" by this definition. What you're really making in that case is a large, empty, very boring place like the cut and paste cities of the early Elder Scrolls games.

In my other posts I made examples of well done cities. The cities in TES definitly aren't. They feel dead.

Say what you wan about Ubisoft their Anvil Next engine is perfect for building well done cities. First time I played Origins I was blown away and the last two games even more.

Originally Posted by JDR13
Are you still currently playing BG1? It's one of my favorite cities in any game. For 1998, it was mind-blowing. I still find it fantastic even today.

Still playing it, but I've not been in the city yet. I have spent too much time on other EA and trying to finish other games Looking forward to it though!

Originally Posted by Couchpotato
Say what you wan about Ubisoft their Anvil Next engine is perfect for building well done cities. First time I played Origins I was blown away and the last two games even more.

Yes, and it's not only the nice buildings but also how the street are populated, the sounds, and how you can move in the crowd. Probably the most convincing experience of a populated area.

The fact it's possible to climb on the buildings probably reduce the impact of fake buildings. Even if there are many of them, there is still some degree of interaction, and they don't feel just like an artificial decoration or a maze for the player to get lost in.

Originally Posted by Redglyph
Yes, and it's not only the nice buildings but also how the street are populated, the sounds, and how you can move in the crowd. Probably the most convincing experience of a populated area.

CP 2077 does that even better.

Ubisoft has always been great at creating environments. It's a shame their titles are so repetitive and gamey.

Originally Posted by JDR13
CP 2077 does that even better.

Ubisoft has always been great at creating environments. It's a shame their titles are so repetitive and gamey.

I've not played it but I'm not surprised, The Witcher 3's Novigrad was already very good, though not yet the same scale as Assassin's Creed's cities like Paris or London.

Yes, it's a bit of a shame. They make dream environments with iconic settings, but the game has been less and less appealing to me, it's a hunt for markers. I suppose we can't have it all. Imagine if we could heavily mod even an old AC with a good story and a different set of abilities… everything else is already there.

(I see there's a story creator for Odyssey - I gave up before that one, but I suppose it's limited to AC's particular style of gameplay.)

Nah the AI citizens are leagues ahead of anything done in CP 2077. CDPR created a huge city but it doesn't feel alive as the cities do in the latest Assassin creed games.

In CP 2077 the citizens and cars just randomly pop in with hardly any interaction. It's just a boring sandbox city but at least the story made up for that shortcoming.

Bottom-line CDPR PR lied about the openness of Night-city. I expected more.

Originally Posted by Redglyph
(I see there's a story creator for Odyssey - I gave up before that one, but I suppose it's limited to AC's particular style of gameplay.)

I assume so. I didn't find the base game interesting enough to explore anything extra.

Originally Posted by Redglyph
What would make it more convincing, for a city or even in general, is a day / night cycle instead of NPCs staying always at the same place (and in the case of Larian, always repeating the same line ad nauseam).

Omfg, this. If I hear "Lettuce see who can choose the finest greens!" one more time, I will seriously snap.

Originally Posted by Aubrielle
Omfg, this. If I hear "Lettuce see who can choose the finest greens!" one more time, I will seriously snap.

I was actually trying to forget that

And this too, "Smells worse over here than a dozen rotten eggs dropped in a vat of vinegar."

What's funny is the techniques people come up with, to shut them up without being caught. For the crier in D:OS2, one way is to find a dead body and use the Bloated Corpse spell, drag the bloody thing all the way to the market and make it explode next to the NPC to silence (while keeping as much distance as possible). I did it and it works well, but now the place is such a mess!

Originally Posted by Morrandir
In my other posts I made examples of well done cities. The cities in TES definitly aren't. They feel dead.

It's hard to know what you mean considering your definition is regressive. "What I mean by cities that feel alive is cities that feel alive."