Baldur's Gate 3 - Interview @IGN

Originally Posted by largh
Of course, when BG2 came out, they were ahead of everyone regarding the party interaction, but IMO games that followed have done it better. The scripting options were limited in 2000 compared to these days. Was it just me but in BG1 I found the best part to be the wandering in the forests? Such forests were never done in computer games before, the atmosphere was unique, graphics great, and the forests felt dangerous due to the low-level characters. Diablo nailed the similar type of dangerous atmosphere in dungeons the year earlier and the dungeons in BG1 did not feel particularly memorable to me but those forests were great!

I agree with the low level forest exploration being very fun, especially the first time I played.

About party interaction, I'm thinking what made it great to me was the characters and the voice-over work. And nostalgia of course

Originally Posted by Falksi
Colour palette specifically. Just too bright & colourful for my liking.

Hmm. I looked at images from all games. There's not a huge difference to me, but in one image the grass was very bright green, the ground bright yellow and the sky bright blue. In that image it felt like a commercial photo, and I'm guessing it was from in game cinematics, or a trailer or something.

My feeling after watching some gameplay was that it is a bit brighter, but I'm not sure if that's really true. We'll, it's still at least year away from release, so things like that can be tweaked

“I see people talk about the darkness of Baldur's Gate,” he says. “And it's absolutely something that we want to bring out. But Baldur's Gate was very, very lighthearted and strange and silly and bizarre in places, as well.
[…]There are characters that are so cartoonish and strange, and they coexist alongside torture and horror… and getting all those things to sit well together, I think, is part of what Baldur's Gate is.”

While I agree with that statement, I remain sceptical in particular when he mentions silly and cartoonish: in my view, these qualities are what ultimately broke Larian's previous games for me. Their particular sense of humour nullified immersion and lead me to only ever finish one of their games, Ego Draconis, even though I enjoyed the gameplay, e.g., of DOS1/2 quite a lot otherwise.

All that said, I enjoyed the Baldur's Gate series back in the time, and supported two Larian Kickstarters, even. The Illithid plot sounds intriguing, and I do hope that they are flexible enough in their storytelling to do the Baldur's Gate legacy some justice.

From my news thread if you missed it.

Baldur's Gate 3 Community Update #5 - Early Access

Hello everyone! We hope you’ve recovered from the Panel From Hell. We have a huge, bumper community update for you today. We’re going to talk about Early Access at some length, so get a cup of something ready, and maybe a snack. Nestled in? Let’s go.

What is Early Access? What are your expectations? Everyone has a different answer to this, depending on the experience they’re looking for, or their objectives that lead them to shipping a game into Early Access. Regardless how you define it, buying an Early Access game needs to be an informed decision and today we come here to inform.

We’re going to cover a bunch of topics discussed on the 18th’s Panel From Hell, where Geoff, Swen, Adam and Chris talked in some depth about not just Early Access, but also Avernus, first of the nine hells and the setting of the game’s tutorial.

I'm going to buy it twice.

Originally Posted by coyote
While I agree with that statement, I remain sceptical in particular when he mentions silly and cartoonish: in my view, these qualities are what ultimately broke Larian's previous games for me. Their particular sense of humour nullified immersion and lead me to only ever finish one of their games, Ego Draconis, even though I enjoyed the gameplay, e.g., of DOS1/2 quite a lot otherwise.

All that said, I enjoyed the Baldur's Gate series back in the time, and supported two Larian Kickstarters, even. The Illithid plot sounds intriguing, and I do hope that they are flexible enough in their storytelling to do the Baldur's Gate legacy some justice.

That's exactly my concern. While I generally enjoy Larian's humour in D:OS 1 & 2, there are elements that I find a little too far on the side of ridicule, like the characters' dance during fights which reminds me of bad kung-fu movies, or the stealth disguise as a barrel, bush or rock. The latter is very fun to see the first time, and I had to smile at that, but those give an overall impression of carelessness or even self-derision that breaks the immersive mood I'm looking for in CRPG games. If I'm roleplaying a dark rogue, it simply doesn't fit. If that's the spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate, I'm not sure it would fit at all.

We've already seen the characters had this silly dancing stance during fights in BG3 too, ridiculously wobbling, or heavily heaving on the character's sheet as if they just had a sprint. Hopefully they'll keep it at that and the rest will gain some subtelty.

At least the most important part of flexibility in the decisions, the actions and probably the environment and inventory management will be taken care of, they have a robust experience in those domains. And about the story and narrative, I suppose we'll see, it seems to be handled well (let's pray that nearby NPCs don't play their dialogue in loop as they were in the D:OS series…).