Is this a joke? No, really, where is the punchline? (2024)

Is this a joke? No, really, where is the punchline?

I've come back after months, finally expecting my bug-less run, just to have twice the amount of things not working!

I did not believe it's possible to be worse than Besthesda, but Larian has already accomplished it, and I'm not even in the second act. I will never purchase a Larian game again. This was my absolute last straw.

You cannot have a game one year past release where the flow is one hour of gaming, half an hour of desperately trying to fix the latest issue, ad infinitum. I should not have to state that this is absolutely unacceptable, but here we are.

Re: Is this a joke? No, really, where is the punchline?

Silver/#94475709/07/24 11:56 PM

Location: Athkatla

But what about the incredible bug fixing praise Larian gets? Surely that must count for something...

But no doubt in my mind, BG3 is getting worst and worst while Pathfinder WOTR just gets better and better. In terms of gameplay, content and bugs.
That is the nature of cinematic based romance centric games. It takes precedence over everything else. People want deeper romances, relationships, they get more bugs and the rest of the game stays sh*t. Its still pretty good sh*t, but still very little got fixed/improved or added. Zero new options.

BG3: The illusion of a flexible RPG. You get a ZERO customizable experience. Check the gameplay options menu versus games like Pathfinder or PoE. Reminds me of Bethesda actually. "You do it OUR way, and WILL like like".

Re: Is this a joke? No, really, where is the punchline?

Count Turnipsome#94476010/07/24 05:00 AM

In a weird way it's true, Larian DOES fix a ton of bugs. What the game journalists don't say is that each patch creates a gazillion new bugs. I'm honestly not sure how this is possible, but it's been consistent for a year now. Some ancient bugs Larian might not even know how to fix, like the Grymforge, but new stuff breaks so randomly, I really don't understand how it happened.

Re: Is this a joke? No, really, where is the punchline?

Silver/#94476310/07/24 06:26 AM

As Larian basically abandoned BG3 they don't need to fix anything to keep people playing or to serve as a base for DLCs, so they don't care.

Also, Larian realized that the success of BG3 does not come from it being a good game and people playing it, but from people ogling at the characters and dreaming up NSFW fanfiction, so that is what they produce.

Re: Is this a joke? No, really, where is the punchline?

Silver/#94477510/07/24 07:10 PM

I would consider it both a good and a bad game. To be more precise, it plays like the expansive early access of a legendary game that never got completed.

Bg3 is the equivalent of getting an A on some exam sections and an F on others. Leaving you with a C, except the whole class got D's, F's, and plagiarism accusations, so they bumped you up to a B as you're all graded on a curve. The worst part is, that's not even necessarily unfair. It just makes me sad. Sad and angry.

Fundamentally, Act 1 was too large and unstructured, which brought unresolvable issues to the flow and resource allocation of the entire game. It's difficult to pin down where Larian actually went wrong. Between this, pushing for romance and the bug infestation, it can be a very troublesome game. The sort people either replay 10x or come to not stand. I didn't expect to find myself in the latter category. I will finish this playthrough. It will also be goodbye.

Re: Is this a joke? No, really, where is the punchline?

Silver/#94477810/07/24 09:14 PM

There's a song about this phenomena:

"99 bugs in the code.
99 bugs in the code.
Take one down, patch it around.
101 bugs in the code."

It happens with coding a lot that fixing one bug, creates more. It's possible that Larian's code is more spaghetti-ish than normal given the higher than average volume of additional problems.

Though I also question their overall resources. They're classified as a AAA developer, but bug fixes (Especially major ones, like when Patch 3 I think it was, broke Act 3 completely) take so long to occur. Even accounting for the whole "Support of the game post-release is a luxury, not a right" when THEY break things, it should get fixed in a reasonable amount of time.

It's really not.

6 years of development time on the game.

3 years of which was spent in Early Access working on Act 1 (With a focus on addressing player feedback. They also rewrote the plot for the game during this period).

The remaining 3 years went into Acts 2 and 3.

Doesn't take a Rocket Surgeon to figure out where resource allocation may have gone awry...

Re: Is this a joke? No, really, where is the punchline?

Silver/#94477910/07/24 11:25 PM

Re: Is this a joke? No, really, where is the punchline?

Taril#94478111/07/24 07:40 AM

Location: Belfast

AAA developers tend to deal with a small fraction of complexity that Larian is dealing with. cRPGs tend to be buggy and more complex than your average game, and BG3 is more complex than your average RPG. Frankly, I am impressed how well the game has been polished in spite of its scale. It’s been a while since I played it, so I can’t comment on its current state - its a shame if new issues keep popping up. Hopefully there will be a comprehensive patch with the final update.

Re: Is this a joke? No, really, where is the punchline?

Taril#94479211/07/24 12:49 PM

I agree with this a lot. I know we had a discussion where I wanted longer support, and part of why I think that is also accounting for the things that have been broken during fixes or even added in Patches. I want to mention the fact that Larian added a kiss for Ascended Astarion in Patch 6 that broke the romance for many people. It is in my eyes similar to a bug since many could not play it because of the loss of autonomy of their own characters. There are several threads on the matter so we need not discuss it in detail!
Game bugs sucks, especially when it prevents you from playing or enjoying the game.

Re: Is this a joke? No, really, where is the punchline?

Wormerine#94479311/07/24 02:09 PM

Here we go again with the special pleading for BG3. Why is it more complex? There are only a handful of environments - Act 1, Act 2, Act 3 (the city) and the Underdark. There aren't that many NPCs in the game and most of those are 'same bloke different haircut'. What scale? The maps in each act aren't that big. There is more going on in CP 2077's Night City than in all of BG3.

Owlcat's WotR was mentioned earlier and I will mention Owlcat's WH40K which has continually been patched, and still is being, with new content added and has a DLC on the horizon.

Meanwhile Bioware seem to going down the Larian route with DA: The Veilguard - dumbed down combat, naff story and plot but hints of nudity and sexual shenanigans featuring a diverse lore-unfriendly cast.

Re: Is this a joke? No, really, where is the punchline?

Silver/#94479411/07/24 03:25 PM

The exaggeration never fails to amaze me.

Play for an hour and then spend half an hour trying to fix issues? C'mon, Nell Carter says Gimme a Break!

Thousands, hundreds of thousands of people have played this game and enjoyed it. Personally, I've played thousands of hours myself.

The idea that the game is broken to the extent that's being suggested is just silly. It's hard to take arguments seriously when they engage in this kind of over-the-top rhetoric.

You'd think the game was built on bubble gum and shoestrings to listen to some of you talk. Feels like a bunch of 'bah humbug!'

All I suggest is taking it down a notch. Saying, "Here are some issues I've had a problem with..."

Re: Is this a joke? No, really, where is the punchline?

JandK#94479711/07/24 03:57 PM

This is not an exaggeration. This was my literal timed average for Act 1. Sometimes it took two hours of finding a solution, sometimes it took 15 minutes, but this is what it ended up looking like. You may not like it, but you don't get to tell me that I hallucinated the last week.

I don't have infinite break time. Because of the extreme bugginess, I spend much more time in Act 1 than I would have liked. If it wasn't for some helpful people, I'd still have permanently no access to my camp chest. There were issues that are still unresolved and I've given up on. If I knew in advance which issues were unsolveable, I could have saved a lot of time. As I don't have thousands of hours in the game, you will have to forgive my ignorance.

I sped through Act 2 so far, where the bugs are mostly dead bodies ragdolling, NPCs not wanting to talk to me (can't finish the quest) and a Halsin disappearance. I already know if I tried to fix this, I would end up with another 4-5 hours+ of bugfixing under my belt. This is what happens if you have to reload major fights on tactician modded to behave like honour mode. I'm glad I didn't take the risk of real honour mode, I would have been locked out of even more content. It is what it is, I literally don't have the time to chase down a druid that a part of me is glad I don't have to deal with.

Re: Is this a joke? No, really, where is the punchline?

Jordaker#94479811/07/24 04:14 PM

Right? After exploring every nook and cranny, if you look at BG3 as a whole, you can quickly realize it is not as complex and expansive as many other games, including a couple CRPGs. The "complexity" argument hardly justifies the fact that everytime they touched the code so far new issues appeared.

Re: Is this a joke? No, really, where is the punchline?

Silver/#94480111/07/24 09:30 PM

I've never had trouble accessing my camp chest, not once.

Am I understanding this right: you modded your game and you're experiencing known problems from said mod?

Re: Is this a joke? No, really, where is the punchline?

JandK#94480311/07/24 11:35 PM

I do not have a ton of mods, nor any known common problems from my mods that I can think of. 95/100 mods aren't even capable of causing issues if you're the least bit selective.

The worst case scenario for a hair mod, for example, is it not being compatible with some head types, not blowing up your camp. Modding isn't magic. Similarly, all that modded honour does is adding legendary actions to enemies + rebalancing the game. It simply removes the barrier that tells the game these changes shouldn't be made because you're not officially starting in honour mode. It's a very clean fix. However, if something is well known to be bugged in honour like the Durge cape, you will inherit that bug through the rebalancing. That's because it barely changes the basegame.

Additionally, I've had all of those problems months ago before I modded the game. The camp chest especially used to come and go, and I don't just mean the capacity to open it, it used to literally FALL THROUGH THE MAP. I could not store anything in camp out of fear the chests would disappear, or their contents. Especially if you placed a chest inside a chest, that was just asking for trouble.

All of this lead to me taking a break from the game. For half a year, I've waited. I wanted to do a *complete* and *stressless* honour run, but I knew from my luck, I would once again be eternally trapped in combat in early Act 1, nevermind the deadly Act 2 bugs that could get you at the time. Now imagine my surprise that all the bugs I've encountered in various runs have combined in this one, with maybe 30% of them fixed! Anything that doesn't literally kill a run is seemingly below notice, and it shows. This isn't just poor luck at this point. It literally feels like being a beta tester.

Re: Is this a joke? No, really, where is the punchline?

Silver/#94480711/07/24 11:49 PM

I will say, on my end, I've had very few bugs. I've only encountered the one where your only option is 1. Continue (only on multiplayer though), which is annoying for sure, and a couple of act 3 npcs having some mouth and eyeball polygons stretched beyond belief for some reason after one of the patches. My friends have also had very bug-light experiences, thankfully.

That being said, it's true that Larian tends to introduce a lot of new bugs when they drop patches. I assume that's why they're doing much longer playtesting now.

Re: Is this a joke? No, really, where is the punchline?

Silver/#94495613/07/24 09:03 PM

I play on console almost exclusively now so obviously no mods. Considering the games size and complexity (yes it is complex) I find it incredibly stable.

Also I’ve never owned a non bugged game since Coleco Pong.

Never owned a new car that didn’t have at least one rattle somewhere…(I really listen).

I agree it would be nice if fixing known issues happened a little faster but scarcity is just a reality of life.

Re: Is this a joke? No, really, where is the punchline?

Ranxerox#94506415/07/24 12:36 PM

So where or how is it complex? This is not a big game.

Re: Is this a joke? No, really, where is the punchline?

Jordaker#94506615/07/24 12:51 PM

The game needs to keep track of various decisions and potential variations in both combat and dialogue. It's a lot more complex than some other popular games.

Re: Is this a joke? No, really, where is the punchline?

Jordaker#94507615/07/24 04:13 PM

How is it not?