D&D General Baldur's Gate 3 will now be releasing August 3rd on PC and September 6th on PS5, increased level cap, race & class details and more

[el-remmen]

Baldur’s Gate 3 has more cinematic dialogue than three times all three Lord of the Rings novels combined. It has 174 hours of cinematics, making it more than twice the length of every season of Game of Thrones combined.

Does this mean what most folks call "cut scenes" or does it mean going through dialog loops with NPCs or something else?

 

[bedir than]

We also did a lot of work house-ruling this class, re-balancing Monks and giving them more Ki to ensure they feel powerful next to our other classes.

good. sticking to the PHB here would make the Monk less interesting

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Does this mean what most folks call "cut scenes" or does it mean going through dialog loops with NPCs or something else?

Presumably both. If it's just the former, we'd be looking at probably dozens or hundreds of 10-60 minute cutscenes.

But in the Early Access there's no cutscene that last more than about a minute or two - whereas there are obviously quite a few hours of dialogue loops. Even if it was just dialogue that's like, more than 3x as many, say any Mass Effect game - because I can completely all of those, doing basically 100% of stuff (including DLC), not skipping dialogue (because why bother playing ME to skip dialogue?!) in about 60 hours each.

So if there's no exaggeration here we're looking at a kind of completely insane amount of dialogue and cutscenes for a single game.

I kind of believe it because Act 1 alone basically feels like nearly a complete game by itself, if you do all the content.

EDIT - So it's going to be the dialogue - Mass Effect 1/2/3 combined is 1.2m words of dialogue. Baldur's Gate 3 is 2m words of dialogue.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

good. sticking to the PHB here would make the Monk less interesting

Yeah pretty much all their rebalancing so far has either made classes/subclasses work better for BG3, or just straight up improved their design as compared to the PHB of 9 years ago. Given WotC and various others are also doing rebalances at the moment, it's not surprising.

Really glad to see the selection of subclasses, particularly that they didn't just stick to PHB subclasses in the end.

 

[CommodoreKong]

Yeah pretty much all their rebalancing so far has either made classes/subclasses work better for BG3, or just straight up improved their design as compared to the PHB of 9 years ago. Given WotC and various others are also doing rebalances at the moment, it's not surprising.

Really glad to see the selection of subclasses, particularly that they didn't just stick to PHB subclasses in the end.

Hopefully since they're making changes they release a manual or list of all of their class/subclass/spell features before release so I don't have to spend hours at the character creator.

 

[Vael]

Can't wait to play the full game. I joined Early Access, something I try to never do, and been playing the game half-heartedly because I can only replay the nautiloid so many times, but I'm very eager to get the full game and struggling with what to play. I like playing Druids and Sorcerers, but I also have Gale (and Halsin) and I kinda wish I could have a 5 person party, lol.

 

[el-remmen]

I don't mind some dialog loops but abhor cut-scenes and usually try to skip them even the first time playing a video game - so that just seems like an absurd and annoying amount to me.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Hopefully since they're making changes they release a manual or list of all of their class/subclass/spell features before release so I don't have to spend hours at the character creator.

That'd be really good though I'd be shocked given their documentation has been very, very, very close to "absolutely nothing" so far (decent tutorials though). Also the fans haven't documented stuff very well, but hopefully that'll change on launch.

I'd really like to know what they've done with Swords Bard, because I doubt they've left it as it.

I don't mind some dialog loops but abhor cut-scenes and usually try to skip them even the first time playing a video game - so that just seems like an absurd and annoying amount to me.

Basically if you look at the number of words in the script, what they're saying is there's as much dialogue on BG3 as in the whole of Mass Effect 1/2/3 (it's very similar for the Dragon Ages combined). So if you like dialogue, great. If you don't like dialogue, this is going to be a punishment session like no other game.

 

[jgsugden]

I wish they'd included a confirmation of multiclassing. Sven said it would be there previously ... but I have not heard any reference to it.

 

[MarkB]

I wonder if this is to get around the other big RPG release, Starfield coming out on September 6th. With BG3's original release date I was going to skip it until after I'd had my fill of Starfield, but with an earlier PC release date I may consider buying it on release.

And the PS5 release being the same day as Starfield is less of an issue since Starfield isn't coming out on PS5. Still, competing with that marketing machine for ad space won't be pretty.