Can we talk about barrels?

[Nonaym]

I've got 408.1 hours in an EA game that has between 21 and 24 hours of content. I've played BG3 since the release and I've been having a blast! I already feel like my money was well spent - good job (so far) Larian!
But the barrels though...
Every patch it seems like the fun barrels (water, oil, smoke powder, firewater) have less and less utility. In the early days there was a pick up cursor for these barrels, which turned into and attack cursor. Though you could still right click to pick them up.
The fun/utility was in being able to properly manipulate and throw these barrels. Any character, not simply the high strength ones, used to be able to do this.
Not so with Patch 5!
There is a particular point in EA where you character stumbles across a treasure trove of "fun barrels". I used to be able to stuff my PC's inventory with these barrels for later use. Now, that character wasn't able manipulate them, much less to stuff them in the inventory.
Also, barrels are no longer throw-able. Which takes the fun out of, well, the fun barrels.
Creatively using barrels to put out fires and slay dragons is part of the charm for me with games like BG3. I can understand toning down the environmental pyrotechnics. I know what it's like to have characters perched atop a wooden tower, with the entire location a molten field of pure destruction below. (Sweet-sweet D:OS2!)
But completely hamstringing the utility of barrels seems a bridge too far.
I do have a clear barrel-bias though.

[War Maiden]

Oprindeligt skrevet af GreyWarden506:

Oprindeligt skrevet af Nonaym:

I've got 408.1 hours in an EA game that has between 21 and 24 hours of content. I've played BG3 since the release and I've been having a blast! I already feel like my money was well spent - good job (so far) Larian!
But the barrels though...
Every patch it seems like the fun barrels (water, oil, smoke powder, firewater) have less and less utility. In the early days there was a pick up cursor for these barrels, which turned into and attack cursor. Though you could still right click to pick them up.
The fun/utility was in being able to properly manipulate and throw these barrels. Any character, not simply the high strength ones, used to be able to do this.
Not so with Patch 5!
There is a particular point in EA where you character stumbles across a treasure trove of "fun barrels". I used to be able to stuff my PC's inventory with these barrels for later use. Now, that character wasn't able manipulate them, much less to stuff them in the inventory.
Also, barrels are no longer throw-able. Which takes the fun out of, well, the fun barrels.
Creatively using barrels to put out fires and slay dragons is part of the charm for me with games like BG3. I can understand toning down the environmental pyrotechnics. I know what it's like to have characters perched atop a wooden tower, with the entire location a molten field of pure destruction below. (Sweet-sweet D:OS2!)
But completely hamstringing the utility of barrels seems a bridge too far.
I do have a clear barrel-bias though.

I feel you! I rarely used barrels but even I noticed the change. I think everyone complaining about the realism is sucking some of the fun out of the game. I can easily imagine Gale doing a spell to make them lighter or whatever to make it believable. I hope Larian puts an option for people who dont really mind and like utilizing the items in the game.

And there it is.

[LukanGamer]

so long they make a required way to use them in a realistic way like through usage of 1 or 2 spells that would be fine imo, and not make this even less Baldurs more DoS for sake of casual fun.
(the barrels I guess are in and a thing that not changing so ya Larian should be making certain they minimal and realistically fit given this meant to be a more real game).

[Vixziค็็็็็n]

Oprindeligt skrevet af War Maiden:

Oprindeligt skrevet af GreyWarden506:

I feel you! I rarely used barrels but even I noticed the change. I think everyone complaining about the realism is sucking some of the fun out of the game. I can easily imagine Gale doing a spell to make them lighter or whatever to make it believable. I hope Larian puts an option for people who dont really mind and like utilizing the items in the game.

And there it is.

There what is? It's not DoS it's a D&D Baldur's Gate game. If you want a game that doesn't have a ruleset around it I'm sure there are some out there or....there's always DoS. But what you are doing here is reading 'The Legend of Drizzt' and complaining it's not more like 'The Hobbit'.

[Vixziค็็็็็n]

Oprindeligt skrevet af pandariuskairos:

Oprindeligt skrevet af Patrick:

I would be happy with more options to try and cater for more people, let's hope that can be done in a way that doesn't compromise encounter design. Besides barrels, I think there are too many scrolls/special arrows etc lying about. That was fine in DOS1/2 - which I played and enjoyed - but doesn't fit 5E D&D.

I absolutely agree - the amount of consumables in the game is absurd (I barely even use them) and the fact that all classes can use scrolls is also wrong.

The consumables (particularly grenades and bombs) can really water down classes to make them all feel the same (everyone's a 'Bombardier').

When combined with all the other stuff, particularly explosive barrels, it feels less like a high fantasy D&D setting and more like Metal Gear.

The classes and scrolls thing is equally annoying to me.

[Jardenon]

Because this is D&D not Divinity.

[asdf]

I think the 'realism' argument is taking the discussion in the completely wrong direction personally. To me it's always been just about game design - the issue I have with barrels is that they can trivialize way too many fights (basically all of them if you wanted to). A gimmick that can be used to trivialize a few specific fights is one thing, but a gimmick that allows you to trivialize basically the entire game if you wanted to is not okay - barrels that are limited to only being used in specific sections of the map are okay, barrels that can be dragged to anywhere in the game are not.

If it were purely about barrels I can overlook it, but the problem is that if you apply the same logic to every abusable mechanic (like they did in DOS2 pretty much) and say 'just don't use it' then I'll just stop caring about combat altogether because it's too broken to care about. That's pretty much my biggest criticism of DOS2 - the game was such an unbalanced mess and there were a million different ways to completely trivialize the game that I couldn't take any of the combat in it seriously. No matter how hard I tried to limit myself, there were always more exploits that could break the game.. I'd have to ban practically half of the game before the combat could be challenging, and I'd always just give up on trying and accept that the combat was a joke. Things like that didn't do anything to promote creativity for me, it just made the game so trivial that the combat became entirely irrelevant.

[Pan Darius Cassandra]

Oprindeligt skrevet af asdf:

I think the 'realism' argument is taking the discussion in the completely wrong direction personally. To me it's always been just about game design - the issue I have with barrels is that they can trivialize way too many fights (basically all of them if you wanted to). A gimmick that can be used to trivialize a few specific fights is one thing, but a gimmick that allows you to trivialize basically the entire game if you wanted to is not okay - barrels that are limited to only being used in specific sections of the map are okay, barrels that can be dragged to anywhere in the game are not.

If it were purely about barrels I can overlook it, but the problem is that if you apply the same logic to every abusable mechanic (like they did in DOS2 pretty much) and say 'just don't use it' then I'll just stop caring about combat altogether because it's too broken to care about. That's pretty much my biggest criticism of DOS2 - the game was such an unbalanced mess and there were a million different ways to completely trivialize the game that I couldn't take any of the combat in it seriously. No matter how hard I tried to limit myself, there were always more exploits that could break the game.. I'd have to ban practically half of the game before the combat could be challenging, and I'd always just give up on trying and accept that the combat was a joke. Things like that didn't do anything to promote creativity for me, it just made the game so trivial that the combat became entirely irrelevant.

I only played DoS, but I quickly got to the point where 'find the barrel to blow it up' wasn't fun because it trivialized and railroaded the combat into doing the same thing over and over again, so I ended up uninstalling very early and never finished it, despite liking the writing and voices.

I was afraid BG3 would inherit too much DoS, but ultimately decided that it was D&D enough to take the risk, even though there is a definite DoS influence here.

[DCRWrites]

Larian is building BG3 on the foundations of their previous games, such as D:OS2, which made much heavier usage of environmental effects and "barrelmancy" than has been traditional in D&D. When they started working on building their new game, they included the same kind of environmental effects as they had in the previous game.

The catch is of course, that Divinity uses a different rules system, so you get different interactions, and things don't play out the same way. Now they're trying to dial the barrels back to something that adds to the game without breaking the sense that this is the Forgotten Realms--a setting that for all practical purposes has either very few or no explosives and only a few kinds of incendiary devices.

It's a balancing act, and the final result is going to be limited by the license as well as player feedback.

[LukanGamer]

If you can't avoid the "barrel abuse" it just means you should not game and likely would just find a different abuse.
The barrel abuses both here and DoS are not even the most OP by far.
(Even just filling a chest in DoS and throwing unto enemies heads far exceeded that is abuse and Op ridiculousness).

[Vixziค็็็็็n]

Oprindeligt skrevet af LukanGamer:

If you can't avoid the "barrel abuse" it just means you should not game and likely would just find a different abuse.
The barrel abuses both here and DoS are not even the most OP by far.
(Even just filling a chest in DoS and throwing unto enemies heads far exceeded that is abuse and Op ridiculousness).

So basically a funny way of saying they aren't needed. No need to even talk about abuse when you can just remove the problem. And if it's not needed then they can be minimized or removed which is exactly what Larian started doing.

Now while you completely sidestepped the actual point, which is that this is a D&D game not a DoS game where there is a specific ruleset involved and a particular setting, we ultimately come to the same conclusion. =)

[Space Dog]

Oprindeligt skrevet af GreyWarden506:

Oprindeligt skrevet af Nonaym:

I've got 408.1 hours in an EA game that has between 21 and 24 hours of content. I've played BG3 since the release and I've been having a blast! I already feel like my money was well spent - good job (so far) Larian!
But the barrels though...
Every patch it seems like the fun barrels (water, oil, smoke powder, firewater) have less and less utility. In the early days there was a pick up cursor for these barrels, which turned into and attack cursor. Though you could still right click to pick them up.
The fun/utility was in being able to properly manipulate and throw these barrels. Any character, not simply the high strength ones, used to be able to do this.
Not so with Patch 5!
There is a particular point in EA where you character stumbles across a treasure trove of "fun barrels". I used to be able to stuff my PC's inventory with these barrels for later use. Now, that character wasn't able manipulate them, much less to stuff them in the inventory.
Also, barrels are no longer throw-able. Which takes the fun out of, well, the fun barrels.
Creatively using barrels to put out fires and slay dragons is part of the charm for me with games like BG3. I can understand toning down the environmental pyrotechnics. I know what it's like to have characters perched atop a wooden tower, with the entire location a molten field of pure destruction below. (Sweet-sweet D:OS2!)
But completely hamstringing the utility of barrels seems a bridge too far.
I do have a clear barrel-bias though.

I feel you! I rarely used barrels but even I noticed the change. I think everyone complaining about the realism is sucking some of the fun out of the game. I can easily imagine Gale doing a spell to make them lighter or whatever to make it believable. I hope Larian puts an option for people who dont really mind and like utilizing the items in the game.

There is a spell for having fun with barrels in DnD. Telekinesis. 5th level spell, available for a 9th level Wizard. Throw them around to your hearts content. There's also a potion of Giant Strength that lets you carry and throw heavy objects.

This is the whole point. These things and feats already exist in D&D. But they are part of the level progression or have a resource cost attached to them. If you make everything widely available from level 1 without any restrictions these fun things lose their meaning. Level progression becomes less interesting and less rewarding.

You need to play a Wizard to 9th level and discover how to be an ACTUAL barrelmancer in D&D to understand it I think. Larian is frontloading too many things that should be saved for later and perhaps they understood this now.

[War Maiden]

Additionally, as an update, it seems as of today or within the last few days (unsure since I didn't play BG3 for a few days) it seems the fluid tanks on the Nautiloid are once again targetable, if you start a new game. I am unsure if they did a server-side patch or whatnot, but they are working again. Just so you all are aware, since I made a new game today to try out the Patch 5 Wizard. Both myself, and Lae'zel, could target them successfully.

[Wyrlish]

Oprindeligt skrevet af War Maiden:

Additionally, as an update, it seems as of today or within the last few days (unsure since I didn't play BG3 for a few days) it seems the fluid tanks on the Nautiloid are once again targetable, if you start a new game. I am unsure if they did a server-side patch or whatnot, but they are working again. Just so you all are aware, since I made a new game today to try out the Patch 5 Wizard. Both myself, and Lae'zel, could target them successfully.

Yeah... found that out with a buddy the hard way... y'know trying to kill him with burning hands... I killed us both xD

[Siegdarth]

How about invetories? How can you make it fit!? Taking the shield from my ass huts a lot, imagine a whole barrel <o>.
We need a bag of holding for that D:

[War Maiden]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Siegdarth:

How about invetories? How can you make it fit!? Taking the shield from my ass huts a lot, imagine a whole barrel <o>.
We need a bag of holding for that D:

Aren't you supposed to be wearing your shield, you know, on your back...?

...

Now that I think about it, I find it odd that rogues can backstab a person with a shield on their back, as it would automatically give complete protection against it, unless of course, it was a backslash to the Achilles Heel... then... yea...