Of course they are. They’d be mad not to.
I am interested to see what they do, as they’ve said before the BG3 engine sorta breaks down after level 12 so they might not go any higher. Presumably that means it’s another ‘start at level 1’ type campaign.
A return to Icewind Dale or Spelljammer perhaps??
I’d be perfectly happy to see content at the same levels as BG3 campaign. Ideally a new campaign entirely, but if it’s just DLC then an extra Act or a side campaign with new characters as a prequel or sequel or something would be neat.
Yeah, side campaigns are probably the way to go.
It’s almost impossible to implement high level magic. Just the interactions between spells is insane. Basic interactions like Force Cage+any AoE (Sickening Radiance) to build the microwave of death… would be so hard to implement. They’d honestly have to veer off 5e and implement their own spells instead, tailored to the video game medium.
I do think the framework of the game would be a great place to start for additional campaigns. They could take this game and put a Candlekeep Mysteries style sequential dungeon crawl add-on and people would love it just to play multiplayer short campaigns.
It’s not impossible cause any thing that has specific rules laid out can be implemented. And table top rule are turn based(no time sensitive action, ie, physics simulation), fixed permutations/outcomes(dice rolls for everything), programming is just “rules” for moving numbers, even for deep learning networks.
The harder to implement are the conversations, cause there are pretty much infinite way depending on who initiate the conversation(background/race/stats/class/proficiency/+whatever player thinks that’s possible and DM assign a check value), with potential plots lines, the writer has to limit what can be chosen and remove other options even though it’s legit on table top.
I mean, spells like Wish are going to be basically impossible outside of going the AI route (which is an entire can of worms).
Wish can duplicate any other spell, or it can have your own effect (with a chance of it being monkey-pawed plus you never being able to cast Wish ever again).
Also bear in mind that it’s not “just” rules for moving numbers. You have to have particles, animations, etc. You can’t just have conversations, you have to also have SFX from impacts, camera shake, UI elements, etc. When you start to get into the world of “anything is possible” you kind of have to go back to basics, text-based adventures.
With AI stuff, maybe some of that can be done - but AI is just so incredibly slow in its current form. It won’t stay that way forever, mind - I think the best comparison is graphics in the 1990s. Graphics were incredibly basic because anything complex would take ages to render and couldn’t be used in games. Over the next decade, things were built to specifically speed up that process, and now modern GPUs can easily keep up with the highest-quality CGI without much fuss (there’s a reason why Disney has the Volume, which is essentially just running CGI in the Unreal Engine alongside the actors in real-time).
But until that, we’re going to be pretty limited. It’s going to be impossible for any kind of free-form rules to be implemented, unless options were restricted to such a point that it’s basically a completely different spell.
Was it the engine or the ruleset? It’s widely accepted that D&D 5E is sorta hot garbage at higher levels so I was assuming that’s what Larian was referring to.
I’ve heard that high level D&D sucks ever since I got into D&D back in 2e, so I don’t know if 5e truly sucks, or it’s just continued player sentiment toward something that’s always been, IMO, misunderstood.
Personally, I fucking love epic level shit. Starting at 20 and using the epic level book to go further is awesome. The problem I see, though, is DMs quite often don’t think epic enough. They think too small scale and it sucks for everyone because
- There’s a lot to keep track of on a single character. So many spells and abilities at that point, and if you’ve never really played a lot of high level stuff, you can get choice paralysis or just not know how some of your stuff really works.
- Strength. What’s a challenge? Quite often when I see what others are using in their high level campaigns, they are just poorly balanced large scale battles or a single big monster and not really thought out. If your party has close to God like powers, they should be fighting actual gods.
