OK, I finally took the plunge on Baldur’s Gate 3, and, coming from playing several hundreds of hours of Solasta recently, the first thing I noticed is the lack of a combat grid....
I’m currently in two different D&D campaigns. One plays combats on the regular 5ft grid, the other is “theatre of mind” where where everything is just described. Both are fine, I don’t really feel like I lose anything with either method, it’s just two different abstractions for the same ideas.
Larian’s previous game, Divinity Original Sin: 2, was still highly tactical despite its lack of grid-based positioning or targeting. The game used its mechanics of skills, freer movement, and surfaces/clouds to really shake up each battle and make them unique. Each combat was like a little puzzle. For me, who usually bounces off the likes of XCOM, it was absolutely brilliant. BG3 is much the same, just with a different ruleset (and I’m glad I was familiar with it beforehand. It must be daunting to be thrown into 5e without having a book thrown at you).
Being a nerd now, there is actually a grid in these games, but it’s only used for navmeshes and the surfaces. The game doesn’t expose either of these to you in-game. Visually, the edges of surfaces are messy and extend/retract from where they technically are according to the engine. I suppose you can kind of see the navmesh grid by clicking all around the edges of walkable areas, but other than walking up to edges, the navmesh has little impact on anything else.
I think this is a good change overall. Mojang has been putting a lot of effort into getting people to explore the world over the past few updates, and this feels like the next step of that. Making book trades biome dependent forces players that want to maximise to go out into the world, and maybe even set up infrastructure to make travelling less tedious.
I do worry about the anvil costs, now that you’re always going to have to combine books together to level them up. The “Too expensive” message adds nothing to the game, and only punishes players for a mechanic that was almost completely redundant the update immediately after the redesign (anvil rework in 1.8, mending added in 1.9).
Why do modern strategy games hate the grid?
OK, I finally took the plunge on Baldur’s Gate 3, and, coming from playing several hundreds of hours of Solasta recently, the first thing I noticed is the lack of a combat grid....
New Java Snapshot 23w31a
Some interesting changes to trading in this snapshot. Changelog: www.minecraft.net/…/minecraft-snapshot-23w31a