The Belgian studio has taken a few concepts from Divinity: Original Sin 2, Larian’s previous game, to make it significantly more difficult.

Baldur’s Gate III received its last Panel From Hell broadcast before its release, and Larian talked about the game’s most challenging difficulty level, Tactician. Following the example of Divinity: Original Sin 2, there will be more aggressive enemies with better stats, which is just the beginning. You’ll get more than that, and you better be prepared for the adventure…

Matt Holland, lead combat designer at Larian, explained: “We have it in two layers: there’s the base layer that all the characters in the game will get—that’s the basics like just increasing HP or making it easier to hit you. Then there’s the local layer. We’ve gone through every single combat in our game, and we’ve added little bits of spice to make that combat shine just a little bit hotter and be that much harder.”

They demonstrated an example by comparing one of the combat scenes to Baldur’s Gate III’s Balanced (i.e., normal) difficulty level. On Balanced, the monk duo defeated the goblins by passing through the city. They were knocked out once, but other than that, they did pretty well in the fights. At the Tactician level, however, the goblins were armed with fire arrows, and the main entrance to the city was filled with oil and explosive barrels. One monk was knocked out within a turn, and the second barely stood. Holland says the AI is brutal, and they want to make it feel like you’re playing against a DM (dungeon master; since the game is based on Dungeons & Dragons, the idea is legitimate, as that’s a board game…) who wants to push your limits.

So if it doesn’t work out so well, the fault will not be with the game but with us because the machine will go after those who use “concentration” spells that last several rounds. We recently reported that Baldur’s Gate III will be released on PC on August 3 but will not launch on PlayStation 5 until September 6.

Source: PCGamer