Baldur's Gate 3
- Thread starter Old_Hunter_77
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I mean in general, yes. For Forgotten Realms, eh.....
Baldurs Gate 1 was basically a nothingburger plot.
Baldurs Gate 2:
Their most compelling character across the BG saga was an evil elf who got turned into an immortal human as punishment. Whose plan was some nonsense convolution plot that seemed to be effectively meaningless in the end. He stole Imoen's bhaalspawn powers so now he can his revenge (literally already had a personal clan of vampires, dozens of extraplanar and golem units, the apparent ability to have a giant sewer base under the nose of the Cowled Wizards who are specifically meant to regulate wizards, was able to break out and take over their prison after (allegedly intentionally) getting thrown in there, and in the final level has literal dragons under his command. So F knows why he needed a generally inconsequential bit of power from a dead god.
Irenicus actor puts in a solid performance, and his moment to moment dialogue seems fine. But boy howdy does the whole backend fall apart if you go back and try and actually look at the story.
Icewind Dale:
Mostly a dungeon crawl, but the plot revolves around demons pretending to be Helmites. (which gets weirdly reused in Neverwinter Nights, although its not demons that time but predecessor lizardfolk gods who otherwise don't exist in the settings). While Helm in the Forgotten Realms does technically allow evil followers. There's definitely kind of hard limits. And with the oft-times astonishingly direct involvement of gods in FR, I don't think you could reliably last to any level of note while actively impersonating one before some comeuppance blows your cover.
Neverwinter NIghts:
I mean, they weren't even trying at this point. Its a nonsense plot full of stuff that makes no sense in the setting. Mostly designed so everything and the kitchen sink can be shown off since the game was a toolset at the ed of the day. The one thing you can say for it is it actually generally stuck to level appropriate things and you didn't get a whole lot of ludicrous mismatches where a level 4 is meant to defeat dragons (that comes in the expansion lol)
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So this is a surprisingly common trope in fantasy.
"You, sirrah, have brought ruin upon my hearth and home and slain my family. As punishment, I curse thee with my dying breath that you shall live forever, so you can ruin other people's hearths and homes for eternity! Because surely the misery, despair and devastation you will go on to inflict on many thousands more people is a small price to pay for your suffering."
I didn't see it until after you said something. And when I said that, I was referring to Honest Trailer themselves.
I vaguely remember making a joke about that sometime around the game's release. I didn't want to be proven right!
31 hours in, been scouring the Underdark for the last few hours, and about to wrap this section of it. I showed up, some duergar acted pissy, and then a drow got pissy at me for not wanting to push slaves into lava. DIdn't really know who he was but I killed him. Also got my first illithid power. Oh, and killed the adamantine golem in a way that rewarded me with a special achievement, though I imagine the other way of doing it would have been even more arduous. It's been mostly side stuff, but by god there's just so much of it. With Dragon Age Origins I was like 2/3 of the way through the main game by this point, but here it feels like I've only scratched the surface.
One thing I hope gets discussed more as more players play more of the game is the narrative quality and emotional resonance of the individual quests. Like I get that there's a lot of them, and some of them are funny and weird and you can do all sorts of stuff but I've yet to read about people being actually moved or invested from a story perspective. And that's fine, I know people want to be respectful of spoilers and it's a long game, so I'm not criticizing I'm just curious.
Like I want to eventually hear the opinions of people who hold the Witcher in as high regard as I do talk about side quests the same way we talk about the werewolf and his sister-in-law, or the hymn and the fake baby burning, or the corrupt lighthouse-> framed for murder-> ghost cave sequence that is still my high water mark for side questing. I want to hear people genuinely moved by Kratos' or Aloy's journey also be moved by their character's or a particular party member's journey.
Because BG3 is credited for being a good narrative game, but so far that praise if about how it promotes its narrative- mechanics, systems, freedom of action, etc- but so far not really the actual story part of the story. And I know I have to wait for that, that's cool, just something to look forward to.
Like I want to eventually hear the opinions of people who hold the Witcher in as high regard as I do talk about side quests the same way we talk about the werewolf and his sister-in-law, or the hymn and the fake baby burning, or the corrupt lighthouse-> framed for murder-> ghost cave sequence that is still my high water mark for side questing. I want to hear people genuinely moved by Kratos' or Aloy's journey also be moved by their character's or a particular party member's journey.
Because BG3 is credited for being a good narrative game, but so far that praise if about how it promotes its narrative- mechanics, systems, freedom of action, etc- but so far not really the actual story part of the story. And I know I have to wait for that, that's cool, just something to look forward to.
You know, there's always gonna be a crap takes and someone always complaining about the most minuscule things in any games, but it's hard to tell when someone's serious or trolling
Honestly, I don't think the narrative quality and emotional resonance is high. It's not bad, either, mind, it's just quite... ordinary.
Take Shadowheart. I said she comes across as uneven. Someone else pointed out she is possibly supposed to be in conflict - but you don't really get much sense of that inner conflict. She's just "Praise Shar!" here and "Down with Selune!" there, and then at a crunch moment with a nudge from the player junks it all in and switches to Selune. There is obviously a clash between her relatively nice side and the raw cruelty of Shar, but it's just not really dealt with at all. Or Wyll, oh so dedicated to rescuing his father, and then at the flick of a PC nudge, can just be persuaded "Ah fuck it, he's gone", let's move on.
This is what the game's full of in narrative and character. Standard fantasy adventure stuff that exists and is fine as long as you don't think about it too hard, and narrative and characterisation that is compromised so that the player can "play god" and arrange the outcomes to their satisfaction.
Indeed. Although honestly, whilst someone could argue a load of stuff was cut, no-one can seriously complain it's short on content.
I am thinking about the time it takes do all those things. My point is use that time for different things vs just making the game look prettier and the game world bigger, that's what AAA does (while usually removing stuff in the process like the worlds of Far Cry are more static than they've ever been). Instead of spending the time and resources to do that, you can spend that stuff towards actually making the game itself better. Rockstar games like RDR can have missions designed to be completed in a multitude of different ways because why have an open world game if you make your missions super linear? Mercenaries (a nearly 20 year old game) is still my standard for open world games that very few of today's games even come close to meeting. The biggest point of an RPG is to allow the player to make decisions and the world reflecting said decisions and you can do that in lots of different ways like BG3 and Mass Effect are obviously very different games but at their core, that was their primary goal.
You aren't right because the article is pretty shit and Kotaku level garbage. Sure, IGN or anyone uses some hyperbole in the headlines saying devs are "panicking". The Escapist article says IGN's video is disingenuous while being completely disingenuous to what IGN's video (and tons of other videos) are actually about. IGN was mainly criticizing the AAA dev response to the twiiter thread and not the original thread itself, and that's what everyone else has been making fun of too.
And you never even admit when you're wrong like when you were comparing apples to oranges talking about the staff size at these dev studios. You said Obsidian had less than half of Larians staff, not even close to true. You said Bioware had less employees than Larian when they have about 200 more. Then, when you reply you just cut all that shit that you're wrong on out of the quote. Then, people here are trying to say Larian has all this funding to be citing they got money from selling shares of their company acting like that's some unique way to get funding when that's the bong standard way companies get money (nobody is saying Larian didn't get money from some means to make the game). The point is Larian didn't get funding in the way most AAA devs do and they were able to make a better game than them. Larian even tweeted back to a dev with "what funding?"
I play and buy good games regardless of where they come from. AAA has been pretty barren of such games for 5-10 years now. Why would you think Starfield isn't gonna "Bethesda" (isn't Bethesda still using their shit game engine? probably why there's no driveble vehicles), what was the last Bethesda game that didn't "Bethesda"? It's like saying the next Ubisoft game that looks just like all the past Ubisoft games isn't gonna "Ubisoft", why would you think that? The next Larian game is probably gonna "Larian" because Larian makes their type of games and always have. Why don't you look through my post history before Cyberpunk released, it was pretty spot-on (though I didn't expect all the bugs), I knew from CDPR's experience that there would be no way they could make a game they were claiming Cyberpunk was going to be; a FPS immersive sim RPG with important narrative choice in an open world needing tons of AI, traffic, driving vehicles, etc. They never did any of those things before, yet they are going to make a game with all those elements? That's one of the tallest tales ever and people fell for it. It's like people totally forget that CDPR had to fix with a patch literal running in Witcher 3 because of how shit the controls were at launch, but Cyberpunk's scope is totally what CDPR could do... believe it!!!
I think the hardest part for someone not knowing DnD to play BG3 is to learn DnD. Once you figure out that out, I don't think anyone will have too much difficulty with the game. And, yeah, playing on easy is just fine as well, and you can bump it up later if you want. There is an intimidation skill in the game as there is in DnD. Of course, a video game (BG3) isn't gonna be as freeform as DnD where you can constantly intimidate but it should be an option a decent amount of the time.
So in my opinion the narrative writing in Baldur's Gate 3 isn't emotional in the same way Witcher 3 is. There are a couple of reasons:
1. BG3's narrative is very much adventure-centric, in the sense that it's a story about the journey not specifically the outcomes. This is because they've put in so many different outcomes that if reaching the endpoint was the goal, there ultimately would be a huge failure to stick the landing if for whatever reason the player didn't get a particular ending that satisfied them. So as a result the moment-to-moment adventure and small run-ins with quirky characters are the focus. This means that there are memorable moments in the story along the way and these moments are what keep pushing the player forward rather than the player having emotional attachment to character's specifically.
The Witcher 3 was very much about Geralt and the people he cared about. He cares about Ciri, so you care about her. He cares about Yennifer, so do you. Because in Witcher 3 YOU ARE Geralt. So his concerns become yours. The way he treats people throughout the world builds your connections to those people and thus makes you care about possitive and negative outcomes of those people. Even side characters like the Bloody Baron and the like, you care because you've become Geralt and you've made those choices that steered the outcome in a specific way.
2. There is too much variance in potential story in Baldur's Gate to really have a strong through-line narrative. So much of the game is missable not just because of how you choose to interact with things but also straight up exploration can run you into so many different things and potentials that making a sort of main plot type of story I don't think would work. The game acts much the same way a DM in a real tabletop game would, where a DM might have a "big bad guy" that eventually will be thrust upon the party, but the session to session events are mainly player driven. Maybe the players explore a cave, maybe they go shopping, maybe they start a bar fight. These individual events can be good and memorable, but they also aren't going to be epic narratives either.
So I think that is what people are praising the most is how good the little story moments feel versus a game-spanning story being mind-blowing.
Maybe that’s why I’ve been struggling to find the will to finish TW3. All these characters that I’m supposed to care about are buried underneath the connective tissue of bloated gameplay busywork. This is my main issue with story-driven games that also try to be everything else, is that something’s gotta give.
Something like GoW 2018, while wide, was still linear and focused enough that I never lost track of the characters or emotional beats. I wasn’t distracted by searching everything in the environment with an icon for something useful, discarding most of it, micromanaging inventory for what I kept, doing contracts, tracking shit, playing cards, etc. Even the boat travel stuff in GoW was kept engaging because it was woven into the immediate task of progression organically with Mimir’s stories and little bits from Kratos’s past.
Comparatively speaking it’s at least partially why I pretty much blasted through TW2 without long breaks because it felt like it was more meat & potatoes without nearly as much junk food scattered all over the dinner table.
I mean that's the balance that has to be struck for everyone right? I don't like immersive sims for that reason. Game's like Dues Ex, Prey 2018, Deathloop, System Shock, totally not my style. But I like loot based games like Path of Exile, Diablo, Nioh, on top of games with big narratives. GoW 2018 and Rag are great for me because I get that narrative but also get enough side shit to do to keep playing that it makes them even better on top of the narrative. It's also why TW3 was so great as well imo, where a lot of people had problems with some aspect of it (typically combat) that didn't bother me at all. On the flip side it explains why I hate Zelda games, because there is not enough story there to keep pushing me through all the tedium and bland exploration.
...You know what I would have loved to see? If they turned that on its head in the second act (so to speak), and established that everyone being into you as a symptom of your Mind Flayer parasite basically trying to charm/dominate your companions. And everything before that would have been a "false" romance, with the true romances starting after that revelation prompted some soul searching (including revelations about potentially incompatible sexualities and preferences) about whether their attraction was real and if - having now experienced it - they even care if it wasn't natural.
Can you just imagine that? You could have run the gamut of reactions from "I'll treasure the time we had together...but this isn't me, and I just don't think this is going to work", through "this is new for me, but I love what we have too much to let it go, so I want to keep trying, if you're up for it", all the way to "Yeah...I'd have still wanted you regardless". Never mind the questions about how willing a given character would be to continue the relationship in light of its tainted origin.
Yeah, it would be a potentially risky decision, but the setup is so conducive to it that not having it feels like a wasted opportunity.
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