Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General The importance of this game.

You see, I am the opposite. I found little to like in D:OS world and characters. It's incoherent, shallow and flat. PoE world had a lot of thought put into it, characters properly reflect the world they live in, and whole thing is believable and interesting. It wasn't always as easy to get into nor engaging as it could and should be, but I felt the more I invested in PoE the more I got out. Moment to moment storytelly can falter at times (especially PoE1) overall journey is well worth it. D:OS, on the other hand, is disposable, forgettable nonesense.


I am the opposite, again. Replaying Baldur's Gate before PoE2 and recently Pathfinder only examplifies to me, how well designed PoE1&2 are. Even things I am not entirely in love with (like attribute system) I find to be simply better then what BG had to offer. I didn't enjoy how uninteractive BG are - for that reason spellcasters were my favourite class in BG. I am also a balance guy. I don't enjoy finding "cheesy" mechanics.

IMO you can take every individual part of BG1&2 and Pillars did it better - from class design, companions, roleplaying. However, BG2 really nicely comes together - story, mechanics, atmosphere, while PoE is at odds at times. Well, if they make PoE3 I will be there.

DOS (1, haven't played 2 yet) overall is just a playground to goof around in. Apart of maybe the front loaded skippable exposition in the introduction movie , there's barely an attempt made at a narrative hook or conflict to pull you in at all -- compare that to the moment you arrive in Guilded Vale in PoE1, for instance. Slight early game spoiler ahead: The bodies on the tree, the bells announcing yet another hollowborn. It's a moment where the writing, the visuals and the audio together communicate the world's conflict pretty clearly. DOS1 doesn't have any of that.

Which kind of makes sense, I guess. I've recently read an article with Tim Cain and his pal Leonard Boyarsky where it was said how difficult it was in a multiplayer environment to tell a coherent story. What with everybody running around to do whatever they currently feel like. And whilst BG3 will be multiplayer too, I liked what I saw in the BG3 presentation so far though.

This is exactly my take as well. I found D:OS to be mediocre, and my antipathy towards the game begins with the setting. It is gawdawful. Easily the worst game setting I have ever experienced. And then on top of that you add in silly story and characters, shallow character development, ....

well i know PoE isnt awfull, but the general consensus of people that ive heard is that PoE is kind of bland.
the setting feels irritatingly sober to me.
Theres just something lacking that grips you in. I liked the fish people at first i guess.
In a way the world seems to reflect the gameplay: taking itself very seriously but lacking "soul". its an obnoxious internet term at this point but i think it probably sums it up.

I was actually excited about Tyranny at first because i dug the Bronze age aesthetic they had going on for themselves, but then, eh.
Tides of Numenera (was that obsidian? i actually forgot) was a simmilar route. I originally thought Numenera was a great setting but then the more i learned about it the less it felt like an actually good idea and the more it felt like a bunch of half baked "Hey wouldnt it be cooool maaan" things that lead to the same old same old dungeons and dragons expirience while pretending to be wild and fresh.

The last Obsidian game i genuinly had fun with was NWN2s expansions. I know people always praise Obsidians companions and writing, but the last time i actually had that expirience with an Obsidian game was Mask of the Betrayer.

Imo Obsidian and Bioware lost their mojo roughly at the same time.

>Original Sin

Im not gonna pretend the OS games are high ficiton. But what pulled me in OS1 was the sheer whimsy of it.
OS1 isnt Lord of the Rigns, OS1 is the hobbit.
Or mabye its Narnia, its whimsical like that. It reminds me of walther moers to oin the way that it obviously doenst take itself seriously and just runs with its crazy ideas.
Im not praising its writing, but im praising how it brings ideas across in its gameplay. The narrative isnt great, but the narrative and the gameplay become almost synonymous with each other.

I actually think OS2 is worse in that than OS1, OS2 is tryint much harder to be a CRPG, this includes the CRPG seperation of gameplay and story.

I found D:OS much more compelling because it set for itself a very different array of goals and, I feel, executed them quite well. The series is delightfully irreverent, and unashamed of its absurdity with sort of a Monty Python sensibility. I very much appreciated that.

PoE, on the other hand, takes itself very seriously. It is somber and solemn almost to the point of being overbearing. While there are moments of humor, it is largely joyless. There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach, but I rarely ever found anything about my time with #1 evocative. Looking back it seems to be in my memory a tapestry painted only in shades of beige. I’ve played through it completely twice and, aside from the hangman’s tree, I can remember almost nothing about the experience.

As for #2, I’ve put about 150 hours into it and have still never beaten the game. I try. I’ve started several attempts, but I always lose interest at around level 12 or 13. At this point I’ve just given up on it. The story and the design of the game are exceptionally discordant. The story places a high imperative on tracking down the rampaging god absconding with your stolen soul. The stakes are very high and deeply personal. But the world design is a big open map for exploration and side questing. If I just follow the story, I feel like I missing out on most of the game’s content, as well as opportunities to level and gear. If I meander about, the narrative becomes trivial. Such a disjunction in design is a real deal breaker for me.

This is one aspect where I found PoE to flounder, though there are others, and all these keep me from seeing the series as anything but just okay at best.

Yeah, PoE is complicated. It didn't click for me until saw where PoE1 was leading to. Then in clicked hard for me. And while I adore series there is a lot of criticising to do. It being built on promise of being similar to IE games I think it's this biggest problem.


Numenera was inXile.

I actually think NWN2 is my least favourite Obsidian game. I actually didn't know much of Obsidian (only NWN2 and KOTOR2) until I played through their catalog while they were making Pillars1 - trying to get a feel of the studio. Fallout New Vegas is one of the best RPGs one can play and a high point of Obsidian's resume so far, and Alpha Protocol is one of their more inspired efforts even if game is painfully unfinished and broken. Tyranny was ok. World and story was fine, but gameplay wise it was pretty boring.


Yhh... I don't think you can compare Divinity to any narrative work. I don't have problem with its tone but it's a fantasy themed playground, not a world to explore. I suppose any RPG setting really is. It's just needs to be elevated by good campaign, and I don't think neither D:OS1 nor 2 really had that. It wasn't Neverwinder Nights1 level of bad, not by a long shot, but that's similar feeling I got. A lot of resources poured into building the engine, not enough into content - to my preference at least. Custom campaign editor never offered much value to me. I shit a lot on Divinities. I don't mean to.

I think the whole concept of a game being a "spiritual successor" to some other game(s) should be abolished and never ever raised by any developer. The moment a developer slaps that "spiritual successor" tag on their game they are setting themselves up for bitter criticism and possible failure of their project because it is impossible for anyone to truly satisfy the nostalgia-driven feelings of fans of the original game(s). If the fans themselves want to make connections to some older game, let them do so. But the developer should strictly stay away from making any such connection claims.

If you are making a game that is specifically conceived as a callback to a particular game and need to encourage backers on Kickstarter, I can’t imagine not mentioning that progenitor game.

well, i dont thin k you can compare Narnia to LOTR either.
I wouldnt say OS1 is a playground, that sounds soulless. Theres artistic ideas there, they just dont take themselves seriously.

Its more about a personal journey rather than a grand narrative.

I think i found a more apt comparison.

OS1 is more like a Studio ghibli film than a fantasy novel.
its got those ideas that COULD make a narrative, btu kind of liters them on the side while the main journey is just some protagonist doing some dreamlike stuff

The spiritual sucessor things was a part of POE success. I'm glad they were sucessful because there are new games like this now.

I'm really sad Larian choose a total different path for BG3 because rather than a simple ressurection, it could have been a real revival for the genre with some of their amazing mecanics... what PoE/Tyranny/Pathfinder aren't according to me (even if I love them and if they have a few new gameplay mecanics)

I think this is even worse. All Studio Ghibli films I have seen so far have a strong thematic throughline and robust character arcs and development. That's not solid worldbuilding vs fairy tale discussion. I am actually not a lore guy, and prefer for fantasy elements to be manifestations of story themes, rather then made up history lesson.

But as @Wormerine has pointed out, and with which I concur, it ended up hurting PoE2. Badly. Why? Because PoE1 was so heavily hyped as THE spiritual successor to the IE games that when hardcore fans of the IE games played PoE1 many of them came away disappointed that the game was not EXACTLY like the old IE games they fondly recalled. And that's why many people who bought and played PoE1 did not bother trying PoE2 (a shame, since 2 is a better game than 1 in many ways).

By making PoE1 as a spiritual successor to the IE games, Obsidian limited itself creatively to trying to mimic those old games and not doing anything new or innovative for fear it would alienate fans of those old IE games. And yet despite this, they still ended up disappointing many of those IE games fans anyway. So they shot themselves in the foot not once but twice! Firstly, the lack of newness and innovation in the game meant critics were not as impressed as they could have been, and neither were new gamers who had never played the old IE games. And secondly, even in the face of Obsidian bending over backwards trying to create a game that mimicked the old IE games, fans of those old games ended up disappointed.

Really don't understand this criticism, because it is a spiritual successor to the IE games by very definition, aethestically is very similar. It has its own world building (the best non-licenced worldbuilding ever for a CRPG) and its own ruleset, again, because it is not a licensed game, it is an original IP and that's what people backed. The writting in PoE1 particularly is stellar and way better than BG's, which is just an epic tale about going from farmboy to literal godhood.
Combat is very similar also. Wizards function exactly as they did in the IE games, and martial classes now have more options. So all this "many people disliked" sounds BS to me, simply because PoE1 sold more than 1 million copies, garnered accolades and nominations and was lauded as one of the best games of 2014, the same for Deadfire in 2018. The scores are too high for "many people to have hated it".

Deadfire did great critically but failed commercially. It sold very poorly. Like, crazy bad. According to one investor’s calculations based on the dismal returns he got on it, it probably sold somewhere around 100k copies.

Yeah, I'm comparing their performance is terms of scores and accolades. Deadfire had no marketing, maybe because the game was too expensive to make, and it shows when you look at its graphics, it is a technical marvel.

I don’t know how much of this you can blame on marketing, though. The way the internet works, I would feel safe betting that most of the people who bought PoE1 know about PoE2. That such a small percentage came back for a second bight suggests to me that something was very wrong beyond not enough marketing.

Hey neither of you has to convince me on the merits of both the PoE games. I personally LOVE them both. I also was a backer of both with a pretty decent sum of money. I'm only commenting on how I am reading gamers generally. I think when someone says a game is the spiritual successor to some other much-loved older game, the fans of that older game have this rather ridiculous expectation that the new game will be literally EXACTLY the same as the older game. And when it isn't exactly the same, they get angry and bitter and sulky.

I personally LOVE the setting of Eora that Obsidian has created for the PoE games. And I especially LOVE the new mechanics they have created, because I don't care for D&D-style mechanics at all. And most of all, getting into bed with WotC is a recipe for disaster, imo, and I strongly believe studios should create their own new IPs rather than licnsing and recycling old IPs.

I agree. But PoE2 sales have picked up since those earlier dismal numbers, and now are believed to be around 500,000, still well below the more than 1 million sales for PoE1.

Well using myself as an example played PoE1, loved it to the point that it made me a CRPG nerd, playing BGEE trilogy and IWD thereafter, and I did not know about Deadfire's release for at least around a year after release.

I think I need to clarify, that I meant that IE lineage hurt PoE artistically, rather then just commercially. Not that you are wrong, but that's not exactly the point I was trying to make (I didn't mean to present PoE's shortcomings as a failure of fans to appreciate it, but as a failure of the game to be as good as it could be).

I think there are quite a few things you can point to and criticise PoEs for. Something, which hurts PoEs the most to me, is lack of cohesion between gameplay loop and narrative. Let me give an example: PoE2 was pretty widely criticised, among other things, for not being able to at the end of the game. I don't think that's a problem in itself. I do like that PoE isn't interested in traditional "ascend" narrative, and a certain level of powerlessness is what I adore about the setting. But that isn't expressed in gameplay, because gameplay follows the traditional DnD progression of raising in power and facing more and more powerful forces, and being a bad ass. Either gameplay loop should be changed (I for one would welcome lack of numerical increase in power) or that discrepancy should have been addressed in the narrative. It's not that PoE2 subverts an expectation - it just ignores it, and goes for something that gameplay loop doesn't reinforce narratively. The result is a rather underwhelming finale, which rings hollow. I remember with PoE1 some critics questioned how unavoidable the murder in the game is - which is a common problem when the games tries to elevate narrative to the more ponderous place, without altering pulpy gameplay loop (newer Naughty Dog or Tomb Raider games share the same sin as well).

BGs makes the amount of murder you make the center of moral conflict and a part of your character arc - no matter if you roleplay as good or evil. So, while I prefer many individual elements of Pillars better, I do think that BG, as a whole, works better overall.

I can see some of themes of BG1&2 in BG3, and that gives me hope.