Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General CRPG and choice

Recently I had a discussion on Reddit about choice in the context of BG3.



As you can see, people reaction has been overwhelmingly negative to the affirmation that CRPG are designed to offer choices that lead to branching consequences. Following this, I feel like I need some kind of reality check. I know that popular RPG have been following that path for at least the last decade : Skyrim and Hogwarts Legacy have practically no choice that matter, Mass Effect complex choice system got ignored at the end of the last game, Cyberpunk origin choice was merely just 20 minutes of exclusive content, an so on... On the other hand, the latest Pathfinder game offered a lot of branching paths and it is beloved by a lot of fans. What should BG3 aim for? Would it benefit from letting players experience the maximum of situations in one single run? Or more generally, are games with meaningful choices a dying breed as people just want to be able to consume everything there is to experience as quickly as possible?

Copying usernames from reddit aside, I would argue that we can't know whether the person was downvoted for the tone "CRPGs aren't for you", or the idea that you need to play games more than once to get everything out of them. Actually, I'd just frame your conversation without the reddit conversation.

I think there should be various outcomes, but we shouldn't make the game into a slog or a kingdom manager, like Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous.
What I realized after trying to replay WOTR is that the story is not exactly engaging in and of itself, what makes the story feel meaningful is that the game is very clunky and feels like a chore most of the time, and you put in a lot of effort in order to achieve certain story outcomes. This "suffering" makes the achievement feel like it was earned and meaningful. After I realized that an that I have to go through the Crusade system AGAIN, I decided to just delete the game on my 2nd playthrough, because the ending wouldn't have been meaningfully different from the previous one to justify all the frustration.
It does actually feel like a burden.
I would like to avoid that completely in BG3. Make the choices meaningful and lead down to wildly different outcomes, including a grimdark path as well.

To Snowram, I think the negativity might come from the claim that 'CRPGS aren't for you'. I think that's bordering on being kind of elitist. Soulslike games aren't for me because I don't find constantly bashing my head against difficult combat rewardin in and of itself. That's a question of what sort of experiences I enjoy. But if someone's problem is just that they don't have enough time in a day to play through a game multiple times, then it's not that crpgs aren't for them, they just don't have time, and framing it otherwise is kinda unfair. I also think the idea that you need to see everything in a game to get everything out of it is in general, wrong. It can be how some peopel engage with games, but to say that's the proper experience is wrong. I'm never gonna go all the way through the evil paths in WotR because I don't want to, I don't like playing evil. I'm also not gonna make a bunch of evil choices because those feel bad. ButI still think I've gotten my money's worth out of the game and then some. Same goes for Mass Effect, I've never played a renaged playthrough and I never will, because that's not a character type I would enjoy. But I still thoroughly enjoyed the series. People who need to see every path and make every choice should be catered to, but I sincerely believe crpgs would be better off if that weren't the prevailing idea.

But to your main point, I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding that pretty much everyone has about what makes meaningful choice. Or maybe I fundamentally misunderstand what makes meaningful choice and everyone else is right, who can say? And it's this; I don't think choices lack meaning just because they don't take you down a branching path that's wildly different. I think all it takes for a choice to feel meaningful is for it to meaningfully say something about your character. I think that the most important sorts of choices in that regard are the smaller ones. The ones that make variations on the path which make it more unique, regardless of the ending. For instance I'll point you to Telltale's Batman games. People bemoan telltale for the choices not feeling meaningful, but I found the fact I was able to craft a consistent character that matched my vision for what they should be to be the thing that made the choices matter. I got to the same outcome storywise in that I stopped the bad guy, but the character I had at the end felt uniqe. In one run I started as an angry, violent avenger who had to overtime learn to temper that rage with deeper purpose and responsibility, but who through it all clung to the people close to him with intense care and need. In another I created a stalward, duty-bound person who could not let go of his crushing weight of responsibility nor his black and white outlook on life. Both felt like they mattered because they both felt like MINE. So basically what I'm saying is, I think frequent, smaller choices that recognize what limits a game has are the way to go. Things that allow you to craft your character and their arc through the story.

So to Brewman's point, I've put several hundred hours into WotR across like, five or six paths and I play on a really easy difficulty and I LOVE the crusade manager, I'm always excited to play around with it, it doesn't feel clunky or like a chore at all. That's not what makes the story feel meaningful. To me what makes the story feel meaningful is that each playthrough I get to create a different character and give them a unique journey with various choices to make. The choices don't become meaningful just because they lead to vastly different outcomes (even though yes, your choices can actually lead to surprisingly different outcomes along the way) but because they were made by your character and you got a bunch of options for expressing your character's personality and ideas. And no, the story in itself isn't that engaging, but that's because the story isn't meant to be engaging by itself. It's meant to be a vehicle by which your character can experience things and do things and have change and growth. The story centres around your character and so requires you to engage more with the characters you create. One of my problems with BG3 is that it feels like our character is an afterthought compared to the story Larian wants to tell, and the kind of person our character is able to be is curtailed so they can tell that story.

I think this is really well put and reflects my view too. I prefer not to get tied into one of just two or three clearly defined paths (eg good and evil), but rather to be able to pick my way through decision points and story beats in multiple different ways which are given different flavours depending on what has gone on before, for twistier and more morally grey stories for at least some of my characters.

But whether we’re talking about significant branches in the story or multiple smaller decisions, I agree that any cRPG is going to need to have mutually exclusive choices of some kind to feel meaningful. Without seeing the foregoing discussion on Reddit it’s hard to be sure, but I suspect that the negative reaction mentioned may have at least partly been because no one was actually disputing that and rather what was being discussed was more artificial gating of content that didn’t have a decent rationale, such as we get when companion conversation triggers get overwritten. Personally, I think that replayability is a poor reason for restrictions like that and, eg, forcing us to pick a limited number of companions past act 1, when these don’t make independent narrative sense. That in no way means I object to getting different content based on my choices when that does make narrative sense.

That is, I think replayability is a consequence of good, flexible game design rather than something that developers should attempt a shortcut to by more-or-less arbitrarily restricting the amount of content available in a single playthrough. And while I suspect that I will replay BG3 again and again and would want each experience to be different, I have a lot of sympathy with those who would prefer to spend their time otherwise and who would therefore resent not being able to eke full value from their single playthrough because content that there is no good reason they shouldn’t be able to experience is made either totally unavailable or unreasonably difficult or counterintuitive to access in the course of a single run.

I feel like when people talk about "Choice" though, they're really talking about narrative agency. They want the actions they take to cause the story to change, the more dramatically the better. Even if your choice is doing little more than adding to your character, I like when there's some kind of feedback from the game, like companions reacting to your choice.

Maybe I'm in the minority but I actually like knowing a game is bigger than a single playthrough, whether through divergent storylines or just an expansive world. I'm a little worried that game developers took the fact that 70% of people don't finish games, and decided to make them shallower experiences overall.

I admit i never understanded this argument about "not having enough time" ...

I mean its not like you can play only one game, and only once in whole life ... is it?
You will play other things, right?
So ... quite obviously i would dare to say ... you DO have time, so that is not the real issue here.
🤔

Maybe you just dont want to play the same game twice?
That would be understandable ...
Except, the more distinct consequences the game have, tje more different it is ... so again, you should be arguing for branching and strong consequences ... shouldnt you?
I mean have you tryed to play trough EA by joining the Druids and then joining Goblins?
Or play as a Fighter or a Wizard?
Arent those experiences different enough?
🤔

As for those examples you provided ... those are heavily railroading games ... Skyrim even goes so far, it makes important NPCs litterally imortal ...
It may suit somebody ... i guess ... but its beyond me how this can still be called RPG. :-/
The simple fact is that the less your choices matter, the easier the game is to write. So many studios pick this way to make the game cheaper ... but its rarely good thing for gameplay. :-/

I think it would behoove game devs and players alike to rethink how they approach narrative branching. Because as it is now, I cannot fault devs for looking at the statistic that only 70% of players finish games and changing their design philosophies to match. Even beyond the cynical corporate money side, it's kind of dumb to look at such a massive statistic and not account for that in your design approach. Look at Tyranny for an example. A single playthrough of the game is actually pretty short for a crpg. But it's designed to be played through multiple times, with different quests and events happening due to early story branching you select. I think making games that have shorter storylines that expand outward via branching is gonna play better than long, sprawling epics that have to account for even more major choices accumulated through longer narrative. That way each run individually is less of a commitmenet, and less daunting to dive into a new playthrough to see how any particular new choices alter the narrative.

I also think it's worth considering the scope of the narrative. The grander the scope of the story, the harder it becomes to account for what's going on. Look at Mass Effect. They had to account for the possibility of myriad choices across the entire galaxy on how the ending panned out and they couldn't. But then look at the Citadel DLC. People find that a far more satisfying as an end note on the series specifically because its an ending that lets you take stock of the stuff that really matters, your companions and friends, the lives you impacted through your journey and who impacted you. Now look at Fallout New Vegas. You get to decide the fate of a whole region, but its broken down into small chunks. You see how your actions impact various regions and factions, with some big choices whose fates you see touching things broadly. Again the smaller scope allows for more meaningful decisions, because the wider the scope of the story, the more tangled and messed up things become.

I've come to be wary of dramatic narrative changes, because more and more I find that those bigger changes mean sacrificing our agency in who our player character is. I value the character and being able to shape them far more than being able to shape the larger narrative in a truly story-altering way.

This answer kinda got rambly, I hope folks can still follow along.

Sorry for the double-post, but I didn't getto see this response and I have things to say about it.


The issue, such as it is, is that there are more games coming out now than ever before, and people feel a pressure to get to all of them. Especially since more and more, every big release is a "conversation" and folks will want to be on top of it or even just want to keep up with their friends who play the games, as well as jut wanting to play games they're excited for. Look at the people who were lamenting BG3 and Starfield coming out so close together. Especially since games, big releases especially, are getting longer as well, by the time you finish a game the first time, there's another new game to get to. And then another, and another, and before you know it, you're kinda forgetting about that one game you said you wanted to replay. I also think part of this is kind of unhealthy, part of a sense that turns finishing games into an obligation, like if they don't have something "tangible" to show for playing the game then the time was somehow "wasted" but that's a whole other can of worms.


So firstly, the genre of RPG has been diluted to the point of being almost meaningless. Just look at the number of games described as rpgs to see that. I think with skyrim in particular though, they made a deliberate, not wrong choice. The story is there to provide a context, to provide an excuse to go and explore, and exploration is the POINT of the game. It's not a game about the politics and complexities about the region, really. Choosing imperials or stormcloaks, it's not actually important, the important part is going out and doing stuff, exploring dungeons. You can go off and ignore the plot for long stretches when you feel like it. So they decided "nah, we're not gonna try and make a complex branching narrative here." Instead they focused on creating a vast world worth exploring.

Of course we don't have all the discussion, but that's not AT ALL what your reddit comment is about...

I guess everyone like branching consequences.
But many players, especially those that won't play the game more than once don't like to miss important content.

A lot of things are hidden in BG3. After many playthrough there are still area I never found and quests I didn't complete or even noticed.
There may even have more "secret" areas/quests than "obvious" side content in the end. That's great for replayability but most players will only play once and won't read all books/letters/interract with this hidden item/...

I love choice, consequence, and reactivity in games if done well! There are only a few games like BG3 that I play more than once. Even if I just play a game once, I love making choices and having the game react to them!

If it is not done well, things feel gated unnecessarily or the consequences don’t follow from the choices in a satisfying way. For example I wasn’t happy with how WotR handled it. I got very bad consequences from picking chaotic good choices when playing Azata. Since I thought Azata was a chaotic path, I wasn’t expecting such harsh consequences from picking chaotic choices!

I have thoughts on RPG reactivity, and while had express some of them, this is a nice excuse of compiling them. On a very basic I love reactivity and consider it a must for a good RPG - at the same time, I didn't enjoy RPGs with some of the most sweeping reactivity I have seen (Tyranny, Witcher2), which prompt me to think about what I do and don't like about it.

As I see it reactivity isn't about giving the game replayability. To me, reactivity is first and foremost a narrative device.

cRPGs aim to translate a table-top experience into a computer setting - and that includes creating a character, choosing that characters actions. In table-top DM will take those choices into account when crafting the adventure. As it now singleplayer cRPGs have to work with pre-made content, so our digital DMs aren't able to react to player choices on the fly, and so devs came up with reactivity - unique dialogue lines unlocked by our race, class or other tags, dialogue and quest branching paths, systeming reputation systems that track and respond to our in game actions. The goal of those systems is to permit players a certain freedom of expression, and than acknowledge and respond to those choices, in the way that would emulate that of a human DM.

No such system allows for ultimate freedom - the only stuff the game can respond to is stuff developers foresaw happening and created content and systems to respond to such actions. Developers set the boudaries of possible roleplaying and scope of choices player's can make. As such, I don't see cRPGs with more or less choices as better or worse - it is far more important to me if the choices on offer feel natural, and if they are well responded to. An cRPG that offers a staggering amount of options, but fails to follow through on them, or a cRPG that offers an impressive reactivity, but choices feel artificially restrictive both come up short. There is a balance to be achieved, though of course whenever it is hit or not may different from player to player.

The same applies to system - if a game offers an overwhelming amount of race/class choices, but makes some as vastly better choices (simply more effectve, more reactivity, more relevance to story/enemy) - that's bad. On the other spectrum, a game that offers choices but mutes them soo much, they all feel the same to play is not great either.

I also think it is better for a game to have small scope of reactivity and player expression than be inconsistant. I don't think a cRPG has to necessarily allow players to, for example, kill everyone, but if they do, discovering that a key NPC has a plot armor can feel very unsatisfying.



It is not a strict rule, but I generally feel reactivity feels better if it gives player something, rather than takes something away - though I think this is more of how a content is presented. When playthrough is finished, if player things on all the things they didn't get to do, rather than all the cool situations they saw because of stuff they chose to do - I think this is one of key elements that make reactivity compelling. If player constantly reminds player they are not getting to see all content, that could be rather frustrating. I think it is better to hide from player stuff they are missing, and highlight stuff they see because of the choices they make.



Personally, I see act of making a choice to be more interesting than watching ramifications of choices we made. Reactivity is there to track and reward choices player have made, but ultimately the goal should be to facilitate and encourage role-playing. If the player regularly thinks about his character actions and is engaged in the decision making, it is more important that numerical amount of reactivity the game offers - or even if there are any branching paths. If playthroughs with varied player choices still feel natural in spite of lack of content heavy reactivity - to me that's smart and efficient design. That's is why I favour games with variables, rather than few but major branching paths. Games like Mass Effect failed for me, because players make on decision in the game - will I be a Paragon and Renegade, and the rest of the game is just playing through and reinforcing that choice. On the other hand, I wasn't disappointement that my choices didn't really impact the story of Pentiment, as I was engaged with my choices throughout the experience. A game that constantly engages player and makes them explore their character are I think have better reactivity, than games that have a lot of passive content reserved for major branching paths.

it is not to say that major branching paths or game changing choices should be avoided or make a bad cRPG. Bloodlines is a gold example of a game, where our clan choice can have a major repercussion on the rest of our playthrough.

I also see the need for choiced to be justafiable - if a game offers multiple choices, but only one feels like a choice any character I could come up would take, regardless of their objectives, build, personal views etc. than I see it as a poorly constructed choice.



Witcher2 is an especially interesting case. I think it should be clear enough that I see two chapters2, as a bit of a waste of resources. The game, however, also fails in a more interesting way:

Due to a drastic difference in branching paths route A & B change things that have nothing to do with Geralts decision to make the two major paths somewhat coherent. Making a choice doesn't send a ripple effect - it transport Geralt into another universe, when not only he, but also others make fundamentally different decisions in order for the story to continue. A simple example would be It's a game when one playthrough leaves important narrative blanks, and 2nd playthrough reveals that the whole thing doesn't make sense.

I'm not hating on WOTR btw, my only playthrough was an angel playthrough and it was sufficiently epic, but I wouldn't play that game again, because it felt like a chore a lot of the time.
Another example I like to bring up is Knight of the Old Republic, which is a well known, but rather old game. I still love playing that game, even though it's really not too complex and it has only 2 ending. I think the reason that game works for me is because it really comes down to meaningful choices at the Temple or at the Star Forge. The game doesn't even have epilogue slides like Fallout New Vegas, so you have no idea how quets affect the universe after your adventure is over. What is even more funny is that it's a game that doesn't have an "Im gonna become a God", like most RPG seem to do these days.

C'mon we live in an age where games are checklists of stuff to do in a strict order, games that treat gamers like absolute retards.

Fallout and Deus Ex are still considered one of the best games ever made simply because there were multiple ways to approach any task, but you had to deal with consequences of your actions. Disco Elysium is the only modern game that let's us figure out stuff ourselves and the outcomes will be different depending on our choices in game, character "build" choices etc.

For sure I'd love a game that gives us freedom and player agency.

70% of the people don't finish their games? Could we also say that 70% of the games are not worth finishing? Maybe that's the thing I would want to see in a game review ... is it worth finishing, did you play all the way through?

As far as choices in story options, I tend to stick with the heroic path most often. The replay value is more in the way problems are solved and skills are used, whether it be conducting combat, or getting NPC's to do things differently, or finding out hidden information. For example, I recently made a Shadowdancer in BG II and wow, I love backstabbing now! Before it was always a pain in the arse to have to run away and back, but with hide-in-plain-sight it became really fun! Take that, Amalas, you lout!

I don’t think those two statement are relevant to each other. Most people who buy games don’t finish them - regardless of their quality. Pick your favourite games and go to steam achievements and see how story achievements aggressively decrease in percentage gained.

From what I gathered, if a game has a high completion rate, it tends to be a niche series with a very dedicated audience.

30% completion rate is actually pretty high. I think 10-20% is a more common number.

I agree. While Steam isn't necessarily representative of gamers in general, and the achievements are sometimes buggy, you often see extremely low completion rates for games. Just look at Fallout 4 for example, just over 50% of people reached level 10, which is very early in the game. Whereas for Final Fantasy I, over 40% have beaten the whole game.

I'd be interested to know what percentage of Fallout/Skyrim players use mods, and how early they start using them. They keep achievements from triggering for Steam right?

I think the 70~80 non-completion rate tells us is that most people don't really play games for their story, for most games that's valid.

Another thing I was thinking about is how often the 'choices' in a game are invalidated by that game in order to save all of the work that would be required to create those worldstates. That sort of thing is pretty demoralizing for me.
A lot of games do this and still say they're replayable despite you already knowing what the game would be, based on some artificial point of 'divergence'.

With that in mind I'd would say that the reactivity in the Witcher 2 is very good, you're given two very distinct world states based on your actions in the first act, and unlike a lot of games, you actually don't learn the whole story of the second act until you see it from both sides of the battle. I wouldn't say they're incoherent with each other, there's a way events playout with and without Geralt's influence. You're actually allowed to fail quests too, which doesn't seem to happen often in general.
This is very different to the reactivity of The Witcher 3 because everything that happens in the climax of the last game is explained away off screen. If you want to talk about wasted resources, every time a sequel reboots the story, you're talking about using resources to avoid dealing with your established story.

Of course when the term 'reactivity' is used, a lot of the time they're referring to the capacity of the game, to deal with sandbox decisions made by the player. BG3 is very reactive in this sense, including having something dumb like taking the artifact from Shadowheart cause that many variations on how the game plays out. It's probably the most impressive part of the game so far, and the thing I'm most interested in testing the limits of.

They work for a single playthrough, but they don't line up for a combined playthrough. It is not a story you see from two different sides, those are two different stories, and two different sets of events. Saskia poisoning has nothing to do with whom Geralt choses to back in act1. Triss in act1 will talk to a different person through the magic-zoom-thingy, and she does that in a flashback before you made your choice. It makes narrative sense - introducing players relevant in your future act2, but it doesn't make sense as a reactivity to your choice. Not an issue on a single playtrhough, but on repeat playthrough the changes get absurd. I think changing so much, very much invalidates the appeal of choices. You are not seeing results of your action, you are entering different timelines tailor to accomodate your choices. To me Witcher2 became worse after 2nd playthrough.

While there isn’t a right way or a wrong way to enjoy a game, I think some people would benefit from letting go of the idea that the quantity of content equates to enjoyment. I never play with guides or worry about missing some content. If I do, so what? For me a complete experience is how satisfied I am with exploring and interacting with a game. Not treating it like a check list.