So, I've played a lot of the game, and love it to pieces. However, I noticed something that started happening a lot at the end of act 2, and it's continuing to happen in act 3, and it's an exceptionally irritating thing in a game with otherwise top-tier storytelling. I figure it's likely way too late to change this stuff in BG3, so I guess consider this more feedback for Larian's next project.
(also, in case it isn't super obvious: MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD)
The thing I'm referring to is a phenomenon I call Villain Cutscene Paralysis, where as soon as a cutscene starts, the villain can do whatever they want, and the party makes no effort whatsoever to stop them, even though it is incredibly obvious they should. It really pulls me out of the story when I'm yelling "DO SOMETHING, IDIOT" at my characters. Let me give a few examples:
1) The two fights with Ketheric Thorm during the assault on Moonrise Towers at the end of act 2. For context, both of these trigger when he hits 0 HP- which, in both cases, happened because my paladin MC was hitting him with a warhammer.
In both cases, he just... walks off, takes a full 30 seconds to summon the illithid tentacle/jump into the pit in the mind flayer lair after a dramatic speech- and both times, the heavily armed Paladin who was beating him with a hammer, and thus was within arms' reach of him, just.... stands there, does nothing, and lets him do stuff that's very obviously bad for the whole team. Why? Why let him do this stuff while making absolutely zero effort to intervene?
2) Orin. Now, Orin is a great villain, and her VA did an astounding job. But... several times, she shows up to taunt my characters- and again, she stands *right in front of us* talking, then casually teleports away, and there's never any option to even *try* to do anything. We just let the incredibly dangerous psychopath who is obviously stalking us get away over and over without doing anything, or even trying to.
3) The scene where you track the Bhallite serial killer to the barber's shop. This might be the worst of the lot, because it explicitly shows my character in the background just *standing there, doing nothing* as the killer monologues about how much they like hurting people, picks a knife, and puts it to the target's throat. The only reason the guy lived was the killer chose not to slit his throat after the whole party just stood there and watched him pick out a knife and put it there. Again, it's maddening to have obviously Very Bad things happening, and the party just stands there.
I mean, I'm not crazy. I get you need to convey the story, and there's limits to how much interactivity you can work in before you drive your animators/writers insane from the variations it causes. But, please, for the future- if your story requires the villain to be totally free to act for 30 seconds, give some reason why I'm not allowed to do anything about it, or it just makes my characters look stupid rather than making the villains look scary. I do believe something like the cutscene interrupt actions from mass Effect 2 and 3 would have helped a *lot* with this.
Still 9.5/10 game, great work, but this specific thing annoyed me enough I wanted to leave feedback on it.
Last edited by Comrade Canuck; 16/08/23 02:03 PM.
