Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Story & Character Discussion Did Larian's Insistence on Freedom Hamstring Them?

So this is something I've been thinking about for a little bit. People are coming out as being rather disatisfied with the story by the end, and I wonder if part of that is a result of a particular manifestation of Larian's desire to give players as much freedom as possible, specifically, the freedom to kill everybody and still have the game work.

A story needs a cast, it needs secondary characters who are, in their own way, important to the central plot, both in terms of theme and in terms of direct participation. The companions of BG3 do some work in terms of theme, but they're all incredibly tangential to the actual plot. They have to be, because Larian wants youto have total freedom to not recruit anyone and to just go it alone. I think that results in them all being at arm's length from the plot and prevents them from really having the impact they could and in some cases probably should.

The biggest offender is Lae'zel.
Another issue is with Shadowheart.
Even Wyll suffers from this to a degree.
Jaheira is another example.
Even outside of companions, we don't have a set cast of secondary characters that can really hold up any narrative weight since they can again, all be killed and so have to be somewhat non-essential. Compare that to Mass Effect, where you can't just kill any character, or the Dragon Age games, where even though you can dismiss some characters, you still keep a handful of companions and you have a somewhat wider cast beyond that. I think that this all ends up weakening the plot because we effectively only have our own single character to hold up everything.

What do other people think?

Your point is totally correct. The plot has all sorts of threads coming off due to companions that can't be too important because you might not have them, and really it's even worse than a game like DA:O, since in that game the groups you went to (Deep Roads, elves, mages, Redcliff) had separate concerns that had to be fixed, whereas in this game Act 2's major dungeon is all about Shadowheart, the Creche is all about Lae'zel, Astarion's absence makes Cazador a totally meaningless sidequest NPC, etc, and things are more tied to companions in general. I think they ended up with a rather unhappy medium - the companions are important enough that they can't really be dropped without hurting the narratives in all these places, but Larian insists on them being optional, also because of their multiplayer commitments as much as freedom. I'm not sure how they will resolve this in future; for me, I'd just as soon they drop the extreme freedom and co-op and make more focused narratives, but those are also the things making them unique for better or worse.

Star Wars the Old Republic has a similar situation. Due to player choice, with important characters being able to be killed off if a player so choses, what happened was that killable NPCs simply couldn't play a large role in future stories. Players were frustrated because they always have similar unkillable NPCs with them in the main story, but the reality was, if you didn't, you'd have to have generic new characters for every new expansion.

BG3 as you've mentioned has fallen into a similar situation. It's why I've said that Origin companions simply aren't necessary to play as, you're getting a bit more flavour sure, but they cannot be integral to the main plot, because you're not forced to take them with you. It's the unfortunately reality of complete freedom of choice, you're making the overall story shallower because it has to be.


I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing, but it's the reality of how they've made the game.

Wyll is a really bad one, as he's clearly important to the main plot,. but HE LEAVES IN ACT ONE if you choose one side of the binary big choice. But later in the game people are like what will wyll say about this and like, idk he;s gone

You're pretty much correct. Larian appears to have put player freedom over establishing basic narrative structure, and it means that everything feels oddly disconnected. It doesn't help that Larian didn't really commit to doing stories with impact and then letting players miss out on them. I'd say Larian had a lot of ideas they wrote down early in the process -- a plot with so many quests you can skip, a party member has the McGuffin -- and then remained too committed to them even when they began to really work against their storytelling. The video about the difficulties Larian had with the Astral Prism is the most obvious point of evidence. As a professional writer and editor, if you're running into a problem like that, where you basically have to do a ton of work to make something work in Chapter 6 (the Prism ending up with the player) and about the worst thing you can do is insist on keeping the plot as-is. In that case, you should go back to Chapter 1 or 2 or whatever and just... make it work there, when the audience is primed to expect contrivances to set up the drama. Just have the artifact end up next to you on the beach, y'know?

Then you've got at least one variable pinned down (where is the artifact and who has it) and then you can start planning some structure to your story.

I've thought about this more and my mind went to Fallout New Vegas. It had companions with quests too but they were overall unconnected to the main plot as well. That game's storytelling worked great and it didn't really have broader, set cast either. My theory there is that New Vegas was just telling a smaller story, focused on just one single region and firmly anchored on a specific moment for our character, i.e the beginning of the game. BG3's story is supposedly about one region as well, but we have things touching on other planes and ancient conflicts, multiple gods and wannabe gods, and events going back decades and centuries before the main plot even begins. BG3's story is just so expansive that it NEEDS more of a cast to support it.

I think the game should have done one of two things. Either it commits to having a handful of unkillable essential NPCs, or it makes those essential PCs killable and if you kill them you get a non-standard game over because the story just can't work without them and you inevitably fail. I think people would be happier with the latter approach generally.

Pretty much agree with what everyone here has said. You can'r be both a story-rich narrative-driven game and a (semi)open-world sandbox game at the same time, even though that's exactly what Larian has tried to do with BG3.

Not quite true - Obsidian tend to tie their companions to the main story as well - they tend to represent factions that we will interact with.

I think the advantage those companions have: is that they are companions. Story revolves with PC in mind, and companions are made to be skippable.

BG3 has companions, who are also playable heroes with super important driving plot to the story. The result is that during the you do play out stories of your companions, rather than your own.

I don’t think it is “freedom” vs “story” but that one hasn’t been designed to fit the other. It feels like we have a fairly rigid story, that than Larian is desperately trying to keep telling regardless of what player does. I think Tim Cains RPGs (fallout, arcanum) are great examples of more organic, system heavy games.

Here it is 3 1/2 years later after a really llllooooonnnngggg EA (which I didn't play at all) and every post above still holds true re: incohesive story line.

It will make subsequent playthrough's less than they could be