Hey Larian, Hey All,
I'm a little late to the party - a ps5 player - and I just got to the epic fight in the House of Hope.
We all know how great this fight was - but I wanted to do a quick analysis as to why I think it worked as well as it did.
It worked well on both a story driven conclusion as WELL as a gameplay buildup. I wanted to talk more about the technical gameplay aspect so that we might be able to get more things like this in the future. Acknowledging why it worked is important - so let me lay out my reasoning, and maybe we can hear some more feedback from other players.
Firstly, needless to say, I love it. but why?
I'll briefly touch on the obvious story lead up. Raphael's entire quest is great, starting from the beginning of the game with great character development throughout the rest of the acts. We learn about his ego, his cruelty, and his charisma. That obviously made his song a lot better...but that isn't all.
What really made this work was the "Oh S***!" moment. You know youre battling a devil, you are told constantly leading up to it how impossible it will be - and you fight through a gauntlet to get to that moment.
All this comes together with a bow on top when Raphael summons a butt load of helpers while standing in the middle with menacing wings.
So why does this song elicit such a strong emotion, specifically?
For me, I found myself saving constantly throughout the House of Hope. I ate through the majority of my save game slots, almost half of them, because I didn't know what to expect after each gauntlet hurdle. There were a lot of tasks, and it took a lot of TIME. I couldn't leave, and I was stuck with my party members (at least I thought i was). So when the fight finally started - I was literally thought to myself, "s**t ... am im f***ed? Am I going to have to reload a save from 3 hours ago?"
Time invested is a HUGE part of video games, and one of the only ways to incite fear into a player of game where there are not real stakes. When you feel like youre going to lose all the time you put into a game, it gets your adrenaline pumping because you actually will incur a real life LOSS if you lose.
Many games nowadays just allow you to die and simply pop back in where you lost to try again. This trivializes the feeling of loss, because you lose nothing. Due to the fact that you are stuck in the House of Hope with no way to exit other than restarting a previous save from hours ago, this boss fight starts and you start to think that you might have made a mistake. Something that just doesn't happen in video games.
The music emphasizes this feature perfectly. The big bag your facing is literally singing to you. For a moment, I thought that I was simply not supposed to beat him. How could I? He has a previous boss on his side, he has 666 life, and a army on all sides - AND he's singing about your doom and mistakes right in front of you.
More games and more scenarios need to be made where YOUR TIME is on the line. FromSoft has mastered this, though obviously in a different game type. When you reach a boss, the battles are intense, because you know if you die, you are going to have to redo a significant portion of the game, and it heavily invests you in the fight. You never think, "Ah, well, I'll just try again after I die."
This gauntlet in BG3 mastered it as well. All the quests in the game could benefit from this, though in a story driven RPG it would need to be done creatively and uniquely for each battle to really work consistently - a challenging development task.
Anyway - A long way of saying, great job on this quest!