Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Idle game wishes (not BG3, just D&D in general, mostly about yuan-ti)

Just some idle wishes for games. This is in general because it's NOT a reasonable request for BG3 AT ALL.

It would be really nice to have a D&D style game focused around yuan-ti (distant thunder) where playing a pureblood is possible (approaching Storm of Zehir) and actually has a significant impact on the direction of the plot (Storm of Zehir fiddles out).

The yuan-ti have been attracting me as a character type due to their unusual emotional natures. The lore states repeatedly that they don't have emotions the way humans and other lineages do, but they're not immune to the Charmed and Frightened condition. So, it's interesting to me to ponder just how they interact with and experience emotions. I've taken to expressing it as a sort of calculation, probably not literally so because I wouldn't expect all yuan-ti to be skilled mathematicians (or even most, really). But it provided an interesting metaphor.

Like imagine you spend your entire life making calculations and analyzing your situation (which, to be honest, we do). All your calculations are essentially based on other calculations you make. You analyze the approximate value and cost of a particular line of action and use that to judge the value of certain other things which are used as the basis for other actions. You're still prone to errors in analysis and basing things on incomplete or flawed data. Just the intense chemical impact that drives emotions is not one of the variables that you have to provide context. Depending on the sort of info you're basing stuff on you can still come to the sort of irrational attitudes represented by Frighten and Charmed.

And grief too... so, like imagine there's a particular value that you have involved in almost every analysis or calculation you do over the course of a day and the value is consistent and reliable. But then, one day, that value is just... gone... and suddenly all your calculations are now thrown into disarray because one of the key bits of data you use is no longer existent.

I also love the idea of toying with yuan-ti approaches to faith. Judging by the stats of their people, their priests are mostly warlocks and their interaction with their deities is somewhat strained (while the big four are kinda safe, there are dozens of lesser snake gods that rise and fall regularly as yuan-ti rise and replace each other as one of those lesser gods in a cannibalistic race for power. So the idea of a yuan-ti paladin or cleric is very intriguing to me. Even just a yuan-ti celestial warlock paying heed to a being like a lillend, guardian naga, couatl, or other benevolent snake entity as adverse the malevolent powers that spurred their transformation.

That said, I'm aware it's easiest to get a very character specific campaign arc on a tabletop with a GM and such a game would not have a big enough potential audience to make it.

Then again, it would be nice if background and ancestry choices impacted the direction of a story a lot more than they do in RPGs. We get some here and there, like how the opening parts of Dragon Age: Origins are very different depending on which culture and species you choose to play. But my ideal would be that a culture or background choice would have heavy impact on the sort of missions you get through the story.

Like right now, most games are like this:

one tutorial arc everybody shares > first major adventure hub with a selection of side-quests that can individually go one way or another > next hub same > next hub same... etc

Then you have open world games like Fallout or Skyrim where you have a shared tutorial and then can just go... anywhere, but the quests at different places just sit around and wait for you to pick them up.

Many a couple of games will have a selection of different starting tutorial arcs but then almost immediately after everybody hits the same arcs with just some adjustment in the order things are done (Dragon Age is like this.

And many of those MMOs are sort of a combo of the open world (quests just waiting around for you to find them) and multiple tutorial thing.

Kind of what I would like is this:

Dependent on character creation choices you get one of a handful of tutorials... depending on your choices in that tutorial you go to one of a couple of different next hubs branching off that tutorial. At the hub you might have a bunch of side-quests and a choice three to five major story arcs... when you complete one of these arcs and return, the other arcs will be gone or changed in their scope or severity.

You come out of tutorial and here rumors of bandits in the woods, a diplomatic envoy of goblins, and undead in the graveyard. If you choose to go deal with the diplomatic goblins and handle that issue one way or another and go back to the hub, you might find that the bandits have been handled by some other group but the undead have become more than a rumor and are spreading out of the graveyard... and the fight against the bandits stirred up some trouble with local treants and dryads. Once again, you choose and complete one and return to find other mission lines either gone or changed.

Each of the mission lines would have hints of the over-arcing myth arc and eventually, you'll secure the hub (or lose it if things go badly) and you'll move on to a different hub.

The problem is that this would require a massive amount of variation and development.

The way BG1-3, NWN1&2, and other such games work is that each location generally only has one to three major variations. Like there are only two versions of Neverwinter in NWN1 and the second version (the war) is quite a bit smaller than the first (the plague). And the outpost in NWN2 only really shows up in one version. Where as in my ideal, each location would present different side-missions and main-missions and be in differing circumstances based on when the player came to the location and what they had already done.

Going back to the prior example:

If you don't take the diplomatic goblin envoy, then you might find a war break out and future hubs be colored by that war... or the envoy might go just okay instead of well resulting in constant issues of maintaining a fragile peace
If you don't take the bandits in the woods they might spread to become a major problem in the region even holding land... or the local guard might shut them down and rile up local dryads and such
if you don't take the zombies in the graveyard then they might become an undead scourge overwhelming people.... or the zombies might be destroyed at the cost of causing the rise of a paranoid inquisition

These differences would mean other locations on the map would have to have a different variation for each combination of starting tutorial and player choice in earlier hubs.

Player 1 might come out of tutorial 1 go to hub A then hub G then hub C then hub W then lead toward climatic battle 5 (maybe slipping into the villain lair)
Player 2 might come out of tutorial 6 go to hub W then hub B then hub D then hub A then lead toward climatic battle 2 (maybe a heroic stronghold under siege)

And the situation player 1 has at hubs A & W would be vastly different from what player 2 found in the same places due to each coming at them from different directions and at different times and in each cases the final battle happens in differing locations.

It's a LOT of date... like a lot a lot.

But you could also use it to link different playthroughs, like do a new adventure as a new game + and the tutorial option taken by the first party is unavailable and the second group will be approaching the same over-arcing danger on different parts of the problem. so player 1 and 2's storylines might both be in the same collective timeline but with different major villain focuses and differing perspectives of each other. The New Game + party might even stumble on tales of the first party now and again. Heck, if you do it so that different adventures can be advanced simultaneously and they hear rumors of each other, though it will cut off ability to see and accept some side-quests.

Again... so much data, so much writing, would take forever to develop.

But yeah, in such a game you could, for instance make a yuan-ti pureblood celestial warlock and end up being pursued by yuan-ti throughout the campaign while also dealing with the myth arc of the eldritch monstrosity trying to break into the world, culminating in destroying the yuan-ti cult leader performing a ritual to said being... meanwhile you could also pick a human fighter playing through brokering an alliance with goblins as gnolls start swarming out of the wilds driven by cultists to the same eldritch monstrosity, but ending with killing the gnoll lord in a climatic battle at the gates of a castle manned by goblins and humans...

Each might end with a battle with an avatar of the eldritch entity, just in a different circumstances... or the eldritch being might be implied background to one of them.

alternately, there could be multiple potential myth-arcs and stuff that player 1 experiences as stretching main-plot complex stories lines might only appear as tangential small side-quests for player 2.

Like when you have those fetch quests that imply a bigger issue that the game just doesn't get you involved in... what if that's something your other playthrough has to deal with?

Replayability would be great and DLCs could add more potential plot lines and locations so that you can stretch more and more how many active adventurer parties you can have in the same connected save-files before you have to start a fresh world and see what happens with it.