Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General "So what is BG then?" This is what I think it is.

I am consistently confused as to how people expect a continuation of the same story, when the story definitively ended at the Throne of Bhaal. The Bhaalspawn arc is over, and the Lord of Murder is very much alive and part of the pantheon. BG leaned on the Time of Troubles, and the Time of Troubles is over, long over.

I think ultimately what is conflating the issue is that you have a segment of the fans, perhaps a large segment of the fans, whose connection to tabletop DND is sketchy at best, and nonexistent at worst, as such, they seem to treat Baldur's Gate as divorced from the setting it takes place in, the pantheon, which is apart of that setting, the history of that setting, the linear progression of said history, and so on so forth.

What also is a bit baffling to me is that Larian even mentioned that the dead three: Bane, Bhaal, and Myrkul play a prominent role in this game, and that the illithids invasion, while concurrent with rumors of a cult, and the involvement of the dead three, are possibly just there to provide the initial backdrop, perhaps as a sort of 'iron crisis'.

Since we are all talking about the diverse differences of what constitutes a game being called Baldur's Gate, I'll just add mine, because why not:

1) A strong storyline, well defined characters, likable and unlikable companions that provide flavor while adventuring, an assortment of city/regional/and world saving adventures as well as a lot of mini-quests that provide context to the motivations of the main character, his or her companions, and the larger nature of the events happening within a city or region.

2) A good power curve, being able to go from missing wolves 9 out of every 10 rounds, to basically demigod status over the course of a lengthy saga. Whether this is done in the context of one game with a lot of hours worth of content or spanned across several titles obviously remains to be seen, but a power curve is critical in DND as per the 'tiers of play'.

3) A contemporary attempt to port the tabletop experience to a video game format. Now obviously this is where a lot of the opinions begin to unravel. Bioware was unable to faithfully adapt turn based combat to ADND, so they settled for RTWP. If you don't believe me, look up the old interviews. Yes, you read that correctly, the entirety of RTWP was a workaround. An innovative, genre defining workaround, but a workaround none the less that obviously has its own interpretation in the present day given that we have the capability of having a robust tabletop turn-based inspired gameplay experience that attempts to faithfully implement the tabletop experience into a video game environment.

4) An attempt to faithfully represent the setting in a video game, and this is where I begin to have my own issues as I hope Larian does not level-lock areas and other gameified decisions that do come from D:OS2, and while I was fine with it in that game, DND is not about MMO level-locked mechanics, you should be able to stumble into the crypt of a lich in an Inn just as easily as encountering a herd of gibberlings or a pack of orcs as easily as you would a few slimes in some underground sewers, just next to a secret door with a hidden illithid lair. This variation, and the thought of 'well, I will need to come back later rather than just bounce from level locked area to level locked area, was very smart and really gave a strong DND flavor to the older games.

There are more, but this is already too long, so I'll simply say, you don't see RTWP in there, you don't see Bhaalspawn in there, you don't see the naming convention of Baldur's Gate being conflated with a game name rather than a city in a setting of which the first one was based on. I saw this debate in Deus Ex with the new games, and I can simply point to NWN 1 and 2 being completely different games that were completely unrelated both citing the name of a city, also the original Neverwinter Nights was actually an AOL pseudo-MMO that had nothing to do with either but I didn't see people complaining about it at the time.

So I will simply end with, perhaps we should give them more than the pre- pre- pre-alpha to showcase whether or not they are willing to check the boxes for us, or perhaps you need to understand that their patron, WOTC, in this case, also has their own vision, likely a bit more in line with my 4 points than a nostalgia-fest and the divorcing of a game series from the world, setting, system, and history that actually had to have been created for them to even be realized at all.