Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Latest News Gathering the Party - Community Update #2

They are COMPLETELY different games. Baldur's Gate has a complete different itemization, no cooldowns, spell slots, reagents, the numbers are much smaller and so on. When i mean low numbers, i mean that the strongest wizard on SoA has 18 INT and the toughest dragon on SoA had 200 hp. Armor works in a completely different way, on D&D, armor deflects blows. On divinity is just a secondary health bar. And on BG2, full plate armor is far more likely to deflect a sword hit than a warhammer hit. BG2 and DOS2 are completely different games.

They are actually using the same DOS2 engine..well, they started with it and have been upgrading it big time. I think Swen said it was only like 30% the same now...so basically a new engine. Inventory management is actually one of my very few concerns as well...i don't want it to feel like DOS where you just pick up and sell everything. yes, i get that in P&P you could do that if you wanted but most DMs would get tired of that and just stop having vendors that would buy garbage. i also really hope they have a really good money system...it's so satisfying only getting copper and silver for a level or two and then start to find gold with more challenging adventures. maybe that's just me but in most campaigns even a single gold piece is worth a decent amount.

Except no one is talking about 1960.

Let me use Star Wars as an example. The original trilogy was amazing, it took inspiration for real historical dictatorships for the Empire and what they did but did not mirror it or shove it in the audience members faces. When George Lucas and others working on it did interviews it was about the story, the characters and the universe of Star Wars itself. Then we go to the sequel trilogy. The movies themselves didn't push an agenda but they were written far more poorly than the original trilogy or even the prequel trilogy. During interviews Kathleen Kennedy and directors like Rian Johnson would talk about how they feel so great about making things better for women because they now had a strong woman that girls could look up to as a hero, they put together a story group that made it clear that they were more interested in incorporating today's social and political issues as part of the Star Wars legacy rather than build on what came before, wearing "The Force is Female" shirts and saying or saying that there are too many white men on camera, and off camera running the film crew and special effects.

For those paying attention it becomes very clear that those in charge are more interested in putting forward a message that ties into whatever social issues of the day are rather than write a story that fits those characters and the universe.

Let's look at The Last of Us 2 as another example. The first game focused on Ellie and Joel and how it built up their relationship, and it had to follow Ellie and Joel because she resparked his humanity and capacity to care about others and she was the only person who could potentially save humanity. Neil Druckman, head of Naughty Dog, has said he was greatly influenced by Anita Sarkeesian in the past and now wanted to tell a story about hate and make the players look at Joel and Ellie as the villains that you played as and felt justified doing until you went to another character. Neil made it clear that he's interested in preaching about morals in his game to the players in a story that didn't have to follow Joel or Ellie and could feasibly be done with any other character to match the themes they were going for.

Naughty Dog also copyright struck any and all videos they could discussing the leaks, whether or not they used footage from those leaks, even claiming ownership of memes on Twitter to get those taken down for a few weeks as well, pretty much breaking copyright and fair use law. This was the biggest issues people had with them far more than the so-called pandering that the leaks apparently tried to showcase.

All I'm saying is that it does happen. If game developers want their games to sell well they need to know their target audience and market appropriately to that audience. If they build up a fan-base who have come to have certain expectations of that company then it is on the company, whether through advertisements, gameplay reveals or interviews, to temper those expectations and let the audiences know what to expect moving forward.

Which is why I'm really happy with the gameplay reveal Larian did, playing live for everyone so everyone knows exactly what we're getting, compared to the cinematic movie that Bioware did with Anthem's gameplay reveal...which didn't show much gameplay.

I´m a little puzzled. There´s no source mechanics in BG3 that we know of, and the gameplay showed the usual D&D5e skills, dialogue skillchecks, alignment choices, spells and the usual stuff you see outside combat in a D&D campaign and that does not appear in any Divinity game.

I'm not sure you got my point about 1960? If it were 1960 and we talking about university brochures someone with an eye for such things might say: "hey why all the coeds on the brochures? Is this just virtue signaling?" But if some were to say that in 2020 we would ask "wft is a coed? What's you deal and what graveyard did you dig up that term from?" Now, in 2020, don't even notice when there is a gender balance in university photos. The point is that your politics trains your eye to see some things and keeps it blind to others.

Can't comment on the Last of US 2, never played it. But on Star Wars we have different views. Lucas did an amazing job with the first two (now episodes IV and V) and a decent job with Return of the Jedi. And then he just embarrassed himself with the prequels. Sure the special effects were great but writing was worse than many of the novels and he phoned in the direction. And there were agendas in all of Lucas' movies. Princess Leia kicked ass and saved the boys in the middle of her rescue. She was a 1970s feminist. This princess doesn't sit around looking pretty, she shows the boys how to shoot . . . But in the prequels, Lucas went backwards with the gender politics. Padme was a forgettable nothing who receded into the background to allow Anakin to take center stage. The third prequel was okay I guess, better than Rogue One.

The three recent Star Wars helped undo some of the damage that Lucas did. I thought Rei kicked ass in the Force Awakens -- I put that movie on par with the Return of the Jedi. Sure, the last one (IX) had a bit too much fan service in it but so did Solo. And the Rise of Skywalker (IX) was much better than Solo. Solo didn't have any of the elements you point to -- it had a male protagonist, it stayed true to Solo's pirate tropes and couldn't be said to stand for anything but making cash. No feminist narrative there but it was only marginally better than Rogue One.

That's why I'm not accepting that any problems with Star Wars can be attributed to a "the force is female" / "pushing an agenda" problem. The problems with Solo stem from the fact that it was directed by someone who doesn't really like sci fi and who tried transform a sci fi movie into the sort of movies he would have liked to have directed -- which is why we got car races and train robberies. Compare Solo to Fury Road. Fury road was the best Mad Max yet and its feminist 'agenda' wasn't at all subtle. I think the feminism made the movie . . .

Sure, admitting you have progressive politics sets up conservatives to dislike something but I'll take an honest expression of belief over PR department claptrap any day. When you try to stand for nothing you fail at everything but being boring. Like you I "pay attention" but I attend to different things -- I wish people would see how many movies are really just military recruitment vehicles and ads for gun manufacturers .

Star Wars is the perfect analogue for BG3 -- BG2 was the best video game ever produced. Can Larian live up the expectations? If they want to learn something from Solo's failures it would be: make sure to hire BG2 fans. There is no substitute for sincerity -- you can throw all the money you want at a production but you put people who don't like the genre and are only motivated by a paycheck take the reigns the product.

Anyway, good exchange of views.

KillerRabbit:
>This only seems jarring because it conflicts with your politics.
How so? It clashes with any in universe continuity.
>How many redheads did you count
1 dwarf i think.
But thats besides the point. You want to construct a trap for me here and go "A HA! See? you only see X". Bullshit.
Theres redheads among pretty much any european ethnicity.
Redheads living among non redhead european looking people doensnt need to be explained. Meanwhile half the population of a northern european country with no big migration movements do need to be explained.
Maybe you live somewhere else but i can for a fact tell you that i do not know a single african looking person born from a european family.
meanwhile i got redheads in my personal (usualy pretty dark haired) family. Youre making a false equivalence.

> We've lost our ability to make the distinctions that seem so important to parts of the European right.
ah of course.
And now youre conflating shit.

No, despite what you americans get taught, not all "white" people look the same.
theres no such thing as "white" people. Theres caucasians, which is a pretty damn broad definition including anyhting from Finns to Arabians, even tuareg are caucasians IIRC.
Are you gonna say those groups tend to look alike? So is it then unfeasable for you to make other distinctiosn between groups?


>Politics are everywhere
and so is internal consistency. When Frank Herbert wrote about the Fremen of dune, he didnt just put Arabian tribes in space for no reason, simply because he liked Lawrence of Arabia.
He invented the population first, he came up with their variation of a faith and how it spread throughout the pre machine wars galaxy.
Because any good science fiction and fantasy writer knows that his setting has to be internally consistent.

But yes, you are right in identifying that Dragon Age is a political setting and it includes nonsensical elements for the sake of making a political point.
So essentielly you agree with me, but you dont want to because you dont like the politics you assume i hold.
Congratulations.

We're almost at the point of understanding one another even if we are unlikely to agree with one another. I'm saying that DA is a political setting, that DOS2 is a political setting, that BG2 is a political setting and that politics are inevitable. Humans are political animals. What I don't agree with is the notion that there are political settings and non political settings.

Also I'm not trying to set you for a trap. Truly. I'm aiming for understanding. I'm blind to some things and I see some things more clearly. Just as you do. And there are advantages to seeing and to blindness.

On Caucasian / white. We just aren't going to agree. Race is a social construct, there is a no Caucasian race outside of census forms. Caucasian / Caucasoid has been used by many different racial taxonomies but started with the (neo platonic) notion that 'whites' had their origins in the Caucasus mountain chain because the people who still live in the Caucasus are the most beautiful people in the world. It's silly theory that been thoroughly debunked. (and I have read the original accounts btw)



You are making my point for me. Yes, Americans have been "taught" not to see these differences.

You can divide up the world anyway you like -- redheads / blondes / big ears / windows peaks / tongue rollers etc. It just don't think those categories are any more real than white. And because these aren't real -- because people can be 'taught' not to see them -- I just don't object to someone creating a world were half of the people look black. Or a world where half the people have widow peaks for that matter. Incidentally, no one has explained why Faerun and Rivelon have achieved gender equality. Women can be warriors or enchanters / necromancers or paladins. Was there a women's movement at some point? Why are these worlds more equitable than our own? And if the gender equality of these two settings didn't spoil your enjoyment of BG and DOS (and I hope they didn't) you might want to think about *why* race is so important to you and gender equality less so.

Oh on Dune, part of why I was never a big fan was that the politics were too similar to the geopolitics of the time. And, yeah, the whole Lawrence of Arabia / white savior narrative annoys me. And I could go on . . . Good example of a book with right wing politics.

>politics are inevitable
To a point.
unconscious biases are inevitable. Political messages are. Setting descisions based on political messages doubly so.
That comes from someone who has deliberatley put political questions into his campaigns on one hand, but also made sure that it doesnt permeate the entire thing on purpose. Its escapism afterall.

>race is a social construct.
definitly gonna disagree there as you predicted. If you dig up bones of a person, you can determine their ethnicity up to a point. some ehtnicities are of course more simmilar to one another genetically than tohers and thus their phenotypes are harder to distinguish.
Id say Ethnicity is a social construct, Nationality is a social construct. Race,or more accuratley Phenotype is not a social construct but a biological reality.
I dont personally care about the Etymology of the word "caucasian". its a term thats used to refer to a certain Phenotype. Americans call it "white", which is a pretty dumb word to use if you ask me.
My point was that it is a very broad definition and in a continent like europe one thats not even as usefull as "brown haired".

>Making your point for you
so youre arguing thats a good thing? Id say it makes you not see nuance.
Its like how Russians see more shades of blue than non russian speakers. Id personally love to see more shades of blue.
Id Also wouldnt turn that into a moral judgement because Americans certainly are more Race obsessed than Europeans are, and if youre gonna disagree with me then id like you to turn on your TV right now.

Ive heard from multiple people of eastern european descent that Witcher is the only video game theyve ever played that had people that looked like them.
Somehow id figure representation mattered to some degree to you, or why else would you argue in favor of a game where half the people are african american fo rno reason?

btu that goes beyond my point anyway. Thats another discussion:
my point is, internal consistency is important.

Your arugment is that you are IN FAVOR of NOT doign Internal cosnsitency.
Your mistake is that you think ia m IN FAVOR of it because o my Politics.
I am not.
When the next Elderscrolls game takes palce in Hammerfell, like it probably will, i damn well hope that the majority of people we see there are Redguards and look like Redguards, aka something between Central AFricans and Northern Africans.
Not because "my politics", but because thats immersive to me. It acts on the same logic as the real world does.



>Women equality in Faerun
Its a fantasy world and Biology works differently. Contraception exists wideley, Women are not physically weaker than men in Faerun, Bisexuality is the norm (now you can argue nature vs nuture with me, but i dont think youll wanna go there)
So no, the argument is biological not cultural.
And yes, it dos go against my immersion. I perosnally think that a world built on the ideas of a sex obsessed hippie does not make for an easy palce to immerse myself in.

But that entire paragraph couldnt have been loaded any more. What are you getting at here?
I know exatly why i care about some things and not about other.
I care about Aesthetics first and foremost. And in aestheitcs i like things that make sense within that aesthetic.

>Good example of right wing politics
And its also pretty good.
just like Tolkien :^)

No, phenotype of a population being different is not social construction Ethnicity is a social construct, Nationality is a social construct. Race or Phenotype is not a social construct but a reality. When i mean by "ethinicity" being a social construct, the most iconic example is the US definition of ""hispanic/latino"". which makes no sense and no other country used that definition. Even literal nazis. Egon Albrecht was a Brazilian born luftwaffe iron cross ace. Richard Darre, a Argentine born minister. Both guys would be considered "oppressed minorities" on US. Not because they have anything genetically similar to "mestizos" and different than Germans but due a arbitrary ethnic definition.

Phenotype characteristics and certain regions of the world favoring different characteristics is not "social construction". Pale skin in middle of central Africa is not a characteristic that will be "promoted" by the environment. The fact that a lot of populations had neanderthal DNA is not social construction either.



On first editions of D&D, woman was weaker than man. They changed because accessibility and avoiding controversies got more important than internal consistency. IMO in some societies makes sense to woman be equal to man and some even superior, see the Drow societies. But most human societies should be patriarchal.

But i really don't wanna see dark sun for 5e because dark sun will be far different to be adequate to modern politics. We can't have a game like Gothic in modern times or the butthurt will be extreme.

It's a word. One that has different meanings to different people; sometimes it's toxic (and again, that tends to be more from the extremes) and oftentimes it's a colloquial term whose meaning depends on context. IME it's usually imbued with significant overtones relating to culture, ethnicity and so on rather than any (pseudo-)scientific meaning and the difficulties often come not from the application of the word itself but the insistence, overt or otherwise, that one person's definition is the One True Meaning. Which ultimately results in people talking cross purposes. During my time online I've seen endless arguments about this and similar issues where a disproportionate amount of time is devoted to semantics and asserting what someone else is trying to say rather than the actual communication of ideas. Which I think tends to be the problem.

Why is it that when people talk about writing, narrative consistency and cultural setting that somehow it MUST mean that the speaker is right wing in their politics? Why can't it be just as simple as someone who doesn't care about politics wanting the fictional worlds to make sense?

Take Baldur's Gate 1. There is the Cursed Girdle of Masuclinity/Femininity. Magically changing a person's gender when they put it on. In such a magic rich environment it makes sense that there would be something like this there. Or Cyberpunk 2077 coming out soon, where gender and your body type is all but meaningless because technology has advanced so much. But bring up examples where the writing doesn't make much sense for the characters, setting or story, or the developers make it clear that they are putting something in to appeal to represent an audience base without figuring out how it makes sense for that particular setting and suddenly you're right wing?

I don't get it that mind set.

reminding me of ghost in the shell where batou asks the major why she even still bothers with a female body

No. The most iconic example is BioShock. BioShock is a criticism against Ayn Rand ideas and BioShock infinity a criticism about conservatism.

Drow society on CRPG's are interesting exactly because they are matriarcal.

Now we're agreeing on something. Yes, Tolkein was a Tory, a monarchist and a British Catholic. He was a conservative in the Burkean sense of wanting to preserve the best of the past while moving into the future. It's one of history's riddles that his books were embraced by hippies. Those books expressed a coherent political worldview.



I'm making the same few points again and again using different examples.

A) What we see, what care about it is determined by a number of factors including our politics. For you it seems very important for games to include NPCs that have phenotypical features that could have plausibly emerged from different geographic environments and that these phenotypically derived features mirror the divisions in our own world. This is important enough to you that if a sizeable portion of them don't fit that environment it breaks immersion. For me it doesn't break immersion. Sure there may be a backstory here but I'm much less interested in that story than, say, how the hills became populated with dragons. Really and truly.

B) Politics are inevitable. A decision to make one country populated only by people with a certain skin color is also a political decision. This is the point of the graphic posted earlier.

Sure, we can talk about degrees. But less =/ better. Tolkein was loaded with politics and was all the better for it.

On caucasian / white we'll also lump that under disagreement. Johann Blumenbach went a mountain town, decided that the women were hot and declared that the world's best race came from the world's hottest women. If Blumenbach were alive today he'd be curating lists of the 100 hottest babes. I see the word "caucasian" and I laugh a little.

Sure. We're pretty much in agreement. I use the word / metaphor construction because it also refers to an architecture of social practices. Where you get to live, how you are treated by police etc.

That's rabbit hole. But, hey, I'm a rabbit.

Of course phenotypes are a sort of reality and, yes, different phenotypes emerged from different geographical conditions. But the decision to lump those together and attribute characteristics to them is a social construction. Just like "blondes are air heads" -- blonde hair is a reality, the decision to lump such people together and say people with this sort hair are 'air heads' is a human creation. Take the epicanthic eye fold -- the almond shaped eye. It's probably a cold weather adaptation. Which explains why you find it in Finland, Upper Canada and Siberia. But you also find it in the American southwest, scattered throughout Africa and the Philippines. Now if I start lumping everyone with epicanthic fold together in a group 'Asian', start attributing characteristics to them and begin treating them in different ways I'm using a social construction. Or, long story short, there is no essential difference between race / ethnicity / nationality. Some national borders are natural -- coast lines and such -- but we would agree that the nation state is a construction. Same is true of 'race' -- just because something has some natural features doesn't make it a natural category.

>A
What we are about is dictated in part by our politics.
but not in full.

Else you can riddle me please how i like Turn Based combat and Monster Races translates in any way to my worldview.
People are more complicated than that.
Im interrested in History and the development of Human nations.

but on your actual point. Yes, it is important for me. it breaks immersion.
But i have an actual argument here. it doesnt break immersion bcause it goes agaisnt my interrest. The argument that it makes no sense that a Human population that appears to be very seditary and not very well mixed in universe appears heavily racially mixed.

It doesnt break your immersion, but it only does so because you dont care about it. Which is fine, you dont have to care about it but its still a valid argument.

>B
Wrong.
We had this debate in Kingdom Come deliverence and Witcher.
Sometimes a Cigar is just a Cigar. And sometimes medieval Bohemia was ethnically homogenous (by american standards of race anyway, not by actual variance in "socially constructed" ethnicity)

>Rabbit Holes
Im not a Rabbit, but i can deal.
It is not social construction to attribute Characteristics to phenotype. It would be ridiculous to act as if there arent characteristics associated with developing phenotypical characteristics based on enviroment, sexual selection and ressources.
Sickle Cell Anemia is probably one of the best ways to illustrate this , but somehow id be very surprised if you didnt know this already.

But before i go on here, i like to point out that you brought up "Characteristics" beyond looks. Nobody else did. The argument was that Enviroment tends to dictate phenotype, not any particular characteristics.

Lumping everyone with the epicanthic eye fold seems to be stupid because, form what i understand, it could be paralell evolution of a trait.
Meanwhile lumping groups together that share history, ancstry and other traits... yeah i personally dont see why you would not do that.
We do it for any other group of animal.
We also do it for culture, not just culture, we do it for political movements, we do it for philosophical schools and for Art movements.

Why is Human Phenotype the only "thing", as in "thing we are putting a name on" that we wouldnt apply that logic to?

Randomly, I only noticed very recently this is a thing with me. I dunno, talk about unobservant; I'd seen it in relatives and for years I'd cursed my eye-liner not working the way it "should" until it finally dawned on me. And sure enough, looking at photos of myself when I was very young, there it is. AFAIK I have no east Asian heritage though; but it's its own thing in some north European types.

Er anyway. I agree with the social thing and I think a person's appearance is simply a very visible manifestation of cultures and entire histories etc. Which is okay as a starting point as long as you get it right, and part of that is first and foremost accepting people as the individuals they are: if they don't want to be encumbered by any particular baggage then it shouldn't be forced on them. And again, that's something I've observed "both sides" of the usual political divide tending to do. I won't say "for better or worse" because it's always for worse, whatever the intent.

If we´re still talking about D&D I have to point out that unlike the Tel-quessir could claim the primal war between Corellon and Gruumsh for their heritage and the dwarves claimed to have been forged from the rocks of Abeir-Toril itself, humans had no unifying creation myth. In fact is one of the few races that exist having originated since before written records existed and were frequently considered one of the creator races, and humans are found in almost every world in Abeir-Toril, and many other planes of existence like the Demiplanes of Dread in Ravenloft.
It is canon that the humans in Thay or Mulhorand were first brought to Toril through portals to another world created by wizard rulers of the Imaskar Empire so they also exist in other worlds outside Toril. So the "it makes no sense that a Human population that appears to be very sedentary and not very well mixed in universe appears heavily racially mixed" could be applied to other worlds but not in D&D. Humans, unlike most other races, did not emerge as a whole but rather in several places at once, coming from elsewhere, thereby resulting in its diversity.





Changing the topic the main problem I got is that Politics are anywhere when more than 2 humans gather, but it´s frowned upon when it comes to videogames or other media. And when I say politics I mean "politics that people think are relatable to the real world and are against my beliefs"
I mean, there are lots of stories driven by politics as a plot device: The Imperials vs the republic, families killing each other over the power of the throne, a warlord trying to preserve the survival of the species by reducing the excess of population vs the avenging heroes that want everybody to survive, etc atc

But when it comes to themes like fascism, homophobia, transgender, racism or something that strike too close to "modern, real-world problems" that creates a backslash and it´s frown upon like it´s "second class plots" and "political" and "take this away from my preferred series/movie/etc" when sometimes is related to what the story wants to tell us.
Maybe sometimes could be classified as forced or preachy, indeed, but the pertinence of those values to the plot is for the creator of the story to decide, the writer is the one that decides what he wants to tell us with his story and what is important, not the reader.

Okay.....what does that have to do with anything I said about whether or not things in the game make sense for that game's world? If it's in there to act as criticism of any modern social or political issues but does or does not make sense in the setting of the game itself makes it forced into the game for a social or political narrative and not to enhance the game.

It doesn't matter to me if things are in the game, only if they make sense that they are there in the game's setting.

As a side note, yes, the Drow are very interesting, most of this post was not in response to that and I honestly don't mind if the power dynamic of men and women....who can live for near 1000 years, with a society built on political deeds and backstabbing as they worship the Spider Queen, governed by women, looks overall. That'll be a fascinating thing to explore.

EDIT: And yes, that was an egregious example in Bioshock, as you pointed out. Sorry, misread your post then read it properly when I posted. Oops on my part.