Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Huge lack of urgency in the story !

This seems like two different (but somewhat related) issues: having the passage of time be meaningful and feeling like the character has a place in the world.

Passage of time:
I actually love a ticking clock. I don't want to just outright lose if I don't do the thing in time, but I want the world to feel alive and like it's not going to wait for me. This is the worlds story and my character is the lens through which I get to experience it. I want an ignored problem to get worse and have consequences. I want to have to pick and choose what I care about - not just which side of a battle am I on, but should I even involve myself when I also care about this other thing and I only have time to deal with one of them. Or maybe I can try to do a little of both things and take the chance that both of them fail. If I can go to every place on the map and complete every quest, the world feels much smaller and less alive; and that makes me care much less about what happens to the world.


Place in the world:
Apart from the immediate "I should find someone to get rid of this tadpole.", the character I'm playing doesn't feel like they have any aboutness. They don't want anything. The expressionless, voiceless appearance of my character during dialogs really doesn't help; it doesn't seem like they care about anything. Admittedly, in a tabletop game, it's fairly easy to decide what your character wants and have it color their actions; but not so easy in a video game with limited scripted options for dialog; it's much easier to focus on "what's happening to me right now?" and ignore the rich life and backstory that you've been living up to this point.

That said, maybe there could be some options for personal backstory? They could come up pretty naturally during conversations with party members at camp, for example: "What do you do for a living?" "What's your family like?" "Have you ever been to prison?" "Have you ever encountered X?" "Have you ever fought in a war?" "We've been out here for a while - do you miss anything from back home?" It doesn't have to be heavy-handed, and maybe it doesn't even have to affect anything else in the game, mechanically, but being forced to answer those kinds of questions can get you thinking more about who your character is, beyond just "what useful combat skills do I have?"