The city was Yartar, which is SE of Neverwinter, its 2+ months journey from BG
I missed that then. But this thread and everyones confusion about what city it is / where we're from as a PC just shows that nobody has a clear sense of what's happening. And that's coming from someone who is prepping Descent into Avernus (so I've read the campaign a few times now).
This proves the game makes a terrible job at providing you with some context. It is just confusing as it is now. The game should tell you where the action takes place exactly / ground it into the lore. I don't want to rely on external intel dropped by the devs during an interview to learn all of this. This is bad storytelling IMO.
We don't know where we've got captured. Our PC don't provide you with anything personal (like, we don't have any choices to customize him/her through dialog). They could either implement some choices through character creation or let us customize our PC through dialog. But I think the game and the story would benefit from it. It would be more engaging.
Plus, the world needs to react more to what's happening. Your companions should too. I mean if we were all abducted, wouldn't one of our first questions whenever we meet be "what was the last thing you remember before waking up on the ship ?" or "where were you kidnapped ?". Seems like some basic info and a great way to give players something to get involved in the story, and to create a bond between characters.
Where you got captured, how does hardcoding this affect your actions in the game. If you were caught in say BG how does that affect you trying to get rid of the tadpole? If you were adducted in bed with a Mayors wife, how does that affect how your going to get rid of the tadpole?
A DM being vague about YOUR past in an RPG is allowing you to make that decision, and choice for YOURSELF. From there you can eloberate use what you've created as your backstory to solidfy how your character reacts to this, either internally, or externally through sudden voilence, always using persusion, killing a companion, letting a companion go, traveling alone, not killing anyone they don't need to.
The moment a DM/Game tells you your backstory those choices that are going to make up your character is ripped away from you. If he tells you your a nobody, born to shepards your going to act a certain way. If he tells you your a nobles spoiled brat, your going to act a certain way. If he tells you you have crabs, and were captured in a brothel, with another man your going to act a certain way.
By telling you your no longer playing a true rpg, or your character your playing Theirs. Larian stated they want you to tell YOUR story, and want to help you tell YOUR story.
Larian is letting YOU make your decisions for yourself about your backstory, where you were captured, why you were captured at that time. Your backstory may be as simple as going okay I chose hermit, so Character was grabbed picking berries. or it could be as eloberate as what they had for dinner, what they did on a daily basis. If they had a family, if that family was captured at the same time, if so are they searching for them? If they are would you really be telling your compainions any of it? None of them seem to care about anything other then their own problems, same with the druids, goblins, and others. You might not find your family, but that background and character is YOURS, it's not another pregenerated character that belongs quite literally to Larian Studios. It's yours, and thats what Larian stated they wanted to do, is let YOU tell YOUR story, not Ast, or Le, or Shadowheart, but YOURS.
do you even rp bro?
Rant over
Ouch, you need to take a break and relax a bit, no need to be condescending. I've actually both played and DMed for D&D since more than 20 years and I'm a player of the Early Access, which I think entitles me to give some feedback and honest opinion withtout being flamed with some "do you even rp bro".
Anyways, back to the topic. What I'm saying is that, sure, the DM leaves you room to customize your own backstory, I never said otherwise. But as a tabletop player you're actually free to input and dig into it whenever you want, why as many options as you want, imagination being the limit. In a video game ? Not so much.
That's why (if you step down a bit from your pedestal and actually read what I've been saying), you'll notice how I'm in for options to
customize your character through
dialog options and through
character creation, which are video game mechanics. Another option would be, as I tried to illustrate through my previous comment (but seeing how you caught fire I'll try again), to learn about/customize your character
through your companions : having them asking you we're you're from, what was your job, why you were abducted, whatever the devs see fit would be fine. Just give me a purpose in this story other than "tadpole bad, goblins bad, companions jerks, arrrhg". It would allow you to mold your character further, and it would create a bond between you and your companions. That's good writing.
Many games do that : they give you options to customize your personality and backstory. No need to look far, pretty much any Bioware game / leading RPG games in the industry do it. Take Mass Effect for example : a couple of defining choices at the very beginning, and then two very basic options to choose your personality along the way (renegate/parangon). I don't think anyone having played to games would call Shepard a "bland" character. Yet we all have a different Shepard because the game gave us room to mold him/her the way we wanted through
dialogs,
choices and
companions.
It works in tabletop too : when as a DM I bring in a new DMPC or NPC companion, I make sure they engage players and ask them about themselves (be it to deceive them later in the campaign, or for the sake of knowing them better). It gives more depht to my world and the player answering questions feel rewarded, because my NPC cares about him/her, my world reacts to him/her. And my players would jump hard on me if my NPCs wouldn't see fit to react to a mind flayer hive crashing just a few miles away.
Oh, and by the way, you're telling me how much Larian gives me freedom and such in the game (I take it as an excuse for the abysmal lack of characterization of my PC). Fine. But as you may notice in my previous posts, that same Larian
gave me a tag telling me I'm from Baldur's Gate. That's
arbitrary and mandatory. So much for Larian letting me be whoever I want as you're saying heh. If I'm from Baldurs Gate as the game tells me, then I have a pre-established story, and it means I should be provided with some context on how I got on that ship in the first place.
Bottom line : the game should do a better job for exposition, especially in a setting as rich as the Forgotten Realms, it should provide me options to give my PC more personality / backstory (my companions are a**holes I want to murder, but at least they've got some personality), and more importantly it should make NPCs react to what's happening around them. A mind flayer Nautiloid literally crashed a few miles from where they all are, and yet, nobody cares.
There isn't a single person i know that played Larian games for the writing.
Ouch.
I'm starting to realize this too. It hurts me because Baldurs Gate has been a carefully written story. Right now it looks more like a combat simulator where every excuse is good enough to feed me with more "tactical" combat. That may also be why Larian games don't usually provide you with rewards when you deal with problems out of combat (no XP, no Loot whatsoever). It's just not how they implement things in their games.
I thought they had trouble exposing their own setting in DOS because it was a new one, but with so many good material available for the Forgotten Realms, I find it very *worrying* to say the least.
