Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Larian's Biggest Oversight, now with review of ea

At the very end of the intro cutscene, when you are knocked out of the Nautiloid by a rock, an unknown magical force saves you from falling to your death. This is never explained in Act 1 and if I had to guess it is the Absolute saving you because you are the chosen one etc. etc. A bit cliche to say the least. DOS2 did the exact same thing, almost beat for beat, with the sinking ship going down and you being saved by a god. You even wake up on a beach again, lol.

Divine beings are not allowed to do this in FR/DnD lore. The overgod Ao forbade it with the threat being non-existance.

When making comparisons you need to be careful not to make it too shallow or too deep. If it's too deep nothing is the same but make it two shallow and everything is the same.

I can say that Baldur's Gate 2 and Call of duty black ops are the same since both are video games but that would be a shallow comparison, therefore bad. But equally bad is to say there is nothing similar between dragon age origins and Baldur's Gate because in one of them there are gnomes and in the other there isn't.

@Abits
There is a thing called tropes and cliches in writing and while you presented a fairly decent word salad it is completely negligent of the fact that these things exist and they do so for a reason. DivOS2's intro and BG3's intro are very much the same with only the set pieces being changes which we would consider a trope(specifically, Deus Ex Machina) in writing.

This is literally the opposite of what I said. I was replying Dmoulius comment, in which he asked whether the player was rescued by a god in bg3, implying that if not, the stories are not similar. I said that perhaps there are differences in details, but that isn't enough to say they are completely different.

Bg3 starts like many RPGs. My favourite RPG, Kotor, starts in very similar (some would say kind of identical) way. However, there is nothing inherently wrong with that, and it's not what this discussion is about

@Abits
My bad.

It's cool. English is not my first language so I see how some of my comments might be misinterpreted

Everytime a new game disappoints me in story telling and writing, I start Witcher 3 again to enjoy a good game.

No seriously, after wasteland 3 was such a disappointment I hoped for BG3 and can somehow understand what the thread-starter means.
Companions reacting strange or not at all or only very one-dimensional, quests triggering or ending at weird stages or leading to strange results (mostly to noone reacting to the outcome) makes you feel that everything is just there to make you think that your choice matters while it actually doesn't do anything. That's bad writing that happens quite to often in modern day RPGs.

I thought it was the tadpole. Sadly, there are a whole lot of things we don't know that are assumed for the sake of critique.

I assumed the same actually...

Out of interest where do you get this lore from? Is it new?

To my knowledge gods were encouraged to care for and help their followers after the time of troubles and this completly goes against that. Infact he made it so that gods needed worship to continue excisting. Which is also one of the reasons why wishing to be a god doesent work. Even if whatever entity you ask it off can fulfill it, youd instantly die.

Cleric and paladin their powers directly come from their gods as well. So it confuses me abit.

The gods of dnd are another hornet's nest I'm not sure I'm ready to kick lol.

You are correct. This is FR lore after 2e and into 3e. And AFAIK, this has not changed since.

This is a great and interresting post OP.
I agree that the story telling is not enough consistent atm.

Another exemple with the goblins camp... You HAVE to fight them at the gates of the grove. If you miss the goblin prisonnier, you're heading their camp to slay them. At the gate they're hostile EXCEPT if you have good dice rolls... Hostile or not at the gate, the goblins in the camp are friendly. Inside the temple, they all become hostile if you miss you're dice rolls... If you succeed, you can talk to Haruspia... You can accept "you don't know what you don't know why"... the absolute mark... Agree = Friends, disagree = everyone hostile. If you head to the drow without talking to Haruspia, it leads to other situations (you can cheat on her, which is very cool).

The goblins becoming hostile or not is not consistent.
The dice rolls have way too more impact on what happen.
If you miss a few things about the story (and you can easily miss many things) you can't really understand things.
Even if you don't miss things, you don't really know why you should join the absolute, exept they are the "evil" side.

I agree that the game have a HUGE potential and awesome choices/dialogs/consequences... But the story telling is not really consistent, especially if you're not doing things the right way.

Another point is that gameplay has to fit a story if you want to have a consistent story experience.
Actually combats are NOT a part of the story, especially because their gameplay don't fit any story.
Surfaces, jump, rythm/slow turn, lack of character voices/sentences, ... Everything in combats feel like you're in a parenthesis, not in the story anymore.

the 2nd sundering
Lore seems to have changed abit. Gods in general appear less but they still can appear on the material plane. Mystra for example is mentioned as an example of this

Not interested in participating in the e-wang measuring contest that is going on in this thread, but the game screenshot showcasing number of dialogue options is not actually official BG2 content.

It's from an NPC mod (Saerileth), and a very poorly received one at that.

I just finished my first and only playthrough of Disco Elysium. Failing in that game was indeed fun, and it did indeed keep me from reloading to get a different result, allowing me to for once just enjoy the ride.

My very early experience in Baldur's Gate 3 implies that there are a lot of 50/50 choices that if passed move you to the next phase of a conversation and if failed result in battle. The cost and time of the voice acting likely limits the amount of dialogue per encounter, but Disco Elysium somewhat got around that by having full voice acting only for the initial and/or critical dialogue options, and using text only for some of the minor ones.

The scope of Disco Elysium was much more limited, and there was very little battle involved, meaning the characters and their dialogue options remained available throughout the game to revisit, which surely helps with the event flag system, as it becomes much harder to break.

I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, sorry.


Generally agree with everything you wrote. I want to address two specific points you raised -

1. Evil route - the evil route in this game is terrible narratively speaking. It is one of the things that makes my belief that Larian simply don't think the issues I raised here are issues at all. Larian specifically asked gamers to try the evil route and heavily encouraged it. But if this is the best you can do when creating evil route, either fire your writers and call Chris Avalon or rethink your priorities.

2. You mentioned it in passing but I think it's an extremely important point - "But the story telling is not really consistent, especially if you're not doing things the right way."
This is a problem that was everywhere in dos2 and the reason why I feel there is no reason to replay this game. If only one choice would lead to a cohesive and consistent story, the fact you have other "choices" is a kinda bullshit. Perhaps this issue worth a more thorough comment, since it is prevalent in almost every aspect of Larian's design philosophy, and influence many of the problems I pointed out here, and some more that I didn't.

Willem De Wit hope you'll see it, I missed your comment and want to respond - the cost of multiple dialogue choices is high, but we have a long history of great rpg's who did it better than it is in bg3. Just to name a few fully voice acted RPGs with more meaningful dialogue choices - Kotor 1-2, fallout New Vegas, dragon age origins, jade empire, pillars of eternity : deadfire, the Witcher series. It's a matter of cleaver writing.

You are right to be confused. I somehow managed to post this reply in the wrong thread, though I am not sure how.

My apologies. :D;

Happened to me twice already 😂