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