Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General [SPOILER]Theory about Shadowheart origin

This game has a long way to go before it's remotely like the Witcher. I don't particularly care about whether it would be super faithful to FR or will make some changes, as long as the story is good and make sense. Same for the characters. I do think it would be stupid to choose to create a FR game only disregard it. But if it serves a great stories I don't mind.

I completely agree with you, @azarhal, but I also appreciate @Abits' point. I agree that in-game there should be a better sense provided of what it truly means to be a cleric of Shar (among other critical bits of FR lore). And perhaps the books you find are a good way of doing this, although even there may be include some identifier that tells the player which books are especially useful to read and understand. I care about this game (even in the face of absolutely hating its combat system) precisely because I love the FR setting and all of its rich lore. But the game ought to be set up for someone who knows nothing about FR lore to not be lost within the game and to enjoy it just as much as someone like me.

Yes Witcher 3 is definitely my standard at this point for how to do lore (and story?) well. I have not read any of the Witcher novels and did not play the first two games. I went into Witcher 3 completely ignorant of any and all things Witcher. And yet I very easily understood every bit of story and lore that got thrown my way, and never felt lost within the game. The game did a great job of bringing me up to speed on everything pretty quickly and well.

The Witcher 3 is one of the finest RPGs of all time. Hard to live up to.

I think Bioware Was also very good at this. They created Two new Universes (Mass Effect and Dragon Age) And you learned much about the creatures and cultures of each world you traveled to rather quickly. One example that pops up to mind is the first visit to Orzammar in dragon age. The first thing you see is the two would be kings arguing and quickly turn to violence. and then you have another great scene at the assembly. you also have the hilarious couriers each candidate has near his estate. these things do much to teach us about who's who and what everyone wants.

God Dragon Age Origins was good.

Hot take incoming: Dragon Age: Origins was a solid B- that benefited from having pretty much zero competition when it was released. I played it a fair bit as it was literally the only game in town, but I find it extremely difficult to return to.

Why?

I remember how when Dragon Age Origins came out the Rpg forums were full of people telling me it sucks and not Baldur's gate and that Bioware used to be good but now they suck... good times.

They had no idea what "BioWare sucking now" even means. It still had so, so far to fall.

It's so funny. I used to be the guy protecting the new DAO from the mean old gamers. how the tables have turned

I'm an old gamer and I loved (at that time) the new direction Bioware was taking with DA:O.

Ugh, I was writing a long post, accidentally reloaded the page, and lost it all.

To keep it brief, for a game whose primary focus is supposed to be story and characters, I found both of these facets to be underdeveloped. Loghain is a great example of this. His betrayal of the king demonstrates no internal logic. It’s just a crazy-stupid plan that predictably blows up in his face. I can still remember the first time I played this and Loghain sounds the retreat and thinking “why?” and never getting a satisfying answer.

Story and character issues, alongside terrible art direction and sound design; truly uninspired class, leveling, and combat mechanics; and a painfully formulaic gameplay structure of go to place, fix their problem, move on; all leave me quite ambivalent about Origins. I like that it helped revitalize a genre of western fantasy RPGs and introduce so many new players to the genre, but I still personally find it to be overrated.

My man.


I think Loghain's motivations are weak as well. art and sound is a matter of taste I guess... but specifically the sound is very similar to BG and I know for a fact Inon Tzur was involved with the music of both games.

about the structure of solving problems for everyone - by that time it was pretty much the Bioware formula. you could take it or leave it, but most of Bioware did it. I don't think it's fair to put it all on DAO. But of course, nothing wrong with thinking this game is overrated and not so good and such...

Yeah, people are of course welcome to enjoy or dislike games as they will. This is just my own red-hot take.

I actually think the music was quite good for DAO. The problems I had were more to do with mixing, ambient sounds, and sound effects. A great example of this is the discrepancy between the city of Baldur’s Gate and whatever the capital city of DAO was (its been a while). If you turn off the music in Baldur’s Gate you will hear plenty of background noise. It sounds like a bustling city, so even though visually it is quite static, the sound keeps it from feeling completely inert and dead. In DAO this is completely absent. Turn off the audio track and you will hear almost nothing. This, alongside the clunky way characters move gives the game a peculiar feeling for me. Everything seems smothered and lifeless.

As for art direction, DAO is all over the place. For example, while the character models are somehow both simultaneously idealized and poorly rendered, they are still mostly representational. That is to say, they don’t have cartoonish proportions (except for the boobs 😂). The weapons, however, are outrageously oversized, as are one of the shoulder pads on all of the suits of plate armor. This doesn’t look good to me. It’s inconsistent. I think one of the few things DA2 did well was that it tried to give the series a coherent sense of visual identity (though this included way too many unnecessary spikes in Kirkwall, because they were literally trying to make their game edgy), because the first game really doesn’t have any. I can’t even remember what a DAO darkspawn look like, but I can remember how they looked in the sequel despite them appearing in far fewer numbers and me having played far fewer hours in that game.