Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Why not add system of hostile npc reaction on undead player from DOS2 to BG3 for drow race

Tieflings have never had the bad reaction that orcs, goblins, and drow do. All three of which have regularly raided other cultures for slaves, plunder, or conquest. Something tieflings haven't been dealing with.

Tieflings have never been considered inherently driven to evil, even at 2nd ed when they were introduced their evil alignment was put toward mostly upbringing/living with suspicion.

The way that the druids are already treating the tieflings in game is appropriate for them. And the optional dialogue options for tieflings goes along with that. My expectation is we'll see more of that in Baldur's Gate...because that city doesn't have a reputation for being intolerant, but it also doesn't have the cosmopolitan reputation of either Waterdeep or Neverwinter....it certainly doesn't have the fair-minded reputation of Silverymoon.

I'll have to check out the Drow dialogue some more, but there's a couple of considerations I have in mind for this.

One is that Dialogue is explicitly something that Larian has said they are still expanding. Another is that that's somewhat bigger ask than most people seem to think it is.

Separate dialogue for Sun Elves and Moon Elves is on my wishlist and extra dialogue for drow would also be great, but I am well aware that that would be an expensive endeavor. Even if they cut corners on what they pay their writers and voice actors, which is common in the industry, that's going to be a fair amount of time and money. There's also the extra time coding them into the conversation and making sure everything triggers and trees appropriately.

You also have to be write the dialogue in question to both capture the distrust and yet NOT cut off quest options or derail the main story line. The NPCs have to work with the main PC or the game doesn't work. There's no live GM to take the story in a new direction. As such they risk having a bit of dialogue of "You are a terrible monster that must be destroyed, now please do this favor for me." And to be fair, it's possible to thread that needle, but the sheer quantity of dialogue in most of these games tends to mean that the overall quality is a bit middle-ground. There's been a lot of cases where video games talk about how amazing a particular story is and it turns out to be a relatively common trope that turns up in novels. (Bioshock Infinity's ending is one of these that strikes me as a very well-executed version of a common time-travel story.)

As to the press to stop using "evil" races. I'm someone who has hated "Always Chaotic Evil" since I first started playing in the late 80s with 1st edition AD&D and Champions. I have not yet seen someone push for changing the Lore, only the mechanics of the PC races. In a lot of cases, those are people that would be very happy exploring the problems that face a goblin or hobgoblin who has turned against Maglubiyet. Actually, one story I want to play is that of a Yuan-ti Celestial Warlock pacted with a lillend, couatl, guardian naga or something similar trying to establish a way to draw other yuan-ti from the evil of their culture and find a safe place to settle in hiding. That would deal with both the issue of common races distrusting yuan-ti and the hunting parties of yuan-ti seeking the heretic. But....it's not the sort of storyline that works well in a video game.

If I had tons of money, I'd try to get a game developed that had radical differences in storyline based on the character's species, creed, and background. Because it is something I really wish existed. Like the model I have in mind is a starter area with issues going on, maybe some opened based on stuff the character is, and instead of the model where you do all the quests at every level, instead when you focus on story Y, then you can't go back to story X and Z because that situation advances to a different level situation at the next story point and the eventual big bad could be very different based on which line of quests you take care of. Like in playthrough one you have X BBEG but in playthrough two you shut him down in the low levels and the BBEG is something else.

But to be perfectly honest, that's like asking for dozens of different games wrapped up into one place. It would be prohibitively expensive in terms of development and would only really happen if someone with enough disposable income just decided "this is something I want to make and don't care about profit." That's an irresponsible stance to take with somebody else's money...and it's even a bit irresponsible with your own money, to be honest. But there it is.

Most RPGs you have Act I with the same set of missions regardless of character. There may be some different prologues (Dragon Age: Origins, for example) or occasional dialogue nods to a character species/background (NWN2), and occasional minor class/species specific side-quests. But that main quest-line is the same regardless of what character you make. And that requires most of the NPCs to have minor if any variation in how they react to different characters.