the problem comes with locking quests and dialogue/NPCs/routes behind some checks, disco elysium here has the best take on it where white checks can be retried and red checks have a shitton of failsaves written in to provide alternative routes to destinations should story impacting checks fail, this made exploring both the fail and success route a great addition to replay value, the d20 here I think is fine but larian has to do considerably (read: a metric ton) more work to write alternative routes and failsaves to quest triggers and dialogue, this means if they want to continue having the game fully voiced (still wondering why NPCs with generic 1 liners and no full dialogue tree need full voice acting, honestly seems a waste production wise considering the work still ahead of them) then this means a lot more time has to be spend on writing additional quest triggers, additional cutscenes for alternative ways for quests to work themselves out and a ton more dialogue (with voices if they want to keep that up) to accommodate those alternative routes and quest resolutions.

For example the quest to
confront kagha completely vanished when I killed the 3 goblin leaders, no option to talk to halsin or cutscene in which we confront kagha after the goblin leaders are dead, no alternative resolution to it other than the 1 cutscene we've got now for the confrontation + combat, I had 1 (one) chance of tipping one of the druids off when collecting my reward but if I skip that dialogue and just collect my reward there's no option to follow up on the quest to turn kagha after grabbing the reward for returning halsin
this to me means that there's still a lot of work to be done quest/story wise where larian needs to really bring their A game if they want to map out these quest triggers and dialogue options to include a ton of failsaves and alternative routes to completing quests.

for example despite being hinted at it lacking dialogue choices and alt routes currently
prevent dror razglin from being killed stealthily leading to an unavoidable confrontation in the throne room that always guarantees the rest of the temple turning aggressive as well meaning unavoidable goblin genocide unless you torch the grove


the game also does and does not take into account exploring and sneaking:
the bugbear assassin that takes out the tiefling with the soul coin can break completely if you run up the wrong side of the mountain to get to them, if you approach from the 'wrong' side the bugbear activates before you can get anywhere close to combat range and 1shots the tiefling lookout meaning you just pickup a soul coin and have absolutely no clue what this is supposed to be, what it's for, it's an item that knowing what I know after 3 playthroughs I know is going to play a part in some quest now but picking up the soul coin from her corpse if you approach from the 'wrong' side also prevents an arcane check from rolling meaning now your CHARACTER has 0 flags triggered for HIS knowledge of the soul coin ergo: quest triggers highly likely to be completely broken after this or play out jank as fuck where suddenly my character will have dialogue that indicates there was a check or that the dialogue did take place when it did not (no failsave or alt route so just bruteforce the preprogrammed path = extreme railroading of quests), don't say it won't be like that larian, I've played DIV OS1 and 2 and both of those had some really wonky quest triggers at time that had to be done in the EXACT right order or you'd risk soft locks or broken unsolvable quests, like in DIV OS2 I explored in the first act to where I ran into the final boss of the arc on accident and because of lvl scaling in DIV OS2 the bossfight was easily beatable and from there on the entire first act was jank af and soft locking a ton of quests that would culminate in that boss fight, I do NOT want to see that stuff again in BG3




it also means that if I don't take the exact right type of choices in dialogue when confronting
priestess gut (need to free halsin first and be told for the 4th time a stealthy approach might be best or the priestess dialogue for going somewhere private results to her aggroing her guards instantly + a giant temple aggro chain again, if you talked to halsin first and been told for the fourth time a stealthy approach might be best you get an additional dialogue option when talking to the priestess about just needing to talk about something in private which when that dialogue tree is followed the game seems to pick up on the fact you want to do a stealthy approach and the priestess for some reason doesn't use her "call for help" ability which leads to another unavoidable full goblin genocide (and no a 2 hour long combat encounter every playthrough there is not my idea of fun or a good aligned character, evil aligned characters also don't seem to approve much of the genocide as lae'zel says she thought it was amazing of you to do it but 0 approval is given for any actual slaughter leading to a story that is as of now HUGELY disjointed from its gameplay mechanics aka the ludonarrative discobiscuits (dissonance) rears its ugly head when D&D should really be the opposite with its writers going as far as to explain vlaakiths power by her sacrificing lvl 16+ gith for power which seems extremely excessive until you realize most of these stories can be played by players/DMs writing their own homebrew stuff, so I'd say take a note from disco elysium here and give alternatives when failing checks or alt routes to solving quests and for the love of god please no more janky quest triggers like DIV OS 1 and 2 where I found myself frequently reloading saves because apparently exploring breaks quest triggers (just like it's doing in BG3)


and in order to remedy any of this they'd need to do a lot of rewrites and re-record a ton of dialogue or add a lot of additional dialogue/quest writing in order to make the experience as good as it should be to not ruin the immersion when you run into soft locked quests because of wonky triggers or because you didn't pick the exact right combo of dialogue options. This more than anything feels like it removes my player agency and I start playing by outcome instead, instead of playing how I want to I'm now pidgeonholed into using guides in order not to fuck up quest triggers because I don't want to risk breaking the game by accidentally doing it in the wrong order (which is already poorly indicated with how the terrain often barely guides you along any intended path seemingly encouraging exploration and sandbox play only to break when that is attempted)

As it stands now I am constantly savescumming at almost every bit of dialogue because 1. autosaves are inconsistent and spaced way too far apart from one another to be relied upon at all, 2. picking the wrong combo of dialogue choices or quest triggers can ruin a quest or make it significantly harder when not needed or just flat out locks you out of some routes to solving quests or sometimes just softlocks em

Last edited by Ianthebea; 13/12/20 10:33 AM.