Yep, I share many of these thoughts. It does seem like story is actually bellow the gameplay, world design and seemingly even multiplayer on the importance scale, very odd.
I made a thread not too long ago where I tried to outline my thoughts and feelings of what the issues were, its not as eloquently put but I do think the gist is similar, it was hard for me to wrap my head around why the story and the game by extention, feels so off when compared to something like Pathfinder Kingmaker or Wrath of the Righteous (Have beta for it and its inrcedible). Your post helped me clear my thoughts and I do hope that Larian listens to this feedback, I hardly seem to be in it alone, there is simply something off about the way this game deals with the story.
You can say that this is the Larian formula but this isnt Divinity, they actively went out of their way to try their hands at BG3, and I am very grateful they did, but they should reconsider their ideology of how to put the games together and who they really want to target, because as it is it doesnt feel like they will please all that many fans. Personally Id just chalk multiplayer down the abyss and make it something they deal with after launch, not make it into decision behind the primary design seemingly, it kicks up nearly every other aspect of the game. I remember being somewhat confused the first time I finished D:OS 2 (and 1 for that matter) it felt like I only had a relatively small piece of the story and little understanding, despite going out of my way to explore nearly everything, even the story seemed to be designed around multiple replays and solutions, you can freely skip large sections of narration and plot development for characters and story without it being obvious at all and that simply feels wrong. Replaying the game for me was always about discovering alternatives, finding out secrets and difference in roleplay not putting the actual plot of the game together over multiple playthroughs.
The begining of the game is great, its coherent and structured but as soon as the map opens up and the main quest kicks in, it feels like a sequence of several unrelated adventures that you can barely even consciously chose which to follow because you cant really start heading in a specific direction without running into milion things and missing million other things along the way, always making me feel like im not moving forward in the story and at the same time I probably made the wrong choices of which order to play in. And its even worse because you supposedly have a death clock on your head which makes you want to rush and get some answers or solutions as soon as possible. Personally I suggested a much easier solution, but it obviously wouldnt fix everything especially not in the case of character reactivity and event flagging, but making clear separation between specific parts of the story and map would help a lot in terms of player choice and how coherent is proceeding with the story, the more I play the game, the less I am a fan of the maps full of things to bursting that are barely connected to anything. BG 1 and 2 had this right.
It simply feels like the experience should be more managed, more controlled to a degree, its nice that you can do anything but it doesnt matter if it just leads to the same outcomes and only serves to mess up the proceedings and roleplay, make the game more linear for all I care, I dont think thats a bad thing at all if it keeps the story from being all over the place and me missing out on huge story bits.
It may seem weird or maybe even stupid but I genuinely feel like majority of the off feeling I have with this game can be chalked up to its design to be played with multiple people at once, its made so everyone can have something to do, places to run around in, ways of going about stuff differently but the experience for the player who plays alone should be the main thing here, yea many people will use BG3 for their own campaign for sure I dont doubt it, but even among the most fervent of dnd players who will actually want to experience it in a group the first time or first few times around? For me story is king, story, characters and then gameplay and whatever else.
And personally, I hate the Origin characters idea, just the whole of it, makes no sense to me in a bg game that precreated character has more content and more to do than PC. Love them as companions but if they didnt make Origins character as they did they would have had much easier time of making the game and I wager not many players will even experience their stories from their point of view, just the amount of replays it would warrant is insane and I would bet anything that vast majority of people will simply want to play as them. I finished D:OS 4 times but never played as and Origin character there either despite it decidedly feeling like im missing out (a horrible feeling to be had for sure in an rpg like these)
Last edited by mademan2; 04/05/21 09:54 PM.
