Originally Posted by Tuco
Originally Posted by ash elemental
Originally Posted by Tuco
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Apples and oranges.

Both BG1 and BG2 combined were made on a budget that these days wouldn't net you the cinematic intro for BG3 and its tutorial on the ship.
BG2 in 2000 had a budget of... what? Less than 5 millions or so?
And what was the budget for Icewind Dale? Which had character-based choices in dialogues. So why would character reactivity be such a big financial hurdle for BG1&2? You even have an example of a stat-based dialogue in BG2: the wish spell.
i wouldn't know, but probably a lot smaller, given that IWD was basically the "cheap Baldur's Gate spin-off focused entirely on dungeon dwelling and combat".
And yet on that smaller budget IWD-devs managed to implement some unique dialogue choices. And if you look closer at BG2, the mechanics required to implement this are often already there. For example Bodhi will refuse a pure thief, because a thief siding with the vampiric guild would lose the stronghold. Multiclass thieves she is ok with. Which in my opinion doesn't make sense. Would it really be so much more expensive from a development standpoint to have Bodhi refuse a paladin or a good-aligned cleric instead? I doubt it was a matter of resources.