Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous vs BG3

I am not surprisedthat you got various titty mods for Skyrim and then felt underwhelmed by it as a game. Skyrim has its flaws, sure, but it's not that bad. Just rather light weight. And having everybody walk around with obvious modern day plastic surgery and aggressive makeup and photoshopped faces is not going to help the immersion one bit. It just makes everything look completely absurd.

As for the Witchers, there certainly is role-playing elements in it, but it feels to me that too much focus is placed on player skill rather than character skill. That's a trait of action games. Still, there is some character-definition in it and there is a fair amount of dialogue and there is consequences to choices. So I'm not willing to reject the franchise as "not RPGs", but they're not really the deepest RPGs either.

MMO's, yes, of course you'd be a fan. To my knowledge there isn't an MMO out there that isn't about repetitive grinding, with an absolutely pathetic story that has more problems than the last season of GoT. Being a tiny bit blunt, I'm occasionally hard pressed to find people that I feel like having a conversation with, so why would I then want to spend hours playing a game with bunch of of the people that I don't really want much to do with in the first place? Sure, call me antisocial, but if I wanted some clowns to run around and be randomly incomptent in my games, I'd probably be playing Counter Strike.

Anyway, it seems to me that the "RPG" of MMORPG is really to suggest that they're the same form of "role-playing game" as the Diablos, the Path of Exiles, and what have you. Meaning really just action clickers with player-directed stat upgrades and mindblowing item grinding. Imagine running that Boddhi boss lady 500 times for good drops, totally makes sense, right? Or maybe you'd need to kill Lord Firecracker 1000 times to have a 5% chance of getting Carsomyr, right? Awesomesauce!!! (No, not really). Point is, anything and everything that makes any game more MMO-like is, in my opinion, hopeless garbage that needs to take a quick hop into the fires of Mount Doom. Just my opinon, of course.

Cyperpunk 77, indeed a total flop, but MP is hardly the reason. There's no MP that could save that game. It has a railroading and janky storyline that really isn't about the player character, its environment lacks interactivity, and there's really not a whole lot of character development for the protagonist. The dramatic majority of quests in the game are random fedex or assassination jobs that have zero impact on anything. The few times it matters whether you've done a quest, it doesn't matter at all how you did it, whether you went full murder hobo or peacenik. The itemization scheme of the game makes exploration moot, and while the city looks glorious, there's really not a whole lot of effort put into designing with verticality in mind. There's rarely ever any reward to climbing up and it's usually not possible to go below.

And in action terms, the AI is rubbish, the enemies are all the same with marginal visual differences, the weapon variety is lacking, and CDPR completely failed to set up truly "epic fights", in no small part because of how much impact character level has. Overlevel and you're nearly immortal and just pwning like a madman, underlevel and you get one-shotted from a random gunshot in your general direction. Reducing the game's problems to just being lack of MP, bad AI, and bugs is selling CDPR short in terms of the rank incompetence on display. The game isn't just bad, it's like if a clusterfuck met a disaster that it really liked and produced a whole family of purified awful.

Getting back to this topic, WotR. A pathfinder game, meaning a game using a crack-snorting variant of the D&D 3.5E ruleset. I'm sure it does get a lot of things right and from what I can tell, it looks like it does have some more Baldurian design elements, but I really don't like 3E that much, and I very much suspect that WotR late game gameplay will either be quite doable, if you've optimized the everlasting hell out of your character and your companions, or it will be completely insane, if you've taken a role-playing approach and just picked whatever "felt right". And 3E optimization is hard. I say that as someone with a university degree. Trying to figure out all the nuance in all the race and class options and the exact right time to take this or that class for access to this feat or that class skill is more work than I put into some of my classes, back in the day. That's frankly more work than I feel like putting into a game that I'm playing for fun. The alternative appears to be the cookie cutter approach, which gets old real fast. Do I want that in BG3? Not really. Were BG1 and 2 like that? Not at all.

Frankly, most of these games shouldn't be an inspiration for BG3 in any imaginable way. BG1, BG2, PST, maybe a few popular books on how to design user interfaces, maybe a book on human-computer interaction, and that's really all Larian needed to focus on. They are well versed in everything else they need to make a great game, after all. Frankly, I worry some times that Bethesda managed to come closer to the originals with their first modern Fallout sequel than Larian is aiming to do with BG3. And to be brutally honest, I am very worried about all the MP nonsense that appears to be part of the single player experience that Larian has in mind.