It’s like the inn that burns for days after the goblins ostensibly sacked it. It makes no sense in hindsight, but that doesn’t matter to the experience.
It most certainly does. [...] It makes it a BAD experience, completely lacking in setting immersion, which constantly reminds you that it is a video game every few seconds.
The first time I found the "Everburn Inn", I must admit I was a little confused as to the timeline. I thought maybe a band of goblins from outside the goblin encampment had just attacked the inn, but then realised it was a set-piece that was just waiting to be found. I agree it felt video-gamey, but, y'know,
it's a video game. Once I had knocked the door down and started to find my way among the spreading flames, the larger context didn't matter any more. It was a thrilling experience in itself which contributed to my overall good impression of the game.
At least, that's my point of view, which you address later in your post:
The people who don't pay attention to setting immersion aren't going to notice whether the directions as described match up with the physical directions required - they're just playing a video game, so it WON'T really matter to their experience of the game one way or the other. To the people who do pay attention to these things, who prefer to be immersed in the story and the setting and not pulled out of it by gamey elements that regularly break that immersion... it WILL matter to their game experience.
If you have two groups of people, one of which WON'T mind either way, and one of which WILL, then you HAVE got an option that makes both parties happy - and you should do it that way, or in this case, fix the issue.
I agree with you on the principle. From what I can see, though, Larian do not.
BG3 is full of gamey elements that stick out until you give up and stop thinking about them. They've been well documented on this very forum. It could be a stylistic choice meant to thematically underline the unreality of the story, but I've started to think that it's purely driven by game design. The more I played BG3, the more I accepted that it's a theme park built for my benefit rather than a coherent world.
I don't know if that's good or bad. One one hand, there are worst things for a game to be than "optimized for fun". On the other, I'm not sure the people in this forum are the target audience for BG3.
We're the kind of people who write hundreds, if not thousands of words on a single topic, mulling it over ad nauseam to make sense of it. Larian, by contrast, relies above all on "Rule of Cool", using ellipses, shortcuts and hand-waves to make the experience compelling. I don't know if those two visions can really mesh and keep in line with Larian's vision for a blockbuster adventure full of action and intrigue.
...I need to mull it over.
