Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General The Game Fails to Present a Compelling Setting

Simply put, I've gone through a large chunk of act one and I feel as though the game has done little to nothing to really introduce me to the setting of Faerun.

As someone whose knowledge of the setting is only gleaned via the players manual and snippets I've gotten from the forum, I don't actually know very much about the setting at all. I can make reasonable guesses, but I don't know much. The game seems almost allergic to giving us clear worldbuilding. And that's to the game's detriment I feel. Obviously we shouldn't get long, dull info dumps, but we know virtually nothing about the world beyond this nameless area. I have no sense for what's normal, in the world. For instance, we're dealing with the Hells a lot in some form or another. Should I as a player assume that the Hells are a common foe for adventurers? What about this talk of Elturel being dragged into the Hells? Should I assume that that's something at all common? I assume it's uncommon, but how uncommon? Is it almost unheard of? Or is it like a natural disaster? Something rare, but common enough that everyone's at least familiar with the concept, even if they've never interacted with someone who's experienced it first hand. What about druids? How common are druids? Based on act one, I would assume that druids are a thing that everyone knows about, though most people haven't ever actually met one. Gale talks about Shadow Weave, but what actually is that? Aunt Nettie can potentially tell us the tadpole is influenced by netherese magic, but what is that? Why can't we ask Gale about it?

This goes beyond just broad questions of baseline normality. Our characters are supposedly meant to be from Baldur's Gate, but we know next to nothing about the place that the person we're playing as is supposedly from. And yet we have a fellow Baldurian in our party that we could talk about the place with. We don't know anything about Waterdeep either, when Gale seems the type who would happily talk our ears off about the place. However we do get a loving description of the Astral Plane from Lae'zel.

Compare that to something like Dragon Age: Inquisition. You get dropped in the thick of things, but after a handful of hours playing, you get an understanding of what's going on around you. And by the time you get to Haven and go around there for a bit, you should have a sense of what the baseline normal of Thedas is. Then there's Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. You spend your first few minutes there getting introduced to the setting in surprisingly subtle ways. You learn that demons are a threat, but they're a localized one, and that the city feels they have it under control. You're injured and you meet someone who uses divine magic to heal you. As they do so they say prayers, so you know that magic has some sort of connection to the gods. And you get a few minutes to see a section of the city and get a feel for it before the crazy stuff happens. And after you get safe finally, you can talk to your companions and learn more about the world through them. Not to mention talking to various NPCs.

Am I the only one who feels this way? The game just doesn't seem interested in actually conveying information about its setting and I hope that changes.

No you are absolutely not alone in thinking this and I believe this been discussed in these forums in and amongst other related issues, such as immersion and creating a coherent game world. I suspect what little understanding I have of the BG3/D&D setting is as a result of playing the original BG and Iceland Dale games circa 20 years ago so I have no idea what a newcomer would make of it all. And frankly at the end of Act 1 I was no closer to understanding who or what The Absolute is...eventually I just stopped caring, which was in marked contrast to my experience with the previous games.

It's the small details which make a game world believable and reveal to the player incrementally the lore, history, characters etc. in a game universe. When you start a game flying through the Hells on an alien ship with no idea why you're there and are then catapulted from said ship when it explodes and are suddenly suspended a matter of feet above the ground before hitting it...well that's an awful lot to ingest. Nevermind all the crazy info thrown at us from our outlandish companions, all these different Gods and Demons they'e involved with...ironically it is almost too much information but does little to actually ground us in the here and now ie. the nuts and bolts of a believable game world. It's like the mundane aspects of what make a game world work are overlooked in favour of the rule of cool, anything goes, explosions and dragons etc.

Personally I feel that Larian do not have a solid handle on how to create a D&D game worthy of its predecessors; it's like they are constantly trying to fit round pegs into square holes because their previous experience has always involved working with round pegs. It might well turn out to be a decent game in its own right no doubt but I felt like it lacks direction and is trying to be too many things.

Yup. I am still not 100% if it's problem of assumed knowledge, or just Larian's worldbuilding is that sloppy. Hopefully it will get better on release, once Larian has whole content to work with.

Ive suggested they could use AC Valhalla's Boat Trips, there you can ask them to sing or tell stories. Everybody knows, the best stuff is made of stories and songs. Lets say theres amazing Gladiator, someone is gonna make a story. Or some Adventurer bangs girls left and right, "lets make a song". Ive always found it funny, devs spend so much time making books and all kind of text, best stories are not in the books.

While Im it, I think it would be damn fun, if player does something, next time you listen a story, its about you. One of the main Character, could become really famous and others envy him. Astarion could become real Legend, and Gale is pissed off.

Larian could be more spontaneous. Its tabletop vibe.

Sorry, people talk about songs and tales of fame and adventure, and my mind just goes to the first Fable game, where the bard had custom poems and songs related to all of your in game deeds that you could pay him to sing about ^.^ It was adorable!

Dark Horse is going to love this game. They'll be able to make a 36 hour long "The History of Faerun" comic to explain the backstory of Faerun for people that have never played any of the games set in the setting.

I don't have the game yet, but I can certainly see the point here. I definitely do not want to read a 4-page, in-game book to get a sense of the local history. But at the same time, the local stories need to be told somehow. I thought the bartender/tavern chat was a great thing to have in the original Baldur's Gate, just like in a D&D module. But in my first try at the Friendly Arms Inn, I got drunk from five golden meads, never got any real information, and then had to go to bed. They set the cups threshold way too high and ruined the feature. I never tried it again.

"Say there Bluffer, put up a dram to soothe me dusty throat. And while yer at it, 'afore I get clear this darkmans, pray tell, where can a willing ear with a rum bung be told of the place called ... City of Brass, eh now?"

They're likely to say "The City of what now?" to that query, since we're not on the elemental plane of fire, and we're not at a mage's conclave, where someone might know anything. "Local stories" are just that, local. To pull one example from the OP, news about Waterdeep wouldn't be local. I live in the central US, that would be like me going to a bar and expecting to get gossip about things in Tokyo. Gale has a lot of exposition, about the Weave, and Mystra, because those are the things that consume his thoughts. I have no idea what kinds of conversations are going to be possible in Act 2, or in Act 3. Nobody does, but it's automatically "we're not going to learn anything about it".

In regard to actual local stories, we do get information. It does require doing some reading, and chatting up various NPCs, though, as opposed to being spoon fed the information. One of the iterations of this thread went on for pages because the entirety of the Pantheon wasn't laid out in the prologue, because SH is a Shar worshipper. Hence my previous comment, because in order to "catch up" with "the story so far", there would have to be a resource that covers nearly 40 years of material, from 1st Edition forward, so that someone that's never played, or isn't a lore junky, will be "up to speed". All of this material is available, even in updated "you don't need to read anything but this" formats, for the current edition of the game, and I'm not talking about BG 3 here, but Dungeons and Dragons in general, but expecting someone that wants to know these things to actually look it up is a bad thing.

Someone sitting down to talk with me is going to be disappointed if they're looking for news about where I live. I'll talk about games, and my motorcycle until the cows come home, but I won't be talking much about the city I live in, it's not prominent in my experience, it's just a backdrop for the things that are important to me. So, when I see a character in a game doing it, I'm not surprised, in fact, if I hadn't read about it here, I wouldn't have even noticed. If Waterdeep figures prominently later, I expect we'll get some exposition, but I don't expect we'll get 40 years of "what came before", but instead that we'll get information pertinent to what we're doing. A good example would be the Chanters in Candlekeep in BG, doing the "The Lord of Murder" chant. I had no idea that it was relevant to me in my first playthrough. I was in the dark about a lot of things Faerun back then. But I didn't hit a forum looking to complain that nobody laid out the full story in the prologue.

+1 OP!!

The thing that bugs me the most about the game is that we don't get a good sense of what our character SHOULD know. I don't expect the game to lay out everything about the setting from the start, but I do think that as a player, by this point in ACT ONE, I should grasp what's normal for the setting and understand a bit about it. Your point about the pantheon for example. It would be bad writing to just dump all the information about the pantheon all at once for the player. But we encounter a lot of Selune-related things in the game. It'd be nice to know if she's a common goddess that most people would know about, or if she's obscure and it's meaningful that there are a lot of temples to her in this region. It doesn't even have to be conveyed directly through the game. We actually get a good example of another neat way games can give exposition via a conversation with Lae'zel. I can't remember the exact wording, but when we talk to her, our dialogue choices subtly get across that githyanki are rare, and encountering one is unusual even if your character HAS met one before. That's a subtle type of worldbuilding that only games can really give. Compare that to Shadowheart's revelation that she's a Shar worshipper. The reaction options we get there all seem to assume we as a character at least know the common, for lack of a better term, "pop-culture osmosis" opinion of Shar that would lead our character to have an opinion of their own about her.

To bring up another example you mentioned, that "lord of murder" chant. That's purposeful foreshadowing, giving you infomration without context, so that when we do get that context later, we have an emotional reaction and a sense of catharsis brought about by realization. One equivalent of that in this game would probably be the way our character is saved from falling out of the Nautiloid. We don't know why, but we're not supposed to know, specifically because learning that is meant to create a reaction. To contrast that...are the hells a common problem in this world? Based on context clues, I would assume that yes, hell and devils are a significant threat to the world, even if they're a threat that not a lot of common folk would need to worry about consistently. To give an example of when the game does this sort of thing right, we have Aunt Nettie. She's a hag. The game doesn't tell us what a hag is, but it doesn't need to. It's clear from context that a hag is the setting's take on the idea of the evil old witch that will make bargains and hand out curses. I assume there's more to them than that, but I don't need to know anymore to understand her place in the story, and if I want to know more, then I'll go look it up online.

You mention that the idea of expecting someone who wants to know the lore of the world to look it up isn't a bad thing, and I agree. But the question is why they're looking it up. If people see hints of a bunch of things that are extraneous to the experience of the game and think "oh this sounds cool, I want to learn more" then the game has done a good job, it's presented a cool setting that people care about. But if a decent chunk of players, particularly players new to D&D or just the setting of Faerun, feel the need to look stuff up just to understand the story being presented to them, then the game's writing has failed. I don't feel interested in the setting, I feel detatched from it, and my character feels detatched from the setting as a result.

+1 to the OP.

I've only played a bit (18h), but so far the game has failed to make me care. The only "compelling" thread I've seen so far is the tadpole, but my understanding is that there is no real urgency to get rid of it...

I wasn't so hot on Larian doing a Baldur's gate game, and EA has not made me more optimistic.

If the graphics are, by consensus, the only true positive of this game, what else is there?

(sure sure, EA, Covid and still a lot of development to do)

Must the game explain itself? It's a third installment in a series, taking place in an established setting. A lot has changed since BG1 and 2, but the basic knowledge (e.g. about Baldur's Gate the city) from those games is still applicable to BG3. You don't pick up a random adventure module and expect it to explain every minute detail, like how common druids are, about its world.

The counterexamples you give are quite confusing. Inquisition has a bombastic opening, and I can't see how anything after that will give you a sense of what's normal in the setting if you're coming into it completely blank. The whole game is nothing but a mess of extraordinary circumstances and factions you have little context for if you're not reading the codex. Not helping the situation is the general sloppiness of the plot: for example, was the conflict between the mages and the templars really that important if it's resolved practically offscreen? Overall, Inquisition is not a game I'd recommend anyone to go into blind (or at all, to be honest), it needs at least the context of Origins, where all the factions and their basic dilemmas are showcased.

Wrath, on the other hand, is a very straightforward story. A person with minimal knowledge of basic tropes will be able to grasp it. Sword & sorcery, demons = bad, demons are attacking, kill demons. Everything beyond that is fluff, but even so, a good 70% of dialogue in Wrath is expository in nature. You'll be asking everyone who, what, where, when, and why over and over, and maybe if you're lucky you'll get an alignment option to actually roleplay. It becomes absurd at times, how you can stand in the middle of a field and go down a list of questions like an automaton, interrogating a demon whose only desire is to tear you apart and defile the remains. He has no reason to answer, yet for some reason he does. It's very mechanical, hardly something to emulate.

I understand that for a lot of people BG3 is going to be their first BG game, and probably their first DnD game, but I can't say that modeling dialogue to cater to people who pick up the third book in a series and then act surprised when they don't understand what's going on in the world is a good idea. A baseline level of knowledge has to be assumed.

I wouldn't classify BG3 as the 3rd installment in a series. Yes, technically it has "3" in the title, but it seems to be an entirely separate plot a century+ after the original saga, 3 whole editions later (each of which involves significant changes to the D&D world). In movie terms, I'd call it a reboot instead of a sequel, and reboots are supposed to stand on their own merits and not require watchers to know much about the settings/characters.

Considering the game seems to be it's own thing more then continuation of BG1&2 then I would say yes. Even if it was direct sequel it is a sequel 20 years after the original. And it's not that there has been many good DnD games in a while. Expecting players to remember or even play 20 years old games, and be familiar with a setting with little presence in PC gaming would be a mistake. DnD is not exactly Star Wars.

And I don't think BG3 needs to dump exposition about everything, but it shouldn't throw names and terms left and right and expect for it to make any impressions. Much have been said about Shar (a god which in spite of playing BG1&2 and all other DnD cRPGs I know nothing about) and Shadowhearts confusing reveal. To see how it can be done well: see BG2 and the introduction of Viconia. If she marely showed up and expected to me to be shocked that she is a drow it wouldn't work for me - I didn't know what drow is, when I played that game. Instead we have a situation that introduces her, and the surface dwellers attitude toward her. It also created a foundation for when we ourself go to drow settlement. Imagine Witcher3, which would just expect everyone to read all the books and play two previous games to enjoy it.

It's fine to use existing lore to add texture to the world, and include details that only initiated will get. What we have in BG3 is lack of set up or context.

EDIT: I should also add that BG3 runs into a problem of not being faithful to the setting. That's a bit of a strawman argument, but if monsters I know from BG1&2 are not recognisable in BG3, what else has changed?

There was also a valid argument about BG II Shadows of Amn not being tied to the setting of the original Baldur's Gate. However, there was one area common to both BG I & BG II ... anyone remember? ... Candlekeep. In BG II it was only in the dream sequences, but it did appear quite often and on into Throne of Bhaal. That was the tie-in in terms of a setting continuity, and it also served to keep the central theme of "coin on edge" going. If BG III is really a thematic successor to the older series, then I think somehow Candlekeep needs to be brought into play.

On the other hand, that's probably not too exciting when compared to possible new areas like the City of Brass!

There's too much of a disconnect.

This is where I wish there was more text to the game. Holding the cursor over certain things would give us a popup with a short description of them. Would be especially useful for the deities and maybe the locations as well. People shouldn't be expected to do external research just to understand basic things about the world.

Only if we have the option to silence them in some manner. Some of us want to have the freedom of anonymity. Hate the games where we are forced to have everyone know who we are.

Always +1

If this were some standalone IP, I'd agree 100%. The problem is, "the world" is Dungeons and Dragons, not just BG 3. There are 10s of thousands of stories that are part of "the world" that may not have any impact at all on BG 3, and every time I see "there's a disconnect", I wholeheartedly agree, there is a disconnect. People are always trying to disconnect BG 3 from the thousands of years of history in the Forgotten Realms. Or, more accurately I guess, they want that history outlined for them, because this is the "assumed knowledge" that the characters have, or that some of them will have. In the case of people that have no knowledge at all about the setting, yes, they should be hitting "outside" resources, because the outline could be a real slog to sit through.

If there's a constant stream of people wanting the game to give them more information on the setting, then I would take that as meaning the game has failed to give enough information. We also definitely don't need to know all those thousands of years of history either. Let me use Pathfinder as an example again. I've never played a game of Pathfinder. I've at least played a few sessions of D&D and read a bit of 5e setting stuff. But the only thing I know about the Pathfinder setting comes from context clues based on the similarities between D&D and Pathfinder. Yet neither of the Owlcat Pathfinder games left me feeling confused or unmoored from the setting the way that BG3 has.

Also, it's true that this is the third entry in a series, but it's a third entry that's coming about two decades after the last entry. If it were a book or even a movie I would fully agree that people should experience the first entries before coming to BG3, but this presses up against a rather unique problem that I think only games have. After a certain point, old games can get less enjoyable to play, as gaming conventions grow more streamlined, refinements are made and new quality of life inclusions become the norm. I tried playing the two Knights of the Old Republic games and I couldn't stick with them. Hell, the first Mass Effect game is one I don't enjoy revisiting because I find it more of a slog to go to. So for a lot of people new to Baldur's Gate, going back to play the first two games would be an unpleasant experience in the way going back and reading the first books in a series wouldn't be. Plus BG3 is wildly changing things from those first two games anyway, and it doesn't seem to be a direct sequal (maybe there will be a twist that reveals it actually is, we don't know yet) so it makes even more sense for BG3 to be more of an entrypoint for new players.