So I've watched the video from OP by now and to be 100% honest the dev speaking there already answered the most important question I think. He says himself " As a designer when I put those systems in the game, I don't know what story they will create. How they will work together. It could be very interesting or just fall flat in some situations".
TLDR: I don't think " systemic design" is better or worse. It's just different. And yes BG3 definitely didn't even stand next to a systemic design.
I don't have a single example to give about a story that was " written" or "created" by systems interactions in BG3. Simply because BG3 environment is a bit too small for this in my opinion in it's current state.
The main "system" generating situations on it's own is pickpocketing and Wormerine gave a quite good comment about that:
I am glad you mentioned this - this was the very first thing that discouraged me from being creative. I didn't mention it as I didn't try to steal the Idol for couple patches now (at least early on one could cheese it though container exploit) but on my initial run I bought potion of invisibility, stocked up on arrows of darkness, performed perfect heist - and guards run up straight to me. Very disappointing.
Pickpocketing in general is just odd to me. They make sure that all items are there in the inventory to be pickpocketed, they have scripted reactions for when you the characters should give you that thing and realized the thing was stolen, they even made a big deal of you being able to steal the explosive barrel in the forge - but none of it feels good to me. It's very meta. I don't think BG3 is good in giving an objective, and allowing players to use their toolkit to solve the problem. It's more like there is linear story progression, but then they allow you to break it. That's not fun. At least not to me.
The way I see it stealing an object marked as " artifact" for a faction could/should branch to few outcomes once the AI realises the item is missing. Maybe the artifact could be sylvanas idol for druids but it could be just a very expensive item if you're stealing from a simply peasant.
A) Looking for the guy responsible( as in starting a patrol sequence).
B) Starting a "retrieve " quest.
C) Setting up more guards in the city due to the recent crime.
In some very specific situations like the sylvanas idol if " default" AI reactions don't give a solution it could lead to pre-defined/ scripted results like tieflings "vanishing" from the grove forever.
Thing is that's just the question of what happens if you steal an item. What about...kidnapping kagha? Or just killing her? A murder right now == fight. But what if you manage to kill someone and the culprit is never found? Ai should/could have some ways to deal with it and act accordingly " by default".
But all those "generic" AI systems create a story of it's own. You don't need to invest that heavily in branching dialogues and pre-scripting reactions for every NPC to every possible situation.
Simple example: I can't use revivify scrolls on NPC's. If BG3 was 100% based on systemic interactions I could use a scroll on a given NPC and the AI around would make a quick check. Let's see how it could work for Kagha:
" Spell used in line of sight -> Revivify -> Target == [X ] -> Relation to X? -> If enemy (girl being killed at the grove by Kagha) -> Relation to spell user == enemy's ally -> Choose reaction[kill, ban from city,force to 'reverse' action]".
You could have a decision tree like this created for each and every spell working together with the decision tree above. If user unknown -> Use existing solutions to try to find the user. Is spell reversible by using a different action?Force player to use it. Etc etc.
And then, on top of all those systems. Somewhere in between. Have a couple of scripted dialogues to the story you want to tell.
But here's the issue. Larian designers have a very specific story in mind. And they write an insane amount of them through branching dialogues trees and trying to predict every possible scenario. So naturally sooner or later those scenarios will be limited.
BG3 could very theoretically try to go in a "systemic" direction but with how heavily they went into scripting AI reactions per character and per quest it makes absolutely 0 sense to try to force those systems on top of it in my opinion.
It's just a very different philosophy to make games and it's not necessarily better. Especially in my Kagha example above it shows quite clearly that making close up dialogues for everything is the first major fuckup for a systemic design : You would now need recorded dialogues for everyone with a different voice so the entire "systemic " side of things goes to shit. You now need to predict every outcome for every character and record it making the entire ideology invalid. So yeah. There are some limitations to impose on yourself when it comes to game design if you want to make the game revolve 100% around systems and not situations you script yourself.
And that dialogue issues also points at a different "problem" systemic games might have. They kinda flatten out some characters to subjugate them to infinite possibilities to their behaviour. Possibilities no one bothers to predict since there's just too many permutations. The only way to make a character feel "unique" in those circumstances is by making him ignore those systems.
Simplest example: Player's party. They ignore those systems. Simply because they have a very specific goal to achieve.
Even better : In bg3 you have Halsim. He ignores the fact you murdered kagha. He just plainly doesn't give a single fuck simply because he has more important things to deal with like telling you the rest of the story. If he was present at the grove he should by all logic become your enemy if you killed everyone there. But no, he doesn't care. And he simply can't care.
I mentioned Kenshi in my previous post. It's a game relying 100% on existing systems creating a story for the player. It has a few unique characters thought. It's a very low budget game with it's own limitations but what point would there be in making all characters in this game fully voiced and have some kind of insane branching quests behind them if the systems make it so all of them can die in a random moment in time because of random spawns and attacks?
( For those who didn't play the game ... All factions in the game have leaders. Those leaders reside in cities and have unique[very short and simple] dialogues. Those cities get attacked on regular basis. The leader can die at any moment even if you never met him causing some massive changes on the world map. It's not very probable that it happens without player's interaction...but it can).
If Larian was making kenshi those leaders would be most likely killable by player's hand for instance but at no point they could die randomly without the player knowing about it. Simply because too much work would go into his quests.
