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.
Well put. I think this is a central conflic of Larian RPG that I find so frustrating. It is somewhere inbetween getting close, but failing to scratch either of my itches - neither a tight story with satisfying branching paths, nor emergent systemic sandbox.
Just to be clear, I don't think Larian should even aim at full on emergent sandbox with BG3. I suppose, my wish for final game would be for Larian to carefully look through their scripting and make sure it doesn't invalidate systems they put into the game. I had this very frustrating experience in D:OS2 where in act 3 there is a quest to either kill Mother Tree or Shadow Prince - I didn't like either so I killed both. The game didn't like that and as quest wasn't complete it didn't register the death of those characters. I don't want the same for BG3. My ideal would be something like Fallout1&2 - still purely handcrafted content, but it's content build to take advantage of player's toolset. As I mentioned Goblin Camp is a pretty good example. That said, the weird thing that I notices is that so far the only reactivity I encountered is with gobbo under the windmill. And that's a mechanic that have been around since day1. At the same time, in the game there is (are?) scripted fight where the combat doesn't end with death - like the gobbo with the ring. Wouldn't it make more sense to tie it to non-lethal attack? If you kill goblin straight up, camp goes hostile, if you knock him down you get to humiliate him without killing him?
If they can find more "gameplay" in the systems they already have then that would be even better. Stuff like inventory really bothers me - on one hand it's very granual system with every item being present in the inventory, and every character having their own inventory and weight limit. At the same time, any character can just access anyones else inventory at any time, and items can be just sent to unlimited stash, that you can access pretty much at any point by teleporting to the camp... so what is going on here?
