Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Rings of Power Review - And How It Relates to BG3

OK. So I just finished watching the second episode of Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power. I gotta say, I was actually VERY impressed. This is crazy to me because I expected it to suck moldy lemons since so many were bashing it for not staying true to Tolkien. I'm actually eagerly waiting for episode 3, and I thought to myself while watching it that this is the best D&Dish show I've ever seen. Frankly, it was a REAL fantasy, not some goofy, silly, cheesy joke of a fantasy like what D&D keeps producing in terms of movies and such. I have actually enjoyed RoP a lot mainly because I feel like finally they are branching out from the mainstream LotR story. FINALLY, they aren't dwelling in the Third Age at the end of the era when Sauron and the One Ring are a thing and Aragorn and Frodo, etc. They are branching out to the full larger world of Middle-Earth that Tolkien was creating, and they aren't even just sticking with the stories told in the Silmarilion. They're touching on those stories, but they're branching out to tell additional stories that have never been told. ORIGINAL STORY! What a concept in today's world where all people ever do is regurgitate the stories already told from the 80s or before.

So yeah. This is going to create lots of backlash. I'm fully aware, but I don't care. I thought it would be good to create a thread where people can express their opinions about the Rings of Power and also how it relates to BG3.

How does it relate to BG3? Besides the "Elves look like humans with pointy ears" debate which partially stems from the fact that LotR elves are frequently depicted as roughly pretty humans with pointy ears, I found a few other things that relate. Feel free to add more.

1. Dwarves look and act like dwarves. Ah! It was refreshing to see more dwarves that look and act like dwarves - not like Thorin and company in the Hobbit movie. I don't know what they were thinking, but they looked like short humans and acted like them too. I didn't feel that most of them were actually dwarves. In RoP, they seemed more like actual dwarves, and Prince Durin's wife really won me over. I thought, "Finally, a dwarf woman who has all the classic dwarf woman characteristics including a bit of hair running down from her sideburns along her chin. And yet, I thought they didn't overdo it, like some do. She still looked like a good-looking dwarf woman. And I thought she did the part very well.

2. Hobbits. Please, Larian. Even RoP has halflings that look more like how halflings are supposed to look. The main Hobbit girl is more like what I think Niara would approve of for a base halfling model in BG3. Her best friend is also a HUGE improvement to what we're looking at for models in BG3. Their proportions are WAY better for all Hobbits in RoP - at least in my opinion.

3. Lore. What are your thoughts about RoP's interpretations of Tolkien's lore. I, personally, thought they did a pretty good job. I noticed a few items that I thought were a bit off, but for the most part I thought they stayed relatively true. For example, I liked how the dwarves kept bringing up Aule. I liked how Elrond brought up the Silmaril and talked about their forging and what they actually were. I liked how Galadriel and her company went into the Forodwaith and explored one of Morgoth's ancient strongholds. I liked how the elves were treated by humans like arrogant overlords, and the humans of Middle Earth were quite happy that the elves were leaving. I wasn't bothered that they took maybe a few liberties. It was actually refreshing. Similarly, Larian has taken a few liberties with BG3 instead of staying true 100% to established lore - such as ceremorphosis and its process. Instead of making a point to say that a person with a tadpole won't even be themselves after a few hours with a typical transformation, but their brain is completely consumed and so is their very life, they make it sound as if the victim will remain aware of who they are the entire seven days. Some find this to be just as refreshing. I, for one, think RoP held more true to established lore - so far anyway - than Larian is, but I do think Larian is doing a pretty good job themselves. I've actually been fairly impressed overall with Larian's lore. Again, there are a few things I've picked apart, but overall - so far - they've done fairly well at staying true to the source.

Anyway, that should be enough to get the ball rolling, especially since I'm sure you all don't need much to get you going on this topic. Some are going to berate me for even saying that I even remotely enjoyed RoP, and I'm sure I'll get a lot of "Can you even call yourself a Tolkien fan?" kinda comments. I'm sure I'll also get a lot of "BG3's lore SUCKS, man! How can you even remotely say it's good." But whatever. I enjoyed RoP, and I hope it continues to get better and better as they continue it. Similarly, I hope BG3 gets better and better as they continue it.

I am always happy to see a new fantasy or sci-fi show!😊

I’ll just repost from the elf thread that I love the elven armor in RoP! Maybe they could add some great elven armor in BG3 as well.

I'm very generous on this one, as I've been waiting the better part of my entire adult life to watch something like this, on this scale, even if it isn't exactly the Silmarillion. It's still totally doing what it needs to for me. I honestly find it extremely hard to be disappointed in really anything about it, and found it kind of odd to hear of others not digging on it? They've completely nailed the Alan Lee visual aesthetic as far as I'm concerned. Morfydd as Galadriel reminded me of a John Duncun mural or something, with the glowing sidhe vibes that I'd expect from Tolkien elves. I really don't mind them looking more human as others seem to.

When I read the Silmarillion in highschool I always got an impression that the Eldar were much more in line with what we're seeing there in RoP than the popular D&D Elves of FR or Dragonlance or whatever. The fact that they committed to 5 seasons right away is also pretty impressive. I think some of the backlash is probably being amplified, and perhaps even being directed by bad faith actors to score cheap shots, though I guess that'd be kind of impossible for me to tell. Not to dismiss valid criticism here, as I'm sure it's out there, but you just get the sense like how could anyone be truly that put off by it? I mean hell, if you'd have told me at age 15 that I'd get not only a pretty kickass series of LotR films, but then some second Age action as well two decades on, with like a billion dollar budget? I'd never have believed it. I didn't think I'd get a solid Dune either, which is a different subject I guess, but still, it's like wow. I'll just eat my popcorn and be super happy on this one lol. Especially cause I thought the Hobbit films were pretty weak, and I figured that might be the end of the road. But then surprise, here comes this one.

I think they just needed an in, and after they got it they could probably go back and do the Black Sword of Nargothrond or Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin and some of that material maybe. I mean it seems like they have a bit more goodwill from the estate than I expected at least. There's a lot to build off once it's got some legs to stand on, but I guess some people just want to see it all kneecapped and crashed to burn.

ps. sorry forgot to mention BG3 there I guess lol, but yeah, I like the Harfoots for a Halfling look a bit more than what we've got going currently in this game. I still hope for some work done in that department. They're just not small enough in BG3 for me hehe. Dwarves seemed good to me. I was stoked to see them in masks too!!! As for the Elves, I think I already know what we're likely to get, and I'm not going to grumble about it overmuch. For BG3 I'd like to see them provide something a bit more Alien to cover the D&D bases, but it's not the biggest hang up for me. I liked that greenman leaf face armor too! All the armor in that show is looking pretty aces so far. Anyhow, just wanted to chime in on a positive note, since I didn't hate it, and quite the opposite hehe.
Best

Elk

Yes! More armor and equipment that is race related. The Sharran armor is good, but I'd like to see some dwarven weapons, elven armor, etc. I think that'd be really cool.

Oh, and they need a Halsin elf in RoP. lol. That would make it perfect.

Exactly!!!🐻🐻🐻

I read a lot of negative feedback on the show and it was really hard to stay open-minded about it when I started watching. I am by no means a hardcore Tolkien fan or even a fan at all, but I was initially put off by the reviews that made a huge emphasis on the wokeness of the series. But after giving it a try I can surely tell that there is no such message at least in the first 2 episodes. I guess some visual markers triggered a reaction in some individuals, leading to some sort of rushed points made. I guess it just was a convenient scapegoat and it happened to be one because of an incredibly poor marketing that highlighted wrong things. My thoughts:

- Visually I liked it. It is not a breakthrough by all means, but it is pretty and flashy.
- It sticks with the formula of several separate stories/povs which I think worked poorly. The pacing felt incredibly unstable to me - sometimes rushed (Elf/Healer), sometimes slow (Harfoot/Wizard). In LotR everything felt so organic because the plot started as a whole and then broke down into several smaller ones. Here it sometimes feels like a mess.
- The exposition itself was not my cup of tea, it tried to appear interesting through plot-driving events, not through interesting writing or characterization.
- I liked Elrond and Durin plot in all aspects, it was not spectacular, but it was very good. Actors did a real job of building up their characters and solid writing helped as well. I liked Disa as well, I think she did a pretty good job as an actress portraying a female dwarf princess.
- I didn't like Elf/Healer plot and I completely disliked Galadriel's plot. The actress did such a poor job, she slipped through half the scenes with a poker face, this resulted in a shallow depiction of a character, a very poor introduction, imo. In the Elf/Healer plot the depiction of human village was very uninspired, there were no mood shots, humans are wearing weird sheepskin coats and half-torn rags and act like morons with 1 brain cell, it all looks so cheap and made-up, idk.
- Contrary to the human costumes, I liked how they did elven armor and weapons a lot, they really felt very light yet hard to penetrate. Costume quality varies - from very poor to spectacular.
- A racial mix felt really weird, because the show clearly depicts that there are some proto races present (harfoots, petikanthropus retarded humans). It is not logical that one area in middle earth historically formed such racial variety. This is what haters interpreted as wokeness, I guess? But to me it is just a poor world building. It is harder to believe in a world like this.

One minute the show is amazing, the next minute it is horrible, it really feels like a patchwork blanket. I'd give it 5/10 for now.

I agree that creative liberties can be a good thing and Larian do a good job with BG3 as of now. I think those are good parallels to showcase, thank you GM4Him.

I thought the first two episodes were promising, and looked fantastic. True, many of the elves in it don’t really fit my mental image of elves, including Galadriel, but I’m sure I’ll get over it. And I also really liked the look of the dwarves and hobbits and other characters.

I’ll definitely keep watching to see how it goes, but while I am hopeful at this stage think it could go either way. For me, it’s going to depend on how they tie together the currently disparate stories and grow the characters.

I can’t comment on the lore, because while I read The Hobbit and LotR when I was young (and the LotR text-based adventure might have been my first cRPG ), and I’m a fantasy buff more generally, I somehow never got on with Tolkien’s writing. I actually preferred the films, even the Hobbit ones <ducks>.

Given what I have heard about Galadriel and Finrod in Ring's of Power, I have decided to just re-read the Silmarillion instead. The characters depicted in RoP are so completely detached from their inspirations that I will not be spending any time on it.

My hope now (slim though it is) is to live long enough for the Silmarillion reach public domain, when I am sure somebody not owned by a soulless corporation will be able to do an adaptation that does not urinate on the characters that Tolkien wrote.

Note that I am not totally against adapting books to the screen. I thought that Jackson did a reasonably good job with LotR, and so far I quite like the Netflix adaptation of Sandman. Its just that here the changes to Galadriel and Finrod are egregious and pointless. Tell a story in a different (and cheaper!) universe if you are going to change this much!

It's the elves that are the sticking point for me, is it too much to ask for people hundreds of years old to behave a little more demure?
Otherwise the two episodes I've seen have been pretty positive, if a little slow going. I think meeting the Dwar...s was my favorite part, though I was half expecting some clever resolution to the rock smashing challenge.

I don't think a thing about it will relate to BG3, apart from what has already been said in the 'Elves aren't Elves' thread

The writing is ok for a generalist fantasy series as I think are the actors but the show does not project Tolkien/middle earth to me. The Dwarfs were well done but the whole "You never came to my Wedding/Birthing event" was pure, mass produced cheese. Does it relate to BG3? Other than it being in a "fantasy" setting, I don't see many connections. I'm trying not to present the argument that they are both aimed at mass market consumers with a passing interest in the world. I think BG3 has way more ambition than that although it needs to be a crowd pleaser to make money so......

Coming from someone's whose main exposure to the LotR universe is the original movies, The Hobbit book, and then the first hobbit movie, the show seems...fine. Not great, but not terrible. The first episode was interesting enough and visually impressive. The second episode, however, really started showing its cracks. The pacing of the different PoVs was at times poor, as was the writing (e.g., everything involving the rafts, the needless fight scene in the Healer's house, the 2 cliffhangers in a row at the end of the episode). Extrapolating forward, I worry that I'll spend a lot of time getting tired and/or frustrated with certain scenes/plotlines, which will drag me out of enjoying the show.

The fantasy races seem fine. Elves are arrogant, stoic, and easily stuck in their ways. Dwarves are also arrogant, but jovial too with a hint of cunning/ruthlessness. Hobbits are reclusive and full of life. Wizards are weird. Humans are...humans, prone to paranoia and violence. The show's solution to (earth)-race is practically the perfect one: just put people of color in roles and don't comment on it in-universe. The other options would be to: a.) create specific societies of single earth-races for each fantasy-race (e.g., the black human society, the white humans, the middle-eastern humans; and similar for all fantasy races) or b.) only cast a single-earth race for some/all fantasy-races (e.g., all elves are white; possibly everyone is white).

It'll be interesting to see how the audience & critic reviews change as time passes and the dominant opinions (hopefully) become more based on the actual show content, rather than how well it matches with Tolkien's lore and outrage about black elves. Female dwarves should have beards though; fight me.

These first two episodes were good enough for me to keep watching. Some of the scenes were fairly ponderous, with long visual sequences. I am not against sweeping visuals when they enhance a mood or feeling, but many times I found myself wondering, "Why are they showing this?" Some of the Harfoot and Dwarf comedic dialogs were gimmicky and a little too strained for my taste, but I appreciate the attempt.

I guess my biggest thematic concern right now is how they develop the motives of the elves. Tolkien makes it clear that many immortal elves succumb to despair because they live in an ever-changing world where things do not last. Shipping off to the island in the West was the ultimate surrender, and not a contest prize the way it was portrayed in this series. As Galadriel explained in LOTR, the Three Rings were made to primarily to stave off the passage of time and to preserve what the elves had built.

What I am really looking forward to is the Ents! Treebeard is my favorite LOTR character. I have a big old tree in my back yard ... I wonder ...

Am I the only person who thinks that the characters (as portrayed by the actors) sound a bit too...contemporary?

I don't really feel inclined to draw any comparisons between what are two distinct IP's, regardless of the shared fantasy elements and the obvious inspiration of LotR on D&D. Some good points were made here on the depictions of the fantasy races as a potential guideline for Larian's interpretation of the same D&D versions but at this stage I don't expect Larian to digress from their vision of said races.

As for the show itself, it didn't really look or feel like Middle Earth to me but I appreciate that is a subjective take. It seems to me that Jeff Bezos' obsession with having his own Game of Thrones is quite evident in this production.

Above all I felt the writing/dialogue was distinctly bad with this line from Galadriel being a prime example:


I mean, seriously? A race of ageless, eternal, ethereal creatures of great beauty, grace and wisdom and this is the line they give to one of the principle characters in the entire history of Middle Earth? Tolkien, that great lover of words , so much so that he invented fictional languages for fun and included them into his attempt at creating a mythology for The British Isles, borrowing heavily from Nordic mythology, amongst others, as inspiration.

I also thought the acting a bit wooden.

As for the casting, I'm only going to touch on that lightly because to have reservations about it is to be immediately tarnished as a racist and worse. I think there were ample ways they could have incorporated diversity into the cast without shoe-horning diversity into the fantasy races, mostly because Tolkien did write other ethnic humans into the world he created. I would have loved to have seen these other realms explored and could have provided ample room to look into the history of the South and other areas; people who eventually sided with Sauron in the Third Age. Surely not all of them were evil? Perhaps they were tricked or enslaved against their will? A fertile plot to create your own stories from if ever I heard one. I appreciate people will disagree with this and I'm fine with that.

My main take is that I would have loved for the source material to be a bit more respected.


I couldn't agree. I don't expect the writers of this show to have Tolkien's grasp of language and character but they could have at least attempted to pay homage in their portrayals.

There are two major things ruining our enjoyment of anything lately ...

1) Woke things stuffed everywhere ...
2) Seeing woke things stuffed everywhere, even tho they are not there ...

Huge Tolkien fan, have read LOTR every September for past 25 years (a tradition in my house), read Simarillion about 5 times (have spreadsheets and hand made maps), and poured over appendices before show came out.

Wish it was about Feanor (oh, how I needs that). Expected it to be garbage, was pleasantly surprised that it is pretty good! They are shoving 3500 years of events into a workable narrative, so I am being super forgiving. Missed opportunity not to show or reference the elven kinslaying…a few other things a bit cumbersome in the narrative. But overall, super excited to see more!

Also agree with Ragnarok’s post above. So sick of constant hating on everything from everyone on every side. Just happy to enjoy a new show tbh.

It feels like this thread is just talking about the rings of power and not Baldur's Gate III

I don't have much emotional investment in Forgotten Realms lore, so it is hard for me to connect BG3 to my distaste for Rings of Power.

Can't go wrong going back to the books. I'm not obsessed or anything lol



Honestly some of the film-criticisms mentioned above are quite valid, and I wouldn't exactly disagree, even if I'm still totally awash in good feelings about the show.

I mean this is coming from somebody who used to have to settle for stuff like Dragonslayer or half a Bakshi cartoon to get my rocks off, and now I got this?!

Like my pining inner-teenager would have to just slap myself if I came down on it too hard here.

I knew the show was going to be about Galadriel and a riff off the appendices more than the Silmarillion or the Middle-Earth Histories with those thousand year sweeps I adored so much. Galadriel is pretty major in the LotR, as one of the 3 women characters we get to read about in a virtual sea of men, but she gets only very selective mentions in the Silmarillion. Not making her out to be a Noldorin Smurfette here or anything, but compared to Melian or Luthien or Finduilas etc she's kind of a minor character there even among the Elven maids. Sure she crosses some grinding ice and gets in on the long line, but not exactly the biggest deal on the block there. I think Cate Blanchett cemented her more in the popular mind as the quintessential Eldar dame, and that's going to be hard to top. But I like how the Welsh gal played it, and where they're trying to take the concept. I'm pretty forgiving

Oh, yes of course, I was saying how much I look forward to seeing Ents in ... Baldur's Gate III.