Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous vs BG3

I think we need to be able to play to the end of BG3 before we can compare its writing to Wrath of the Righteous. The end could be awesome, or it could be a stinking cesspit. We won't know for sure until next year.

My main gripe with them was not the length, but rather how rigidly they were sewn into the timeline. Take Jubilost's quest, for example, where the answer to the riddle he is told becomes freaking obvious in the following chapter, but the game waits all the way until after the coronation to actually proceed with the questline. Between those nodes in the plotline they basically have static personalities, and you don't get any new dialogue options with them whatsoever, apart from the romance triggers. I would have loved to see them interact in the capital, for example, or for them to have bigger impact on the main plot (where the only characters that do that are the arbitrarily unkillable ones). Instead of having your treatment of companions affect them in some significant way, the game itself just punishes you for not looking after them enough / making wrong choices. You never get Bishoped, or Zevraned. They just get randomly killed in the penultimate act, as far as I could tell.

I agree that the companions just fall off the face of existence in Kingmaker especially because there are so many. You talk to them once, get their story and done except like Linzi or Tristian. I can't even remember the last time I did anything with most of them. They're just there.

In WotR, it's relatively the same, but not quite. There's a bit more companion development and interaction. Sure, Ember has fallen off the face of the planet for me, but I've clearly not unlocked her story yet. She's a total mystery. Although I've brought Selah with me on many quests, she's just there. The tiefling guy might be presently doing something interesting, but Sosiel is a snore. Lann seems interesting, and at least since the counsel started he's back to being interesting again. The noble snob guy at least has an interesting story so far that they aren't just revealing right away and Junio is fun. I love the hell knight gnome too, even if he is evil.

Ah, Regill. He's not evil though. He's pragmatic. He should have been tagged as LN, not LE. In many ways he's the male version of Valerie, except that Valerie can admit when something is wrong, morally, even though it's lawful.

At least when it comes to companions' missions it's better than Kingsmaker where you had to do their missions in one particular way.
You still have 1-2 options but it's better anyway.

I suppose that’s true, but to experience that 5 minutes one might have to go through 10+ loading screens (which were lengthy on my old machine) slowly slog through the world map, deal with multiple random events and rests, get to sort the kingdom management mess while you are at it etc. that’s a bigger Kingmaker problem, padding maybe 40hours of worthwhile content into 200h long slog.

Isn't all this discussion about characters and writing ultimately somewhat subjective? I hear those of you who are less than impressed with the characters and writing in the Pathfinder games, and I would agree Owlcat's writing needs some improvement. But for me, Larian's writing, and their characters, are utterly attrocious. Most Larian characters and Larian dialogue writing feel like fingernails on a chalkboard. Furthermore, "liking" the characters in a game is not about the quantity of writing associated with those characters. Again for me, these charcaters in BG3, as I know them for now pending the final release of the game, are not at all memorable and also not at all likeable. I truly am not going to enjoy adventuring with any of them. By contrast, even though they were largely empty-suits, I still to this day find many of the characters from BG1 to be both memorable and likeable.

I don't believe so, but personally I don't have enough knowledge about writing to properly criticise anyones work.

You might not be able to get your opinions published in some esoteric journal, but I bet you can tell us whether or not you like it... and at the end of the day THAT is what matters.

I do have lots of writing experience, and any time you want readers engaged with characters, the worst thing you can do is tell the reader everything about that character up front. To draw in readers, you need to leave room for mystery. There needs to be some element of that character that entices you. If you reveal everything up front, readers pretty much say, "Oh. Ok. Their story is done. Next."

That's part of why it bothers me so much about Shadowheart and her armor. It screams Shar for those who know anything about Shar, and everything about her says Shar Cleric. Why not start with her trying to deceive you. Have her lie about her goddess and pretend she serves someone else?

While I don't think the companion writing in Pathfinder is the greatest, I do think a lot of the problems are design and structural. More so in Wrath than Kingmaker.

The companion content to game-time ratio is definitely a part of the issue. But the bigger issue for me is how that content is delivered. The PF games are pretty formulaic in how they stretch out the companion content across the game. The way almost every companion quest gets a few mini-quests spread across Acts, and are always structured (sometimes unnaturally) to have the player wait in between. This kills the momentum of many of the companion stories and the overall emotional experience. They essentially push the player to be passive about their companions' goals and motivations (i.e. "it's not really urgent, just wait"), and consequentially highlight how secondary those are to everything else that is going on.

For example (WoTR Seelah Spoilers):

Stretching the companion resolution into the final acts also means they get lost in the cascade of arcs and climaxes that comes from the main story. There are some big moments in Wrath, and I think having a bunch of the companion arcs resolving in parallel to those moments make them feel very inconsequential. Some of the companion stories do fit with the "waiting between Acts" format more naturally than others. But overall I think the format actually detrimental.

Overall, I do find the companions of Kingmaker more impactful than Wrath because they're better integrated structurally into the main plot.

Kingmaker Spoilers:

I didn't get to finish what I was going to say before so...

The big key to companions is working their story into the main story. This is something BG3 seems to be doing, and I like it. I mean, hopefully anyway.

The issue I think with Pathfinder is that their stories just don't matter. Their forgettable. When a companion quest actually does happen, you kind of feel like, "who are you again and why is this important?"

Good companion writing peppers character development throughout the entire story and weaves it into the main story.

Take some of the characters from KOTOR. As you go, you learn a little more about each one here and there. HK-47s story, for example, isn't just dumped on you, and it's woven into the whole plot. Same with and especially Carth and Bastilla. Little by little you find out more, and if you do their companion quests you unlock more AND they open up to you more, becoming closer friends. Everything builds and each morsel you unlock makes you appreciate them more.

Again, Pathfinder is mid. Unfortunately, most cRPGs don't know how to do companions well, so it's okay. I certainly don't feel like I'm hooked on helping any of them or learning anymore about them, but they're okay.

To divert the discussion somewhat and raise a question:

Is it a good or a bad thing that WotR restricts companions to different mythic paths? And not just one (like how in MotB you choose between the rainbow bear and the One-of-Many), but several? Given how dead-set on making the players be obsessive completionists they've been in the Kingmaker days, it's certainly a step in a different direction. And it's at least a bit of a fix for the problem that Kingmaker had, where you could just have everyone with you no matter what your and their alignment was, and your choice at the beginning (between Valerie/Harrim and Linzi/Jaethal) didn't account to jack, since you could just get them both back a little later like nothing happened. Someone like Tristian at least had a narrative explanation as to why he'd stay with an evil character, but why would someone like Valerie stick around a chaotic barony is a head-scratcher.

I personally like it. In general, I like having to choose between this or that and not having both. But I want information up front and at the earliest possible stage that I'm going to have to make that choice. I don't like it when that choice is thrust upon me out of the blue without prior warning, including especially when I was making other related choices which I would've made differently had I know about this later choice.

I'm somewhat of a completionist myself, and I usually don't replay RPGs, especially if they're really big games. So I do like being able to get "everything" done in one go of the game. But at the same time, I'm okay if that "complete" run has a few things here and there locked out because of choices, so long as I feel I had a fair shot in making *informed* choices that allowed me to have an "optimal" (from my standpoint) run. So "optimal" supercedes "complete" for me.

Yes, but that is as @k wrote subjective. I still think something can be criticised as objectively good or bad regardless on my personal feelings on it.

I agree with this. I absolutely do not like games where I'm building up a certain character only to have them suddenly taken away. I don't like wasting my time on such characters. The only game that did this okay, I felt, was FF7. They made my mouth drop to the ground, so I accepted it. Not really, but I didn't hate Square for it.

Most games that give you a choice and give you a heads up, though, are also fine. I was actually surprised and a bit put off by Kingmaker allowing us to take Harrim and Jaethel, or the reverse. I mean, it was okay, but I felt almost like it made our decision less meaningful. I was fully prepared for my decision to be permanent and I was happy with it because they gave me enough info at the start to make a wise choice.

And like kanisatha, I am also usually a 1 and done cRPGer. I don't really like games where I HAVE to replay them over and over again for the whole story and content.

That said, I do think BG3 has me hooked enough to maybe do more than 1 playthrough. Why? I do find myself hooked by the individual stories. That means, to me, that their companions are actually well written and on a whole different level than Pathfinder.

But, does that mean it's objective or subjective? Who cares? I feel that way. Others may not. Does it really matter whether it's subjective or not?

Not at all. Being subjective is perfectly fine, especially on a forum! But sometimes some people (not you here) end up presenting their subjective views as objective fact, which of course is not right.

The problem with a lot of games that claim to be replayable is that you usually have all the information after one playthrough, the only thing that makes a second playthrough of a game really meaningful is if you don't get all the information about the story just from playing through it the first time. Just having a point near the end where you get to choose between three endings isn't it, but only getting three distinct endings based on what you accomplished during the first two acts is.

If all the questions of Baldur's Gate 3 are answered after one playthrough then there isn't much incentive to go back in, that goes for the companions and for the main plot.

Well, it might warrant two runs at the least, what with there being options to either side with the Absolute or not. Add on top what unique racial reactivity there might also be (I highly doubt they'll just drop the framework they can carry over from D:OS2 where being an undead gave you quite a few unique opportunities to pursue). And playing as the different origin characters, unless the drop the origins altogether (which I would personally very much welcome, so that they instead focus on letting custom characters have a lot more room to play around, while the origin-specific dialogue can still be seen if you were to switch to said characters during conversations when you have them as companions).

I disagree on that having "all the information" makes the second playthrough meaningless, though - if a game is very well-written, then going in again after having seen the plot unfold allows you to pick up on the foreshadowing and the nuances of the writing, and look at things from an enlightened angle.

When the full BG3 game is out, I will play at least 1 single player game and 1 multiplayer game. I will likely do more single player playthroughs as well! I love having choices and reactivity, but I doubt I will do an evil path playthrough. The first playthrough is the best, but with BG3 I enjoy the journey so much that multiple playthroughs are still fun!😊