My thoughts on this are two-fold: One, I think this is a natural progression of the "everything must be fully voice-acted forever" trend that started with Bioware's ME. Since VA is expensive from a time/effort/resources (in-game/out-of-game) standpoint you're going to end up limiting the amount of options. That then often leads to your first thought as a developer being "how can we cut this down to fit while still giving distinct options" instead of "how can I add depth, richness, texture to this experience (BEFORE the editing/content elimination process starts)." It comes with the territory of needing to provide VO for every reaction/response. Less "bloat" but often can make the story (character's and overarching) railroad-y and, in the worst case, tonally all over the map.
Larian's choice unfortunately kind of locked in this state-of-affairs unless they were to get extremely creative or have a team the size of CD Projekt. It's one of those decisions you make at the beginning of development that simply cannot be undone once you get far enough into the process.
Two, I think this is kind of par for the course on the tone of the game itself. A lot of things are simply overdone (e.g. That Intro and most of the companion stories) because the general design philosophy seems to hew closer to the "big set pieces and explosions" similar to what you might get with an action genre pastiche. Things are more exciting when the stakes are all or nothing, black and white, whereas nuance would be too banal* or lacking in hooks. Honestly, it's a typical failing within fantasy writing (esp. in video games) because "illustrating" your world with charcoal has a higher learning curve than just doing the line art. If that metaphor makes any sort of sense.
*Not my opinion, but my general feeling from having played BG3 at the start of EA and then sparingly since then.
That's just me dusting off the old "literary analysis" hat, though, and I might be overlooking or misreading something that someone else can see.
Last edited by Bird Person; 02/11/22 08:41 AM.
