Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Lets talk about Romance, the Birds and the Bees

Right.

But what I am saying and trying to give examples of is that sometimes it is. So the options are kind of...

Do you want choices that actually matter and can lead to different interesting outcomes, but sequels may have to choose a canon or miss out on some of your choices?
Or do you want choices that just matter way less and don't lead you off into interesting different outcomes, but keep you more on the same rail?

Because when you listen to the gaming community at large they want choice and consequence that actually matter and change the game in significant ways.

This reminds me of the stuff Pawel Sasko, one of the Cyberpunk 2077 devs, was talking about the other day. People were asking them to open up everything in the game, to make it so they can go into every building and open everything up. People have been asking for that from the beginning and saying things like - "We don't think it is too much to ask" as well. But he laid it out for them in a semi-technical way and explained that if they did that it would take years of work to properly do it AND it would become so demanding on systems that not very many people would be able to afford the hardware to actually play it.

But you say that you write stories and I say this honestly... if you are a good enough writer where you can come up with an epic story that tens of millions of people are interested in. You can come up with a world, protagonist, supporting characters and then write out all of their choices, a branching narrative and consequence... then also while writing keep in mind that you must be able to account for every choice while also staying within budget/time constraints of a project like Baldur's Gate 3 AND at the same time take any potential sequels into account...

Then you should make a video game, because you would likely be an insanely wealthy individual.

You can make choices that matter and have a stringent story. You might need more new characters than recycle old ones - because most of the continuity problems have to do with bringing back dead characters, but DA2 and DAI would have worked as well without Leliana. The antagonist in SWTOR didn't really need to be Revan, it would have worked very well with a new character.
I never said, I was writing for video games. I write fictional Stories. But I have to keep tabs of my continuity too, maybe not as complex as a video game, but as I said - reuse fewer characters or make the characters, you want to keep unkillable. Good example was Wynne- you can kill her in the temple, but since she had the spirit of healing inside her, most people were ok with her turning up in Awakening and in a novel.

You say this, but I disagree. And I disagree as someone who has never even played SWTOR. The only thing that I know about that game is that Revan was in it and that everyone says Revan is insanely awesome. Outside of that I literally do not even really know anything about Revan other than apparently they were a super cool character. I don't even know if Revan is a male or female character.

Could they come up with a character as good as Revan - one that gathers that much fan fare and attention? Maybe. But I can guarantee you fans wanted more Revan and I know this because it is literally the only thing that I know about the game due to how much fans of the games went on about them.

It is very much like saying "You can do Mass Effect again - but instead of Shepard and his gang, just throw together a new cast of characters". Well they tried to do that and it was a disaster - because it isn't easy to come up with great characters that everyone invests in and wants to see again.

Is Tomb Raider actually Tomb Raider without Lara Croft? Can you just easily craft a new Tomb Raider?
Is The Witcher really going to be The Witcher without Geralt? Is it that easy to just come up with a new Witcher that everyone loves and a cast of supporting ladies everyone gushes about constantly?
Is God of War actually God of War without Kratos? Can you just randomly replace him with a new God and the series is just as good?

You say that it WOULD have worked very well with a new character - like that is a foregone conclusion. A much better word to use is that it COULD have MAYBE worked very well with a new character.

Franchises are franchises for a reason and sequels happen more than they probably should for a reason. It is absurdly difficult to not only make a game people want to play, but to have characters that people connect with in that game. There is a reason there is damn near a infinite amount of books, but there are so many best sellers... because writing a good one is absurdly hard to do.

Also - I am not disagreeing with you. I want what you want as well - I wish we could make a ton of crazy choices, kill whoever we want, burn down whatever building we want and the world, sequels, etc. would factor all of that in. I'm just saying that is A LOT to account for, it is insanely hard to do and there is a TON that goes into it... while at the same time having budgets and timelines forcing people to make decisions around finances, dev constraints and with smaller windows than they would probably like.

As you said, you probably don't know anything about SWTOR. Most people don't think, Revan is awesome in it. Especially the people, who played KOTOR are pissed. And Revan isn't even a big part in it, it is literally only one storyline. It would have been enough, when at the end of that storyline, the guy, who said , he is Revan, turned out a fraud.
Lara Croft is a bad example- she was always a female, british archaeologist. And I bet her fans would be pretty pissed, If that would change. Same with Geralt of Rivia, who probably won't become Geraldine all of a sudden, Kratos or other defined Heroes.
Shepard would have the same problem as Revan, If they would be made canonically one gender, one ethnicity and one personality.
As I said, Revan could be female, black, asian. S/he could have been totally light side and romance different characters. SWTOR and that godawful novel just pissed on everything players could decided and made him an unhinged, totally uninteresting white guy, who romanced Bastila. Not cool and a lot of players thought so.

Well i certainly hope so ... fans (myself included ofc) are beging for that for almost two decades.

But im also quite sure that when Disney talks about Old Republic they mean era, not a game.
Even tho they may want to use Revan ... i believe his name was teased in ep. 8 or 9 ... one of Sith ships there was named after him.

---

To be fair tho ...
Most fans would be pissed anyway, bcs main reason for that was that they made Revan their Idol ... (wich by the way was HUGELY supported by Drew Karpyshyn's book).

And just the fact that their beloved character wich was allways (except when plot needed it ofc) pictured as so strong to be seen by many as almost flawless and unbeatable ...
Was out of sudden supposed to loose ... against bunch of nameless nobodies on the top of that ... was simply too much for his legacy to hold.

Same thing happened to Illidan during Black Temple raid, back in Burning Crusade ... but Blizzard was smarter than BioWare and they added to loot Warglaves of Azzinoth ... the most epic weapon WoW ever seen.
So even hardcore dans of Illidan as my little not-so-humble self ... were killing him every week.
True ... all that fame and glory faded a bit when everyone was wearing them ... but that feeling when you finaly looted second one was worth it.

Funny when i think about it that Blizzard managed to achieve the same with Ashbringer during Legion expansion ... but never give people option to wield their own Frostmourne. O_o

Im sory but what are you talking about now?

Revan as far as i know was central theme of whole expansion .. for almost two years everything in the game was about him. O_o

In the whole game the Revan storyline wasn't a big part compared to the whole Story. It was the Shadow of Revan Expansion.

Funny the novelization is getting brought up, because despite being written by Drew karpshyn, it was quite garbage. Y'all know he was involved with the infamous Baldur's Gate novelizations too, right? Neither of those should have been made. And I think it bears pointing out the awful bit of character assassination(as well as literal assassination) that happened to the Exile in the books ToR as well.

Drew admitted in an AMA on reddit years ago that Revan was male lightside because essentially 'the protagonist *had* to be lightside male'....but the exile was 'allowed' to be female because Revan was made male. I'm going to be honest, I thought that was a little bit sexist. And it's pretty clear that Drew didn't like the Exile or KotoR 2 from the novelizations either.

Honestly, I'm not terribly impressed with how WoTC/Lucasarts and the Bioware writers handled the issue of player agency in regards to the two series. Setting aside the actual *quality* of the writing regarding the novelizations/canon protagonists, which was *very* poor. An all-around disaster on all fronts and absolutely nothing that I'd hope Larian would want to use as a precedent.

I'm surprised SWTOR isn't dead yet.

It's been dead to me ever since pre-release beta, where it bored me to death with its padded introduction.

I watched that Grease 2 movie clip.

I ... uh, well ... I just don't know what to say.

Where does the pollen go?

However, your stories have a single plot line. The story starts at Point A and goes to Point Z in a linear fashion with no options for the readers to change anything that happens along the way. So, it's really easy to track continuity, you can do it with a basic outline. What happens when there are 10 permutations to an event? How many stories are you going to write in order to keep track of all of those possible permutations? What happens when you get to the end of the story, and there are 10,000 possible permutations?

Respecting everyone's choices sounds great, and looks good, in a forum post. It is, however, extremely difficult to do if you're going to have any significant choices. So, either they put everything on rails, which works pretty well for franchises like Tomb Raider, or Assassin's Creed, or, they take into consideration that some of the choices are going to be "per save file", but the main story may well have to ignore some of them. Speaking of BioWare, they handled Virmire pretty well for the franchise. There are some choices there that change who can't appear later, but those are rather limited, I guess. Ashley or Kaidan, Wrex or Wreave, does Kirrahe survive? Those kinds of things were dealt with rather well, but the scope was smaller than twisting everything that could possibly happen in KotoR into a single, takes everyone's choices, including who Revan is, into account. Because, from where I'm sitting, Revan worked out ok, because my main KotoR save file did have a white male Revan.

Yeah, good for you, my Revan was an asian female, so it didn't work out for me at all and so I'm rightful pissed. Same with Bhaalspawn, who suddendly is canonically a white human guy too- not cool. I'm not talking about minor decisions and if I'm honest, I don't care, If I kill Minsc and he comes back in BG2 as if nothing happened.
But leave player characters alone. That is not so hard. SWTOR didn't need Revan, there didn't need to be a novel with the Bhaalspawn in it. Just make different characters for those occasions.

The people writing a video game should try to write as many permutations as they can before it's ripped out of their hands.
I think one of the reasons people had trouble accepting Mass Effect 3 is because of how ungainly some of the ways it dealt with possible world states from the previous two games. That isn't to say that Mass Effect 3 didn't have some places where it did well. I think a lot of that is from how little Mass Effect 2 did to advance the overarching plot of the trilogy.

If there ever is a Knights of the Old Republic 4, I personally don't think they'd adhere to The Old Republic canon. They made Revan a man because that's probably what %70 of the people who played SW:ToR made, and the MMO couldn't have it both ways. They made the Exile a woman because when SW:ToR II came out gaming was more sex conscious, and gaming wasn't being treated as stereotypically a young boy's hobby; and because they'd already made the protag of the first game a dude.

for some context, https://www.gameinformer.com/b/news...ffect-players-choose-female-shepard.aspx

Knights of the Republic II came out in 2004, the Star Wars MMO released in 2011, and the Revan expansion game out in 2014. I don't know when Revan was definitively made male.

There was a novel about Revan, I'm not sure, if it came out before SWTOR or not.
But my point is, I don't care, if 70 % are white male players and might be happy with the white male Revan (who by the way is a total whackjob, just saying), if you make a player character customizable, leave it be. Same with Exile (or Bhaalspawn btw). There really is no reason at all to bring back such a character. Create a new and fresh character. The Revan storyline in SWTOR really was just about some crazy cult - it didn't need the name dropping. The story was engaging and it would have been without Revan.

Or do it as they did in KotOR II.
Remember talking with Atton? When he mentioned that Revan was a woman and you have option to corect him that he was actualy guy?

Not so hard either.

Hell, Dragon Age has been mentioning the Hero of Ferelden in all three games, even including codex entries about them, and they've still managed to do it in vague terms.

Rag and Ghost: exactly. ANd they could have kept the Revan questline vague - let the guy say, he is Revan, but it's never proven.

Oh yeah, I fully agree with you. I'm just using Dragon Age as proof positive they could have done what you're describing.

My preference would be for every iteration to be incorporated into the story, my point was that by being a living multiplayer game the MMO's can't effectively do that. You guys seem to like having had "THE HERO OF FERELDEN" be some amorphous blob, but for me every time continuity is treated like Shrodinger's hero arc, it gets a little frustrating after a while.

My point about the theoretical KotOR IV is that unlike the MMO, you can have another Atton conversation where you check the flags that make the game's worldstate into your own.
As for bringing back Revan at all, I don't think it was done particularly well, but I don't want games to shy away from using existing characters, just because they can't handle all the potential worldstates that could exist. Revan's disappearance is one of the big mysteries of the last game, and while I will curse Bioware for turning the next game into an MMO, I won't fault them for continuing that story. The Old Republic's storylines really petered out after launch, before picking up again with the Eternal Empire storyline, at least for players like me who treated the MMO like a single player game.

Also judging from the Revan book's title The Old Republic: Revan, I'm going to assume it was part of the same marketing drive as the MMO expansion. Star Wars novels can already be pretty flimsy continuity, but a video game tie-in novel, yikes.