Originally Posted by Lake Plisko
Originally Posted by fylimar
There is a reason, I'm done with Electronic Arts and Dragon Age. Not just that, but If you play Star Wars - The Old Republic, it turns out that they made Revan canonically a white, unhinged dude, who married Bastila, while my Revan was a black female, down to earth and Bastila went dark side ( I just find that ending more fitting for someone like Bastila). I hate it, when player decisions aren't respected, including the ones, you put in spoilers. If you don't want something to happen, don't give players the possibility. Problem solved.
I mean the old BG games had similar problems ( and both franchises, DA and BG were BioWare - don't get me wrong, BioWare is great in writing stories, but they backpaddle and recon a lot): If you kill any of the companions, that will appears in BG2, in BG1, they will appear anyway, for example Minsc, Jaheira, Viconia, Imoen. I normally kill Minsc in BG1, because I want Dynaheir in my group and normally don't need Minsc and they only come as a pair, and there he is in BG2, greeting me, like nothing happened.
I really hope, Larian doesn't do that. Given, there is a BG after BG3.

I think you might...

1. Take video games a bit too seriously.
2. Not appreciate the amount of work it would take to continue on stories from every possible ending with every possible action taken. If you want a franchise with sequels to take place and have every action or choice accounted for in every game - then you are going to end up with little to no choices in the games. Or the endings are going to end up being very, very similar as to limit the consequences of choice.

Cyberpunk 2077 would probably be the best example of this. There are like five endings in the game where you end up in different places and you can even end up with an entirely different personality. If they make a sequel where those choices transfer over they either have to pick a canon ending or put in some kind of shallow 30-60 minute prologue where all of those different endings somehow converge so that you can start around the same place. Add onto this if they gave you the ability to just randomly kill any character in the game this would add even more complexity to a sequel trying to carry over those decisions.

I'd love it if all franchise had hyper-complex decisions that spanned multiple games and nothing canon ever had to be chosen as well. But given that there are limited budgets and games actually have to come out in a span of like 3-6 years that is highly unlikely until maybe some crazy new AI/development technology comes out that speeds things up or video games start making significantly more money as to hire even more enormous dev teams.
No, I think they have a point too.

It's kinda cruddy when you play through a 100+ hour rpg developing you character's story and then find out none of your choices mattered. And not even often in a 'well the IP owner needed X or Y to happen in subsequent periods of the timeline, so that ending can't happen, so your work had to be undone'...but in very avoidable areas.

Character gender is a big one of those areas where player choice gets ignored, and it's pretty indefensible to say that it was putting too much of a burden on the devs to keep player character gender choice ambiguous in the vast majority of sequels....because most rpgs with a MC with a selectable gender refer to them using gender-neutral titles. "The Lone Wanderer" "The Nerevarine" "Revan" "The Bhaalspawn" etc. Hell, even KoTOR 2 made the effort to accommodate that particular player choice (along with alignment) So it ain't that hard. But they always gotta go for 'brown haired white male human fighter' or closest equivalent to cash in on for tie in novels etc and very avoidably do the same in sequels when they could have just kept it ambiguous. Seriously, Fallout NV used gender neutral terms to refer to the protagonist from the second game through it's entirety, including a character that met them, then a singular npc refers to their gender and now that player agency is gone. Same thing with the Nerevarine.

Obviously it's a different matter when one's talking about 'did you choose to side with the bad guys and end the world or save it and become the new ruler of the kingdom?' sort of stuff, but there are ways to address that as well. Again, KotoR 2, which had a dev time of less than a year handled it with no save import feature.

Garbage like Abdel Adrian or the ToR version of Revan should be something to avoid.

Dragon Age/Bioware games in general have gotten very retcon-y though in general, so their vaunted ability to carry over data from previous games is a little tarnished IMO. Still a lot to learn from their example though.

I'm hoping BGIII lets us keep some of the ambiguity about the Bhaalspawn, Adbdel Adrian be damned. Let us have a conversation with the brain-damaged ranger and 'refresh his memory' like KoTOR II did with Atton Rand. Nothing would kill my enthusiasm for the game faster than getting to listen to the Bhaalspawn's former companions reminisce about their adventures with Abdel.

Last edited by Leucrotta; 29/11/22 05:18 PM.