The trailer is disjointed AF, isn’t it? From ‘why have you come here’ to ‘you may just be the godsend we’ve been praying for’ in just a couple of seconds. Did whoever pick these dialogue snippets even think – does this make any sequential sense? She goes from not knowing why you’re there to being certain you’re the saviour of the whole thing – with no hints in between to suggest why there’s the big U-turn.
Beyond the disjointedness, it’s not evocative. Not mysterious. The exposition about the parasites and the Absolute cult – the two most boring pieces of EA – suggest this is actually the main thrust of the core narrative.
Compare that to the BG2 opening exposition: ‘one such deity foresaw his own death and walked the land before…he left a score of mortal offspring intended to be the fuel for his rebirth…that god was Bhaal and you are one of his children’.
One is written by a pre-schooler who thinks alien parasites are ‘cool’ and therefore everyone’s gonna just love the pitch. And by the way, we’ve an evil cult who’s out to get you! The other is written by an adult who sets a dankly intriguing tone setting you up as a child of the devil, in a sense.
Both involve parasites – Bhaal wants you to be a host, but he already has acres more characterisation than the Absolute in the same amount of lines: at least you know he’s cunning enough to have foresaw a major setback, and to have devised a plan to counteract it. Being called out as the unwilling demon-spawn of this character also gives the MC substance from the get-go.
The BG3 trailer doesn’t set up its own parasite or evil god as anything other than unpleasant – they’re literally just bad parasites in your brain and the god is boss of a bad cult.
The gameplay, I’m sure, will be as decent as it always is. But the Patch 9 graphics are still quite wretched. I realise, now, that the older darker shadows not just made the game a hundred times more atmospheric – but they also covered up the flaws of the bland Larian engine. I tried the gamma slider, and almost got it back to the way to the way it was – unfortunately dialling back the lightness also obscures the UI.
Back to the narrative – I feel it’s very self-conscious and completely out of touch with the source material.
The main issue is that Larian writers are more suited to DOS-style goofy nonsense. They’re fish out of water with this story. They should have just hired a different set of writers and let the current set work away on DOS3.
The rest of the trailer is just pseudo-Hollywood style spectacle – generic tentacle crashes through some bricks, here’s a random city shot, and here’s some monsters prowling about.
For what it’s worth, Minsc appearing out of a mimic wasn’t a bad idea – but they’ll probably just stick to this OTT shtick for the entire character. I was reading
some lines from BG2 Minsc today – they’re actually really well-done. Natural and funny and builds up a good banter with the fairy-wizard girl. It organically develops the relationship between the two and is a hundred miles from the over-workshopped dialogue of BG3 that’s like listening to the most boring person in the pub tell you about how they just painted their whole house magnolia.
Lastly, the Matt Mercer as Minsc VA said so much about the Snowflake Council at Larian who are clearly influencing too much of the art direction. I heard the guy doing the Minsc impression – he doesn’t pull it off even remotely. Why did they not hire the original actor? It’s because the Snowflake Council pried into his private life and discovered he’s just a human who isn’t perfect, so he can’t be hired again.
Maybe don’t pry into people’s private lives? It’s pathetic.
PS: To the dude who previously (weeks back) kept seizing on every little thing I write – my codemonkey script to remove you is still working like a charm and I cannot see anything you post or even if someone quoted you, as I’ve deliberately automated search and remove of the nodes for both scenarios. Just trying to do you a favour there bud, because you’d be wasting be wasting your time.
