Lol’ing that I was able to log back in – apparently I’m a pariah now?
Ok.
Anyway, there was always ‘silliness’ in Baldur’s Gate – great silliness, like Minsc and Edwin. There was ‘silliness’ in Ulysses too, the greatest novel ever written – in fact, the whole thing can be read as comedy.
But you need a bit of brain mixed in there too. Like Seinfeld or Ricky Gervais – great comedy is indeed ‘silly’ but knowingly so.
We don’t get that with Larian writers – it’s naïve silly. It has no real comedic depth, no bite to it – it’s always harmless, always tepid. The quotes are meme-material on BG3 reddit, but for me a yawn-fest. There’s just no substance to what they deliver.
This is a shame because while the original BG series weren’t Hemmingway, they were far better than this ‘Absolute’ dross that we’re getting here – essentially a rehash of DOS2. Don’t be surprised if Bracus Rex (Larian’s Bhaal) turns up randomly as the final boss, with no build up whatsoever…
The one good thing that BG3 had was the beautiful black-laden graphics of Patch 7 – simply stunning. I think part of the brilliance of the colour black is how mysterious it is – and how the brain always works to ‘fill in’ a mystery, to try and decode it. It fires up your imagination. Black is such an extraordinarily powerful colour, used by all the old masters to great effect…
Now even that’s gone – Patch 8 and 9 are so stunningly, vapidly illuminated. Everywhere the eye looks, the game says ‘look at this, we hide nothing because our art team is so great!’
This game won’t be a disaster – it’ll be average. I miss the BG2 era. But I see the same spark in indie companies – Hollow Knight, Silksong, Death Thrash, etc. Larian is just too big now to deliver an interesting experience – it’s become the Marvel of video games. Here’s your blockbuster version of Baldur’s Gate – enjoy!
No thanks…
And you know what? They do have the gameplay design talent. They do have the art talent.
They simply hired the wrong writerly talent, and it has completely ruined the whole lot of it. They should’ve just hired one of the Polish – like Diablo 4 did. Yeah seriously, they hired one of CD Projekt Red’s writers – it kind of shows in the grit of their new cinematic: the menacing archangel (brilliant) but the somewhat underwhelming Lilith (looks like Maleficent now but was incredible in the first video: redly transparent, glistening and haughty – fantastic design!
Where does it all go wrong, eh?
Video games do employ some of the best artistic geniuses going – they also, sadly are under the whip of some extremely incompetent Hollywood-wannabes like Larian-nouveau.
Roll on Hollow Knight Silksong and Death Thrash to save the day…
