Originally Posted by Gray Ghost
Originally Posted by neprostoman
It is not what-aboutism, it is about high statistical probability of ruined immersion applied to players with a certain mindset, which is not applicable to role playing games, but more to books and/or cinema or visual novellas, where there is no interactive elements and therefore high demand for a certain level of logical coherence. Broad strokes are in place in BG3 and they make sense. The specifics of the genre allow plot stretching and interpretive thinking and justify some of the smaller plot holes. If BG3 was a linear visual novella with a set protagonist, plot coherence would become much more crucial. But BG3 is an RPG with a high emphasis on replayability and changeable characters. It is not that kind of game that "plays itself" but the one where you are free to justify your leadership as you see fit, according to your character's lore. I am all in for more dialogue options to help me project that lore onto the world, but it has nothing to do with other companions being interesting and unique. They are unique, yes, but they are also flawed. And that is what makes them interesting and not at all Mary Sues.

I would argue that we don't have the choice to justify our leadership according to our character's lore. The game never asks us to justify it, it just assumes we're the leader and that's it. Everyone treats us as the leader of the party, it's never really called into question. Sure we can create all kinds of headcanons for our characters - I am a big supporter of that - but as far as this point is concerned, it doesn't matter if we make our character the lost heir of a far off kingdom, groomed from birth to be monarch or a country bumpkin who was working as a caravan guard and is used to taking orders. We'll both be equally the leader. You think the Dragon Age games aren't a good comparison, I'll bring up a game that I think is a perfect comparison; pillars of eternity. In that game you start off as some random traveller. At the very start of the game you get to talk to someone about the specifics of your past, at least some of them. And then going forward, you pull the party together yourself. Everyone follows you because right at the start they agreed to follow you for whatever their reasons are. They all have their own things you agree to help them with, and in turn they're helping you with an explicitly personal problem. You don't realize the full scale of the threat until a while into the game, until that point your problem isn't anymore important to the wider world than any of your companions' problems are to them, so it wouldn't make sense forone ofthem to want to take control. Not so here, where most companions have their own opinion on how to fix this problem afflicting all of usand no reason not to try and take control.

The same thing happens here, in a narrated cutscene even.