We’ll see in the full release, of course, and tastes will vary, but bringing this back to the topic at hand, for me a good mystery is part of good RPG writing, and even if it’s possible to have an RPG without one, I enjoy following clues, uncovering plots, puzzling about the motives and allegiances of folk we meet and theorising about what’s really going on only to have my expectations upended. As well as being engaging in its own right, mysteries have a mechanical benefit as they can include red herrings or periods where the trail goes cold that are an opportunity to explore side plots without feeling we’re taking an unwarranted diversion from an urgent main quest. I don’t particularly want to know what I’m dealing with straight away, and while I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing to see the main antagonist early on as long as there are other mysteries to solve about them, knowing who I will be fighting from early in the game is very definitely not something I see as important or even desirable.
Whether BG3 will actually turn out to be a good mystery is up in the air, but for me it’s got lots of intriguing elements and I’m looking forward to finding out how they fit together. It’s act 1 and I would expect to have far more questions than answers at this stage. And I have no issue with the name “the Absolute”, which seems to be a perfectly decent cover name for a (fake?) deity, a shadowy cabal or whatever it turns out to be. It’s possible that Larian will drop the ball and that the plot will turn out to be too obvious or overblown, and that the nature and plans of the Absolute, or whoever the antagonist or antagonists end up being, will turn out to be uninspired, or that the parts that other factions play won’t be interesting, but I’m going to remain optimistic that Larian can pull it off until proved otherwise, and that with the whole game to play with they’ll be able to correct some of the early pacing issues that admittedly affect EA, particularly when it comes to companions.
