Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Can we be Kind?

So my biggest gripe with this game so far, the thing that genuienly makes it so this game won't even break my top 5 RPGs and possibly keep it out of the top 10 and will keep this game from being actually memorable is that while this game offers a lot of choices as to what you can do and how people can react to you, the game is frustratingly limited in how you can behave in terms of your personality. I feel as though if I want to playa good character then I'm pushed to either play a complete doormat or be a dismissive jerk a bunch of times. For some examples that have stood out to me, when you meet Volo there's no option to seem interested in participating in the discussion he's trying to engage in. You can only be brusque and annoyed at his questioning. When Wyll tells you about his encounter with the goblins for the first time,you can either laugh at him or agree that he should be killing goblins, no option to try and divert him away from his anger or suggest it's going too far. And in the conversation with Wyll after you meet Raphael, when he warns you about the danger of making a bargain, again all your responses are dismissive, no options to take his words to heart or acknowledge his wisdom.

So I'm going to put it to this forum, full of people praising this game for its roleplay value. Do you have these issues? How satisfying do you find it to play not just characters who are good, but who are kind? Who try to consistently be nice, who are enthusiastic about stuff, who enjoy life and enjoy engaging in other people's silliness now and then. I genuinely want to like this game far more than I currently do, and this is the huge, glaring reason why I don't, the thing this game just falls entirely short at compared to other games I've played. So does anyone else have these issues? And do you think they'll be fixed come full release?

There will always be limits in how many ways you can react in games. The amount of work that goes into each permutation is hard to grasp when you are not working on it. I never expect a character to be 100% what I want him to be - no game so far has offered me continously the options I wished for, but that's fine because its a game. If I can get roughtly 70-80% the responses I have in my head I'm happy enough.

I do have the feeling though Larian enjoys much more the darker character traits and puts more effort in portraying those and offering options for them. If you listen to the last PFH there are quite a few (not too serious) comments/gripes about players not using/seeing the evil choices or killing off the evil characters... to me it feels like a disconnect between the dev team and their audience in general.

https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=741085#Post741085 ?

Im not sure, if i get your idea corectly ... but this seems like yes to me.

Yes, our dialogue choices are awfully limited ... to the degree that i woul even dare to say that sometimes i feel litterally railroaded. :-/
Often offering only one option, masquerading as several, that only adds small flavour to your dimissal, or agreement ... wich are your only options in said situation, since thats where all of them leads. :-/

But no, it certainly dont apply to inability to be kind ...
Even if you wish to be rude, snarky, or just hit the NPC back in their face (sometimes figuratively, sometimes litteraly) ... you just cant.

I find this especialy anoying with Shadowheart ... especialy in her first incarnation, where she demanded you to tell her everyting, since "as we are in it together your business is my business" (i believe this sentence remained there tho) ... but as soon as you start about her relic, its "none of your business" ... i feel deep, primal urge to tell her that "as long as we are in it together your business is my busines" even if that reduce my reputation with her to 0, or start combat imediately ... i dont care i just need to smack that smug face with her own words.

And this got even worse, since the button "attack imediately" was removed.
Wich reminds me to visit other topic ...

Personally, It's a breath of fresh air. So many games the main character is the hero who usually saves everyone from the big baddie, and have the cringe millennial writing to go along with it. I am sick of that trope. I finally can play a neutral character who only really cares about himself, but don't have to be a complete ass about it. It feels as though it's based in a grounded reality, and I like it even more for that. I'm sure there will be times where the character can be kind, though I assume those times are far and few between because of the harshness of the world. Though when they do pop up, it will feel more authentic.

That's fair, I fully support the game allowing that, but I very much want to be the hero who saves everyone. And more importantly even if I can't save everyone - I'm fine with not being able to save everyone, sometimes things just can't work out, nor should they - I don't see grounded reality being an excuse to make allowing me to be kind something few and far between. I know plenty of people in this real, grounded reality that are kind and enthusiastic and care about people and are interested. I reject entirely the notion that grounded reality translates to kindness being rare, or frequent kindness being inauthentic. The harshness of the world makes it even more important to me that my character can be kind and a respite from that harshness. Yeah, life is hard but using that as an excuse to also be hard has always rung false to me. Life is cruel, but each and every person has the right to make the choice if they also will be. And I don't appreciate a game that's selling itself so thoroughly on freedom and options taking that choice away from me in the interest of being "grounded".

Most of my characters are kind by default and I've never really felt like the responses completely shut down the ability to be kind. It might be how you interpret different lines though.

For Volo, you can answer his questions. I usually do. Either giving him correct answers or giving him blatantly outlandish ones that he's clearly after. I always interpreted that as the player character is in on the "joke" as it were. We're humoring him either to be nice or because we also like to embellish our stories with outrageous flaws. I've never felt like I was outright rude or dismissive of him unless that was my goal.

For Wyll with the goblins... Admittedly I don't travel with Wyll much. I don't remember this convo very well.

Wyll at the camp though? He's kind of telling you something obvious. It's common knowledge not to make deals with literal devils. I've always taken that as him being a bit condescending to me, personally. He thinks I need a long story with a morality lesson at the end to know that beings of pure evil are not to be trusted just because he was dumb enough to do it himself. Even then, I didn't feel like the choices I made at the time were especially rude. I more or less agreed with him and moved on.

I do recall stopping to save Shadowheart on the ship, though. And talking down a snake to spare a child's life before saving another child from harpies. I stopped to tell the Tiefling kids an inspiring story and took time out of my busy day to instruct another Tiefling in how to do a thrust. Each time I was polite and chose not to ridicule anyone. Just a gentle barb or two for the sake of good humor.

I did make that kid flip the coin a dozen times, though personally, I felt like that was a sort of Dad Humor moment. Afterward, I made a point to purchase from his shop and didn't get mad when they eventually stole from me. I even stepped in the path of a crossbow to save the life of a goblin prisoner purely because I felt it was the right thing to do.

There might be a few dialogue options without a super nice option, but at least for my experience I've never found it hard to feel like a genuinely good dude playing this game.

I never had the impression, that I can't play a kind character in this game tbh. I often play chaotic good and that works Well here.
I agree, that sometimes your answering options seem a bit limited, but I have that problem in other games too, even BG 1&2.

One thing I've noticed is that Larian gives a lot more options to being bad than most other games I've played. And goes in-depth in trying to make you take those options more than other games. But I still think there are plenty of good and kind options. Just that when you compare it to previous games in the genre, it seems like Larian is pushing you to be evil, but if you take the game by itself, you'll notice there's always options not to be bad.

I wonder if some veteran RPG players on this forum are having a bit of a "culture shock" because of that.

BG 1 and 2 also had a different type of issues when it comes to answering options: the fact that very often they were exclusively for flavor on YOUR side and it made virtually no difference whatever you picked.
They were never the most "reactive" CPRGs out there, not even in their era. For instance Fallout 2 easily outclassed them even at the time.

I love these games, but nostalgic people should stop idealizing them to standards that they never actually reached.

+1

Personally I feel like this game will offer by far the most reactivity to the choices we do have and I feel like we do have a good amount. From what I've seen this game will most likely have the most possible outcomes and consequences based on our choices and oh man does it look like there's a lot there. I am very curious to see just how long we can drag certain deceptions and just what kind of endings are there available to evil players. Like, can I get to become the new ruler of the tower of doom win mostly deception and a couple boss fights? I would be extremely surprised if this doesn't end up being the most memorable RPG ever released. Because even though some of the older RPGs may have offered more lines of dialogue to reply with to every conversation they didn't offer more consequence and possible outcome permutations.

I think a lot of older RPGs left the content of your character to the imagination. Now we see the consequences of our characterization because technology allows for greater reactivity. It can still be jarring though.

In general I don’t have issues playing a kind character in BG3, although I do agree with the one dialogue with Wyll. In the PFH they said they redid a lot of Wyll’s dialogue, so we will see what is in the final game!

I don’t think BG3 has more issues with this than other rpgs I have played. I had more issues with WOTR with one companion dialogue. Probably will always be an issue with limited dialogue options, but it is great to give feedback to hopefully avoid the worst cases!

Can you be kind in this game? Yes. However this is NOT a fairy tale fantasy. If you are kind to others dont expect them and the world to love you back and all is good and happily ever after. This is realistic high magic fantasy. If you give someone your heart they could stomp on it, or could be kind to you initially then ghost you. Or you could be kind to someone and they can take it as weakness and take advantage of you. So the simple answer to your question is yes but the more correct answer to your question is what is your expectation around kind.

Do you have any actual example of this being the case? This isn't me trying to bait you or anything, but I would really want to see where those additional responses triggered something special because I've not played the game enough to have seen it. So some pointers would be welcome.

Yesterday I had to replay the seen with that true soul drow Nere and had once my bard and once my paladin doing the talking with their own specific dialog choices... well the difference was the bard had 1 exchange, the paladin 3 and both ended exactly the same way. There are some occasional inspiration points to be earned, but so far I've not seen any real difference besides the usual big story path evil goblin or good druid and some minor individuals... but nothing of this seems more reactive than any of the big modern games. Its just added inconsequential oneliners I've noticed so far - which are cool, I understand how much work goes into creating those, but I don't see anything I have not seen at the same level in other games.

The game isn't out yet and for obvious reasons they don't want to show too much but they have confirmed 175+ hours of cutscenes for possible story permutations. For perspective we'll be lucky if we see 5 such hours of possible cutscenes in one playthrough base on our choices. This is a game we could play dozens of times over and still not have seen half of the possible outcomes to possible choices. None of the RPGs of offered even a fraction of the reactivity.

I totally agree here. I used BG 1&2 as examples, because people tend to put them on a pedestal. I love both of them and other older games, but they are far from perfect.

Larian doesn't want us to be playing good, kind, noble characters in BG3 because that isn't their thing. So even in situations where they're giving you good/kind/noble options, you can tell they don't want to do it but are feeling compelled to do it, and so they make those options silly/lame/pathetic.

I wouldn't really say it's not their thing as the game will definitely offer the paths of pure good and righteousness if that is what the player wants but the problem with those paths is they are overdone...the large majority of games never offer you a way to stray from that path, most movies and books focus on stories of characters that walk that path too...it's the most walked and worn out path. It makes sense that they would focus on the alternative because those alternatives are things the player almost never has a chance to experience.

You can be good, you can be evil. IMHO the more rewarding options in Early Access are usually good. Like sure, you can let the child get eaten by harpies or break a certain Tiefling's Lute over your knee in front of her but those aren't the sort of actions that actually *get* you anything, and this trend extends to the big story quest branches as well, so I'd say if anything it encourages you to play good.