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

I'm sure it comes as no surprise to you, Ghost, but yes, yes, a thousand times yes, I share this complaint and it really sours playing the game at all for me. It honestly feels to me sometimes like the game has been written by people who generally only know how to be arseholes, and who think that being a meek pushover is the only other possibility if you're not going to be an arsehole... that every conversation is a contest, and every dialogue a competition that you either 'win' or 'lose'... or they think they are supplying balanced and good options, which to me just seem like more jerkish attitude and personality that my nicer characters would never say.

I have found the dialogue options that force extremes of characterisation onto our character, without providing a balance or a middle ground, or the opportunity to simply be friendly while remaining reasonable to be extremely disappointing.

I'm not asking about being good, I'm asking about being kind. I feel like the game wants to make us snarky, and dismissive rather than patient and tender-hearted.


I fully expect and want being kind to backfire on me at times, same with being cruel. But I don't want to miss out on the chance to make that choice for myself.

And Trethon, considering the way they're pushing the evil path, I think it really isn't their thing. Even when Sven was playing thr heroic route at the PFH, he played his character like an arrogant jerk. If they wanted this to be a game about going dark then they should have advertised it like that, maybe I wouldn't have bought it. Or at least would have waited for a sale, because there are plenty of dark games out there I have no interest in touching

It's funny, Tuco mentioned this earlier, but the Fallout series in general has much better dialogue than the Baldur's Gate series. And it's not really even close. The fallout games, for the most part, actually feel like you're having conversations when you're talking to an NPC, but BG3 doesn't do that, at least not that I've seen. Sure, I say things, and people respond, but for some reason it never feels like a real conversation.

Ok if that is your expectation and you haven't played EA I think you will be pleasantly surprised. I always play goodie two shoes and this game allows you to play as such.

Separate the marketing from how the game actually plays. Alot of people are put off by the over the top depravity on display but they then improperly correlate that with you can't have a good and kind char playthrough which in my experience is not true. Sure I won't always get the outcome I hope for

Spoilers

For example I wish I could have saved Mayrina and her family as well but it is just not possible but I can still play good and kind through that whole portion.

People will be upset that Shadowheart and many other companions react negatively to acts of kindness and can be evil/obnoxious, but I mean...worshipper of Shar...

Oh I've played early access four or five times since it began, twice since patch 9 came out.

I like the hag quest conceptually, but it feels like it's there to just try and make us feel sad without earning it. Killing off two people we've barely met for what feels like no good reason when it really feels like we should be able to save them and the one brother is weirdly hostile. It feels like we should know these people ahead of time to build some kind of emotional link, but that doesn't exist so it feels like they're trying to force a tragedy without laying any groundwork.

I agree with the others, and strongly. When reading the initial post, the first thing I thought of was Alfira. "Your teacher would be proud, that song is worth a few tears."

As for Wyll and the goblins, goblins are monsters, I think it's a rare person in the realms who would feel sympathetic towards them

And yet Wrath of the Righteous exists and serves as one of the benchmarks BG3 will be measured against.

I get this vibe listening to them talk about the game and from PFH stuff.

I do not get this vibe when I played Early Access though. I was satisfied with my mostly good run of the game. I believe I played before some companion tweaks as well, so their prickly personalities could be a tad off putting at times when the game started. But most of them (besides Astarian, who I think is just an abysmal character overall) grew on me.

Oh yeah, I adore Wrath and think it's one of the best crpgs I've ever played. Certainly ranks higher for me than BG3 currently does.

A benchmark BG3 already passed for me, even without playing the early access, because I despised so much Wrath of the Righteous I wouldn't play it even under torture

Same. I found Wrath of the Righetous cartoonish, obnoxious and over the top. Put it down after about 5-10 hours and have zero desire to pick it up again.

Got through most of early access for BG3 and wanted to keep going about a year or two ago. Decided to put it down and wait for full release because I knew I'd be playing it a ton upon release.

I wish, you could save Mayrinas brothers. I always feel bad, that she looses first her husband and then her brothers.

100%. I remember someone here saying he knocked them out rather than killing them, which I quite liked. I've also heard speculation that this interaction will be fleshed out in release, which I hope for.

Perhaps it is a case of "write what you know".

Yes, you can be kind in the game. Another example is the moment when you can mediate between Barth and the kid who steals the locket. That one scene can go a few different directions. My favorite is the one where the kid admits that the locket reminds him of his mother, and Barth lets him keep it. (Barth is the character with Aradin and Remira outside the grove when you first arrive.)

There are moments like that throughout the game. It's all in how you play it.

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And yes, unfortunately, there are the occasional moments where the dialogue tree doesn't have what you're looking for. I suspect that will continue to be a problem as long as humans are manually doing the writing. It tries. It often succeeds! Sometimes it doesn't.

An example of a time when it fails: Volo. He tells you about the goblins flocking to the Absolute over their god Maglubiyet. You can respond by saying it's silly goblin superstition or hold your tongue. Well, neither of those choices appeal to my character. I'd rather say something like, "Really? That's fascinating." To be polite and to express my natural interest.

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There is a path through the conversation where the brothers run off, but you don't find their corpses dead by the redcaps later. I believe Auntie Ethel makes a throwaway comment about them being back at their farm outside Baldur's Gate, suggesting they may have been teleported back.

So what you are saying is that you EXPECTING the reactivity and not that it is there? Sorry, if this sounds pessimistic or pedantic, but the difference is huge. Nothing shown so far in this game is even remotely above what has become standard in this genre. I will gladly eat my words if the actual game proves me wrong (hey, I paid the full price for it even before the EA release, so why would I want them to fail??), but Larian hasn't shown much of what they are claiming so far.

For example: a lot of the 'cinematics' are just oneliners from crowd people you speak to. That requires work from the dev team and on that scale a lot of it and adds a lot of cinematic hours put together, but adds absolutely nothing to the game. Like so many things Larian promises sound absolutely amazing on paper, but very little of it created a whole 'new level of' experience in the EA so far.

The kid is also telling bald-faced lies, completely shamelessly, but you are not allowed to detect this at all (there is no check) until after the matter is resolved and you go talk to the kid again - at which point he soft-ridicules you and makes it clear it was a pack of bullshit so he could keep his loot. ... So, once again, the game treating you like an idiot and a whipping target, without giving you any recourse against it once you made that choice, which is what others in this thread are complaining of.

Standard? There has been nothing like this since Larian's previous game, Divinity original Sin 2 and even that wasn't nearly as expansive as this. The notion of making meaningful choices in games has been abandoned by most of the games industry, forget about there being anything remotely close to what BG3 has already shown. Not sure where you get these ideas of standards or other games doing anything even close to this when there's been nobody but Larian working this kind of game for at least the last five years.

Also no, they said 175 hours of cinematics...that's not just random crowd lines as you walk around.

I mean you can make good choices, they just tend to be harder.

If you kill either quickly enough mayrina doesn't get sent to the dungeon and put in further peril.

If you sneak past Ethel's thralls and kill her you can save one of them.

You can invest in Mol

You can let the goblin kids escape in halsin's room and fight more guards

You can let the monster hunter go.

Theres plenty of options to be nice

You can, it just isn't obvious how to. If you try to be too nice and kind with a pair of angry dumbasses who think they can take on a hag, they blow you off. That feels pretty realistic to me. At least one patch had a conversation path that convinced them not to go, but like I said it wasn't the 'heroic' option.