Originally Posted by Boblawblah
Originally Posted by Zerubbabel
However, I think we also need to contextualize the kind of game ME2 is: It is a pure character study. The entirety of the major missions in ME2 are all either recruitment missions or loyalty missions. The entire game is centered around exploring the personalities of the characters. That's why characters like Grunt, Mordin, Jack, and Thane feel so remarkably fleshed out and deep. If 100% of the content in BG3 were character study of our six origin companions, we might be having a different conversation.

I wonder though, is BG3 NOT a character driven RPG as well? When people talk about why they love the game, the characters are almost always at the forefront of the discussion. The recent rush to defend poor Lae'zel, the constant SH fanart, the Halsin memes, it's pretty much all people talk about. The actual main plot? The villains with an exception for Raphael? All very 'eh', very similar to ME2's main driving plot. The plot is a backdrop for character interaction/development.

Also, each Mass Effect game is 30 hours give or take 5 hours or so. BG3 if you're playing without redoing a bunch of stuff and steadily making progress, weighs in at about 100 hours, give or take 10 hours or so. You'd think BG3 characters could do so much more with their development in 100+ hours than a single ME game does in one (or even 2, because all it took for those characters to become legends were two games). Wyll? He's got a very simple story, with very few meaningful choices. SH? She has exactly ONE big moment, and then she's sort of just there. Karlach I would argue is the most developed. She has a lot of incidental interactions without the player character, main story tie-ins, a constant 'dealing with her issue' progression throughout the game, and a resolution (whether or not you like it) to her issue at the very end of the game. The rest though, I just don't see it.

Sure, I could reload and choose different dialogue options and get different responses, but that doesn't change their entire relationship with Tav or each other.

All this is obviously imo, and off the top of my head, so I might be not remembering things, etc. Grain of salt and all of that. That said, I need to play through the ME trilogy again, see how it holds up now that I've played BG3.

I agree that each character needs more. BG3 is a character-driven RPG, but I remember ME2 as special in that every single "quest" was centered around at least one companion. You spend a lot of time knowing these companions in ME2, and each companions has, at minimum, two long sequences centered entirely around them. Shadowheart gets a small set of sequences centered around her. Wyll gets nothing. Lae'zel gets one major sequence. Proportionally, Harbinger got less screen time and buildup than Orin, Ketheric, or Gortash individually. Many quests in BG3 are incidental to the characters taking part in them. That's not a bad thing, but it does not give them "umph" in terms of consequences.

While I like the personalities of the characters, they are not the center of the game. The obsession over individual characters in this frankly crowded game is a lot like this meme:
[Linked Image from i.imgur.com]

What is there is good, in my opinion. But if we wanted something like an ME2-onward level of investment in the characters, the game would have to focus a much greater proportion of its overall script, screentime, and story on the companions and their individual psychologies.

Another limitation of this game’s story is that it needs to work without any companions at all for custom multiplayer parties. That means the story has to makes sense with or without our companions. Mass Effect 2 cannot make any sense with its companions totally removed.

Remember the human (This is a forum for a video game):