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Or look at Shadowheart. What does Shar have to do with this whole plot? It's not important enough to come up at all before the conclusion of Shadowheart's plot, certainly. But how could it, when you can kill shadowheart or drive her away. And the gith? They shod be super important, but you can kill Lae'zel and skip the creche entirely. None of this stuff that the companions are attached to can matter because they wanted to give us the freedom to skip it. So the story always was going to be choppy and disjointed. To use DA: Inquisition as an example, you will always have at least 4 particular companions with you, and a host of unkillable supporting characters, so they can contribute to the backbone of the plot. We don't have that for BG3 and it suffers for that.
I think I remember conversations from the datamining days where people were basically going, "Hey, isn't it weird that none of the companion characters seem to be relevant to anything plot-related we're datamining?" I kept thinking about that as I was playing through the later acts.
But Larian could've coded a plot where there was reactivity to account for that. If it was something they knew they had to do at the start of the process. But sometimes I get the impression that they started with ideas and tried to make them work. For example, the article about Larian grappling with the importance of Shadowheart's artifact to the plot and needing to find all these ways to keep it around the player. As a professional editor, I had this pang of concern for their story then and there because they were spending so much time to make it work with 'the artifact is in Shadowheart's hands, it must end up with the player at all times' instead of just... going back to that core concept (the artifact is Shadowheart's) and changing it to something that'd work (just put the artifact in the player's hands ASAP.) Not to use a cliche but this is precisely what people mean when they say 'kill your darlings.'
It's unfair to compare it to Disco Elysium, but I'm going to do it. Disco Elysium is a detective RPG where you need to figure out the mystery of a hanged man behind your hotel room... and you can actually figure it out without ever visiting the body behind the tree! BG3's scope is a lot more expansive than DE, sure. But DE's writers knew what they were working toward and every aspect works toward the goal of being a detective RPG with, honestly, an absurd level of reactivity and branching narratives. Similar to most RPGs, DE works best when you go with the core hook, but gets very funny when you try to push against it ("So,
have you gotten the body out of the tree?") but it also allows you to try and outsmart the game, allowing for so many ways to pick up info around the case and follow threads, or simply not figure it out at all. But even then, it has a few things you
must do to reach the end of the story. It also helps that everything is tightly and delicately interwoven, so, doing something that seems random on one side of the map might logically lead you back toward the case, or some aspect of it.
Now, BG3 has a bigger scope in both scale and geography (DE's scope is, like, two city blocks and a fishing village; a detective story versus a fantasy epic) but if the Larian writing room knew they were going to weave a plot where all the player characters may not be a part of it, then they could've written something that accounted for it. But they'd have to be prepared for players being upset or missing content. Which they seemed like they had! Swen talked it up, EA pointed to stuff like Gale and Raphael making a deal. It feels like they had a whiteboard full of some really blue sky brainstorming -- eight companion characters who can each be a protagonist, a plot involving illithids, and the Dead Three, and Shar, and a dream visitor, and crazy reactivity, a dozen ways to solve every quest, content you can skip over, talking to corpses, events that develop organically as you rest, faithful 5E adaptation, multiplayer etc -- and then it just didn't come together in time.
Like, I don't even think it'd be terribly difficult, you'd just need to grapple with players calling things 'cheap.' Kill Lae'zel? Fine, she's not there to vouch for you to the gith, and they're hostile. Don't free her from the cage? She's there when you meet the gith and she says you left her to rot -- difficult persuasion check or they attack. Don't recruit Gale? Well, he goes to Raphael. Kill Gale? Raphael's little helper does his resurrection riddle thing and then he signs a deal with Raphael. Don't recruit Astarion? He tries to bite you during a long rest. Kill Astarion? Good going, you've
disrupted Cazador's ritual, and he'll be pissed if he finds out
. As far as I'm aware, BG3's writing lead was working on his first game during this production, so, maybe he was out of his depth? IDK. I know from coding my own little interactive fiction games that even features and ideas that seem small or easy can end up drastically bloating out the workload... but I was an amateur with no experience, not part of a big CRPG team, y'know?
