Thank you to all my fellow regular posters for engaging with this— I’ve been very interested in hearing the diversity of your opinions.
On the matter of ambition: when the initial BG3 controversy broke out, I was one of the people saying that ambition ought to be encouraged, and that bigger dreams make for better games. I still believe this. What I am noting is that the ambition is spent “horizontally” i.e. across many different visions and ways to accomplish the game, rather than “vertically” I.e. providing depth and consequence to a smaller number of features or ways of playing. Ambition, in my opinion, is always good, but there are different ways to apply it that come with their own unique trade-offs.
I think there is strain between the part of the game that can be played like a multiplayer immersive sim, and the part of the game that can be played like a semi-linear party-based single player RPG. There are so many ways the quests and stories can be “resolved” that I feel the game hesitates to give you emotional investment at certain points. This game has to be everything to everyone.
My favorite way to play this game has been as a single player RPG focused on my companions and their interactions with my PC, each other, and the world. That’s the kind of game I like, but it seems that’s only a narrow sliver of what this game is. Now, I imagine there are people who prefer the immersive sim, multiplayer party type experience. Instead of committing to one vision, Larian spread its resources across many.
Yeah, I would agree with you here on the horizontal point. I also think that the writing, story, and narrative flow of the game should have been nailed down at least a year ago. The fact that they were re-writing characters, introducing new ones, changing a central plot character as far as June 2023 is kind of nuts. I've never heard of that. That might have been the 'crisis' they were mentioning some months ago. Changing such things obviously has a pretty significant ripple effect throughout the game. I've also noticed a major shift in tone, like Gale in EA, as was mentioned, making a deal with Raphael. There was an overall more morose and darker tone to the companions that was, for some reason, scrapped. And sure, it is their vision to do with it as they will, but it was just a little strange to me that they decided to change so many details so late in the game, which obviously had them scrambling to then remove references to all of these cut moments and/or re-write others to account for the changes.
Obviously some references are still in the game that don't account for these changes, and, as such, it begins to reveal this patchwork of plots within the game due to these re-writes. The graveyard in the files of cut content is likely a testament to all of these changes, if they were cut a long time ago, they likely would have been purged from the files, but given that the cut content is so massive, it seems to indicate that the changes were fast and furious and probably not all accounted for or adequately cleaned out for the sake of story and narrative fidelity.
As TRQ said, and as you say, ambition is good, I'm glad they were trying to shoot for the stars, but they should have landed on their moon a year or two years ago with a solidified vision and just iterated on that consistently across the board. Instead, it was probably, and here I am obviously speculating, a lot of narrative changes all the way in the lead up to release, which, as anyone knows, major changes to any piece of work under difficult time constraints is bound to create inconsistencies, errors, omissions, strangeness, etc.
