Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Story & Character Discussion Why are there hardly any consequences? *Spoiler*

I would say they are almost completely absent.

Outside of just mindlessly murdering your companions I can not think of a single long term consequence. You can murder the tieflings yes but most of them die anyway ..

I hope we are not going into a future where even classic CRPGs are safe from the dumbing down that is plaguing everything these days.

I see no reason why there should be any consequences for using tadpoles, because Emperor and Prism shields you from becoming mindflayer in the first place.

That's the rewrite that kinda ruined everything and that seems universally disliked.

It's hard to design systems that punishes players and still retain engagement. I believe this is why tadpoles ended up being all kiss and no curse, or now just change your appearance. Just the assumption alone can be a huge deterrent, and the initial narrative is essentially echoing that in that it's rooted in "finding a cure" for the tadpole before you turn into a squid. That + suspicion of the emperor was more than enough for me to pass on using any of them.

From Larian's PoV, you spent all of those resources developing the illithid powers and hamfisting it into the story, unsurprising they made it consequence free and I think the only reason there isn't more obvious encouragement is it would undermine the entire foundation of the story

It would have been incredibly easy to implement in this game.

The consequences could be to start forgetting who you are (locking out dialogue, for example you are romancing someone and your romance says: "do you remember when we..? And you are forced to not remember and you get dissaproval), having to pass skill checks to resist brain eating urge etc, maybe if you start consuming 1 or 2 you start getting cravings for them (you have to pass skill checks to not go berserk for X rounds). And so on.

I thought the Spirit Eater mechanic in MoTB was well done for example, it is something you have to be conscious of, but it is not there nagging you 24/7 unless you start to give in. It is easy to deal with as long as you deal with it in a proper manner but if you start slipping it becomes difficult very fast.

Larian called a big retreat when it came to consequences and reduced a lot of stuff in this regard. Tapole Power for sure was always something they thought of being an important decision and I am pretty sure they would have followed it through to a point of no return. For example not being able to refuse turning into a mindflayer and making checks to resist harder and harder. I believe a lot of that got recycled into the Dark Urge Origin as the whole tad pole thing, like sedurctress, didn't revceive a lot of positive feedback in EA. Instead we got something which shouldn't anger to much people and very important don't cause frustration when playing the game.

I for once was really disappointed when i found out that it did not matter if you chose Underdark or Mountain Pass as you could visit both anyways even after entering the Shadow Curse. I am pretty sure this was also changed quite late. As I got some comment from Shadowheart triggering about "Dark Justiciars like in the Underdark Ruins" although until that point I've never been there before visiting the cursed lands.

Hard to design system? I think a lot of rpgs already worked with similar systems to effect the game with such a system. The obvious one first, allignment charts changing through your decisions and in order open up for more decisions in that regard. A corruption system in the direction of Knight of the Old Republic 2 would also present itself. By using your tadpole power more and more you also can corrupt your followers making them follow your dark decent. Giving your main an aura where you can strenghen a certain aspect of the group while neglecting another.

The Witcher had plenty of engagement, as did Cyberpunk 2077. You could totally screw yourself into bad endings. Hell, Takemura was an immensely popular character, and pleasing hm meant getting a bad ending. In Witcher it was also easy to get the ending where Ciri dies by doing the obvious, popular thing.

None of those games caught flak for the consequences, they may have done for other reasons, but not for having real story divergence based on choices.

I also think witcher 3 does a much better job of giving choice and consequence to the player(especially long term), in addition to giving more diversity in endings.

Despite Larian constantly claiming BG3 is groundbreaking in these regards.

Preach!! (Couldn't have said it better myself)

Difficult != impossible. I would assume many ideas were worked through as consequences to tadpoles, ultimately none of them ended up in the game. Maybe they forgot?

While BG3 is a huge breath a fresh air and shows an intrinsic desire to make a great game vs a great product, Larian is still in the business of selling games. This game in particular, isn't even their own IP. Obsidian spent over a year trying to broker a deal for BG and wasn't able to get a licensing agreement. I highly doubt WotC/Hasbro just said "Hey just kick us 20% and do whatever you want."

I agree with a lot of the sentiments regarding the overall plot, being railroaded at the end game, do whatever you want as long as you eventually pick the right choice etc. I would guess a lot of the narrative issues stemmed from not owning the IP. The infinite iterations of sending it up and down the chain to WotC/Hasbro - many of whom are very much on the side of having a great product. At some point there's no more money, there's no more dev time, you have to release. Maybe Larian had full creative control and all their writers just suck, maybe Mearls has a serious Mindflayer fetish. I can only speculate, and I do think having insight into the more business side of development would be really interesting.

I actually seriously doubt WoTC had anything to do with it. Having their narrative (and their gameplay) fall apart in the last act is something Larian had a history of in their games well before this.

How would WoTC be to blame for anything? Maybe there are a few things Larian wouldn't be allowed to do, but there are millions of different solutions to things they could come up with themselves.

WotC/Hasbro owns the IP. That IP is still used in production of WotC products and is arguably at the height of it's popularity. I would assume WotC had a lot of creative control because of this. BG3 can't just rewrite the lore and characters, even game mechanics because it doesn't just effect BG3...it could effect all other products stemming from that IP.

BG3 isn't like a DnD game, or based on DnD games. It is a DnD game. Is it just coincidence this is the new DND preorder?

I understand how this works. WHat I am saying is, even if "all paths lead to rome", you can still pick your path.

It is evident that there are things in the game that do not work that had nothing to do with WOTC, etc the Emperor. Not saying the Emperor can not work in the game, but in the current iteration of the plot I just loathe every second he is on screen and pick whatever anti Emperor dialogue I can out of spite. RP goes out the window, he is that annoying.

To add my 2 cents, it's really obnoxious to see all these OP builds for BG3 because tadpole powers are like rare candies, powerful with no consequences.

Dark Urge also suffers from it to an extent, but different. In their case, there is 0 incentive to commit to the Dark urge, except one situation in Act 2.

Dark Urge, Tadpole powers, parts of act 2 and basically all of act 3 needed at least year or 2 of development time. For Larian's sake, I hope they use the ravenue to fix at least some of those problems.

That's exactly what they do. Have you not seen all the absolute garbage D&D games out there? Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms? The chinese MTG crap? They don't care as long as they get their cut, and if something turns out good they make money off it by including it in modules / writing a book about it.

As much as I like what Obsidian did, they had a loooot of issues as a studio. I'm not surprised a deal didn't go through when they cut ties with their star writer.

I never used the tadpole powers,so can't really comment on tha, but I thought, you become a half Illithid through using them?

I would like a bit more reactivity to my Durge though. I mean she is resisting and normally good, but then THAT scene happens and none of the companions have anything to say. When I told Gale afterwards about my urges, he said 'As long as you don't act on them, all is good' - with the body still lying there.

Yeah, the fact that telling about your urges to your companions is just brushed off as if it's okay, we know you can kill us while we sleep, but we don't really care. And that scene,That's why when replaying Durge, I played solo, and never even recruited other characters so I didn't break my immersion.

The tadpole's lack of consequences is pathetic in so many ways that I just don't care about them at all, like, they aren't even interesting, what was supposed to be the hardest choice in the game was just a cosmetic choice after all.