Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Real life politics influencing game act 3?

The Witcher made the depiction of refugees and renegades/revolutionaries pretty exemplary. Look at the Scoia'tael elves. Deprived of land by humans, a once great empire turned to squatters, but many of them aggressive racists even beyond humans and not all of them pure personalities fighting for justice, but often using the excuse of justice for personal gain. To Larian's credit, they did this well with ironhand gnomes. Wulfren is a self serving asshole, but some in his crew are actually pretty decent if not honestly good people.

The supposed evil empire compared to the Romans turns out to be far more benevolent to magic users than if you let the Redanians gain independence from the Empire incursion and then mass genocide of casters and suspected casters takes place. Morality in The Witcher isn't obvious and partisan. There are good and bad individuals in every faction.

The female leader of the Sorceresses is shown to be a corrupt, manipulative woman who was at both times the victim of her status as sorceress by having her eyes gouged out, but then you see she was the one to propel the vicious anti-mage attitude by meddling in politics, assassinating the male brotherhood of casters as she was a female supremacist, and bullying the crown prince to a point of seething hatred for all casters which translated to an era of mass burnings and impalements for casters both male and female. There is no simple always oppressor/always victim category that is easily and permanently applied to one group of people in the game. Characters have agency and are not a walking soapbox. Even the witchers who are abused as children and outcasts are pretty varied. Some are good like Geralt, others are amoral, and others are downright evil and use their powers for self-advancement.

Well I am glad to see a lefty engaging in good faith debate and not just poisoning the well by smearing people and making no actual argument.

I have barely started chapter 3, but I would note that you are almost immediately greeted with a quest where refugees have invaded someone's home and the guy returns to his home, asks them to leave and they refuse to do so.

It is pretty ridiculous that Larian decided "Hey, lets make a quest where someone is literally stealing someone else's home, and we portray the home theives as sympathetic and the guy objecting to his home being stolen as a moustache twirling villain."

No, stealing someone's home is not OK and the homeowner objecting to said theft is completely reasonable. Claiming a refugee status doesn't change that. For Larian to suggest otherwise is frankly pretty gross.

Let's see Sven's home invaded by refugees (there are plenty to go round in Germany) and see how accommodating he is about the matter. Call me a cynic, but I expect he would want them removed immediately.

As an aside, not wanting the demography of your country being changed beyond recognition doesn't make you "a bad person". Smearing anyone simply for the desire to not have comfortable familiarity replaced with the feeling of being an alien on one's own land does make you a bad person, however.

I like you.

The orange bit certainly was. Donald Trump has repeatedly been called Orange Man because he uses too much bronzer.

Well that is all well and good to say, but I would note that there is a very large divergence between the sensibilities of almost any large media organisation (of which game devs are a subset) and what views are actually popular amongst the public. Try finding a game which reflects what most people think about the death penalty, trans issues, immigration etc. You would be hard pressed to find a steelman representation of such positions, never mind a game which was genuinely sympathetic to them. For all large modern corporations purport to care about diversity, its diversity of identity, not of viewpoint, that they are focussed on.

Do you think artists are under an obligation to share the views of any population, let alone the majority, and to incorporate those specific views into their work? Do you think artists ought to steelman any issue they seek to incorporate in their work? It's fine for you to say yes, but I think shackling creatives does more harm than good.

I was specifically responding to your point that you aren't forced to play games which express such views. OK, well what games can I play then? And its hardly an issue limited to just video games. You increasingly cannot find a banking service that is willing to accommodate people with widely held views on such matters if they express them publicly. I would like there to be politics free zones and for people providing goods and services that are not intrinsically political to stop crowbarring politics into their goods and services.

Personally, I would prefer it if game devs did not strike consciously political stances on contentious issues. BG1 and 2 had themes that you could describe as political, but lets be honest, its content was almost entirely uncontroversial. This is increasingly less and less the case these days. The two largest RPG releases in recent months, BG3 and Starfield, appear to take a decidedly left leaning stance on currently contentious issues. I don't want to feel like I am being given a ham fisted lecture which I don't agree with by a dev who cannot even represent my disagreement in a vaguely accurate way. If they aren't prepared to give a fair hearing to both sides of a discussion - and they aren't - I would prefer they not have the discussion and let entertainment be just that, not ham fisted political propaganda.

But yes, if you are going to broach the matter, you should actually represent the opposing position reasonably, not come up with a stupid caricature.

I think you'll find that most games, if not all, released before 2016 do not broach most of the contemporary issues that annoy you in particular.
I like Paradox games like Crusader Kings and Stellaris. They allow for political gameplay without focusing on the contemporary hot-button issues that bother you.
If you are looking for modern RPG releases, consider Elden Ring, Divinity: Original Sin 2, Mount and Blade II, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Dark Souls III, or Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous.

Look, when I wrote that original post, I was mostly thinking of how I have zero desire to play Disco Elysium because I don't think being lectured by Marxists for 50 hours on material I'm already familiar with makes for a particularly interesting week. Thus, I do not intend to play the alleged "greatest RPG of all time" Disco Elysium. I also don't feel the need to demand my views be accounted for in the work.

I have no intention of playing Disco Elysium either, but I have to be honest, a game which is just naked Marxist propaganda is fine in my view and the attitude "Don't play it if you don't like it" is far more reasonable. The issue with a game like BG3 is that the overall plot and gameplay is not intrinsically political and plenty of people might be interested in playing it regardless of political outlook, but they unnecessarily crowbarred contentious and slanted politics into regardless. It is particularly egregious when it is a successor to a series which did nothing of the kind.

I don't mind explicitly political games being political. What I do object to is having a ham fisted political lecture inserted into a game which is not marketed as such and which I am otherwise interested in playing. Its particularly annoying when it goes only one way. Lets take a non political issue. Imagine if there were a sub plot or two that promoted scatological sexual practices as an active good and you were presented with no reasonable way to object in game. Could you see why some people might find this objectionable? Would people raising those objections be making unwarranted demands to have their views represented, or would this be entirely reasonable feedback?

Referring back to the quest I mentioned in another post, where refugees literally steal a guy's home and refuse to leave when asked, why is there no dialogue option to reflect the view refugees are recalcitrant lawbreaking scumbags and you are removing them for what you believe to be entirely moral reasons? You have the option either to let them get away with wanton criminality or be very obviously the bad guy. Aside from being absurdly biased, its just plain dumb.

It's less that games shouldn't be political, but that they are always lopsidedly political on one end without alternatives in the "free market" because the games media, publishers, and corporate executives more or less strangle any nascent gaming company that deviates from the political orthodoxy in the cradle. If there was a true free market where everyone is free to find games that reflect their values and preferences, people wouldn't care. But active marginalization of a large section of the population via top down corporate advertising censorship campaigns and smear by guilt through association has completely distorted the landscape of commercial art, of which gaming is a part of.

The threat "it would be a shame if your game with the wrong values and politics were subjected to a smear campaign by gaming journalists who moonlight as political activists, making your game unpublishable as no advertisers or capital would want to touch it, and we'll namecall those workers who decide to work for you to make sure they are blacklisted in the industry" has smothered any viewpoint and narrative diversity in the industry.

I must be getting old, because the idea that games "released before 2016" did not broach contemporary issues (or were not accused of doing so regardless of reality) is so off-base that reading you claim that actually made me laugh out loud.

Games did not suddenly start getting political, or getting accused of being political, in 2016. Since the dawn of the medium there have been people looking at video games and trying to say "This game is on MY SIDE so it's good" or "This game is on THE OTHER SIDE so it's bad." It has forever been the most obnoxiously overused and often misapplied criticism levied at the medium (and in fact this probably generalizes to ANY medium.) It's the refuge of dimwits and a mindtrap that short-circuits critical thinking. "I don't have to actually experience the media or think about it because it's written by OTHER SIDE and thus I assume it's bad."

Case in point, you are really depriving yourself by not playing Disco Elysium. I have no idea whether the writers are actually marxists or not, but if they are it's not like Disco Elysium is some bland piece of propaganda. It is genuinely some of the best writing I've seen in a video game, in a world that feels very real (As a sort of weird alternate universe that went through similar political spasms that ours did in WW2) that incorporates some genuinely creepy paranormal horror elements. Armed with the foreknowledge that the writers are communists, you can probably detect some communist sympathy in the game, but it is definitely not blatant and it's not like they gloss over the real world examples of communism going badly; I distinctly remember a moment in the game where you come across a wall full of bullet holes (because dissidents had been told to stand against it and be shot) and they were very open that the communists had done this. And it is about so much else than simply politics besides; murder, mystery, heartbreak. I am hardly a communist myself, but it is absolutely a shame to think 'writers are marxists, therefore bad' when it comes to this game.

I am getting really annoyed at people not reading the prior contexts of my posts. Man was complaining about trans issues, refugees, and other stuff. I mentioned pre-2016 because before 2016 we had different political issues dividing the population and different cause celebres. Only specific moments in recent history have brought people to hold certain issues as “political” and “controversial,” and games in the past were no less political, but focused on the recent history of their time, like the critique of the Cold War and War on Terror in the Metal Gear franchise. Thanks for calling me a dimwit, though. From you, I take it as a compliment.

If I wanted another politics and economics lecture, I’d go back to uni, or pay more attention at work. I didn’t say writers are communists therefore bad. I said being lectured for 50 hours doesn’t sound like a good time.

No, we really didn't. These issues didn't spring forth from nothing in 2016. Immigrants and refugees did not suddenly start being talked about in 2016 and neither were trans issues - in fact I can remember people complaining specifically about a trans character in Dragon Age Inquisition. There was no sudden shift in 2016. I've seen people bring up this idea before, and it is an utter illusion. And look, sorry for being harsh but seeing people being dismissive of art because they don't like the politics of the creators is one of my biggest pet peeves. It is such a needlessly tribal thing to engage in. Disco Elysium is not at all a lecture, and if you heard that it was someone's been dishonest with you. It is actually the only game I've played where they actually DID pull off the promise of "Failing rolls is just as interesting as succeeding them."

I think this thread, and topic, has run its course. Let's talk about games and enjoy them instead, ye?

Who people are / aren't really doesn't matter here. We can simply establish that and decide that anyone who doesn't see another gamer as just that, a gamer, is just being pedantic and weird. It really doesn't matter, at least I suspect that is the pure end goal everything else claims to seek.

End of thread.