Originally Posted by aqa
Originally Posted by WizardGnome
Originally Posted by Zentu
This is an amazing RPG but the game processes from a master piece of story telling and plot development, to progressively go down hill with the last bit being a mad rush to the bottom.

Is this really true though?

I've watched Larian drop the ball on endings in multiple games now. My diagnosis is actually a bit different. From where I'm standing, problems with the main plot begin *right away.* I don't actually think that starting the game off with an epic chase on an alien spaceship, multiple dragons, teleporting to hell, etc. is a very good way to start the game, in fact I think it is very bad. It's a longstanding Larian tendency in writing where they apparently think that rushing as many "epic" things into the plot as quickly as possible makes it better, whereas it in fact just cheapens them imo. BG3 is never at any point a "masterpiece of storytelling and plot development." What it does have is some pretty good *sidequest* writing, and really fun gameplay early on, and that fun gameplay helps to gloss over the weakness in the writing. It's later on, where the gameplay begins to unravel, that people begin noticing the lackluster plot more. This is compounded by the fact that the writing itself does genuinely decrease in quality as the game goes on.

Agreed, but that wasn't always the case for Larian. Divine Divinity had proper pacing, though obviously an old and low budget game with far lower production quality. Those particualar issue only started with Divinity Original Sin and it's sequal.

I think you just missed the biggest flaw though. The MC should be meaningfully and uniquely tied into the story. There must be a reason why YOU go out and try fix things, and why your companions look to you as the leader and defer to your descisions. And you only have to look at the classics with good and memorable stories to see that in use. BG1, BG2, DA1 (sort of), DA2, ME123, PS:T, NWN2 MotB, all had that and it's why their stories worked so well without ever feeling contrived. The origin character mechanic completely undermines that. It reduces "tav's" role to a subset of an origin character, and an irrelevant part of the story.

Oh no, I mean, I have other criticisms of how Larian does things that I didn't mention here, and the Origins system they use is one of them. They contort the plot to fit with their "Any one of these origins characters could feel like the MAIN character!" philosophy and it's all for naught, because they KNOW the stats and they KNOW the overwhelming majority of people go for custom characters. And you are right - it actually makes a generic "custom character" feel less involved in the plotline than their origin characters. I actually found this to be worse in BG3 than in any other game so far, at least on my first playthrough - because I played as a generic wizard, and then watched as the game treated Gale more like he was the MC wizard than I was. It is actually almost absurd how much the game seems to say "Shut up, the REAL wizard is talking" to a MC wizard when Gale is around. That being said, I think in BG3 the "Dark Urge" customizable option is actually intended to be the "canon" main character playthrough, and that one actually does nail you to the plot more than a generic character does.

But you're right - I am only familiar with Larian from DOS1 onwards; I never played the older games. I was considering doing so out of historical interest at some point.