Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Cinematics: Essential or Extravagant?

Yep, DA2 race locks you into a human, it's also considered the worst game in the franchise,which is embarrassing since DAO is still the best game in the same franchise.

Hawke can be male human or female human, but not anything that is not human.

I liked it better than Inquisitions. It had a novel plot structure, and it didn't try to bore me to death with way, way, way to much "open world".

DAO was a lot of fun, the rest of the series shouldn't even exist imo. Mages and Templar are just such a boring conflict.

I won't hear such slander. Inquisition is still one my top 10 rpgs of all time, and for its flaws, DA2 actually has still going for it. It's not GREAT, but it's solid and I think its party has a level of interaction and a quality of dynamic that few games have matched even now. I'll agree that it's the "worst" game in the franchise but that's relative, since every franchise has to have a worst. This thread isn't the place for in depth discussion of the Dragon Age series, but I just had to step in to provide a quick defense.

Okay so in DA2 you can only play a human but my point stands.

Bioware cut back on cinematic dialogue for DAI, and that is one of the reasons (along with poor map and quest design) that I didn’t like DAI as well as the other Dragon Age games or BG3. Cinematic dialogue makes a huge difference to me!

Why yes, indeed the original Bioware staff left EA Bioware pretty quickly, and obviously for a reason.



Dragon Age was already only finished during EA ownership and EA changed many things about DA:O, like removing multiplayer, adding a console version which in turn made the interface for PC worse, or separating parts of the game into a DLC, just so EA could get your personal data. Which is why I never played that specific part of DA:O, since I refused to give EA my private data.

But yes Dragon Age wasnt so great.

They had three classes and only ONE of them (Mage) offered any actual variance in how you could build your character. Warrior just picked either Twohanded or Shield, and Rogue just picked Archery or Dualweapon, and then picked all skills of these respective combat styles. So they would always be the exact same in the end. Only Mage could actually pick from many different spell trees and thus you could build your Mages in all kinds of ways.

By the way all three classes also suffered from the problem that you would pick two of four subclasses. Thats not really the point of subclasses and by the way thats not even more variance than picking just one subclass. Because there are four ways to pick one option from four options, and four ways to pick two options from four options.

Additionally all subclasses only added four more abilities.

Apparently it only got even worse with the expansion when all classes would pick all their four subclasses, which completely removes the whole point of subclasses. I already didnt bother to get the expansion though.

So yes DA didnt have much of a rulesystem. It was pretty horrible and kept shooting itself into the foot pretty badly.

I like even the d20 rulesystem from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic better. Sure, it even had less party members (3) and you had very poor control over what they would be doing. But it had far less issues, like the skills (another problem in DA:O) actually work properly, and it allowed to freely pick what force powers your Jedi could have, and of course you can easily have an all Jedi party.

Also of course the story of SWKotOR is just so much better than that of DA:O.

Thats why I've replayed SWKotOR about a douzen times or some such, and keep replaying it every once a while until this day, though it gets harder and harder to run it. While I played DA:O only once.



So yes, technically you're right, DA:O was a failure on many levels. But it didnt get out until after Bioware had been bought by EA. And I dont think Dragon Age: Origins would have hurt Bioware too much. As far as I remember, even in the state it came out it was still pretty successful.

Poor map design how? Several large areas with various types of environment much more so than anything in DA:O or DA 2 and IMO superior to anything BG3 has to offer. What's wrong with the quest design? The quest in DA2 is like BG3 in forcing you into choices you don't want. I enjoyed DA:O as much as DA:I more or less. The main quest and plot of DA:I is head and shoulders above the overly-complicated, cliched, hole riddled mess which BG3 provides.

The dialogue in DA:I is also far superior to BG3 with or without cinematics. The humour in the party banter is well done and way beyond Larian's schoolboy offerings. The dialogue touches on politics, diplomacy and theology among other grown-up subjects.


To return to the topic: IMO far too many cinematics and far too many of them are just people talking. Cinematics are especially annoying when one has to reload and sit (or click) through the damned thing again.
One thing I will say in their favour is that I am fascinated and impressed by the amount of facial movement/expressions during convos (especially Lae'zel and Shadowheart). This is probably my favourite thing in the game.

I had hoped for complex combat like in The Temple of Elemental Evil, but with the rest of the game also great, but it unfortunately turned out they have removed many of the things you could do in D&D3, like a Delay action, characters hardly get any feats anymore, etc.

Really the only relevant thing for me in that regard is that you can disable it.

Um, not really. My kind of lady aint represented. But whatever. The romances in BG3 dont appeal to me anyway.

Also, why exactly would my Halfling ever want to romance a Halfelf, Tiefling, or worst of all Githyanki ? Absolutely doesnt fit. They are all brutally too tall.



Well, I havent played DA3, but in principle I like open worlds.

DAI has huge maps filled with nothing but a very large number of fetch quests and little or no cinematic dialogue for those quests. They were very boring to me! The opposite of BG3 where I love the maps and quests!

I'm resisting the urge to turn this towards talking about DA:I. Regarding the cinematics, I think Larian, as they so often do, went way overboard with them. The introductory cinematic stuff with companions? Totally valid. Good stuff. Having basically every character trigger a scene when you click on them? Too much. Way too much. I even can get appreciate wanting to have a cinematic cutscene for every side quest and giving every question associated with the main quest a cinematic. But so much mundane stuff that could have been conveyed without cinematics involves one. Merchants don't need cinematic scenes. I don't think cinematics help crpgs at all and in fat I think they result in lower quality choices, dialogues, etc, but even to the degree where they're beneficial from any point of view, Larian just took it to an absurd degree.

This

My point regarding Origins was that it was initially announced as a "back to the roots" title, initially PC-exlusive too, as far back as 2004. They did this, as at that point Bioware had done Kotor (which whilst entertaining, wasn't quite BG either with its extremely compressed small hub world level design, simplified 3 character combat, and downgraded character options). And Jade Empire, which was more of an action game already to begin with.

And even without any involvement from EA, they still "streamlined". The only major influence EA MAY have had over Origins was that it had to be released on consoles likewise -- and fittingly for that era, the console's combat system is simplified more so (during the early to late 2000s in particular, ALL publishers for some reason were under the impression that console games needed to be this simple, you could play them with your arms tight behind your back... which of course paved the way for the success of FromSoftware, amongst others).

Bioware was well on its way of being afraid with still associated anything resembling D&D/RPG by the early 2000s already, and still market themselves as the "character and story driven game company" for reason. That's why I'd personally rather not want another company walking down that path. In particular one that has shown that you don't need to hide that you're doing RPGs, capital R P G, and still can wrap the package in a way that attracts the crowd you may desire. And for anybody saying OWL BEAR SEX DID IT -- as a reminder: Bioware didn't market Origins on its "indepth" character system or "complex" combat to Average Joe likewise. In various circles, they're known as the "Romance&Sex" company for reason.

Ah, the DAO marketing with all the violence and Marylin Manson. So terrible.

Whilst we're at "streamlining": Baldur's Gate was never a niche hardcore RPG to begin with. Nor was it intended to be. If you "streamline" significantly more, what's left? I mean, if you put it next to Dragon Age 2, Witcher 2, Mass Effect 2, it may look the raw deal. Put it next to Darklands, Realms Of Arkania or Age Of Decadence however, and it appears like Diablo mixed with Warcraft 2, two major PC blockbusters of that time. Which the combat intentionally mimiced some, if not mechanically, then viscerally. In particular BG1 is mostly auto-attack combat just the same, due to the lack of spell complexity and fighter type classes being fighters and that's that. Like the units in an RTS. Key Bioware staffers were major fans of Warcraft either way.

Or as Guido Henkel (former Attic, Interplay and the dude on Planescape Torment's cover artwork) put it:


https://rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=8620

I remember Mark Darrah talked about this ad in a video discussing DA:0 on his youtube channel. He agreed that it was kind of dumb but also that it did exactly what they needed it to, so it was an entirely successful ad.

Diablo game out in 97, but BG1 development began in 95 and it released in 98, so I can’t imagine that game had much impact on BG’s style.

But yeah, point stands that BG has never been the hardcore RPG it is often remembered as.

Yeah, good point. The Warcraft /RTS influence is clear though, Warcraft 2 was played a lot at the Bio offices. The game ended up still being compared to Diablo either way though (as it looked sorta like it, superficially) even by major PC magazines. Which created an overlap audience. Some may have sticked to it and enjoyed it. Some not.

Sort of like Larian going all-out cinematic, Mass Effect style. Thing is, the actual game naturally plays nothing much like Mass Effect at all. "This is boring TB combat, I'm back to Mass Effect where I can blow the shit up Gears-Of-War-style, not recommended."

As an anecdote from that era: Interplay management actually approached Tim Cain mid-way through development with the demand to make Fallout more like Diablo. Ugh. (28:20 minutes mark onwards)

Absolutely essential but only if well done.

Games like BG3, Witcher 3 and the last few expansions of WoW really makes me feel like I am in a movie

On the other hand games like Fallout 4 made cinematics really bad/ generic and didn’t add much to the story .

But if done right they are amazing