Originally Posted by Leucrotta
The deliberateness of it particularly gets my goat too. I have read/watched enough media to recognize the little tricks being used to elicit desired emotional reactions from players, and I have played the earlier games enough that I can pretty readily recognize Larian's deviations from those games. It really bothers the hell out of me knowing that their depictions weren't accidental or the result of the team not being familiar with the source material, there would have had to be actual discussions taking place about how to make the characters produce such a visceral dislike in the playerbase that they'd *want* to kill them, so that they'd have a feeling of cathartic triumph after finally vanquishing them.

You can see similar writing/acting tricks used with other antagonists like Cazador and Lorroakan in the game, the difference being that those aren't existing beloved characters from a franchise that the game is purportedly paying homage to.
Yup. For example, if Larian really wanted Vic to still be a high ranking Sharran involved with SH's story? Off the top of my head, SH could have been in a Stockholm Syndrome situation with Vic as someone she would want to aspire to in order to serve Shar instead of making Vic an abuser. They could have made finding memorabilia from the previous games something you could confront Viconia with, so that instead of having to fight her its a case of having to choose to, because she willingly steps aside. Could even have her shrug off Shar's chastisement as a callback to the epilogue WOTC retconned.

Still want Sav as a Bhaal cultist? First, get rid of the fucking incest, WTF? Second, make it clear since Bhaal rezzed him, he has no choice but to bide his time following orders and has reactions to a Resist Durge story instead of literally being author insert with a handwave for why they fucked up the BG continuity.

That's just off the top of my head, done in five minutes. All it takes is treating the characters, their backgrounds and the players of BG 1 and 2 with respect.

Last edited by Rahaya; 19/11/23 06:40 PM.