Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Story & Character Discussion Opinions on the main plot writing?

Another indication that Larian's writing stuff didn't really know what they were doing, and were just making things harder on themselves than they had to, is Shadowheart's artifact. There was even a Youtube video about the amount of work they had to do to account for all the different ways to get "the box" into the player's hands and/or their general awareness to ensure the plot functions. When I read that article, I was sitting there thinking, wow, there must be a really specific reason why Larian is doing all this work. Any decent editor would've looked at their over-complexity and told them to KISS it.

There's a bit of a tip in writing where if you're having big trouble with Chapter 4, then you probably made a mistake in Chapter 1 or 2. A similar idea is that if you have to drop in a lot of exposition to explain something suddenly, you haven't set it up as neatly as you could've. The mysterious artifact is one of the most obvious cases of that I can remember seeing these issues in a big name release. Like a lot of the other Act 1 components, it sounds great as an isolated idea: the grouchy elf cleric has a mysterious artifact that, gasp, is protecting the player from the big bad! Seems simple enough, right?

Well, what if Shadowheart dies? What if the player doesn't pick up the artifact? What if Shadowheart leaves the party? What if the player simply lets her keep the box and never asks about it? The video talks about all the work they had to do to make the artifact work and how it basically broke BG3's plotting. And all the while, the general idea was to take all these extra steps just to... put the box into the player's hands a few hours later, via some really complicated scripting.

The thing is, there's a way to fix this: just put the box in the player's hands earlier! When they wash up on the beach, the box is just there. Did it end up there by chance, or is there another reason? Who knows, but there's an initial mystery. The player picks it up or, if they don't, it zooms into their pack as they walk away. Weird! Then Shadowheart is like, hey, that was mine, but I guess you can keep it because it wants to go with you. Which is pretty much how the game wants it to go anyway. You've got a mistake in Chapter 4 where you need the protagonist to have the item all of a sudden, so go back to Chapter 1 and give it to them when it's natural and where the audience is expecting obvious setup.

As it is, even if you take great pains to never take the artifact from Shadowheart, never have her die, etc. the game just decides that you got the artifact some point and everyone knows about it.

Otherwise, how can you begin to structure a plot when you don't know who is holding the McGuffin, or if it's even in the group? Even Disco Elysium, which has way more reactivity, very quickly establishes: you're a detective, your partner is Kim, you are supposed to be investigating a hanged man. It's like BG3 wanted this early twist that the party member's mysterious artifact was actually an important mysterious artifact... but why?

I feel like a lot of newbie video game writers are prone to going like, wouldn't it be cool if you didn't have to recruit everyone, wouldn't it be cool if the characters can die, wouldn't it be cool if your party member had the McGuffin, without really thinking about whether that helps the actual story. Because most of the time, it doesn't! It just creates more work. Someone should've stepped in when they were pulling their hair out about getting the artifact to the player at Hour 4 or whatever and gone, hey, don't waste time on this knot, just cut through it and make it work at the earliest possible moment.