Larian Studios Forums Divinity General Discussion What BG3 missed but what would have made it 5 times better game

Because games like this are pretty fun to play through multiple times, even mainstream players do it so its very common, what would greatly improve the story and gameplay aspect of it is failure. And i mean failing at big story elements.

In BG3 and in classical story telling you can set aim for yourself such as "i try to save the world" or "i will sacrifice the world for my god" or "i will become tyrant" etc and whatever your aim is going to be, achieving that in BG3 and in classical design is easy and game kinda tells you on every choise which one to pick if you want to achieve this or that ending. This is safe design and lacks total ambition and actual design art of story telling and player manipulation. Are you truly setting the bar so low larian ?

In bg3 you did have a moment, my favorite moment in the whole game, where player could fail to save isobel from kidnappers, at that moment many players had chosen "i will be a hero and save these poor people"... then you failed as isobel died and game totaly rubs it into your face, showing how horrible end all those poor people end up facing because of you failed. It was very sad and a surprise for every player who ended up failing at that point. Total masterpiece of story design in a world full of cliche stories where you can predict everything that is going to happen next. That moment should become whole aspect of story telling because of it is a game, even if you make players fail they can re-play, in fact they get burning urge to re-play and correct their failures they had on their first run. There is a game that did this in tiny scale, a very good game, dragon age origins, a lot of players didnt get the endings for certain things that they expected, instead they got sad endings.. that made everyone replay and try to figure out how to get the ending they want, and it was NOT made easy, game didnt guide you to it instead it tried to trick you from reaching your goals, the correct choises were not the obvious choises.

And that is my main idea.. make your storytelling so that it manipulates players to fail. As they try to achieve good endings to their stories, make player think the game guides them towards it but if they follow the "obvious" choises, they end up failing, so it kinda becomes a challenge to find the correct choises, correct path to achieve the kind of ending you want to achieve. And moreover, as you reveal to your player that they have failed, that they have been tricked, rub it into their face so hard they want to smash their keyboard to the wall, make players feel sadness, disappointment and failure, possibly even in black-humorous way. That is anti-clichee and very good story telling technique for a game that people play multiple times.

Whenever you know you can surprise the player, for example when player thinks he has won a battle for something and saved the day.. Then villain returns out of nowhere and rips apart everything and rubs it into player's face as they stare their screens with their mouth open :OOO in shock unable to take action.. that should be the bar you set yourself. Next step from this is that once player finaly finds the secret and correct path, they have to live in excitement and wait and wait until out of nowhere game reveals that even the villain came back and annihilated nearly everyone, you had figured out some secret that finaly saves the day and is revealed on the darkest moment when player thinks he has failed and everything is over. That kind of reveal method maximizes the satisfaction of finally succeeding.

If this idea feels radical or very obviously bad idea.. then remember there is movies that make people feel all kinds of feelings, sadness and sorrow among them yet people still like those movies.. what separates games stories from movie stories is that games can be replayed. So make story harder please.