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I have to disagree. Definitions of good and evil do not change over time because good and evil do not change over time.


I'm not really sure where you're going with this. If you're simply pointing out that in modern times situations operate in "gray areas" I would agree. Societies that live in worlds where dragons, hags, demons, devils, and other soul sucking creatures exist do not operate in these "gray areas" unless dealing with other humans or more "neutral" creatures. The way classic RPG's define the the sections and subsections of your alignment are still largely applicable to any RPG that gets made. Most characters, creatures, or monstrosities fall within the...

Lawfull Good
Neutral Good
Chaotic Good
Lawfull Neutral
True Neutral
Chaotic Neutral
Lawfull Evil
Neutral Evil
Chaotic Evil

...alignment types applied to pretty much any story driven RPG. And that literally encompasses pretty much every designed character or creature. I mean, we could debate the philosophies of it but all actions and morality can be displayed within that alignment spectrum. For example hags like the one in BG3 (you know which Auntie I refer to) are Chaotic Evil. There is literally no "gray area" in her morality. If she is cooperative it's so she can do you some evil. Perhaps there are benefits to allow her to do evil. But she's doing evil.

I think what it sounds like is that you want your character in an RPG to have good incentives or societal pressure to perform evil within the game. Which if that's the case, I might agree since having situations like that is congruent with how morality typically works so seeing it displayed in an RPG narrative is not only fine it should be encouraged. In the real world doing hateful things does have benefits from time to time so in an RPG there should be reasons and purposes for doing those things as well.


It will highly depend on the scenario/game where you're roleplaying. I think people can be pushed into doing evil by external forces. You can still do evil things and have empathy, but typically the most extreme cases of evil (Chaotic Evil as it were) doesn't typically require you to lack empathy so much as it requires you to enjoy causing catastrophe or chaos. Much like a pyromaniac can't help but be fascinated and addicted to starting and watching fires, a person can be fascinated with how much control and power they have at ruining other peoples environment/life.

Nature vs. Nurture can be debated all day but people always still fall all over the alignment spectrum. But you can't make a great fantasy RPG without at least dabbling in good and evil.

As one of them 90's kids, the earliest I can remember is a simple DOS based racing game.
A little bit later, mostly settled on RTS as a genre, having spent time with the more classic RTSs (like Dune 2 or Red Alert 2), but ended up spending years with a more obscure game known as Outpost 2. To the point where I had a whole high-school project centered around making a map mod for it where I implemented the board game of monopoly using the in-game chat to hook into to supplement the player input that would need to go into the code in an easy enough format. All with the help of the small community that kept that title alive through the 2000s.
Never was a genre purist, as some other titles of the time caught my attention, like the Descent games, Hellbender, can't deny having played Doom 2 and some other of those early titles where so many more things could fly in terms of games as they do today. BG1 and 2 were also in there somewhere.

So, factually, I can't actually name a title that made me a gamer. It was more the exposure to games as a whole. In fact, to even list my whole repertoire of games played to date would be largely impossible, as I'd have to count the titles from before I had access to legally purchasing games. A short teaser would include stuff like The Incredible Machine (3, maybe), Empire Earth, Fire Emblem titles (5 through 7, really), even the Sims 2 and 3, diablo 1 and 2, emperor: battle for dune, C&C games down to Generals, the aforementioned titles in this post and on and on. Admittedly, my young adult life was vastly spent with an inordinate amount of play time in Path of Exile, but by this point in time, I have a steam history can rely on for a recap. Prior to that is purely memory-based and we all know how reliable that can be.

I'm not sure how much of a stretch it would be to say that if my Steam library consists of some 200 games from about 2010 onwards, there could easily be another 1-2 hundred titles that I've spent *some* time with at some point prior.

To be fair, I do have clinical ADHD and each game can only hold my attention for *so* long, depending on how much of said game there is to learn and toy around with. I will also not hide from the fact that I had ample time to spend on playing games during a decade-long depression cycle where vegetable wasting daylight playing vidja games would not be a stretch to describe my functionality back then.

As short as I cand add to this (even if I'm half a year late to the party), is that I personally do not see what we use today as actual "AI", since all I see is some code that alters itself and needs a huge amount of memory to store all the possible logical paths it sees. Kind of a decision tree of decision trees of... more decision trees?
I've more been following the neurological network-based AI development, area with actual potential to create a digitalized intelligence akin to ours, but the catch there is that we do not yet have the ability to even handle the amount of information that would be needed to just digitalize the neurons of a single brain. We're talking I think some billions of neurons, *each* of them having some 10k possible connections, a weird kind of permanence, with the way memory works, the whole shebang would be kind of impossible to simulate even if given the entire processing power of all hardware on Earth at present. We're just not there yet in terms of hardware.
It gets even funnier when we ended up calling computer-driven NPCs or players in strategy games "AIs", when they were not much more than a set of algorithms that worked against each other. Sure, the algorithms got much more complex and we gave them the ability to change themselves and each other, but that is still not actually intelligent...

It's a little difficult to convey that notion that "even the greatest heroes can end up adventuring with mismatched socks", when the socks may be mentioned once, but the focus will remain on the heroic deeds anyway.

Highlighting hubris is indeed a theme we could do more with, especially given nowadays. Grew kind of attached to a simple quote "The road to hell is paved with good intentions", as it is a simple form for many meanings, ranging from faking good intentions to actual good intentions that went too far and still got one to the same destination. It also includes good intentions that were only perceived as being good, when ,in fact, they were kind of destructive. Like overbearing.
I remember Kreia from Kotor 2, who was mostly lecturing on how both good and evil are largely misguided and their intent can end up causing the opposite they set out for. Of course, this does involve the temporization factor.

But overall, actually making a game where a certain decision earlier on in the story actually leads to a cascading effect where the characters will not even end up in the same locations due to the stuff set in motion by said decision presents the conundrum: how do you make alternate routes that reflect something that happened earlier on whilst also somehow guaranteeing the main plot is followed and the character(s) still feel like they had freedom of choice. But it tends to just be that all roads lead to plot (and Rome).

The crux is the scope of the power.

A typical RPG is about you, the protagonist, working to overcome insurmountable odds and become the hero.

While a power trip is you, the protagonist, being a Mary Sue and being literally unstoppable and having complete control over everything.

Essentially, it's like the difference between beating a difficult boss to get some really nice loot and using console commands to just spawn it in your inventory.

Both lead to your character having the powerful loot. But one is earned the other is given.


Having NPC's with their own personalities is great.

The main concern with the original quote is more so the inability to actually differentiate your own personal goals with interactions.

It happens a lot in RPG's where any dialogue option that is in anyway positive is taken to mean "Romance" and the only options to not pursue a romance are "Be a massive jerkface".

So if you are talking to some NPC to find out more information about them or the world... If they're not a romance option then it's fine, you can talk to them all day without issue and develop a friendship. If they are a romance option, you either get locked into a romance with them or you don't get to talk to them at all.

Whereas the ideal would be for there to be options for platonic relationships alongside options for romantic ones. While having the option to turn down advances without being a colossal jerk (As even if you try to be platonic, NPC's can still fall for you due to other actions)


The ever present concern is player freedom vs character building.

Playersexual NPC's provide the most player freedom as someone is free to romance anyone they wish regardless of their character.

However, such a thing can detract from the character's personality.

Of course, one does have to consider how much of a person's personality is their sexuality? Your average Twitter user it's their entire personality, but for sane people it's barely a mention.

All we have thus far is the reveal trailer. All the temporization we have is of the TBD, TBA, whenever time frame.
I would hazard at least a couple of years to release and dev diaries in Larian style were more a near-release kind of thing, IIRC.

Whilst the argument is ongoing, my 2 cents:

Just about any long-lasting game series will suffer from human lifespan, exponential growth and the general lack of discussion withing the frame of time relevant to each entry.
To sum up: Within 30 years, we've gone from CRT monitors to LED-based monitors, pixels that you could see with the naked eye to pixels that you might see with a magnifier glass, etc, etc, since that's just how fast the hardware technology has evolved.
Now speaking of the Divinity series, I have personally played them all. Even if the order was more: Divinity 2: Dragon Knight Saga -> Divine Divinity -> Beyond Divinity -> Divinity: Dragon Commander -> D:OS 1 -> D:OS2. The catch would be that Dragon Commander was not even out yet by the time I went through the first 3 titles. Nowadays, I would find it hard to go back to the originals, even if simply because my eyes can only take so much strain nowadays. But if we're to talk about Divinity (series) as a whole, ignoring the early titles that are still cannon to the universe may be unwise.

But then think of each of the titles within their own time frame. Larian has always gone as far they they could push given the technical limitations (as well as studio size and costs) of the times each of those entries were released.
Casual reminder that both D:OS titles were quite literally all-in bargains for Larian.

What remained consistent throughout was the good old Larian flavor. Talking with an immortal lich you're about to fight? Sneak in a quip or two, get a matching retort from the lich, making the dialogue feel way less stiff. Because the more notable characters, at least, have some dimension to them. Bellegar, the mad mage who speaks only in rhymes? Still shows some method to his madness when he actually helps the player character. Whatever the form their titles took, I could never fail to appreciate the Larian...ness(?) sprinkled here and there.
The other aspect that always drew my attention is the art direction. While I am auditory and typically fail to grasp visuals that easily, the sound design and the music kept stirring me onwards as I played each title. RIP sir Kirill, your work will be remembered, but that is not to belittle sir Borislav's work.

All in all, words alone will hardly do justice to Larian's own legacy and it's that very legacy that keeps me coming back. Now, if only the creature mechanic from Divinity 2 (not D:OS2) would sneak its way back into the series. And on that note, what wizards of the universe will grace us this time? :p

Ah yeah. In addition, taking photo in photo-mode, now takes 3-4 seconds delay before the snap. Previously it was instant.

I’d try lowering the graphics settings and disabling a few expensive effects first. BG3 can be pretty demanding on some Macs, especially in larger areas.

I’d also check that the game is running on the latest version and that there’s enough free storage and memory. If it still freezes like that after lowering settings, then the Mac’s hardware may simply be struggling with it.

Currently, in BG3, Telekinesis is a level 5 spell that requires Hr'a'cknir Bracers (Act 2), Tressym Collar (Act 3) or a level 9 Wizard (Act 2-3), which ruins the fun of collecting all items since the beginning of the game. Besides, Telekinesis only happens once per turn, and that action economy cannot be optimized, which, again, ruins the fun.

I love this game, but there's one scene where the game's presentation feels really weird.