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Originally Posted by teclis23
I am following BG3 like a religious zealot. Literally.

I genuinely think that this game will be great.

But.......

The cinematic cut-scenes between PC / NPC interactions appear to be very very very lack-luster. By that i mean they dont stir up any emotional or immersive feelings for me at all like for example the jon irenicus cut-scenes did in BG2.

Am i on the only one seeing this?

I can only suggest to Larian that you need to get rid of your current script writers as this is the most disappointing part of your production by far.

Larian the writing is bad man and you need to completely overhaul it like right now. It isnt woking what you are trying to do with these cut-scenes. They are at best weird and not immersive at all.

You have to remember that the cut scenes you're watching are from the Early Access which is a very early part of the game were the characters haven't yet had time to develop through their interactions or through their personal stories, so it's very difficult to judge the quality of writing. Larian aren't CDPR levels of writing quality to begin with so you have to be prepared to compare BG3's writing against its previous games, not others in the market.

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Do we seriously need to enter telltale cinematic mode for a commoner just saying <<good day to you stranger?>>. Should be automatic as you approach or just voiced when you click on the character.
My biggest complaint of the whole cinematics are your companions mostly complete and outer ignorance of whats going on around while you do the talking or stuff happens. A very Larian thing. Its like they are transported to a pocket plane and their bodies just stand there with no mind.
In Baldurs gate 2 you had tons of cross banter between your companions in relation to stuff happening and dialogue content. It wasnt perfect but feels more immersive than having Astarion jumps you with a knife to your throat while your companions twittle their thumbs and stare at the sky.

Last edited by mr_planescapist; 13/06/21 03:43 PM.
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The ones that are weird to me are the animals. Why does every animal have to have a cutscene when I talk to them? 'tries to talk to a mouse' DRAMATIC CUTSCENE INTRO 'the mouse looks at you and doesn't say anything'. ok...


edit: before someone says the inevitable "aCkSHuAllY...", yes i'm aware that the mice are special. that wasn't my point.

Last edited by Boblawblah; 13/06/21 03:36 PM.
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I love the cutscenes and don't want them removed even the slightest. it's easy to skip them if you want. Only problem is the camera is a bit wonky at times, but it's EA....

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They hired many people for cinematics. I am curious to see the final product.

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Cutscenes are so 1990s, like when everybody and their least favourite studio tried to ape the big movies upon the storage capacity problem of disks was finally lifted (CD-Rom, etc.) And yes, this is meant to be a polemic -- at least a little bit (Bioware / BIS back then actually advertised their 5 disks of BG to be full of gameplay rather than video as a unique selling point, and could do so, (see "General Info") but the times they are a-changin'). wink

One of my first good memories of BG3 /EA from last year wasn't actually connected to anything cinematic or "scripted". There's a bunch of skeletons lying around in a crypt that rise when you push a button. SPOILER: IT'S A TRAP! Well, upon "knowing" that and reloading (I know, it's a bit meta), I picked up their rotten corpses and threw them into a fireball trap -- and then pushed the button triggering their rise. laugh

However, it was the the eventual carefully scripted cutscene flat out ignoring my actions and ruining that moment somewhat. As cinematics are scripted by their nature: In the lovingly hand-crafted movie showing the advance, the skeletons rose in their usual place. Fade out, and them being burned by the fireballs someplace else completely. I even reported this as a possible bug back then. laugh https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Main=88275&Number=680547#Post680547

Whilst blockbusters such as The Witcher or Mass Effect 2 are like 90% cutscenes to sit through (only slightly exaggerating for effect), and more and more games naturally start aping them: Moments arising out of interactions and gameplay will always trump any cutscene tenfold (go ask Warren Spector, a name which the Ultima fans at Larian may recognize).

That is, for as long as they aren't ruined by the inevitable cutscene which at best would be the icing on the cake, e.g. a dramatically shot and staged sequence showing skeletons actually rising in the hells of fireballs; however, perhaps inevitably, it wasn't meant to be. wink

Additionally, what others have already said. If every conversation starts out with the same sequence of Hollywood-wannabe, it eventually gets tiresome. Games can for sure be like movies, but they don't have to be like all the friggin time. Does anybody remember Gabriel Knight 2? It had the actors even "acting out" the most mundane tasks via a cutscene/movie sequence, such as picking up any generic object. All the bloody time. At the end of this clip, there's even a sequence specifically framed to show the actor not only picking up the newspaper, but also putting it down again. In the first game of the series, when it was all just pixel art and simple animations, nobody bothered to do that. You can easily imagine the makers going: We're now just like the movies, yeah, so let's show it off some!


The greatest strength of tabletop gaming / D&D is all in players improvising, in acting out characters and situations and the dungeon master dynamically moderating it all -- BG3 at its very best actually acknowledges this on many levels, as Larian are such a proponent of "systems driven gameplay", which makes it all the more painful when the rest of the game is so "static". It's like two fundamentally opposed philosophies clashing: One for the actual "game", and the other for the storytelling technique. At worst, it's actually as if both the systems guys and the cinematic guys were working from different countries (which, the way Larian are set up, they may actually do). Maybe one day some RPG developer will find a visual language that lifts this to that level rather than just aping all the big dogs and blockbuster cinema becaues of "It's popular!".

(And I acknowledge that must be a massive challenge whilst appreciating the work going into cutscenes all the same).

In the meantime, I'm actually more "immersed" in the "story book" sections of PoE or Pathfinder. Whilst they too may be aping what's always existed and for a time was pretty popular -- they are at least interactive and recognize RP games as a medium of interacting rather than sitting there and watching. Additionally, they likely cost way less and thus eat up way much less ressources which can be spend on something else. I really don't rate Bethesda much these days, but the one credit I give them is that they don't follow suit here, despite the many criticisms even of professional games journalism how all of their stuff should be way more "cinematic", including dialogue sequences. Sure, they don't focus on plot and characters near as much as opposed to exploration. But still.

Last edited by Sven_; 15/10/21 04:44 AM.
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