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#805657 14/01/22 09:33 PM
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300+ hours into this game maybe 8-9 full playthroughs and many partial playthroughs too. Currently playing multiplayer with my friend ( first time in multiplayer) just hit level 4 in the putrid bog/swamp. We just had another cutscene today that I have never seen before & thats probably the second or third one (cutscene/branching storyline ), this was the first time ive seen the one with woman/companion that you dream of when creating your character at the outset of the game.

My point is that no matter what else you like or dislike about the game - the depth to it the amount of choice & player agency (if thats the right term) is simply outstanding. i've never seen the likes of it in 30 + odd years of gaming..the whole replayability factor of this game is just at another level.

What you think?

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After a similar number of hours and play throughs as you, I finally found the gem to unlock the evil Book of Necromancy yesterday and experienced those cut scenes and quest closure for the first time. I had the same thought - I love that I find/experience something new every single time I play this game.

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I love the reactivity in the game!😊

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There is certainly a lot to discover ...
But so far we dont have enough information to determine how inpactfull our choices will actualy be. :-/

On the contrary Grymforge showed us that there is quite high chance that Larian will still march us on the same road no matter wich side we will choose.
(If you help Tieflings and join Halsin ... you should preffer the way through Underdark, over the Shadowlands ... yet it prooved to be dead end, since it also only lead to Shadowlands and you need to return back and head toward mountain pass.)
I just hope that road will be different enough for both sides.

But there still is a lot of unused potential. frown

Last edited by RagnarokCzD; 15/01/22 07:14 AM.

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Originally Posted by RagnarokCzD
On the contrary Grymforge showed us that there is quite high chance that Larian will still march us on the same road no matter wich side we will choose.
(If you help Tieflings and join Halsin ... you should preffer the way through Underdark, over the Shadowlands ... yet it prooved to be dead end, since it also only lead to Shadowlands and you need to return back and head toward mountain pass.)

there seems to be an entrance to an ancient temple behind the cave-in. We can't currently go any further, but I think its likely that this is the actual underdark route mentioned. Therefore I think that we will actually have two completely different routes, not least because Larian so often hinted that 'you can have two completely different adventures'.

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Originally Posted by Sigi98
Therefore I think that we will actually have two completely different routes, not least because Larian so often hinted that 'you can have two completely different adventures'.


Maybe if you only follow the critical path. Datamined content confirms we'll be moving between the Underdark and the Shadowlands for the Nightsong quest at minimum. To say nothing of the githyanki creche, another suggested route that appears to bypass the Moonrise altogether, which I doubt will be allowed.

Most choices will probably be Morton's forks. Developers have always been wary of locking players out of content based on their choices. The only major game I can think of that went through with the promise of completely different story paths was Witcher 2, and it was criticized by the players because they didn't want to replay it to see the other path. From the development standpoint too, it's not an efficient use of resources to create content only a portion of the players will see in one playthrough.

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Is there really that much "reactivity"? It's definitely easy to miss a lot of stuff, or lock yourself out of content, but in my 3 playthroughs I didn't see much of "you get to see it because of choices you made". The biggest exception, of course is the evil path, though most of the good stuff you will see on good playtrhough anyway.

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I'd say there is, though I think there are some issues due how time mechanics currently work in the game. For example, on my second playthrough of Grymorge the party went there asap, skipping most of the Underdark. By the time they've arrived at the myconid village, Thulla
died and was turned into a spore servant. (Also managed to get Nere killed by the poison that one time. :D)

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Depends on definition ...
I mean concidering Mass Effect, or Dragon Age, even single lasting consequences is too much to handle for BioWare. laugh

In my opinion there is many option to altern your gameplay ...
True, so far there is only one big quest where you get REALLY big difference, but i hope there will be more later. frown

And not just choice consequences, but racial reactions too ...
Personaly i hope Duergars will try to enslave us on sight, when playing Gnome. laugh


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Especially in an industry that gives players choices, but rarely is able to truly build a story around their lasting ramifications, players who can't appreciate the level of work that goes into creating a game like The Witcher 2, with two entirely different second acts, I hope don't impact game development (looks at Witcher 3) nevermind

And considering the numbers I've seen thrown out about how many players 'finish' games at all, I don't think efficient use of resources should either. The most efficient use of resources then would be making interactive movies.

I don't know what your viewpoint is, but knowing a game is too big to experience in one go adds a lot for me.

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I suppose reactivity will be somewhat limited until the game industry decides to incorporate AI at a higher level. I recall the venerable Lord of Magic game, which is not really a role playing game but it did have some player choice aspects, in which you never knew exactly where the end boss was going to show up. And while your character gains levels during play, the boss is doing the same thing!

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I guess my main point was replayability, there is only so many times you can play any game before you get tired of it. I think with BG3 Larian are doing a fantastic job of giving us/player characters a vast amount of choices - even if it’s the illusion of choice so to speak - it keeps things fresh and interesting.

Even the greatest fantasy books - lord of the rings, Magician, Belgariad ( we can debate later what the best are these are just a couple of my favourites) may have multiple plot twists and threads but ultimately there is one main story and one main ending.

Data mining - you guys are the kids who open their Christmas presents when mum & dad are out, the ones who read the final chapter of a book first 😉 - I don’t personally care how my character in BG3 ends the story only that I have a great journey along the way - how Larian choose the journey is in their hands - but the way it’s being handled currently makes replaying the game easy & enjoyable - I think we are extremely lucky Larian are the ones who are doing this game…

Just for the record I’ve not played any of Larians prior titles .

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Well if we are praising Larian for replayability ...
I believe by 678h played, and still loving the game, still finding things that i didnt think about in previous game, or i didnt notice, and still being exited about every next character, or patch (im giving myself a little pause now tho laugh ) speaks for themselves. O:-)

Speaking on wich ...
Cant wait for what next patch will bring us. ^_^

Last edited by RagnarokCzD; 15/01/22 10:29 PM.

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That’s a great effort I’m on 312 hours now - I try to buy other games to try something different too but they never seem to keep my attention longer than a day or two 😋.
No game has hooked me quite like this one either…
Yes patch 7 let’s hope they just keep making it better & better…

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Originally Posted by Sozz
Especially in an industry that gives players choices, but rarely is able to truly build a story around their lasting ramifications, players who can't appreciate the level of work that goes into creating a game like The Witcher 2, with two entirely different second acts, I hope don't impact game development (looks at Witcher 3) nevermind

And considering the numbers I've seen thrown out about how many players 'finish' games at all, I don't think efficient use of resources should either. The most efficient use of resources then would be making interactive movies.

I don't know what your viewpoint is, but knowing a game is too big to experience in one go adds a lot for me.

My viewpoint is I prefer to temper my expectations to avoid disappointment.

The poster I was responding to brought up the possibility of completely separate storylines (as per Larian's words), I only described why I think we shouldn't expect too much branching. Since we're mentioning CDPR's games, the stated reason for the shortened main story of CP77 was that the developers saw how few players finished TW3, and wanted them to experience the full story of Cyberpunk. This statement was made during the pre-release period, so it's not a case of them promising too much and then finding an excuse when they couldn't deliver. Whether we like it or not (I don't), developers do listen to the people who don't finish their games, or don't finish them more than once.

While I think we shouldn't expect too much, it's too early to say what the exact level of variance and consequencecs in BG3 is going to be. There is, I think, a decent amount of responsiveness if the player decides to act outside of the scripted interactions, like how every NPC who gives you something has a special line if you pickpocketed the item beforehand. If nothing else, it's more than most other RPGs let you do. Whether that level of attention to detail will be present within the actual story is hard to tell.

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Originally Posted by RagnarokCzD
Well if we are praising Larian for replayability ...
I believe by 678h played, and still loving the game, still finding things that i didnt think about in previous game,
I am glad you are enjoying it. I am worried BG3 will be another Skyrim for me - a game many enjoy and sink countless hours into, and which bores me after an evening sessions or two.


Originally Posted by Sozz
players who can't appreciate the level of work that goes into creating a game like The Witcher 2, with two entirely different second acts, I hope don't impact game development (looks at Witcher 3) nevermind
Did I found someone who liked W2 reactivity? Would you expand on why you though W2 multiple paths were a good thing?

For me personally it didn't work for two reasons:
1) I don't think each path works on it's own. With resources stranded between two paths I thought that neither was particularly effective. I think there are some interesting concept (like how player might be missing some crucial information and make different decisions due to limited knowledge) but overall I thought the narrative is weaker because of it rather then stronger. Like dragon makes no sense, unless you followed to scoia'tael path. There could be a joy in seeing how those things fit together on both playthroughs but:

2) reactivity makes no goddam sense. The point of reactivity is for game to acknowladge player choice, but in W2 (and that's actually quite common in witcher series) we jump into another universe, when not only we, but everyone else made radically different choices. Events we had no influence on play out differently, things on the side we are not present on don't happen or get resolved anyway. As such, it fails in the very thing that reactivity aims to do - make players feel like their actions have impact.

If the only goal of such reactivity is to provide replayability - then yes, and open world with a lot of missable/skippable content is a better way of doing it. W3 is stronger narratively, and depending on your playstyle can still offer a decent reason to go back. System-rich games like Arcane games or Deus Ex offer replayibility through sheer flexibility of gameplay systems, and class based DnD combat can offer replayibility through a wide range of distinct classes.

From those three I think Larian has biggest shot at the second "Arcane-like" replayability, though for me, personally, many options Larian offers feel like they are too broken to work. For me RPGs are about roleplaying, and for example, how stealth and pickpocketing works is so detatched from other systems, I feel like I am using a command console everytime I try to engage with those mechanics. DnD's limited class system, should automatically give BG3 some replayability, but oddly enough Larian is hell bend on making everything feel the same and have access to similar tools. Why is that, I have no clue.

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Its really depth? I think Larian is "smoke and mirrors". They kinda are those Magic Standup dudes. That short "mute" dude and the big fellow.

If Larian's style is smoke and mirrors, they need something firm and lasting imho, like good gameplay and characters etc.

Last edited by GreatWarrioX; 16/01/22 01:19 PM.
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Originally Posted by GreatWarrioX
Its really depth? I think Larian is "smoke and mirrors". They kinda are those Magic Standup dudes. That short "mute" dude and the big fellow.

If Larian's style is smoke and mirrors, they need something firm and lasting imho, like good gameplay and characters etc.

The gameplay is amazing in BG3 - just incredible fun. I realize that this can be seen as somewhat subjective but I love the hell out of the freedom the game gives you for all kinds of shenanigans. Once the crafting system is implemented and the game is completed it's going to be probably the only game I play. I have a Discord server filled with all the multiplayer Chads I could find that are eagerly awaiting the finalization of this game/platform - we have...plans.

As to Characters, well, that is more of a mixed bag. I very much enjoy Shadowbae and Bae'zel (Jennifer English and Devora Wilde) and Astarion can be fun but I always feel he is a nod to the Twilight crowd, Wyll is incompetent, and Gale is just the worst.

Thankfully in Multiplayer we kill (or knock out) all these people from the start so they don't bother us in camp. So Larian can create all the terrible PC companion they want, that just means more killin'...


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I think The Witcher 3 having a stronger narrative is debatable, it certainly has the more conventionally told narrative. In terms of reactivity what do we really get? How often does every storyline intersect with each other, and how isolated are they so that your decisions don't have to be accounted as widely? Don't misunderstand me, I love each Witcher game, and in terms of reactivity they're still head and shoulders over most games, but between them I have my choice for which was told more interestingly.

I didn't have your same experience in TW2, not feeling an effective story was being told in either route. Moreover the ramifications on your specific Act II had on what actions were available to you in the climax and in Act III, are part of the kind of reactivity I would like to see more of in games. And I don't think having plot points resolve without your presence is a shortcoming, it's another ramification of your actions, right?
What I will say is that Witcher 2, like Mass Effect 2, and Dragon Age 2, kicked a lot of the promise of their stories into their supposed sequels, and to a one, none of them really deliver. The actions of Witcher 2 are barely a footnote in 3. The central conflict of ME isn't really developed in 2 and the actions of 2 are usually reduced to a character being absent, or some bonus points in a minigame. I've said enough about Dragon Age and how it fails in this regard too.

I haven't played all of Arkane's games, but if Dishonored 1 and 2 are what people mean when they talk about reactivity then I don't think they are terribly reactive, there's a hidden number that you contribute to that changes the world-state as you add to it, nothing you specifically do really is reacted to by the world, I understand that Prey's DLC did some interesting things adding Rogue-like elements to a game loop, something they did again with their last game, but nothing about that really seems to be the same to me as what I think everyone else is interested in, having your specific actions ripple out into the game world, flipping switches that are specific to that action. I have played all the Deus Ex games, apart from the opening of Human Revolution, I don't think they did anything groundbreaking in this regard, they were fun though.

Larian has talked about their n+1 design, every quest has n number of resolutions, +1, that +1 being what happens when a player can kill any NPC in the game. Every quest has to be resolvable if their NPCs are dead. This is technically reactivity but to me it's the least interesting type of reactivity, at least from what I remember from DOS2. You might as well have Biff the Understudy come back (with Speak with Dead we kind of do). Slightly more interesting is stealing items, so far it's pretty rewarding to see a game not break when you do this, but it still doesn't seem to have greater ramifications beyond that initial interaction. Much more interesting is when you do quests "out of order", I was really interested to see what an interaction with Minthara would be like if you meet her after getting information from Nere, and there was something there for me. To bring it back to the Witcher, a favorite narrative trick they had was delaying the ramifications of your choices, sometimes choices you didn't realize you were making, till a different act in the story. Well I see a lot of groundwork being done in the EA stage for when we make it to BG, this is the kind of reactivity that is most interesting to me because I see it as potentially having the most profound impact on my personal story in the game. It's also usually the most disappointing when it fails to follow through so who knows.

A lot of times reactivity in games seems to be mostly a euphemism for how well it deals with you killing people. Maybe it's connected to the renaissance Rogue-like games have had, and their influence on RPG design, I don't know. But it's still only the first layer of what a reactive stories can be. It's also been years since I last played either Witcher game, so maybe I'm just remembering them with rose-tinted glasses.

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Originally Posted by Blackheifer
Originally Posted by GreatWarrioX
Its really depth? I think Larian is "smoke and mirrors". They kinda are those Magic Standup dudes. That short "mute" dude and the big fellow.

If Larian's style is smoke and mirrors, they need something firm and lasting imho, like good gameplay and characters etc.

The gameplay is amazing in BG3 - just incredible fun. I realize that this can be seen as somewhat subjective but I love the hell out of the freedom the game gives you for all kinds of shenanigans. Once the crafting system is implemented and the game is completed it's going to be probably the only game I play. I have a Discord server filled with all the multiplayer Chads I could find that are eagerly awaiting the finalization of this game/platform - we have...plans.

As to Characters, well, that is more of a mixed bag. I very much enjoy Shadowbae and Bae'zel (Jennifer English and Devora Wilde) and Astarion can be fun but I always feel he is a nod to the Twilight crowd, Wyll is incompetent, and Gale is just the worst.

Thankfully in Multiplayer we kill (or knock out) all these people from the start so they don't bother us in camp. So Larian can create all the terrible PC companion they want, that just means more killin'...

Sometimes I just feel like Im at wrong place. Gameplay is amazing? Incrediable fun? Come on.

I say it, we need triple A CRPG, and show them how its done. Or then they have made massive improvements from DOS2. I havent EA'd.

I dont want to sound like a dick, but Im gonna laugh if this game is another 90+ metacritic game. Unless they make massive changes.

Last edited by GreatWarrioX; 17/01/22 01:43 AM.
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