First, I would say that I hope I don't come across as angry. After all, we're arguing about video games of all things. But there were a lot of questions I had earlier in the thread that remain unanswered.
To address one argument - that people should play through multiple times - I feel that this argument is dismissive and unrealistic. Many players, myself included, tend to get a little burnt out after one playthrough and don't feel like picking up a game immediately afterwards. Expecting players to play through your game multiple times so they can have the experience they wish is unfair and unrealistic. It places an unrealistic expectation on the player, and frankly totally misses and sidesteps the major points that many of us are making. I do understand that a really large game that has so many choices will inevitably lead to people missing content, and I'm ok and supportive of that sort of thing. I simply don't understand why that should apply to character and party choice, when having party choice and conflict was such an essential part of the original games. To sum up: I'm not looking for the perfect playthrough. I'm looking for a satisfying one.
Another argument I would make is that limiting character choice after a single act totally misinterprets and changes the way characters have always worked in the BG series. In those games you could lose your important, essential characters late in the game, forcing you to either make due or change your party. This, to me, goes to the heart of what a previous poster said - I totally agree that forcing a player to make choices is essential and a good thing for a game and an experience. It makes everything heavier and more meaningful. But currently what we see is that the major character/party decision is made potentially only once: at the end of act 1. In the original games these heavy choices were made *frequently* with every dialog and moral decision that you would make. These were hard decisions, and they happened a lot.
I've mentioned in a different thread that I sometimes enjoy playing evil characters. In the BG games, my choices were sometimes strongly influenced by who was in my party. By choosing to do the evil thing, I sometimes ran the risk of pissing off Minsc, for example. And if this happened late in the game then I was doubly careful and aware of where we stood together in a group. So how did I make these decisions? In short, I roleplayed. I used "head canon" with my character and justified it in character realistically, thereby giving greater depth to the character I was playing instead of playing a cartoonish villian who did whatever he wanted, consequences be damned. The consequences were very real from a player's perspective. I could, of course, replace Minsc if necessary. The game allowed for that by letting Minsc walk away if needed and by giving me extra choices late in game. They might not have been my first choice but.. is that not the nature of in-game decision making? The way I understand things, I can be an evil dick in the later acts and my good friends will simply stick around. And if they won't - will I be allowed to replace them? Based on what little we've heard I would guess no. Currently, this is unknown and I am totally open to being corrected on my initial suspicions.
Ultimately, what Larian is implying is that players really must make one decision, or a culmination of smaller decisions, that pays off at the end of act 1. And that's it. There's nothing else, no further decisions to be made about party makeup later in the game, and absolutely no serious character v character conflicts that occur after the 1st act (don't forget how characters could clash in the original games). To me, this is not a choice. This is railroading. And it certainly isn't BG.
One thing I will add that is in agreement with what has been said previously. I do think that smaller parties with less potential mixing of personalities tends to lead to greater in-depth character interactions. Planescape was a great example of this, for instance.
Well said. A game being designed as something that MUST be played multiple times is complete BS. Proper game design does mean that even someone who plays the game only once still gets a meaningful and FULLY satisfying experience. And it is people who play a game multiple times who are clearly in the minority.
Furthermore, none of us is even complaining about not experiencing the companions who are lost after Act 1. I don't care that I didn't experience the stories of the companions who were not in my party. That's not even the point at all. The point is that we are locked into having only three companions (regardless of who those companions are) and not having any flexibility to change companions from quest to quest or replace companions we lose later in the game or who we decide we don't like. None of these things changes from one playthrough to another. It doesn't matter how many times one plays the game, these problems with the game remain in each and every one of those playthroughs.
