Originally Posted by OneManArmy
Originally Posted by Moirnelithe
Originally Posted by kanisatha

I truly appreciate your very fair-minded words. However, the point I was trying to make is that it should not be surprising to anyone in any way that the numbers were 75:25 in favor of playing good. If anything, I would expect the numbers to be 90:10, and feel the only reason it is 75:25 is because some people who would normally never play evil decided to help out Larian's testing needs by giving the evil side a shot.

Furthermore, it is not at all realistic to expect that in a BG game the "good" side and the "evil" side will be or can be equivalent. The Forgotten Realms is a very decidedly good-aligned setting. The setting itself is good, and evil is restricted to pockets within it. Those pockets of evil, from time to time, try to break out of their pockets and spread out into the good parts of the setting, but eventually get driven back. Decades of FR lore makes it very clear that in the FR the good side ALWAYS wins in the end, and any gains by the evil side are at most LOCAL and temporary. So how is Larian supposed to make a story-driven RPG where somehow the evil side bucks all of that FR lore and the overall nature of the FR setting and ends up winning in the end? To put it more bluntly, if you as the protagonist somehow manage to "win" playing evil, at some point therein all of the many, many very powerful good-aligned NPC characters in the setting should/will rally against you and surely defeat you. Heck, the game should just have Elminster show up at your door and turn you into a smear on the ground.


Sure, but in that case Larian should have told us there is only a good path in BG3 and remove the Lolth Drow and evil aligned companions from the game entirely. And they should not have requested us to come try out the evil path in EA. And finally, they should also refund my 60e. I bought the game expecting to be able to play the role of evil in a roleplaying game. *shrugs*



There is a game "Fable - The Lost Chapters", a classic Action / RPG genre. Yes, it is completely linear in terms of the main quest. and she is almost 20 years old. But in decision making and side quests, the path of evil and the path of good are equally popular, equally balanced in terms of content. All players play the game at least twice as a good and evil hero, and both times they enjoy playing the role. Baldurs Gate 3 is a much more replayable game anyway, there is much more freedom in it, but more attention is paid to a good passage

Sure. But I think the difference is in the particular setting being used for a game. In this case the FR setting just doesn't allow for outcomes where evil "wins" in a big way. That would just go against the setting's established lore. Settings like FR which have so much history and lore are great for an RPG because the devs have so much raw material already developed from which to draw for their story and characters. But the flip side of that is all that rich lore also serves to limit how far you can take things with your game in a way that an "open canvas" setting does not.