Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Larian! Please stop punishing good roleplaying

I said this elsewhere earlier but it's more directly relevant to this thread, so:

I have always hated it when games punish me *FOR BUYING INTO* the (false) sense of urgency.
Games often present a negative consequence for actually treating the supposed emergency, urgent thing, or time sensitive task as such.

Ive played games where doing the time sensitive emergency first gets you the bad ending, becasue you're supposed to ignore it and do literally everything else first to get the good ending.
I've played games where doing the urgen tasks first leaves you underpowerd, as in underleveled and undergeared, because the game expected you to earn xp, money, and loot doing random tasks with no urgency at all first. Yes this woman's husband was kidnapped and is going to be executed any second now, leaving a child fatherless, but you need to pick all these flowers and clear the rats out of the basement first because level scaling.

And I've played games, like Baldurs Gate 3, where I'm mechanically punished for buying into the false urgency by being underpowered relative to the people who don't buy into it, because they get to go in with all resources replenished while I don't. Someone who made reaching Halsin drastically easier (and completly broke the balance of this DnD based game, which relies on rests as a huge balancing factor) by long resting after every set of goblins shouldn't get the same result as me, who fought my way there in one game day. Strictly speaking you can, and I did on my first character, get to Halsin without fighting by making the goblins think you're an ally, but for the sake of discussion this is fighting through with the cannon urgency vs fighting through ignoring it. If I have a more difficult set of encounters, fighting these goblins while strategicly using and/or running out of spell slots and entering fights below max hp, by doing it in one day, and another player has a bunch of easy af encounters because they spent a whole week taking naps before they reached him, then my Halsin should be like "wow you were quick" and their Halsin should be dead already.

And lastly I've played games, *primarily* Baldurs Gate 3, where I'm cannonically punished for acting on the cannonical urgency, by all this missed companion dialogue I'm not getting because I don't sleep for 8 hours every 5 minutes. Absolutely attrocius.

If the story is going to present urgency, actually have it, or at the very least don't punish players for pretending it's real.