The potential for Baldur's Gate III (spoilers from BG1+2 within)
Samiel
Member Posts: 156
As a long time fan of the series, although I am desperately hopeful that these enhanced editions sell well enough to warrant a true sequel I cannot help but wonder what form that might take. For me the ending of Throne of Bhaal was so satisfying I can't see the story picking up with the original player character. That's not to say it would be impossible, just that it would be a big challenge in storytelling. That said I would like a story that centers around the Bhaalspawn saga in someway.
There is also the power level question. By the time you reach the end of the saga you are so incredibly powerful it becomes tough to imagine decent plot lines that are both challenging, but also keep you grounded in the Forgotten Realms. I would like the opportunity to start a new PC's story, taking them and their party from humble beginnings at level 1 through to the Dizzying heights of epic levels.
*SPOILERS AHEAD*
Perhaps the story could centre around a descendant of the original PC, who discovers that Bhaal was playing a long term plot. Should his attempt to ressurect fail, as long one of his line survived the Bhaalspawn cycle would begin anew once there were sufficient descendants to ignite it. The focus of this story wouldn't be a simple rehash of the prior games, but rather a race against time to find a way to lift the curse of Bhaal's blood once and for all. Breaking it down into a simple three act structure it could work something like this:
Act I: Your character starts off his/her adventuring life in the shadow of a famous hero who travels the realms accomplishing great deeds, but it turns out this seemingly great hero has far more sinister motives. They want to restart the Bhaalspawn legacy and utilise their fame to seduce people in high positions, across many lands to hurry along this process and ensure that whole kingdoms will war should their children come of age and into their murderous heritage. You stop this villain in this act.
Act II: Despite earlier victories it is revealed that this enemy was one of a cabal, utilising many methods to herald the Bhaalspawn, and it may already be too late. Whilst coming into conflict with this cult the knowledge of Jon Irenicus needs to be sought out, in order to learn the secret of drawing and transferring the divine essence so that it can be cleansed and purified once and for all.
Act III: Despite succeeding in learning the ritual, the second Bhaalwar ignites, and you must race to collect the Bhaal taint in one place, and only through some great act of sacrifice (the antithesis of murder) can the curse be lifted once and for all...
There is also the power level question. By the time you reach the end of the saga you are so incredibly powerful it becomes tough to imagine decent plot lines that are both challenging, but also keep you grounded in the Forgotten Realms. I would like the opportunity to start a new PC's story, taking them and their party from humble beginnings at level 1 through to the Dizzying heights of epic levels.
*SPOILERS AHEAD*
Perhaps the story could centre around a descendant of the original PC, who discovers that Bhaal was playing a long term plot. Should his attempt to ressurect fail, as long one of his line survived the Bhaalspawn cycle would begin anew once there were sufficient descendants to ignite it. The focus of this story wouldn't be a simple rehash of the prior games, but rather a race against time to find a way to lift the curse of Bhaal's blood once and for all. Breaking it down into a simple three act structure it could work something like this:
Act I: Your character starts off his/her adventuring life in the shadow of a famous hero who travels the realms accomplishing great deeds, but it turns out this seemingly great hero has far more sinister motives. They want to restart the Bhaalspawn legacy and utilise their fame to seduce people in high positions, across many lands to hurry along this process and ensure that whole kingdoms will war should their children come of age and into their murderous heritage. You stop this villain in this act.
Act II: Despite earlier victories it is revealed that this enemy was one of a cabal, utilising many methods to herald the Bhaalspawn, and it may already be too late. Whilst coming into conflict with this cult the knowledge of Jon Irenicus needs to be sought out, in order to learn the secret of drawing and transferring the divine essence so that it can be cleansed and purified once and for all.
Act III: Despite succeeding in learning the ritual, the second Bhaalwar ignites, and you must race to collect the Bhaal taint in one place, and only through some great act of sacrifice (the antithesis of murder) can the curse be lifted once and for all...
Post edited by Tanthalas on
0
Comments
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldur's_Gate_III:_The_Black_Hound
I think that a BG3 needs an independent story and new, fresh characters, too. But I would love if BG3 and the previous games overlaped a bit. Maybe we could see an encounter between my BG3 party and the one or the other character from BG2 :-)
Through dialogue triggers, maybe say you meet Viconia and can determine if you had a fling or not... the story shapes through your dialogue and action triggers.
Planescape thing could be an idea for Planescape: Torment 2 introducing both Nameless One and Bhaalspawn Godling, who while being at a new level of existance had something happen to them and now need to work together.
The second idea could either be a complete restart or re-introduce the characters from BG2 (who didn't become godlings) after someone from the planes somehow fucked them all up and stole their XPs or something. . . That or it's the player character's kid chasing his father's trail.
Maybe i'm just short sight but for me a BG3 shoud resume in:
- An multiverse adventure as a god (gonna need a lot of good ideas and a huge code ability to be done).
- a following baldur's gate saga, where the main char have a backgroud of someone that was affected by BG and BG2 events OR even a son/daugther of main char IF the mother/father comes as a backgroud (chosing betwen Anomen/Aerie/Viconia/Jaheira and any other official romance implemented).
- A spin off saga that happens alongside the events in BG/BG2, being focused in another son/daugther of bhaal with his own problems, allies and enemies that somehow cross both sagas in a moment of the game.
But unseless the choice falls on my last option, the frist thing to do is to renegotiate the copyright contract cos, at the end of BG2 each character has a summary of what happened to him after the BG2 events, what can crash any hope of interaction with old NPCs in BG3.
What could be a good thing or a bad thing is that Irenicus can return as a villian in the game. . .
----
The epilogue for each character is open ended enough that they can at the very least make cameo appearances showing examples of some scenes from their epilogue (like Minsc's Justice Fist group).
If anything, I could see the new Lord of Murder freeing him from being bound to work off his debt in the Blood War. . . only for something to go wrong and being temporarily stripped of his Godhood next to a newly reawakened TNO, who has been fighting so long that he's 'forgotten' almost everything not related to the War and surviving it (because if he fails to do so, he won't be able to escape).
Cue their travels through the planes, LoM trying to regain his Godhood and TNO searching for his old allies as he adjusts to no longer being involved in the Blood War and dealing with the enemies he made along the way when the War inevitably burst into the rest of the planes.
My only problem with this is coming up with a suitable binding 'Torment' for the new LoM.
PS:T and BG are exactly the 2 most incredible plots i had ever seeing, a game that merge both would make me cry blood tears of happines, but if not proper done would put me in a rage and hate that would shame the lower of the Devils of Nine Hells.
PS: correct me if i'm wrong someone, but in BG2 SoA, when the player dies and go to the Nine Hells... in the Abyss, isn't that a mistake? Or he is in the Nine Hells (lawful) or in the Abyss (chaotic). just a thought on my mind.
You are right about the story being done right or not at all, though.
I think my other major issue with that idea is one of the things I love about Baldur's Gate Saga is how it was grounded in this rich high fantasy world, and one of the things I love about PS:T is it's utterly original take on fantasy RPGing with it's incredibly atmospheric and surreal setting. Now a high level game almost by definition has to shift to momentous planar events and settings (something ToB had to go to in the later stages). I want my return to Faerun to be simply that, a return to that world, and not the planes around it.
Better I think to hope for a Baldur's Gate III AND a Planescape: Torment sequel (I don't want to just add a 2 to that game, as I feel the next game in the series deserves a new word to encapsulate it's central theme like Planescape: Deliverance rather than to just rehash the Torment thing as the first game personified that so completetly, any attempt to re-hash it would be doomed to failure).
As for ascending to godhood or not, this would be the perfect time to decide that, as with the release of BG2EE they could alter the end game code to save the character and that final choice between Godhood and retiring. This information could then be used to alter the circumstances of the game(s) in question.
I'm most in favor of a Planescape sequel that has TNO and LoM leaving the Blood War behind; though if you decided not to become a God, the destruction of Bhaal's Throne is what frees TNO and he still has to escape on his own. If you don't load the character info, then you're stuck with just The Nameless One, albeit the Throne of Bhaal was still destroyed.
As for BG3, like I said before, I want to explore the forgotten realms world. Baldur's Gate, The Sword Coast, Amn, Waterdeep, Calimport. . . I want to explore them all at my leisure (I'm still pissed that when I played IWD2 that I could never explore Luskan). That and I want to kill that asshole Saemon Havarian. WTF, is he supposed to be some sort of special character or something? I can kill Drizzt, but he's off limits? Bullshit! I can understand Elminster, because the game can't do him justice in a mage's battle, but everyone else is fair game!
Anyways, If you load yourself w/o a love interest you get forked back to level one (with a few neat magic items) after losing your divine essence.
If you load yourself with Aerie or Jaheira as a love interest (god choice or not), you get to play your child who has a leg up on the other starting characters in the form of some magical gear as you get separated from your parent and need to find them after getting some important news or other.
If you load yourself with Viconia as a love interest, you don't get a lot of extra magical goodies but you can play both your character's son and yourself (only if you didn't choose to become a god) at level one in tandem as you deal with the circumstances of the game.
Lastly, if you don't load yourself you're a nameless pissant bum who got strongarmed into finding that adventuring ex-Bhaalspawn (by canon timeline).
Note: If you had a love interest and became a God then the Deva from ToB pops up to tell you that the protection you enjoyed will be ending, if you want it back, you need to help your father re-assert his dominion as a deity.
I happen to love both, but I don't think they can do either series the justice they deserve by shoehorning them into the same story. Baldur's Gate is a sweeping fantasy epic in the mold of The Lord of the Rings, whereas Planescape: Torment is a gritty, visceral, and intense character driven narrative. To put them both in the same story you would have to either subsume one story type into the other (relegating either the The Nameless One or the Child of Bhaal to a mere cameo in the other's tale), or diminish both story threads to try and make it all fit.
In fact unless it was done extremely well any Planescape sequel would run a genuine risk of screwing up the whole richness of the story. Planescape: Torment is simply put one of the best stories in videogame history (it's actually up there with the likes of Shakespeare and Homer IMO). One of it's strengths as a story is that it is a genuine tragedy in the mold of Hamlet. It struggles with weighty notions of personal identity, the struggle against natural and supernatural law, fate vs free will, personal responsibility and the struggle of the self against the self. I could go on it is seriously that deep, but one has to be very careful about any next chapter in The Nameless One's story, as to continue with the themes of Torment is to simply re-hash old ground (and bottom line is they could only hope to be AS good as Torment, only without the freshness that the original story possesses in which case what is the point?), or to spin off the story as some sort of redemptive arc for The Nameless One in which case unless it is done EXTREMELY intelligently would ruin and undermine the whole of Torment.
Besides if Chris Avellone wasn't involved, it wouldn't be a continuation of his story, and simply put I don't trust anyone else to do the story the justice. Now bearing all of this in mind, shoehorning The Nameless One into The Baldur's Gate Saga, has bad idea written all over it.
Anyways, I like most of your post but I don't get why you said that about shoehorning TNO into the Baldur's Gate Saga. Ultimately, I want to give TNO a chance to escape the Blood War with an event that makes sense and can negate whatever contract or punishment he obtained to get sent there. . . The destruction of the power behind the Concept of Murder is one such event. Unless you have a better idea than "I ran away from the Blood War and the 'Powers that Be' didn't stop me, LOL!" I don't see TNO's story continuing.
Besides, I want to continue using my character from BG even if he becomes a godling, so having him around as a secondary character works for me.
Now I'm not just shooting down this notion for the fun of it, I'm really trying to figure out how this could realistically work. The best I can personally come up with is to keep the franchises seperate and free to tell their own stories, although some sort of nod or reference could work (in the same vein as The Marvel Cinematic Universe having subtle little nods to the wider world in them). Say you get to the end of Baldur's Gate III, and your Bhallspawn (or new character if it goes in that direction), stops that game's big bad, it sets off a massive cross plane event, and in it you see rifts open up, with all manner of planar entities spilling out, and then it cuts to some unkown landscape, a beautiful verdant place brimming with light and beauty a rift opens up, and through it walks this impossibly scarred man....
I am just spitballing here, but I still believe trying to follow both the Child of Bhaal, and The Nameless One, in the same tale is an ill-advised one, no matter how cool such an idea first appears.
In all honesty, I've spent some time thinking about a PS:T sequel and how I would handle it. I'm just not going to post what I've come up with here to spare anyone legal issues.
I can appreciate that BG2 needed a new setting and it went well with the whole kidnapped,'where the heck are we?!' theme that the game creates in the beginning, however I think carrying the story off to the Dalelands (as the original plans for BG3 intended) seems a bit farfetched to me.
I know the story's meant to be more about the main character than the city, but one of the main things that I liked in the first game was the sense of mystery it created about the big area I wasn't allowed into at the top of my map. The fact that all the characters were talking about it, and how something important was inevitably going to take place there really acted as bait for me to keep going with the game in my first play-through. I remember the feeling of joy when the chapter 5 text was playing, and I heard the words 'You must now enter the city of Baldur's Gate…'. The city just has so much lore and things going on, that I think there's still so much more that could be explored there.
Besides, Icewind Dale 2 goes back to many of the old areas that were in the first game, (even if it did reuse almost all of the old dungeons), so why couldn't Baldur's Gate? Dark Alliance was also set partly in Baldur's Gate. Something like that would be good - even if it's not wholly set in the Baldur's Gate/Sword Coast region, a hearty nod in that direction wouldn't hurt, in my opinion. Alternatively, they could set it in Baldur's Gate, but include areas north of it, as opposed to the southern areas which were explored in the first game.
I've always been of the opinion that being able to explore the world as you desire (while having some sort of moderate goal to complete) is good enough for me when playing a game. I just want very few, if any, of the old dungeons to be plot relevant. The point is to have a land for you to explore, increase the chances of random monster attacks while traveling, and having things you can do besides the linear path of the campaign.
I have yet to pick up NWN2 because I hated the original, particularly for it's lack of the ability to get more than a single follower in a game system designed around a minimum of a 4 person party (fighter, cleric, rogue, and wizard).
It does a tonne of other stuff that it doesn't get the credit it deserves for either:
1. The story is way better than NWN, as it has a proper fully fledged campaign rather then NWN which felt tacked on to supplement what was really IMO designed as a multiplayer game.
2. Introduces a Law/Chaos alignment dimension to the usual Good/Evil one.
3. At late game you get a keep you have to manage which opens up a cool choices.
4. What I thought was an incredibly well done court case segment where you get to first go around investigating something you are accused of doing, then get to choose to represent yourself in the actual court case.
I'd say finally as there were no console versions to worry aboutnthe graphics in some ways far surpasses Dragon Age, particularly in the areas of lighting and shadows.