In Soviet Amn you do not seek quests; quests seek YOU!
_Connacht_
Member Posts: 169
When you start chapter 2 in BG2 you are literally bombed by new quests all at once only because you are... there. Nalia walks right towards you in the Copper Coronet and so the guy from Trademeet once you go to the gates. Delon from Umar usually spawns very soon. Then the first time you go outside Athkatla (usually for Nalia) you trigger the Harpers quest for the docks (which also can trigger Yoshimo to tell you to go to Renal).
Ok, you can choose the order you prefer, but it's strange to have an agenda already filled with tons of mustdo-things from the very first moment. You are trying to find quests after all.
Ok, you can choose the order you prefer, but it's strange to have an agenda already filled with tons of mustdo-things from the very first moment. You are trying to find quests after all.
3
Comments
Being pestered by quest-givers in role-playing games lets us feel powerful and wanted, and temporarily forget that in real life we are too lazy, too incompetent, too untrustworthy, and simply not important enough for anyone to trust us with slaying a dragon or rescuing their children or saving the world or fetching them an item from the store down the street... or any task, really, that requires more training than a rottweiler or more cunning than a drunk toddler or more hand-eye coordination than a day-old cheeseburger.
I think BG2 suffers from not being more like BG because it was designed so much to capture a bigger audience. Too linear, too goal focused. You do the quests for XP and money, not because you actually need to do them. It takes far too much justifying RP wise to complete the whole of BG2.
Both main objectives (rescuing Imoen/getting soul back) actually would have a time limit on them. The game story obviously says they do (RP) but actually playing doesn't.
Imoen rots in Spellhold as long as you want her to. You can wander the realms with no affects from having no soul.
"Save the world, huh? I think I can fit you in a week from Thursday. I'll let you know if I get a cancellation."
Eventually, the questgiver of your stronghold might directly contact you: so would do Nalia with a fighter, the Trademeet guy with a druid and so on.
Still, you can probably play the whole game with zero curiosity and you'd be fine, because everything is served up to you. Doesn't require much effort and is therefore, for me, less engaging.
BG1, on the other hand, revealed a lot of things only after you took an active interest in them, or explicitly went out to explore things and check the world out. The journeys were longer, the empty space wider, and your knowledge of the land (at least the first time) very poor, so you had to get out there and make an effort. You had to try. It was far more compelling, to me, because I didn't feel so 'carried away' by the plot and was forging my own path. I felt like a more active participant.
In BG 2 you are already quite powerful, so people start contacting you more. And while I am sure there are Xvarts villages in Amn the density of interesting encounters is too small for your party to justify just wandering around blindly.
In a way even ToB makes sense since by then you are pulled inexorably towards your destiny.
Anyway it is not a black & white situation. It is not that either you wander around blindly without knowing where to go and what to do, or you are directly approached by other people in a short time.
You could simply know in the beginning that "in the copper's coronet there are are some people asking for help, besides if you are a CLASSNAME there is X in the D district that might ask for you". Then Delon could trigger a bit later (I always have with me Minsc and it's not unusual for other player to bring him along, since it's canon that he's one of Charname's companions), in my playthrough he always spawned very early. The guy from Trademeet might popup text like Firkraag in the gates, you will surely see him but you don't have to talk with him if you don't want. The harper's quest might trigger when you return to Athkatla, not when you first leave the city.
It is a tough balance giving a level of direction so that new players are not lost, while letting old hands feel they are in charge of their own open-world experience. We have learned a lot in the last 20 years about how to do this better,yet I still don't think studios get this significantly better today. The balance may be different, but I rarely get the satisfaction I experience playing through a complete BG run (for all that most of my runs peter out just before I rescue Imoen, darn that restartitis).
I agree with you, BG2 did what it had to do and was succesful.
However, although the excuse is more than valid, it doesn't invalidate the criticism.
I sometimes feel, and it is probably totally false, that there was too much of a concern that BG2 had to be bigger and better.
Which sometimes swamped the integrity/purity (not sure if those are the right words) of what was actually created in BG.
An example of this for me, is the removal of the three elven NPC in BG2 and then ending BG2 in Suldanessellar, after Ust Nathar and having Irenicus as the bad guy.
Did nobody figure that having an elven perspective, that was important in BG for underlining you were "no longer in Kansas" and creating the world, needed to be carried over?
Sacrificed for steam punk and we can do bigger and better.
A better way to put it would be to say, at the time, BG was not as recognised as the masterpiece it was but all these years later it is or it should be.
Not the technical side of things, but the success of building a world inhabited by characters, that was totally submersive and inspiring for millions of people.