Thoughts on the World Design of Baldur's Gate
Chronicler
Member Posts: 1,391
So, basically everything in most videogames, but specifically Baldur's Gate, is representative of something bigger, imo.
There are hardware reasons why a thriving metropolis will have a hundred NPC’s and not a million, but there are also gameplay reasons. A city of a hundred feels rich and full of life, where a city of a million feels like a faceless crowd.
Every Bounty Hunter in the land is after you. You see the notices being sent out to any who will listen. You only actually encounter about a dozen bounty hunters though, and from this you must extrapolate the rest. A dozen bounty hunters punctuates your journey, where a hundred bounty hunters would just be tedious.
Bandits have been terrorizing the nation. You find their central hideout. There’s about five big boss guys with unique abilities and equipment, and a dozen facelesss mooks. This is an dynamic and interesting encounter, where a realistic fighting force that could terrorize a nation would be a slog. You’d be fighting faceless mooks for hours with no end in sight.
You find some woods. They’ll be about 2 minutes to walk from one end to the other. There’ll be about four or five points of interest. This is a fun little exploration. If it were three hours to walk from one end to the other and large swaths of it were just woods, suddenly the fun is gone.
The real world offers more experiences than any of us will ever participate in, but the game world must offer a cohesive meal for us to gobble on up and move on to the next thing. Part of how they offer that cohesive meal is they cut out the crud.
So that thriving metropolis, it’s mostly named NPC’s with specific interactions, and a little bit of unnamed fluff to pad it out. Those bounty hunters, they each have unique abilities. You fight the bounty hunter waiting for you at the inn who throws some new stuff at you, but we don’t bother the player with the bounty hunter who wakes them up in the morning with stuff they’ve already seen. The bandit camp has the interesting bosses, and leaves enough faceless mooks for you to do a victory lap if you’re so inclined. The woods cut out all the aimless wandering, clusters all the points of interest together. The player gets the parts of the world that are fundamentally fun, because this is a videogame, and that’s what we’re doing here, but a larger more boring universe is always implied to exist.
There are hardware reasons why a thriving metropolis will have a hundred NPC’s and not a million, but there are also gameplay reasons. A city of a hundred feels rich and full of life, where a city of a million feels like a faceless crowd.
Every Bounty Hunter in the land is after you. You see the notices being sent out to any who will listen. You only actually encounter about a dozen bounty hunters though, and from this you must extrapolate the rest. A dozen bounty hunters punctuates your journey, where a hundred bounty hunters would just be tedious.
Bandits have been terrorizing the nation. You find their central hideout. There’s about five big boss guys with unique abilities and equipment, and a dozen facelesss mooks. This is an dynamic and interesting encounter, where a realistic fighting force that could terrorize a nation would be a slog. You’d be fighting faceless mooks for hours with no end in sight.
You find some woods. They’ll be about 2 minutes to walk from one end to the other. There’ll be about four or five points of interest. This is a fun little exploration. If it were three hours to walk from one end to the other and large swaths of it were just woods, suddenly the fun is gone.
The real world offers more experiences than any of us will ever participate in, but the game world must offer a cohesive meal for us to gobble on up and move on to the next thing. Part of how they offer that cohesive meal is they cut out the crud.
So that thriving metropolis, it’s mostly named NPC’s with specific interactions, and a little bit of unnamed fluff to pad it out. Those bounty hunters, they each have unique abilities. You fight the bounty hunter waiting for you at the inn who throws some new stuff at you, but we don’t bother the player with the bounty hunter who wakes them up in the morning with stuff they’ve already seen. The bandit camp has the interesting bosses, and leaves enough faceless mooks for you to do a victory lap if you’re so inclined. The woods cut out all the aimless wandering, clusters all the points of interest together. The player gets the parts of the world that are fundamentally fun, because this is a videogame, and that’s what we’re doing here, but a larger more boring universe is always implied to exist.
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Comments
How big is the game world?
...The area represented by the game world is from Baldur’s Gate in the North, to the Wood of Sharp Teeth in the East, to the Cloud Peak mountains and Amn in the South - representing about 300 square miles, compressed down to the interesting bits.
I don't think many people would be interested in spending the better part of a day walking through endless stretches of wilderness with nothing to do. Or spending an hour or more walking through Baldur's Gate city, passing hundreds of NPCs that when interacted with all give the response: "This man/woman glares at you suspiciously, and continues on his/her way."
It's the same in table-top roleplaying games. Your DM is not going to describe every step you take in your journey from one town to the next. If something interesting happened, there will be an encounter. If not, you'll get a brief bit of exposition and hand-wave, and then be told that your party arrives without incident.
And it's the same in literature as well. Even Tolkien -- with all his lengthy, highly descriptive prose -- would often condense a multi-day journey into a single paragraph in order to progress the story from point A to point B and get on to the interesting parts.
“Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
There are maps with very little in them, but I don't think there are any with nothing.
Even these maps are condensed to a certain extent. I suspect they would've had more in them if not for budgets and deadlines and all those ways in which the reality of the creative process can often mean the final product will fall short of what it sought to achieve.
When it comes to armies, bandits etc I find it to be rather poor story telling to have a whole region traumatized by bandits only to later having charname + 0-5 comrades solve it by killing 20 guys in tents, something a city state with an actual force would be able to do themselves. I get the mechanics behind it, but I don't consider it good world building. Few games (if any?) manage to make it actually feel epic. SoD make some really, really good improvements in that regard with their battles at the castle and bridgefort. Hotu did something similar as well. It makes for better world building IMHO then empty streets and "armies" of 5 generic warrior types with one or two named leaders.
PKM's map with it's slow traveling speed can feel very annoying after a while for a powergamer like myself, but I've grown to like it due to the very fact it builds up the world and the areas as part of something really big and vast.
... and then there are rather questionable design decisions as well. I for one could *never* understand as to why the devs choose to take tomb designs straight out of Egypt for BG2. Think about it for a second: Mulhorand is on the other side of the continent! At no point in history had Mulhorandi any kind of relationship with Amn. So there's really no point in using their architecture for Athkatla's Lower Tomb as its contradicting the Forgotten Realms own world building.
I feel the same about the Black Raven Monastery in Icewind Dale 2. The devs tried to give this place an "Asian" atmosphere simply because it was a monastery of martial arts monks. But the Black Raven order was founded by a half-drow who came from the Underdark, and who built up his legendary fighting skills while in the Underdark. Kara-Tur has nothing to do with this.
I used to agree with you but now I have come to think that for a small, reasonably low-level party (1-4 characters of levels 3-5) the Ulcaster dungeon is actually pretty good. I like the atmosphere of the place and if you have left it for long enough that you don't remember where the traps are it can feel pretty creepy.
That's a good point. I hadn't thought of it that way. There really does need to be some kind of unique treasure in a dungeon and Ulcaster's dusty tome doesn't really cut it.
Most of the BG1 content is in the open world content rather than the dungeons you have to do to progress the main story, so I don't think it's weird that the open world loot would vastly outnumber the dungeon loot.
Would that include
Because those things are (potentially) awesome.
I feel like a pretty hefty chunk of those are available in the open world too. Some for pretty minimal risk.
The cave at Seawatcher: basically, a mini-dungeon. There's only one path to the cave, and it goes by two groups of sirines - much more dangerous than the typical enemies found in the area.
Then the cave interior has a loop of rooms, traps, and a powerful monster in each room; more dungeon-type design.
The Wisdom and Dexterity tomes in BG city... OK, not dungeons. Instead, they're quest content. You need to be doing the poisoning quest to pick up the wisdom tome, and you need to be invited into the thieves' guild (so they can give you a job) for the dexterity tome.
The Nashkell Mines could be something of a mini dungeon. Just an introductory dungeon to get you started. You go through a few floors of kobolds, one or two ghasts, then you fight the boss.
A cave is very much just a cave though, no matter how few entrances there are. One Room does not a dungeon make.
If you're out in the Nymph Woods and you go off the beaten path and find a hidden burrough or something that's not a dungeon. That's like the classic definition of open world content.