BG3: Worth it or not? [DEBATE THREAD]
Rik_Kirtaniya
Member Posts: 1,742
This is for both the pro-BG3 and anti-BG3 parties to engage in CIVIL conversation and debate regarding the game. All opinions can be voiced here, but the discussion MUST be kept civil. Please be respectful to your fellow forumites, and if you don't agree with someone, just respectfully disagree. No name-calling, flaming or trolling. Keep satire and sarcasm to a minimum because they tend to almost always come off as aggressive. Please try to not sound condescending or patronising to your fellow forumites. All opinions/criticism are to be regarding BG3 and must not be targeted at individual forumites themselves.
All forum rules hold valid here. Thank you and enjoy the discussion.
Positive Only thread: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/80567/why-bg3-is-amazing-positive-only-thread-no-criticism
Criticism thread: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/80568/the-problem-with-bg3-criticism-thread
All forum rules hold valid here. Thank you and enjoy the discussion.
Positive Only thread: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/80567/why-bg3-is-amazing-positive-only-thread-no-criticism
Criticism thread: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/80568/the-problem-with-bg3-criticism-thread
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Comments
First, a disclaimer: I haven't bought or played the Early Access.
I have something on my mind that I've wanted to say since the whole issue about the BG3 companions started. I keep reading discussions, here in this forum and elsewhere, about how difficult it is to play good-aligned characters, how the developers are catering to evil roleplaying, and such things. That evil players get rewarded.
But that's true for BG1 and 2, too. For example, you have to choose between two evil guilds to find Imoen.
And how many people who like to play relatively good characters still steal everything and break into houses, because otherwise you don't get those amazing items?
How many people choose the evil options in Hell because of the rewards?
You choose the good path in roleplaying because you want to, because you feel that's the right way. If you just do it because you get more power, it's not about roleplaying, not about goodness. It's powergaming. Which is perfectly legitimate, too, of course, but then you can't claim the game is bad because the good path isn't properly encouraged or rewarded.
(And btw I know that people who play the evil way usually aren't evil in real life, it's just a game after all.)
If BG3 makes it difficult to roleplay a good character, that would be okay with me, because so does SoA, for example. If it makes it impossible, I can still choose not to play it.
I think people tend to regard the old games fondly and don't see the rough edges anymore, because we're so used to them, or to the remedy that's out there in the form of so many mods.
A new game is seen through the overly critical glasses of our own expectations and biases. Time will tell if those first impressions are going to stick.
And my main point remains that "good" isn't always "easy", just like in real life.
I'd say its more like a cartoonishly evil guild, and an unlawful guild. I'd rate the majority of Shadow Thieves as neutral. 70% of a thives guild's activities are gonna be pickpockets and unlicensed sale of goods. There's definitely evil people in the guild, but its not "mwahahaha drink the blood of the innocent." So I don't really think the two are all that equivalent.
Its also worth noting that the Cowled Wizards are a legally sanctioned institution. So there is no lawful way to get Imoen out of there.
Well it *is* still Early Access, and there aren't any obviously good party member, yet. (I have not seen too much about Gale)
Ironically enough though, in BG2, the most "good" path you can take is actually joining Bodhi.
She is shipping those thieves to Irenicus. Have you seen the blood pools in her lair? That cannot be maintained by captives that you are sending elsewhere. A LOT more than just shadow thieves are dying to vampires. One of the encounters in the city at night has a vampire go out of its way to say that the only reason you aren't hunted when go out at night is because Bohdi extends here protection.
Oh wasn't trying to deny that, just providing a little meta.
Tis the season to be meta
@Arvia More directly related to the subject your comment addresses. difficult good can be very satisfying. Tyranny has one of the best (imo) good paths in video gaming. Its a setting where evil has already won, so you have to be SMART to be good. Not just from a combat perspective, but in terms of politics and alliances. If you enjoy satisfying good paths, I recommend giving Tyranny a try.
If you get into like the written material on the Shadow Thieves (like Volo's Guide to Baldur's Gate II and Lands of Intrigue) you learn they also do stuff like shaking down local businesses for money. From what I remember, merchants can't operate in the city as a business without giving them their cut.
Athkatla is called the city of coin. As long as you can pay off the guards for whatever you do that happens to not be legal, and you aren't challenging the guilds/leadership of the city, you can pretty much get away with anything.
I guess the difference to me is that the vampires are a lot more chaotic, whereas the shadow thieves are well entrenched within the existing political structure and use that to their advantage.
Edit: And now of course that I've written this I can't find anything to support this other than in Cloaks and Daggers, which came out in 2000. I swear there were earlier sources for this as well.
I know I keep bringing it up, buuuuuuuuuuuuuut, Tyranny was marketed entirely as the RPG to play for evil. Evil already won before the game started, you outright work for the evil overlord, the evil empire is realistic in its evilness (think fantasy Rome). I didn't even know the game had a good path until someone who already played the game informed me. And it amazingly turned to be fully fleshed out pretty satisfying.
Hopefully BG3 can learn from BG's mistakes and manage satisfying content for both playstiles like Tyranny did. Its been over 20 years, BG3 has no business making the same mistakes.
You can find my opinion ridiculous, I can live with that. But if I play a paladin in BG1 or 2 without breaking into any locked house, without taking anything from containers unless in enemy dungeons, without looting tombs (that also means not taking the Tome from the Candlekeep crypt, for example), without sacrificing an animal on an evil altar in the Underdark to summon the demon knights that drop the belt you need for Crom Faeyr, if I don't do the quest to get the Ring of Gaxx because he's behind a locked door, then I don't get the same rewards as someone who does all that. And for the record, that *is* the way I usually play these games.
And I still find it a satisfying experience. But I don't blame the game designers that there's no reward for that.
To your point about how you would play a paladin, truth is I would probably also want to play my paladin that way (mostly). Things like not breaking into average people's homes and stealing their stuff, I do that regardless of my character's class, even if I'm playing a rogue. And I've already posted on a couple of other occasions that in BG1, in one of the eastern areas of the city, there is a house with a man and his butler that has arguably the best helm in the whole game. But I find it a horrible thing to do to break into that home and murder those two innocent individuals just to get that helm. The HUGE difference between us is that I do find it extremely unfair that for playing this way I get screwed out of a whole bunch of material rewards (and possibly even some XP), and I absolutely blame the game designers for having done a poor job of how they designed the game.
I actually think this analysis is rather unimaginative, especially given the Forgotten Realms setting.
One of the weak aspects of BG1 and 2 is that the rewards for playing in an evil style weren't that significant. They weren't enough to justify the enormous cost.
Whereas the rewards for playing perfectly good were immense. Considering most of the game world is likely to be populated with characters who are good-ish, I think it's actually a perfectly fine dynamic to reward evil player with material rewards and let good players have their reputation reward. This would also reflect, to a large extent, how morality works in the real world. We can do "evil" or selfish things and get material rewards. Or we can do good things and be respected by those around us. It's an excellent framework for moral choices in an RPG, imo.
What you seem to be advocating for is some kind of perfectly balanced equality of outcome, and I just think that would make for a profoundly uninteresting game world.
Okay, thank you for clarifying and sorry for misunderstanding.
I don't know how to phrase my answer so that it doesn't sound condescending or like an attack, because I see how you have to defend your viewpoint here all the time and don't want to provoke you or anything.
So please try to take it neutrally and not as a challenge.
I mean, this is the problem *you* have with the game. I really don't understand why you don't just move on and play something else, if you don't even like that about the "old" BG games. And I don't mean to say "Shut up and go away" by that. I'm really wondering what your aim is.
I mean, I absolutely don't like Game of Thrones, for example. Neither the books nor the TV show. I forced myself to finish the first book after buying it, watched some extracts from the TV show and thoroughly disliked the cruel, gory and unnecessarily obscene and violent world, where everyone gets maimed, raped or uselessly and brutally killed. I know there's goodness in there, too, interesting character development and whatnot. But the whole setting is not for me. So, I don't read it, I don't watch it, I give it a wide berth, although I love fantasy and was hoping for an interesting new book series.
I don't waste my precious time and energy to post on a GoT fan forum about how they should make another TV show where kindness is rewarded and good people survive, and tell every fan how I hate the show. When someone mentions it, I say "I don't like it. Too brutal and obscene for me." I say that once, and that's it.
I honestly don't understand what your goal is. Do you really want game developers to change their approach, and do you think you will achieve that by what you do here? Or do you share your frustration because you like the games enough that you only want some details to change? But then, you seem to have the same opinion of BG1 and 2. So, I really want to ask what your agenda is, because while diverse opinions are always good for a discussion, there needs to be a flexibility to understand other points of view, otherwise it's just a repetition of one's own anger.
I repeat, I have tried to phrase everything carefully, I have read it again before posting, and if anything still comes across as offensive or provocative, it was not meant that way.
As for your personal analogy attempt, there is no equivalence there. You don't like GoT, so you don't post on it. I may not like BG3, but I do love the original BG games, the Forgotten Realms, and cRPGs. So it totally makes sense for me to not only post about BG3 but to be passionate about it as a subset of all those other things that I love.
Btw, I also have to ask: doesn't understanding other points of view cut both ways? You want me to be "flexible" and understand your pov. Where is your flexibility in understanding my pov?
I thought that trying to understand your motives and asking about them implied a certain flexibility to see your POV.
But I'm tired of splitting hairs. I'm going back to silent observer in this part of the forum and keep reading what people who are playing have to say about it.
I apologize for derailing this thread.
Now let's say that GoT was touted as being Lord of the Rings 2. That would drastically change the way Tolkien fans would view it. Does that make the feelings here any more clear?
@ThacoBell , okay, that makes your perspective a bit clearer. Maybe comparable to how many people felt about what Disney did to Star Wars.
That's two completely different topics, though.
"Bg3 is Divinity, not Baldur's Gate"
and
"Evil gets all the advantages while good playthroughs aren't properly rewarded"
I can't say anything about the first statement, because I'm at the beginning of D:OS EE and can't really compare anything yet.
The second statement is a completely different one, and I won't repeat what I've already said about that.
Did this, like a lot of other DOS characteristics, end up in BG3 as well?
For a game that explicitly adds height as a gameplay factor, it's a crazy idea to NOT be able to look up! Right..?
100% fair.
Not to the galaxy brain designers at Larian, from what I can tell. :P
@Sjerrie I haven't had an instance yet where because I couldn't look at the sky I couldn't make a tactical decision / had any other obstacle in the gaming experience. There are built-in options which support the player who wants to see different levels of ground, including key-holing (the feature we included into NWN:EE as well, btw).
Not to mention the other game, but Solasta has a rotatable and zoomable camera and uses vertically in its level designs as well. The ‘not on a flat surface’ argument doesn’t fly after one sees how that game handles it.
As for BG3 as a whole, it'll be worth it if you liked Divinity: Original Sin. If you didn't like the cartoonish, camp, parody-of-RPGs style of D:OS, you probably won't like BG3 either, because it's really just the same thing. The game looks, feels and plays precisely like D:OS 3 and doesn't feel connected to the Baldur's Gate series in any meaningful way. It takes place in the same universe but the similarities end there. The turn-based combat is very slow and cumbersome because you mostly just have one action per turn, and the writing is very much Larian's trademark "everything must be funny, weird, cliché-filled and ultra-camp."
I have thousands of hours invested in the Baldur's Gate trilogy. BG1 and BG2 remain my favorite PC games, by far. I've always used the auto-pause feature to its full potential, however, so I've basically played these games (in combat) as turn-based. I've done enough homework, though, that I'm not expecting BG3 to resemble the gameplay of the Infinity games at all. While I haven't played D&D tabletop in decades (2nd Ed.), I enjoy most fantasy, especially the Forgotten Realms setting. I certainly haven't kept up with any lore through today. I'm only expecting BG3 to tie into the tabletop lore, possibly, dropping in a few names or locations from the Infinity games down the road.
I'm greatly hoping that the replay-ability of the Infinity games is here. I've read from many sources that have claimed to have put in dozens of hours, so far. The replay-ability of BG2's demo was enough for me to get dozens of hours from it. If BG3 does end up being playable on my PC, I'm expecting to get hundreds of hours out of the early access, if I thoroughly enjoy it.
I have to agree with Dunski here.
I went back again just recently and tried to play D - OS 2 and while I like turn based combat and was impressed by the technical aspects, I could not enjoy the too frequent "tongue in cheek" dialogue and atmosphere.
I don't mind the occasional humor like you get with BG 1 and 2 but overall the feel (for my taste) should be ominous and epic.
This is not to say that the Larian stuff is "bad". It's just a matter of taste and for their games I can never seem to acquire it ....
Exactly, it all comes down to personal taste. If someone doesn't like that particular sense of humor (I like it), that doesn't mean it's a bad style or something wrong with Larian games, it just doesn't meet your taste. I like ominous and epic stories, too, but even in the most serious situations there can be elements of silliness and humor, at least in my opinion. That's how life is, or how I like to see it.
But I do understand what others might find distracting or annoying about that.
In a vacuum, yeah.