RaggleFraggle
Ask me about VTM
- Joined
- Mar 23, 2022
- Messages
- 1,059
Even treating lore like scripture is not necessarily a good thing, either. Writing good lore takes way more effort and forethought than most writers are capable of or want to do. Writing is a skill that you never stop learning. Eventually, many writers will desire to revise past work in good faith. Even Tolkien himself once wrote that he didn't appreciate the finality of publishing (take a look at how his worldbuilding underwent many revisions before publishing).
We admit the writing in BG isn't that great. There are mods that exist specifically to expand and improve it, like the BG NPC Project. What Larian is doing to returning characters isn't appreciated by fans of those characters. Ultimately, this is a product that uses the brand name to attract returning players too. Using the worst interpretations of characters isn't a good way to win fans over.
This is the drawback of writing sequels to crpgs that give a plethora of choices. Firstly, WotC is gonna arbitrarily pick what events are canon and their choices are gonna be stupid (e.g. deciding those awful BG novels are canon over the actual games). Secondly, trying to account for choices in sequels just increases the workload and isn't going to satisfy everyone anyway. ME2 and ME3 only accounted for a fraction of choices. BG4 accounting for choices in BG3 would be an absolute nightmare to design.
Canon is an inherently tricky proposition to apply to fiction and defies how fiction has been conventionally thought of before the legal invention of intellectual property. Mythology doesn't have a canon because it was shared through oral storytelling that changed with the telling. Long-running IPs have inescapable continuity problems because it's simply impossible for human beings to keep track of the sheer volume of internal chronology and rules, to say nothing of deliberate retcons. It's a headache.
We admit the writing in BG isn't that great. There are mods that exist specifically to expand and improve it, like the BG NPC Project. What Larian is doing to returning characters isn't appreciated by fans of those characters. Ultimately, this is a product that uses the brand name to attract returning players too. Using the worst interpretations of characters isn't a good way to win fans over.
This is the drawback of writing sequels to crpgs that give a plethora of choices. Firstly, WotC is gonna arbitrarily pick what events are canon and their choices are gonna be stupid (e.g. deciding those awful BG novels are canon over the actual games). Secondly, trying to account for choices in sequels just increases the workload and isn't going to satisfy everyone anyway. ME2 and ME3 only accounted for a fraction of choices. BG4 accounting for choices in BG3 would be an absolute nightmare to design.
Canon is an inherently tricky proposition to apply to fiction and defies how fiction has been conventionally thought of before the legal invention of intellectual property. Mythology doesn't have a canon because it was shared through oral storytelling that changed with the telling. Long-running IPs have inescapable continuity problems because it's simply impossible for human beings to keep track of the sheer volume of internal chronology and rules, to say nothing of deliberate retcons. It's a headache.
