Baldur's Gate Avellone on the strength of BG2 companions

[<3sRichardSimmons]

5 people talk at each other about two other people talking at each other: the thread.

 

[Fairfax]

"Why should the player care?"

This is more than just pandering though, I didn't get the feeling from Avellone work that he did pandering on the way Bioware did. Pondering "why should the player care?" is a legitimate question as much as "why should a movie goer care?" or "why should a reader care?". You need to care about the perspective of the people that are going to consume your stuff, unless you want to live on a cave and sell to nobody like PoE 2 did.

Yes, it's his approach every step of the way. The idea is that you shouldn't write or design anything that players are unlikely to care about (like PoE's loredumps).

-Player motivation. This isn't the same thing as character motivation (see above). What you want here is to be able to provide the player with enough teasers to keep him going throughout the game, either by revealing critical information, introducing cool, new companions, acquiring new special abilities, and so on. Basically, each stage of the game should ask the question, "Why should the player care?", and each stage of the game should answer it. It is difficult to make the player care about saving some generic fantasy realm if the designers haven't constructed a way to make the player care about its inhabitants, the political situation, or the events that are playing out there?

On my long list of hates about RPGs, one of them was, I always felt it was an unnecessary chore to make you care about a world when in fact what most players care about is their own personal experience. So in Planescape, we [decided], “We’re just going to make everything about you. This is your journey, the planes aren’t going to explode—it’s all about your personal journey, and about everything that took place that you did beforehand that’s caused this situation.” And that’s how we wanted to keep it. You want to have a totally selfish adventure? I’m right there with you. That’s fantastic. I don’t want you to save a nation or go rescue the princess or kill the evil wizard, I want you to save yourself, and you figure out how to do it. It’s all about you, so enjoy it. Because that’s the kind of game that I want to play.

He asks himself (and tells other writers to do the same) that question after writing anything. Fenstermaker knew about that guideline and mentioned it in a KS update, but clearly didn't follow it:

"Why should the player care?" is a question we try to ask ourselves for all aspects of the narrative. When it comes to plot, the question is answered by its themes - they make the plot about something more than a physical struggle.

 

[Roguey]

The idea is that you shouldn't write or design anything that players are unlikely to care about (like PoE's loredumps).

It may have been explained at one point how this happened, but I still don't understand how it happened https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...-to-the-new-thread.75947/page-86#post-2280329

 

[Cael]

People need to understand that if a character raises a visceral reaction from you (e.g., Anomen being an asshole misogynist or Rendon Howe being an irredeemable bastard), the writer has done a great job.

Too often, we get idiot "critics" crying about how much they hate a certain character and therefore the guy writing that character is a lousy writer. No, you morons. If that character can raise that kind of emotion in you, then the writer has done his job well. He has made you connect to the character, he has brought out the character's motivations, quirks, character well. That is what makes a good writer. You hating the asshole is the whole point. He is not there to be loved. He is the bad guy, the douchebag, the jerk.

That selfish spiteful hate, where a person hate everything associated with something he hates regardless of history, reason or circumstance is why we get a whole segment of society today who hates so well.

 

[Roguey]

That would make Pallegina one of the best characters of Pillars of Eternity.

 

[Cael]

That would make Pallegina one of the best characters of Pillars of Eternity.

I don't think that hating a badly written character can be described as "visceral". Mostly it is: Man, that was badly written. I'll have that last piece of pizza if you guys don't mind.

On the other hand: Fuck you, Alistair, you stupid crybaby fucktard! Stop being such a big baby and grow the fuck up! Grey Wardens do anything to fight darkspawn. They are not a title for you to wear, you cockless bitch!

 

[Fairfax]

The idea is that you shouldn't write or design anything that players are unlikely to care about (like PoE's loredumps).

It may have been explained at one point how this happened, but I still don't understand how it happened https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...-to-the-new-thread.75947/page-86#post-2280329

There was Fenstermaker's excuse:

It's too verbose in many places. The beginning was egregious. I'm to blame for a lot of that. Part of it was that I hadn't written prose in a long time. I found my stride later on. I am very sorry.

A separate, but equally large part of it was the exposition. Nobody likes writing exposition. You feel unclean when you've written it. It's boring and it doesn't advance plot or do anything worthwhile at all. Unfortunately, in this case, there was a lot that had to be conveyed for you to even understand what was going on. You had to know what a bîaŵac was before it struck. You had to know what adra was. You had to know what a Watcher was very shortly after becoming one. You had to know who Glanfathans were and why they would be mad at you for being in their ruins. You had to learn about animancers and the Saint's War and a slew of other things that led to the world being in the state it was in.

Later on in development, we got kind of a hyperlinked tooltip system that explained certain highlighted words when you'd mouse over them. This was used to explain systems primarily, but if I'd have known about the system early on, I think I could've made a lot of the early dialogue cleaner by offloading those explanations into some database the player has to opt into. Wouldn't have solved everything, but wouldn't have hurt.

Sawyer spread himself too thin to oversee that stuff, which made it worse.

In the end, it goes back to:

Feargus just said, “no, you should have chosen Eric.”

 

[Roguey]

You had to know what a bîaŵac was before it struck. You had to know what adra was. You had to know what a Watcher was very shortly after becoming one. You had to know who Glanfathans were and why they would be mad at you for being in their ruins. You had to learn about animancers and the Saint's War and a slew of other things that led to the world being in the state it was in.

I disagree with a lot of this. Yeah, there are a lot of people out there who need to have everything spoonfed them, but there's nothing wrong with being thrust into a situation where the protagonist has no idea what's going on (though sure if it's something the player character should know, this should be conveyed in some way to the player e.g. the PC in kotor 2 talking about being a general in a war you the player never actually experienced).

 

[Rake]

I’m not complaining, I’m disagreeing. BioWare companions and “quality” are generally not concepts I associate.

To be fair, Avellone didn't said that the characters were deep, well written or anything i would associate with "quality". He said they had a certain charm that latter games (PoE) lacked. And i agree 100% with him.
BG2 companions were a silly bunch, shallow, most of them archetypes instead of characters, and had saturday morning cartoon level writting. Most of them had a single trait, most of the time silly, that the writers took and based the whole character around that. But (and maybe because of that) they were charming and most of all memorable.

It's not an accident that Minc, Aerie, Edwin etc. are well known to the point of being almost memes. And love them or hate them, you remember them. Because they have something to remember, even if it's the single silly trait "idiot with a heart of gold that talks to his space hamster"

Compair them to POE characters that were a boring, completely forgetable bunch. I wouldn't say they were better written because most of them are shit. Were they more like real people? Yes. Were they more interesting? Hell no.

The only memorable ones were Durance and the GM. And they were head and shoulders above BG2 companions. But even they, even if they had allowed Avelone to run with his original concept for them, are more in vein of PST companions. Better written, way deeper, more interesting, but lacking in charm compaired with BG2 companions.
I read Avellone's post as 'if you are writting a sequel to BG2, for people who love BG2, your game should have the same style and "vibe" as the original game

 

[Rake]

Also from the insterview:

I didn’t think it would have measured up to what made the original Baldur’s Gate special, unfortunately – Black Isle just didn’t have the same focus BioWare did, or the same heart for the series.

I was worried its disconnect in terms of story, antagonist, premise, companions, gameplay, and even priorities were all different than Baldur’s Gate itself. And I was worried it would also be off-putting to players expecting a return to the original series.

Lastly, the developers who worked on Baldur’s Gate loved D&D. They played it, embraced it, and I think part of the charm of Baldur’s Gate was that they let the characters they had played in their own campaigns appear and be part of the story in Baldur’s Gate

Slams to Sawyer aside, every single critisism he made for Black Hound could be applied to PoE as well as the reason the game failed to measure up with BG2. And yes, i'm sure it was intentional from Avellone

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

So here’s “the greatest writer in the business” (at least he was, that’s undebatable, but I can’t recollect when he last wrote something great), praising BioWare’s cast of whiny teenagers:

The charm of the companions, for starters. One challenge I came back to after Pillars of Eternity (and I admit, I wrote two companions) is that a lot of the companions had lost a sense of charm that the Baldur’s Gate cast had. It hit me when I got involved with the Enhanced Editions, because they reminded me of the companion design of the original game and made me realise that following a formula had taken Obsidian largely off the beaten path. I say Pillars 1, as I didn’t play Pillars 2, but the Pillars 1 companions with the possible exception of Eder just didn’t carry the same punch as the Baldur’s Gate crew. The Baldur’s Gate crew felt like your friends, rivals, and even your conscience at times, but none of the Pillars companions had that charm about them. Again, I felt partly to blame for that.

Now, as harsh as I am towards the original Pillars companions, companion writing is easily the worst part of my otherwise beloved BG2. The game relies heavily on melodrama and sappiness. And the Beamdog companions, man, they are just...

Presumably there’s a reason MCA keeps describing the BG2 companions as charming and not some other positive term. He’s not saying they had depth or complexity. They were charming like cartoon characters are charming, and that includes melodrama and sappiness. That’s why they’re so memorable even eighteen years later.

Can you imagine a nine year old kid parroting the barks from POE? Because the worst thing about BG2 was having to listen to my nine year old brother say “faster than chiktikah fastpaws” every time I told him to do something for the next eighteen months.

Also, for all their simplicity, the BG2 companions had way more agency than POE’s. You could piss them off so badly they would leave or attack you or attack each other or force you into certain quest outcomes. POE’s companions don’t do any of that—they’re totally passive outside of dialogue.

The pen and paper thing also rings true. New Vegas is the best thing Sawyer’s ever done and he’d been DMing tabletop Fallout campaigns in that setting for years.

Edit: ninjaed by Rake

Edit 2: they underestimated the fact that they were essentially making the spiritual successor to a beloved Saturday morning cartoon franchise. “Man, Thundercats would’ve been great if only it had more complex characters, more realism, and a much darker tone” is not something anyone would ever say.

 

[Eyestabber]

Funny thing is that Obs tried and failed to do Bioware-style companions with NWN2

Did they? Well, they got the "annoying" part 100% right.

 

[hexer]

They were charming like cartoon characters are charming, and that includes melodrama and sappiness. That’s why they’re so memorable even eighteen years later.

Agree 100%. They're not the world's greatest written characters, they're simply there for the purpose of instilling "Saturday-morning cartoon" entertainment level.
Players who want more brooding, serious stuff can always play Witcher 3.

 

[Rake]

Edit 2: they underestimated the fact that they were essentially making the spiritual successor to a beloved Saturday morning cartoon franchise. “Man, Thundercats would’ve been great if only it had more complex characters, more realism, and a much darker tone” is not something anyone would ever say.

To be fair they promised a spiritual succesor to all IE games (as silly as that is) So i don't think the problem was the darker tone per se. No one would have complained if they had given us Mask of the Betrayer with BG2 combat. The problem is that they failed abysmally in the more serious, quality approach.
And the main reason is that nu obsidian writers just can't cut it. The only narrative people with real talent were Avellone and Ziets, and both had minimal involvement

 

[Tigranes]

Avellone hasn't written anything substantial and great for years. Arguably his last substantial and good output was Old World Blues, which was also the last time Obsidian had good writing.

People need to understand that if a character raises a visceral reaction from you (e.g., Anomen being an asshole misogynist or Rendon Howe being an irredeemable bastard), the writer has done a great job.

Too often, we get idiot "critics" crying about how much they hate a certain character and therefore the guy writing that character is a lousy writer. No, you morons. If that character can raise that kind of emotion in you, then the writer has done his job well. He has made you connect to the character, he has brought out the character's motivations, quirks, character well. That is what makes a good writer. You hating the asshole is the whole point. He is not there to be loved. He is the bad guy, the douchebag, the jerk.

That selfish spiteful hate, where a person hate everything associated with something he hates regardless of history, reason or circumstance is why we get a whole segment of society today who hates so well.

I agree in the sense that Anomen, for example, executed his character brief quite well. You are usually fucked off at Anomen because he is an immature foppish dumbfuck - I don't really find myself being fucked off at Anomen's writer, wondering who could have written this crap.

But I think sometimes it's also got to do with your tolerance threshold. Technically the same rule should apply to Aerie, but....

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[A horse of course]

Can you imagine a nine year old kid parroting the barks from POE? Because the worst thing about BG2 was having to listen to my nine year old brother say “faster than chiktikah fastpaws” every time I told him to do something for the next eighteen months.

The Virgin Von Kuck vs. The Chad Little Brother

Funny thing is that Obs tried and failed to do Bioware-style companions with NWN2

Did they? Well, they got the "annoying" part 100% right.

Why do people constantly compare Neeshka to Bioware waifus? No. 1 difference: She's not a romance option. Just like real life, of course a player is going to find overbearing, outlandish or aggressive women appealing if they are considered attainable.

 

[Cael]

Why do people constantly compare Neeshka to Bioware waifus? No. 1 difference: She's not a romance option. Just like real life, of course a player is going to find overbearing, outlandish or aggressive women appealing if they are considered attainable.

I actually like Neeshka. She can be annoying, but that was a result of cut content rather than anything else. Other than that, she has some genuinely funny moments (arriving at Neverwinter for the first time, for example) and she is probably the most reactive of all the companions, wanting to gut Ammon for killing Shandra despite not liking her when they first met, and choosing to side with you in the last battle despite magical compulsion if you treated her right.

 

[deuxhero]

This whole "Why should the player care" and it not being the same as the character caring reminds me of War of the Wielded from the penultimate issue of Dungeon. In it the player characters find an intelligent magic sword (something that was in the core D&D rules but virtually never used) that tells them where to find more magic weapons, but in the end the player characters learn they were being manipulated to engage in a war between multiple intelligent weapons. The consensus (it isn't hard to form one when Google can't find 10 different people talking about it) seems to be players really dig the promise of finding magic weapons AND seeking revenge after they figure out they've been manipulated by their own greed. Unfortunately the consensus is also that beyond the plot skeleton the actual adventure itself is pretty lame. (One side note on this is that the adventure really feels like it was made for Japanese themed world in a few points, there's even a fight in a bathhouse, but given a setting lift for wider appeal. Or at least it would be exceptionally easy to convert to one.)

 

[J_C]

As much as I don't like it when Chris is overly critical about his own and Obsidian's writing (which I still consider pretty good for the most part), I have to agree with him. In POE1, the companions which were interesting and/or fun are Eder, Aloth, Grieving Mother and Durance. I think the other were pretty flat. The Baldur's Gate companions might be a bit whiny, but they have that charm which MCA is also talking about.

 

[Jarpie]

You had to know what a bîaŵac was before it struck. You had to know what adra was. You had to know what a Watcher was very shortly after becoming one. You had to know who Glanfathans were and why they would be mad at you for being in their ruins. You had to learn about animancers and the Saint's War and a slew of other things that led to the world being in the state it was in.

I disagree with a lot of this. Yeah, there are a lot of people out there who need to have everything spoonfed them, but there's nothing wrong with being thrust into a situation where the protagonist has no idea what's going on (though sure if it's something the player character should know, this should be conveyed in some way to the player e.g. the PC in kotor 2 talking about being a general in a war you the player never actually experienced).

I've said this on other topics as well before, people can fill in the gaps, for example Glanfathan's are clearly some tribals and they're not happy you're in some ruins, it's not that hard to put one and one together.

 

[Grunker]

I’m not complaining, I’m disagreeing. BioWare companions and “quality” are generally not concepts I associate.

To be fair, Avellone didn't said that the characters were deep, well written or anything i would associate with "quality". He said they had a certain charm that latter games (PoE) lacked. And i agree 100% with him.
BG2 companions were a silly bunch, shallow, most of them archetypes instead of characters, and had saturday morning cartoon level writting. Most of them had a single trait, most of the time silly, that the writers took and based the whole character around that. But (and maybe because of that) they were charming and most of all memorable.

It's not an accident that Minc, Aerie, Edwin etc. are well known to the point of being almost memes. And love them or hate them, you remember them. Because they have something to remember, even if it's the single silly trait "idiot with a heart of gold that talks to his space hamster"

Compair them to POE characters that were a boring, completely forgetable bunch. I wouldn't say they were better written because most of them are shit. Were they more like real people? Yes. Were they more interesting? Hell no.

The only memorable ones were Durance and the GM. And they were head and shoulders above BG2 companions. But even they, even if they had allowed Avelone to run with his original concept for them, are more in vein of PST companions. Better written, way deeper, more interesting, but lacking in charm compaired with BG2 companions.
I read Avellone's post as 'if you are writting a sequel to BG2, for people who love BG2, your game should have the same style and "vibe" as the original game

You got a point, can’t deny that.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

The Baldur’s Gate crew felt like your friends, rivals, and even your conscience at times,

I wonder if he thought of them as such back then or that's how he feels after a decade.

 

[Neanderthal]

Korgan Bloodaxe was a very well made character, with a healthy hatred for the Elf and the efficacy of a good axe over book fondling or god bothering. Apart from him Sarevok had his moments, but I didn't think much of the rest of them, they were simply tools.

Now Dupre, Iolo, Shamino they were companions.

 

[Grunker]

The Baldur’s Gate crew felt like your friends, rivals, and even your conscience at times,

I wonder if he thought of them as such back then or that's how he feels after a decade.

Especially the conscience bit is weird