Hey everyone, I just wanted to share some of the reservations I have about Larian taking over the project. A couple of my posts have been deleted so far... I hope Larian will recognize that criticism is important to advancing their art and that my words are worth keeping around, even if most people disagree with them (which seems to be the case). Anyway, here are the big concerns I have about Larian taking over the BG franchise:
Tonal Whiplash: Now granted, I only played the first Divinity: Original Sin, but I felt it really suffered from some storytelling blunders. The player is introduced via an ultimately pointless murder that immediately gets interrupted by a brief glimpse of some cosmic horror, interspersed with lul-random, wink-wink, genre-aware slapstick comedy. All these competing tones were woven together really inelegantly, and it really hindered my own engagement with the plot.
Baldur’s Gate as a series, by contrast, has an extremely consistent tone. It’s a story about loss, death, and destiny. Granted, the game is humorous, but its humor is largely incidental, where it works. There are moments of outright silliness, but they’re some of the weakest moments in the games. The real depth comes from the narrative, and the real comedy comes from the characterization: Edwin’s sarcastic, breathy asides, Minsc’s classically heroic overexuberance, Viconia’s complexities that contrast the values of her people with the starkly different culture of the surface.
Not a Spiritual Successor: I didn’t understand when critics described Larian’s games as “spiritual successors” to Baldur’s Gate. I only played the first Original Sin, but in my mind it didn’t match the gameplay, mood, storytelling, themes, or characterization at all. DOS places emphasis on puzzle-tactics that over-emphasize elemental interactions and incorporate a lot of conveniently-placed gunpowder barrels. Its mood is light-hearted and wacky. It features almost no deep characterization: companions are mere cyphers with no personality and NPCs are vague sketches that aren’t given much time or consideration. The Baldur’s Gate franchise, specifically SoA, featured historically deep characterization of a type that hadn’t yet been seen in video games… real, deep relationships with fleshed-out characters who would chime in to contradict and make demands of the player. Most were given their own quests, windows into rich backstories, lives that didn’t just revolve entirely around the Bhaalspawn… what exactly were those critics referring to when they described DOS as BG’s spiritual successor? They are both party-based CRPGs? That’s pretty shallow.
Full Voice-Over: The increase of voice-acting in games negatively impacted the depth of storytelling and narrative choice. Games like PS:T and BG2 were able to tell really rich stories and engage in deep, thorough dialogue and characterization precisely because they weren't expected to spend tons and tons of money on full voice-over. Quality of storytelling has declined since it became bog standard in RPGs. How is Larian planning to deal with this?
Real-Time-with-Pause vs. Turn-Based: The Baldur's Gate series is the definitive game franchise for real-time-with-pause combat. It's how the games were made to be- a real-time adaptation of turn-based D&D mechanics that a few clever people realized could be automated for a video game. I'm very concerned that Larian is at the helm because they are known for turn-based games. You can already observe a big rift forming in the game's prospective community around this issue... the old Infinity Engine system is hard for new players to grapple with, and games using it will never be as popular as a simple turn-based system, but for me, it's crucial to the identity of the series and the fast-paced excitement of the gameplay. For me, the fact that's it's even being debated is sacrilegious.
Too Much Freedom?: I am really concerned that Sven Winke keeps playing up the open-ended nature of Larian’s games in regard to BG3. He and Mike Mearls really seem on the same wavelength about the fun in D&D being derived from being able to say whatever you want to the DM and the DM adjusting to suit your decision. From the recent interviews, Sven really thinks meaningful choice in a video games means “if you see a chair you should be able to light it on fire and throw it at someone.” Sorry, but all the moveable cheese and baskets in the world can’t make Skyrim a successful story-driven RPG.
DOS offers a lot of choice, but it’s mostly superficial. It garnered a lot of praise for being open-ended, when really all the environmental interaction boiled down to obvious elemental combos and a tons of cartoonishly big gunpowder barrels placed all over the battlegrounds for no real reason.
BG2 gave you freedom in overcoming challenges in the sense that you had 300 spells at your disposal and a crazy number of magical items and consumables… you could die in a fight, reload, cast Clairvoyance to survey the surrounding rooms, find a better angle of approach, swap out some useless potions in your quick slots for the ones you need (plus that Wand of Summoning you’ve been saving for a situation like this) and then try again, READY AS FUCK. When you won after that, you felt great; you got that awesome satisfaction of knowing you found your own unique way of overcoming a challenge, playing with the full range of toys that the game gave you. Didn’t matter if you totally circumvented an encounter- the gratification came from knowing that you found a valid, easy way around it.
I never got the same feeling from a DOS encounter. It was always more like, oh, I’m dying, I should try again and use one more of those barrels, and put it in that big gaping hole where they want me to put it. I’m glad these barrels are all over the place!
Calling It Baldur's Gate "3": I'm already nervous about this game being a cynical, shameless cash grab banking on nostalgia, and the fact that they named this game Baldur's Gate 3 isn't reassuring. The story of Baldur's Gate is over… it ended formally with Throne of Bhaal. Granted, some of those souls were working on the Black Hound a few years later, but it never came to fruition, and who can say what it would have dealt with?
The pertinent question that no interviewers have asked is, in what sense is this going to be a third installment of the franchise? The off-chance that Boo or Viconia might show up is not enough to warrant giving the title that 3.
There have been other spinoff games set in the same universe – Dark Alliance, for example – that used subtitles to distinguish themselves from the actual series. This was because although they take place in the same geographic region, they don’t engage heavily with the narrative of BG1 and BG2. So why are they calling this game BG3 and not, oh, Baldur’s Gate: Attack of the Mind Flayers? (lol) Because they’re cashing in on the name.
Mind Flayers?: The illithid: a classic monster of D&D and a wonderfully frightening, strange, alien being. It is precisely that alien nature that makes them so frightening. In the abstract, you only ever need one mind flayer in D&D: a player character has only got one brain… and that brain being eaten is enough to kill that PC… and a session where one PC dies is still scary as hell!
An illithid’s ‘fear factor’ is derived from its alien nature… it is less and less scary the more commonplace it becomes… once you’re fighting a hundred illithid, they might as well be zombies or orcs… that should be obvious to anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of horror. The fact that the story beat they’re leading with for this game is “the whole city becomes mind flayers” really raises red flags for me.
I know this teaser isn’t the opening cinematic, but just as a point of contrast, BG1’s opener, which this trailer consciously imitated, immediately introduced us to a really daunting, compelling villain: Sarevok. His spiked armor, glowing yellow eyes, and orgiastic chuckle at the prospect of killing that fellow Bhaalspawn really sold him as a villain and got us all wondering, how the hell are we going to take that guy down?? It didn’t matter that he was basically a human; he was brought to life in that cinematic, and a mundane villain with good characterization will always be more impactful than a villain who’s defining characteristic is that he’s weird looking.
Summary: Basically, I’m really concerned about this project. I’m a huge, huge Baldur’s Gate fan, and a fan of all Infinity Engine games. But I’m really, really, worried about whatever this is coming down the pipeline, because Larian has not proved itself to be aware or competent with the design or storytelling principles of the original series. I need some assurance that Larian is serious about this project, and the legacy they have inherited.
TLDR: It’s very possible that the next Baldur’s Gate could be a lul-random, turn-based puzzle-fest where you drop chandeliers on hundreds of mind flayers. Be afraid.
