Baldur's Gate Baldur's Gate 3 RELEASE THREAD

[dukeofwoodberry]

Better game: BG3 or WotR?

 

[processdaemon]

Better game: BG3 or WotR?

I'm honeymoon phasing with BG3 but I think overall I prefer WotR. I don't really like 5e and also prefer RtwP so WotR wins big on combat, turn based feels too slow paced to me for the number of enemies in some of the fights in BG3 and it grates on me after a while (I appreciate that 5e would be difficult to adapt to RtwP in a fluid manner though). It's hard to choose one over the other for any reason other than that since for everything that one does right they do another wrong; the writing is uneven in both, immediate reactivity to class/ race and whether you've changed/ stolen things in surroundings is far better in BG3 but the decisions you make like Mythic path affect the whole story more in WotR, lategame encounter design is better in BG3 but WotR has better endings/ includes epilogues, etc. I did really enjoy both games though, my WotR preference is probably more because of my subjective tastes than objective quality and if someone loves 5e and turn based they'd probably come to the opposite conclusion.

 

[Fedora Master]

Better game: BG3 or WotR?

They are both woke and have bad design decisions out the ass.

 

[volklore]

WoTR for me and by far. I gotta say though cinematic dialog with mute protag is nice and BG3 graphix and audio are fucking good (It really like when battle music transition to a more epik upbeat one when you have a big power round, I wish more games did that). It's really too bad it comes at such a big cost.
BG3 combat is also much more polished but less interesting that WoTR for obvious reasons. I think BG3 act1 is stellar, but WoTR also has some pretty good maps.

 

[dukeofwoodberry]

Better game: BG3 or WotR?

I'm honeymoon phasing with BG3 but I think overall I prefer WotR. I don't really like 5e and also prefer RtwP so WotR wins big on combat, turn based feels too slow paced to me for the number of enemies in some of the fights in BG3 and it grates on me after a while (I appreciate that 5e would be difficult to adapt to RtwP in a fluid manner though). It's hard to choose one over the other for any reason other than that since for everything that one does right they do another wrong; the writing is uneven in both, immediate reactivity to class/ race and whether you've changed/ stolen things in surroundings is far better in BG3 but the decisions you make like Mythic path affect the whole story more in WotR, lategame encounter design is better in BG3 but WotR has better endings/ includes epilogues, etc. I did really enjoy both games though, my WotR preference is probably more because of my subjective tastes than objective quality and if someone loves 5e and turn based they'd probably come to the opposite conclusion.

I found late game encounter design sucky in BG3. The tactical combat felt boring and I was just steam rolling everything. I really enjoyed the early game combat where you had to have a strategy and think about what you wanted to do with limited resources but by act 3 all that is thrown out the window because the game is super easy.

Also the game desperately needs some punishment/balancing for spamming long rests.

 

[whydoibother]

Better game: BG3 or WotR?

I like 5E more than Pathfinder, and I like the more character driven Bioware model more than the more combat oriented Pathfinder model.
Also the gimmicks in the Pathfinder games (city management, crusade) always seem to flop for me, and be an annoyance.

So BG > WotR > Deadfire.
And I'd even put Solasta ahead of WotR, even if its story and visual presentation is very poor. I just prefer the rules, verticality, etc.

 

[dukeofwoodberry]

Better game: BG3 or WotR?

I like 5E more than Pathfinder, and I like the more character driven Bioware model more than the more combat oriented Pathfinder model.
Also the gimmicks in the Pathfinder games (city management, crusade) always seem to flop for me, and be an annoyance.

The party members are mostly trash in BG3 tho. It's a huge flaw of the game especially because they are going for that Bioware model with a huge emphasis on party members. But their writing for party members sucked

 

[Infinitron]

 

[dukeofwoodberry]

No thanks.

That video actually highlights one of the problems with the BG3 companions. "The greatest wizard in the world," "the most interesting girl in the world," "the magic negro who is the greatest hero in the world but made a pact with a demon and his dad is the Duke btw." These back stories are over the top and childish. Sounds like something a 13 year old would come up with.

I prefer more grounded backstories.

 

[Infinitron]

Another one of these roundtables at Rock Paper Shotgun, this time featuring Matt Barton and felipepepe(!): https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/rp...ve-baldurs-gate-3-and-the-future-of-the-genre

RPG experts on why we love Baldur's Gate 3, and the future of the genre​

"Fidelity is a death cult," says Mark Darrah



Often when we talk about "hype" surrounding a release, it’s in anticipation of shared cultural euphoria more than that of a great gaming experience. Either way, a great RPG game hits different. Recently, Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate 3 have both been landmarks. Not to mention the enduring sweep of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and the Minesweeper-esque ubiquity of Skyrim. When studios get the RPG right, the end result inspires excitement and devotion in ways that feel utterly unique to the genre.

To this end I chatted to Dragon Age, Baldur’s Gate, and Mass Effect maestro Mark Darrah, some of the folks at Studio ZA/UM, and the minds behind the two definitive tomes on CRPG history: Matt Barton of Dungeons And Desktops, and Felipe Pepe of The CRPG Book. I wanted to ask these genere experts about all things choice and consequence, player freedom, and Baldur’s Gate 3’s phenomenal success. What turns a niche into a phenomenon? What goes into creating a great RPG? And what makes the genre so special to people? Turns out that last one is a big question to ask.

“The beauty of a great CRPG is that it’s the closest a computer-mediated experience gets to making you feel like you’re engaging with another consciousness on the other side of your computer screen,” says Justin Keenan, writer and narrative designer at ZA/UM, and a big part of why Disco Elysium’s writing is so singular. “It’s that magical power at the player’s fingertips that allows them to approach a story from so many different angles with so many different pairs of eyes the RPG elements provide,” adds Kaspar Tamsalu, ZA/UM’s lead artist.

Pepe, who recently put out the expanded edition of his gorgeous non-profit tome with Bitmap Books, tells a story of playing the very first Baldur’s Gate with his brother years ago. A certain quest lets you craft armour from human skin, but only wear it if you roll an evil alligned character. “I could do the quest, but I couldn’t wear it, and that made me almost drop my save and start a new one,” he says. He recently learned how BG3 lets druids in cat form hop through cell doors, while I just found out I can have Karlach yeet my gnomes up ledges they can’t reach. “See, even between us, talking about the things we’re finding. You don’t get that in any other genre,” he points out.

“I often compare it to how good tomatoes taste when you grow them in your own garden vs. buying some at the grocery store,” says Barton. “Sure, your tomatoes may be lumpy and have little spots on them, but by God, it's your tomato, and you were there with them the whole time, watering, feeding, pruning, defending them from rabbits, whatever it takes.”

“It’s kind of weird this is a genre,” says Darrah. “You’ve got a Dragon Age, which is all about characters. A Zelda, which is all about exploration. You’ve got a Skyrim, more about my own personal identity, building the character I want to play. Trying to draw a thread between all these games, I think it’s maybe about people. About how each RPG is approaching what ‘people’ means.”



That's quite a task. For good or ill, there’s been a fair amount of discussion about the material aspects and feasibility of producing huge RPGs in recent months. No matter how reactive or personal-feeling an RPG is, they all rely on some level of illusion to maintain that feeling. Creating and sustaining that illusion, says Keenan, is “monumentally difficult. You have to create a lot of material and assets that any given player probably won’t see. What gives the genre that little frisson of magic is the illusion that there’s infinite possibility, where in fact there’s merely an abundance of carefully scripted and designed possibilities.”

“Something like a BG3 is definitely very cleverly doing a lot of tricks,” says Darrah. An RPG, he says, no matter how reactive it might seem, isn’t able to fly by the seat of its pants, not least because it doesn’t have any. “Maybe this is something that only someone like me can actually see, but they’re not always reacting to what you’re doing, but they’re giving you freedom,” he explains. “Now, often, the things they’re doing are relatively shallow. If a player can’t tell, who cares, to a large degree. There’s truth to that. Certainly, one of the places that freedom comes from is just masses of content. That’s just the nature of the beast.”

Darrah describes part of this magic as an approach to design sometimes called campfires in the dark, via a Failbetter Games design philosophy, where the fires are explicit parts of a games story and the player is navigating darkness between them. The story in BG3, says Darrah, is mostly reacting to where you are, not how you got there; “This is how you can see Matt Mercer piling up a bunch of boxes and teleporting. And the game doesn’t literally crap its pants as a result.” But this kind of design does come with drawbacks. “You can’t weave things together as tightly,” Darrah says, “but it’s so much more robust of a philosophy. It allows for more actions to be taken because the design holds together. That’s how things in BG1 are done for the most part.”


Being turned into a cheese in Baldur's Gate 3 | Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Larian Studios

“Fidelity,” continues Darrah, “is a death cult. Allowing the individual pieces of the narrative to be self contained is just more open ended, more robust. Because if I tie the narrative together really tightly, then I need you to go through all the pieces along the way. I need to railroad you through the story, because that’s all the story understands.” Like a DM that’s a bit too in love with their own planning, then? “Arguably, that’s what most modern RPGs are… a bit too in love with their own story.”

For Pepe, BG3’s presentation is what’s allowed it to catch on in such a huge way. “We were playing and loving Pathfinder: Wrath Of The Righteous. It’s a similar ruleset. In terms of reactivity and crazy things that can happen, they’re basically the same game,” he says. “The difference is that presentation. It combines the complexity from traditional CRPGs with the presentation of a Witcher 3 or Dragon Age. It wouldn’t work if it was isometric. We have very well written isometric games, but they don’t land the same way.”

“In the years we’ve been discussing RPGs, there was always an example: you take a very traditional roguelike and compare it to Mass Effect, you have freedom, but you basically don’t have graphics,” Pepe continues, “and I think it was a BioWare developer who said the graphical fidelity in those games prevented, say, a grapple maneuver. But then you see Larian pulling this off. You can literally grab a man and hit an enemy with it, and you have animations for it! It’s just something we didn’t think was viable. So it really feels like you’re combining lineages, and bringing together the two audiences.”

As a huge fan of the originals, it’s been easy to get tunnel vision - of course BG3 was going to be a huge hit, BG2 is an all-time classic. But Darrah brings up something easy to overlook from a nostalgia bubble. “It's a real testament to what Larian believes in that they would even try and get the rights to a sequel from a game from 2001 in 2023,” he says, “because they’re not really getting much lift, in name recognition, from Baldur’s Gate. I think Larian was expecting modest success. Instead they got a massive break out. That’s not from the title. It might be because it’s DnD, but it’s not because it’s called Baldur’s Gate 3.” Barton agrees with this, saying, “I think the great Dungeons & Dragons movie that came out recently did more to get people excited for BG3 than the old games did.”



No matter their takes on why BG3 - and RPGs in general - are experiencing such a boom, everyone I spoke to feels optimistic about the future of the genre. “Larian has shown definitively that there's a huge demand for really deep, crunchy CRPGs, anything is possible,” says Barton. “It seems like we’re always hearing that CRPGs are a niche market with a relatively low ceiling in terms of how many players they can reach,” says Keenan, “then something comes along – whether it’s Disco or Baldur’s Gate 3 or something else – that absolutely blows a hole through that ceiling.”

Darrah says that, if the games industry learns anything from Baldur's Gate 3, he hopes it’s that “perfecting visuals is kind of a death cult.” BG3, he says, has a lot of the sort pops and hitches that would be filed by a QA team and fixed in most AAA narrative games. “And, honestly, probably better spending your money somewhere else.” Rather, he says, Baldur’s Gate 3 represents something close to a triple A budget being spent in an AA way. It’s a formula that rings true for last year’s Elden Ring, too. “Games like Zelda, like GTA, ultimately end up being not very influential on the marketplace because they’re not really things that can be replicated. But when you look at something like Elden Ring, or BG3, there are lessons to be taken there. Having scrappier people competing in this space is good for the space… You get a lot of AA for AAA prices.”

 

[Dishonoredbr]

Better game: BG3 or WotR?

I preffer WotR because of the character building aspect. I playing a Aeon but i already planning my Lich run using Winter Witch..

 

[Dishonoredbr]

Another one of these roundtables at Rock Paper Shotgun, this time featuring Matt Barton and felipepepe(!): https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/rp...ve-baldurs-gate-3-and-the-future-of-the-genre

RPG experts on why we love Baldur's Gate 3, and the future of the genre​

"Fidelity is a death cult," says Mark Darrah



Often when we talk about "hype" surrounding a release, it’s in anticipation of shared cultural euphoria more than that of a great gaming experience. Either way, a great RPG game hits different. Recently, Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate 3 have both been landmarks. Not to mention the enduring sweep of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and the Minesweeper-esque ubiquity of Skyrim. When studios get the RPG right, the end result inspires excitement and devotion in ways that feel utterly unique to the genre.

To this end I chatted to Dragon Age, Baldur’s Gate, and Mass Effect maestro Mark Darrah, some of the folks at Studio ZA/UM, and the minds behind the two definitive tomes on CRPG history: Matt Barton of Dungeons And Desktops, and Felipe Pepe of The CRPG Book. I wanted to ask these genere experts about all things choice and consequence, player freedom, and Baldur’s Gate 3’s phenomenal success. What turns a niche into a phenomenon? What goes into creating a great RPG? And what makes the genre so special to people? Turns out that last one is a big question to ask.

“The beauty of a great CRPG is that it’s the closest a computer-mediated experience gets to making you feel like you’re engaging with another consciousness on the other side of your computer screen,” says Justin Keenan, writer and narrative designer at ZA/UM, and a big part of why Disco Elysium’s writing is so singular. “It’s that magical power at the player’s fingertips that allows them to approach a story from so many different angles with so many different pairs of eyes the RPG elements provide,” adds Kaspar Tamsalu, ZA/UM’s lead artist.

Pepe, who recently put out the expanded edition of his gorgeous non-profit tome with Bitmap Books, tells a story of playing the very first Baldur’s Gate with his brother years ago. A certain quest lets you craft armour from human skin, but only wear it if you roll an evil alligned character. “I could do the quest, but I couldn’t wear it, and that made me almost drop my save and start a new one,” he says. He recently learned how BG3 lets druids in cat form hop through cell doors, while I just found out I can have Karlach yeet my gnomes up ledges they can’t reach. “See, even between us, talking about the things we’re finding. You don’t get that in any other genre,” he points out.

“I often compare it to how good tomatoes taste when you grow them in your own garden vs. buying some at the grocery store,” says Barton. “Sure, your tomatoes may be lumpy and have little spots on them, but by God, it's your tomato, and you were there with them the whole time, watering, feeding, pruning, defending them from rabbits, whatever it takes.”

“It’s kind of weird this is a genre,” says Darrah. “You’ve got a Dragon Age, which is all about characters. A Zelda, which is all about exploration. You’ve got a Skyrim, more about my own personal identity, building the character I want to play. Trying to draw a thread between all these games, I think it’s maybe about people. About how each RPG is approaching what ‘people’ means.”



That's quite a task. For good or ill, there’s been a fair amount of discussion about the material aspects and feasibility of producing huge RPGs in recent months. No matter how reactive or personal-feeling an RPG is, they all rely on some level of illusion to maintain that feeling. Creating and sustaining that illusion, says Keenan, is “monumentally difficult. You have to create a lot of material and assets that any given player probably won’t see. What gives the genre that little frisson of magic is the illusion that there’s infinite possibility, where in fact there’s merely an abundance of carefully scripted and designed possibilities.”

“Something like a BG3 is definitely very cleverly doing a lot of tricks,” says Darrah. An RPG, he says, no matter how reactive it might seem, isn’t able to fly by the seat of its pants, not least because it doesn’t have any. “Maybe this is something that only someone like me can actually see, but they’re not always reacting to what you’re doing, but they’re giving you freedom,” he explains. “Now, often, the things they’re doing are relatively shallow. If a player can’t tell, who cares, to a large degree. There’s truth to that. Certainly, one of the places that freedom comes from is just masses of content. That’s just the nature of the beast.”

Darrah describes part of this magic as an approach to design sometimes called campfires in the dark, via a Failbetter Games design philosophy, where the fires are explicit parts of a games story and the player is navigating darkness between them. The story in BG3, says Darrah, is mostly reacting to where you are, not how you got there; “This is how you can see Matt Mercer piling up a bunch of boxes and teleporting. And the game doesn’t literally crap its pants as a result.” But this kind of design does come with drawbacks. “You can’t weave things together as tightly,” Darrah says, “but it’s so much more robust of a philosophy. It allows for more actions to be taken because the design holds together. That’s how things in BG1 are done for the most part.”


Being turned into a cheese in Baldur's Gate 3 | Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Larian Studios

“Fidelity,” continues Darrah, “is a death cult. Allowing the individual pieces of the narrative to be self contained is just more open ended, more robust. Because if I tie the narrative together really tightly, then I need you to go through all the pieces along the way. I need to railroad you through the story, because that’s all the story understands.” Like a DM that’s a bit too in love with their own planning, then? “Arguably, that’s what most modern RPGs are… a bit too in love with their own story.”

For Pepe, BG3’s presentation is what’s allowed it to catch on in such a huge way. “We were playing and loving Pathfinder: Wrath Of The Righteous. It’s a similar ruleset. In terms of reactivity and crazy things that can happen, they’re basically the same game,” he says. “The difference is that presentation. It combines the complexity from traditional CRPGs with the presentation of a Witcher 3 or Dragon Age. It wouldn’t work if it was isometric. We have very well written isometric games, but they don’t land the same way.”

“In the years we’ve been discussing RPGs, there was always an example: you take a very traditional roguelike and compare it to Mass Effect, you have freedom, but you basically don’t have graphics,” Pepe continues, “and I think it was a BioWare developer who said the graphical fidelity in those games prevented, say, a grapple maneuver. But then you see Larian pulling this off. You can literally grab a man and hit an enemy with it, and you have animations for it! It’s just something we didn’t think was viable. So it really feels like you’re combining lineages, and bringing together the two audiences.”

As a huge fan of the originals, it’s been easy to get tunnel vision - of course BG3 was going to be a huge hit, BG2 is an all-time classic. But Darrah brings up something easy to overlook from a nostalgia bubble. “It's a real testament to what Larian believes in that they would even try and get the rights to a sequel from a game from 2001 in 2023,” he says, “because they’re not really getting much lift, in name recognition, from Baldur’s Gate. I think Larian was expecting modest success. Instead they got a massive break out. That’s not from the title. It might be because it’s DnD, but it’s not because it’s called Baldur’s Gate 3.” Barton agrees with this, saying, “I think the great Dungeons & Dragons movie that came out recently did more to get people excited for BG3 than the old games did.”



No matter their takes on why BG3 - and RPGs in general - are experiencing such a boom, everyone I spoke to feels optimistic about the future of the genre. “Larian has shown definitively that there's a huge demand for really deep, crunchy CRPGs, anything is possible,” says Barton. “It seems like we’re always hearing that CRPGs are a niche market with a relatively low ceiling in terms of how many players they can reach,” says Keenan, “then something comes along – whether it’s Disco or Baldur’s Gate 3 or something else – that absolutely blows a hole through that ceiling.”

Darrah says that, if the games industry learns anything from Baldur's Gate 3, he hopes it’s that “perfecting visuals is kind of a death cult.” BG3, he says, has a lot of the sort pops and hitches that would be filed by a QA team and fixed in most AAA narrative games. “And, honestly, probably better spending your money somewhere else.” Rather, he says, Baldur’s Gate 3 represents something close to a triple A budget being spent in an AA way. It’s a formula that rings true for last year’s Elden Ring, too. “Games like Zelda, like GTA, ultimately end up being not very influential on the marketplace because they’re not really things that can be replicated. But when you look at something like Elden Ring, or BG3, there are lessons to be taken there. Having scrappier people competing in this space is good for the space… You get a lot of AA for AAA prices.”

Every time i see one of these articles mentioning Skyrim as huge achievement in the RPG genre , i just feel like i taking crazy pills.

 

[Infinitron]

Cool stuff:



https://www.pcgamer.com/just-in-cas...ck-up-npcsand-even-back-ups-for-its-back-ups/

Just in case you murder everyone, Baldur's Gate 3 has back-up NPCs—and even back-ups for its back-ups​

The tiefling refugees will always find a new leader, no matter how stab-happy you are.

Baldur's Gate 3 is a game of almost unparalleled freedom, and we all know what that really means: the freedom to murder any NPC you can get your hands on. Usually, the danger of any RPG murder spree is that you might kill someone who's vital to a later main quest event, and end up locked out of progressing. But it turns out Larian's accounted for that by giving certain NPCs back-ups to replace them if they perish—and even back-ups for the back-ups.

YouTuber Proxy Gate Tactician has taken a deep (and bloodthirsty) dive into the possibilities around the Tieflings at the grove, and discovered some fascinating interactions. Mild Act 1 spoilers ahead.

Normally, if you choose to kill the goblin leaders, Zevlor, the leader of the tiefling refugees, will invite you to a celebratory party. If you kill him before then, however, you still get the invite—another tiefling called Asharak will step in as the new leader, and take on Zevlor's role.

So what if you kill Asharak too? As it turns out, there's a third-in-line—Carys, a character you normally don't meet until later in the story, will step in. And because she otherwise doesn't appear at the Grove, there's no way to kill her before this moment, so she's the ultimate failsafe.

But it goes even further than that—because the party is attended by tieflings you can meet in the Grove, it's possible to kill the entire guest list ahead of the event too. But even that won't stop the festivities, as all the guests are replaced by new characters you can't otherwise meet, one of whom even has a unique interaction (drunkenly inviting you to dance).

Though Proxy Gate Tactician goes on to discover that messing with the game in this way can lead to inconsistent dialogue down the line (Carys doesn't recognise you when you meet again, and she thinks Zevlor's still alive), it's pretty amazing that this many layers of failsafe exist in the game, especially all with unique dialogue and fully voice-acted and animated. It's this sort of stuff that makes me think we'll still be uncovering unexpected interactions and secrets in Baldur's Gate 3 for years to come.

 

[Alienman]

So the backups are just characters that magically appear.

 

[whydoibother]

So the backups are just characters that magically appear.

As a last resort, yes. But before that, there are actual existing characters getting repurposed.
Sure beats the situation we have in many RPGs, where the game bricks your safe and you can't complete quests if a certain NPC dies too early.

 

[Alienman]

So the backups are just characters that magically appear.

As a last resort, yes. But before that, there are actual existing characters getting repurposed.
Sure beats the situation we have in many RPGs, where the game bricks your safe and you can't complete quests if a certain NPC dies too early.

Sure. But it would be cool if it meant something instead of just making sure you end up in the same place regardless of what road you take.

 

[whydoibother]

So the backups are just characters that magically appear.

As a last resort, yes. But before that, there are actual existing characters getting repurposed.
Sure beats the situation we have in many RPGs, where the game bricks your safe and you can't complete quests if a certain NPC dies too early.

Sure. But it would be cool if it meant something instead of just making sure you end up in the same place regardless of what road you take.

It does mean something, in the cases that are scripted to do so. If you kill Gale at the portal, you don't get Elminster showing up later.
The failsafes are specifically for cases that are NOT scripted to change based on your action, yet your action may prevent the usual execution, so there's a few backups.
If you want everything to be reactive, always, then.... well, even in tabletop not everything is reactive and the DM has some idea of where he wants things to move, so you are just shit out of luck. Maybe try roleplaying in ChatGPT, in text form. Closest thing to complete reactivity.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

My suspicion that this is a successor to bioware's legacy of massively commercially and critically succesful RPGs that are actually kinda shit feels wholly justified, if not entirely confirmed just yet.

In fairness, BG3 actually has vastly superior gameplay compared to the first two Baldur's Gate games, it's just that the non-gameplay aspects owe much to the decline wrought by Bioware.

 

[NwNgger]

Would the people enjoying BG3 have found the graphic bestialty, animal torture, weird sexual jokes and strange gay sex acceptable if this game came out in say 2005? Would those people have written long diatribes online justifying the above content, downplaying it as "not a big part of the game." "It's a joke" like they're Vaush? And most importantly would other people upon seeing people justify all that have found those justifications acceptable too?

No they wouldn't have. They would have thought you were a weirdo and sex pest.

 

[whydoibother]

Wyll getting the robe without killing Karlach,

Robe?

Infernal Robe if you recruit Wyll and kill Karlach, reward from his patron demon on the long rest after the kill. Though he is regretful of it.
In Act II he can get Infernal Rapier for fulfilling another request from his patron, no spoilers.
Both are very good items, and though the cost for the first is a companion dying, the second is something you'd probably do anyways. The only cost is to bring Wyll along so he can bargain for it.

 

[whydoibother]

Would the people enjoying BG3 have found the graphic bestialty, animal torture, weird sexual jokes and strange gay sex acceptable if this game came out in say 2005?

Yes, because they would be immediately recognized as jokes, and not taken seriously like by le current day kulturkampf sickened brains. Also, "graphic beastiality" just shows me you haven't played the game, and are getting mad at someone posting about it on Twitter or whatever.

 

[Tyranicon]

The only cost is to bring Wyll along so he can bargain for it.

The price is too high.

 

[Raghar]

BTW act 2 plot is kinda mentally disabled. Astarion could simply show that person his back instead of killing him, and he would likely get answers as well.
And when characters found truth about swarm of rats... They could simply told that to that demon... He would kill rats, and be done with. In fact he might simply resurrect last justicar just to piss of Rafael. That would make A LOT OF SENSE.

Instead you end murdering his favorite displacer beast... C'mon.

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

A bit meh, but compared to Bethesda's plot armor, I can see why people are impressed. At least they all have unique identities.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

BG 1 had "Biff the Understudy," friend of mine triggered him once.

https://baldursgate.fandom.com/wiki/Biff_the_Understudy