Baldur's Gate Why do YOU hate Baldur's Gate 3?

[Saxon1974]

with the most generic atmosphere

Stop right there you criminal scum. The atmosphere is one of the best things the game had going for it, which was partially spoiled by Bioware themselves with all their "modern" jokes in the game.

You try hard faggots who think standard fantasy is bad because you've been brainwashed into thinking only grim dark is gud don't understand what made fantasy actually attractive in the first place, and why modern fantasy is such incredible shit.

Traditional fantasy was attractive because of the nostalgia people have for the world of tradition and myth. That is why everybody obsesses with medieval Europe, because even with the Renaissance we are already too close to modern times. Even with all their superficiality and attempts at humor Bioware managed to create an environment that felt actually lived, and if you want a more serious take, look at Icewind Dale (the portraits in particular, but also the tone and even the writing, which was better than a game meant to be about combat probably deserved to have), or Diablo. Modern fantasy games don't have any sense of awe and mystery to them, no call back to a more mythological age, no attempt to make the magic feel special even within the world itself. It's just constant in your face pew pew. Look at this shit it almost feels like something out of a mobile game:

F A N T A S Y amrite?

People say WoW is to blame for this but even WoW had a lot of atmosphere and sense of wonder, despite the shit art style that probably ruined a lot of fantasy games thereafter. Fantasy has become too common place, the more generic the more fantastical it is. Baldur's Gate 2 itself felt already excessive as they basically threw everything and then something in it, but that's common place now. Look this game, which starts off with Illithids right off the bat (meanwhile BG1 started you off Candlekeep lmao, but then Bioware was obviously following Fellowship of the Ring with BG1). Fantasy is no longer a nostalgic call back to a more mysterious age in European history, it's a commercial genre, with tropes and cliches that have nothing enduring about them. It's like with capeshit movies.

Agree with this. Modern fantasy has become so boring and generic. I would prefer a more sword and sorcery style, slaves, warlords, low magic etc...

If you look at Middle-Earth which was the biggest influence on modern fantasy IMO, it has very little magic and hardly any that is in your face. It's mostly hinted at, so when something magic happens it keeps being interesting and fantastical.

 

[Allwynd]

with the most generic atmosphere

Stop right there you criminal scum. The atmosphere is one of the best things the game had going for it, which was partially spoiled by Bioware themselves with all their "modern" jokes in the game.

You try hard faggots who think standard fantasy is bad because you've been brainwashed into thinking only grim dark is gud don't understand what made fantasy actually attractive in the first place, and why modern fantasy is such incredible shit.

Traditional fantasy was attractive because of the nostalgia people have for the world of tradition and myth. That is why everybody obsesses with medieval Europe, because even with the Renaissance we are already too close to modern times. Even with all their superficiality and attempts at humor Bioware managed to create an environment that felt actually lived, and if you want a more serious take, look at Icewind Dale (the portraits in particular, but also the tone and even the writing, which was better than a game meant to be about combat probably deserved to have), or Diablo. Modern fantasy games don't have any sense of awe and mystery to them, no call back to a more mythological age, no attempt to make the magic feel special even within the world itself. It's just constant in your face pew pew. Look at this shit it almost feels like something out of a mobile game:

F A N T A S Y amrite?

People say WoW is to blame for this but even WoW had a lot of atmosphere and sense of wonder, despite the shit art style that probably ruined a lot of fantasy games thereafter. Fantasy has become too common place, the more generic the more fantastical it is. Baldur's Gate 2 itself felt already excessive as they basically threw everything and then something in it, but that's common place now. Look this game, which starts off with Illithids right off the bat (meanwhile BG1 started you off Candlekeep lmao, but then Bioware was obviously following Fellowship of the Ring with BG1). Fantasy is no longer a nostalgic call back to a more mysterious age in European history, it's a commercial genre, with tropes and cliches that have nothing enduring about them. It's like with capeshit movies.

Agree with this. Modern fantasy has become so boring and generic. I would prefer a more sword and sorcery style, slaves, warlords, low magic etc...

If you look at Middle-Earth which was the biggest influence on modern fantasy IMO, it has very little magic and hardly any that is in your face. It's mostly hinted at, so when something magic happens it keeps being interesting and fantastical.

That's how I also feel about modern fantasy games, most evident in the genre of trash mobile games.

Everything has to be neon colored, especially evil factions. I think it started in WoW TBC with The Burning Legion have that glowing green goo as their theme, then in WoTLK, the Lich King had this blue glow on him and it became thematic for each faction. After that every fantasy game has taken this and multiplied it by 99999999999. Now it feels like being in some neon night club. I tried Baldur's Gate 3 today and it felt exactly like that in the starting area.

I liked older fantasy games that started you in regular or even dull places and as the story progresses, the settings become more grand, in a way it eases you in into the big boy stuff. It also has a sense of progression which I mostly enjoyed in Vanilla WoW with the appearance of gear - at first you look like some peasant, but as you reach like level 20, you start to get better looking gear, then at level 30 even better and so on and it just pleases you to loot something that's better than what you already have and see what it looks like, it adds that sense of progression when you look in retrospect you started with nothing and look at you now.

New fantasy RPGs just try to be super bombastic and epic from the start and I think they either exhaust it immediately or go into full overdose epicness mode later on. I wanted to play BG3 and like it for the close up cutscenes and the voice acting, but the art style and the actual game itself just fell flat on its ass. Probably in like 30-40 minutes I gave up and uninstalled it. Big joke, will never play it again, not that BG1 or BG2 were great, but I personally enjoyed BG1 the most and I hated BG2.

 

[KyivAfter12am]

with the most generic atmosphere

Stop right there you criminal scum. The atmosphere is one of the best things the game had going for it, which was partially spoiled by Bioware themselves with all their "modern" jokes in the game.

You try hard faggots who think standard fantasy is bad because you've been brainwashed into thinking only grim dark is gud don't understand what made fantasy actually attractive in the first place, and why modern fantasy is such incredible shit.

Traditional fantasy was attractive because of the nostalgia people have for the world of tradition and myth. That is why everybody obsesses with medieval Europe, because even with the Renaissance we are already too close to modern times. Even with all their superficiality and attempts at humor Bioware managed to create an environment that felt actually lived, and if you want a more serious take, look at Icewind Dale (the portraits in particular, but also the tone and even the writing, which was better than a game meant to be about combat probably deserved to have), or Diablo. Modern fantasy games don't have any sense of awe and mystery to them, no call back to a more mythological age, no attempt to make the magic feel special even within the world itself. It's just constant in your face pew pew. Look at this shit it almost feels like something out of a mobile game:

F A N T A S Y amrite?

People say WoW is to blame for this but even WoW had a lot of atmosphere and sense of wonder, despite the shit art style that probably ruined a lot of fantasy games thereafter. Fantasy has become too common place, the more generic the more fantastical it is. Baldur's Gate 2 itself felt already excessive as they basically threw everything and then something in it, but that's common place now. Look this game, which starts off with Illithids right off the bat (meanwhile BG1 started you off Candlekeep lmao, but then Bioware was obviously following Fellowship of the Ring with BG1). Fantasy is no longer a nostalgic call back to a more mysterious age in European history, it's a commercial genre, with tropes and cliches that have nothing enduring about them. It's like with capeshit movies.

Agree with this. Modern fantasy has become so boring and generic. I would prefer a more sword and sorcery style, slaves, warlords, low magic etc...

If you look at Middle-Earth which was the biggest influence on modern fantasy IMO, it has very little magic and hardly any that is in your face. It's mostly hinted at, so when something magic happens it keeps being interesting and fantastical.

Exactly. All this metaphysical stuff in Tolkien's work - the not-God, the not-Angels etc. - the common people of Middle Earth probably know nothing about it. This is what adds depth to the world building.

Kirkbride says something similar when he recalls working on Morrowind:

Because the world was just getting stranger and stranger, we wrote a whole bunch of stuff that definitely got refined over time, and went in different directions. After The Pocket Guide to the Empire, which was sort of the gazetteer of the world for Redguard, I just kept being obsessed with how the world began. We’ve got this pantheon of eight gods, and yet every single one of the cultures kind of recognizes them, and that doesn’t make sense at all — they’re all different races and whatnot. So what does that mean? And I’m like, “Let’s bring in some books on quantum mechanics, and it’ll totally make sense.”

So we all had kind of different agendas in the creation of the world that we knew would dovetail into Morrowind. And the true north of that was a quote: “Tell me the dog’s story.” I don’t know if Ken got that somewhere or not. But Kurt Kuhlmann, my boon companion — he’d made a board game about the Peloponnesian War, and whenever I would go crazy with something in the society, he would always bring it back to logistics: “If these guys are enslaving people, why? What does it do for them, financially? What does it do to borders?”

Ken said, “You know, you tell God’s story, and Kurt tells the farmer’s story or the soldier’s story. But I want to know the dog’s story.”

And I’m like, “Whaaaaat? That sounds wise.”

It doesn’t matter that we have all these mythic heroes and all this magic and this unlikelihood. How does the pet regard it when it’s getting scraps under the table? And it was a very great way to work. We’d slide between these — I wouldn’t call them specialties — but just what appealed to us. So, much like Kurt would take my stuff and interrogate the logistics of it, Ken would turn around and make it into a homily that they sing at the temple or whatever. And all of that just made it feel more real, so that when they really did start development, we just knew what the world was.

That helped a lot. I’ve never done something like that with a group of people since.

https://www.polygon.com/2019/3/27/18281082/elder-scrolls-morrowind-oral-history-bethesda

And I think the appeal of Morrowind's world is not just in the crazy metaphysics (lots of books and games do that), but also in how well it is integrated with the daily life of people. Normal people know very little of it, and have differing views on what they know.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Is that a mustached TG demon licky licking that dude's ear. His look of disgust almost hides his terror as he feels he-cubus's boner pressed against him. Seriously, that face looks like a mustache of sorts.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

I hate that nose.

 

[whydoibother]

I like Baldur's Gate 3.

 

[mondblut]

Hating things is fun.

Plus, zoomers watching cr*tical r*le seem to love it, so any decent person of taste would hate it.

 

[Gregz]

I like Baldur's Gate 3.

Please tell us why

 

[Erikkolai]

It looks unappealing to me. Generic high fantasy crap. Looks plastic and artificial in the "everything is flawless" kind of way. It lacks the grittiness of the original games.

The companions turn me off. Granted I said the same about the companions in PKM and ended up loving that game, though I doubt I'd be able to overcome these ones.

It was produced by the developers of the DOS games, all of which I've tried and discarded mostly because they've felt too childish, whimsical, and PG13. Never enjoyed a Larian game.

It was developed in the current year and is popular on Twitch.

The only noticable incline is that it scrapped custom portraits.

 

[bec de corbin]

It should really be called Ruins of Myth Drannor 2

 

[V_K]

Um, no. RoMD, for all its shortcomings, was a solid if slow dungeon crawl with full party creation and not a whiff of romances or cutscenes.

 

[Ol' Willy]

Isometric RPG with cutscenes

 

[undecaf]

I did not care much about the originals, so I'm not all that acquainted to hate this in the first place. Henceforth I'll be taking it just as another Larian RPG that makes a good effort at emulating a PnP, but falls short because some design decisions just don't add up (likely... I won't be playing this one until it's finished properly).

 

[whydoibother]

I like Baldur's Gate 3.

Please tell us why

Its a good implementation of D&D, and a well presented and mechanically deep video game. Even at this early stage, its fun to play and gives me that "just one more quest before I go to bed" feel.
I can't wait to play the full version, alone for a slow immersive roleplay session, and with a friend for wacky murderhobo shenanigans.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Remind me again in Ruins of Myth Drannor. Maybe they should have attempted Descent into Undermountain II

 

[Morgoth]

Don't hate it, but from what I'm seeing from the EA version, I'm not really burning to play it anytime soon, either. If ever. It just can't shake off that Larianesque wank.

I'm actually more curious about DA4. Sue me.

 

[Goose]

It's a low effort D:OS 2 mod made for the masses.

Larian dumbs down RPGs the same way WoW dumbed down MMOs. Anyone who supports it is a decline enabler.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Soooo... will you be having kids in this game and giving birth if female. Yeah, saw some Japanese game in this thread...

I wouldn't be surpried tbh... RPGS and having kids... jolly. What next taxes, 9-5 job, regulations, traffic, and ultra complicated politics??? I thought fantasy was to get away from the IRL grind.

 

[Shadenuat]

"Some"? Generational style mechanics is nothing uncommon for JRPGs, including wargames.

Western games, granted, have CK series but in general, are too prude to make anything interesting like that due to re-living victorian era I guess.

 

[Stormcrowfleet]

You

What do YOU think?

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

That Dude is stalking me. He looks hungry.

 

[Ramnozack]

I think it will be meh-to-ok at best and utter shit at worst. Regardless, nothing about this reminds me of Baldurs Gate, I fucking hate that they are doing this to this IP. Imagine if OwlCat had a few more years to establish themselves, maybe they would have got the offer to make BG3

 

[Ontopoly]

I hate it because it represents the passionless tendencies of the video game industry nowadays. Also, it's got nothing to do with baldurs gate. What a bunch of crooks

 

[Poseidon00]

I want to say I don't hate it, but I only put a couple of hours into it and I just haven't felt motivated to continue. I had never played a Divinity game so I had no feelings toward Larian. Now I feel like they're not terrible, just not good.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Gonna play Divine Divinity?