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Is Baldur's Gate 3 woke or parody of woke?
I am character creation screen - you can choose between body type 1,2,3,4 . After that you can choose between voice 1 and 2 , Your Identity can be Male / Female or Non Binary, then you can hide your clothes (at this point I decided that developers were actually trolling because nudity in D&D BG series was rare to nonexistent) and you can choose your genitals if the default doesn't suit you to Vulva A, Vulva B or Penis A-D ,
So you can make a decent futanari I guess.
Have you noticed that Man and Woman were nowhere to be mentioned and you can't choose your gender? That everything is deconstructed and presented in the most cold, indifferent, clinical way? I don't think that it shows welcoming or acceptance. More like indifference and very subtle contempt while not giving reasons for complaining - the video game equivalent of sliding benches that make impossible for homeless people to sleep on them.
I was thinking of putting this in the fun thread, but does anyone else think (wokeness aside) that Baldur's Gate 3...isn't that good?
I admit I'm a lifelong Dragon Age stan and will defend that franchise to the end (even for its many flaws), but I've played a huge number of 'classic' CRPGs (including both actual classics like Planescape and Arcanum and modern classic-style games like Pillars of Eternity, Shadowrun Returns, Tyranny and Wasteland 3) and enjoyed them all.
I really don't like the writing in Baldur's Gate 3. It feels like fanfiction written by fantasy nerds who have never actually read anything that wasn't genre fiction. The romances are really poor and designed to cater to tumblr horniness (yes, even by Bioware standards), characters shuttle between Marvel-humor and absurdly melodramatic 'deep' or 'sentimental' moments with nothing in between. Everything feels like an in-joke or reference. There's a sincerity there (unlike DOS2) , but it's an insincere sincerity, like the moment in a superhero movie before the final battle when everyone suddenly gets serious and someone mentions that their team is like a family.
I played Hogwarts Legacy earlier this year, and that really is a mediocre game (beautifully recreated castle aside) with very average writing and a dull main storyline. But one thing I really appreciate about it - at least now I've played Baldur's Gate 3 - is that it takes its world, ridiculous and weird and nonsensical and full of a billion plot holes though it is, seriously. People in Baldur's Gate 3 don't act the way humans (or humanoid races who are essentially humans on the inside) do in the situations that they're in.
The world feels very small, and very banal, and very modern, and choices are "moral dilemmas" as imagined by a DM who is very active on the D&D memes subreddit. Maybe this is what many players want, as it certainly provides the experience of tabletop Dungeons and Dragons when played with a dungeon master who collects funko pops and has the poster of every MCU movie in their bedroom, but it falls a little short of the best titles in the genre, which are written by people with wider tastes in fiction.
Playing Pentiment by Josh Sawyer/Obsidian, one gets the sense that this is a game written by a man with a genuine interest in the source material and with a broad literary taste. David Gaider, who wrote Dragon Age, stated that his primary influence in the script and tone was the 1968 movie The Lion of Winter, about Henry II's court in 1183, not high art but of which Roger Ebert said "One of the joys which movies provide too rarely is the opportunity to see a literate script handled intelligently. 'The Lion in Winter' triumphs at that difficult task; not since 'A Man for All Seasons' have we had such capable handling of a story about ideas. But 'The Lion in Winter' also functions at an emotional level, and is the better film, I think."
By contrast Baldur's Gate 3's writers appear YA-fictionbrained. The script lacks a trace of high culture or even midbrow influence. The lead writer was, like many writers in games, an ex-game journalist, one of modernity's more ignoble professions. The emphasis genuinely seems to be on recreating the average nerd DM's campaign in digital form, but the whole point of a professionally produced product is that actual writers should be able to do a better job than some software engineer who writes campaigns in his spare time, so this is little consolation.
I also find the gameplay disappointing. This is to some extent by default, since RtWP is a vastly superior mechanic for CRPGs than turn-based gameplay (because it allows one to fast-forward through trash encounters and to play at one's own pace). But even by the standards of good turn-based combat systems, Baldur's Gate 3 is poor. A big part of this is because of the direct translation of many 5e mechanics into a game, which is ridiculous since they were designed for abstraction to make tabletop play viable. The combat system has too many actions, too many redundant spells (ability systems in games where the DM can essentially decide what each use of each ability can do are completely different to rules-based video games) lifted directly from the source material. And too many abilities is a big problem, because the biggest difference between a CRPG and tabletop is that in a tabletop game, you play only one character. In a CPRG, you play 4-6, so the logic of combat complexity changes.
A second problem is the incessant on-screen dice rolls, which are ugly and immersion-breaking (the whole point of digital games, some would say, is that they can put this kind of thing behind-the-scenes). A third issue is that D&D itemization is fine for tabletop campaigns where you can carry a handful of items, your inventory is a box on a lined piece of paper and there are three combat encounters in a 4 hour session, but it works less well in a game where there are mountains of loot and players are used to more interesting itemization than +2 swords or things that provide a single-point increase in one stat. The game is also extremely easy, but that's a more common complaint.
There doesn't seem to me an inherent reason why games can't have good writing. After all, at least some mainstream movies have good dialogue and are written by well-read screenwriters, it's not impossible. I think it's something about expectations. Game designers, directors and fans are so used to only consuming genre/fantasy/scifi fiction that they don't even understand what's possible, what's out there.
I like the writing! The Marvel-humor can get pretty bad, but I'll assert that there actually is plenty of writing between that and the absurdly melodramatic moments (many of which are also pretty bad, yeah). The latter, though, I've basically come to expect from videogame writing in general. All characters need to have deep dark shocking secrets or else they're two-dimensional, or so writers seem to think nowadays. So in that they simply didn't depart from what was already the norm.
For one, the characters actually seem to grow, rather than just eternally playing stereotypes of themselves. Shadowheart is given genuine reasons for her beliefs, but also seems to be inching towards a realization that those beliefs are nevertheless wrong. Same with Lae'zell. Wyll is given a little sidequest where you convince him he was duped by his former masters into pursuing innocent people; its conclusion was very cool. I assume there's much more along those lines, but I've been focusing more on the NPCs whose writing I already knew would be far superior.
More important is the writing in between. Yes, your companion characters generally give either terrible side-quips (when prompted during your conversation with other characters) or immensely melodramatic personal details. But all the other characters are written much better. The tieflings in the druid's grove have an immediately compelling situation where they need help evacuating before the druids seal the grove. They ask, but don't beg, for help, and a lot of attention in-game is given to the fact that they're training children with swords. This is done explicitly not so that the children can fight off any marauding goblins during their evacuation, but so that their skills can hopefully buy time; just a second or two might make the difference between life or death. That's my jam. Rational people in interesting, emotionally stirring situations, doing what they can to improve their situation but still in need of aid. Another good example is a child you talk to at one point who proudly shows off her (IIRC) "magic", nothing more than a crude sleight of hand. While her display distracts you, though, you catch her friend attempting to pickpocket you. They're stealing to try and raise money for the group's evacuation. Just a great little scene IMO. There are plenty of others along those lines--just interesting windows into a world that feels somewhat real and not too scripted.
On romance -- I've been playing a dark and brooding edgelord. I keep getting close enough to each different companion to initiate the romance dialogue (well, I hate to call it that, because really it's just a heartfelt conversation at that point, but I guess in rainbow-land all close relationships are romantic), intentionally ask probing questions about my companions' lives, and then storm off as soon as they ask me anything about my own. Their shocked expressions always crack me up. I figured the actual romance would be poorly written, and also for other reasons didn't want to take things farther (I am highly uninterested in pretending to have a relationship with a videogame character), but up to that point the dialogue felt pretty well-written. Everyone talks about their dark and mysterious pasts, of course, but does so in a pretty cool way. For example, Astarion discusses being given the option of becoming a vampire brood in exchange for having his life saved, and says something along the lines of "I thought an eternity of servitude would be better than death. I didn't realize how long eternity could be." Yes, it's melodramatic, but I still liked it.
I certainly have plenty of complaints but overall have greatly enjoyed the story so far. And I usually hate videogame writing.
Writing isn't that good. Halfway to competent.
I mean, it suffers from being very modern minded.
How many families with 6 children can you count? Is it realistic that a warrior priest would go mad with grief after his wife's death?
Tieflings in old ADD games were nutty if good scoundrels, weird, as you'd expect from such parentage.
Tieflings in BG3 are written as if the entirety of the demonic heritage is biological, and whatever souls they have are entirely human. (I only got to chapter 2 so far).
I don't disagree with the thesis, but a man in grief from losing his wife and daughter taking foolish actions is not some modern affectation... Maybe I'd complain if he was a priest of some dark god, but Selune isn't presented that way.
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