While this headline is true, I don’t think it’s the fundamental reason for the game’s success. Having characters that feel alive is awesome, and part of what elevates BG3 over D:OS 1 and 2 for me. But what makes it great is the amount of control you have over the narrative; how the game responds to your choices. There is nuance. There are permutations. It ain’t perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than any rpg Bethesda ever put out (fite me).
A lot of Bethesda content is quasi-procedural. TES and FO maps are littered dungeons/encampments that are pretty formulaic. Re-used passage & room artwork, generic antagonists, just little opportunities to engage in combat mechanics. And they respawn periodically, so you can go back and get your mechanics fix.
Everything in BG3 is scripted. There are no random encounters, wandering mobs, or replayable dungeons. Everything in the game is there intentionally, and everything in the game has been hand crafted.
Yeah, this is true. I think Bethesda games have just felt really empty and lifeless to me for a long time. I enjoyed Morrowind a lot. Oblivion I played for a while, but never finished the story. Don’t even remember if I ever finished Skyrim, which was obviously massively popular. Same with their Fallout games, it’s just been diminishing returns for me. Different strokes, and all that, obviously, they just don’t have that secret sauce I crave.
I think part of it is that your character doesn’t have any personality; you’re some total cipher of a Chosen One, which makes it difficult to form an emotional connection to them, and by extension to any of the NPC’s. Some of their NPC’s have well-written dialogue, but I sure don’t remember any of them.
Bethesda’s “good stories” have always been moreso the player’s stories of cobbled together mechanics as a a result of their playstyle/current abilities, gear, and motivation.
Most of the time it might be rote open world questing with some enjoyable grind loop, but there are a lot of particular memories I love, like robbing the Red Diamond jewelry store in Oblivion’s Imperial City, “casing” the place by day as a customer and purchasing a necklace, purely to experience the joy of breaking in at 3 AM and robbing it blind.
The joy and hilarity I felt when I came back the day after I’ll always remember. Entering the store to see the shopkeep, beaming at his new customer, all of his shelves and cases completely fucking empty, as he vacantly grinned at me, buck naked as id stolen the clothes right out of his sleeping pockets.
I’ve stolen a lot of shit in that game, but that one was good. It’s incredibly rare for me to remember Bethesda’s actual character moments that fondly, as they’ve always come off plastic and rehearsed in some combination of writing, voice acting, and rigid animation. Sometimes they almost reach a good story, like some popular side quest chains, or Paladin Danse’s personal quests.
So, I think these two games tell their best culminational “stories” in different fundamental ways, and I think it’s neat how each one’s best potential narrative, whether written or otherwise, is a marriage of the game’s possibilities and the player’s motivation and intent. But you’re probably right, BG3 can tell a lot more, better stories than my idiotic repetitive Bethesda adventures, but I do like some pulp.
Yeah, I think you’re right, and maybe my waning enjoyment of that style of rpg says as much about my lack of imagination as anything else. I’m just a sucker for a story I can get caught up in, with characters that I can somehow relate to, and I’ve nearly always felt let down by Bethesda games in that regard.
Bethesda’s "good stor
A lot of games do mocap on the face but what strikes me most about BG3 is how much body language the characters use. They aren’t an emotive head on a stiff body switching between obvious static poses. Dame Aylin isn’t just shouting at me she’s leaning into it, arms up, fists clenched and shaking. It really adds a lot to the character performances.
The other day Astarion jutted his chin up and out (very smugly) and his neck stretched and the Addams apple moved correctly. Games have come so far
Astarion’s mocap in particular is just excellent. He’s so deeply weird and it’s completely appropriate. I love how during most normal gameplay, his whole body is constantly on the edge between breaking into raucous laughter or total exasperation. Kudos to the actor(s) and techs that put the whole package together.
I knew having a Lucifer type character would be one of the more entertaining features of having a vampire as a party member before I even knew he was a vampire
I feel dumb not seeing that one coming.
Man, I felt like I was supposed to already know he was a vampire day 1. Aside from his give away physical features, he straight up sleeps like one.
I mean, it helps. But the fact that the choices (or mistakes) have actual real impacts on the game going forward are as big as far as I’m concerned. I ended up with my hand being forced into combat early that made an encounter with a potential party member immediately hostile. That sucks, especially since I wasn’t trying to do what happened in the earlier encounter. But in terms of a world feeling alive, having it actually react to what you do is pretty damn significant (unless “you’re small and irrelevant” is intentional).
It’s time developers come to grips with the fact that making choices matter is what makes it a successful game. I’m tired of storylines that don’t make any sense except to give you a world to kill people in. Sorry folks, lore is important and that takes writers.
Stop treating them like afterthoughts.
It definitely depends on the game, I’m perfectly happy with a game that has a story to tell, and tells it well. Not everything needs to have branching options and 50+ hour playtime. Some of the best stories I’ve played are short and railroady, WaW and BO1 campaing’s are fantastically interesting and you don’t make a single choice in them.
There’s plenty of great games that give you fuck all in terms of real choices that impact anything. What matters is that the gameplay supports the story, and vice versa. The problem is when developers treat one or the other as an afterthought. If you have a game where the story is an afterthought, it’s going to feel like the campaign of a fighting game, where everything is just cut scenes between the actual gameplay. If you write a story, but the gameplay isn’t really there, it feels like a Netflix special that you’re stuck playing to see the plot.
Remnant 2 is brilliant at this and bad at this at the same time! The in-world stories that are told along with the environments are absolutely STUNNING! Everything clicks together so well and a slightly different story is told when re-rolling the map!
Main story cutscenes tell the worst story I’ve ever seen executed. (Worse than Monster Hunter World’s Handler story stuff) I’m glad they’re skippable on another run. Because literally everything is is some of the most classic gaming experience one could have.
There was so much promise in their lore!! I liked N’Erud the best but the rest didn’t really lead anywhere other than that you visited, you did something notable, and then you left. Nothing really changed.
I would say if it is all about the gameplay, like Serious Sam or Doom, then the story doesn’t need to be that important and dexisions don’t need to matter. But if the story is front and center, like Baldur’s Gate and most similar RPGs, the story and how choices impact the story need to be well done so it doesn’t feel on rails and replaying it is enjoyable.
I personally am perfectly happy with a game that’s all about mechanics and gameplay.
But the extremely rare game that actually is well written is nice to see.
It gets super confusing when you do stuff in the wrong order though. Missing a clue because you didn’t read the right book or something but then randomly finding the end of the quest and everyone is talking like we know all about it.
Usually it recognizes it. Sometimes it doesn’t though. I’d hope those instances get patches eventually. Even worse though is when something triggers for something you didn’t even do. I’ve had a party member get angry at me for something that I did the opposite of. It’s a pretty solid game, but it’s not totally bug free, which is expected with so much complexity. Who knows, it could have just been a cosmic ray that flipped a bit and not even their fault (though I doubt it).
I don’t think the lack of choices is necessarily a bad thing. The original Doom had no story choices (it barely even had a story) and it’s still pretty good even by today’s standards. Half-Life 1 and 2 pretty much had no story choices as well (there was 1 at the end of the first game) and the first one in particular is considered revolutionizing how stories are presented in games.
What I do think is an issue is when the game presents you with a choice that doesn’t matter. Bioshock Infinite is the first that comes to mind as the game puts quite a few options front and center, but really none of them matter (except the very last one) and the game even implies that the choices deliberately don’t matter because “constants and variables”. Thus those choices, at least for me, detracted from the story because there was never no need to make me make a choice.
In that sense I agree that choices should matter, but I think a better wording is that if you’re going to have choices make them matter or don’t have choices in the first place.
You also miss out on Minthara? I’ve been hearing she’s great but I merced her ass
I doubt that they’re referring to Minthara; you have to make an intentional series of decisions to >!murder a bunch of people!< in order to get her in your party. It’s relatively easy to miss several origin companions if you’re not the type that explores the whole map. And one of the origin characters starts with >!a quest to kill one of the others!<.
Funny, it all feels very dead to me - but then I guess that is what the fireball spell does…
Would really be cool if the devs did a tech talk on some of the techniques they used. They’re definitely ahead of the industry in a lot of the areas.
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GDC is always exciting because it’s a big conference of devs, mostly AAA devs, telling the technical details of their algorithms and systems. It really helps the game industry as a whole.
I thought Lae’zel looked like that because she is a githyanki, but after seeing the actual actress I’m not so sure. Her nose looks unreal. They mocapped her way too well.
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I’m 20 hours in, and all I see is a massively buggy, broken shit-show. Vanishing npcs while talking, vanishing items, menus that stop coming up, interactions that stop functioning, npcs that go hostile for no reason and can’t be fixed with a reload, characters/quests that permanently break for no reason, team mates that drop-off the map ir into the scenery at the start of battle and they can’t get out ordered healed when something downs them. And so, so, so much more.
I really, really want to love this game. But I do not, and I regret wasting the $60, as well as my incredibly limited free time.
Weird, you’re in the VAST minority it seems. I am ~60 hours in and have only seen one bug while playing online on someone else’s game.
You should contact Larian support, it sounds like a problem unique to you.
Yea, maybe you’re just unlucky but I’ve been running it on my ancient mid-tier 2017 pc and it runs amazingly on high. No major bugs except with throwing weapons.
And yet I can’t help thinking that a lot of the extreme side character content could have been aided significantly by AI.
The main 80% of the voice acting is outstanding.
But particularly in Act 3 there’s something disconcerting about every other pedestrian you can talk to who spouts a quip using roughly the same voice with mediocre delivery.
It’s a perfect use case for the AI voice tech available today. The main parts and actual side characters should still have been bespoke acting and mocap, but the random pedestrian in the city might have been notably improved with using generated voices to broaden the variety.
BG3 has been very strong evidence to me that hybrid approaches integrating AI for filling in background content are going to be the standard by the end of the current console generation.
