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).
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.
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.
Funny, it all feels very dead to me - but then I guess that is what the fireball spell does…
I mean, it definitely helps. The production quality is insane. 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.
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 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.
If you’re talking about the TikTok video of her reading Twitter comments, it’s a filter that’s pinching her nose. She doesn’t actually look like that.
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 or into the scenery at the start of battle and they can’t get out or get 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.
I’m sorry that you’ve had this experience. I’ve been playing since the start of early access on a low-end PC, and never had any of those issues.
