Comment on A Baldur's Gate 2 remake is apparently in development, with the original co-lead designer returning
Coelacanth@feddit.nu 1 week agoIs the game actually that branching? It always felt pretty linear to me, although granted I only played it once myself and watched Welonz and Mapocolops Let’s Plays of it. Like sure, you can have some player agency on a micro level in the moment-to-moment stuff, but the story is the story. It’s not like Witcher 2.
Or did you just mean Raphael? I guess the player might have some agency on how much to engage with him.
yakko@feddit.uk 1 week ago
bg3.wiki/wiki/Endings is a pretty long page. Witcher 2 has, what is it 16 endings? There’s at least that many here, but I’ll grant that not a lot of the possible endings feel meaningfully unique, just stylistic preferences. That might be the real shortcoming, the fact that when your enemy is “absolute mind control monster”, there are only so many ways to win that are meaningfully different.
Coelacanth@feddit.nu 1 week ago
Well, what I am talking about when I’m talking about branching narratives is not really endings. There are tons of games with tons of different endings, especially these types of combinatorial endings where they’re cut together out of various parts that answer individual side quests and whatnot. Many games can technically have hundreds of “different” endings, but they’re not branching narratives.
I always use Witcher 2 because it is a very rare example of a truly branching storyline. Siding with Roche or siding with Iorveth means getting two completely different experiences. I didn’t really see that in BG3. Imagine if you could join up with the Absolute in Act 2, not kill Ketheric and have a completely different Act 3 where you’re buddies with the trio? That would be a branching story.
As far as I can tell in BG3 the main story beats just kind of have to happen, and you might get some flavour one way or the other or some fake choices but the story is the story.
yakko@feddit.uk 1 week ago
Thanks for clarifying, got it. Yeah BG3 isn’t branched, at all. That kind of game script is a lot rarer, for obvious reasons. It’s a shame, those kinds of choices always end up feeling more substantial than whose company you keep, how you kill people, or who you have sex with.
Coelacanth@feddit.nu 1 week ago
Yes, agreed. It’s perfectly understandable why we’re not really getting games like Witcher 2 or to a certain extent Dragon Age: Origins with any kind of regularity. Any executive signing off on the budget for a truly branching storyline game would need to be absolutely unhinged. I hope some of the now-larger independent studios might give us something like that in the future, but otherwise it seems to be relegated to the genre of cinematic choices-matter games like Until Dawn and what have you.