"a denial, a denial, a denial, a denial, a denial, a denial, a denial, a denial, a denial"
Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit
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(some BG3 spoilers included)
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The voice is struck dumb. The invader, the deceiver, the manipulator, the spy, the liar, the presumptuous filth claiming beneficence while trampling the boundaries of self has retreated to take its place by its erstwhile master. I only regret that I shall have to end its miserable well-deserved punishment of a life in absolute slavery. In its place, we have birthed an arguably greater monstrosity from the chained heir. This one at least claims it will submit in turn after our enemy's fall. Should it forget this request, I shall forcibly remind it. Now, only the last battle remains.
Behind me stretch scattered aftershocks of an ambling and oft discordant adventure: great foes felled, lairs laid waste whether in forest, fortress, temple or beneath the waves. Yet now I find my mind turning to the multitudes passed by in every town, to the captives and predators, to the aides and collaborators, and no less to my own companions and allies. Were any among them worthy of respect? Or even of attention?
Child of darkness, did not (by your own admission) your own sins in service to Shar bind you to your sordid little cult far more securely than your convenient change of heart? I let you make your own choice beneath the Shadowlands, and it was yours and no more than that. And your life's course for years before was yours and no more than that.
Should I in turn see any value in a pompous pigeon but the heritage she herself struts and boasts at every turn? Be your immortal blood your sole quality, aasimar, let it serve loftier ambitions than baring your flesh beneath the diluting light of the moon's dull gaze.
I'd held hope for the gith when she spurned her corpse-goddess, only to hear her reiterate her worship of a new overlord. Does your knee even un-bend, planeswalker, or does it merely pivot?
I tore down down the mummified master of a horde of rotting abominations hungry for the flesh of innocents. What use, then, to leave the horde in place?
A singing devil. Now I've seen everything.
Should I have spared the musclebrained Rashemi lummox? One does not bring a butter-knife to a battle of razor wits.
Child after child toddles across my path, each with a new complaint more tedious than the last. Am I shirking my druidic caretaker duties on this campaign merely that I might play nursemaid to domesticated monkeys? Has the overworld no labor to which nimble little hands may attend, if only to keep nimble little feet out from under my foot?
Rabble, babble and rotted brains. I have zombies a-plenty without imitators to clutter the ranks.
When this is over, I walk on alone.
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Personally I'm big on world-building but let's admit I'm weird, only quasi-human, a wer-wolfe. Ask most fans of plot-heavy, story-based cRPGs about their favorite memories in the genre and they'll cite characters instead. And hey, I'll gladly join in. My favorites like Planescape: Torment, V:tM-Bloodlines or Tyranny all feature some very memorable NPCs or companions in addition to large casts of believable extras and bit players properly fitted into well-defined social milieus. Even Baldur's Gate 2, which set the heretofore standard, was rightly applauded for the individual traits displayed by its large roster, even if they weren't all very thoroughly fleshed out. T:ToN, NWN2 and especially MotB, Kingmaker and Path of the Righteous, DA:O, AoD or Colony Ship, Vagrus, KC:D, the first PoE, even lower-quality writing like V:tM- Redemption, I could go on and on (have in fact gone on and on) about RPGs which, aside from their other faults or strengths, manage to convey something memorable either by character arcs or cultural development.
So for now let's skip "what" and ask: who or where is worth remembering from BG3?
Astarion for his snarking and his story's climax, maybe Minthara for wasted potential, and the hag, certainly, as a good old-fashioned cackling villain owning her cruelty in a myriad ways, developing the mindset, yeah, whoever wrote her did well. The Shadowlands, mildly, if only it had dwelled more on its inhabitants' adaptations to the curse and less on sapphic saviors with no other personality traits.
Aside from that, can you tell me the difference between Balduran culture vs. Elturan as portrayed in your 200+ hours of adventuring? Between a small village and the big city? Between tieflings and dwarves? Between merchants and mystics? Between adorable Shadowheart's sad, needy little girl mannerisms with her ingratiating voicing and any other sadistic thug trying to pull a last-minute redemption and blame the system for everything?
You can skip either individual characterization or world-building but
not both, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized I can
barely name any character or location in any of Larian's games I've ever
given a shit about. It was, in fact, one of my earliest complaints, back when I'd only played two of their titles partway, that the company appears incapable of anything but the most overused, lowest common denominator, generic fairytale/RPG filler material, jumbled together with no attention to constancy or consistency. I ask again as I did before: "tell me how anyone thinks they can build an immersive interactive experience around crap like this:"
Many adventures I'd hoped I might pursue in a fantasy world, but taking orders from Dumbo ain't one. I'd never really considered the dividing line between "whimsical" and "goofy" but surely it sits only a few pixels away from the line between telling a joke and being a joke. Does anything ruin a story's charm quite like the feel that the writers themselves don't give a shit and are just tacking on random gimmicks in hopes of looking creative to the uninformed and unimaginative via "LOLrandom" filler? One or two such digressions are usually cute, even necessary. Hell, I'd be the first to complain if we went back to nothing but box-filled warehouses and hippie elves. But when you're constantly jumping from ogres to fairies to dragons to dungeons to box-filled warehouses to talking cows to steambots to steamboats to curses to mad scientists to hippie elves to devils to talking pigeons to sex scenes to cauldrons to peasants to kings to talking cats to fuck-it-all-let's-throw-in-a-circus, you've created less a rich tapestry than a nonsensical jumble of loose threads on the floor which you're hoping I'll mistake for a rug. And then fall through into a vast pit of indifference.* I do understand a game this size cannot all remain interconnected, but you could've at least attempted thematic coherence beyond adolescent rebellion. Even Dragon Age managed that, despite being fundamentally at least as trite a pile of cliches as D&D.
But even taken individually, most encounters skew decisively toward infantile moralism. Pretty and nice things are good. Ugly and unpleasant things are bad. The power of friendship trumps any objective considerations. If nothing else, giving Raphael his very own Disney villain theme song should clue you into this M-rated game gunning for customers with a mental age of twelve, and please don't try to pretend that infantilism doesn't also extend to your RP choice in there. Saving the nice little woman from the big mean man is also the strategically sound option to gain a quite powerful healbot on your way out - which is to say you're being bribed to pad your ego by playing the hero instead of being made to choose.
On that note, nothing says infantilism like actual infants. Where most games avoid children to avoid making extra character models, BG3 both capitalizes on that lack and tries to get its money's worth with a sizeable passel of Artful Dodgers, Oliver Twists and Baker Street Irregulars. I actually liked quite a few: the wannabe resurrector whom you can coach into zombifying her brother's corpse by mistake, the bored son of a comedian, or the little goblin whom you can taunt about its parents deserving to die only for it to reply "Well, yeah - they was nasty old geezers - wanted to cut 'em a raggedy new smile myself some days." I'll even put in a special good word for Vanra, the little girl you pull out of the hag's belly:
Until that point, it works per the usual fairytale motif: beat up some ugly monster, rescue the pretty young damsel, then if you're not in a rush wait until she hits puberty before fucking her. I was pleasantly surprised though to pass by her mother's house later and hear a few lines of dialogue between the two, struggling to re-acclimate to mundane life an understandably shellshocked kid unable to form sentences and afraid to even go outside. It instantly brought to mind Picard's breather episode after ST:TNG's famous Borg two-parter, a welcome logical follow-up, an unusual hint of awareness from purveyors of mass entertainment that dramatic/traumatic/destructive events are not neatly fixed by an episodic reset or a happily ever after.
Plus, yes, heartwarming to boot. I wish those two the best.
But, again, whoever wrote the hag-related quests was rather more insightful or inspired than the rest. For the most part, the kneebiters in BG3 look cute and draw audience sympathy as they would in any sitcom or action movie. And that's about all they do. Some game designers have derided D&D's LCGE alignments as too limiting and simplistic, but Larian evidently dodged even such basic questions for a far more primitive, simpleminded metric of favor and disfavor: cuteness.
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| - unless it's masculinity in service to a woman, then it's "alpha" |
Shadowheart supplies the most consistent example. I'm normally a sucker for the broken little girl routine, but she over-played it even by my tastes. Her dialogues so single-mindedly pushed the idea of her being a victim (while ignoring what by her own admission were her own numerous victims) that by Act 2 I'd lost interest in her personal quest, and the fact that she defaults to "good" if left up to her own devices when faced with the Nightsong made me despair of her providing any cogent assessment of Sharran worship, instead rehashing some trite little fable about purity of heart. By that point Minthara was replacing her in my line-up anyway, so when her quest came up again in Act 3 I surrendered her to her fellow cultists.
An evil action to have taken, sure. I mean, I assume they'll torture her to death. Or, since I know for a fact from my BG2 Diviner's companion roster that Viconia already owns a Vest of Human Flesh +5, maybe she needs the shorts of half-elf flesh to go with it. *shrug*
But what I did not expect was "disapproves" penalties from every one of my companions**, including Minthara of all people! Because how could a drow matriarch possibly approve of my own drow sacrificing one of our hated half-breed surface cousins to yet a third drow?!?
The real kicker's that if you do hand Shadowheart over, the Daughter of Darkness quest bugs out and doesn't even complete properly. The devs apparently thought it unthinkable that anyone would side against adorable, emo little Shadowheart, who's guilty as sin of more than her share of standard Sharran crimes anyway, including my own tilted windmill of brainwashing. Her against Viconia. Against dignified, stalwart Viconia. Who soloed Jon Irenicus for me with two casts of a third-level spell. And, in-character, I'm surrendering one cleric to get a whole cult on my side?
Take her! Do you want fries with that?
At least Astarion fucking owns his evil nature.
Another recurring issue is the perennial anti-intellectualism of pop-culture, and to bridge the two, let's bring up this bitch:
"A tower full of trinkets" is the accusation hurled by every superstitious, inbred hick in history at ivory towers, ignorant of the nuanced analysis and systematic contextualization necessary to construct and utilize those "trinkets" - plus, Highlander Urkel over there has a throne made out of books! You seriously expect me to side against a guy with a book throne? Not to mention she's twice the pompous twit he is. So yeah, sure as Shadowheart's now a pair of lederhosen, Aylin's a nine volt battery. Distasteful her enslavement may be, but centuries of personal and public intellectual pursuit (foppish, but still) where that idiot jock would only spend her time dancing naked on moonlit hilltops... well, the juxtaposition greatly helps settle my conscience. (edit: yet of course the choice between them is presented as starkly as any cartoon mad scientist strapping a beautiful young damsel to a laser table; no thanks)
While I did not pursue Gale's quest past the meeting with the goddess, I saw much the same attitude in the ensuing dialogue at camp, where most dialogue options push you to talk Gale out of his ambitions, argue to remain slaves to the gods (or remain passive) even though he is absolutely right:
And, what, no dialogue option for a Lolth-sworn drow, despite Lolth's whole schtick being overthrowing at least part of the reigning pantheon? I should be high-fiving Gale by this point.
Extra point deduction for the line about "our time together" somehow presented as counter-argument to his ambitions - especially as I never romanced him.
For a more down to earth example try Mystic Carrion's quest. As he wasn't actually advancing knowledge but only playing spirit medium to a few rich clients, I did halfheartedly decide to end his saprophytic existence. At which point I'd assumed the rest of his undead would either join and die in the fight or somehow drop re-dead... not that his operation would just be taken over by some random street-trash ghoul, leaving a mansion full of ravening flesh-eaters to continue plaguing the city. How is this a good ending, when you've only eliminated the intellectual side of the problem? Well, you can't go wrong with beating up a nerd, I guess.
In summary: spoon-fed morality, cuteness, romance and beating up nerds. Themes thoroughly tailored to the mass market, which is to say to overemotional, instinct-driven, cretinous apes, whether typified by the cliched giant brain antagonist or by the fixation on mating rituals.
It was annoying enough finding persistent romance dialogues in every companion's scripts, even indulged in a couple of sex scenes, but I had not expected to be taken to task for not settling down by a damn corpse. Unsurprisingly Larian did not include the reply I would actually voice to such a question: that love is an evolutionary adaptation by which individuals are induced toward surrendering labor and self-sacrifice via emotional manipulation, that it is a form of mental control, brainwashing, slavery, and especially in this campaign we've already got more than enough of that going around.
And perhaps the saddest part? Larian really is better than this. Hints flit here and there that the writers knew damn well what tedious platitudes they were spewing.
But such moments, sad to say, come sparingly.
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* -and given this blog's meandering nature and lack of audience, I should know.
** Easily cheated btw; just leave your other companions at camp when you hand Shadowheart over. There's no fighting involved anyway. Also, in retrospect, given I jokingly blamed Viconia (and Korgan) for my chaotic neutral diviner falling into chaotic evil by the end of BG2... and now Viconia's tempted yet another of my characters to evil acts... maaayybe she really is a bad influence?
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