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PaperclipPerfector
21d ago
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Notes -
The people who criticize it as more of a Larian game than a BG game are probably right - but there's also some of what you call post-5e culture. (I think- I avoided that like the plague). Marvel-speak and such is mostly related to certain companions, but the overall writing isn't that good.
Don't think it'll ruin it - the games really do feel a lot different, but you're going to be regularly disappointed in the writing. It's really a shame that people let to write something that expensive are just.. meh. Same as with Fallout 3 & 4.
Personally, I'm not going to even consider anything AAA ever again. I also probably only played BG3 bc a friend bought it for me. Maybe the new Cyberpunk - at least the main game had good writing. There's 'Atom RPG', a not so new Soviet Fallout-inspired game. I'll get into that once I learn cyrillic.
I can't really judge BG3 fairly, but I have a sneaking suspicion that, in hindsight, Neverwinter Nights is the real Baldur's Gate III - it still has that late-90s D&D culture, BioWare's writing style is still pretty close to what it was in the originals, and it evokes the Forgotten Realms setting as it existed at the time. NWN vanilla doesn't impress me that much, but once it hits its stride in Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark, I'd argue you do get something that's visibly kin to BG2.
From what I've heard, if one is interested in something more authentically in the style of Baldur's Gate, the Owlcat Pathfinder games are much closer, both in mechanics and in terms of writing?
To change subject somewhat...
I count myself a Dragon Age fan, but I'm definitely put off by everything I see in Veilguard. As it is, I loved Origins and Awakening, though 2 had a handful of interesting ideas but ultimately was an unsuccessful game and laid the groundwork for the series' pivot away from Origins' style, and then Inquisition had its share of good moments, but was definitely a game at war with its own design. I can imagine rescuing 2, and I can imagine splitting Inquisition into two different games, both of which might be good on their own merits but which do not successfully fuse, but neither of them ultimately work as a whole. More concerningly, I'd say that Inquisition, despite some superficial similiarities, is a different genre to Origins, and then Veilguard seems to have reinvented itself yet again. I find it a bit hard to talk about Dragon Age as a series - I'd argue that Origins/Awakening essentially take place in their own little continuity, and they work best as a stand-alone game like Jade Empire. Inquisition refers to things from Origins sometimes, but it's clear that it's not the same world.
To me, Veilguard looks like a passable action-adventure, plus some cringeworthy woke scenes that everyone is fixated on, but one that has nothing to do with any previous Dragon Age game beyond a couple of proper nouns. So I'm inclined to give it a miss. I doubt it has much to offer a Dragon Age fan.
I played NWN.. back around when it came out, but I do remember being disappointed. Not sure why.
BG2, on the other hand..
I feel one can get used to almost any kind of graphics as long as it's not 320x240. Young people have no idea what they're missing if they haven't played modded BG2+ToB. With the anti-cheese patches and stratagems(I think) it was an amazing game.
I still consider it the best Western RPG ever made, and if you have Pocket Plane and Gibberlings Three to upgrade it even further, it's very hard to match. There are some other competitors, but it's definitely up there in the top few. It's right in the middle of Shamus Young's Golden Age of PC Gaming (though I'd expand it to all gaming) - there was a sweet spot there, around 1998-2002 or so, which reminds me of Alan Jacobs talking about moments in time that bring particular arts to a height. There was the right balance between enablement and resistance for digital creativity to flourish.
Is this just nostalgia for when I was a teen? Perhaps. You can certainly point to a lot of excellent games outside of the 1998-2002 period, or perhaps 1997-2004, or however widely we cast the net. But I feel like there's something to it, because that period did birth a number of masterpieces, many of which have had sequels or revisits that try to capture the magic, and fail. Final Fantasy VII in 1997, Starcraft in 1998, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in 1998, Age of Empires II in 1999, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri in 1999, Baldur's Gate II in 2000, Deus Ex in 2000, Diablo II in 2000, Grand Theft Auto III in 2001, Halo: Combat Evolved in 2001, and so on. I could easily go on! I choose these titles because they've all had modern sequels - FFVII remake, Starcraft II, all the Zelda sequels, Age of Empires IV, Civilization: Beyond Earth, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Diablo III and IV, GTA IV and V, the entire Halo series up to now, and so on, and while the new generation is definitely much more technologically advanced, it's hard to look at what we have now and see the same kind of inspiration. Several of these games have had a lot of spiritual successors. Dragon Age: Origins was a spiritual sequel to Baldur's Gate, and of course Baldur's Gate III now exists, but while they may be good in their own right (DA:O was great, no comment on BG3), I think it's safe to say that none of them are BG2 levels of good.
Am I being unfair or just cherry-picking the best games of that period, or was it a real creative peak?
No, you're not cherrypicking.
It was the golden period when game devs were still making games for people like them-not insulting the intelligence of players, but they had much bigger budgets because gaming was expanding towards the dimmer types.
It is as simple as that. Excellent games still do get made - e.g. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri has an almost worthy successors - but they never get a lot of attention because AAA is kinda dumb now. Word of mouth only. I recommend watching Sseth's videos - he reviews a lot of such.
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By Hordes of the Underdark it got to the level I'd consider "good", before that it was at most tolerable. There are mods that BTFO anything released by the studio.
Sorry, to be clear, I consider BG2 the best RPG.
NWN is a fantastic toolbox, and SoU and especially HotU are good, but I don't think the official NWN reaches the high levels of BG2. (BG1 is... interesting. I think vanilla BG1 doesn't measure up, but modded BG1 does become almost a match for its sequel. If you have Tutu and a number of the NPC mods, I think BG1 becomes a very respectable companion piece to its sequel.)
I agree entirely that NWN has some amazing modules and adventures that beat out anything the studio published.
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