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Notes -
What was "based" about Hades 1?
It was not based, but rather the sequel more heavily catered to woke pieties and aesthetics than the first. It is not the best example, but sequels degrading, if not on an about-face like Kingdom Come, then simply unignorably further downward into wokeism, is a noticeable pattern.
And Baldur's Gate 3 shows us that people, including the white Gamers, love it as long as it's a good game.
Anacdata: the people I know that first played BG1 on launch either didn't buy BG3 or gave up on it.
BG 3 appears to have - successfully - shifted its target audience.
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BG3 also did not exactly have the opportunity to plainly slander White Christian Europeans (unless they somehow made their way into Faerûn). It also did not vandalize the prior titles in the series with woke retcons.
I blindly (nearly zero prior review on social media or otherwise, because I enjoyed BG1/2 very much and decided to dive in blind only if a trusted friend could vouch it wasn’t woke goyslop) played through it on recommendation from a friend who didn’t find it catering directly to modern audiences in his own playthrough (unlike recent Ubisoft titles). I believe now that he was wrong and is not sensitive enough to know he is swimming in woke waters.
It’s mostly fine, but it isn’t real time with pause, the writing is poor but serviceable for the gameplay. The problem is aesthetics - everything is undifferentiated morality choices, spiritually genderless with no alignment system. All races are strictly equivalent, and would-be evil races are turned into sympathetic humans with some devilish window dressing. At some point in the third chapter, the designers’ jarring preference for girl bosses become impossible to not notice, everything has a sterile-feminine bent. It’s not done well. There’s apparently a whole lot of degeneracy that is avoided by not engaging with it - after I beat it I was surprised by some scenes on YouTube I never saw in game.
Much of this could be predetermined by the edicts of the 5th edition D&D rules however, which is why I never use that rule set in any tabletop setting.
It has some good moments, and the tactical gameplay loop is there, so it is worthwhile but it isn’t any sort of Infinity Engine game. There’s no successor to those.
The writing in BG3 is terrible.
The characters are god-awful. Their motivations trite or pathetic, their journeys not worth caring about. However, all that does not matter as the game emulates tabletop well enough to allow you to do some genuinely stupid shit to break it as hard as you possibly can.
Fundamentally as a work of fiction, it kind of fails. However, as a roleplaying experience, it was pretty good. I hear the Dark Path is better written, but I'm in no hurry to get back to it.
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I've avoided BG3 myself, despite being a massive fan of BG1 and BG2. The shift from RTwP to pure turn-based is huge, and as far as I can tell BG3 is a 5e game, not an AD&D2e game - and I mean that in terms of atmosphere, themes, and writing style, not just mechanics.
And as far as I can tell, yep, BG3 is pretty woke. I remember when the jokes/memes about sex with a bear were going around, but beyond that, it strikes me as very much a post-Critical-Role type of D&D, focused on misfit characters and with a lot of snark. It just does not look like Baldur's Gate to me, in any way, and to be honest I rather resent the fact that it claims the title.
It's a huge improvement and I say that as a massive fan of BG1 and 2. DnD (whether 5e, Basic or ADnD2e) was built for turn based play. Now I would certainly prefer if BG3 was either ADnD2e or 3.5E based (as 5e is definitely not...great) but it is definitely better off as turn based.
As for sex as a bear, well you have to remember Forgotten Realms was created by Ed Greenwood who is the very definition of a horny player. Canonically any NPC who does not have a defined sexuality is pansexual in the Forgotten Realms. And his self insert character basically gallivanted around banging powerful goddesses and avatars and what not including gender swapping. The bear sex part is very true to Forgotten Realms probably about as much as dead gods coming back to life (or Mystra's chosen being in relationships with her). It's part of it's "charm".
That's a very subjective call - I would say that RTwP was the central mechanical pillar of Baldur's Gate, so making a BG game without it feels like missing something essential. At any rate, I massively prefer RTwP to pure turn-based, and I feel RTwP better represents the flow of actual gameplay in tabletop D&D (where you do actually speed up, slow down, skip or rush at times, and then go moment by moment when it matters). It was therefore a design choice that both suggested to me firstly that BGIII isn't very interested in imitating its predecessors, and secondly that it not be to my tastes.
As to sex... certainly Ed Greenwood was a dirty old man, and always has been. (I have no idea what you're referencing with canon, though I would not be surprised if Greenwood has gone on to say free-love things on the internet. For however much you think that's worth.) However, Greenwood was never the only person who worked on Forgotten Realms, and in particular Baldur's Gate comes out of 90s, TSR-era AD&D, which had deliberately put more emphasis on narrative, worldbuilding, and indeed morality. That was the peak of the Paladins & Princesses era of D&D, and it showed.
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It’s Divinity: Original Sin III with a Forgotten Realms skin suit.
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Overall I think you're basically correct, though in fairness I still enjoyed BG3. One of the gripes I do have, though, is the writing. The worst example is Karlach, a tiefling you can recruit to the party. She talks like she just strolled in from Reddit - casual tone, liberally using modem day profanity, etc. She's also not the only one, though she is one of the worst offenders. It's such a stark contrast from BG1/2 where they went out of their way to not make dialogue sound modern day, with concrete guidelines for writers on how to achieve that. I hate it.
It's not even the presence of snark by itself - BG1 and BG2 contain plenty of jokes. There are also plenty of characters who use casual language. This page over-selects for comedy, but even so, there is a lot of casual silliness. Lines like, "For someone who supposedly has her soul tainted by the evil of a dead god, you remind me considerably of a chipmunk with a sugar high and a death wish" easily fit that kind of Reddit or Twitter-informed search for a perfect one-liner.
Even so, I think you can still tell that the writing culture of 1998 or 2000 was very different to that of 2023. I think for me a lot of it is worldbuilding as well? One of BG2's advantages was that it is substantially based on the 1997 boxed set Lands of Intrigue, and that set had quite good writing and a level of detail and verisimilitude that the game could make use of.
I also wonder if it was the intended audience as well? Not to go full GamerGate, but in 1998 and 2000, the hold of progressive ideology over the American video game industry was not yet complete, and I feel like there was at least the aspiration still to make games for a wide audience, and one less politically polarised than today.
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