Gaming

Outlets these days are more than happy to signal boost random controversial statements for clicks. Every time I see something that says "receiving hundreds of likes on Twitter"... that's nothing. That's practically nothing.

Not gonna lie, this was exactly the first thing I looked up, though I changed my mind in posting because it seemed to be a bad faith article in general. But yes, if you're going to have a person stand by their professionalism and experience, especially when making such harsh criticism over a highly rated game while demanding more media literacy, I think have someone that actual has relevant professional experience would make it far less eye-rolling to read.

I've absolutely died as a result of bad dialogue choices but that's just role playing; sometimes something you might choose to do can only logically result in your death and I, for one, am happy to be given that choice. I've straight up deleted a character profile with lots of progress because there was no in-character way not to do the thing that would kill me in dialogue. That game over is just that character's canonical ending as far as I'm concerned. He couldn't not shit-talk that god, that god couldn't not erase him from existence out of spite. If the game had not provided me with an option to shit-talk the god, I would have been annoyed that none of the dialogue options were true to my character.

a situation where your character would get killed for a bad dialogue choice.

I think this is a ridiculous thing to criticize too. Dialogue is important in a game like this and it has (sometimes lethal) consequences.

Imagine if this argument were applied to combat. It turns out that it is impossible to beat some encounters by role-playing a loner wizard who refuses to cast spells. Nobody in their right mind would actually believe that is a valid criticism.

Yeah, ultimately this article reads as if it is questioning the quality of a work on the basis of how the audience engages (or doesn't engage) with it. Ultimately there is one case where the character dies due to a bad dialogue choice, and that response is very clearly a joke one for if you're not roleplaying.

I dunno, it just seems as if the article is clickbait, and if this game dev would prefer playing a game 90% ludonarrative dissonance and 10% no meaningful player choice.

I have died twice due to dialog choices. Once Lae'zel killed me in camp & once I turned into a mind flayer under the Absolute, thus ending my journey.

I know of three instant game end dialogue options. One with Astarion, one with Volo, and one in the House of Hope. I think there might be a few more as well.

There's also one with Mystra I think.

There's one dialogue in the Githyanki creche where your entire party is instantly killed if you choose the "wrong" option. There's nothing to indicate that the choice will lead to that outcome. I'm not aware of any other dialogues like that, however.

This is such a absurd statement I'm inclined to agree about the trolling.

Maybe you love the characters, maybe you love the world, or maybe you love the character creator. That’s all well and good, but the fact of the matter is that all of those things—and a good many other aspects that Baldur’s Gate 3 has been praised for—are poor measurements of evaluating a game. If these subjectivities were the most important aspects of games, then we could say that chess or soccer are bad games. And I don’t think I need to explain how absurd that statement would be.

Most games should be so lucky.

I understand that this game isn't for everyone, especially people who want a pause button in a turn-based game.

The fact that you didn't find it fun is totally valid. BG3 is a very opinionated game that gets a huge number of things right for its target audience - the people who really enjoy CRPGs, branching paths, and choice driven gameplay. It does sound like that you're really not into those things, so BG3 could never have been an excellent experience.

The games that you list are designed to be mostly linear experiences, so it was possible for the devs to make the core gameplay shine because they had time to really polish those systems and interactions. There was enough people and time to really tune RDR2's gunplay, the horse riding, the hunting and tracking, and make the world feel organic.

BG3's dev time was spent on tuning the combat encounters, tuning the class building options, and making sure the world (almost) always made sense. While baking in hundreds of stories about your companions, side characters, abusive store owners, and lost puppies. The game never holds your hand, only asks "here you are, this is what you've done, what do you do now?". The amount of effort put into respecting the moment to moment choices made by the player is staggering.

The complexity in these systems in BG3 left preeetty clear issues with things that would otherwise have time to be polished out of a game before release (animation jank, visual bugs, pathing, pausing). For me, they were more like bumps in a very scenic road. But I hear you when you come in expecting a shiny polished RPG but there's all these fourth wall breaking bits that kind of stall the whole show every like 5 minutes.

I think there's enough nuance here to have both sides of the coin be true - it's an absolute masterpiece for the players who enjoy the specific experience it offers, and it only makes sense to feel it's overrated when you're coming in expecting a cinematic or visceral experience.

It's not that deep. Here's the two main critiques leveled towards the game in the article.

• you don't always know the consequences of your actions, and they're not always predictable: a seemingly sensible choice sometimes ends badly, and a seemingly dumb choice could get you a reward
• you can load a save and redo your things whenever you want, i.e. save-scum

These are both somewhat obvious just from the structure of the game. Ultimately the conclusion the author is shooting for is that this makes Baldur's Gate 3 a bad game but a good piece of interactive fiction.

The author uses the mechanics of chess often as sort of an example of the pinnacle of game design which to me is telling. Video Games are much broader than that. Insisting that people should not call the thing you don't like a game but instead "interactive fiction" is pedantry at best, and gatekeeping at worst.

Sure, if you view the game through the lens of chess you will come away with these flaws. But for example, if you always knew the consequences of every choice the narrative tension would be destroyed. Of course chess has no such concern, so if we're looking at games through that lens then narrative tension is of no value. Ultimately I think this is just a very narrow viewpoint of what games should be.