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dammit-sammit · 2 months ago

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I love Theo Solomon’s performance so much (so much), but I also miss sm the version of early access Wyll who was allowed to sound happy. And made jokes. And was sarcastic and confident and unapologetic and sure of himself and was still the softest gentlest kindest member of the cast. This blindingly bright star of a character. I miss so much when he was allowed to be those things. Like, I miss when the writing and the direction allowed for that.

Just, if you didn’t play early access please do yourself the favour of watching Wyll’s early access cutscenes on youtube. Absolutely every second of it is a joy. His happiness is infectious. (As far as I’ve been able to find out, his original actor was Lanre Malaolu, and just like Theo Solomon he is incredible.) And the reason why Wyll ended up with so much less content after the rewrites was because they spent the second half of his development time getting rid of that and replacing it with a version of the story where Will is spoken to more disrespectfully by the other characters, and he spends a huge proportion of his dialogue by comparison unnecessarily apologising for everything he is and does.

The complaints from early access players about him coming off as too ‘smug’ should have read as an obvious fucking dog-whistle at the first glance, and it honestly really stretches imagination to believe that no one in the writers’ room realised that. The game is amazing in a lot of ways, but it’s been kind of hard to celebrate that when it feels like we’ve all been standing face to face with irrefutable evidence of (at least some of) the (overwhelmingly white) writers’ moral bankruptcy since release.

Like. Wyll is *still* a brilliant character, which at this point I think is an outstanding achievement on the part of his actor, made despite the actions of the writers.

I just. Words cannot express how pissed off I am at the BG3 writers for agreeing to play into the EA playerbase’s transparently racist bullshit on this. Do you know how hard it is to be that good at working with language, and that bad at processing what someone else’s motivation with it is? They have to have known what it was they were being asked to do. And they did it.

God. I’m just. So fucking pissed off.

"bg3 set the new standard" "bg3 spoiled us" GIRL bg3 shipped unfinished with unequal content for the companions to favor the whitest man possible, and after treating the single black person in the companions like actual shit bc racists were mad about him even existing and they listened. this is not the standard i want for video games lmao

#for the record I was part of the early access playerbase #a lot of people were bc it was a massive crowd. the subreddit was huge even years before release #and like most subreddits and most early access playerbases it was overwhelmingly composed of white men #and that in of itself should have been enough reason for Larian to not take a *word* of what they said about Wyll seriously.#OR Shadowheart for that matter.#the EA playerbase apparently complained about her being ‘too mean’ which is why a lot of her early game dialogue got chopped and changed #and I can confirm that it was fucking *fine*. She was just funny and right.#but wrt Wyll specifically - there is absolutely /no one/ whose opinion on him should have been taken into account except for Black players.#The way this shit was handled seems to be a huge disservice to them and that’s putting it charitably.#The writers should have known better and I will bet you anything that they *did*. They made a choice with their eyes wide fucking open.

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