#getting out of baldur's gate now and am excited to get to know this franchise

[astarions-juice-box]

Getting into Dragon Age Origins for the first time and see what's up with this series

[felassan]

Two excerpts I think are important, BioWare on diversity and inclusion & BioWare on its future (including comments on crunch culture), under the cut:

An ongoing commitment to diversity and inclusion

From its earliest years, BioWare has pushed to make games for everyone, ensuring a diversity of players is reflected in the far-reaching worlds of the Mass Effect universe to Thedas and well beyond. LGBTQ characters and romances have been pillars of BioWare experiences and it’s a given that players have the option to play as a variety of genders and backgrounds in a BioWare game - customization that can be traced all the way back to the character generator in the first Baldur’s Gate.

“Years and years - in fact, probably more than a decade - before I ever played a BioWare game, I was aware of their reputation for diverse representation,” says Emily Taylor, a senior level designer who has been working in games since 2007. “From playable female lead characters like FemShep to canonically gay, bi and trans characters, BioWare is extremely  well known for supporting diversity in advance of most of the industry. As a woman who’s loved playing computer games since Pac-Man was in arcades, it’s always been particularly important to me to see games that represent the full diversity of the player base, so I was absolutely delighted to join the BioWare team in 2018 and be able to contribute to the future of the Dragon Age franchise.”

BioWare also recognizes that the studio is still learning and growing some twenty-five years into its existence.

Like most games studios founded in the nineties, BioWare was started by men. People of many genders and backgrounds have since joined the studio in increasing numbers, but BioWare continues to do the work needed to do better on these fronts - for its developers and its community of fans. 

“Representation matters,” studio general manager Casey Hudson says. “It’s at the heart of our studio’s mission. Inspiring players to become the hero of their story means they should be able to see themselves in our games, and just as importantly, in the teams that create them.”

“I joined BioWare in 2010 and I’ve been so happy to see that, year after year, we are still striving to improve representation in our games. Even when mistakes are made or we stumble, the conversation is ‘How can we do better next time?’ with an honest desire to improve. So many of us here know how important it can be to see yourself in the games you play and the stories you enjoy, and we want to be able to give that kind of joy to our players. It has me very excited for things to come,” says Rachel Hammond, online engineer on SW:TOR and Anthem.

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BioWare in 2148

With 25 years down, BioWare looks to the next 128

A couple of months after moving into EPCOR Tower, finishing touches like paint and stairs were still being completed at BioWare Edmonton’s new studio. The dev teams didn’t seem to mind as they found their bearings and hammer away at new projects. 

“We can’t go back to where we’ve been,” Casey Hudson says, now the studio’s general manager. Casey left BioWare for a three-year stint at Microsoft during Anthem’s development, returning in 2017 to succeed Aaryn Flynn as studio head.

“The way that we worked, all of those stories and the crunch and eating pizza for six weeks straight and all that kind of stuff, as fun and memorable as it was at the time, those things won’t work for where we’re going,” Casey says. 

As BioWare grows, Casey says it must learn better ways to work while still embodying the values laid out by Drs. Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk. 

“It starts with the ones that were there at the very beginning with Greg and Ray of humility and integrity,” he says, “Those are super important.”

Other pillars include a passion for excellence and courageous creativity.

“We used to exemplify this not because we were courageous, but because we didn’t know better. We would try things and fail and try something else until we got it right, and it was very experimental. But what can happen is, once you do know the consequences of failure, you can very easily start retreating. And at that point, it actually does take courage to put yourself out there and try something new,” Casey says. “We’re not super young and inexperienced anymore. We do know better, but we still have to try and do some crazy stuff anyway.”

“I am excited for what the future holds. I think BioWare is changing. I think we’re at a crossroads where we can either accept that and move into the new BioWare, or we can try to cling to the past. We have to be respectful of our origins without being constrained by them. It’s an exciting time and I’m really looking forwards to what the next five years brings,” says John Epler, who began at BioWare as a QA term tester and now serves as Dragon Age’s narrative director. “I’m one of those people who is probably going to be here until they literally have to wheel my desiccated corpse out of the building, because I love working here and I love the people I work with and I love getting to come into work every day to have long, detailed conversations about how eluvians work.”

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Another note on the future of BioWare:

In 2019 BioWare Edmonton pulled up its deep roots in its former building to head to fancy new digs in Epcor Tower, a twin-spiral 28 floor office located in the Ice District of Edmonton’s downtown. BioWare moved its staff of more than 300 developers into three floors of the tower, where there’s plenty of room to grow.

– From Bioware: Stories and Secrets from 25 Years of Game Development

[vaultt-tec]

How did Fallout 1 ever get made?

PCGameN sat down with the Fallout 1 team and discussed its making.

This is in a read more because it is SUPER long. I added it all here but click the link and read it on their site, there are more pictures!

Tim Caine was at PAX when he first saw Vault Boy as a living, breathing entity - it was a cosplayer of 16 or 17 years old, hair gelled to replicate that distinctive swirl. ‘This is weird’, he thought.

Feargus Urquhart remembers walking into Target and seeing that same gelled haircut and toothy smile, not on a fan this time, but emblazoned across half a metre of cotton. ‘How is it that a game that we all worked on somehow created something iconic?’, he wondered. ‘How did it show up on a t-shirt in a department store?’

Related: the best RPGs on PC.

In the years since, Bethesda have taken Fallout into both first-person and the pop culture mainstream. Vault Boy has become as recognisable as Mickey Mouse. The series’ sardonic, faux-’50s imagery now feels indelible, as if it has always been here. But it hasn’t.

It took the nascent Black Isle Studios to nurse the Fallout universe into being, as an unlikely, half-forgotten project in the wings of Interplay, where Caine and Urquhart were both working in the ‘90s. The pair helped create one of the all-time great RPGs in the process.

“The one thing I would say about Interplay in those days, and this isn’t trying to pull the veil back or anything like that - there was just shit going on,” Urquhart tells us. “It was barely controlled chaos. I’m not saying that Brian [Fargo] didn’t have some plan, but there was just… stuff.”

One day, Fargo sent out a company-wide email to canvass opinion. He wanted Interplay to work on a licensed game, and had three tabletop properties in mind. One was Vampire: The Masquerade. Another was Earthdawn, a fantasy game set in the same universe as Shadowrun. And the third was GURPS, designed by Games Workshop’s Steve Jackson.

The team picked the latter, overwhelmingly, because that was what they played in their own sessions. But GURPS wasn’t a setting - it was a Generic Universal RolePlaying System. And so Interplay’s team had to come up with a world of their own.

“I would send out an email saying, ‘I’m in Conference Room Two with a pizza’,” Caine says. “And if people wanted to come, on their own time, they could do it. Chris [Taylor, lead designer], Leonard [Boyarksy, art director], and Jason [Anderson, lead artist] showed up.”

Interplay at the time was almost like a high school, as map layout designer Scott Evans remembers it: incredibly noisy and divided into cliques. Caine was building a clique of his own.

Traditional fantasy was the first idea to be dismissed. The team actually considered making Fallout first-person, a decade early - but decided the sprites of the period didn’t offer the level of detail they wanted. Concepts were floated for time travel, and for a generation ship story - but one after the other, they were all pushed aside and the post-apocalypse was left.

“One thing I didn’t like was games where the character you’re playing should know stuff that you, the player, don’t,” Caine says. “And I think the vault helped us capture that, because both you the player and you the character had no idea what the world was like. The doors opened and you were pushed out. And I really liked that, because it meant we didn’t have to do anything fake like, ‘Well you were hit on your head and have amnesia’.”

There was plenty about the Fallout setting that wasn’t as intuitive, however. Players would have to wrap their heads around a far-future Earth and a peculiar retro aesthetic, even before the bombs started dropping. The question of how Fallout ever survived pitching is answered with a Caine quip: “What do you mean, pitch?”

For a short while, Interplay had planned to make several games in the GURPS system. But soon afterwards they had won the D&D license, a far bigger property that would go on to spawn Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale. As a consequence, Caine’s team were left largely to their own devices.

As for budget - Fallout’s was small enough to pass under the radar. Although Interplay are best remembered for the RPGs of Black Isle and oddball action games like Shiny’s Earthworm Jim, they had mainstream ambitions not so different to those of the bigger publishers today. During Fallout’s development they were primarily interested in sports, and an online game division called Engage.

“It was almost like a smokescreen,” Urquhart explains. “So much money was being pumped into these things that you could go play with your toys and no-one would know.”

Which is exactly what the Fallout team did, pulling out every idea they’d ever intended for a videogame.

“Being just so happy and fired up that we were making this thing basically from scratch and doing virtually whatever we wanted, we had this weird arrogance about the whole thing,” Boyarsky recalls. “‘People are gonna love it, and if they don’t love it they don’t get it.’

“Part of it was a punk rock ethos of, every time we came up with an idea and thought, ‘Wow, no-one would ever do that’, we always wanted to push it further. We chased that stuff and got all excited, like we were doing things we weren’t supposed to be doing.”

The team laugh at the idea that Fallout might have carried some kind of message (“Violence solves problems,” Caine suggests). To these kids of the ‘80s, nuclear holocaust felt like immediate and obvious thematic material. The game’s development was guided by a mantra, however.

“It was the consequence of action,” Caine puts it. “Do what you want, so long as you can accept the consequences.”

Fallout lets you shoot up all you want. But if you get addicted, that will become a problem for you, one you’ll have to cope with. The team were keen not to force their own views onto players, and decided the best way to avoid that was with an overriding moral greyness. The Brotherhood of Steel - in Fallout 3, a somewhat heroic group policing the wasteland - were here in the first game simply as preservationists or, more uncharitably, hoarders. Even The Master, the closest thing Fallout had to a villain, was driven by a well-intentioned desire to bring unity to the wasteland. His name, pre-mutation, was ‘Richard Grey’.

“Everyone needed to have flaws and positive points,” Taylor says. “That way the player could have better, stronger interactions whichever way they went.”

Although the GURPS ruleset eventually fell by the wayside, the Fallout team were determined to replicate the tabletop experience they loved - in which players don’t always do what their Game Master would like. They filled their maps with multiple quest solutions and stuffed the game with thousands of words of alternative dialogue. “The hard part was making sure there was no character that couldn’t finish the game,” Caine says.

Fallout’s dedication to its sandbox is still striking, and only lately matched by the likes of Divinity: Original Sin 2. It was a simulation that enabled unforeseen possibilities.

“I am shocked that people got Dogmeat to live till the end of the game,” Taylor says. “Dogmeat was never supposed to survive. You had to do some really strange things and go way out of your way to do so, but people did.”

During development, a QA tester came to the team with a problem: you could put dynamite on children.

“Where you see a problem…,” Urquhart says. He is joking, of course, yet the ability to plant dynamite - achieved by setting a timer on the explosive and reverse pickpocketing an NPC - became a supported part of the game and the foundation of a quest. This was a new kind of player freedom, matched only by the freedom the team felt themselves.

“We were really, really fortunate,” Boyarsky says. “No-one gets the opportunity we had to go off in a corner with a budget and a team of great, talented people and make whatever we wanted. That kind of freedom just doesn’t exist.

“We were almost 30, so we were old enough to realise what we had going on. A lot of people say, ‘I didn’t realise how good it was until it was over’. Every day when I was making Fallout I was thinking, ‘I can’t believe we’re doing this’. And I even knew in the back of my head that it was never going to be that great again.”

Once Fallout came out, it was no longer the strange project worked on in the shadows with little to no oversight. It was a franchise with established lore that was getting a sequel. It wasn’t long before Boyarsky, Caine, and Anderson left to form their own RPG studio, Troika.

“We knew Fallout 1 was the pinnacle,” Boyarsky says. “We felt like to continue on with it under changed circumstances would possibly leave a bad taste in our mouths. We were so happy and so proud of what we’d done that we didn’t want to go there.”

Fallout is larger than this clique now. Literally, in fact: the vault doors Boyarsky once drew in isometric intricacy are now rendered in imposing 3D in Bethesda’s sequels. And yet Boyarksy, Taylor, and Caine now work under the auspices of Obsidian, a studio that has its own, more recent, history with the Fallout series. Should the opportunity arise again, would they take it?

“I’m not sure, to be very honest,” Taylor says. “I loved working on Fallout. It was the best team of people I ever worked with. I think it’s grown so much bigger than myself that I would feel very hesitant to work on it nowadays. I would love to work on a Fallout property, like a board game, but working on another computer game might be too much.”

Boyarsky shares his reservations: that with the best intentions, these old friends could get started on something and tarnish their experience of Fallout.

“It would be very hard for us to swallow working on a Fallout game where somebody else was telling you what you could and couldn’t do,” he expands. “I would have a really hard time with someone telling me what Fallout was supposed to be. I’m sure that it would never happen because of the fact that I would have that issue.”

Urquhart - now Obsidian’s CEO - is at pains to point out that Bethesda were nothing but supportive partners throughout the making of Fallout: New Vegas, requesting only a handful of tiny tweaks to Obsidian’s interpretation of its world. “I’ve got to be explicit in saying we are not working on a new Fallout,” he says. “But I absolutely would.”

Caine has mainly built his career by working on original games rather than sequels: Fallout, Arcanum, Wildstar, and Pillars of Eternity. But he would be lying if he said he hadn’t thought about working on another Fallout.

“I’ve had a Fallout game in my head since finishing Fallout 1 that I’ve never told anyone about,” he admits. “But it’s completely designed, start to finish. I know the story, I know the setting, I know the time period, I know what kind of characters are in it. It just sits in the back of my head, and it’s sat there for 20 years. I don’t think I ever will make it, because by now anything I make would not possibly compare to what’s in my head. But it’s up there.”

[tiasmusings]

Mass Effect

“This is Commander Shepard, signing off.” We’re a couple of weeks now from the release of Mass Effect: Andromeda, and I feel like I need to talk about this franchise and what it’s meant to me. I didn’t like Baldur’s Gate. I thought it was distinctly inferior from a tactical gameplay perspective (which is what I wanted at the time) to the old DOS-based SSI Gold Box games. I didn’t like Neverwinter Nights because its UI hated every mouse I ever owned. I thought Knights of the Old Republic was clunky and painful to play, trying to put action gameplay into a user interface that wasn’t up to the task. The first Bioware game I sat down with and realized I loved was Dragon Age: Origins. When Dragon Age 2 came out, I liked it as well, but a lot of other people didn’t, so in order to make that up to people Bioware gave everyone who bought it at full price at launch on PC a free copy of Mass Effect 2. Knowing that Bioware games run on their stories and the player’s connection to the characters, I bought the first Mass Effect on the cheap so I could play that before playing my free new game. I fell in love. Not just with the game, though it was something new for me - a mix of shooter and RPG and exploration game that didn’t bludgeon me over the head with the weaknesses of any of those genres. The first shooter I’d really enjoyed since Doom 2, honestly. With the characters. With the companions who accompanied me on my travels, with the people I met as I explored the galaxy, with the species and ideas and problems I ran across. I was Shepard. Shepard was a fully-realized character, and she was me, and she could be both because her writing was so good and Jennifer Hale is maybe the best voice actor working in video games right now. As I played through the trilogy, I made friends. Garrus and Tali and Liara were there with me for years, by my side, always dependable and always themselves. I fell in love, as much as I can with a fictional character, with Ashley, with Liara, with Samantha Traynor. I hated Saren, despised Harbringer, but I also felt a connection to them, and it was a bit of a proud moment when Harbringer knew my name. “If I must tear you apart, Shepard,” he told me, “I will.” Or he tried. I’d never been good at sniping in video games before, but Shepard would be, so I learned. I’m not great, still, but I was good enough. Harbringer would possess a Collector, rise into the air. “I am assuming direct control” was what Harbringer would start to say, but more times than not, by the end, it was “I am assu…” followed by a heavy round from my Widow anti-materiel rifle between the Collector’s uppermost eyes. I loved at least 350 of Legion’s processes. Watched Ashley grow to understand that humanity could not stand alone in the universe. Knew that the Illusive Man would betray me, and still felt it when he did. Stood at Garrus’s side as he did his damned calibrations, and was both delighted and horrified when that pretty blue girl I rescued from the Geth so long ago became the most powerful information broker in the galaxy. I stood on the line between ally and enemy to Aria on Omega, and I helped her take her palace of crime back when it was taken from her. I watched my mentor rise from Captain to Admiral to Councilor, burn out on politics, then stand against the Illusive Man in spite of not really understanding what was happening in the end. I found the perfect angle to line up a shot on the terrifying Banshees of the third game. I played chess with my yeoman. Later, I took a painfully sexy, absurdly adorable shower with her. I died. I lived. I became the god-queen of the universe, and I brought natural and artificial life together. I played on the PC, but Shepard, more than any other character, was the seventh console generation’s embodiment for me. Her story is done. I can go back and play the Mass Effect trilogy, but I don’t really get to be Shepard again. In a couple of weeks, I get to go to Andromeda. I get to be Ryder, the Pathfinder, and make new friends and find new loves and new enemies and new guns to shoot them with. Shepard’s story is done, and rightly so, but I think I’m going to miss her more than I have any other video game character I’ve played. She earned her signoff. I’m excited to see what comes next.

[curriebelle]

I’m sure you all guessed this but if you’re lookin for something to do between Thursdays I’m gonna recommend Baldur’s Gate II to e v e r y o n e. Especially if you don’t have a D&D group at home, because it’s the closest you’ll get to D&D without one, and ESPECIALLY if you’re also a Bioware fan. I have some thinky thoughts about it & Dragon Age II here. Not so much the usual #currie academia, but along those lines nonetheless.

So I said in a post before that Baldur’s Gate II is very much like what Dragon Age 2 should have been, and I want to pull that apart for you somewhat. Disclaimer here that while I’ve played DA2 a disgusting number of times, I’m only 20 or so days into BG2 (Chapter 3, I think)

I acknowledge that technically speaking, DA2 is rightfully the lowest-rated game of the Dragon Age franchise, but it’s also my favourite by far. This is largely because I admired what it aspired to be. It wanted to be an in-depth exploration of a single, fascinating locale, and all the conflicts that could arise from it across time. Some of the things people complained about - such as Hawke having such a limited background, the divisiveness of the companions and their behaviour, and the lack of a single overarching villain - were the result of reaching for this goal and failing. Bioware either lost their direction or lacked the time to pull it off . A lot of the other problems with the game, particularly the repeated dungeon maps, but also the useless junk-gathering and slimmed-down combat (which I actually liked, but I get that it’s controversial) managed to cripple this particular aspiration even further. Kirkwall lost parts of its complexity and bigness, but clues of it remained behind - particularly in the morally complex sidequests, which often hold a mirror up to the larger conflicts. My favourite one is when you head out to find the son of some noble or count and it turns out that he’s just a regular old straight-up murderer. No demons in his head, but suffering a mental illness - not one I’m qualified to diagnose, but one that each of the party members misinterprets as a pathetic excuse for his violence. Their preferred solution is to kill the bastard, but a player - if they actually know what mental illness is, and how it can be mismanaged - is left with much more to think about.

The resemblance between Dragon Age II and Baldur’s Gate 2 started out as simple allusions and parallels, which I thought were amusing. Now I know who Edwina the barmaid is, and now I know why the loading screens say “gather your party before venturing forth”, and now I know why they make you collect pantaloons. I’ve also met some of the predecessors of the Dragon Age party members. Imoen looks a heckofa lot like an early-2000s Leliana and gets the same broken-bird treatment. Jan Jansen is Varric after several heavy doses of hallucinatory drugs, from the family merchant business to the hand-made crossbow to the penchant for tall tales. I’m pretty sure Velanna from Awakening is a re-skinned Viconia (and I think they share a VA, to boot). Also, I feel like some of the flatter BG2 characters were revamped, re-examined, or re-incarnated. Anomen is pretty much a sexist prick so far, but he’s had some interesting chats with me about his lawful-neutralness. I wonder if their answer to him was to take the same ethics but fix the sexism problem with a genderflip, because in a lot of ways he reminds me of Aveline. (Disclaimer: this in no way takes away from the fact that Aveline is the greatest thing ever and Anomen is a lil shit). Moreover, Morrigan’s eternally grumpy power-hungry practicality, as well her potential prideful fall, and her return, in a sequel, as a semi-friendly spy embedded in a political clusterfuck (Orlesian court vs. Shadow Thieves) makes her quite reminiscent of Edwin. There are others, too, as there are exceptions. I don’t see a clear Fenris analogue in BG2 yet, nor has Minsc ever been properly revived (though Iron Bull maybe comes close). I think that’s smart, though. Imoen/Leliana is a good template to reuse but Minsc shall never be equaled.

Beyond the people in my party, I started to see traces of Kirkwall in Athkatla. Some of the districts have obvious analogues (Keep = Government, Hightown = Waukeen’s Promenade (same aesthetic, even, with all the white stone), Darktown/Lowtown = Slums/Graveyard, Docks = ....well, Docks). There’s also the sense that there are some really hecked-up things going on in the underbelly of the Athkatla, what with the random lich I found in the Egyptian-style tomb under the graveyard (?), the beholders in the sewers (FUCK) and the strange women Naruto-running around at night and casting dominate on random thugs (???). Plus they have a strangely perpendicular policy on magic. Mages in Athkatla are both the Circle and the Templars - that is, the practice of magic is heavily restricted, but it’s restricted by the Cowled Wizards (who have conveniently cast Immunity to Government on themselves). Or perhaps Athkatla is what the Tevinter Imperium looks like from the inside?

Quest structures are also re-used between the games. The overarching quest of the first part of BG2 is identical to Dragon Age II′s - I have to raise enough money to Save my Sister, either to protect her from the Circle or steal her back from Irenicus. The anti-qunari cult and the weirdness of the Primeval Thaig are not dissimilar to the Cult of the Unseeing Eye quest (except for the FUCKING BEHOLDERS aaah). There’s somebody skinning people in the Bridge District at the moment, and though I haven’t advanced very far in that quest I’m catching the horrible, creeping scent of All That Remains about it. One of the very first quests was to return a handful of acorns to a faerie queen, which requires that you leave Athkatla - and it felt almost exactly like turning over Flemeth’s amulet, even before I found the red dragon hanging out in the same area. I’m even getting companion loyalty quests now (hence, Edwina) and while reuniting Keldorn with his wife was considerably less funny (though just as heartwarming) as convincing Aveline and Donnic to Cup each others’ Joinings, I’m not surprised I’ll be helping people with everything from marriages to magic mishaps. Let’s just hope Jan Jansen doesn’t make me gather poo for his turnip-based explosives so he can bomb the Cowled Wizards or something (Cheers, Justice, I’ll always love you).

But these similarities aren’t really a bad thing at all. I’m certainly not accusing Bioware of copying their own homework - I’m actually accusing them of failing to copy their own homework. Or, to stretch the metaphor, for their horrible teacher Mr. EA to change the deadlines to their homework without telling them so they had to rush it and get a C+ from all the game critics. Poor muffins.

Here’s the thing. The inklings I had about The Point of setting things exclusively in Kirkwall are full-on confirmed by the existence of Baldur’s Gate II and Athkatla. Games like DA:O and DA:I are explorations of breadth, spanning countries; games like DA2 and BG2 are explorations in depth, spanning time, and digging deep into a particular city. Athkatla feels amazingly alive to me, and endlessly fascinating and complex. There are multiple underground ruins alluding to ancient magic and long-forgotten deaths. There are hints in the government district that everyone from nobility to turnip farmers regularly drown in ineffective bureaucracy. The Shadow Thieves, the Cowled Wizards, the noble families, and the Radiant Heart, and the Circus, all of them fill out the middle ranks of a squabbling, rule-breaking, living populace. Party members have ties to everyone from peasants, to nobility, to Cambions from Sigil. And there are strange individuals everywhere, spies and liars and con artists and performers and collectors and people who will only sell me turnips. I just finished a quest where three young boys asked me to buy them swords and I bought them a keg of ale instead. It was awesome.

Anyway, this actually segues into something else that’s interesting for me - Dragon Age 2 was all set to tackle the coolest thing that emerged, quite organically, in BG2 - the fact that of all the characters in the game, Athkatla is the most interesting. Playing it, you begin to understand why the quests are so similar between it and DA2. Exploring things like lost ruins, or the different rewards, invitations and behaviours of different organizations, or serial killers and justice systems, or problems with merchants, or entertainment venues like theatres and circuses, or religious conflicts - those are all quests that deeply engage one in the character of a place. Quite frankly, I like that better than hopping town-to-town and solving problems as you pass, which is the DA:O/DA:I model. It’s far too easy to seem random that way (what did those werewolves in DA:O ever amount to?). And conversely, it’s also why things like the party in Orlais are the most exciting things in those games: they offer you glimpses into the operation of society, into how the fantasy world truly works from the crowns to the cobblestones. BG2 is made of that experience of depth, and DA2 was prepared to be that but more. 

In certain places, you can see how DA2 fixed the very, very few problems BG2 actually had (alongside a decade of technological development, of course.) The rivalry/friendship system in DA2 is a huge improvement on the reputation/alignment system of BG2. I am effective as shit at solving problems so why does Edwin grouse at me just because I’m nice? Moreover, why do I have to choose between mega-discounts and the game’s best wizard? I much prefer the idea of friendship/rivalry, because real people can respect and disagree with you, and (although this might just be because I have his romance mod installed *ahem*) the DA2-esque Rivalry relationship seems to better characterize how Edwin thinks of me anyway. And while I’m on my soapbox, why’d they take that system away from Inquisition? Rivalry was certainly would have given me a better time with Vivienne, whom I desperately wanted to love but couldn’t because I could never get her approval high enough to offer me any quests. Heck, at least Edwin will still get Nether Scroll’d even if he constantly complains about me rescuing kittens.

Moreover, before its flawed execution, the skeleton of DA2 is far more ambitious and intriguing than BG2′s. BG2 is still a defeat-the-evil wizard game, and it stumbled across the story-of-a-city model largely by accident (one of the most graceful stumbles I’ve ever seen, that’s for sure). I assume (though correct me if I’m wrong) that I’ll still be kickin’ Irenicus’s unsympathetic ass as an endgame (unless he goes Sephiroth Supernova or has an evil boss or something). DA2’s conflicts with the qunari, and especially the conflict between the mages and the templars, turned the city into DA2′s most interesting character and its primary villain, which is the logical, brilliant extenstion of what BG2 accomplished. Meredith, Anders and Orsino - the trifecta of DA2’s endgame catalysts - were all emblematic of an impossible social and political conflict, born out of everything Kirkwall was over the span of a decade. Almost every little plotline in DA2 gives you something new to think about in terms of law, order, magic and rule in Kirkwall, and the finale was a culmination of that. It was a narrative waterfall into which the stream of every sidequest fed. It’s a brilliant structure - but it failed to spark the love its narratively inferior predecessor did, and certainly failed to achieve the quality of BG2.

And it’s only because Kirkwall is no Athkatla. It could have been, but it wasn’t. It felt emptier, and thinner, less populated and less complex, even though all the bones were there. This was largely because of those repeated dungeons - there’s something new in every corner in BG2, and the exploration of the wilderness outside the city is more extended, and every room is different, whereas the dungeons in DA2 wear out their welcome before the first act is over. It’s immensely frustrating, because Dragon Age 2 was so close to being BG2 but better. And there are things (particularly that friendship/rivalry thing) that are marks of improvement and reflection borne of lessons learned from BG2 and DA:O. It makes DA2 even more of a tragedy than it already was. Suffice to say I love both these games a lot, and I am indeed recommending that anybody whose curiosity has been piqued immediately download BG2 from gog.com (I hear there’s a bear companion in the Enhanced Edition. His name is Wilson).

But if I might replace the soapbox a second, I think the biggest tragedy of all of this was that Bioware didn’t try again. For all that Dragon Age 2 felt unfinished and unfocused, it was nowhere near as soulless and directionless as Dragon Age Inquisition, at least for me. Inquisition functioned fine, and it’s not a “bad” game by any quantifiable metric, but I could not be asked to play it more than once. I know people like it, and there are things about it to like - from my own perspective, I loved the fancy-party sequence, and there have been few companions in any game as interesting to me as Blackwall (is that a weird choice? I don’t know, I’m not really In This Fandom). But I did not care about my Inquisitor the way I cared about Hawke. I didn’t care about something as indistinct as The Inquisition the way I cared about Kirkwall, as underdeveloped as it was. I admired DA:II’s aspirations; I do not admire Inquisition’s attempt to be Skyrim when that’s not what we come to Bioware for. I don’t want Bioware to make Skyrim, I want Bioware to try BG2/DA2 again. It could be so phenomenal if they pulled it off.

[entergamingxp]

Baldur’s Gate 3 – 5 Takeaways from the Gameplay Panel

March 4, 2020 8:00 AM EST

From flaming arrows to boots of godly might, here are 5 of Scott’s takeaways from the PAX East gameplay reveal for Baldur’s Gate 3.

Larian Studios has finally peeled back the curtain on the gameplay of their upcoming opus, Baldur’s Gate 3. Hosting a panel at PAX East, fans slowly shuffled into the large room, anxiously waiting to sink their teeth into the newest entry of this fabled franchise. Over an hour later, I left that panel, and damn it, I need this game now. Now that I’ve had a little time to sit and think about what I saw, here are five of my main takeaways.

1) The interest in Baldur’s Gate 3 spans generations of players

I had a couple of hours to kill waiting in line to enter the panel. Looking around, I was surprised to see just how wide of range the attendee’s ages were! Baldur’s Gate first released back in 1998; it is Bioware’s first game using the Infinity Engine, a platform that would become synonymous with isometric D&D-inspired games for years to come.

As such, the people that were waiting in line ranged from young to older middle-aged players. It was great to see these two groups talking and sharing stories of their own unique adventures. Folks, Dungeons & Dragons is one of the few things Gen X, Y, Z, and Millenial players can all talk about and relate to.

2) The game is very much in a pre-alpha state

As much as I want this game to be out tomorrow, where the state the game was during in the demo, that release day is still a long way out. The vertical slice of gameplay saw was taken from a very early part of the game. Early on, we were informed that even the save system wasn’t functional yet. If he died, the demo would have to start over; a scenario we got to witness first hand after, well, he died.

The reveal actually ended with the game glitching out. I couldn’t quite tell if it was an infinite loop of the characters taking turns back and forth, or entering and exiting combat. Either way, it made for a lovely booming sound on the speakers.

All this being said, I’m perfectly 100% fine with it. This game never promised to be out soon. The crowd was still jovial and ate up all the silly occurrences we were witnessing. Reveals like this are great peeks behind the curtain of game development that we don’t get to see all that often. Larian knows how to make quality games; I believe in them and you should too. We just need to have patience and we will be rewarded handsomely!

3) The lighting and visuals are beautiful

Hooooo-boy does this game look pretty. As I sat in my chair, I couldn’t help but be blown away with the visuals. The lighting of a particular note was impressive. Most of the demo took place around a landscape dotted with trees and mountains ruins. Sunbeams shine through the trees and shadows were cast all over. The shadows cast around the environment aren’t just for looks either, as they play into how successful your sneaking can be.

Cool as that is, a very mundane moment left an especially strong imprint on me. While exploring some ruins, the main character came across a tome. Upon opening it, a trap sprung, spewing slippery oil all over the area and activating flaming arrow turrets hidden in the walls. As each of the six or so arrows shot from within their secret enclosures, they cast light as they went from one side of the room to the other. Each arrow’s flame was reflecting on the greasy floor, along the stone pillars near you, and the objects that are strewn around the room.

While the fire arrows on their own are impressive looking, it makes me more excited to see how well reflections are used. In a game that will no doubt be full of impressive large-scale magic spells, I can only imagine bolts of crackling lighting illuminating dark caves as they strike their targets. That thought makes me giddy with excitement.

Baldur’s Gate 3 was clearly going to look better than the previous title. I just wasn’t expecting it would look as good as it does. Also, as mentioned in the previous point, it could look even better since we are still a long way out from the games actual release.

4) Baldur’s Gate 3 a melding of Divinity and Dungeon and Dragons mechanics

To be completely open with you fine readers, I have not yet played either of the Divinity: Original Sin titles yet. I own them, I just haven’t had time to play them. However, I do play in a bi-weekly D&D campaign.

Watching gameplay, there was a lot that pulled directly from the tabletop. Skills, spells, stats, races, and classes are straight out of the books. The flow of combat turns, and bonus actions during gameplay are much more Larian-style. It seems to work well, and nothing about what I saw gave me pause or worried me that it was diverging too far from the Baldur’s Gate style fans love. I believe introducing longtime Baldur’s Gate players with Larian’s style and quality of games will only grow both communities.

5) Boots are OP

One of the fun features they flaunted was the fact that you are able to the hurl most items from your inventory. You can hurl them straight at an enemy’s face, killing them.

During an especially harrowing encounter, our hero’s bow continued to miss. Shot after shot, each one, which supposedly had a 90% chance to hit, missed. What didn’t miss, however, was trusty Boots. Yes, a mythic pair of generic brown boots flew through the air. Carried on the wings of an angel, straight and true, directly hit the head of the menacing bug in the distance crushing its skull, and sending it to the afterlife.

It was unfortunate that there were more bugs and our hero was fresh out of boots. The bugs proceeded to kill the party, which caused the demo to restart. The crowd got a kick out of it though, and that’s what matters.  I can’t wait to see “Boots Only” speedruns of this game when it comes out.

Most likely, we are still far off from even finding out when we will get the final release of Baldur’s Gate 3. We do know that players will be able to try out an early-access build later this summer. But if Fortnite has taught us anything, early access can last a long time.

Personally, I almost wish Larian would forgo the early access release altogether. I would rather play it when it’s all done, polished, and right where they want it. Larian has proven that they are damn good makers of RPGs. We don’t need an early access build. I say this knowing full well I will get it and play the crap out of it because DAMN I want this game bad.

Regardless, seeing the gameplay reveal with a room packed with fans was a treat. I went in excited for Baldur’s Gate 3 and left with a rabid hunger for it. I’m anxious to see what new reveals we get next, but I sure hope it involves skills devoted to boot-throwing.

March 4, 2020 8:00 AM EST

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/03/baldurs-gate-3-5-takeaways-from-the-gameplay-panel/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=baldurs-gate-3-5-takeaways-from-the-gameplay-panel