I mean, it definitely helps. The production quality is insane. But the fact that the choices (or mistakes) have actual real impacts on the game going forward are as big as far as I’m concerned. I ended up with my hand being forced into combat early that made an encounter with a potential party member immediately hostile. That sucks, especially since I wasn’t trying to do what happened in the earlier encounter. But in terms of a world feeling alive, having it actually react to what you do is pretty damn significant (unless “you’re small and irrelevant” is intentional).
It’s time developers come to grips with the fact that making choices matter is what makes it a successful game. I’m tired of storylines that don’t make any sense except to give you a world to kill people in. Sorry folks, lore is important and that takes writers.
Stop treating them like afterthoughts.
It definitely depends on the game, I’m perfectly happy with a game that has a story to tell, and tells it well. Not everything needs to have branching options and 50+ hour playtime. Some of the best stories I’ve played are short and railroady, WaW and BO1 campaing’s are fantastically interesting and you don’t make a single choice in them.
There’s plenty of great games that give you fuck all in terms of real choices that impact anything. What matters is that the gameplay supports the story, and vice versa. The problem is when developers treat one or the other as an afterthought. If you have a game where the story is an afterthought, it’s going to feel like the campaign of a fighting game, where everything is just cut scenes between the actual gameplay. If you write a story, but the gameplay isn’t really there, it feels like a Netflix special that you’re stuck playing to see the plot.
I personally am perfectly happy with a game that’s all about mechanics and gameplay.
But the extremely rare game that actually is well written is nice to see.
I would say if it is all about the gameplay, like Serious Sam or Doom, then the story doesn’t need to be that important and dexisions don’t need to matter. But if the story is front and center, like Baldur’s Gate and most similar RPGs, the story and how choices impact the story need to be well done so it doesn’t feel on rails and replaying it is enjoyable.
It gets super confusing when you do stuff in the wrong order though. Missing a clue because you didn’t read the right book or something but then randomly finding the end of the quest and everyone is talking like we know all about it.
You also miss out on Minthara? I’ve been hearing she’s great but I merced her ass
Funny, it all feels very dead to me - but then I guess that is what the fireball spell does…
And yet I can’t help thinking that a lot of the extreme side character content could have been aided significantly by AI.
The main 80% of the voice acting is outstanding.
But particularly in Act 3 there’s something disconcerting about every other pedestrian you can talk to who spouts a quip using roughly the same voice with mediocre delivery.
It’s a perfect use case for the AI voice tech available today. The main parts and actual side characters should still have been bespoke acting and mocap, but the random pedestrian in the city might have been notably improved with using generated voices to broaden the variety.
BG3 has been very strong evidence to me that hybrid approaches integrating AI for filling in background content are going to be the standard by the end of the current console generation.
