EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
Here's the link for the renders in question. As I said then, I actually find them quite handsome, and since I'm sure you know that I'm a dragonborn fanboy, I hope that carries at least a little weight, hah.I must have missed the earlier post - that is good to hear.
Someone who's been working on a customization-expander mod (which you have taught me the rather significant need for!) found them. They were fishing around inside the files for the most recent update ("patch 8" which came out in...July, I think?) We're due to get the next Early Access update sometime soon, as an official tweet from Dec 7 claimed that "patch 9" would be arriving Soon™.
The dialogue lines were discovered by someone who edited their save file so that, despite being graphically human, their character had the dragonborn (or half-orc) tag, activating voice lines from various NPCs. One was actually quite interesting, the aforementioned "blood of dragons flows in your veins" stuff, coming from the Githyanki party member discussing Vlaakith's red dragons gifted "from Tiamat herself." The overall "my queen has red dragon servants!" is a universal thing, but the NPC has different responses to a dragonborn who inquires--and even mentions that the githyanki might consider arranging a similarly rewarding exchange with the PC as the one they have with the red dragons. Between the two, I'm feeling cautiously optimistic, whereas I had been pretty bummed before at the total lack of info.
I think I may have spoken unclearly. The person I was speaking to had said the following.I mean, this is kind of true, but it's also kind of not true.
The specific argument being: Multiple other games have made direct (or as close as possible to direct) translations of 5e rules to video game mechanics, and have done so successfully both in terms of fidelity to the TTRPG rules and in terms of being a successful gaming product. As you can see from the other phrasing ("why on earth have they made it into DOS2 with a D&D skin?"), their argument is clearly painting this as a situation where multiple video games have been made by directly and simply implementing 5e's own rules as-is, such that it would be a major time and resource savings to just do things this way, and should be something Larian would already know well. Hence, their choice to not do this is strange, bordering on ridiculous, unless some ulterior motive applies.But I really don't get Larian. As we've seen in other games, 5e is a straightforward system with mechanics that can translate well to video game format. So with the BG franchise bagged, why on earth have they made it into DOS2 with a D&D skin? Just build from scratch on the simple 5e mechanics with lots and lots of char choices, and spend the resources on a really long and involved story that can carry the BG heritage.
My response is...none of the above is true. There's been one game that did this, and while it was a fair success it has its own wrinkles (and has a widely-panned story.) Further, that one game has plenty of issues that might have turned Larian off from following that pattern. Yet further, that game only started getting funding after BG3 was announced, not before, meaning Larian had no evidence that such an approach was worthwhile anyway. Hence I said there is no widespread precedent, as strongly implied by the original message. Larian made a smart choice for its resources and what products existed at the time, and did not suddenly change directions halfway through development simply because one single product did things a different way.
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