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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9058380" data-attributes="member: 18">What the hell? How would that even work?I've never said that. You're confusing me with someone else or very, very badly misremembering.I played BG1 and finished it (my review is still up on a certain site), and I was rather unimpressed with it because I'd just played Fallout 2. I also completed BG2 though I'm not sure I ever finished the expansion fully. BG2 was wildly more impressive than BG1, and an actually good game.There's no reason to make it rocky and arid-looking to do that though - you can have that sort of terrain in wetter regions, and with less exposed rock.Rather I think think their art team was used to it, and just approached it that way without even looking into what the BG region was actually like. Because the starting area of DOS2 is nigh-identical - rocky, arid, Mediterranean-looking terrain. And they made a lot of other similar missteps in early development - the tone was very dark, very grey, exactly like DOS2. The characters were universally complete wankers, exactly like DOS2. The options you had were 100% morally grey bollocks. Basically is seems like they had little initial regard for the FR and its lore, and absolutely none for D&D and how that tone differed from the DOS games.But they got pushed back so hard and so immediately on that did change, and now it's much closer to what you'd expect from something set in the FR, albeit with some of the residual sort of unnecessary bleakness and often-unfunny "black humour" characteristic of Larian (again though, a lot funnier than it was in the DOS games, esp. as it's not basically going through a translator and was "funny in French/Flemish" but utterly humourless in English like a lot of DOS1).It's a totally different tone to BG1/2, which were sort of weirdly almost soap-opera-y or Telenovela-ish at times, with all these overwrought high-strung characters bickering and dramatic reveals about parentage or trauma and so on. There's some bickering and of course reveals, but they're done very differently, and weirdly seem much more, well, British - everyone is more reserved and less "snarky" (the largely British VAs change the tone a bit too).Agree. Owlcat does the same bickering tone and characters who make you want to say "Don't make me come back there!" or "I'll turn this party around!" as BG1/2. Everyone is incredibly high-strung. Even the chillest party member in an Owlcat game is minutes away from a tantrum. But despite horrific things happening they generally have a fairly positive tone. Whereas in DOS1/2 Larian had companions who were all terrible people, everything was morally grey to the point of accidental self-parody, and yeah tons of black humour, much of which fell flat. DOS1 also features a sort of side-order of unexamined misogyny (weirdly common in eurogames) and general heartlessness/lack of empathy that made it feel kind of sociopathic even by CRPG standards. But Larian have continually improved - particularly as they hired more and more writers (and Swen got involved with the story less and less), and specifically writers who were primary English speakers (they've got a big writing team in Ireland IIRC) - there's even a significant difference between release DOS2 and EE DOS2, because they re-wrote virtually the entire script. That combined with the pushback on their most stereotypical elements has changed BG3 (at least in Act 1) significantly for the better.</blockquote>

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