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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9681966" data-attributes="member: 18">That's an issue with Larian's games generally, and comes directly from it being Swen Vincke's attitude, essentially, but I feel like you're overstating it as an issue with BG3.BG3 supports playing good very well. It is true that Durge was originally the only way to have a "custom" PC (but this changed before the game even hit Early Access!), but let's be real, not only were there also six origin characters who you could also play as, approximately half of whom are "Good" if played according to their personalities (Karlach, Wyll, Gale), but playing Durge as good (i.e. "redeemed Durge") is probably the best way to play BG3, and frankly, is not at all dissimilar to the plot of BG1 and BG2, where you are Bhaalspawn.The idea that playing good is "boring" and "hollow" is pretty silly imho and certainly is pure opinion of the most "everyone's got one" kind. There's no lack of "good" content, there's no lack of "good" endings (indeed, it was the "evil" endings that they had to patch in later). So this strikes me as projection of opinion more than fact of game design.To be clear, I was majorly concerned about this precise issue, based on DOS1/2. I worried that that BG3 would be another crapsack world deal with deeply hateable characters, and at the very start of Early Access (I didn't buy BG3 EA because of this, I got gifted it, note), it actually was kind of like that - the companions were generally pretty annoying (especially Shadowheart), and there a number of situations which only had negative/grimdark resolutions.Swen defended this by saying they were only having the more "evil" companions in at first, but in retrospect that clearly wasn't true given Wyll and Gale were there, and Minthara wasn't.There was immediate backlash on the BG3 forums, subreddit and Discord though, and Larian started backpedalling pretty rapidly. The main complaint was "This is the Forgotten Realms, and this is D&D, we should be allowed to be good guys/heroes". And to Larian's credit, they did actually change things a lot. They toned down how jerky all the companions were (Shadowheart was the last to be fixed), and they added solution to situations weren't lose/lose-type grimdark deals, and indeed with one situation, they ended up removing it entirely, because it was just too tonally weird too early on. What we got in the end is a very far cry from DOS2, it's not at all the same deal.Now, it is worth noting Swen has some... opinions... which may influence future games:1) As noted, he's fascinated by "evil" or "dark background" characters. But he's not in charge of the writing or story of future games. So how relevant this is, I'm not sure.2) At the release date of BG3, Swen thought DOS2 had "better" combat gameplay. I think this is an astonishing position, given that DOS2's combat is hugely criticised as being weird, counterintuitive, and all about slathering the entire battlefield in various effects rather than doing anything tactical/interesting, but again, Swen doesn't do the gameplay design, merely approves it, and it seems like he listens to people.3) At the release date of BG3, Swen thought DOS2's setting, Rivellon, was a "better" setting than the Forgotten Realms. Obviously that's a matter of taste - both are painfully generic fantasy settings - the FR is actually slightly less generic. Rivellon is a <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrapsackWorld" target="_blank">crapsack world</a> (as per the trope), which somehow makes it even more generic. Fortunately, Swen confirmed that DOS3 is not one of the games they were considering/working on post-BG3 and "Excalibur" the game they seem to be working on now is apparently an original IP (or so he implied)So I think it's quite likely any future is going be somewhat dark - but an awful lot of good CRPGs are fairly dark, so I don't think it's a big concern. I strongly suspect they've learned from BG3 that people don't want horrible characters and deeply depressing settings, even if they want somewhat messy ones.</blockquote>

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