Since I have a ludicrous number of real-life issues going on that mitigate against me writing anything that requires effort or commitment right now, I'm going to grab onto a comment of Tipa's, spin five hundred words out of it and call it a post. I know. We all expected more but sometimes life disappoints
Here's what Tipa said, talking about my complaints about just how damn big Baldur's Gate 3 is:
"I really think this is not a game for completionists. You're not supposed to see everything and do every quest. It encourages quick but meandering playthroughs; two or three times and each time lots of new things."
I think that's good advice for a gamer but it doesn't really address the issues for anyone who's chosen to roleplay their character, even very lightly. And BG3 is, after all, a D&D game. Roleplaying is kind of the point, isn't it?
Like a lot of people, I generally try to avoid playing Evil characters. I also steer clear of playing jerks, blowhards, pompous asses and selfish gits. Mostly what I play are either trippy cartoonish characters for whom everything is one big gosh-wow life experience or pollyannish do-gooders who trek around the map like the Littlest Hobo on steroids.
Either approach means that if someone asks me to do something that doesn't sound positively sociopathic, the chances are that I'll do it. Or agree to, at least. It's a particular issue in BG3 because so many of the requests are so plausible.
Because I'm also anything but a completionist, not all the promises I blithely make get kept. I don't intentionally break them, I just get distracted and forget I made them. In every RPG I've ever played, on or offline, my quest journal is usually stuffed so full I have to delete unfinished quests just so I can keep adding new ones. Which I do.
That never bothers me as a player. I don't have any issues with not finishing quests or leaving them hanging. I don't often care how things turn out. Very few stories in RPGs are sufficiently interesting for not knowing the ending to feel like it's going to be a problem.
As a character, though, I do sometimes feel a degree of commitment. It's often when I come to make space in the Journal that I'm reminded of promises I made and that's when I feel like maybe I should go do something about them.
The upshot is that in a game like BG3, where there are what seems like literally hundreds of NPCs asking me to do things for them, many of whom, for a change, could make a fairly convincing argument that they couldn't do those things for themselves, it's more than averagely likely that at some point I'm going to start feeling the pressure.
I mentioned in another post that almost all dialogs do have some kind of "Get lost, pal. I have better things to do than fix your dumb problems" option. I'm sure that works beautifully for people who love roleplaying bastards but it clearly isn't going to do much for me. Later in the game there may also be a few "I'd really love to help but I'm kind of busy saving the world right now" answers, which is obviously an improvement but, honestly, still feels much too rude (And self-aggrandizing.) for me to be comfortable saying it.
The inevitable result is that I agree to everything anyone asks me, then start trying to do it until I meet another NPC who asks me to do something else and I switch tracks to do that instead. This happens over and over again and pretty much describes my progress through all RPGs.
BG3 does have the advantage that many apparently unrelated questlines end up being connected after all, so dotting about between them doesn't always mean nothing's getting done. On the other hand, some of the interactions are so abstruse and unforeseeable that, when you run into one of those, it feels like a real bait&switch.
The prime example of that in my playthrough so far has been Korlach's clockwork heart. She's one of the numerous companions I have never invited to come adventuring with me but who hangs around in my camp anyway. All of them seem to think being a camp-follower means I have to fix their entire lives and of course I'm far too polite to tell them to sod off so I always promise to do my best.
As an aside, all my three regular party-members love me. Well, two of them absolutely worship me and the third is only lukewarm because I refused to sleep with her, twice. Apparently the one thing every character I play has no issues saying a firm "No" to is any kind of sexual relationship.
Other than that, though, she loves me too, and the reason they all think I'm so goddamn wonderful is because I agree with everything they say and promise to do everything they want. And since they're always with me, unlike the NPCs who watch me walk away, never to return, those are the promises I actually keep.
I fully intended to keep my promise to Korlach and find her a mechanic to fix her malfunctioning pump but before I even got going on that, there was a scripted incident that I'm fairly sure I couldn't do anything about and after the smoke cleared, the one person who could do the repairs was dead. I spent a while googling to see if there was any alternative but apparently this guy is literally the only smith in the whole of sodding Faerun capable of doing the job.
Which is obviously bollocks and bad writing. I imagine any competent Dwarven forge could have done the work for a very reasonable fee, not to mention about a gazillion other crafts-persons or magic-users, not to mention the infinity of clerics that could have brought the guy I needed back from the dead. But no. Get that sequence in the wrong order and you've had it.
Again, fine. Actions have consequences and all that. Win some, lose some. All the cliches. The thing is, if you have no real idea which quests are simple, which are complex and which have critical decision points, it's hard-to-impossible to triage them for efficiency or even sanity.
That's not a problem for me, either, generally. As I've said, what I mostly do is quite similar to what Tipa's suggesting. I meander through the plot, wandering back and forth across the landscape, picking up quests and dropping them again, only finishing any of them by chance. And for fifty or sixty hours, that's a lot fun.
I guess you could set some rules on what sort of quests you were willing to take. No helping refugees. No helping devils. No helping rude people.
Or on how many - only speak to a couple of NPCs in each new area, for example, and completely snub the rest. Then, on your next playthrough, you could swap those rules around. You'd probably always have to hit certain nodal points in the main plot but I'm sure they can all be approached in various ways.
Even if that did indeed give you several playthroughs that felt quite different, though, it does nothing to address that awkward roleplaying problem. You'd either be roleplaying some kind of opinionated bigot, only willing to help those who "deserved" it or some spell-slinging time-and-motion inspector, willing to help but only according to a quota system.
If I'm finding this problematic, how must genuine completionists be feeling? Hard to imagine, since it's an alien mindset for me. It seems like they'd find it as abrasive as sand in a bathing costume but who knows? Maybe they love it. Maybe having a hundred and fifty hours of gameplay before they get every "i" dotted is the dream. Certainly, the game seems to be almost universally adored so I guess it must be.
BG3 is just an extreme example of the problem, anyway. I think AgingGamer is onto something when he comments that "80+ hours often seems too big". That's where I've felt the ennui set in before and it's happening again here, although I'd say things generally begin to feel stale after 60 hours.
There always comes a time when I just want to be done with the damn thing. That's when I realize I'm not even thinking about the quests any more, just slogging through them without taking in much of the detail.
I hit that point in BG3 at start of the weekend. I haven't played for a couple of days, mostly for unrelated reasons. The longer I'm away, the less I feel like going back, although I'm not yet so fed up with it I'm going to quit altogether. I'll keep picking away at it but, as often happens with MMORPGs, it's starting to feel more like a habit than a pleasure. (It's worth pointing out that MMOs seem to manage to delay this sort of reaction for orders of magnitude longer than other genres, which presumably is why developers keep insisting on making more of them...)
As for playing Baldur's Gate 3 more than once. Well, maybe in a few years.
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