Great set of posts. I agree with your assessment of the heavy-handed 'relationship' dynamics of the game, but I don't think it's at all unique to BG3. Almost every big Western RPG in recent memory has a roster of DTFs that you can pick your favored mate from, and most of the time it's even less well written. Your point about wish fulfillment is right on the money - we don't really have a big Dating Sim culture in western gaming, but the market is still there, and it's mostly occupied by big budget RPGs. Players want to 'ship' themselves with their favorite character, and not only is that a major feature that drives sales, it also allows developers to, how should I put this, performatively include cultural earmarks that help those players allow themselves to be drawn in. Sex-positivity in general is very much a part of the modern role-playing scene, not just in videogames, and making sure people know you can, idk, fuck a werebear and a vampire isn't just about getting shock clicks. It's an important signifier that, yes, if you read a lot of bad novels about fucking werewolves and vampires, you're not going to be too put off by what goes on.
That's not to say it's all bad, but I do think BG3 falls into some traps, especially with the way the game revolves entirely around the Origin characters. Because they put so much genuine care and craft into fleshing out a handful of really compelling characters, they skimped on something I deeply missed from earlier games - somewhat disposable NPCs. Characters who you'd meet, toss a longsword to, have a few drinks with, and then walk away from when they got turned into a thin wet smear by a fire arrow crit. In BG3 everyone's either a husk, made to be the puppet through which the player imposes themselves on the world, or they're a special unique Chosen One with hundreds of pages of dialogue and dozens of major branches and different haircuts and since you MUST be able to bang every single one of them no matter who 'you' are, they ALL have to come on to you at some point. Because, for the reason I hinted at earlier... it'd be a little off-putting if YOU were walking up and saying 'nice shoes...' to a sexual assault victim.
Which leads me to the one thing I really want to push back on - Gale is an absolute treat. You don't deserve him. When I realized my entire party was taking turns trying to yank Wyll's crank at the end of chapter 1 [yes, I picked an Origin character to play as, which I have been informed outs me as some kind of sociopath who didn't realize I was supposed to make a self-insert so I could watch these cutscenes one-handed] I decided right then and there that I wanted to romance Gale, because he was the funniest of the main characters, and I thought his romance would be funny. And to my amazement it took seemingly AGES to get to a gay sex scene! People were talking about this game like it was non-stop gay sex, and I was shocked I made it into Chapter 2 without any. But it all paid off in the end - Gale's gay sex on the Astral Plane cutscene might genuinely be one of the funniest things I've ever seen in a game, and still haunts me to this day. Sometimes I'm just standing in front of the cashier at the grocery store, or sitting in traffic, or frying an egg, and I'll remember Wyll and Gale having gay sex on the Astral Plane and start chortling to myself.
In the end, I think it's important to point out that, by and large, Larian did a fantastic job, they just missed a few steps. The fact that you can just blow off or outright murder even the Origin characters, the ones who had hundreds of man-hours poured into their writing, modeling, voice acting, plotting, the ones I wouldn't be surprised at multiple developers considering 'their babies,' is a testament that they know deep down there's a bigger draw in roleplaying than the allure of having a harem of fantasy race sex partners. But they still could've done a better job. It's not something that I think ruins the game, but it plausibly and justifiably could ruin some people's impression of the game. Especially now, when the critical space for almost all media seems to be split into extremes of carrying infinite water for things that don't really deserve it, or putting the torch to decent work that has that one impurity you will not abide.
And finally, I found the inventory to be miserable, but ironically less so than the first two games - I have always suffered from pack-rat syndrome, and needing to balance out not just the total weight of all the potions I'll never drink and weapons I'll never sell or wield but also dealing with a very low number of 'slots' in BG1 and 2 probably soaked more of my time than the combat in either. The real problem with BG3's inventory isn't so much that it's bad UI, I think it's that there's just SO much thrown at you and no real mechanism or incentive to thin your options down. By the end of Chapter 1 every character has like 30 different consumables they can tap in any given encounter and your eyes are going to go crossed just looking at your innate abilities as options before you even get to your inventory. Too much of a good thing.
Thanks for reading! I now feel like I have to go and youtube Gale's Astral Plane sex. Tbh he is my least favourite by a pretty big margin, I do agree that he is very funny and fantastically performed, certainly one of the game's best comic performances (although to be fair they are all fantastic, it's hard to single out individual actors or characters because they're all so brilliantly played). I just cannot stand a god complex, and Gale is pure that. At least he isn't pro being a dick all the time in the way that Astarion is, Gale likes helping people and is actually grateful for your support, until he goes all Boromir in Act 3. I'd also like him more if I didn't feel he was a few months out from getting hit with a sexual misconduct charge in his professor ending.
But yeah, the game is wonderful in a thousand different ways, I think it will be a long time before any RPG comes close to surpassing it. Even the romance can be good, it's just the setup (and some of the weird optional ancillary shit) that's clunky.
And yeah, the inventory is better than the first two games, which are torture in that regard. I revisited BG2 recently and gosh, it's really bad, even after you get containers to manage it.
The moment the game actually won me over was the first time Gale died and I got to see his "so you've just seen me die" canned voice mail ghost and was laughing the entire time because of how perfectly in-character that is for a wizard in the Forgotten Realms setting.
Great set of posts. I agree with your assessment of the heavy-handed 'relationship' dynamics of the game, but I don't think it's at all unique to BG3. Almost every big Western RPG in recent memory has a roster of DTFs that you can pick your favored mate from, and most of the time it's even less well written. Your point about wish fulfillment is right on the money - we don't really have a big Dating Sim culture in western gaming, but the market is still there, and it's mostly occupied by big budget RPGs. Players want to 'ship' themselves with their favorite character, and not only is that a major feature that drives sales, it also allows developers to, how should I put this, performatively include cultural earmarks that help those players allow themselves to be drawn in. Sex-positivity in general is very much a part of the modern role-playing scene, not just in videogames, and making sure people know you can, idk, fuck a werebear and a vampire isn't just about getting shock clicks. It's an important signifier that, yes, if you read a lot of bad novels about fucking werewolves and vampires, you're not going to be too put off by what goes on.
That's not to say it's all bad, but I do think BG3 falls into some traps, especially with the way the game revolves entirely around the Origin characters. Because they put so much genuine care and craft into fleshing out a handful of really compelling characters, they skimped on something I deeply missed from earlier games - somewhat disposable NPCs. Characters who you'd meet, toss a longsword to, have a few drinks with, and then walk away from when they got turned into a thin wet smear by a fire arrow crit. In BG3 everyone's either a husk, made to be the puppet through which the player imposes themselves on the world, or they're a special unique Chosen One with hundreds of pages of dialogue and dozens of major branches and different haircuts and since you MUST be able to bang every single one of them no matter who 'you' are, they ALL have to come on to you at some point. Because, for the reason I hinted at earlier... it'd be a little off-putting if YOU were walking up and saying 'nice shoes...' to a sexual assault victim.
Which leads me to the one thing I really want to push back on - Gale is an absolute treat. You don't deserve him. When I realized my entire party was taking turns trying to yank Wyll's crank at the end of chapter 1 [yes, I picked an Origin character to play as, which I have been informed outs me as some kind of sociopath who didn't realize I was supposed to make a self-insert so I could watch these cutscenes one-handed] I decided right then and there that I wanted to romance Gale, because he was the funniest of the main characters, and I thought his romance would be funny. And to my amazement it took seemingly AGES to get to a gay sex scene! People were talking about this game like it was non-stop gay sex, and I was shocked I made it into Chapter 2 without any. But it all paid off in the end - Gale's gay sex on the Astral Plane cutscene might genuinely be one of the funniest things I've ever seen in a game, and still haunts me to this day. Sometimes I'm just standing in front of the cashier at the grocery store, or sitting in traffic, or frying an egg, and I'll remember Wyll and Gale having gay sex on the Astral Plane and start chortling to myself.
In the end, I think it's important to point out that, by and large, Larian did a fantastic job, they just missed a few steps. The fact that you can just blow off or outright murder even the Origin characters, the ones who had hundreds of man-hours poured into their writing, modeling, voice acting, plotting, the ones I wouldn't be surprised at multiple developers considering 'their babies,' is a testament that they know deep down there's a bigger draw in roleplaying than the allure of having a harem of fantasy race sex partners. But they still could've done a better job. It's not something that I think ruins the game, but it plausibly and justifiably could ruin some people's impression of the game. Especially now, when the critical space for almost all media seems to be split into extremes of carrying infinite water for things that don't really deserve it, or putting the torch to decent work that has that one impurity you will not abide.
And finally, I found the inventory to be miserable, but ironically less so than the first two games - I have always suffered from pack-rat syndrome, and needing to balance out not just the total weight of all the potions I'll never drink and weapons I'll never sell or wield but also dealing with a very low number of 'slots' in BG1 and 2 probably soaked more of my time than the combat in either. The real problem with BG3's inventory isn't so much that it's bad UI, I think it's that there's just SO much thrown at you and no real mechanism or incentive to thin your options down. By the end of Chapter 1 every character has like 30 different consumables they can tap in any given encounter and your eyes are going to go crossed just looking at your innate abilities as options before you even get to your inventory. Too much of a good thing.
Thanks for reading! I now feel like I have to go and youtube Gale's Astral Plane sex. Tbh he is my least favourite by a pretty big margin, I do agree that he is very funny and fantastically performed, certainly one of the game's best comic performances (although to be fair they are all fantastic, it's hard to single out individual actors or characters because they're all so brilliantly played). I just cannot stand a god complex, and Gale is pure that. At least he isn't pro being a dick all the time in the way that Astarion is, Gale likes helping people and is actually grateful for your support, until he goes all Boromir in Act 3. I'd also like him more if I didn't feel he was a few months out from getting hit with a sexual misconduct charge in his professor ending.
But yeah, the game is wonderful in a thousand different ways, I think it will be a long time before any RPG comes close to surpassing it. Even the romance can be good, it's just the setup (and some of the weird optional ancillary shit) that's clunky.
And yeah, the inventory is better than the first two games, which are torture in that regard. I revisited BG2 recently and gosh, it's really bad, even after you get containers to manage it.
The moment the game actually won me over was the first time Gale died and I got to see his "so you've just seen me die" canned voice mail ghost and was laughing the entire time because of how perfectly in-character that is for a wizard in the Forgotten Realms setting.