Babble about the writing of BG3

[olivermoss]

Bit of a ramble on BG3's writing because Neil made an observation on the story structure that I really like. Sex isn't the goal of the relationships in the game, it's the starting point. The romance is about how do they feel about each other after, what direction does the relationship go, what even is the character's relationship to sex, etc.

This is interesting to me because so many stories and standard ideas about story structure are 'you bone, you're done'. Will they, wont they? Well, they did so move onto the next. Books I've read on writing have been like 'once they are together, end ASAP'. An overwhelming amount of TV and movies follow that logic. It's nice to see such a strong break from that idea.

There is a common complaint about how gory the prologue is. I think this is by design and very good design. It's calibrating expectations. In some games, or shows, you don't know how dark / gory / etc they will get at the end. The prologue is very 'if this is too much for you, still time to refund'. Some people are upset that the prologue keeps them from the rest of the content, but it's very carefully calibrated to make sure you wont hit the ending and then go 'nope nope nope'. There is actually something extremely specific about the intro that is meant to give certain players a chance to ditch so they don't get sidelined by something totally unexpected at the very end.

One of the main dramas around BG3 since it launched is people not being able to play, and some of that is valid! If I was someone who couldn't play for some reason, I'd be very sad at seeing all the happy fans. Some people take it too far and use language they should not use. However, some of the barriers Larian tosses up are for good reason and they are right at the start. The intro is meant to be an exit ramp, and I think that is very good design on their part. It may also be a common design choice, but it's one of the things I've seen people complain about that's there for good reason.

On the technical side / UI side of things a lot of D&D nerds keep saying that the game needs more text explanations for game mechanics. But the game is designed for you to learn spells and mechanics by testing them out. Explaining the D&D rules for rolling with advantage/disadvantage would confuse new players. Instead, they visually show you how it effects the dice. I love JoCat but he's been very 'I actually went to school for graphic design and I can tell you that they should have blah blah blah' and it's sometimes about things where Larian said putting the the text harmed player comprehension, they tested this.

Also, graphic design =/= ui design.

One reason the game was under-estimated was because it's a turn based AAA game in 2023. But Larian was all 'most games are turn based, if you consider indie and mobile games to be games', and this logic paid off. This is part of why it sold so well. It went against the conventional wisdom of modern AAA design and gambled that a lot of people not considered to be 'real gamers' would take easily to their systems.

Okay, babble over.

Comments

[mistressofmuses]

A prologue (or other very early) section serving as that sort of "warning-slash-advertisement" of what sort of tone you can expect from a game is EXCELLENT design, and it sort of bugs me that people don't seem to realize it, ha. Giving that sort of actual-play heads up about what sort of content you may and will encounter is absolutely a ton more effective than an "M for Mature" label, or a text warning on the start screen, or anything else. If it isn't going to be to your personal taste, way better to find out at the start than once you've invested a ton of time and energy!

That's really interesting about the sex and romance arc aspect. Because yeah, so much conventional wisdom about romance arcs is that the sex is the end goal, the literal consummation of the relationship, and once your couple has gotten there, it's time to wrap up the storyline.
That was the case for a lot of older romances I remember reading, and certainly seemed to be the prevailing attitude in fic circles, way back when it was "is there going to be a lemon at the end of this fic?" getting asked.
I've also definitely seen it still being treated as the usual within pro writing advice. That "well, once the relationship is confirmed, there's nothing else to say or do, and anything after the big get-together boning would be boring or anticlimactic."
Usually the only place I've seen that reliably subverted is when the story is focused on people who have sex outside of a relationship first. Say, friends-with-benefits who catch feelings or whatnot.

So while I haven't played BG3, I really *like* that they've subverted that "the romance builds toward the sex" arc!

[olivermoss]

BG3 writing subverts a lot of things, and hilariously some people are mad about it. Some people are acting like subverting tropes/expectations is making fun of your audience? Weird. Anyway, yeah, I really like how hard they go on a different structure. When the vast majority of what's out there is all the same structure, it's hard to write different things because you don't see how they work or know how the audience will take them. There is more divergence from that structure these days, but it's still nice to see how deliberately they break from things. It's nice that sex is there but it's not the Big Reward.

[mistressofmuses]

People are so... fucking weird about writing and story choices. Like, I don't mean to be "like that", but it feels like way too many people have no idea how to analyze fiction and think critically about it. (And assume "think or view critically" means "tear down and try to ensure no one enjoys it" rather than "examine what this is actually saying and why it might be saying it.") It's frustrating to watch people just... utterly fail to understand stuff that feels like it should be basic.

Like, not that everyone has to love every trope subversion out there, and sure, some things claim to subvert when they do really seem to hate their audience that likes the genre or whatnot.
But good trope subversion? THAT IS MY SHIT. Well-subverted tropes understand what they're subverting and have reasons for it, and that is GOOD FUCKING SHIT, okay?

It can be hard to find things that succeed at following a different structure or a different arc! For exactly the reasons you said - having the same structure, with the same beats, over and over makes it hard to envision something else. It's also more difficult when you try, because you don't have that familiar blueprint or framework to follow, and are stuck doing a lot more from scratch to make it make sense and have satisfying payoff.

And yes. I like that it includes sex - rather than just making the idea of romance utterly sexless - while not making the sex the signifier for happily ever after or the relationship being "real" or whatever.

But if people are weird about writing, they're EXTRA weird about sex, and they've gotta be EXTRA SUPER weird about writing that involves sex.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, people are weird and intense about sex, about writing, and also about whether the big fandom making so many people happy is also catering to them. Also some people take what writers say in the worst possible light. Especially when a game is so iddy for so many, people are quick to feel attacked for no reason.

On some level, all CRPGS are going to influence each other and be reactions to each other, especially when BG1 & 2 are the original Bioware games. I'd say people need to chill out but... CRPG fandom be like that.

[mistressofmuses]

Oh yeah, that's a bit part of it too. There's that level where a lot of people seem to expect and demand that things cater to them specifically. And don't get me wrong - I *love* finding things that DO cater to me, lol. Unfortunately, some people feel like something that doesn't cater to them must be capital-B Bad, and take it personally that anyone has different taste than they do. You're right, they wind up feeling attacked by the fact that a lot of people like a thing they don't. Or they feel like it's an attack for other people to like the same thing in a different way.

Lol, that's true, too. Ain't no chill to be had!

[olivermoss]

It sucks to feel left out, and it happening all the time can due to bad things, but some people just want to create dumpster fires and make everything worse. And also people can get very weird about The One Thing that does cater to them. Saving The One Thing or getting other people to watch The One Thing becomes like a moral crusade.

So much energy channeled into drama.

Actually the BG3 drama isn't bad yet, it's almost more that we all know that certain metas are going to shape discourse for ages to come. I've seen a lot of people overreacting to some small fires because they know what can happen if left to spread.

[mistressofmuses]

That's true and fair. It is rough when you always feel left out for whatever reason, and never having anything that appeals to you the way it does to others can certainly feel alienating.
But also... yeah, there are also people who just want to start shit. There are still plenty of people who get really bent out of shape about other people having fun, and want to try and tear things down solely to decrease that fun.
(Or yes, worse: people having fun The Wrong Way! Disagreeing about blorbo is unforgivable! We must run them off to save our perfect fandom! Shun the nonbeliever!
And I've been put off by things due to fans being SO pushy about how great it is or how everyone MUST watch/play/read/love it. Hype aversion can be real!)

I just don't understand how people HAVE the energy to channel into drama. I barely have the energy to keep up with a handful of canons, and even less to be fully participatory in fandom. If I had energy for more, I wouldn't want to waste it on dramamongering!

I'm glad that BG3 drama isn't too bad yet. I've seen relatively little, though whether that's good curation of my feeds, obliviousness, or because there's not too much of it out there is always a guessing game for me, haha.
Though yeah, once you've been in the trenches of the fandom drama wars, it's understandable that people will sometimes try VERY hard to stifle anything that seems like it could get out of hand.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, while the current discourse around BG3 isn't intense or bad yet, some of it is baffling. 'this is the way to enjoy things'. Some of it is... so clearly a reaction to 2023 fandom that in any other year people would be reacting differently. But obviously I don't want to get into specifics!

And of course a canon where people are going to have different experiences, see different parts of the lore, etc, that makes convos weird. I did not experience the same playthrough as others

I don't get how people have the energy either, and why they'd channel it that way. It's the eternal lament of fandom, that people just want to be like that. Tear stuff down rather than be constructive.

[mistressofmuses]

Understandable! It's interesting in a lot of ways, from that "fandom history" perspective, how very... intrinsic to time period certain types of wank or discourse are. Some wanks of yesteryear feel SO painfully "mid-2000s" or "clearly 2015 fandom" and the like, that it's hard to imagine them happening now. Other things feel so extremely "fandom in the context of right now" that I can't imagine the reactions of five years ago, or ten, or even just one or two.
I wonder what new hells the next few years will reveal to us in "shit fandom can get weird about?" lol.
Though I AM happy that I've also seen very little BG3 discourse, and that it sounds like that's true even if you're more directly engaged with it than I am.

That's also a really good point about things like BG3! It's *so* dependent on player choice (to a much more extreme degree than most games that feature some choice mechanics) that people are truly experiencing different playthroughs! You can come away with very different sets of scenes and interactions than someone else, which may lead you to very different interpretations.

Right? It is an eternal lament... people gonna wank, and people gonna try to destroy things rather than create things. I understand the appeal of going on a rant about something you think sucks and why, but I don't understand wanting to focus on it for longer than said rant, ha. I'm probably happier not "getting" the appeal of long-term, dedicated, energy-heavy hate-dom.

[olivermoss]

Ranting, venting, tearing shit up a little, to en extent that's fine, even healthy. But for some people it's all they do and it's good for clout, but it's unhealthy and does a lot of damage.

I feel like a lot of BG3 fandom just has unresolved Bioware fandom discourse stress and people trying to port DA2 drama directly into BG3 isn't helping.

[mistressofmuses]

Oh yeah. A good bitch session can be great fun! Sometimes I LOVE tearing into a shitty movie or doing a dramatic reading of a bad book. It can also be a valuable thing as a creative - really digging into what makes something bad, dissecting the flaws, *can* help you become better at avoiding those or similar problems in your own work, which makes that destructive impulse into one that helps with creating things, too.

But even if I fucking HATE a movie, I'm not going into threads/posts/etc. started by people who loved it to tell them that they're bad people for liking it.

Unfortunately you're right. I think the heyday of performatively angry video critics a la That Guy With the Glasses/Angry Video Game Nerd made that style of "performative anger as criticism" into an enduringly popular genre, but it's morphed from "comically over-invested anger" to "righteous anger means I'm right" to the whole "the loudest and angriest person wins" attitude. Being angry can lead to lots of clout, but I do not think it's healthy for individuals or for fandom/the internet as a whole.

Oof. Yeah, good point. Lots of people have unresolved feels about unrelated properties and I can see them either on-purpose or by mistake bringing that into the shiny new (superficially similar in some respects) fandom.

[olivermoss]

Both Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy 14 are dealing with completely different youtubers engagement grinding by being very, very wrong about those MMOs. It's sort of interesting that both games are dealing with the same drama from different sources. It's just so effective.

It's like... I hate the react meta and people rehosting other people's videos in ways that are not transformative, but in situations like this I will 100% watch just the react videos to not click on the rage bait. Also, GW2 graphics bad for an MMO? What? Of the big MMOs we have the least dated art style. In this essay I will...

Yeah, this is why fandom drama is sometimes baffling to me because I am looking at just the canon and other people basically rehashing DA2 yet again... or bringing in ideas about certain things based on other fandoms and I am just... but how is this relevant?

[mistressofmuses]

Eesh. People grinding engagement by being SO VERY WRONG is always going to be lucrative (as long as "engagement" is its own metric) but it sucks. It is a bit weird (though again, I guess as long as it's effective, people will do it) to see different fandoms have the same problem from different people.

Though yeah, I never want to reward the rage bait with further hits. Ugh. And what are they talking about, bad graphics? Ugh.

There's a lot of fandom drama that just sort of... passes by in the near distance for me, and I'm glad I don't have to deal with it more directly, haha. But yeah, people importing their old drama (and their old beefs with old canons) into new fandoms just feels... so unnecessary!