LogFAQs > #975994279

Krow_Incarnate posted...

In what possible way? The occasional bit of humor that's there? It's not overwhelming and ever present like it is in DOS and let's not pretend Lilichor wasn't ever a thing.

The vast majority of the game is treated seriously.

The tone isn't a question of comedy. It's a question of genre and narrative intent.

For all the darker moments in BGI and II (and the option for the player to play straight up evil), the game story as a whole still leans into epic fantasy. That's the default flavor of the Forgotten Realms setting as a whole (and games like Icewind Dale and Neverwinter Nights all sort of have a similar feel to the BG games because of it - even the Dark Alliance games feel like BG I and II narratively in spite of having a completely different combat system).

Both D:OS2 and BGIII lean much more towards dark fantasy (which is very much the influence of ASoIaF/Game of Thrones on the fantasy genre over the last 20 years or so). People are dicks, the world is crueler, a number of quests tend to have more bittersweet endings. Epic fantasy and dark fantasy just feel different, in the same way that Game of Thrones feels different from Lord of the Rings.

Some players complained during the early access that none of your companions are really GOOD people. Even the nicer ones don't really feel like heroes, and anyone wanting to play a classic fantasy hero is still going to be stuck with all these completely broken people of questionable morals. That's pretty much the D:OS2 design philosophy in a nutshell. Contrast against the original BG games, where you could still form an evil/evil-ish party (Viconia, Korgan, Edwin, etc), but the majority of allies were still relatively heroic (even characters like Imoen).

Ignoring the fact that Sarevok technically had a chance at redemption in BGII kind of falls into the same category. Him remaining evil fits the darker tone better.

None of which is saying that BGIII is bad. Or that having a darker, more cynical tone "ruins" things. But it does feel much closer to D:OS2 in writing and characterization than it does any of the other Baldur's Gate games.


(And that's not even counting more minor things, like being encouraged to bring "blatantly evil" people into your group and trusting them solely because they have useful game mechanics value - Malady and Tarquin in D:OS2 and Withers in BGIII fill very similar narrative roles in that sense.)