this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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Baldur's Gate 3
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Baldur’s Gate 3 is a story-rich, party-based RPG set in the universe of Dungeons & Dragons, where your choices shape a tale of fellowship and betrayal, survival and sacrifice, and the lure of absolute power. (Website)
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I'm not happy that they still haven't figured out the "pick who initiates dialogue" problem. This has been a thing in Divinity: Original Sin 2, and continues to plague us into Baldur's Gate 3. It's really annoying to watch your party face Sorcerer or Bard sit in the background while the Barbarian gets to fumble all the dialogue checks with their 8 Charisma score just because they happened to be the first one to enter the room, or the one who was closest to the boss before they decided to plea for their life (looking at you, Hag...) There is also the dilemma of whether to pick the dialogue options you would pick or the ones the character speaking would. I would love to pet that puppy but Astarion happened to walk into the door first, so I guess I'll have to pick the option to kick it instead or break character.
I actually agree. I am replaying Divinity 2 and had this problem yesterday. Hope they fix it.
I bet you in a month we'll see a mod that completely addresses this issue and we will all be left wondering why Larian didn't fix it during the entirety of this game's development. I can't believe it would be that hard to just make it so only the character on top of the party list can interact and the others are just treated as NPCs and don't initiate cutscenes/dialogue (or if they do, just swap their positions with the player character, I will take abrupt body swaps over save scumming to get the right character to initiate dialogue any day) yet here we are at almost release with this still being an issue.
I can agree with you if I put myself in a "min/max" mindset, where you're trying to get the best possible option in every situation - but in a roleplay sense, a tabletop sense, a story sense - it's far more interesting if more than one character engages in conversation with the world around them.
Having played loads of tabletop, emergent narrative often pits characters against challenges they're not well-equipped for - which drives the story in interesting directions. The Barb might have a higher chance of failure in persuasion checks, but does that really matter? I guess it comes to the higher level question of whether you'd reload a save if you failed a speech check - if so, I'd argue that it doesn't matter who talks if the player is just gonna reroll (as low rolls occasionally plague even the most erudite).
I'm happy for mods to have a fix for the "No one talks but me" crowd, but my thoughts are that Larian has thrown in so many contextual responsiveness for each character/race/class that it's honestly going to be interesting to see how different characters lead a conversation.
I kind of like the idea of "this person can be a liability if you let them talk to people". D:OS 2 did something like that where party members would ask to take over the conversation and do whatever they wanted with it, and I thought it definitely added to the immersion. I definitely don't think allowing you to magically control who's party to a conversation is an improvement over letting it happen organically.
Even ignoring the story element, from a pure gameplay perspective, I don't think getting a bad speaker trapped into a conversation is really different from having a glass cannon type character get caught out and killed because they can't take damage. It's part of your party construction.
I can't remember what interview it was from, but IIRC, it's not that it's an unsolvable problem, it's in the standard they wished to hold dialogue to. A swap is easy, a swap that feels natural is not. The exponential explosion of little tweaks and permutations was outside the scope they were willing/able to add before release. (Presumably they are under some pressure to release, not just from fans, but from WotC, and the logistics of keeping the company afloat.) Which I can respect, although I both anticipate and fully understand the need for mods to do the swap.
I respect their option, but disagree with it completely. I think accidentally triggering a cutscene with the wrong character, stumbling through it quickly only to reload a save and trigger it with your player character instead feels a lot worse than just always triggering the cutscene with your player character, even if it "breaks immersion" by teleporting them slightly (unless they are really far away/this is an Origin specific interaction). I'm not asking for the complex task of being able to switch characters mid dialogue, I understand how that can prove nightmarish to implement, just let me pick the default character to always initiate all interactions and I'll be happy.