u/MintakaMinthara

Many RPGs shift from one to the other, attracting both praise and criticism in equal measure from different types of fans. This can be particularly evident when we compare e.g. the Forgotten Realms to the world of The Witcher, or Star Wars to Elite: Dangerous. It becomes particularly relevant when we have to discuss the choice and consequences system of our favorite stories: the good old hero's journey with clearly defined good and evil struggling forever, versus gray morality where sympathetic villains have spots of lights and fallible heroes have shadows of grey. What is your take on the matter? What do you prefer to have in your RPGs?

I got the inspiration for this topic by reading Ursula Le Guin's defence of escapism:

"There is an area where SF has most often failed to judge itself, and where it has been most harshly judged by its nonpartisans. It is an area where we badly need intelligent criticism and discussion. The oldest argument against SF is both the shallowest and the profoundest: the assertion that SF, like all fantasy, is escapist.

This statement is shallow when made by the shallow. When an insurance broker tells you that SF doesn’t deal with the Real World, when a chemistry freshman informs you that Science has disproved Myth, when a censor suppresses a book because it doesn’t fit the canons of Socialist Realism, and so forth, that’s not criticism; it’s bigotry. If it’s worth answering, the best answer is given by Tolkien, author, critic, and scholar. Yes, he said, fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can."

Which in turn was referring J.R.R. Tolkien:

"I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which “Escape” is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all. In what the misusers are fond of calling Real Life, Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic. In real life it is difficult to blame it, unless it fails; in criticism it would seem to be the worse the better it succeeds. Evidently we are faced by a misuse of words, and also by a confusion of thought. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.

Just so a Party-spokesman might have labelled departure from the misery of the Führer’s or any other Reich and even criticism of it as treachery. In the same way these critics, to make confusion worse, and so to bring into contempt their opponents, stick their label of scorn not only on to Desertion, but on to real Escape, and what are often its companions, Disgust, Anger, Condemnation, and Revolt. Not only do they confound the escape of the prisoner with the flight of the deserter; but they would seem to prefer the acquiescence of the “quisling” to the resistance of the patriot. To such thinking you have only to say “the land you loved is doomed” to excuse any treachery, indeed to glorify it."

Now I don't want this to degenerate into a flame war since it is a very popular game and my opinion will surely be unpopular, so please try to be civil and discuss. As a long standing fan of Baldur's Gate, I will expose my opinon on why Baldur's Gate 2 was a massive step backwards. I thought of this carefully through years.

Let me start with the most obvious wound: the opening dungeon. In Baldur’s Gate 1, you step out of Candlekeep and the entire Coast Way is your oyster. I still remember the moment I first stepped out of Candlekeep, the sense of freedom and vulnerability, the realization that I have to work out with my own hands a path. You can go north to the Friendly Arm Inn, south to Nashkel, east to the basilisks, or just wander into the coast and get charmed by sirines before you stumble on a cave full of flesh golems long before you are ready. The game trusts you. It says, here is a world, go make your own trouble. 

That feeling stayed with me through every hour of Baldur's Gate, and it is a feeling Baldur's Gate 2 never once bothered to replicate. You spend the first hours walking hte same corridors, fighting the same enemies, pulling the same levers, and listening to the same morbid babblings of Imoen because the game tries to shovel in your throat at all costs some kind of emotional attachment and make you "care" about her (unless you dismiss her, at least I can do that). It also forces you to ackwwoledge a specific party ignoring your agency (I can again dismiss them but then I have to walk alone through two areas, it's a Hobson's choice). It is essentially a forced tutorial masked as a dungeon and it strips away the fundamental joy of exploration and party customization, replacing with a key hunt. It is a chore. Thank gods when I discovered the mod Dungeon BeGone.

Now, even after leaving that dungeon, it is the underlying concept where the problems start. As I said, Baldur's Gate trusted you and its world enough to let you wander off the road and discover a bear that would one-shot you when you are level 1, or a vampiric wolf that requires enchanted weapons when you leveled up. It understood that danger and scale are built through emptiness, accurate encounters and surprises. It was brutal and realistic. That wilderness gave the Sword Coast a sense of place. You had to explore at 360 degrees and earn every inch of the map. Exploration meant picking a direction on the world map, walking into the fog of war, discovering small, self-contained stories or dangerous wildlife that had nothing to do with some grand, sweeping narrative.

Baldur's Gate 2 jettisons this almost entirely. After the initial slog, the Map opens... and almost none of it is reachable. You are deposited into a city district and given a laundry list of massive quests, with characters pointing you where you have to go. You no longer have to explore, the game tells you where to go. After you meet the necessary npc, a new area opens on the map. Each is a theatrical set piece that is waiting for the player, and this design carried on in modern games unfortunately (don't try to hide in a corner, Dragon Age!).

The map is no longer a world. Every area exists to just serve a power progression through a particular flavor: you have the forest of shadows, the besieged keep, the dragon's lair... This is destroying the sense of scale and reducing the environment to a mere background for continuous combat. What I see are overdesigned dioramas that abandon any pretense of a living world.

By the gods, I don't think that the dungeons per se are bad, they are well crafted and the artwork is wonderful, but they are designed as semi-scripted narrative sequences with very little room for the organic exploration that defined so many of the original's best moments. You can feel the developers nudging you along from attraction to attraction, terrified that you might experience five minutes of unscripted quiet. So exploration turned into itinerary.

You do not stumble upon the unseeing eye because you were tracing a river and found a hidden cave, instaed, you get handed a quest card by a priest standing in front of a temple, after a scripted cutscene, pointing at your party and only that. Everything is handed to you because the game is terrified you might get bored. Baldur's Gate was never afraid of you being bored. It respected your patience and rewarded your curiosity with a world that felt real. The sequel treats you like a tourist on a luxury coach, pointing out the big sights while the guide makes sure you never have to walk too far between amusements.

The storytelling suffers from the exact same inflation. Baldur's Gate told a quiet, paranoid story about an iron shortage and bandits on the road, a mystery that unraveled slowly across dozens of hours. You were nobody, and the world treated you like nobody. The political machinations and the revelation of your heritage crept up on you so gradually that when Sarevok finally entered the frame in full force, he felt like a true menace, a man with a terrifying plan rooted in the mundane. The plot was woven into the geography and politics.

Baldur's Gate 2 opens with your abduction by a melodramatic wizard who tortures you, then immediately buries you in the personal trauma of a character who is clearly the writer's favorite. Then Irenicus and his sister and their stolen soul angst, a revenge drama that could be interesting but monologues at you constantly. Damn I got it, there is so much power within me, now let me continue my path. You do not even have the freedom of going away, you are railroaded into witnessing Imoen's abduction and accepting to raise money to find her or Irenicus.

I never wanted that. I wanted to be free to choose what to do. The game WANTS me to care about Imoen, or Jaheira dreams. I can only answer in a rude manner that I don't want to hear their issues and feel like I went with the "bad choice". The game design was clearly centered on the idea that the protagonist does care and the story makes more sense, appears more coherent with that in mind.

Bioware clearly tried to write a linear adventure with a specific plot and specific twists in mind, ignoring how we players build a plot by ourselves. The sense of regional stakes evaporates. You are no longer a denizen of the Sword Coast caught up in history, you are the Bhaalspawn on a path to reclaim your divine essence, or get revenge, or free your "half-sister" (what a poor retcon).

I could try to immerse myself in that, but the pacing is broken. The game tells you that Imoen has been dragged off to a horrible fate, then after chapter 4 that your soul has been stolen and you are dying, and always that time is of the absolute essence. Then it throws out that urgency completely while you run errands for every faction in Amn, with the most aggressive content dump I have ever seen in a roleplaying game until the late 2000s. The story and the structure are at war from the moment you reach chapter 2.

Granted, you can ignore most quests and go straight for Spellhold, but then as I said, you miss quests, you miss content. I like being free to do what I want on my own pace, I don't like if that creates dissonance with the story.

The companions follow suit. In the original, companions who were previously interesting precisely because they were simple adventurers. The game allowed you to assemble a diverse crew of adventurers and oddballs who mostly stayed out of your way, letting you roleplay your own path. I was free to use them the way I preferred and make up my own stories and tales about them, without attempts to turn me into a therapist for a widow or a traumatized elf, nor a marriage counselor for a grizzled paladin.

The sequel instead fills your party with overbearing, talkative companions, every single one of them a quirky trauma case, who constantly bicker, demand your attention, interrupt your playthrough with their thoughts or their inter-party banter even when it's not appropriate (Aerie do you really need to talk with Anomen about sunrise while we are going to face a dragon???), and thrust you into awkward romance subplots. Evidently, Bioware really liked romances, since they later made them a staple.

And here I am, that's all. I expected to be shorter but this dragged me to insist.

I'm not saying Baldur's Gate 2 is mediocre, but it is a massive let down compared to the first Baldur's Gate, and I for one will forever look up with nostalgy at how that game became a classic in its own, while the sequel had an intrusive desire to force emotional depth in your playthrough, instead of making you decide whether you care or not. In no way I can find it a true progression on Baldur's Gate 1, it negates most of it strong points and builds the tropes that developed into the next era of modern rpgsL particularly those from Bioware but not also that (if you ever had the feeling of being in an hollywood blockbuster, in a dating simulator, or in a theme park with shiny things all around to stimulate people with attention deficits, you know what I mean). So I find this to be where everything started, like the original sin of modern crpgs.