Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t the first successful attempt to marry cinematic aspirations with the traditional branching narratives and simulationist world-building of CRPGs. 2009’s Dragon Age: Origins had a very similar mission statement, offering a spiritual successor to BioWare’s earlier Baldur’s Gate titles long before Larian took us back to the titular city (and its surrounding areas).
Why is everyone acting like Dragon Age: Origins is the only fantasy RPG that ever existed? Baldur’s Gate 3 is the next step in a long legacy of genre defining games.
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Oh man, I loved playing Dragon’s Age: Origins. I had a sort of “unexpected companion” when I played through it in college.
I was a computer geek; I had a gaming PC. My roommate was in a frat and had an Xbox 360. The only games he ever played were Call of Duty and Madden.
One day he came home with a copy of Dragon Age for the 360. He said, “This seems like a game you would know about. One of my fraternity brothers lent it to me. Have you played it?” I had just bought it a few days earlier but hadn’t played it yet. Of course I’m expecting Call-of-Duty-Madden-360 roommate to hate it.
Later that week I was going to party and he was staying home – a reversal of how things usually went. I got home very late, very drunk, expecting 360 roommate to be asleep. But no, there he is, playing Dragon Age. As soon as I walk in he says, “BRO I’M IN THE DWARVEN CITY HOW FAR DID YOU GET CHECK OUT THIS SKILL I UNLOCKED FOR ALISTAIR AND DUDE THERE IS A DOG.”
We played through the campaign on our respective machines over the next week, sharing tips and strategies along the way. It was great.
That is an absolutely adorable story. I love that he got so into it.
Why does this article (and everyone else) seem to pretend like Divinity Original Sin 1 and 2 didn’t exist?
Or how games like Neverwinter Nights came before Dragon Age Origins?I felt like the article covered this, but more in a hand-wavey way. The article is really about the more cinematic aspects of the game, which is a more spiritual follow-up to Dragon Age Origins. Dragon Age Origins was very ambitious and was made by the same BioWare that made Baldurs Gate and Baldurs Gate II. They were trying to capture the spirit of the old games with a more fleshed out cinematic world where you could get up close and personal with the characters.
Arguably, Baldurs Gate III is the first game to successfully weave it’s way through both. Divinity Original Sin and DOS II both lack this cinematic aspect. They both hem closer to traditional titles like Neverwinter Nights, where you have the three-quarters overhead view of your characters, but your characters are not explicitly detailed, nor do you get that many “close up” looks at them.
I’m fucking floored at being able to do a full on top-down view, and then being able to zoom in on incredibly detailed characters that exist in the world. It’s arguably the best of both worlds.
Anyway, I see the article as focusing on cinematic aspects, which would be the ability to see detailed interactions among characters akin to a film, a thing we haven’t seen much of in this style of game before, barring DAO.
Man, BG3 is all over the place, but after my bad experience with D:OS I’m really not sure about it.
Tell me more about what you disliked about D:OS. I’m playing through in co-op (in the endgame right now) and want to commiserate.
For me it was the bugs and some weird choices where things that should work to progress don’t, and some progress is so convoluted that we had to look it up and we were like ugh wth.
Looking up stuff is annoying when something you’re sure should work logically doesn’t.
It was just very combat-heavy and very challenging, and not in a very fun way. Also I remember going through a period of finding combat just to get XP to be able to get gear to upgrade to or something like that, which prolonged the dragging. Overall it was a slog, which I carried through to see if I got some payoff. Looking back the payoff for me was “Avoid Larian games”.
Fair. I was playing a warrior so combat wasn’t as much an issue for me. Tbh when we were starting, someone told us to play DOS 2 instead of 1 since it’s a better gameplay experience and I wonder if all these rough edges have been fixed.
I think I had a warrior-type too? You get to pick two characters, I recall.
I’m playing co-op, so I have one PC and manage one companion, and the other player does the same.
Dragon Age: Origins and it’s expansion are still my favourite game of all time. I still absolutely love the origin stories. The other entries of the series could never quite catch what made the first one great.
There’s no way the next dragon age can top that.
I really hope they take a good look and overthink their approach even if that means more delays.
With their last games their track record looks more as if they are about to make a new Assassin’s Creed game as the next Dragon Age Installment
I am a big Dragon Age fan, and I don’t know how far into development DA4 is, but if they are following DAI route (an almost 10 years old game), they’re so screwed. DAI, while better than 2, didn’t leave the best taste in my mouth.
What’s got me worried is how they’re basically trying to copy God of War for the combat. That kind of hack and slash gameplay is not what I want from a Dragon Age game. They’re chasing trends and that rarely goes well.
Yup, that’s my impression too. Mass Effect is in a similar boat. Two of my favorite IPs.
Andromeda was a mess, and not for the reasons most folks like to ding it for. It was both trying too hard (all those references to other games, like Conrad Verner’s sister and Zaaed’s son) and not trying hard enough (all the copy and paste rule of 3 quests to find three MacGuffins then SAM will figure out how to find a location for another fight).
Andromeda was frustrating because they had a lot of potential - I almost wish had had just truly been bad instead of mediocre. Mediocre is more of a letdown.
(all the copy and paste rule of 3 quests to find three MacGuffins then SAM will figure out how to find a location for another fight).
This has been my biggest complaint as I’ve been going through ME:A for the first time. I have limited time/energy to play so jumping into ME:A for 2ish hours and basically accomplish nothing really hurts my motivation for the next play session.
When I first started playing it, I was really enjoying the game. It was about the 3rd planet where I had to go to 3 places to unlock a vault to do a thing that the progression loop really started to weigh me down.
The original trilogy was brilliant for me. Get in, do a couple of missions (each one progressing the story a little more) maybe get sucked into a couple more missions and go to bed excited for the next session. But ME:A is just a slog. I’m doing various loyalty missions which is a little better, but still seems to require a lot of go here, here, and here and shoot some guys and then go into here to finish up.
I remember before it came out, when they boasted that each world would be bigger than all the areas in Inquisition, and I had a sinking feeling, because Inquisition had so much bloat. Andromeda was just more for the sake of more, instead of the side missions being tight missions that gave you extra information about the lore or the world.
It reached a point where whenever I found one of these random rule of three quests in the open world where you kill random whatever enemies and SAM says you need to find more data, I would laugh and say, “welp, that’s a quest I’m never finishing!” and ignore it. I had so much better things to do with my time than drive around the world and hope to come across the next two clues that would pop up in randomly chosen spots. It was a time-waster, and Mass Effect had never had those before. So much of the game feels like it’s designed to take up time to increase play time numbers.
I didn’t even finish it. And you’re right, a mediocre game doesn’t teach the developers any lessons.
I forced myself to finish it. It’s just mass effect 1 but awful. That said, if they just wanted to restart Andromeda and pretend the first one never existed, I’d give it a shot. There’s so much potential in the idea but it was squandered in every possible way
They’ve gotta be looking at the release of BG3 and sweating. People are going to be comparing every remotely similar game to it for years and years
I feel like JRPGs completely changed what an RPG video game is. They are watered down compared to the original cRPGs from the 80s and 90s. Then the “westernized” version of JRPGs watered it down even more. The old cRPGs were so big and so complex. OG Baldur’s Gate, yes, but also Wizardry and Ultima too. I enjoyed Dragon Age because I liked the story, but I’d say Divinity: Original Sin 1 & 2 are more direct descendants of the old cRPG days (DA 2 & 3 bear no resemblance to cRPGs at all). I think Dragon Age games are good modern RPGs everyone should play but Baldur’s Gate 3, imo, is a proper cRPG straight out of the 80s with 2023 graphics.
I’m so thankful this game is proving to be so popular. Maybe people are discovering (re-discovering) what RPGs used to be, and what makes them so great.
I don’t get the constant comparisons to Dragon Age: Origins… it was a terrible game! Bad graphics, bad animations, a terrible cliched storyline where every beat was telegraphed and predictible… I still feel ripped off and it’s been 14 years ago now.
It’s like nobody ever played GOOD fantasy RPGs, like the Gold Box games from SSI or Ultima, or Bard’s Tale, or Wizardry?
