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[jtav]

Warning: Unmarked spoilers for the Baldur's Gate trilogy follow, 

 

I've been making my way through the Baldur;s Gate games for the first time in 708 years and the first time at all for BG1. And one of the things that strikes me is that much of what we complain about with ME3 is present, often in much worse form than ME3. For example:

 

You are canonically close friends with Jaheira and Minsc, even if you never had them in your party. I'm not playing a male this time, but I remember Jaheira having a more elaborate romance plot than others.  There's no attempt to be fair to past characters, regardless of what the player did previously.Speaking of which:

 

Former companions who don't return as party members are treated pretty badly. Tortured and murdered offscreen. Even killed by the PC. Unavoidably. Say what you will about Thane and Legion, Shepard didn't kill them in a sidequest.

 

Mandatory tragedy. Romance Viconia and stay with her? She'll be killed off in the epilogue, no matter what.

 

Decisions between two bad choices. Your choices for getting to Spellhold are mobsters who practice torture and vampires. Aran is only the "good" choice because Bodhi is worse. The choice between the saughin isn't ecactly great either.

 

And yet...I'm having a great time. Using a modded romance, but the BG trilogy is still undoubtedly the best BW games I've ever played. ME3 is...not. It's clearly not the plot elements themselves that made a difference. So what did ME do wrong.

 

[Iakus]

Warning: Unmarked spoilers for the Baldur's Gate trilogy follow, 

 

I've been making my way through the Baldur;s Gate games for the first time in 708 years and the first time at all for BG1. And one of the things that strikes me is that much of what we complain about with ME3 is present, often in much worse form than ME3. For example:

 

You are canonically close friends with Jaheira and Minsc, even if you never had them in your party. I'm not playing a male this time, but I remember Jaheira having a more elaborate romance plot than others.  There's no attempt to be fair to past characters, regardless of what the player did previously.Speaking of which:

 

Former companions who don't return as party members are treated pretty badly. Tortured and murdered offscreen. Even killed by the PC. Unavoidably. Say what you will about Thane and Legion, Shepard didn't kill them in a sidequest.

 

Mandatory tragedy. Romance Viconia and stay with her? She'll be killed off in the epilogue, no matter what.

 

Decisions between two bad choices. Your choices for getting to Spellhold are mobsters who practice torture and vampires. Aran is only the "good" choice because Bodhi is worse. The choice between the saughin isn't ecactly great either.

 

And yet...I'm having a great time. Using a modded romance, but the BG trilogy is still undoubtedly the best BW games I've ever played. ME3 is...not. It's clearly not the plot elements themselves that made a difference. So what did ME do wrong.

To be fair with the BG series, while it is a sequel, it does not import your choices.  So it canonically sets you up with a party of characters who proved popular in the first game and fits with a good or neutral Charname.

 

And while it's true that other characters are Put on a Bus (such as Kivan, Branwen, and Xan) BG2 is very moddable.  Unlike ME3.  I have found mods to re-insert Kivan, Branwen, Xan, Alora, Ajantis, Tiax, and Coran. 

 

I confess to not being too fond of the Aran/Bodhi choice.  But I typically kill off both sides of the sahuagin and leave their city a graveyard 

 

But the big thing the BG2 has that ME3 doesn't have is... the ability to reject the power to change the universe.  To let the Bhaalspawn essence go and live out your life as a mortal.  

[Dubozz]

BG didn't end up like s***.

[Obadiah]

@Jtav

Couldn't say. The game sure left diverse and divergent impressions on people.

 

Expectations due to hype, maybe? Expectations due to constant wins with no difficult choices previously? Maybe players just assumed there would always be an out?

[Ieldra]

Warning: Unmarked spoilers for the Baldur's Gate trilogy follow, 
 
I've been making my way through the Baldur;s Gate games for the first time in 708 years and the first time at all for BG1. And one of the things that strikes me is that much of what we complain about with ME3 is present, often in much worse form than ME3. For example:
 
You are canonically close friends with Jaheira and Minsc, even if you never had them in your party. I'm not playing a male this time, but I remember Jaheira having a more elaborate romance plot than others.  There's no attempt to be fair to past characters, regardless of what the player did previously.Speaking of which:
 
Former companions who don't return as party members are treated pretty badly. Tortured and murdered offscreen. Even killed by the PC. Unavoidably. Say what you will about Thane and Legion, Shepard didn't kill them in a sidequest.
 
Mandatory tragedy. Romance Viconia and stay with her? She'll be killed off in the epilogue, no matter what.
 
Decisions between two bad choices. Your choices for getting to Spellhold are mobsters who practice torture and vampires. Aran is only the "good" choice because Bodhi is worse. The choice between the saughin isn't ecactly great either.
 
And yet...I'm having a great time. Using a modded romance, but the BG trilogy is still undoubtedly the best BW games I've ever played. ME3 is...not. It's clearly not the plot elements themselves that made a difference. So what did ME do wrong.

Apart from BG2 not importing your choices from BG1, if I recall things correctly, people did complain about being canonically friends with Jaheira, since quite a few people didn't like her. Also the choice for getting to Spellhold was criticized.

As for Viconia, as someone who romanced her I didn't take issue with her death because before she died, your character and her had a good time with each other. It comes across as a variant of normal death to me.

As for which differences made....well, the difference:
The BG trilogy didn't have character-derailing autodialogue, it didn't heavy-handedly impose the sacrifice theme, and its ending was satisfying and had a choice which was meaningful for the character on a personal level.

Compared to that, the other elements are minor. They would've been minor in ME3 if not for the bigger flaws, which they compounded.

[Barquiel]

Well, I'm sure a lot of people had a great time with ME3 as well (at least until they reached the ending).

I also remember people complaining about some of these things (I know I hated Viconia's epilogue for example). I can also guarantee you that if Bioware would ever release another game with BG2's romance ratio...well, these forums would probably explode. But some of these points can be explained. Many Baldurs Gate 2 characters have wonderful and memorable personalities, but the BG1 companions were not exactly complex. I think BG2 Jaheira had more dialogue than all the BG1 companions combined. I didn't really like the fates of characters like Safana, but I can't say that I really knew my BG1 companions...therefore their roles in BG2 didn't bother me that much.

The BG community was, of course, much smaller too.

[katamuro]

I think the large part of what made it so bad is that until then we all believed that there would be at least an option of the happy ending. I have never played Baldurs Gate game but from your own words it seemed quite consistently dickish towards the characters in the game. 

Plus all the hype over the game spun by the developers, along with them trying to make ME3 good enough for beginners to start. The last game/book/movie in the trilogy should never be a good place to start. 

[jtav]

I'm going to answer my own question. A few things, I think, make the problems I listed either trivial in comparison ir mitigate them.

 

1, The BG2 companions are vast improvements over BG1. BG1 characters tend to one note and jokey. BG2 featured the (I think) first implementation of companion quests and proper party banter. The player is trading up and it feels silly to complain. I've no attachment to Khalid, and here comes Mazzy anyway. 

 

2. The PC is required to do or think very little. I mentioned Jaheira and Minsc. The plot worked just fine after I dumped them and our supposed friendship is never mentioned again. If ME had no required party members, I think a lot of hate toward, say, Liara would be gone.

 

3. Mod support. The amount of mods for BG is staggering. Many are of professional quality, I'm using a mod for a Xan romance, so Anomen being my only canon option doesn't matter. MEHEM aside, ME modding is very limited. And even if I could put Miranda in my squad, I couldn;t make cinematics or hire Strahovski. I'm stuck with canon.

 

4.The big one. BG never loses track of its themes or tone, From the first dream until ToB, the driving question is the same. Is your fate dictated by your divine nature? And just what are you going to do about it? The stories are  only loosely connected but the series feels like pieces of a whole. The ME series feels very different in tone between installments.

[Mordokai]

Did Jaheira really had that much more romance content? She was the only romance I ever pursued(well... she and Imoen, but she doesn't really count), so I can't really say.

 

Other than that, I believe Iakus has it partially right. Modding scene has been pretty big for BG. Haven't checked it in a while, but up until few years back, new mods were still coming out and old ones were being updated. Couple that together with what Barquiel said about BG1 party members being pretty bland and I think you have it quite all. Granted, I only played the first game once, whereas I finished the second one at least five times, so my opinion should be taken with a grain of salt.

 

To add my own two copper pieces... I think being able to give the main villain(be it Irenicus or Melissan) a proper wallop probably helps. They were well built villains and they really made your life miserable, but you had the chance to return it all with interests. Given how people were clamoring for boss battle with Harbinger, maybe if they got that, there would be a little less complaining with ending.

[Barquiel]

Did Jaheira really had that much more romance content? She was the only romance I ever pursued(well... she and Imoen, but she doesn't really count), so I can't really say.

I don't know if she has much more romance content (I tried to romance her once and had the infamous romance dialogue loop)...I think the main difference is that she has multiple side quests related to the Harpers and to your romantic relationship with her.

[Iakus]

I don't know if she has much more romance content (I tried to romance her once and had the infamous romance dialogue loop)...I think the main difference is that she has multiple side quests related to the Harpers and to your romantic relationship with her.

The Harper Hall quest is a very long questline involving her, easily the longest personal quest in the game.  And her romance ties into it at some points.  So it does make it look like she has the longest romance.

 

And yes, Irenicus, and even Melissan, were in the end far more compelling than The Reapers.  Irenicus especially.  He was a tormented, even pitiable enemy.  But also he was a monster of his own making and needed to be stopped.  None of this nonsensical "I'm saving you by destroying you" troll logic.  

 

And I agree with jtav:  the BG games never lost track of what it was thematically.  With a few name changes the ME trilogy could have been totally separate games unrelated to each other.

[SporkFu]

This conversation makes me kinda want to play BG2 again. I miss Jaheira. She remains one of my favorite romances -- and characters -- of any Bio game. 

[Ieldra]

4.The big one. BG never loses track of its themes or tone, From the first dream until ToB, the driving question is the same. Is your fate dictated by your divine nature? And just what are you going to do about it? The stories are  only loosely connected but the series feels like pieces of a whole. The ME series feels very different in tone between installments.

I agree very much with this. The BG trilogy feels much more like a well-crafted whole and it ends with a choice you could almost see coming, if you knew the setting and thought about where it might lead after you came to know of your origin in BG1.

[von uber]

The main difference? The ubiquity of the internet and the availability of instant response from things like facebook, twitter etc. People are more likely to complain than praise, and ease of getting your message across in this day and age makes it easier to be heard.

 

Case in point: I remember being really annoyed with Destruction Derby 2 (1996! I was 16.. that's bleeding well 18 years ago.. eep!) compared to its predecessor. I moaned to my mate about it and we had a good grumble and that was the end of it. Nowadays a 16 year old me would probably be posting on forums, youtube etc about how crap the game was and how they had betrayed the original game.

 

I always used to be amused on the Creative Assembly forums when MTW, RTW etc came out and there would be DEMANDS for patches, or 'Open Letters to the Community'.

It's always been like this, the difference in this day and age is that there is an easier platform for people to be heard. Just look at the moaning that is going on about whether MEN will canonise destroy/control/synthesis or not - back in the day you just sucked it up and accepted that something like that had to be done to progress things forward.

 

TL,DR: I feel bloody old.

[RedCaesar97]

I cannot speak for any of the Baldurs Gate games (I never played them), but it is my impression that some players so hated the ending, that their hatred spilled over into other parts of the game as they looked to criticize everything else they were so mad. Hatred seems to breed a lot more hatred on the Internet.

 

At least that is my impression.

 

And as others have pointed out, previous choices carried over into ME3, so a lot more players were not happy with how the writers handled some the consequences of those choices they made. 

[Massa FX]

I played BG, NWN etc... They were/are excellent RPG games with wonderful stories and characters. But, I (and I suspect others), never was as emotionally tied to them as to Shepard's story and the Normandy crew.  There's something about Mass Effect that pushed the immersion so that what was acceptable before wasn't OK with me to do with ME characters/story--> ending. 

 

Bottom line: I just didn't care enough about the characters in those games to be upset by their fate.  But Shepard... different reaction in every way possible.

 

Note: I recognize that social media contributed, to a degree, to a global heightened response. My answer is from my personal perspective. I only came to BSN to read/write/vent, and didn't post my thoughts on outside media outlets. In a way, I was embarrassed ... for Bioware and embarrassed for myself too. I cared more than I should have about a video game, however, my reactions were not fueled or influenced by anyone trolling the internet.

 

rambling post. sorry folks.

[vbigiani]

Throne of Bhaal, IMHO, suffers from the same basic problem as ME3: the previous segment of the trilogy introduced and resolved an isolated threat, without significantly advancing the overarching plot, thus forcing the concluding game to rush through the plotline to resolve the main conflict of the trilogy. Unlike ME3, the main conflict was resolvable without resorting to a complete Deux Ex Machina, and the extremely tight deadline (six months!) meant that there wasn't the time to decide upon and introduce a radical shift in theme (like the one we witnessed between ME2 and ME3).

 

Also, thanks to Nostalgia Goggles (and modding, might I add), we all remember the great moments from Shadows of Amn, while ignoring the worse portions of the rest of the trilogy - like what we would do if we played ME2 in a vacuum.

[Linkenski]

I can think of a couple of different reasons.

 

1) It was announced to be a trilogy from the get-go. Bioware couldn't live up to the premise they had decided.

 

2) Every game alienated big chunks of the fanbase of both Bioware in general but also just the first Mass Effect.

 

3) EA, EA-ified Bioware with insane deadlines and **** DLC practices.

 

4) Mac Walters rose in ranks from an "Item description writer" to "Lead writer". Gotta love how that turned out.

[sH0tgUn jUliA]

The main difference? The ubiquity of the internet and the availability of instant response from things like facebook, twitter etc. People are more likely to complain than praise, and ease of getting your message across in this day and age makes it easier to be heard.

 

Case in point: I remember being really annoyed with Destruction Derby 2 (1996! I was 16.. that's bleeding well 18 years ago.. eep!) compared to its predecessor. I moaned to my mate about it and we had a good grumble and that was the end of it. Nowadays a 16 year old me would probably be posting on forums, youtube etc about how crap the game was and how they had betrayed the original game.

 

I always used to be amused on the Creative Assembly forums when MTW, RTW etc came out and there would be DEMANDS for patches, or 'Open Letters to the Community'.

It's always been like this, the difference in this day and age is that there is an easier platform for people to be heard. Just look at the moaning that is going on about whether MEN will canonise destroy/control/synthesis or not - back in the day you just sucked it up and accepted that something like that had to be done to progress things forward.

 

TL,DR: I feel bloody old.

 

Shut up. I am bloody old.

[themikefest]

Shut up. I am bloody old.

Nope. Age is just a number. 

[dgcatanisiri]

I'm taking a shot in the dark, since I have no idea what any kind of build up to release there was for Baldur's Gate, and haven't played it anyway, but my guess is that it had a lot to do with the promises made ahead of time for ME3, specifically the element of 'our choices matter.' ME3 plays with pretty much no more than superficial changes to anything - at many points, it stops being that we're playing the character we crafted and played for the previous two games, and we're now playing BioWare's Shepard, one who reacts in only certain ways.

 

And sure, to an extent, you kinda have to go with that - video games can only allow so much customization, and certainly can't allow you to play things going completely off the rails like in a taple-top RPG with a human dungeon master who can react to your choices, but the illusion is barely there this time. The script feels half-finished, at least a few drafts away from completion, and there's a lot of telling, rather than showing when it comes to plot choices from previous games - many of the things that we were told would have an effect on the game amounted to nothing we saw, only read about on the war assets page.

 

And it might have also had to do with the developer comments ahead of time - unlike in the late nineties, social media allows the fans and the developers to be in constant communication. Given the profile that ME3 had compared to BG2, because BioWare's made such a name for itself in the time since, there was a lot of hype, and a lot of expectation for ME3. And then the game comes out and, like I said, feels a few drafts away from finality. That led to disappointment, and, because of the much bigger audience, a much bigger outcry of negativity.

[Cobwebmaster]

I think it is generally acknowledged that BG set the benchmark for RPGs. I played as a male and romanced all three of the female options. I think Viconia was always heading for disaster no matter how you polarised your character. Viconia's persona and background meant that she would always be hunted by her own kind and others, simply because she was a Drow. Hooking up with my pc meant that she would have considerable protection from yer average and even advanced assassination attempt, but even the pc had to realise that  Viconia was not going to die of old age

As for Aerie the winged elf, I don't think I've ever come across a more simpering whiny ("does my ass look big in this") character. Aerie totally skeeved me out. "But what's this" I thought to myself, in TOB "Does she actually start manning up as her powers grow?". Well sorta and if you romance her through Tob she becomes pregnant

By far the most interesting and complex interaction is that in the Jaheira romance which happens to be my favourite. However,  I do agree some BG2 mods provide  good alternative romance-able characters if you are in to that sort of thing one I recall was rather exotic. I think (and for me Minsc is THE best NPC ever) BG npcs have the greatest depth of character interaction of all the RPGs I have played before or since. NWN (particularly NWN2) goes some way towards matching that accomplishment, and KOTR is no slouch either, but David Gaider I think got a bit fed up with writing romances especially for hot elven chicks

In terms of Khalid? (Jaheira's husband) I thought he was a bit of a fifth wheel in my game in BG as he kept getting killed (as did Jaheira) and had trouble finding a good mesh with his skill set. I found Kivan and the dwarf (can't remember his name useful

As for the ending in TOB? Damn good I thought. All the options given to the PC were good ones including that where you decided simply to go back to a quiet life somewhere with or without a partner, not that you really could after the Bhaalspawn wars, but you did start out as an apprentice/student monk or scholar in Candlekeep!
 

[Farangbaa]

I'm just gonna leave this here...

 

[Ieldra]

I think it is generally acknowledged that BG set the benchmark for RPGs.

Nope. If any single game had that distinction, it would be "Planescape: Torment". Also, the BG series walked in the footsteps of Fallout, which preceded it by two years and features many of the same elements, often better realized than in the BG games. 

[Cobwebmaster]

Disagree. I don't deny that Planescape Torment was an excellent game but for my money not in the same class as BG for a number of reasons. Also while Planescape used Bioware's infinity engine and commonly had it's hero as an "Immortal" or at least in BG's case a potential immortal, there was far less combat and consequently more "chat. BG achieved a better balance between plot development, character interaction (and there was a greater variety of it) and action. I think BG gained a lot of converts from amongst the FPS brigadfe of which I was one. While Planescape didn't convert me to RPGs BG and it's better sequels did

Oh If I am right there was only 1 year between Fallout and BG ratherthan the 2 you mentioned. Fallout (all of them) I didn't like as I grew up in London where there was plenty of bombed areas around and loads of rubble ,UXB s and mines floating around the coastline and in estuaries that had to be disarmed. I lived through such times and reminding me about them in a game has never held any appeal