Choosing your path

 Time to talk Baldur's Gate again!

I know, you're probably sick to death of hearing people extol the returning virtues of one of the greatest video game franchises of all time's return to the spotlight, but I can't help myself. I literally dreamt about the BG3 Narrator dictating my life last night, I'm hopelessly lost to it's narrative charms in a way I haven't been about a Western video game for nigh on years at this point. And besides the point of it being a game existing within the predatory little niggles of high quality gaming, devoid of microtransactions and cash shops and god-awful live service trash that exists merely to keep you playing forever whilst the Ubisoft Devs smile to their investors and pretend every single one of those concurrent players are loyal and loving fans and not lightly brainwashed lobotomites struggling to complete a game that never ends. I love the game so much I'm already thinking about a dozen new playthroughs I'd love to go through as I'm entering the third act of my first.

One of the biggest reasons why I'm so tempted to jump back into the octagon, so to speak, is the fact that Baldur's Gate 3 has within it's software one of the single most interesting choice-meets-consequence tied narrative structures of all time: delivered with a cinematic aplomb. You simply don't see this level of effort instilled into a game at any other level because it doesn't make financial sense for a company to put so much effort into content that 99% of it's players will never see, but Larian have proven themselves to be a company not driven by 'Financial sense'. They want to make great games. They see themselves as artists working to make the art that they want to engage in, expanding in all the ways they want to see in the artform- And I want to talk about how important something like that is.

Perhaps my favourite game for this sort of play before I played BG3 was 'Fallout: New Vegas', a game developed on the bones of a game that already existed some years beforehand. New Vegas balanced it's narrative on a pin-prick between a several faction large war spanning creeds, personalities and overall goals, which naturally allowed for major storytelling beats to be somewhat freeform. Quests would be present for any faction and the player chose who they wanted to work from, building up the relationship system and crafting their own narrative path. And I want to focus on that idea of ;your own narrative path' because that's key to this special feeling of player driven narrative which makes games like the two I'm losing my mind over today click.

Video games are an interactive medium, and storytelling is usually a largely passive experience of one narrative guide meeting the ears of several receivers. With the interactivity of video games the potential exists to give everyone the chance to tell the same story in their own way, claiming a very personal ownership of their adventure and feeling more alive through those consequences. It's like breathing life into a static adventure tale by making it your adventure tale. But it takes so much work and effort to live out that most would never even bother to try and make a game as sprawling as that for the benefit of what seems like a small audience when the masses are happy with different styles of gaming altogether. But any niche can grow and swell when served appropriately.  

Oftentimes when we look at choice and consequence within the confines of the games we play, the actual way this plays out is limited to slight changes in conversation options or a slightly altered unlocked ending. Assassin's Creed Odyssey plays this out spectacularly, boasting a 100 hour long RPG wherein the only real branching path is whether or not you get a boss fight at the very end of the game, a choice which fails to have any meaning or relevance the second after it happens because the subsequent DLC bitterly refuses to acknowledge anything that happens in the main game. Does a player come away from a campaign like that feeling like they forged their own narrative? No, they feel like they just came to the end of another plodding and linear Assassin's Creed story- so at that level one might argue why even bother at all?

Perhaps because of the legacy of games like Mass Effect and 'TellTale's: The Walking Dead'- there's a certain allure to the promise that 'your actions have consequences' that makes the individual actions of one miniscule side quest feel grandiose and pronounced on the grand tapestry of the whole narrative. Insignificant little quips can paint your perception in a way that will come back around years later and the final falling hammer of the conclusion. It's almost like a blank cheque to present the player with whatever stakes, small or large, you can think of under the illusion that every bit will imperatively effect the progress of their story. Although if you actually take a look back, how many decisions in The Walking Dead or Mass Effect actually carry through to the next game? Take a look at the Dragon Age 'save crossover' website and you'll see a surprisingly bare screen with about 20 choices fixed to it, it's actually a little galling. 

Baldur's Gate has breathed a life into this sector of game design which I thought would go unserved since Bioware decided to go the way of the dodo for itself; which shocks me somewhat because that was never something that the original games stood for. The level of granular change you can make here or there, whilst a little buggy (particularly with how the journal seems to struggle to remember the specifics of choices that you made) seems to go a long way to selling the fantasy of 'choosing your own path' and making every playthrough feel like it matters. I guess that sort of sprawling story can only really sustain itself over the course of a single game- rather than the rigors of a series. Still, it's a quirk of design I remembered how to love, and one which I hope is matched in the the branching RPGs still to come. (Looking at you: Mass Effect 4!)