#now i'm thinking abt it i wonder if the weirdly moralizing tone of some of the dev commentary has to do with writing in ontological good &

[s1ithers]

re: baldur's gate's setting limitations: I've read a Lot of shit set in the Forgotten Realms and yeah, I agree. I mean I think it's interesting with the Legend of Drizzt (which are objectively bad although I love them dearly) to see an author clumsily *trying* grapple with sociological cycles of violence, and even that's being really deprecated out of more modern D&D to make it brighter, shinier, more Marvel, and more approachable. Like that's certainly the more marketable approach and in a [1/2

setting increasingly dictated by TTRPGs as played by people who expect videogame logic, /or/ parasocial slice of life, it's not surprising - it also avoids a lot of the pitfalls of "what the fuck were you thinking" that LoD itself is a great example of when it comes to clumsy allegory and sexual assault played for titillation - but honestly I prefer the clumsy trash that contemplates gore and consequence happening on a human level than something that wants to be approachable and friendly but [2/ [3/3] has no problem with the concept of ontological evil which is always more fundamentally regressive than clumsy allegory tbh. But I mean we both prefer DA and DA started /as a reaction to/ the fundamental limitations of the Baldur's Gate series, so it's not surprisingly that a game that sort of ignores the entire DA-digression, and the risks it took with form, doesn't have that spark.

haven't read LoD but agreed, my clumsy allegory tolerance is probably /too/ high but do ontological good and evil at face value & i'm right out

i think what hits weird for me about bg3 is almost some version of the uncanny, like on the one hand it's trying to do psychological realism in a pretty earnest way, but it's also set up this world where like. a character's hair changes from black to white when she chooses Good. yknow. there's some lovely sensitive character writing, but it rests on this substrate of world-logic that's just fundamentally not how people work. ahistorical, like you've said before. so you can only drill down so far before it rings hollow or just comes off kind of pat