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Baldurs Gate 3 is so wild when you realise how vastly different the game is depending on if you choose Tav or Dark Urge

Dark Urge Playthrough: you’re the child of Bhaal, but unlike the Bhaalspawn, you are created solely by Bhaal himself. The first true child of Bhaal. The daughter of one of your father’s previous Bhaalspawn turns on you, attacks you and tries to kill you. In your dying state, she infects you with a parasite so that you’ll die an incredibly humiliating death, and become her slave.

By some miracle you end up on the same nautiloud ship as a Sharron Cleric who happens to to be carrying a gith artefact that contains Baldur himself. Baldur, who was made a mind flayer and is now calling himself the Emperor, realises there’s an incredibly powerful Bhaalspawn on the ship, and that he can use them to his advantage. The power you have will help him destroy Gortash. Of course he picks you, it makes so much sense.

On your way to Baldurs Gate you find out through an unsent letter that you used to be into Gortash. When you get to Baldurs Gate, the man you used to fuck turns out to be an absolute loser and with horror you realise he is still into you. It’s okay though, he’s very easy to kill.

You end up facing off against Orin, your niece, and kill her. Your father appears to you and offers you the chance to become his Slayer. On the high chance you turn him down, he murders you in front of your loved ones, and leaves you to rot.

Then Jergal, the actual Lord of the End of Everything, the original God of Death, who was the very being that turned you father into a God all that time ago, who’s been in your camp for weeks pretending to be this undead scribe called Withers, appears next to your corpse and brings you back to life, basically adopts you, states that he will protect you from Bhaal, and announces that as long as he lives, you will never die. You’re essentially immortal.

Tav Playthrough: you’re a random nobody that was unlucky enough to get kidnapped by Mind Flayers. The Emperor must pick one of the many idiots on the ship to be his pawn. He sees Tav and thinks “ugh, yeah this one will do”.

The gods are silent. Rivellon bleeds. New powers stir.

Built by the team who brought you Baldur's Gate 3, Larian Studios unchains its ambitions to bring you an RPG with greater breadth & depth than ever before.

#at least that's the plan #divinity #larian #larian studios #Youtube

Three dads wishing their daughter good luck at her Catholic school final exams.

Larian using genAI is not a small issue. "Oh they're just using it for placeholders/brainstorming/concept art so it's not bad" is a bullshit take (already was when Clair Obscur did it by the way) because the data for genAI has been stolen from every artist and creative in existence and is now used to put a lot of those very same artists out of work. Not to mention the data centers used for this technology guzzle up huge amounts of water and energy while we are in a climate crisis and have honestly no resources to spare for this kind of crap, especially 'cause it only enriches billion dollar tech companies in the end while hiking up prices for everyone else.

Now, allegedly, there also has been a bro culture at Larian akin to Blizzard or Ubisoft where bigoted employees don't get fired because they're too "invaluable" to the team according to higher-ups (source tw for mention of SA, transphobia, racism).

But...

...I like to also mention that even before all this came out there was a lot to criticise Larian for. Most people just conveniently didn't care about it. Because "Larian listens to the fans!" (only to certain fans though) and "Baldur's Gate 3 is the most amazing game ever" so what does it matter how terrible they treated their one black main character and his fans? The racism and anti-blackness was not bad enough for too many people. I guess Wyll was boring and had no content anyway so why bother (can you hear my sarcasm?)

Just this month a dedicated person modded 840 voice lines for Wyll into the game. The audio files already existed, Wyll's VA Theo Solomon had recorded all of them but Larian never implemented them into the game. Instead they left old voice lines by Wyll's first VA Lanre Malaolu in and otherwise had Wyll stay suspiciously silent in a lot of situations. BG3 has 35 Hotfixes and 8 Patches released over 2 years. Larian never went and fixed Wyll's voice lines so all of his VA's work would be in the game! That is on top of Wyll having the least amount of content of any Origin character (and no - Larian themselves deciding to rewrite Wyll close to release is no excuse), no real personal quest, no kiss or hug in the epilogue and no animated sex scene like every other character got, no cathartic moment of getting rid of his abuser (worse - his abuser being a sexy devil lady means she gets way too much screen time in HIS cutscenes, gets to treat him like a dog, hangs out in your camp for all of Act 3 without you being able to get rid of her and the player can even fuck her), player dialogue towards Wyll feeling especially cruel and out of place at times, his evil ending they added later makes no sense, plus a lot of bugs that still remain in the game after all those patches. (Other examples of Larian's treatment of Wyll: example 1 , example 2, example 3, example 4) But rest assured, Larian slightly adjusted the camera in Astarion's introduction scene in Patch 8 - not that it was needed in any way. Cannot have any patches without doing something for Larian's and fandom's darling white boy. Best company ever!

#larian studios #larian #larian critical #fandom racism #racism #fandom critical #fuck genai #baldur's gate 3 #bg3 #my thoughts

✦ SKETCH ✦ I missssss #DOS2 so much that I decided to replay it. Larian, llove you....

#sketch #ifanbenmezd #larianstudios #illustration #dos2 #divinity original sin 2 #dos2 ifan #larian

I've seen some posts now circulating that list Larian's problems, but none of them felt it worth including that Larian made many decisions based out of racism in developing Baldur's Gate 3 on those lists.

And no, I don't even just mean the stuff inherited from DnD's setting. I mean things like:

Rewriting Wyll last minute to try and appeal to racist fans, then proceeding to ignore him anyway (never bothering to fix his bugs but my god it sure is a relief that Astarion gets his facial animations changed 20 different times //sarcasm) [LINK]

Treating Black people and Asian people as interchangeable, shifting Karlach's appearance from Black coded to East Asian coded between Early Access and Full Release [LINK]

Making fun of ethnic throat singing [LINK]

Astarion's plot with the Gur [LINK]

Culturally appropriating sacred Indigenous tattoos [LINK]

And that's just the basic start of what could probably be a much longer list, if given enough time and people to point it all out.

TL;DR: Please don't let your (justified) hate of gen-AI overshadow that Larian has well demonstrated scummy behaviour before it.

#larian #larian studios #bg3 #baldur's gate 3 #racism