PC Gamer 2024 RPG Roundtable with Swen Vincke, Carrie Patel, Ted Peterson and others

[Ryzer]

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/b...es-blew-up-so-hard-we-just-couldnt-manage-it/

Baldur's Gate 3 once featured an even deeper co-op conversation system, but Swen Vincke said their 'dialogue trees blew up so hard, we just couldn't manage it'​

Larian tried to revisit Divinity: Original Sin's roleplaying arguments over dialogue choices, but it was just too much.

In a recent RPG roundtable I hosted for the PC Gamer Chat Log podcast, something Larian founder Swen Vincke said caused my ears to perk up: the already impressive multiplayer roleplaying in Baldur's Gate 3 was once even more involved than what made it into the final game.

During the roundtable, Ted Peterson, writer and designer of the original Elder Scrolls, pointed out that multiplayer games and MMOs have difficulty keeping their tone consistent—it's easy to tell the difference between the way a player behaves and the way a character would. That was something Vincke had in mind during the development of BG3.

"We've been trying to experiment with that—the problem is that it's so intensive to get it to work," he said. "In Original Sin 1 you could actually roleplay dialogue with your partner, in co-operative play. We actually had that deeply in Baldur's Gate 3 at some point also. But the problem was our dialogue trees blew up so hard, we just couldn't manage it anymore. So we had to cut it all."

I don't know much about Baldur's Gate 3's companions, because for me they're not much more than a bunch of weirdos who hang out at my camp. That's because I played Baldur's Gate 3 in four-player co-op, with no space in the party for NPCs to tag along and invite me into their own stories. I'd like to know what Astarion's whole deal is and why Karlach's so beloved, but I had too much fun with the chaos of playing BG3 with friends—just like I did with Divinity: Original Sin 2 before it, and the first Original Sin before that.

I love playing these games with friends, because there are long stretches of exploration during which we can chat, and enough emergent, sandboxy solutions to problems that I know we'll end up coming up with weird or creative ideas as a group that I wouldn't see solo. We definitely miss out on some of the overall story, but my character's personal journey has still been satisfying. No other developer is making RPGs this ambitious with multiplayer, and I think on the whole Larian's been getting better at it with each passing game. But in terms of pure roleplaying, it would be exciting to see a system like the one Vincke was referencing from 2014's Original Sin make a comeback:

Will we see something like that return for whatever Larian's doing next? I think chances are good. "It's still an ambition," Vincke said during the roundtable. If Larian's next RPG is a bit smaller than Baldur's Gate 3, perhaps those dialogue trees will be a bit more manageable with intra-party roleplaying added in.

You can check out the rest of the 80 minute RPG roundtable in the YouTube and Spotify embeds here, or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

What a load if shite, their dialogues all end up in the same way.

 

[lukaszek]

Outer Worlds humor is so bland, even their "funny behind the scenes stories" are unfunny.

assume position nick

 

[santino27]

I can't imagine thinking the Moon Man stuff was funny at the time... and then years later thinking it's STILL funny enough to warrant sharing. Haha! He's literally horny for capitalism! I'm making subversive commentary! This industry is trash.

 

[Cologno]

The Moon Man computer white boy voice rap albums were funny as hell, though.

 

[PunchYouInTheFace]

It's pretty enjoying seeing a lot walking tumours over here malding over Swen Vincke and The Outer Worlds, lmao.

 

[Yosharian]

Carrie Patel is such a fucking terrible writer

 

[PunchYouInTheFace]

Carrie Patel is such a fucking terrible writer

Damn, Avowed hasn't even been released yet. Also don't forget the culture war parrot talking point and add some Carrie Patel picture (the one with her having colored hair, that would drive the point home!).

(unless if Avowed received well like Fallout TV Show or BG3, it would be absolutely Codexian-esque (Retard) to be a contrarian).

 

[Zanzoken]

Carrie Patel is such a fucking terrible writer

Damn, Avowed hasn't even been released yet. Also don't forget the culture war parrot talking point and add some Carrie Patel picture (the one with her having colored hair, that would drive the point home!).

(unless if Avowed received well like Fallout TV Show or BG3, it would be absolutely Codexian-esque (Retard) to be a contrarian).

You seem lost, NPC. Here is a quest marker that will lead you back home.

https://www.resetera.com

 

[PunchYouInTheFace]

You seem lost, NPC. Here is a quest marker that will lead you back home.

https://www.resetera.com

Not at all, NPC-2 with erectile dysfunction. I am exactly where I need to be

 

[cpmartins]

You seem lost, NPC. Here is a quest marker that will lead you back home.

https://www.resetera.com

Not at all, NPC-2 with erectile dysfunction. I am exactly where I need to be

 

[Latro]

You seem lost, NPC. Here is a quest marker that will lead you back home.

https://www.resetera.com

Not at all, NPC-2 with erectile dysfunction. I am exactly where I need to be

How many tattoos do you have and why is your hair pink

 

[PunchYouInTheFace]

How many tattoos do you have and why is your hair pink

450 total, and it's "Esquire blush", thank you.

Don't forget to use the soap I've sent you last year. It's still there, untouched. Along with 1000 dollar bill I purposely put on your shower.

 

[Roguey]

Damn, Avowed hasn't even been released yet.

Pillars of Eternity, Deadfire, and The Outer Worlds/Peril on Gorgon are enough to judge her quality of work (it's lacking, she is lacking).

 

[Swen]

It's pretty enjoying seeing a lot walking tumours over here malding over Swen Vincke and The Outer Worlds, lmao.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.gamesradar.com/games/ba...as-to-treat-it-like-what-you-would-see-on-tv/

Baldur's Gate 3 director says some Larian devs were "uncomfortable" with the RPG's horniness but the goal was to "treat it like what you would see on TV"​

"You can do really crazy stuff and still relate to it"

Not everyone at Larian was initially on board with just how horny Baldur's Gate 3 is, but director Swen Vincke insisted on handling mature themes in a similar way to a TV show.

As part of PC Gamer's roundtable discussion with RPG developers that included Vincke, the Larian boss admitted Baldur's Gate 3's most explicitly sexual content made some of the internal staff "uncomfortable."

"We try to be as true to life as we could," he said. "Internally in the studio there were some people who felt uncomfortable, and we said, it's a mature game, right? We're going to treat it like what you would see on TV. A series I refer to often was American Gods, which I thought was really well done [in how] it treated mature themes and fantasy settings."

Admittedly, it's hard to compare Baldur's Gate 3's romances to really any TV show - as far as I'm aware, there isn't a show on TV where a druid shapeshifts into a bear and hooks up with a half-elf. That said, I get what Vincke is saying. If some of the most successful TV shows of all time - take Game of Thrones for example - can get away with sex scenes that aren't just incredibly unrestrained but also downright disturbing - it's hard to point at a fantasy video game and say it's too horny.

"You can do really crazy stuff and still relate to it," Vincke said. "It was always tastefully done. I mean, the famous bear scene—it was really a squirrel that was not looking. The rest was the theater of your mind. You filled that in, we didn't do that!"

Ultimately, Baldur's Gate 3 was awarded countless accolades for its story, at the heart of which were numerous complex and deeply rewarding relationships both romantic and platonic in nature.

https://www.gamesradar.com/games/rp...-quests-our-cinematic-team-wanted-to-kill-me/

Cyberpunk 2077 lead reveals the smoke and mirrors behind one of the RPG's most unique quests: "Our cinematic team wanted to kill me"​

Nighttime dives aren't as simple as they seem

Arguably Cyberpunk 2077's most famous date scene - the underwater scuba dive with tech wizard Judy Alvarez - was made with smoke and mirrors, according to one lead developer.

In PC Gamer's lengthy roundtable chat with RPG developers, at around the 35:00 minute mark, CDPR's acting lead quest designer Sarah Gruemmer talked about a limitation that soon turned into a creative solution. "We have the quest where we go diving with Judy in Cyberpunk," Grummer says, which then turned tricky when the team didn't "have diving [animations] for NPCs in our game."

CD Projekt Red developers still "really wanted to make this quest where you have this moment with her underwater," so they opted to use their "scene system to do the entire thing and we just worked around it." That process involved putting "everything on animation and then just had to chuck everything in shorter sections, so she waits there in an idle animation and you can do 'gameplay things' around her."

The trick is that Judy is still "close enough that you can actually talk and then, you know, move to the next section. Everything is, again, just an underwater animation. Our cinematic team wanted to kill me," Gruemmer jokes.

Cyberpunk 2077 developers have been sharing plenty about their redeemed open-world romp recently, with another environment artist explaining that creating Night City posed a "significant challenge" when it came to "adjusting to the scale and characteristics of American settings," especially since CDPR is primarily a Poland-based studio.

https://www.gamesradar.com/games/ac...m-canon-at-the-last-minute-be-on-the-lookout/

Before the days of patches, Elder Scrolls creator's first game shipped with OP bugged killers, so he just made them canon at the last minute: "Be on the lookout"​

Terminator: Future Shock wasn't meant to have robots that could move through walls

If you've ever played the 1995 action game The Terminator: Future Shock, you might've wondered why the heck some of the Terminators are able to move right through solid walls. Almost 30 years later, we know the answer: they were bugged and the designer figured it was more feasible to just make these superpowered robots canon by writing them into the manual than patching the game.

Ted Peterson, a veteran video game developer best-known for being one of the creators of the Elder Scrolls series, told PC Gamer during a roundtable discussion on RPGs that his first game shipped with a pretty serious collision bug that's apparently still in the game to this day.

"We had a bug where Terminators would sometimes walk through walls," he said. "There was some sort of collision issue going on and we had to write the manual before the game came out, and so I wrote in the manual - because I didn't know if we had fixed this collision issue before it came out - 'there are some reports from Skynet that Terminators have been known to phase through solid material, so be on the lookout for this.'"

Asked if the bugged Terminators were ever fixed, Peterson laughed and said "no, I believe they can still do that." It's worth nothing that a cursory Google search yields a bunch of results about Future Shock having collision issues not confined to Terminators.

As someone who writes about video games, many of which are endlessly live service, it's bizarre to recall a time when video game updates and patches just weren't a thing. In 1995 in most parts of the US, it was a coin toss as to whether households had PCs hooked up to the internet, and of course video game consoles at the time were entirely offline, so there would've been little incentive for developers to dig out the source code and remove bugs. That's right, youngins, in my day there were no "day one patches" or "seasons" - you just had to live with the game you bought until a sequel came out.

Anywho, I absolutely love it when a video game secret is revealed after so many years, and the more time in-between, the better. A few months ago, we learned after 23 years that the cult classic horror game Alien Resurrection can be turned into a "boot disk" for playing burned PS1 games because one of its original developers snuck a cheat code past Sony.

https://www.gamesradar.com/games/rp...ndd-game-were-not-going-to-start-rolling-now/

Avowed and Cyberpunk 2077 leads weigh in on Baldur's Gate 3 setting a new standard for RPGs: "Baldur's Gate is a D&D game, we're not going to start rolling now"​

But it might make some choices weirder, in all the good ways

Veteran RPG developers have weighed in on how Baldur's Gate 3 has (or hasn't) affected how they approach their own games.

In PC Gamer's RPG roundtable, senior developers from across the industry were asked about whether the record-breaking Baldur's Gate 3 set a new standard for the genre. Larian Studios boss and the game's creative director Swen Vincke had a very easy response - "I can't answer that" - but the rest of the panel was somewhat split.

Carrie Patel, the game director behind Avowed and a senior narrative designer behind many of Obsidian's RPGs, said the game "reinforced" a philosophy that her studio has long had, "which is that creating a collaborative relationship with your players" is "always worthwhile."

Patel explains that that relationship comes by giving players "options that pay off and trusting in their creativity to find those options and engage with them." Patel continues that developers will "never lose if you find ways to reward your players, find things for them to discover, and trust them to do so" - something that connects Baldur's Gate 3 with Obsidian's gems, from Pillars of Eternity to The Outer Worlds.

Adrienne Bazir, the solo developer behind last year's excellent time-looping indie In Stars and Time, had a similar response but also pointed to drunk amnesiac detective sim Disco Elysium as another example of a game that doesn't give you choices rooted in a moral binary - the choices move past simple good/heroic versus bad/villainous ones.

Something that Disco Elysium and Baldur's Gate 3 both did, according to Bazir, is give players "choices that were straight up weird… what if I was just a bear right now?" Bazir explains that moving past that binary allows players to "kind of play with the medium a little" and hopes devs big and small will adopt a similar thinking.

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty's acting lead quest designer Sarah Gruemmer had a more muted response because "Baldur's Gate is a D&D game, right? So we're not going to start rolling in the games that we make." Cyberpunk 2 isn't going to start deciding headshots based on a dice roll, "but there are still a lot of nice things you can take inspiration from and integrate into your own stuff," Gruemmer says.

 

[Roguey]

"We had a bug where Terminators would sometimes walk through walls," he said. "There was some sort of collision issue going on and we had to write the manual before the game came out, and so I wrote in the manual - because I didn't know if we had fixed this collision issue before it came out - 'there are some reports from Skynet that Terminators have been known to phase through solid material, so be on the lookout for this.'"

That's a pretty funny way of handling it.

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty's acting lead quest designer Sarah Gruemmer had a more muted response because "Baldur's Gate is a D&D game, right? So we're not going to start rolling in the games that we make." Cyberpunk 2 isn't going to start deciding headshots based on a dice roll, "but there are still a lot of nice things you can take inspiration from and integrate into your own stuff," Gruemmer says.

 

[Jonathan "Zee Nekomimi]

White woman who hates white guys so much she's fucking and married to Indian guy. Like Bil Gate's daughter.

Quick correction that the older bill gates daughter, married a egyptian, not a pajeeth. Still shit tier but not the same.

 

[lukaszek]

saying that bg3 is fine because GOT did it well while forgetting that sex scenes there made no sense and spawned lots of memes at a time. Then acne guy in charge grew up over the years and we had less and less of those.

 

[luj1]

These people think turning BG3 into Dragon Age and reanimating the fetid corpse of Bioware is "innovation" lol

 

[luj1]

Baldur's Gate 3 director says some Larian devs were "uncomfortable" with the RPG's horniness but the goal was to "treat it like what you would see on TV"​

No shit

They wont stop until they turn games into Hollywood movies

 

[Takamori]

Something that surprises is how and why Carry Pattel opinion has any relevance to this day when she didn't release anything relevant, not even mediocre.
The other guys makes sense even if by Codex standards they are all shit(except Ted), their products made money and that's how people measure quality sadly.

 

[PunchYouInTheFace]

Pillars of Eternity, Deadfire, and The Outer Worlds/Peril on Gorgon are enough to judge her quality of work (it's lacking, she is lacking).

Is that an objective truth or personal opinion?

Either way, the scapegoat is ready. "Carrie Patel Bad". Some of these walking tumours already start parroting that. I think it would be funny for me if the game turns out to be good.

Just look how plenty of sexually stunted retards above me trying to gasfartlighting themselves into believing that BG3 is somehow bad, lmao.

 

[Fedora Master]

All these people need to be put up against a wall. No need to determine just how bad they are individually.

 

[Swen]

All these people need to be put up against a wall. No need to determine just how bad they are individually.

You serious?

 

[Fedora Master]

All these people need to be put up against a wall. No need to determine just how bad they are individually.

You serious?

Burn this industry to the ground.