In most games involving this topic, it takes a bit of back and forth, some tact, and persuasion skills to “fix” these NPCs, but the emphasis is usually on the end result and how your choices have mattered. But in Owlcat’s games, there's so much narrative focus on the companions’ internal suffering when they are questioning their old beliefs, and the constant fear as they choose to leave a harmful place and rebuild their lives despite immense hardships, and their ending can easily turn out to be bad.

I'm always disappointed when real-life people don't reflect on how the system they are a part of can be problematic, and when they even contribute to the harm without any thought for more marginalised people, but these stories remind me that it is difficult to give up one’s comfort to act on dissenting beliefs.

Someone on Blue Sky posted about how they went down a rabbit hole and discovered that the most thorough guides for Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 were written by a woman who has been thoroughly blogging all her video game opinions since the 1980s.

She's aggressively old school, hates most modern RPGs (she scathingly refers to Baldur's Gate 3 as a "reddit RPG" and gave it a 2.1/10), and basically thinks everything should be isometric, turn-based CRPGs from the 80s and 90s. That's not an exaggeration.

You can play it in your browser here, or download official registered versions of the whole trilogy plus Blades of Exile for Windows free under Older Role-Playing Games from the official site here (you'll need to drag things onto the otvdm program to run them; you can run .hlp film by dragging them onto this in-browser tool.

The Exile series was remade and extended as the Avernum series, currently available partly on Steam and wholly on GOG. It is currently being re-remade (currently up to Avernum 4, whose original version the developer considers one of his greatest failures) and can be bought, alongside other games by the developer, on Steam and GOG.

Have I advanced the story? NO. NUMBERS GO UP.

Have I done any epic fights? NO. NUMBERS GO UP.

Have I done any great dialog sequences? NO. NUMBERS GO UP.

This is the part of RPGs that pisses me off the most, and also part of why I get so offended when people talk about "can equip stuff to make numbers go up" with the conceptual name "RPG elements".

Somewhere along the line, the industry decided that "Role-Playing" didn't mean "inhabiting a character and making choices," but rather "numbers make go up bigger."

True RPG-ing is Convincing a planetary governor to surrender through sheer charisma and political maneuvering, and then figuring out just how to literally charm those leather pants off that lithe and acrobatic bondagy knife play Death Cultist goth gf who literally calls you her Domme.

"RPG Elements" just means equipping a pair of pants that makes you 2% better at convincing that governor. Somehow. Maybe he just likes the pants.

It’s a cheap development shorthand. Developers add a leveling system because it’s an easy way to pad out the runtime and trigger a dopamine hit in the gamer's little lizard brain, even if the "progression" is just keeping pace with enemies that are scaling at the exact same rate.

BUT IF I DON'T MAKE NUMBERS GO UP, I WILL GET SLAUGHTERED IN FIGHTS.

Some dipshits in rags with flamethrowers last night were a bigger threat than a literal WORD BEARER CHAOS MARINE the night before.

Her: the chick in the pod is super pretty

Me, not looking up: yeah, shadowheart is my wife

Mom: 👀😏

Me: i just mean i really struggle not to romance her but like all the romance plots are totally optional

Mom: you really like dark haired women huh?

Me:

90% of romance options I've ever picked:

My real life actual girlfriend: 🧑🏻

Me: yeah I mean well shadowheart isn't... I mean she's... and anyway sometimes i romance Karlach...

Karlach's hair:

But it's sooooooo good. It really hits the spot for me of just the right amount of (tt)rpg elements, folklore-ish storyline, and politics (the kingdom management is fun and I will die on that hill).

And it gets even better with mods which add more classes from the tabletop and background traits and so much more.