In Starfield, there is a quest to betray a certain bigwig. I'll keep the details vague to avoid spoilers, but in many other RPGs this is a critical moment in the story. If you take this path, you will never interact with that faction again. You are choosing this life over that life. [After all, you will only lose access to that faction's mission board, and nothing will happen to you. You can still quest for them, and only the mass of factions involved in that quest line really care. Granted, this is more in the tradition of Bethesda. In Oblivion, for example, I was a master Thief, head of the Fighter Guild, head of the Mage Guild, and a high-profile assassin in the Dark Brotherhood.

This is one of the key differences between Bethesda's RPG and "Baldur's Gate 3" that former Bethesda developer and lead director of "Skyrim," Bruce Nesmith, has also acknowledged. in an interview with MinnMax, Nesmith's thoughts on Larian RPGs was asked, "I love Baldur's Gate, and I'm a big fan of Dungeons & Dragons," and turned the camera to the shelves of RPG books and modules.

"Fan" seems like an understatement. Nesmith actually worked for a time at TSR, which was the original publisher of Dungeons & Dragons and would later be sold to Wizards of the Coast in 1997. Nesmith wrote many of his works there, including Dragonlance, Greyhawk, and the Ravenloft setting. I think "Baldur's Gate 3" is a triumph of the tabletop experience on the computer. Hats off to Larian and his group.

And he discusses Bethesda's game about every hero becoming a multitasking polymath, good at everything and suspected by no one. He describes Larian's attitude as being content to shut out the entire story line, saying, "We could never do that ourselves. Larian could never do it on their own.

Bethesda, he feels, did not have that luxury; at Bethesda, the games we were making were so big that we had to take the approach, "Well, everyone should be able to do it at some point." Nothing is off-limits

"When you play 'Baldur's Gate 3,' you will naturally get the impression that this decision I am about to make closes some parts of the game and opens others. It makes sense: ...... Few of Bethesda's decisions in the game feel very meaningful.

What I see here is a divergence in design philosophy; Baldur's Gate 3 is a 100+ hour experience, but it has such a clear beginning, middle, and end that it even divides the story into three acts, like a play. Bethesda's games are more like soap operas, designed to be enjoyed season after season, with characters and plotlines switching around but rarely weaving in and out of each other.

What is interesting to me is that Nesmith has experience with both tactics: when designing a D&D module, I have no idea what the players are going to do; I have no idea what components the GM is likely to need or guidance for a particular scenario, and I have to completely I have to focus on the 'what's going on,' but at some point I have to put my hand up and say, 'Do it yourself.'"

When designing something like Larian, Nesmith says, "You have to acknowledge (and I'm just pulling numbers out of my ass here) that every player only sees 50% of the game. (Bethesda) was in the business of making games that people would play for hundreds of hours. If you cut 50% of the game, you won't get hundreds of hours of play."

He is not entirely wrong. A great example of a work that fell by the wayside is the companion Minthara in Baldur's Gate 3. Aside from an initial bug that caused over 1,000 lines of her dialogue to disappear, Minthara is a character I never experienced on my first playthrough. However, she is as well-written and deeply explored as the rest of the crew. Her one tragedy is that she is supremely easy to kill.

That is definitely a drawback. But there is a positive side. After betraying one faction, at the end of the quest, you may ask, "Why can I go to that faction's capital, as I always do? I don't care about that". Everyone has their own tastes, and game design is a complex issue that needs to be resolved, but I personally prefer "one door closes, another door opens" games to Bethesda's perpetual sandboxes.