RPGs started coddling us too much, but it looks like they’re trending in the other direction, says Brandon Adler.
I tried playing the original Baldur’s Gate as a kid, but I had next to no understanding of D&D in 1998 and wound up bouncing off of BioWare’s legendary RPG because I just kept dying. Over time, some of the more esoteric aspects of videogame RPGs were sanded away, and when BioWare got to the action RPGs of the Mass Effect series, I had no problem joining the party. (It probably also helped that I was no longer 13 years old.)
But something was lost when RPGs became blockbusters rather than adaptations of pen-and-paper games, and The Outer Worlds 2 game director Brandon Adler is happy to see RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 3 force players to pay more attention to their build choices and the game world.
„In general, it feels like many games, but RPGs in particular, are like, ‚Well, you’re not allowed to make bad choices, so every character build is viable, and we make sure that no matter what you do, everything’s going to be fine'“, Adler told GamesRadar+ in a recent interview.
