Baldurs Gate Fan vs. Mass Effect Enjoyer

Recently, I've been thinking about Mass Effect. I first played through the trilogy when the legendary edition first dropped on Steam. I had played a bit of the multiplayer from 3 before, but didn't have enough context to get truly invested in the story, seeing as I was starting at the end. I binged through the entire trilogy within a week or two. There were days where all I did was play the game. I was pretty obssessed, and I clearly had time to spare.

With the release of Baldurs Gate 3, I was excited when I realized that I could possibly experience something on par with the grip Mass Effect held on me. But while I really enjoy BG3, it doesn't trigger that same obsessive desire that ME drew out. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to know why, and I think I have come up with an answer.

My media preferences tend to be more character-oriented. In other words, I enjoy stories where the main focus is on a set of characters: their interactions, their internal motivations, their conflicts, and their place in the theme all come together to create a story that is dramatic, comedic, or somewhere in between. As an example, I tend to lack interest in Shounen anime, because most shows in that genre place more focus on the world, visuals, or combat with an adversary. As a result, characters in the genre are often simple or inconsequential; totally serviceable for the story they are apart of, but not tuned to my personal preferences.

While BG3 does have companions, and those companions are interesting, I feel like they don't have the necessary room to shine due to the game's nature. BG3 is a choice-consequence game, meaning that you are constantly making decisions that will snowball into entire scenarios and affect the people around you in different ways. It's arguably one of the first of its kind; at least, it was the first to truly get it right. Other games, like Witcher 3 (I haven't played 1 or 2 but I watched the Joseph Anderson videos so I might as well have lmao) are merely choice games. These are more about choosing between a set of options. Maybe the result is mostly the same, but how you got there is what makes the difference.

BG3's choice-consequence nature means that the characters have to follow that model as well. This makes them pretty fickle; if you want them to like you, then you need to act like somebody they would actually like. You can woo Shadowheart by being your standard goody two-shoes, but Lae'zel's murdery ass won't care much for you as a result. This is further impacted by the fact that most of your choices in the game are completely uninformed. You will do things that will result in something that you did not anticipate, which can have an effect on how your companions feel about you. Long story short, the charcters in BG3 are in a much less controlled environment, which means it's harder, if not impossible to craft a tight, refined character story for them.

Mass Effect is not really a choice-consequence game. Sure, the game lets you make decisions that can result in things like permenant character deaths, but these choices mostly exist to punish players who are not paying enough attention to their crew. If you are properly invested in the game and your crew, it is very easy to make all the best decisions without too much thought or effort. As a result, the game and its story are much more on-rails. This gives each crew member a defined path for them to walk, giving them the room they need to carve out their own arc on the Normandy. Which makes for my favorite kind of game: the one with a bunch of characters packed together for you to interact with and enjoy.