General News - Chris Avellone Interview

Is there something special about Baldur’s Gate that its spiritual successors haven’t captured yet?

The charm of the companions, for starters. One challenge I came back to after Pillars of Eternity (and I admit, I wrote two companions) is that a lot of the companions had lost a sense of charm that the original Baldur’s Gate cast had. It hit me when I got involved with the Enhanced Editions, because they reminded me of the companion design of the original game and made me realise that following a formula had taken Obsidian largely off the beaten path. I say Pillars 1, as I didn’t play Pillars 2, but the Pillars 1 companions with the possible exception of Eder just didn’t carry the same punch as the Baldur’s Gate crew. The Baldur’s Gate crew felt like your friends, rivals, and even your conscience at times, but none of the Pillars companions had that charm about them. Again, I felt partly to blame for that.

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Drithius said:

Writes the two most over-complicated, overly serious NPCs in the traditional analyze-this-in-a-thousand-different-morally-grey-Avellone-ways (to the point of alienating others in the studio).

Waxes nostalgia over the lost charm of NPCs in BG.

Yeah… there's a reason Chris will never write a Minsc - simply not edgy enough. You don't need a thousand pages of character exposition to write an endearing character.

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bjon045 said:

Minsc and Edwin were really the only memorable npcs in Bg1, the rest didn't really have any good catch phrases. All the npcs had paper thin backstories. BG2 shone because they kept the best of the npcs and added some more great ones in and also fleshed out the backstories and added a bunch of quests and interactions.

In PoE I thought Devil of Carroc was a great NPC, I found her very memorable and her backstory was very well written. Grieving Mother was the better of Chris's npcs, although I would also place Eder above both of his NPC's.

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bjon045 said:

Minsc and Edwin were really the only memorable npcs in Bg1, the rest didn't really have any good catch phrases. All the npcs had paper thin backstories. BG2 shone because they kept the best of the npcs and added some more great ones in and also fleshed out the backstories and added a bunch of quests and interactions.

In PoE I thought Devil of Carroc was a great NPC, I found her very memorable and her backstory was very well written. Grieving Mother was the better of Chris's npcs, although I would also place Eder above both of his NPC's.

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Archangel said:

And yet he wrote Nok Nok for Pathfinder Kingmaker who is very Minsc like and not at all like Durance.

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