Skyrim's former design lead tips his hat to Baldur's Gate 3: 'Very few of the decisions in a Bethesda game feel highly meaningful, you get maybe three or four'
In Starfield,there's a quest where you get to betray a major player. I'm going to keep the details vague to avoid spoilers, but in a lot of other RPGs this would be a massive story moment. If you walk down this path, you'll never be able to interact with that faction again. You're signing up for this life over that one.
Ultimately, bar losing access to said faction's mission board, nothing really happens. You can still do quests for them, and only the chunk of the faction related to that questline really cares. Granted, this is borderline Bethesda tradition. In Oblivion for example you could be a master thief, head of the fighter's guild, top of the mage's guild, and a renowned assassin for the Dark Brotherhood, all at once.
That's something that Bruce Nesmith, a former Bethesda developer and lead director on Skyrim, acknowledges as one of the key differences between Bethesda RPGs and Baldur's Gate 3. In an interview with MinnMax, Nesmith is asked about his thoughts on Larian's RPG: «I love Baldur's Gate, I'm a huge Dungeons & Dragons fan,» he says, before rotating his camera around to his shelves and shelves of RPG books and modules.
«Fan» seems like an understatement. Nesmith actually worked at TSR for some time. TSR was the original publisher of Dungeons & Dragons, though it would later be sold to Wizards of the Coast in 1997. While he was there Nesmith wrote a ton, including content for the Dragonlance, Greyhawk, and Ravenloft settings. «I think [Baldur's Gate 3] is a triumph of making the tabletop experience actually happen right there in the computer. My hat's off to Larian and the groups there.»
He then reflects on Bethesda games, and how every hero becomes a multitasking polymath—good at everything, questioned by
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