Quote Originally Posted by Keltest View Post
I'm not sure I agree. My main takeaway from most of the quests and such in Divinity was "wow, living in this world sucks. " I hate talking to the animals because almost all of them with anything meaningful to say are super depressing, and not in a way that's played for laughs. Your main buddy Gareth has to either murder a childhood friend or bury his parents. In the endings, the level of personal prize you choose is inverse to how well you're able to leverage it for real positive change, to the point where you literally have to give up your personality to fully save the world.

If there are goofball elements and meta humor, it's because the story really needs it to avoid being unbearable heavy and dark.
The combination of goofball and bleak as hell has been Larian's writing style for a while now, since at least Divinity 2. Divine Divinity is pretty much just bleak, in a sort of low key way. Dragon Commander is I guess less bleak, but it's also so fundamentally weird at all levels (strafe these dudes in a third person dragon action game inside an RTS inside a TBS inside a geopolitical dating sim) it's honestly sort of difficult to pin down to anything.

That said, goofy but bleak is in some ways, a pretty good structural fit for the basic assumptions of this sort of cRPG. To wit:
1) You should be allowed to murder people who irritate you.
2) You should be materially rewarded for every decision.
3) You are super special and will save the world via the medium of killing 95% of the people, and 99% of the wildlife, you encounter.

Basically the fate of the universe rests in the blood-soaked hand of a psychotic mass murderer who's main claim to fame is being a better mass murderer than everybody else, and since about 60% of the sapient population in most RPGs seems to be sadistic bandits, there's a lot of competition. The concept is, at a foundational level, both goofy and incredibly depressing.

Really, in a lot of ways Doomguy is a lot more pro-social of a protagonist than your standard RPG hero.