Baldur's Gate III (2)

[Morty]

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.

"Hahaha, aren't cRPG universes so silly" deconstructions got old for me a while ago, honestly. Yes, the average cRPG world doesn't make a lot of sense; I accept that when I start playing. So I'd rather have characters I can invest in.

I'm going to wait until there's a DLC to increase the level cap, hopefully up to level 15.

I certainly hope they don't do that. No D&D game has ever functioned terribly well past level 10.