this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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Yeah, side campaigns are probably the way to go.
It's almost impossible to implement high level magic. Just the interactions between spells is insane. Basic interactions like Force Cage+any AoE (Sickening Radiance) to build the microwave of death... would be so hard to implement. They'd honestly have to veer off 5e and implement their own spells instead, tailored to the video game medium.
I do think the framework of the game would be a great place to start for additional campaigns. They could take this game and put a Candlekeep Mysteries style sequential dungeon crawl add-on and people would love it just to play multiplayer short campaigns.
It's not impossible cause any thing that has specific rules laid out can be implemented. And table top rule are turn based(no time sensitive action, ie, physics simulation), fixed permutations/outcomes(dice rolls for everything), programming is just "rules" for moving numbers, even for deep learning networks.
The harder to implement are the conversations, cause there are pretty much infinite way depending on who initiate the conversation(background/race/stats/class/proficiency/+whatever player thinks that's possible and DM assign a check value), with potential plots lines, the writer has to limit what can be chosen and remove other options even though it's legit on table top.
I mean, spells like Wish are going to be basically impossible outside of going the AI route (which is an entire can of worms).
Wish can duplicate any other spell, or it can have your own effect (with a chance of it being monkey-pawed plus you never being able to cast Wish ever again).
Also bear in mind that it's not "just" rules for moving numbers. You have to have particles, animations, etc. You can't just have conversations, you have to also have SFX from impacts, camera shake, UI elements, etc. When you start to get into the world of "anything is possible" you kind of have to go back to basics, text-based adventures.
With AI stuff, maybe some of that can be done - but AI is just so incredibly slow in its current form. It won't stay that way forever, mind - I think the best comparison is graphics in the 1990s. Graphics were incredibly basic because anything complex would take ages to render and couldn't be used in games. Over the next decade, things were built to specifically speed up that process, and now modern GPUs can easily keep up with the highest-quality CGI without much fuss (there's a reason why Disney has the Volume, which is essentially just running CGI in the Unreal Engine alongside the actors in real-time).
But until that, we're going to be pretty limited. It's going to be impossible for any kind of free-form rules to be implemented, unless options were restricted to such a point that it's basically a completely different spell.
Even low level magic is sometimes too flexible for a computer based game. BG3 basically ignores Magic Mouth as implemented in 5e because arbitrary "trigger conditions" is just something that cannot be handled in a truly open ended way. Nevermind trying to implement Contingency properly -- a spell that forms the core of high level magical shenanigans.
That's basically what the expansion for the first Baldurs Gate was so they could call it "MORE Tales of the Sword Coast"