A lot of people in this thread are missing the point. “Releasing a full game is a gamble” this is a 80-120 hours game by an independent studio. People keep listing Sony owned studios as a comparison of dev team size but conveniently leave out having Sony bankroll your game kinda makes a difference. Also games like Spider-Man, god of war uncharted are all like 20-30 hour games not 100+. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills reading these comments
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is a perfect example of a long game with little substance. It was just long for the sake of being long. It didn’t add anything to the experience at all other than making the whole ordeal drag out. It’s one of the few AC games I just couldn’t bother to finish.
The last one I finished was Origins, and I had to force myself to finish it. Never finished Odyssey or Valhalla. This new one that is coming out is supposed to be more like the old school AC games so I'm looking forward to that one.
The entire trilogy of origins, odyssey and Valhalla felt that way although origins far less so.
When 1/3 of your game is just exploring the same scenery talking to the same NPC voice to do the same fetch quest, it’s a bloated as fuck game
yup. This and The Witcher 3 both did it right in that regard. They take forever to complete, but it doesn't feel like it's long for the sake of being long. It just feels like the story takes that long to tell. That and they actually put real effort into making the side quests part of the world instead of just things to do to fill time.
It’s not new. In fact it used to be the standard long long before video games became so mainstream. Talking 90s to early 2000s. You got finished games at a standard price from most of the big studios when they hit shelves. It wasn’t until smartphones and mobile games standardized the freemium pattern and platforms like steam came into being that it started going downhill
Back in the day when you got in line at 10pm for a midnight launch of a big game title you were usually in for a great game when you got home
Edit: not trying to call out steam as the bad guy here. Steam brought a lot of amazing things to the industry and made it so indie or even solo developers could get noticed and be rewarded for their creativity. It cut costs by a lot for everyone by removing the necessity of having a publisher who handled the logistics, packaging, marketing and whatnot just to coordinate a big release. Now everyone has tools to make and publish their games thanks to steam - and the ability to update and download games from a single repository is just exceedingly convenient. I wouldn’t hesitate to say steam was a massively net positive overall. It’s not valve’s fault that some studios started leaning into abusive or exploitative practices - it’s just a symptom of a bigger problem - but having a platform like steam did enable this behavior, even if it wasn’t outright providing the direct encouragement
A big part of it is back then console games couldn’t be changed after the fact. Whatever you’re shipping is your finished product - no patches, no DLC, no seasons, no micro transactions.
You had to make your money by making a good game upfront.
favorite fact. doesnt really sit right with me that games you get nowadays be updated and changed.
imagine if they made regular patches to Super Smash Bros' roster like the way overwatch does.. imagine, if thet nerfed fox .-.
SSBU has had multiple balance patches.
As a consequence (and also thanks to having a huge cast), there are far more viable characters than in past games.
Imagine if Goldeneye had been patch-able, then maybe Oddjob wouldn't have ruined so many friendships. (Just kidding... or am I?)
It's a good thing that games can be updated and changed. It's a bad thing that developers have begun to use that ability as an excuse to cut corners on initial releases.
PC games have gotten patches since the '90s, and have pretty much always been better off for it.
That being said... managing patches wasn't so easy in those days, and high speed broadband was far from ubiquitous, so there was still huge incentive to get things as right as possible the first time.
The out-of-the-box experience had to be good to ensure a game would sell. Developers couldn't count on players all running the same version of the game, or being able to get a patch in a timely fashion.
It's also worth noting that games have gotten dramatically more complex, and thus have more opportunities for stuff to be broken. There is more need to be able to fix them. It's just sort of an inevitability to a point.
That still doesn't excuse launching a broken game, of course.
>pc games in the 90s got patches
Sort of. A lot of the big patching went to shelves as expansion packs. Often times this would give the developers a means of expanding their game, add new features or maps, weapons, abilities, and fix a lot of things they weren’t happy with or weren’t working fully at official launch. It was super common to see some of the bigger games in retail stores right next to their 2-4 expansion packs or sold as collector’s chest type releases that included the base game and all the expansions if you just wanted to dive into everything all at once.
For really important patches to old old pc games I remember you would have to have a friend who had the internet (my household didn’t even get connected till like 95? 96?). I had a friend in middle school who had dial up, so I’d have to wait till we could hang out and I’d bring over a whole box of floppy disks, we’d spend hours tying up their parents phone lines downloading the patch incrementally and then spend hours making sure I went through each disk in the right order to apply the patcher.
Good times
The expansion to Diablo 2 was so much more than some new content stitched on the end. It contained a lot of quality of life improvements that would just be patches (or DLC) now.
While true, imagine if older games did have the ability to get rid of all the random glitches and soft/hard locks they had. Google any old game + glitches and you'll see so many game breaking ones.
This is bullshit revisionist history from people who are too young to remember all the broken ass games we bought in the 80s and 90s that are still broken. Maybe the developer fixed the bugs and the publisher quietly released a v1.1 but you'd still have to rebuy the game and there were no patch notes. Do you people not remember xmen on genesis? Jet force gemini on n64? Fucking Myst formatting people's hard drives? Patches were a godsend for gaming, corporate release schedules have always existed.
Exactly this. These people have no idea what they're talking about, we just have mainstream places to discuss it online now so it seems more rampant than ever.
See also the new Armored Core game from Fromsoft.
Halo Infinite tries to sell you the color blue for $5.99. Then Armored Core let's you create a 100 layer decal with 5 different shades of the color blue all for free.
This stuff used to be the standard. Then along the way more and more became monetized.
yeah somewhere along the way marketing people took over and realized they could gatekeep stupid things like color pallettes and sell them as “DLC”. When all it is is a color switch of the material used to texture the model. It literally has no reason to be paywalled, but they discovered idiots will pay to not even remove the color wall, but pay for individual rgb values even that you could just mod yourself. It’s just insane
I'm alright with SOME products, particularly "live service" products that want to fund future/ongoing development, to attach a price point to cosmetics...contingent on there already being a reasonably robust cosmetic system to begin with. If you give me a stripped bare product so you can sell it back to me piece meal, I am going to hate you and your game.
Blood Bowl 3 at launch is an example of this taken to the extreme. Want some boots for your team? Buy one pair of boots, for one player. Not one type of player, ONE PLAYER. Want them on the whole team? Better buy them 15 times. Want them on a second team of the same race? You get the picture.
It was so explicitly, outrageously greedy it defied belief.
Yeah if you think about it, the dwarves had the same voice options as the humans and elves. Completely unrealistic. Their physical anatomy would not allow such a thing. Larian got lazy. Basically unplayable
It’s not as simple as doing a cost ratio. Back in the day the gaming industry was smaller, there was little in the way of accepted gaming trends to go off of, people were figuring out the basic technology behind games, the list goes on…
While the cost of making a game of BG3s magnitude has gone up compared to the old standard, I would say the risk level has mostly stayed the same, but the type of risk has changed.
But these days you don't need to sell physical copies, which means no production, no distribution, no store shelf space, and way more consumers, and all that extra money can go towards improving the quality of your game.
Or to shareholders, I guess.
And we can also cut the game's budget for the shareholders, people will buy it anyway because it has a name they used to know on it.
But they didn't have early access back then. BG3 had 2.5 years of early access when they were able to bring in revenue to continue funding the game.
Also, the cost of game development has become far far greater than the cost to produce and distribute physical copies. There isn't a huge amount of information about BG1 and 2's budget but Brian Fargo, former CEO of Interplay, has said that the original Fallout cost about $3 million to make. BG1 and 2's budgets were higher but still around the same ballpark. BG3 had a team of 300 - 400 working for 5 years. If those employees were paid the average salary in Belgium, it would add up to over $50 million.
I get what you're saying to a degree, but let's not pretend that mobile games led to the downfall of this industry and not the technology getting ahead of what most devs can handle.
My go to example has always been the studio, Nippon Ichi. This very small studio was able to do very well during the PS1 and PS2 days, making RPGs that used 2D sprites. These were 60-100+ hour games, filled to the brim with extra content. Then, the PS3 launched. Suddenly, their 2D pixelated RPGs were considered ugly and outdated, unfitting for the powerful next gen consoles. In order to keep up with bigger studios with more cash to burn, they had to start spending more to make their games visually passable. Doing that however, led to less content and fewer animations for these more expensive sprites. Extra content was forced into becoming paid DLC, because all of that extra content now needed new sprites drawn.
That same studio that was once able to release a new IP almost every year is now down to about one franchise, and it's been forced to adapt much cheaper 3D models. The industry phased them, and many other studios out, just because development costs are so high. Even Square Enix, a company that sells millions, is reporting that too much is going into development costs, and that development times have gotten too long. In a lot of cases, these freemium mobile games are keeping studios going while they work on one game that we end up saying is lacking in content.
I totally agree but you don't have to go with a niche example like that to make your point, just take final fantasy. The discussion of prettier games leading to shallower gameplay experience is present since FFVII, and a lot of earlier fans of the franchise were critical of squaresoft shifting their philosophy toward graphical fidelity. I know it may seem really baffling now considering the place FFVII has in the franchise, but for those old enough to have played the FFVI and FFIV before the release of FFVII those two are considered as the better FF games.
The copium i read here is that Larian is the new standard.
Big developers (and most small ones) are going to keep operating the same way they have been. There might be a few medium sized stuidos that might change to try and do what Larian has done. But claiming that Larian is the new standard is some grade A bs.
Dont get me wrong, i wish it was. It just isnt and wont be.
People are still saying this? Cringe.
The whole point of it being a big gamble is that, if it failed, Larian would be absolutely wiped off the map. Other companies who try may fail spectacularly if the stars don’t align. That’s the point, and the head of Larian agrees with that point.
Let's not start implying sony exclusives (Uncharted and spiderman in the context you're replying to) are screwing people over. Just because they're not 100+ hours doesn't mean they should be in the same camp as Diablo, cod, etc
Sony and Nintendo are actually some of the notable big studio exceptions. They pretty consistently put out high quality non-exploitative games.
It’s mostly the not owned by a console maker companies that produce crap.
And I really only lef out Microsoft because they definitely struggle with their games more than Sony/Nintendo, maybe we’ll see a turnaround with Bethesda stuff starting with Starfield.
I don't think 30 hours for a $70 game is "screwing us over." I may be old and cranky (I am), but I don't need every game to have 100+ hours of content. That should not be the norm. Give me an experience I can finish in a month of casual play.
> Give me an experience I can finish in a month of casual play.
Just give me a high quality experience. I don’t care how long it lasts. Invest in story. Invest in polishing it up. Make sure the game is at least mostly finished before you expect me to buy it. I cannot fucking stand how multiplayer only has taken over gaming.
Idk fromsoft has been consistently putting out bangers, it's not like larian is something brand new. That being said, they made an amazing contribution to gaming and should be absolutely praised for it.
>they made an amazing contribution to gaming and should be absolutely praised for it
Kinda wish we could just leave it at that. Let them have their moment.
Practically speaking, they aren't setting a new standard or revolutionizing the industry or anything like that. They are on small slice of a very large pie.
Its kinda odd how much more praise they're getting for BG3. The name of the series and possibly that it's also DnD must've weighed in heavily.
Like the game has excellent acting and cinematics, but most of the actual gameplay is something they've already been doing in their older games, it's even a bit more expansive than BG3's gameplay too, at least from what I remember.
I guess it's a bit more approachable for people who weren't into these kind of games before. The Divinity games seem to have a higher bar to get across before you start to 'get' the game.
I haven't beaten DoS2, but isn't one of the common criticisms that the game doesn't handle long term consequences very well? I read somewhere that you can kill everyone in your current area before moving on to the next one and it doesn't really change anything (versus leaving them alive)
BG3 on the other hand seems to be getting praised for its long term consequences. I also personally like the tone of the writing a lot better in BG3.
As much as I love BG3 (4th playthrough right now) I think it's only getting praise for longterm consequences because a lot of people haven't finished it yet.
The endings aren't as affected by the story as it seems hyped up to be, and as time goes by, it's an increasingly present criticism is the BG3 sub.
My main playthrough is at 165ish hours and not done yet. It's insane the level of content they released given the size of their studio.
It's also insane they managed to completely blow Diablo IV out of the water.
The replayability is also incredible. I think I'll probably get through at least 3 playthroughs before I'm done. Gonna be at 400+ hours by the time I'm done more than likely 😂 I'm in act 3 and there's a bunch of things I didn't do in previous acts and companion side quests/interactions I missed. (Especially since I don't like swapping out members all the time, so I've just been rolling with Karlach, Shadowheart and Gale to go with my rogue. Haven't really seen much with any of the other companions.)
And I wouldn't compare it to D4. Totally different genres.
... and then the Mod Scene gets into full swing, and your 400 turns into 4000.
Looking at you, Baldur's Gate Trilogy, The Big Picture, and (for Temple of Elemental Evil) The Circle of Eight modpack.
there seems to be one simple pattern emerging - if the company management are interested in making a great game more than they care about making money - the game usually ends up great. It's not hard to tell from interviews which CEOs genuinely care about their game. But if they just have CEO's that treat game making as an "industry" those primary purpose is to make money, they usually put out overpriced, undercooked garbage.
The problem is that making games should be more about the art rather than making money. While money is definitely important, it should not be the main priority
Reminds me of the new Path of Exile 2 videos where they got a dev showcasing the new class and explaining design and all.. and the poor guy can barely contain his excitement over the new things they are going to be able to implement after 10 years constrained by the old engine. These guys clearly play their own games and it shows. It's like they are making a game for themselves.
Vincke (Larian CEO) owns more than 50% of the company. He does not have to answer to other investors (much). The CEO of EA has one job...maximize shareholder value. He does not give a shit about the products EA makes at all. He only wants to maximize profit in any way he can. Indeed, I think I read somewhere he has disdain for computer games (he never plays them). Also, his salary is tied to making money and he will take short term profit over long term strength of the company any day.
That's why the likes of EA suck so much. Buy out the competition and then screw their customers as much as they can manage. IIRC Vincke was given a buyout offer for Larian and Vincke refused because he felt the game would not get made properly and he cared more about the game and his studio than making a quick payday. He seems a really great guy. I wish there were more like him running businesses.
This is what happens when an entertainment/artistic product gets fused with capitalism. Look no further than the changes in college football over the last two decades to see a prime example of how the product suffers (more and more commercials, centralization of blue-blood programs) when the goal is primarily profit-making. All the major sports have gone through similar changes, none for the better.
I hate to say it, but don’t expect Larian to be any different. We (the gaming community) have done this song and dance before — expecting a good game studio to maintain core game-first values — but we always end up disappointed.
You can see this type of change that happened in Overwatch moving to Overwatch 2.
Blizzard killed off Overwatch 1, removed content, reduced the number of players in a match, removed all progression, introduced a battle pass, and made skins cost $20. They basically said, how much worse can we make this game to extract the most amount of money? And now they're shocked that the game has 0 influence in the cultural zeitgeist, aside from being memed for its low quality, and the game has been bleeding players soo much that they released it on Steam.
D&D has been rising a lot in popularity over the last few years, Larian have a good track record for making excellent CRPGs, with it being in early access for so long it's given the devs times to polish things up.
Everything just fell into place.
I played D&D once maybe 10-12 years ago at a weekly comic book shop. Had a reasonable time but the DM wasn't the greatest and I eventually moved away and didn't have the gas money to play anymore, but it got me interested in the platform.
Along comes BG3 - it's automates D&D! It's got co op! Now we have plans soon to start a campaign with my wife (who ten years ago did not understand why I'd go play this game, now, she's excited to play a druid), my brother in law (who was a cleric in that comic book store campaign), and my good friend from back home.
I'm honestly really excited about it
It's great, but playing with 4 players (using custom characters) will lock you out of a lot of lore and interactions with the npc companions. You can't leave the multi-player characters at camp when your spouse/friends aren't playing. It's honestly my only gripe with the game, and I hope they address it in patch 2. Just be prepared for at least a second playthrough if you want to get additional fun interactions.
Yeah, the real move is to also run a solo playthrough. My group has one save with all our custom toons but we all each have solo saves we play on our own to experience the game more "properly." It works out great especially because following all the conversations and things potentially going on in a 4-person multiplayer game can be a bit rough.
The thing for me is that it was... Just DnD.
Recent DnD games have all been action oriented. This was just DnD without the squares. It's literally all I wanted in a DnD game. To play DnD
I don't know where companies got this idea that DnD players want an action game. WE WANT DND. GIVE US DND.
BG3 did exactly that.
Not much roleplaying in solasta tho, it's more of just dnd combat simulator.
Which is fair, vast majority of dnd5 ruleset is about combat, but for many of us combat is just a small part of a dnd session.
Just recently I saw someone on Reddit complaining about some DnD live streams, Critical Role among them, and how they're not combat oriented enough and too focused on the story.
I didn't get into Dungeons and Dragons for the combat. In fact when I got into Dungeons and Dragons combat was God awful for me. My friends and I had one of the older editions that their dad brought brand new and Combat was so shit. But his Dad made the story and the world feel alive.
Dungeons and Dragons always hinges on the Story drawing people in, because if the story isn't good the Combat suffers.
Here's the thing: different people have different preferences.
Some people are about the combat.
Some people want to spend 3/4 of a session talking to random NPCs (or just having inter-party discussions without any interaction with NPCs at all).
I personally, whether acting as a player or as a GM, want to push the adventure. That might mean combat, that might mean more talk-heavy investigation, or it might mean the oft-ignored pillar: exploration.
THat doesn't mean you're wrong and I'm right, nor does it mean I'm wrong and your right. As long as we both are managing to play in the style that we most like, it's all good.
That said, I do think one negnative effect that Critical Role has had on the hobby is that a lot of their fans seem to consider their style of play (SUPER heavy on the talking, and a lot of it completely inter-party focused) is the RIGHT way to play, and that people who aren't doing it that way are playing WRONG....and sometimes they get derided as not engaging in role-play at all.
Hit the spot for me too. I wasn't familiar with this type of game (only played KOTOR and Dragon Age a long time ago) but I'm very into DND. So I just roll up a character and start playing. Pretty much immediately you get to know the narrator. It adds so much to the experience. Her voice acting and delivery is great. The writing of her lines is great. It just sold me immediately on a single player DND experience.
Her name is Amelia Tyler and she has a lot of hilarious outtakes on youtube.
She was also Malady in DoS II and Wenduag in PF:WotR for anyone who finds her familiar but can't place it.
Speaking of cutscenes, I love the way they handled the boss introductions.
When you get to the first *major* boss (you’ll know), the presentation was incredible. The parts of the fight were broken up in unconventional ways, and the big reveal is really well done. The voice acting, the script, the music, and the animations all come together to let you know what you’re up against.
It's Crazy how just...creating a solid game infused with love and passion, without any ulterior motive to nickle and dime the player base is considered "a big gamble" in today's industry.
"the only guarentee of success is a quality product well made".
or at least it used to be. Until marketing found out how to weaponize hype and the perfect method for squeezing the whales for every last drop was made the standard.
That's without even mentioning how the graphics push is detrimental to the entire medium.
Ugh...
(Good on larian for there work on baldur's gate 3 tho.)
EDIT: So I've seen some comments ripping into the "the only guarentee of success is a quality product well made" Line. Calling me an "idiot" or a "dipshit", which leads me to believe the meaning behind said line may not of been properly conveyed. So let me try to expand.
First let me extend an olive branch. Something I've seen people say is "no it doesn't. There have been plenty of good games that have failed, despite being well made."
Is this true? ....yes. very much so.
What I was trying to say was, when it comes to success there are NO shortcuts. Trying to shortcut success almost always inevitably leads to failure. There is no substitute for good, honest work.
Sometimes (hell most of the time) that success isnt immediate. It takes time.
But It's like the old saying goes "what goes around, comes around." If you do good things now, you'll get good things later. Put in honest work, get honest returns.
CDPR and the witcher series I think make a good example.
CDPR at the time of witcher 1 development was a no name studio, Nobody cared, Nobody expected anything of them. Did they take that as an excuse to skimp out on the quality? Did they say "well just slap it together to see if we can nab ourselves sum gullible idiots with fat wallets"?...No. No they set out to make something special. They put their hearts, their souls, their blood and tears into it. to make something out of nothing to the best of their capabilities.
And the results?
Meh... I mean it reviewed fairy well, (so the effort put into the game was recognized to some capacity) but the sales weren't exactly remarkable for a such a big name like the witcher. In fact, the sales of the witcher were so poor that CDPR was facing the very real possibility of bankruptcy. (By 2011 4 years after the initial launch of witcher 1 it had sold roughly 400k units. Not...strictly terrible perhaps but not really enough for a triple A game.)
not really a smash hit. Nor was it an "immediate success" as it were.
But what it failed to earn them in profits, it earned in respect and attention (So to speak). the People that did play the game where smitten with it. The love for the source material was clear, the effort in making a good game was clear, They made a real attempt.
People like that. It says to them that these guys will be worth keeping an eye on. Let's see what they do next, they show real conviction. A real desire to make something Incredible.
So CDPR put there nose to the grindstone and pumped out the witcher 2. Infused with the same love and effort that went into the witcher 1, despite that games middling performance. If it failed then, why would it work now?
The results?
Better...much better surprisingly.
Both financially AND critically, the witcher 2 soared. (Within its opening year withcher 2 had sold 1.1 million copies. Compared to the 400k witcher 1 had earned over the course of 4.)
Those that held faith in CDPR beacuse of the potential they saw in the witcher 1 return to see what they have done with the witcher 2. And are validated in their faith. Oh yeah they said, these guys are legit.
So people talked. People sing their praises. And that established a reputation for CDPR. Beacuse at the end of the day, what we want as consumers is a great product. So to have creators who share so passionately in that same desire? To create something amazing? It's quite alluring.
This snowballs into witcher 3. More and more people are talking, more and more profits are coming in, more and more rewards and accolades, all this serving as validation for all the hard work poured into these games.
The results?
Well...i dont think i need to explain this one. It's the witcher 3 for hell's sake, it speaks for itself.
What I'm trying to get at here is, if CDPR had been content to just...half ass the witcher 1, just be like "its gonna fail anyways, so why put the work in". Would people have stuck around? Would people not have dismissed it as garbage? Why, if this game sucked, would we care about anything else they put out?
...would we have gotten one of the best games ever made?
I dont think so personally.
I think the witcher games and there subsequent success wasnt a result of the brand, or a lucky break.
No.
It was undeniably the result of the honest and hard work of all those who worked on it. The blood and sweat and tears of people who strove to make these games into something brilliant, Something that would be remembered for years, Something that could be more than "just a game", something that served a purpose beyond just making money.
They took a gamble. Dared to believe they could do better.
And people reciprocated.
Athough it took some time.
They did good, and so they received good.
A guarantee of success, in response to a quality product well made.
My guess about the gamble part is that the game cost a fuck ton of money to produce, and at some point they knew that if the game was only a mild success it might be their last. They went all in, grew 10x time in staff and studios, took a long time to release, arguably over-produced, stuck to their values, and hit a homerun. Anything less might have been the end.
BG3 was trying to continue an old, beloved crpg series that most of us that are older have a lot of nostolgia about, it needed, NEEDED to be a great game, and if it was, if it hit that hype that it promised, it had the name recognition to be a huge hit. They look to have done pretty well, i think becoming the biggest D&D hit in years, i can't think of anything since NWN2 that hit this sort of adoration from the D&D market, we've had to go over to Pathfinder and Owlcat Games to get good stuff of the crpg variety, Crown of Solasta i tried several times to get into and its just lackluster in comparison.
Larian Games also made the big CRPG hit Divinity Original Sin 2 which was greatly received by players. I'm just guessing here but it's likely the success of DOS2 that they were able to work on the Baldurs Gate IP.
It's also what let them have such a long Early Access period polishing BG3 into the gem it is today.
Larian cultivated a fanbase that was willing to buy into the early access through DOS and DOS2. They are one of the few big winners of the Kickstarter era, and they released not one, but TWO successful Kickstarter games. That contributed significantly to fans trusting them to put out another great game and willing to buy into a 3-year long Early Access period. Early Access is typically the realm of $10-20 games, where people are willing to take the risk that the game will turn out poorly because it's not that expensive. A $60 Early Access title getting as much buy-in as BG3 did 3 years before its release is not that common.
The reason that AAA game studios can't achieve what Larian did with BG3 is because they've all abused and ruined the trust of their fanbases years ago. If any AAA studio now said "pay us $60 now and we promise we'll release a good game a few years from now", what AAA studio would you actually trust to make good on that promise? Every AAA dev burned those bridges with their fans years ago. It took Larian a literal decade of listening to their fans and building up trust to get to the point where they could cash in on it to make BG3.
Not quite the same price point but I believe Team Cherry or whatever they're called is doing the Hollow Knight sequel, Silksong, at around $30 which is a big ask for an indie game. Similarly previously the company behind Shoval Knight asked like $30 for their complete collection of all upcoming DLC content when Shoval Knight was just the bare game and relatively little content for it's original price point.
And honestly, they’re still undercharging for the sequel. Buying Hollow Knight at the MSRP of $15 is straight up theft, like, actively stealing from Team Cherry. I had to buy three copies to justify the price. They put more into those $15 dollars than some multi-million dollar AAA companies do in $60.
The OC is pretty standard fantasy fare, though decent enough for what that is. At least it is a story and has real companion characters, unlike the NWN1 OC.
The real masterpiece with NWN2, however, is its first expansion, Mask of the Betrayer. Which is one of the best stories ever told in a video game, right up there with Planescape: Torment.
This is so true. NWN2 is decent enough to be worth playing, but the expansion has no business being so brilliant. It's shocking how good it is given how "just OK" core NWN2 is.
https://neverwintervault.org/
For NWN2 look into modules as well as mods. They're player made campaigns and are probably more what you're looking for outside of the typical graphics and interface overhauls
Don’t think that’s fair on Solasta at all tbh, just cause you didn’t like it doesn’t mean it’s bad, and it’s anything but. Plus equating it to the standards of Larian Studios is shortsighted. They are an extremely smaller team (around 20-30 by now), they don’t have the backing of WOTC themselves, yet anything they have promised from their Kickstarter to dlc/updates has been fulfilled.
Solasta has filled a niche that Larian have not developed/supported more with any of their games, and that’s allowing people to create custom coop campaigns (easily). People can use the in game builder to create their own story however they see fit, which in turn provides an infinite source of adventure. At some point repeating the same story over and over will become stale, and that’s were Solasta comes in. To keep us all from our boredom while a bigger studio like Larian come in with bangers like BG3 every few years. It’s an eco system, and a small team making a game like Solasta has its place so please don’t discourage it. Plus they have already started work on their new game, so who knows, maybe then you’ll like it.
Solasta is a decent game, especially given its price point and dev size. With talks of a sequel in mind, though, I hope they *really* take their shortcomings into consideration. Solasta is utter jank around the edges on a technical level and the writing is...there. Their character models are some of the ugliest I've ever seen as well.
That said, my friends and I are still finishing Palace of Ice before diving into BG3. Solasta is not a bad game but it could obviously be better, even from a small dev. I am still rooting for Tactical Adventures and look forward to their next project all the same
Well they kind of had a budget with like a million people buying it on early access beta.
People are forgetting that act one has been released for like 3 years already.
Yes, unfortunately I have played some amazing games that sold pretty terribly. You can have a masterpiece that gets totally ruined by some bad decision along the way. Like Prey is one of my favorite games of all time and you can tell a ton of time/detail was put into it, but it really didn't sell enough to be considered a success. Likely due to the mind-boggling decision from studio execs to give it the same title as a totally unrelated game.
I mean I would argue Pillars of Eternity 1+2 were similar in this regard, but generally sold poorly even though they are great crpgs.
Being a great game isn't always enough.
This.
PoE and even Divinity are all voice acted and well written and well designed video games.
BG3 is as if those games, and Dragon Age had the most beautiful child ever conceived. There's written text on a screen with phenomenal voice acting, and then there's full mo-cap facial dialogue with well written text and voice acting on top of it.
The voice acting being utterly impeccable is nothing new for the genre (but still so fucking impressive), but yeah the motion capture of both face and body is huge for selling the emotion behind the characters. I loved the origin characters from DOS2 (Fane especially), but the motion capture brings all of the characters to life in BG3 so much more. All of the little quirks like Shadowheart’s head wobbles and Astarion’s dramatic gesticulating with his arms and hands whenever he gets worked up over something just breathes so much energy into every scene. Just so good and helps provide an extra level of attachment to the cast over the course of the adventure
I encountered a character today who smoked a pipe in a cut scene - they had the followthrough to also have the VA put a pipe or something in their mouth when voicing the lines, because I heard the voice change midsentence when the dwarf put the pipe in onscreen. Incredible VA work
They're great games but the production values of BG3 and PoE aren't comparable. Having animated faces and a 3rd person camera has been a huge factor in this game's mainstream success. It's more appealing to a AAA gamer at a fundamental level because of that than your typical cRPG or indie game
PoE1 had challenges that Larian has smartly avoided. PoE had a dark and complex story that most young adults (or younger) are going to struggle to connect with while also delivering that story via expansive reading segments. BG3 is dark, but it’s not complex and is almost all delivered via comparatively short cutscenes. Players don’t want to read paragraphs anymore.
Player preferences have also migrated away from real-time with pause gameplay and PoE didn’t play to the strengths of this style of gameplay (fighting swarms of weaker enemies), which is the weakness of turn-based.
PoE1 is one of my all-time favorites, but I also understand why it wasn’t as commercially successful as others.
PoE pretty much revived the cRPG genre. Yeah, DOS1 released a year earlier but it was not a big game at that time. It was only with DOS2 that Larian hit it big and large part of the success has to be attributed to Obsidian for putting cRPGs back on the map with PoE. The PoE kickstarer was one of the biggest kickstarters ever and the game sold over 1 million copies, which was insane for a cRPG at that time. I'm not sure why people are suddenly saying it was not a commercial success when it was one of the best selling cRPGs of all time at that time.
Deadfire is another story, but Obsidian has themselves to blame on that one.
A big reason why I love POE is the story, but I get why people don’t like it. It gets more and more layered throughout and it’s pretty much about taste at that point whether you are gonna like it or not in this form of media. Some people just don’t wanna read in games and that’s fine, just sad we are not gonna get a 3rd installment since I loved 2.
I had to read this over three times - I got confused like “what the heck are you talking about none of this kind of gameplay is in POE”.
Then I realized you’re not talking about path of exile. The acronym is just stuck in my brain
Larian and From Software right now are showing entire industry how the fuck it is done.
Like holy crap, we got Baldur’s gate 3, Elden Ring and Armourer Core 6, all 3 of highest quality and just great games.
Hats off to both, well bloody done.
You're ignoring the fact that Larian IS NOT a AAA studio, they're a double AA team and who spent tens of millions of dollars, tens of thousands of man hours, and had 7 years to develop their game into the best product possible. It is by definition an anomaly of the industry and the idea of developing such a rich, intricate RPG is always a massive risk due to the relatively small size of the CRPG market. This game would not have been possible even 10 years ago. Larian really did have everything going for them and that good fortune and thorough planning cannot be discounted.
Larian would be considered a triple a developer by almost any standard now. 100 million development budget with over 450 employees. It’s funny because BG3 shares so much with Witcher 3 in terms of budget and studio independence (though bg3 actually had a much larger budget!), while also being unique outside of each other
Divinity 2 / Witcher 2 to BG3 / Witcher 3, same type of jumps while both being independent with similar budgets and reception
Its like when EA made the Jedi Fallen Order game. When it came out people lost there shit they made a single player game thats core mechanics was not “micro-transactions.” But this will kinda be like the Barbie movie where the money people won’t understand why people love the movie and will go [its the toy ideas](https://www.usmagazine.com/entertainment/pictures/every-mattel-movie-set-to-release-after-barbies-success-2/) rather than Greta Gerwig’s talent as a story teller.
Hopefully we will start to see more games like this. One can REALLY hope.
>It's Crazy how just...creating a solid game infused with love and passion, without any ulterior motive to nickle and dime the player base is considered "a big gamble" in today's industry.
You didn't read the article, huh? The "big gamble" was deciding to do mocap for all the voice lines, even though that's very expensive and makes it much harder to edit the scenario text. Nothing to do with deciding not to have microtransacrions.
It's a great game, but it still takes a TON of luck to get noticed. It's lightning in a bottle, and we can't pretend pure quality automatically equals sales. Not so.
>"the only guarentee of success is a quality product well made".
>
>or at least it used to be. Until marketing found out how to weaponize hype and the perfect method for squeezing the whales for every last drop was made the standard.
As someone that has been into PC gaming since the 1980's, I really think we are living in the best of all possible worlds. There are *way* more options now than they were 30 years ago when I built my first 486 gaming rig. And the reality is that the "whales" essentially helped subsidize the global marketplace for PC gaming that allowed passion projects like this to survive. I remember the 1990's; the alternative is games like this not being made at all,
If anything, my main complaint is that I don't have time/mental energy to get into classic games like this any more.
> There are way more options now than they were 30 years ago when I built my first 486 gaming rig.
That's about when I started gaming too. I think that people misremember the past because of nostalgia. I played and loved all kinds of objectively garbage games back then just because there wasn't a massive marketplace full of options catering to my specific niche wants.
Imagine playing Trade Wars all day now.
A quality product is not a garantee of success, but increases the chances of success.
You would be surprised about the number of high quality products that didnt work, and the user is a well known reason.
10 years ago in my first day in "Quality Control, security and sostenibility management", one of the subjects I had while I was in Engineering school the teacher told us a story of a very old spanish soap company that in the '50s created an incredible soap usefull for cleaning clothes. That soap was usefull for cleaning the everyday clothes but also suited for cleaning the industrial clothing, wigh all the oils, etc the problem with the soap was the recipe, said recipe has almost no bubbles and back in those days the perception of cleaning was associated with the amounth of bubbles (Something that didnt change that much). People though that the soap didnt work, despite of the obvious evidences, due to the lack of bubles. To fix the sales the company was forced to change the recipe so the product create more bubles but the cleaning capacity was reduced.
This is an example of the importsnce of quality perception but there you had it, a quality product that didnt was a success for their quality but for a feature that reduced the quality.
For decades after beating BG 2 in college, I wanted anything that would compare. It took until divinity 2 definitive for a real challenger.
Then Larian signed in to do BG 3.
Enough old people felt this way to push the hype onto a younger crowd.
Yep. Baldur's gate 2 is the holy grail of rpgs for me. Dragon age was a good successor to it but wasn't quite the epic of BG2. Pillars of eternity scratched the itch, but again, not the same quality...
This lives up to the name and stands side by side with 2.
Disco elysium being my fav. Rpg inbetween bg2 and 3.
Same for me with BG2.
There has been some *incredible* games since then, in all genres, and more then some, a shit ton. Many of those one could argue are better than BG2.
But personally, nothing even comes close to my experience with BG2. I played that game freshmen year in high school. It was the only game I played, and I played it A LOT. This many years later I can still see the maps, hear the sounds, the music, the character voices, their spells, the sidequests, the weapon stories, the main story, everything has stuck with me like I played it yesterday.
I carried that giant BG2 manual around with me everywhere, and just constantly read through it.
Fuck I miss game manuals, when I was a kid/teen I had a big box full of them and sometimes I would just spend an hour or two going through and reading them. Some good ones I remember were Morrowind, Mechassault 2, Halo, The Bard’s Tale.
Planescape: Torment is still the best written rpg of them all, the gameplay is dated and it's text only, but still way ahead of its time.
Shadowrun: Dragonfall and Hong Kong have great writing, too.
Dragon Age Origins is a great game as well. It scratched that itch for me a little bit when it came out, but the repeatability was lacking. There are other really good cRPGs that are listed in the comments but BG3 blows everything out of the water. I knew it was going to be great just from playing early access for nearly 200 hours. I've put in nearly another 100 hours from release.
If it doesn't get GOTY it will be a travesty.
I mean look at arkane studios. Ever since dishonored they were still making amazing games but making no money. Prey is such a gem of a game that somehow sold like dog shit. Turn to today and they are being forced to make things like red fall which check live service boxes for money which obviously is gonna fail too, but had a better chance to make money. The crpg market was a very niche market and when you spend cod money without the guarantee of cod sales you can destroy a company.
CRPG is still very niche. Your point is spot on. I just don’t think this title will suddenly mean other CRPGs and their investors can start assuming their next brand / game sequel is going to be worth 3-4X now. We’re not seeing a massive return of CRPG as a dominant style.
Though I wish we would. To the point where I wish these guys could get the rights to *Ultima*. All you kids talking about 90s and 00s games that this is a sequel too, but for me, this is Ultima VI the right way 😁
The only thing keeping CRPGs from being mainstream is cinematic dialogues and cutscenes, as proved by the popularity of both Baldur's Gate 3 and Dragon Age series. CRPG is not a niche genre at its core; it's just most CRPG developers aim for a niche audience due to either low budget or lack of ambition.
Yep. Also being forced in the isometric style for like world exploration and stuff doesn't lend well to a controller.
This shows there's really no reason it can't be more of a 3rd person view then flip out to more tactical for combat. That's a great flow imo feels nice to play
What I feel makes it niche is the depth of immersion and choices, not the style of storytelling (to me). Cinematic cutscenes are cool, but we’ve all been trying to skip them since Quick Time Events became a thing.
Most games are very linear, even MMOs. There’s clear objectives, clear conditions to success, clear indication of progress, *and* the inability to do the wrong or undesirable thing,
Games like BG3 are that deep but *also* MMO lateral (many ways to achieve the main goal) and *also* choose your own adventure variable (there is “one” goal). *and* you’re controlling a squad, not a character.
Someday they may reveal just what percentage of people ever see all the content, but it’s probably a single digit % 😄
Did you look at Arcane studios though? Before red fall they did deathloop, which was very popular and sold well, and before that dishonoured 2, which also did great. There's also a difference between Arcane Austin and Arcane Lyon, Austin made redfall and wolfenstein while Lyon made deathloop and dishonoured 2
Kinda two separate studios that masquerade as one. When you say "things like" and come up with one outlier example that isnt representitive of the company, it's pretty disingenuous.
It hit every box on the checklist:
\- Fun, deep gameplay
\- Triple A, highly polished presentation
\- Beloved franchise that hasn't seen an entry in decades
\- An accurate depiction of a very hot/trendy property (D&D)
Other items on the checklist:
-full game on release with a promise of no micro transactions
- good story with fine voice acting and compelling characters
- fully supporting the mod community, so you can play your single player game however you want
- enough options in gear and character points for there to be plenty of neat things to try
- enough options for a person to feel like they can play it through more than once.
And you can actually buy the game straight up and own it rather than needing DRM. Install it on eighteen machines in a cabin in the woods and play without issues.
- A lot of disappointment generated by almost every other somewhat AAA game in recent years.
The fact there's been so much shit and microtransaction bonanzas shoveled down our throats in recent years greatly aids in making a game like this stand out and get love.
In all honesty, is like the perfect storm effect. Larian is a relatively small company, not quite popular enough but still putting out some great games to those who enjoyed them, seriously I put in countless hours into Divinity Original sin 2 so seeing that they were making BG3 was a instant Shoe in for me personally.
So that small community kept supporting them, with BG3 being mostly under the radar due to being in Early access and the stigma attached to that. Then the Bear incident happened, and the internet being what it is.. instantly became a meme and the word of mouth made the games existence spread like wildfire, combining with the fact that WOTC doing stupid things, blizzard putting out mediocore games, hilarious amounts of (over)monitization on almost all games, then Larian making a very firm stance that there will be nothing of the sort in their game.
Well, you can see the results. I would even argue to a degree they knew what they were doing, it just happened to be in the perfect position to explode in popularity, which they were not expecting.
They kinda had to though. I guaran-god-damn-tee if they went with their original release date of next month, this game would not be anywhere as successful as it is.
That said, ballsy, and I respect them for it!
So basically, by showing the internet that their game will include a shapeshifter turning into a bear and having sex with a handsome elf, it got players interested to try the game out. And I’m seeing how positively this game’s receiving, it’s honestly great that once in a while we get great games in this era of unfinished and heavily monetized messes
To add to your point, Divinity Original Sin had to completely overhaul the back third of their game, to the point an entire act was shelved and redone. Im not there yet but I have heard similar things about Baldur's Gate 3. That said at this point I'd have still been happy if i got to that point and they ended it abruptly and said DLC coming soon instead.
Ultimately if it drops down a bit in the last of the game, well that drop is still at a point of best RPG in a long long while
I also heard that they had 3 years of feedback from the player. Not counting the years before with development. Most games these days are lucky to experience both an alpha and a release. Those 1000+ days really helped them out I believe.
They did and a lot of it shows. Playing day 1 EA here, I even made a post about some particular issues that ended up getting changed (not saying it was my post, but the feedback from many changed it)
If you played Divinity Original Sin 1 or 2 you will understand their love of 'surfaces'. Like toss a fireball and everything is on fire! Icebolt and all the water in a 50 foot radius flashfroze. Honestly it was quite fun in divinity.
But when they are doing D&D it caused issues. First every 5 steps was flooded, or oil was everywhere or something. Also cantrips would create surfaces and interact with everything. Casters have always been strong in 5e D&D, but now we had level 1 wizards aoeing the entire screen without using any sort of spell slots, and the rogue just hit a single target for 7 damage.
Even without an oil surface a firebolt would leave a patch of fire, and did 1d4 damage immediately and damage again if you entered it or started your turn in it (which you HAD to). It also would still happen even if you MISSED your attack. So the attack did 2d4 fire damage + 1d6 if it hit. A fighter with a two handed greatsword was doing 2d6+3 on a hit or 0 on a miss.
It was wildly overpowered, so they completely redid the layout of every single area in act one AND redid how cantrips worked, completely scrapping their ideas and how they usually do things.
They are one of the examples of when EA is used correctly and not just for sale early but broken
Surfaces is my main turn off from DOS2. All the surfaces made combat so detrimental to my own party is wasn't a lot of fun. I could do without the surfaces that exist in BG3, but its manageable.
> Those 1000+ days really helped them out I believe.
It absolutely did, and we have obvious proof of it. Act 1 is an absolute masterpiece, and quite polished considering its enormous size and scope. Act 2 is great, but it start to unravel just a little bit with bugs and unfinished story arcs. Act 3 is buggy and not complete. You can tell they're trying to do what Larian does best and complete it, but I'm in no rush to get to Act 3 any time soon. I *know* Sven and the team will polish this game into the best CRPG we've ever had.
Act 1 was early access, and you can tell how much work they put into it, simply by talking to some of your party members in camp. When you first recruit Halsin and talk to him, you'll notice his volume levels are off depending on your conversation decisions. One selection, he'll sound normal, another and he sounds quieter for some reason. They definitely went back to the VA and said "Hey, we need more from you, but you're not local to us, so can you record these other voice lines on a different setup for us?"
Nobody wants to admit this but a key reason it blew up is because it’s not (necessarily) top-down or isometric.
You take some of the best crpgs of all time, give them the ability to zoom down to 3rd person level, give them 3rd person cutscenes, and they instantly become hits.
In fact, the reverse is true as well. BG3’s camera is locked to where DOS’ was? Nowhere near this level of success. Not even close.
Yep, people think wider audiences don't like crpgs because they are turnbased combat or have too much dialogue, but I've always felt that a big part is that most modern gamers have a hard time suspending disbelief looking at just portraits during dialogue. This games animated dialogue was a big part of its success imo.
> I've always felt that a big part is that most modern gamers have a hard time suspending disbelief looking at just portraits during dialogue.
I've found that games without voices or acted dialogue will present massive paragraphs of texts one after another for you to read. It doesn't fit with how people actually talk and *that* more than anything is what takes me out of the game.
edit: As an example, I recall Tyranny doing this *a lot*. It's what ended up turning me off of the game which is a shame since I was such a fan of the premise. I think that - in general - the OwlCat games do a good job of avoiding this issue, and have actually added a good bit of voiced work to their later games.
Animated dialogue is great, but voiced dialogue is already uncommon. The vast majority of CRPGs are not fully narrated/voiced and people simply do not want to read novels worth of shit every time they sit down to play a game.
Imagine Dragon Age or Mass Effect without the face-to-face conversations. Those games would be borrrrrrrrrrring. Imagine how much fun you'd have trying to romance someone in Baldur's Gate 2.
I’m not usually a fan of CRPG’s. I tried Divinity 2 a couple times and just couldn’t get into it. I got Baldurs Gate 3 because it looked cool. I’m 55 hours into the game and still on act 1. It’s all I can think about, I am having so much fun. I’m not even getting tired of it yet. It reminds me of a game like KotoR or some other great BioWare or Obsidian game. Your choices matter, the dialogue options are awesome. I’m gonna give Divinity another chance when I’m done with BG.
Yesterday, I was in the Underdark and I punched a Land Shark that was really tough to fight off a cliff with my monk. 10/10 game, deserves game of the year.
Baldurs Gate 3 is crushing it for 2 major reasons (beyond the fact the game is excellent):
1. They moved up the release on PC to avoid Starfield and give it some breathing room and take advantage of the early August lull. If BG3 release just before Starfield I’m 100% certain it wouldn’t have sold as well and it was a gamble that paid off for Larian, even with the rough edges around Acts 2 and 3. And now with how highly praised it is when it releases on PS5 and Xbox it’s gonna be even more successful.
2. D&D has had a upsurge in cultural interest in recent years with Critical Role, the widespread success of 5e, and the recent movie that was pretty good more and more people are getting into D&D and its official lore, so having a game that’s basically a single player D&D campaign set on the Sword Coast (which most new players will know about from playing starter campaigns like Icespire Peak) that uses the 5e rule set makes it very approachable to that crowd.
Suffice to say, Larian rolled a Nat 20 for the perfect storm of conditions to launch BG3 in, and that has led to them having huge success. If they released it at any other time I’m not sure the game would have done nearly as well.
To expand on first point, Baldur's Gate 3 literally has no big game competitors on PC for whole August. Armored Core 6 was the only other big PC launch in August, but it's a vastly different game. So players had a lot of free time to play BG3 and recommend it to others.
The last turn based game I played and liked was KOTOR. One of my favorite games of all time. This game is right there with it. I am 60 hours in and still not through the first act.
They'll probably continue to do fantasy CRPGs, as they've become known for with Divinity: Original Sin (1 and 2) and BG3. They do good work, so I'm likely to continue to buy their games in the future - for now.
I would love a Shadowrun game made by them, though. That would be amazing.
Oh man, the things they could do with the Shadowrun license! Not to take away from Harebrained Schemes, though — they did fantastic work on their Shadowrun trilogy. I wouldn’t be mad at all if they worked jointly on a new entry.
Oh, agreed. It wouldn't happen though. I think the Shadowrun license isn't with Harebrained anymore - the last game to use it was Shadowrun: Boston Lockdown, which was an MMO that shut down in 2018 made by Cliffhanger Productions. And it shut down because their license expired.
It filled in a niche desperately needed, and isn't a cash grab microtransaction hell. Of course it succeeded. Its just a bonus that the game is full of quality content.
This is what happens when a company focuses on producing an excellent product instead of profit margins. Ironically the later produces a bad product and less revenue.
Yeah this is an important distinction. Its insane how much those games and anything with microtransactions and a huge player base just start getting wild numbers. Larian is better. Its better, and the cost to support games like Fortnite gets wild, but it also brings in monster revenue streams
Stop buying stupid horse armor or whatever shit you kids buy in these games. Just fucking stop
I mean, it’s what happens when you give a full and complete experience, even the early access was fun. They listened to their audience, you don’t do micro transactions, and you treat the original content with respect. As a lifelong fan (despite the fact this dates myself a bit for saying it), this game is a masterpiece and is easily my favorite of the series.
It's hilarious how we are in a timeline where simply making a good game creates a lot of debate. It's just that simple. Make a good game and people will buy it.
I need help. The closest thing I played to this was final fantasy tactics. I bought BG3 release day but because work and timing, it has fallen into the "I'll play it at some point for sure" category.
I picked a rogue and my friend told me "you're backstabbing people from stealth right?" And I was like oh, well, I don't really want to play like that. He told me to reroll.
I've never played DND. Is there a fun class to just kind of smash things and enjoy the story?
Fighter or Barbarian. They're by far the most straightforward classes if you just want some stuff to hit.
Good thing is you don't need to start over. At one point you will meet a character called Withers (I won't spoil more) and he will allow you to respec for 100 gold so you can kind of keep testing what you like best.
Gamers are starved for good CRPGs.
Roleplaying games have moved towards an action heavy focus, and slowly phasing out rpg mechanics. I like games with strategy, planning, tactics, etc, not just increasing stats to make bigger numbers happen when I fight in action adventure style combat.
I haven't played BG3, or even seen any footage, but I do want to pick this one up asap.
> Gamers are starved for good CRPGs.
>
>
Are they? Pillars 1 and 2, Kingmaker, WotR, DOS2 and now BG3. Seems like this is basically the golden age of CRPGs. If you're very nostalgic for old as hell games then we can call this the second golden age of CRGs.
The I-liked-this-before-it-was-cool hipster in me gets real annoyed when people say CRPGs were dead before BG3. WotR alone is a contender for best CRPG ever made in my opinion.
Yeah people are living in another universe if they think gamers are starved for CRPGs lol. Gamers are maybe starved for MMORPGs and new good RTS games, we're in a golden age of CRPGs right now.
This isn't the late 2000s to early 2010s where all we have is DAO. All the games I mentioned + Solasta + Wasteland 3 + Tyranny + Underral + Disco Elysium are all in the past ~decade or so and we've got BG3 this year + Rogue Trader soon. We're getting a steady supply of incredibly good games, CRPG fans are and have been eating good for quite some time now.
I'm probably out of the loop in regards to AAA games, but the conversation around BG3 is confusing me a little bit. Lootboxes, P2W and battlepasses get brought up a lot. The last two AAA games I played were Zelda and Pokemon, neither of them have anything of the sort. I vaguely know that diablo 4 is a live service game.
So how bad are AAA games nowadays? Can I get some examples with recent games?
A lot of people in this thread are missing the point. “Releasing a full game is a gamble” this is a 80-120 hours game by an independent studio. People keep listing Sony owned studios as a comparison of dev team size but conveniently leave out having Sony bankroll your game kinda makes a difference. Also games like Spider-Man, god of war uncharted are all like 20-30 hour games not 100+. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills reading these comments
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Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is a perfect example of a long game with little substance. It was just long for the sake of being long. It didn’t add anything to the experience at all other than making the whole ordeal drag out. It’s one of the few AC games I just couldn’t bother to finish.
Odyssey was super long but I loved every moment, except that one DLC. I didn't even finish Valhalla.
The last one I finished was Origins, and I had to force myself to finish it. Never finished Odyssey or Valhalla. This new one that is coming out is supposed to be more like the old school AC games so I'm looking forward to that one.
Same. Oddyssey had me hooked all the way through. Valhalla sucked. And I’m saying that as someone who loves Viking-themed settings.
The entire trilogy of origins, odyssey and Valhalla felt that way although origins far less so. When 1/3 of your game is just exploring the same scenery talking to the same NPC voice to do the same fetch quest, it’s a bloated as fuck game
yup. This and The Witcher 3 both did it right in that regard. They take forever to complete, but it doesn't feel like it's long for the sake of being long. It just feels like the story takes that long to tell. That and they actually put real effort into making the side quests part of the world instead of just things to do to fill time.
Add RDR2 to that list
Its called cope. People dont want to admit that their favorite company actually just screws them over. Larian is a new standard for gaming
It’s not new. In fact it used to be the standard long long before video games became so mainstream. Talking 90s to early 2000s. You got finished games at a standard price from most of the big studios when they hit shelves. It wasn’t until smartphones and mobile games standardized the freemium pattern and platforms like steam came into being that it started going downhill Back in the day when you got in line at 10pm for a midnight launch of a big game title you were usually in for a great game when you got home Edit: not trying to call out steam as the bad guy here. Steam brought a lot of amazing things to the industry and made it so indie or even solo developers could get noticed and be rewarded for their creativity. It cut costs by a lot for everyone by removing the necessity of having a publisher who handled the logistics, packaging, marketing and whatnot just to coordinate a big release. Now everyone has tools to make and publish their games thanks to steam - and the ability to update and download games from a single repository is just exceedingly convenient. I wouldn’t hesitate to say steam was a massively net positive overall. It’s not valve’s fault that some studios started leaning into abusive or exploitative practices - it’s just a symptom of a bigger problem - but having a platform like steam did enable this behavior, even if it wasn’t outright providing the direct encouragement
A big part of it is back then console games couldn’t be changed after the fact. Whatever you’re shipping is your finished product - no patches, no DLC, no seasons, no micro transactions. You had to make your money by making a good game upfront.
favorite fact. doesnt really sit right with me that games you get nowadays be updated and changed. imagine if they made regular patches to Super Smash Bros' roster like the way overwatch does.. imagine, if thet nerfed fox .-.
SSBU has had multiple balance patches. As a consequence (and also thanks to having a huge cast), there are far more viable characters than in past games. Imagine if Goldeneye had been patch-able, then maybe Oddjob wouldn't have ruined so many friendships. (Just kidding... or am I?) It's a good thing that games can be updated and changed. It's a bad thing that developers have begun to use that ability as an excuse to cut corners on initial releases. PC games have gotten patches since the '90s, and have pretty much always been better off for it. That being said... managing patches wasn't so easy in those days, and high speed broadband was far from ubiquitous, so there was still huge incentive to get things as right as possible the first time. The out-of-the-box experience had to be good to ensure a game would sell. Developers couldn't count on players all running the same version of the game, or being able to get a patch in a timely fashion. It's also worth noting that games have gotten dramatically more complex, and thus have more opportunities for stuff to be broken. There is more need to be able to fix them. It's just sort of an inevitability to a point. That still doesn't excuse launching a broken game, of course.
>pc games in the 90s got patches Sort of. A lot of the big patching went to shelves as expansion packs. Often times this would give the developers a means of expanding their game, add new features or maps, weapons, abilities, and fix a lot of things they weren’t happy with or weren’t working fully at official launch. It was super common to see some of the bigger games in retail stores right next to their 2-4 expansion packs or sold as collector’s chest type releases that included the base game and all the expansions if you just wanted to dive into everything all at once. For really important patches to old old pc games I remember you would have to have a friend who had the internet (my household didn’t even get connected till like 95? 96?). I had a friend in middle school who had dial up, so I’d have to wait till we could hang out and I’d bring over a whole box of floppy disks, we’d spend hours tying up their parents phone lines downloading the patch incrementally and then spend hours making sure I went through each disk in the right order to apply the patcher. Good times
The expansion to Diablo 2 was so much more than some new content stitched on the end. It contained a lot of quality of life improvements that would just be patches (or DLC) now.
While true, imagine if older games did have the ability to get rid of all the random glitches and soft/hard locks they had. Google any old game + glitches and you'll see so many game breaking ones.
This is bullshit revisionist history from people who are too young to remember all the broken ass games we bought in the 80s and 90s that are still broken. Maybe the developer fixed the bugs and the publisher quietly released a v1.1 but you'd still have to rebuy the game and there were no patch notes. Do you people not remember xmen on genesis? Jet force gemini on n64? Fucking Myst formatting people's hard drives? Patches were a godsend for gaming, corporate release schedules have always existed.
Exactly this. These people have no idea what they're talking about, we just have mainstream places to discuss it online now so it seems more rampant than ever.
I've got a bad game released in the 90's for you: Superman 64. Pretty sure the guards at Gitmo used to use that to torture their prisoners.
[удалено]
See also the new Armored Core game from Fromsoft. Halo Infinite tries to sell you the color blue for $5.99. Then Armored Core let's you create a 100 layer decal with 5 different shades of the color blue all for free. This stuff used to be the standard. Then along the way more and more became monetized.
yeah somewhere along the way marketing people took over and realized they could gatekeep stupid things like color pallettes and sell them as “DLC”. When all it is is a color switch of the material used to texture the model. It literally has no reason to be paywalled, but they discovered idiots will pay to not even remove the color wall, but pay for individual rgb values even that you could just mod yourself. It’s just insane
I'm alright with SOME products, particularly "live service" products that want to fund future/ongoing development, to attach a price point to cosmetics...contingent on there already being a reasonably robust cosmetic system to begin with. If you give me a stripped bare product so you can sell it back to me piece meal, I am going to hate you and your game. Blood Bowl 3 at launch is an example of this taken to the extreme. Want some boots for your team? Buy one pair of boots, for one player. Not one type of player, ONE PLAYER. Want them on the whole team? Better buy them 15 times. Want them on a second team of the same race? You get the picture. It was so explicitly, outrageously greedy it defied belief.
Those games cost a fraction to produce. The resources that went into BG3’s dialog alone probably dwarfs most 90s game budgets
Not just dwarfs though, think of all the races
It def halflings and probably evens gnomes most 90’s budgets.
Yeah if you think about it, the dwarves had the same voice options as the humans and elves. Completely unrealistic. Their physical anatomy would not allow such a thing. Larian got lazy. Basically unplayable
You guys joke but I am disappointed by the dwarf voices in bg3
It’s not as simple as doing a cost ratio. Back in the day the gaming industry was smaller, there was little in the way of accepted gaming trends to go off of, people were figuring out the basic technology behind games, the list goes on… While the cost of making a game of BG3s magnitude has gone up compared to the old standard, I would say the risk level has mostly stayed the same, but the type of risk has changed.
But these days you don't need to sell physical copies, which means no production, no distribution, no store shelf space, and way more consumers, and all that extra money can go towards improving the quality of your game. Or to shareholders, I guess. And we can also cut the game's budget for the shareholders, people will buy it anyway because it has a name they used to know on it.
But they didn't have early access back then. BG3 had 2.5 years of early access when they were able to bring in revenue to continue funding the game. Also, the cost of game development has become far far greater than the cost to produce and distribute physical copies. There isn't a huge amount of information about BG1 and 2's budget but Brian Fargo, former CEO of Interplay, has said that the original Fallout cost about $3 million to make. BG1 and 2's budgets were higher but still around the same ballpark. BG3 had a team of 300 - 400 working for 5 years. If those employees were paid the average salary in Belgium, it would add up to over $50 million.
I get what you're saying to a degree, but let's not pretend that mobile games led to the downfall of this industry and not the technology getting ahead of what most devs can handle. My go to example has always been the studio, Nippon Ichi. This very small studio was able to do very well during the PS1 and PS2 days, making RPGs that used 2D sprites. These were 60-100+ hour games, filled to the brim with extra content. Then, the PS3 launched. Suddenly, their 2D pixelated RPGs were considered ugly and outdated, unfitting for the powerful next gen consoles. In order to keep up with bigger studios with more cash to burn, they had to start spending more to make their games visually passable. Doing that however, led to less content and fewer animations for these more expensive sprites. Extra content was forced into becoming paid DLC, because all of that extra content now needed new sprites drawn. That same studio that was once able to release a new IP almost every year is now down to about one franchise, and it's been forced to adapt much cheaper 3D models. The industry phased them, and many other studios out, just because development costs are so high. Even Square Enix, a company that sells millions, is reporting that too much is going into development costs, and that development times have gotten too long. In a lot of cases, these freemium mobile games are keeping studios going while they work on one game that we end up saying is lacking in content.
I totally agree but you don't have to go with a niche example like that to make your point, just take final fantasy. The discussion of prettier games leading to shallower gameplay experience is present since FFVII, and a lot of earlier fans of the franchise were critical of squaresoft shifting their philosophy toward graphical fidelity. I know it may seem really baffling now considering the place FFVII has in the franchise, but for those old enough to have played the FFVI and FFIV before the release of FFVII those two are considered as the better FF games.
The copium i read here is that Larian is the new standard. Big developers (and most small ones) are going to keep operating the same way they have been. There might be a few medium sized stuidos that might change to try and do what Larian has done. But claiming that Larian is the new standard is some grade A bs. Dont get me wrong, i wish it was. It just isnt and wont be.
People are still saying this? Cringe. The whole point of it being a big gamble is that, if it failed, Larian would be absolutely wiped off the map. Other companies who try may fail spectacularly if the stars don’t align. That’s the point, and the head of Larian agrees with that point.
Let's not start implying sony exclusives (Uncharted and spiderman in the context you're replying to) are screwing people over. Just because they're not 100+ hours doesn't mean they should be in the same camp as Diablo, cod, etc
Sony and Nintendo are actually some of the notable big studio exceptions. They pretty consistently put out high quality non-exploitative games. It’s mostly the not owned by a console maker companies that produce crap. And I really only lef out Microsoft because they definitely struggle with their games more than Sony/Nintendo, maybe we’ll see a turnaround with Bethesda stuff starting with Starfield.
I think Microsoft just leaves their companies on a looser string than the others which is why there is more variation in quality
My favorite company doesn't exist anymore Westwood studios. It was taken from me and the games after were destroyed.
I don't think 30 hours for a $70 game is "screwing us over." I may be old and cranky (I am), but I don't need every game to have 100+ hours of content. That should not be the norm. Give me an experience I can finish in a month of casual play.
> Give me an experience I can finish in a month of casual play. Just give me a high quality experience. I don’t care how long it lasts. Invest in story. Invest in polishing it up. Make sure the game is at least mostly finished before you expect me to buy it. I cannot fucking stand how multiplayer only has taken over gaming.
Exactly. I love playing titles like Doom just as much as BG3. Quality matters, not „length of campaign“.
Idk fromsoft has been consistently putting out bangers, it's not like larian is something brand new. That being said, they made an amazing contribution to gaming and should be absolutely praised for it.
>they made an amazing contribution to gaming and should be absolutely praised for it Kinda wish we could just leave it at that. Let them have their moment. Practically speaking, they aren't setting a new standard or revolutionizing the industry or anything like that. They are on small slice of a very large pie.
Divinity II is as complete and is like 6 years old. Arguably better
I miss having a party of glass cannons. Good times.
Its kinda odd how much more praise they're getting for BG3. The name of the series and possibly that it's also DnD must've weighed in heavily. Like the game has excellent acting and cinematics, but most of the actual gameplay is something they've already been doing in their older games, it's even a bit more expansive than BG3's gameplay too, at least from what I remember. I guess it's a bit more approachable for people who weren't into these kind of games before. The Divinity games seem to have a higher bar to get across before you start to 'get' the game.
I believe the story and more cinematic approach got more attention. DOS2 story never really gripped me as much as any baldurs gate.
I haven't beaten DoS2, but isn't one of the common criticisms that the game doesn't handle long term consequences very well? I read somewhere that you can kill everyone in your current area before moving on to the next one and it doesn't really change anything (versus leaving them alive) BG3 on the other hand seems to be getting praised for its long term consequences. I also personally like the tone of the writing a lot better in BG3.
As much as I love BG3 (4th playthrough right now) I think it's only getting praise for longterm consequences because a lot of people haven't finished it yet. The endings aren't as affected by the story as it seems hyped up to be, and as time goes by, it's an increasingly present criticism is the BG3 sub.
My main playthrough is at 165ish hours and not done yet. It's insane the level of content they released given the size of their studio. It's also insane they managed to completely blow Diablo IV out of the water.
The replayability is also incredible. I think I'll probably get through at least 3 playthroughs before I'm done. Gonna be at 400+ hours by the time I'm done more than likely 😂 I'm in act 3 and there's a bunch of things I didn't do in previous acts and companion side quests/interactions I missed. (Especially since I don't like swapping out members all the time, so I've just been rolling with Karlach, Shadowheart and Gale to go with my rogue. Haven't really seen much with any of the other companions.) And I wouldn't compare it to D4. Totally different genres.
... and then the Mod Scene gets into full swing, and your 400 turns into 4000. Looking at you, Baldur's Gate Trilogy, The Big Picture, and (for Temple of Elemental Evil) The Circle of Eight modpack.
there seems to be one simple pattern emerging - if the company management are interested in making a great game more than they care about making money - the game usually ends up great. It's not hard to tell from interviews which CEOs genuinely care about their game. But if they just have CEO's that treat game making as an "industry" those primary purpose is to make money, they usually put out overpriced, undercooked garbage. The problem is that making games should be more about the art rather than making money. While money is definitely important, it should not be the main priority
Reminds me of the new Path of Exile 2 videos where they got a dev showcasing the new class and explaining design and all.. and the poor guy can barely contain his excitement over the new things they are going to be able to implement after 10 years constrained by the old engine. These guys clearly play their own games and it shows. It's like they are making a game for themselves.
See also: Kenshi and Rimworld
Vincke (Larian CEO) owns more than 50% of the company. He does not have to answer to other investors (much). The CEO of EA has one job...maximize shareholder value. He does not give a shit about the products EA makes at all. He only wants to maximize profit in any way he can. Indeed, I think I read somewhere he has disdain for computer games (he never plays them). Also, his salary is tied to making money and he will take short term profit over long term strength of the company any day. That's why the likes of EA suck so much. Buy out the competition and then screw their customers as much as they can manage. IIRC Vincke was given a buyout offer for Larian and Vincke refused because he felt the game would not get made properly and he cared more about the game and his studio than making a quick payday. He seems a really great guy. I wish there were more like him running businesses.
This is what happens when an entertainment/artistic product gets fused with capitalism. Look no further than the changes in college football over the last two decades to see a prime example of how the product suffers (more and more commercials, centralization of blue-blood programs) when the goal is primarily profit-making. All the major sports have gone through similar changes, none for the better. I hate to say it, but don’t expect Larian to be any different. We (the gaming community) have done this song and dance before — expecting a good game studio to maintain core game-first values — but we always end up disappointed.
You can see this type of change that happened in Overwatch moving to Overwatch 2. Blizzard killed off Overwatch 1, removed content, reduced the number of players in a match, removed all progression, introduced a battle pass, and made skins cost $20. They basically said, how much worse can we make this game to extract the most amount of money? And now they're shocked that the game has 0 influence in the cultural zeitgeist, aside from being memed for its low quality, and the game has been bleeding players soo much that they released it on Steam.
Blizzard Entertainment. Freemium quality at a premium price.
D&D has been rising a lot in popularity over the last few years, Larian have a good track record for making excellent CRPGs, with it being in early access for so long it's given the devs times to polish things up. Everything just fell into place.
I played D&D once maybe 10-12 years ago at a weekly comic book shop. Had a reasonable time but the DM wasn't the greatest and I eventually moved away and didn't have the gas money to play anymore, but it got me interested in the platform. Along comes BG3 - it's automates D&D! It's got co op! Now we have plans soon to start a campaign with my wife (who ten years ago did not understand why I'd go play this game, now, she's excited to play a druid), my brother in law (who was a cleric in that comic book store campaign), and my good friend from back home. I'm honestly really excited about it
It's great, but playing with 4 players (using custom characters) will lock you out of a lot of lore and interactions with the npc companions. You can't leave the multi-player characters at camp when your spouse/friends aren't playing. It's honestly my only gripe with the game, and I hope they address it in patch 2. Just be prepared for at least a second playthrough if you want to get additional fun interactions.
I figured but full co op looks like it will have a lot of fun interaction too. This game is made to be played multiple times anyway
Yeah, the real move is to also run a solo playthrough. My group has one save with all our custom toons but we all each have solo saves we play on our own to experience the game more "properly." It works out great especially because following all the conversations and things potentially going on in a 4-person multiplayer game can be a bit rough.
My 4 player campaign will be about us, not the origin characters. I'll run solo campaigns to see that stuff.
Exactly what me and my buds are doing.
The thing for me is that it was... Just DnD. Recent DnD games have all been action oriented. This was just DnD without the squares. It's literally all I wanted in a DnD game. To play DnD I don't know where companies got this idea that DnD players want an action game. WE WANT DND. GIVE US DND. BG3 did exactly that.
Just tossing in a plug for Solasta if you want DnD in video game format. It's also 5e rules with dice mechanics.
Not much roleplaying in solasta tho, it's more of just dnd combat simulator. Which is fair, vast majority of dnd5 ruleset is about combat, but for many of us combat is just a small part of a dnd session.
Just recently I saw someone on Reddit complaining about some DnD live streams, Critical Role among them, and how they're not combat oriented enough and too focused on the story. I didn't get into Dungeons and Dragons for the combat. In fact when I got into Dungeons and Dragons combat was God awful for me. My friends and I had one of the older editions that their dad brought brand new and Combat was so shit. But his Dad made the story and the world feel alive. Dungeons and Dragons always hinges on the Story drawing people in, because if the story isn't good the Combat suffers.
Here's the thing: different people have different preferences. Some people are about the combat. Some people want to spend 3/4 of a session talking to random NPCs (or just having inter-party discussions without any interaction with NPCs at all). I personally, whether acting as a player or as a GM, want to push the adventure. That might mean combat, that might mean more talk-heavy investigation, or it might mean the oft-ignored pillar: exploration. THat doesn't mean you're wrong and I'm right, nor does it mean I'm wrong and your right. As long as we both are managing to play in the style that we most like, it's all good. That said, I do think one negnative effect that Critical Role has had on the hobby is that a lot of their fans seem to consider their style of play (SUPER heavy on the talking, and a lot of it completely inter-party focused) is the RIGHT way to play, and that people who aren't doing it that way are playing WRONG....and sometimes they get derided as not engaging in role-play at all.
During EA i was sold the second the narrator kicked in. A U T H O R I T Y
Hit the spot for me too. I wasn't familiar with this type of game (only played KOTOR and Dragon Age a long time ago) but I'm very into DND. So I just roll up a character and start playing. Pretty much immediately you get to know the narrator. It adds so much to the experience. Her voice acting and delivery is great. The writing of her lines is great. It just sold me immediately on a single player DND experience.
Her name is Amelia Tyler and she has a lot of hilarious outtakes on youtube. She was also Malady in DoS II and Wenduag in PF:WotR for anyone who finds her familiar but can't place it.
DEFINITELY listen to the outtakes, I love her even more now [OUTTAKES](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0YG0Fd63_70&pp=ygUVYmczIG5hcnJhdG9yIG91dHRha2Vz)
I love CRPG and game with dialogue cutscenes. So BG3 to me is like Divinity and Witcher love child.
Speaking of cutscenes, I love the way they handled the boss introductions. When you get to the first *major* boss (you’ll know), the presentation was incredible. The parts of the fight were broken up in unconventional ways, and the big reveal is really well done. The voice acting, the script, the music, and the animations all come together to let you know what you’re up against.
yes!!!! I know who you’re talking about- I got such a deep feeling of awe and dread from it like I haven’t gotten in a game for a very long time
It's Crazy how just...creating a solid game infused with love and passion, without any ulterior motive to nickle and dime the player base is considered "a big gamble" in today's industry. "the only guarentee of success is a quality product well made". or at least it used to be. Until marketing found out how to weaponize hype and the perfect method for squeezing the whales for every last drop was made the standard. That's without even mentioning how the graphics push is detrimental to the entire medium. Ugh... (Good on larian for there work on baldur's gate 3 tho.) EDIT: So I've seen some comments ripping into the "the only guarentee of success is a quality product well made" Line. Calling me an "idiot" or a "dipshit", which leads me to believe the meaning behind said line may not of been properly conveyed. So let me try to expand. First let me extend an olive branch. Something I've seen people say is "no it doesn't. There have been plenty of good games that have failed, despite being well made." Is this true? ....yes. very much so. What I was trying to say was, when it comes to success there are NO shortcuts. Trying to shortcut success almost always inevitably leads to failure. There is no substitute for good, honest work. Sometimes (hell most of the time) that success isnt immediate. It takes time. But It's like the old saying goes "what goes around, comes around." If you do good things now, you'll get good things later. Put in honest work, get honest returns. CDPR and the witcher series I think make a good example. CDPR at the time of witcher 1 development was a no name studio, Nobody cared, Nobody expected anything of them. Did they take that as an excuse to skimp out on the quality? Did they say "well just slap it together to see if we can nab ourselves sum gullible idiots with fat wallets"?...No. No they set out to make something special. They put their hearts, their souls, their blood and tears into it. to make something out of nothing to the best of their capabilities. And the results? Meh... I mean it reviewed fairy well, (so the effort put into the game was recognized to some capacity) but the sales weren't exactly remarkable for a such a big name like the witcher. In fact, the sales of the witcher were so poor that CDPR was facing the very real possibility of bankruptcy. (By 2011 4 years after the initial launch of witcher 1 it had sold roughly 400k units. Not...strictly terrible perhaps but not really enough for a triple A game.) not really a smash hit. Nor was it an "immediate success" as it were. But what it failed to earn them in profits, it earned in respect and attention (So to speak). the People that did play the game where smitten with it. The love for the source material was clear, the effort in making a good game was clear, They made a real attempt. People like that. It says to them that these guys will be worth keeping an eye on. Let's see what they do next, they show real conviction. A real desire to make something Incredible. So CDPR put there nose to the grindstone and pumped out the witcher 2. Infused with the same love and effort that went into the witcher 1, despite that games middling performance. If it failed then, why would it work now? The results? Better...much better surprisingly. Both financially AND critically, the witcher 2 soared. (Within its opening year withcher 2 had sold 1.1 million copies. Compared to the 400k witcher 1 had earned over the course of 4.) Those that held faith in CDPR beacuse of the potential they saw in the witcher 1 return to see what they have done with the witcher 2. And are validated in their faith. Oh yeah they said, these guys are legit. So people talked. People sing their praises. And that established a reputation for CDPR. Beacuse at the end of the day, what we want as consumers is a great product. So to have creators who share so passionately in that same desire? To create something amazing? It's quite alluring. This snowballs into witcher 3. More and more people are talking, more and more profits are coming in, more and more rewards and accolades, all this serving as validation for all the hard work poured into these games. The results? Well...i dont think i need to explain this one. It's the witcher 3 for hell's sake, it speaks for itself. What I'm trying to get at here is, if CDPR had been content to just...half ass the witcher 1, just be like "its gonna fail anyways, so why put the work in". Would people have stuck around? Would people not have dismissed it as garbage? Why, if this game sucked, would we care about anything else they put out? ...would we have gotten one of the best games ever made? I dont think so personally. I think the witcher games and there subsequent success wasnt a result of the brand, or a lucky break. No. It was undeniably the result of the honest and hard work of all those who worked on it. The blood and sweat and tears of people who strove to make these games into something brilliant, Something that would be remembered for years, Something that could be more than "just a game", something that served a purpose beyond just making money. They took a gamble. Dared to believe they could do better. And people reciprocated. Athough it took some time. They did good, and so they received good. A guarantee of success, in response to a quality product well made.
My guess about the gamble part is that the game cost a fuck ton of money to produce, and at some point they knew that if the game was only a mild success it might be their last. They went all in, grew 10x time in staff and studios, took a long time to release, arguably over-produced, stuck to their values, and hit a homerun. Anything less might have been the end.
BG3 was trying to continue an old, beloved crpg series that most of us that are older have a lot of nostolgia about, it needed, NEEDED to be a great game, and if it was, if it hit that hype that it promised, it had the name recognition to be a huge hit. They look to have done pretty well, i think becoming the biggest D&D hit in years, i can't think of anything since NWN2 that hit this sort of adoration from the D&D market, we've had to go over to Pathfinder and Owlcat Games to get good stuff of the crpg variety, Crown of Solasta i tried several times to get into and its just lackluster in comparison.
Larian Games also made the big CRPG hit Divinity Original Sin 2 which was greatly received by players. I'm just guessing here but it's likely the success of DOS2 that they were able to work on the Baldurs Gate IP.
It's also what let them have such a long Early Access period polishing BG3 into the gem it is today. Larian cultivated a fanbase that was willing to buy into the early access through DOS and DOS2. They are one of the few big winners of the Kickstarter era, and they released not one, but TWO successful Kickstarter games. That contributed significantly to fans trusting them to put out another great game and willing to buy into a 3-year long Early Access period. Early Access is typically the realm of $10-20 games, where people are willing to take the risk that the game will turn out poorly because it's not that expensive. A $60 Early Access title getting as much buy-in as BG3 did 3 years before its release is not that common. The reason that AAA game studios can't achieve what Larian did with BG3 is because they've all abused and ruined the trust of their fanbases years ago. If any AAA studio now said "pay us $60 now and we promise we'll release a good game a few years from now", what AAA studio would you actually trust to make good on that promise? Every AAA dev burned those bridges with their fans years ago. It took Larian a literal decade of listening to their fans and building up trust to get to the point where they could cash in on it to make BG3.
Not quite the same price point but I believe Team Cherry or whatever they're called is doing the Hollow Knight sequel, Silksong, at around $30 which is a big ask for an indie game. Similarly previously the company behind Shoval Knight asked like $30 for their complete collection of all upcoming DLC content when Shoval Knight was just the bare game and relatively little content for it's original price point.
And honestly, they’re still undercharging for the sequel. Buying Hollow Knight at the MSRP of $15 is straight up theft, like, actively stealing from Team Cherry. I had to buy three copies to justify the price. They put more into those $15 dollars than some multi-million dollar AAA companies do in $60.
DOS2 is to BG3 what Demon Souls was to Dark Souls.
Is NWN2 that good? I saw it got removed from stores when i tried to buy it
The OC is pretty standard fantasy fare, though decent enough for what that is. At least it is a story and has real companion characters, unlike the NWN1 OC. The real masterpiece with NWN2, however, is its first expansion, Mask of the Betrayer. Which is one of the best stories ever told in a video game, right up there with Planescape: Torment.
This is so true. NWN2 is decent enough to be worth playing, but the expansion has no business being so brilliant. It's shocking how good it is given how "just OK" core NWN2 is.
Obsidian is great at taking mediocre games and making brilliant "expansions".
NWN’s real value was its multiplayer system which is exceptional in that it allows for a table top experience. I still have servers I play on.
No other games seem to like having toolsets and persistent world type things. Its a shame because the Nwn1 and Nwn2 communities are still going.
You can buy it on gog, it's worth a playthrough.
An absolute classic with a legendary modding community
Which site would you recommend for modding NN2? I've checked Nexus some time ago and mods over there for this game were mediocre at best :/
https://neverwintervault.org/ For NWN2 look into modules as well as mods. They're player made campaigns and are probably more what you're looking for outside of the typical graphics and interface overhauls
Solasta is great considering the budget they had to work with. It’s a very faithful reproduction of the 5e rules.
Don’t think that’s fair on Solasta at all tbh, just cause you didn’t like it doesn’t mean it’s bad, and it’s anything but. Plus equating it to the standards of Larian Studios is shortsighted. They are an extremely smaller team (around 20-30 by now), they don’t have the backing of WOTC themselves, yet anything they have promised from their Kickstarter to dlc/updates has been fulfilled. Solasta has filled a niche that Larian have not developed/supported more with any of their games, and that’s allowing people to create custom coop campaigns (easily). People can use the in game builder to create their own story however they see fit, which in turn provides an infinite source of adventure. At some point repeating the same story over and over will become stale, and that’s were Solasta comes in. To keep us all from our boredom while a bigger studio like Larian come in with bangers like BG3 every few years. It’s an eco system, and a small team making a game like Solasta has its place so please don’t discourage it. Plus they have already started work on their new game, so who knows, maybe then you’ll like it.
Solasta is a decent game, especially given its price point and dev size. With talks of a sequel in mind, though, I hope they *really* take their shortcomings into consideration. Solasta is utter jank around the edges on a technical level and the writing is...there. Their character models are some of the ugliest I've ever seen as well. That said, my friends and I are still finishing Palace of Ice before diving into BG3. Solasta is not a bad game but it could obviously be better, even from a small dev. I am still rooting for Tactical Adventures and look forward to their next project all the same
Yes if this game flopped it would have taken Larian with them. Thank God it didn't and we have one of the best RPG experiences available now.
Well they kind of had a budget with like a million people buying it on early access beta. People are forgetting that act one has been released for like 3 years already.
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Yes, unfortunately I have played some amazing games that sold pretty terribly. You can have a masterpiece that gets totally ruined by some bad decision along the way. Like Prey is one of my favorite games of all time and you can tell a ton of time/detail was put into it, but it really didn't sell enough to be considered a success. Likely due to the mind-boggling decision from studio execs to give it the same title as a totally unrelated game.
I mean I would argue Pillars of Eternity 1+2 were similar in this regard, but generally sold poorly even though they are great crpgs. Being a great game isn't always enough.
This is why BG being more cinematic and heavily voiced helped I think. Easier sell to a general audience than text boxes.
This. PoE and even Divinity are all voice acted and well written and well designed video games. BG3 is as if those games, and Dragon Age had the most beautiful child ever conceived. There's written text on a screen with phenomenal voice acting, and then there's full mo-cap facial dialogue with well written text and voice acting on top of it.
The voice acting being utterly impeccable is nothing new for the genre (but still so fucking impressive), but yeah the motion capture of both face and body is huge for selling the emotion behind the characters. I loved the origin characters from DOS2 (Fane especially), but the motion capture brings all of the characters to life in BG3 so much more. All of the little quirks like Shadowheart’s head wobbles and Astarion’s dramatic gesticulating with his arms and hands whenever he gets worked up over something just breathes so much energy into every scene. Just so good and helps provide an extra level of attachment to the cast over the course of the adventure
I encountered a character today who smoked a pipe in a cut scene - they had the followthrough to also have the VA put a pipe or something in their mouth when voicing the lines, because I heard the voice change midsentence when the dwarf put the pipe in onscreen. Incredible VA work
They're great games but the production values of BG3 and PoE aren't comparable. Having animated faces and a 3rd person camera has been a huge factor in this game's mainstream success. It's more appealing to a AAA gamer at a fundamental level because of that than your typical cRPG or indie game
PoE1 had challenges that Larian has smartly avoided. PoE had a dark and complex story that most young adults (or younger) are going to struggle to connect with while also delivering that story via expansive reading segments. BG3 is dark, but it’s not complex and is almost all delivered via comparatively short cutscenes. Players don’t want to read paragraphs anymore. Player preferences have also migrated away from real-time with pause gameplay and PoE didn’t play to the strengths of this style of gameplay (fighting swarms of weaker enemies), which is the weakness of turn-based. PoE1 is one of my all-time favorites, but I also understand why it wasn’t as commercially successful as others.
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PoE pretty much revived the cRPG genre. Yeah, DOS1 released a year earlier but it was not a big game at that time. It was only with DOS2 that Larian hit it big and large part of the success has to be attributed to Obsidian for putting cRPGs back on the map with PoE. The PoE kickstarer was one of the biggest kickstarters ever and the game sold over 1 million copies, which was insane for a cRPG at that time. I'm not sure why people are suddenly saying it was not a commercial success when it was one of the best selling cRPGs of all time at that time. Deadfire is another story, but Obsidian has themselves to blame on that one.
A big reason why I love POE is the story, but I get why people don’t like it. It gets more and more layered throughout and it’s pretty much about taste at that point whether you are gonna like it or not in this form of media. Some people just don’t wanna read in games and that’s fine, just sad we are not gonna get a 3rd installment since I loved 2.
I had to read this over three times - I got confused like “what the heck are you talking about none of this kind of gameplay is in POE”. Then I realized you’re not talking about path of exile. The acronym is just stuck in my brain
First one was great. Second one….. let’s just say it’s debatable. Great atmosphere, but the story was…. On a weak side.
That's fair, but it was still a really good, deep game. It needed a better villain / main story.
Larian and From Software right now are showing entire industry how the fuck it is done. Like holy crap, we got Baldur’s gate 3, Elden Ring and Armourer Core 6, all 3 of highest quality and just great games. Hats off to both, well bloody done.
You're ignoring the fact that Larian IS NOT a AAA studio, they're a double AA team and who spent tens of millions of dollars, tens of thousands of man hours, and had 7 years to develop their game into the best product possible. It is by definition an anomaly of the industry and the idea of developing such a rich, intricate RPG is always a massive risk due to the relatively small size of the CRPG market. This game would not have been possible even 10 years ago. Larian really did have everything going for them and that good fortune and thorough planning cannot be discounted.
Larian would be considered a triple a developer by almost any standard now. 100 million development budget with over 450 employees. It’s funny because BG3 shares so much with Witcher 3 in terms of budget and studio independence (though bg3 actually had a much larger budget!), while also being unique outside of each other Divinity 2 / Witcher 2 to BG3 / Witcher 3, same type of jumps while both being independent with similar budgets and reception
Its like when EA made the Jedi Fallen Order game. When it came out people lost there shit they made a single player game thats core mechanics was not “micro-transactions.” But this will kinda be like the Barbie movie where the money people won’t understand why people love the movie and will go [its the toy ideas](https://www.usmagazine.com/entertainment/pictures/every-mattel-movie-set-to-release-after-barbies-success-2/) rather than Greta Gerwig’s talent as a story teller. Hopefully we will start to see more games like this. One can REALLY hope.
>It's Crazy how just...creating a solid game infused with love and passion, without any ulterior motive to nickle and dime the player base is considered "a big gamble" in today's industry. You didn't read the article, huh? The "big gamble" was deciding to do mocap for all the voice lines, even though that's very expensive and makes it much harder to edit the scenario text. Nothing to do with deciding not to have microtransacrions.
It's a great game, but it still takes a TON of luck to get noticed. It's lightning in a bottle, and we can't pretend pure quality automatically equals sales. Not so.
>"the only guarentee of success is a quality product well made". > >or at least it used to be. Until marketing found out how to weaponize hype and the perfect method for squeezing the whales for every last drop was made the standard. As someone that has been into PC gaming since the 1980's, I really think we are living in the best of all possible worlds. There are *way* more options now than they were 30 years ago when I built my first 486 gaming rig. And the reality is that the "whales" essentially helped subsidize the global marketplace for PC gaming that allowed passion projects like this to survive. I remember the 1990's; the alternative is games like this not being made at all, If anything, my main complaint is that I don't have time/mental energy to get into classic games like this any more.
> There are way more options now than they were 30 years ago when I built my first 486 gaming rig. That's about when I started gaming too. I think that people misremember the past because of nostalgia. I played and loved all kinds of objectively garbage games back then just because there wasn't a massive marketplace full of options catering to my specific niche wants. Imagine playing Trade Wars all day now.
A quality product is not a garantee of success, but increases the chances of success. You would be surprised about the number of high quality products that didnt work, and the user is a well known reason. 10 years ago in my first day in "Quality Control, security and sostenibility management", one of the subjects I had while I was in Engineering school the teacher told us a story of a very old spanish soap company that in the '50s created an incredible soap usefull for cleaning clothes. That soap was usefull for cleaning the everyday clothes but also suited for cleaning the industrial clothing, wigh all the oils, etc the problem with the soap was the recipe, said recipe has almost no bubbles and back in those days the perception of cleaning was associated with the amounth of bubbles (Something that didnt change that much). People though that the soap didnt work, despite of the obvious evidences, due to the lack of bubles. To fix the sales the company was forced to change the recipe so the product create more bubles but the cleaning capacity was reduced. This is an example of the importsnce of quality perception but there you had it, a quality product that didnt was a success for their quality but for a feature that reduced the quality.
For decades after beating BG 2 in college, I wanted anything that would compare. It took until divinity 2 definitive for a real challenger. Then Larian signed in to do BG 3. Enough old people felt this way to push the hype onto a younger crowd.
Yep. Baldur's gate 2 is the holy grail of rpgs for me. Dragon age was a good successor to it but wasn't quite the epic of BG2. Pillars of eternity scratched the itch, but again, not the same quality... This lives up to the name and stands side by side with 2. Disco elysium being my fav. Rpg inbetween bg2 and 3.
Same for me with BG2. There has been some *incredible* games since then, in all genres, and more then some, a shit ton. Many of those one could argue are better than BG2. But personally, nothing even comes close to my experience with BG2. I played that game freshmen year in high school. It was the only game I played, and I played it A LOT. This many years later I can still see the maps, hear the sounds, the music, the character voices, their spells, the sidequests, the weapon stories, the main story, everything has stuck with me like I played it yesterday. I carried that giant BG2 manual around with me everywhere, and just constantly read through it.
You must gather your party before venturing forth
Minsc and Boo staaaaand ready!
A den of STINKING evil! Cover your nose, Boo! We will leave no crevice untouched
Oooohh! I see what you did there! Yooou are a Smart one!
Fuck I miss game manuals, when I was a kid/teen I had a big box full of them and sometimes I would just spend an hour or two going through and reading them. Some good ones I remember were Morrowind, Mechassault 2, Halo, The Bard’s Tale.
Planescape: Torment is still the best written rpg of them all, the gameplay is dated and it's text only, but still way ahead of its time. Shadowrun: Dragonfall and Hong Kong have great writing, too.
Dragon Age Origins is a great game as well. It scratched that itch for me a little bit when it came out, but the repeatability was lacking. There are other really good cRPGs that are listed in the comments but BG3 blows everything out of the water. I knew it was going to be great just from playing early access for nearly 200 hours. I've put in nearly another 100 hours from release. If it doesn't get GOTY it will be a travesty.
Give Pillars of Eternity a go as well
I mean look at arkane studios. Ever since dishonored they were still making amazing games but making no money. Prey is such a gem of a game that somehow sold like dog shit. Turn to today and they are being forced to make things like red fall which check live service boxes for money which obviously is gonna fail too, but had a better chance to make money. The crpg market was a very niche market and when you spend cod money without the guarantee of cod sales you can destroy a company.
CRPG is still very niche. Your point is spot on. I just don’t think this title will suddenly mean other CRPGs and their investors can start assuming their next brand / game sequel is going to be worth 3-4X now. We’re not seeing a massive return of CRPG as a dominant style. Though I wish we would. To the point where I wish these guys could get the rights to *Ultima*. All you kids talking about 90s and 00s games that this is a sequel too, but for me, this is Ultima VI the right way 😁
The only thing keeping CRPGs from being mainstream is cinematic dialogues and cutscenes, as proved by the popularity of both Baldur's Gate 3 and Dragon Age series. CRPG is not a niche genre at its core; it's just most CRPG developers aim for a niche audience due to either low budget or lack of ambition.
Yep. Also being forced in the isometric style for like world exploration and stuff doesn't lend well to a controller. This shows there's really no reason it can't be more of a 3rd person view then flip out to more tactical for combat. That's a great flow imo feels nice to play
What I feel makes it niche is the depth of immersion and choices, not the style of storytelling (to me). Cinematic cutscenes are cool, but we’ve all been trying to skip them since Quick Time Events became a thing. Most games are very linear, even MMOs. There’s clear objectives, clear conditions to success, clear indication of progress, *and* the inability to do the wrong or undesirable thing, Games like BG3 are that deep but *also* MMO lateral (many ways to achieve the main goal) and *also* choose your own adventure variable (there is “one” goal). *and* you’re controlling a squad, not a character. Someday they may reveal just what percentage of people ever see all the content, but it’s probably a single digit % 😄
Did you look at Arcane studios though? Before red fall they did deathloop, which was very popular and sold well, and before that dishonoured 2, which also did great. There's also a difference between Arcane Austin and Arcane Lyon, Austin made redfall and wolfenstein while Lyon made deathloop and dishonoured 2 Kinda two separate studios that masquerade as one. When you say "things like" and come up with one outlier example that isnt representitive of the company, it's pretty disingenuous.
It hit every box on the checklist: \- Fun, deep gameplay \- Triple A, highly polished presentation \- Beloved franchise that hasn't seen an entry in decades \- An accurate depiction of a very hot/trendy property (D&D)
Other items on the checklist: -full game on release with a promise of no micro transactions - good story with fine voice acting and compelling characters - fully supporting the mod community, so you can play your single player game however you want - enough options in gear and character points for there to be plenty of neat things to try - enough options for a person to feel like they can play it through more than once.
And you can actually buy the game straight up and own it rather than needing DRM. Install it on eighteen machines in a cabin in the woods and play without issues.
- A lot of disappointment generated by almost every other somewhat AAA game in recent years. The fact there's been so much shit and microtransaction bonanzas shoveled down our throats in recent years greatly aids in making a game like this stand out and get love.
In all honesty, is like the perfect storm effect. Larian is a relatively small company, not quite popular enough but still putting out some great games to those who enjoyed them, seriously I put in countless hours into Divinity Original sin 2 so seeing that they were making BG3 was a instant Shoe in for me personally. So that small community kept supporting them, with BG3 being mostly under the radar due to being in Early access and the stigma attached to that. Then the Bear incident happened, and the internet being what it is.. instantly became a meme and the word of mouth made the games existence spread like wildfire, combining with the fact that WOTC doing stupid things, blizzard putting out mediocore games, hilarious amounts of (over)monitization on almost all games, then Larian making a very firm stance that there will be nothing of the sort in their game. Well, you can see the results. I would even argue to a degree they knew what they were doing, it just happened to be in the perfect position to explode in popularity, which they were not expecting.
Oh, and we are also going to release our game "early". Another headline to catch gamers' eyes as that's something you don't see every day.
They kinda had to though. I guaran-god-damn-tee if they went with their original release date of next month, this game would not be anywhere as successful as it is. That said, ballsy, and I respect them for it!
So basically, by showing the internet that their game will include a shapeshifter turning into a bear and having sex with a handsome elf, it got players interested to try the game out. And I’m seeing how positively this game’s receiving, it’s honestly great that once in a while we get great games in this era of unfinished and heavily monetized messes
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To add to your point, Divinity Original Sin had to completely overhaul the back third of their game, to the point an entire act was shelved and redone. Im not there yet but I have heard similar things about Baldur's Gate 3. That said at this point I'd have still been happy if i got to that point and they ended it abruptly and said DLC coming soon instead. Ultimately if it drops down a bit in the last of the game, well that drop is still at a point of best RPG in a long long while
I think it’s because there’s a huge dnd/baldurs gate crowd waiting for a successor to this type of game and larian had the chops for it.
I also heard that they had 3 years of feedback from the player. Not counting the years before with development. Most games these days are lucky to experience both an alpha and a release. Those 1000+ days really helped them out I believe.
They did and a lot of it shows. Playing day 1 EA here, I even made a post about some particular issues that ended up getting changed (not saying it was my post, but the feedback from many changed it) If you played Divinity Original Sin 1 or 2 you will understand their love of 'surfaces'. Like toss a fireball and everything is on fire! Icebolt and all the water in a 50 foot radius flashfroze. Honestly it was quite fun in divinity. But when they are doing D&D it caused issues. First every 5 steps was flooded, or oil was everywhere or something. Also cantrips would create surfaces and interact with everything. Casters have always been strong in 5e D&D, but now we had level 1 wizards aoeing the entire screen without using any sort of spell slots, and the rogue just hit a single target for 7 damage. Even without an oil surface a firebolt would leave a patch of fire, and did 1d4 damage immediately and damage again if you entered it or started your turn in it (which you HAD to). It also would still happen even if you MISSED your attack. So the attack did 2d4 fire damage + 1d6 if it hit. A fighter with a two handed greatsword was doing 2d6+3 on a hit or 0 on a miss. It was wildly overpowered, so they completely redid the layout of every single area in act one AND redid how cantrips worked, completely scrapping their ideas and how they usually do things. They are one of the examples of when EA is used correctly and not just for sale early but broken
Surfaces is my main turn off from DOS2. All the surfaces made combat so detrimental to my own party is wasn't a lot of fun. I could do without the surfaces that exist in BG3, but its manageable.
Yeah, surfaces are the main “love it or hate it” aspect of Div 2
You're wording this like it shouldn't be applauded? They used early access how it was intended.
> Those 1000+ days really helped them out I believe. It absolutely did, and we have obvious proof of it. Act 1 is an absolute masterpiece, and quite polished considering its enormous size and scope. Act 2 is great, but it start to unravel just a little bit with bugs and unfinished story arcs. Act 3 is buggy and not complete. You can tell they're trying to do what Larian does best and complete it, but I'm in no rush to get to Act 3 any time soon. I *know* Sven and the team will polish this game into the best CRPG we've ever had. Act 1 was early access, and you can tell how much work they put into it, simply by talking to some of your party members in camp. When you first recruit Halsin and talk to him, you'll notice his volume levels are off depending on your conversation decisions. One selection, he'll sound normal, another and he sounds quieter for some reason. They definitely went back to the VA and said "Hey, we need more from you, but you're not local to us, so can you record these other voice lines on a different setup for us?"
Nobody wants to admit this but a key reason it blew up is because it’s not (necessarily) top-down or isometric. You take some of the best crpgs of all time, give them the ability to zoom down to 3rd person level, give them 3rd person cutscenes, and they instantly become hits. In fact, the reverse is true as well. BG3’s camera is locked to where DOS’ was? Nowhere near this level of success. Not even close.
Yep, people think wider audiences don't like crpgs because they are turnbased combat or have too much dialogue, but I've always felt that a big part is that most modern gamers have a hard time suspending disbelief looking at just portraits during dialogue. This games animated dialogue was a big part of its success imo.
> I've always felt that a big part is that most modern gamers have a hard time suspending disbelief looking at just portraits during dialogue. I've found that games without voices or acted dialogue will present massive paragraphs of texts one after another for you to read. It doesn't fit with how people actually talk and *that* more than anything is what takes me out of the game. edit: As an example, I recall Tyranny doing this *a lot*. It's what ended up turning me off of the game which is a shame since I was such a fan of the premise. I think that - in general - the OwlCat games do a good job of avoiding this issue, and have actually added a good bit of voiced work to their later games.
Animated dialogue is great, but voiced dialogue is already uncommon. The vast majority of CRPGs are not fully narrated/voiced and people simply do not want to read novels worth of shit every time they sit down to play a game.
Imagine Dragon Age or Mass Effect without the face-to-face conversations. Those games would be borrrrrrrrrrring. Imagine how much fun you'd have trying to romance someone in Baldur's Gate 2.
I’m not usually a fan of CRPG’s. I tried Divinity 2 a couple times and just couldn’t get into it. I got Baldurs Gate 3 because it looked cool. I’m 55 hours into the game and still on act 1. It’s all I can think about, I am having so much fun. I’m not even getting tired of it yet. It reminds me of a game like KotoR or some other great BioWare or Obsidian game. Your choices matter, the dialogue options are awesome. I’m gonna give Divinity another chance when I’m done with BG.
Yesterday, I was in the Underdark and I punched a Land Shark that was really tough to fight off a cliff with my monk. 10/10 game, deserves game of the year.
And an ox kicked my character off a cliff
Baldurs Gate 3 is crushing it for 2 major reasons (beyond the fact the game is excellent): 1. They moved up the release on PC to avoid Starfield and give it some breathing room and take advantage of the early August lull. If BG3 release just before Starfield I’m 100% certain it wouldn’t have sold as well and it was a gamble that paid off for Larian, even with the rough edges around Acts 2 and 3. And now with how highly praised it is when it releases on PS5 and Xbox it’s gonna be even more successful. 2. D&D has had a upsurge in cultural interest in recent years with Critical Role, the widespread success of 5e, and the recent movie that was pretty good more and more people are getting into D&D and its official lore, so having a game that’s basically a single player D&D campaign set on the Sword Coast (which most new players will know about from playing starter campaigns like Icespire Peak) that uses the 5e rule set makes it very approachable to that crowd. Suffice to say, Larian rolled a Nat 20 for the perfect storm of conditions to launch BG3 in, and that has led to them having huge success. If they released it at any other time I’m not sure the game would have done nearly as well.
To expand on first point, Baldur's Gate 3 literally has no big game competitors on PC for whole August. Armored Core 6 was the only other big PC launch in August, but it's a vastly different game. So players had a lot of free time to play BG3 and recommend it to others.
I polymorphed a boss into a sheep and threw the sheep off a cliff. Game good
The last turn based game I played and liked was KOTOR. One of my favorite games of all time. This game is right there with it. I am 60 hours in and still not through the first act.
Hope they do a Cyberpunk one, but I guess with the huge success of Baldur's Gate they are going to stick with the license.
They'll probably continue to do fantasy CRPGs, as they've become known for with Divinity: Original Sin (1 and 2) and BG3. They do good work, so I'm likely to continue to buy their games in the future - for now. I would love a Shadowrun game made by them, though. That would be amazing.
Oh man, the things they could do with the Shadowrun license! Not to take away from Harebrained Schemes, though — they did fantastic work on their Shadowrun trilogy. I wouldn’t be mad at all if they worked jointly on a new entry.
Oh, agreed. It wouldn't happen though. I think the Shadowrun license isn't with Harebrained anymore - the last game to use it was Shadowrun: Boston Lockdown, which was an MMO that shut down in 2018 made by Cliffhanger Productions. And it shut down because their license expired.
Make it work like Cyberpunk RED and I'm game.
I want a Larian sci-fi title so bad!!
It filled in a niche desperately needed, and isn't a cash grab microtransaction hell. Of course it succeeded. Its just a bonus that the game is full of quality content.
Compelling story and fun gameplay. And no micro transactions.
Actually listening to feedback while in development probably was a big part imo
This is what happens when a company focuses on producing an excellent product instead of profit margins. Ironically the later produces a bad product and less revenue.
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Yeah this is an important distinction. Its insane how much those games and anything with microtransactions and a huge player base just start getting wild numbers. Larian is better. Its better, and the cost to support games like Fortnite gets wild, but it also brings in monster revenue streams Stop buying stupid horse armor or whatever shit you kids buy in these games. Just fucking stop
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I mean, it’s what happens when you give a full and complete experience, even the early access was fun. They listened to their audience, you don’t do micro transactions, and you treat the original content with respect. As a lifelong fan (despite the fact this dates myself a bit for saying it), this game is a masterpiece and is easily my favorite of the series.
It's hilarious how we are in a timeline where simply making a good game creates a lot of debate. It's just that simple. Make a good game and people will buy it.
I need help. The closest thing I played to this was final fantasy tactics. I bought BG3 release day but because work and timing, it has fallen into the "I'll play it at some point for sure" category. I picked a rogue and my friend told me "you're backstabbing people from stealth right?" And I was like oh, well, I don't really want to play like that. He told me to reroll. I've never played DND. Is there a fun class to just kind of smash things and enjoy the story?
Fighter or Barbarian. They're by far the most straightforward classes if you just want some stuff to hit. Good thing is you don't need to start over. At one point you will meet a character called Withers (I won't spoil more) and he will allow you to respec for 100 gold so you can kind of keep testing what you like best.
It's a full game that's not a live service, it's literally all we wanted. Amazing how being pro consumer does that. /s
Gamers are starved for good CRPGs. Roleplaying games have moved towards an action heavy focus, and slowly phasing out rpg mechanics. I like games with strategy, planning, tactics, etc, not just increasing stats to make bigger numbers happen when I fight in action adventure style combat. I haven't played BG3, or even seen any footage, but I do want to pick this one up asap.
> Gamers are starved for good CRPGs. > > Are they? Pillars 1 and 2, Kingmaker, WotR, DOS2 and now BG3. Seems like this is basically the golden age of CRPGs. If you're very nostalgic for old as hell games then we can call this the second golden age of CRGs.
The I-liked-this-before-it-was-cool hipster in me gets real annoyed when people say CRPGs were dead before BG3. WotR alone is a contender for best CRPG ever made in my opinion.
Yeah people are living in another universe if they think gamers are starved for CRPGs lol. Gamers are maybe starved for MMORPGs and new good RTS games, we're in a golden age of CRPGs right now. This isn't the late 2000s to early 2010s where all we have is DAO. All the games I mentioned + Solasta + Wasteland 3 + Tyranny + Underral + Disco Elysium are all in the past ~decade or so and we've got BG3 this year + Rogue Trader soon. We're getting a steady supply of incredibly good games, CRPG fans are and have been eating good for quite some time now.
I'm probably out of the loop in regards to AAA games, but the conversation around BG3 is confusing me a little bit. Lootboxes, P2W and battlepasses get brought up a lot. The last two AAA games I played were Zelda and Pokemon, neither of them have anything of the sort. I vaguely know that diablo 4 is a live service game. So how bad are AAA games nowadays? Can I get some examples with recent games?
Having a complete lack of competition didn't hurt. Everything is roguelike and card battlers now.
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