Consultant and experienced developer Rami Ismail has shared his thoughts on the state of the games industry, while expressing some fears and concerns. He tried to outline the issues of the existing system where funding decides what gets made.
What is the alternative? For nothing to ever be successful? To let the gaming market continue to degrade into microtransaction hell?
I don’t even agree with their premise that it makes it harder for similar games in the genre to succeed. The popularity of BG3 will probably make people more interested in the genre regardless of how amazing it is. As long as it is priced accordingly. I would buy a smaller scale CRPG game if it were $20-$30.
I think that’s where his point kind of lies tho. Don’t get me wrong, I share the same sentiments, but scale doesn’t necessarily translate to production costs. Larian has been in the CRPG genre for a while, and they have engines, proprietary tools, and design philosophies based off their past successes and failures. Other companies won’t really have that edge, and will likely make many of the same mistakes that earlier titles did, which is what Rami Ismail is probably fearing.
There aren’t many other ideal solutions to deal with this tricky problem. Capital like engines and tools aren’t really built so easily, and even when they are built, there’s tons of tiny little details that CRPGs make, ranging from camera to how dialogue is handled, to control schemes, character building (I don’t think Larian got away with utilizing the 5E system without a hefty licensing fee) and plot.
Not to say all these things need to be at quality and comparable to BG3, but that due to it’s popularity and success, it will be a frame or point of reference when thinking about another CRPG, and thus when a game doesn’t do anything new or drastically different, it’ll be framed as a ‘lower quality BG3’ because it won’t have anything to help it escape that direct comparison.
As for doing something different, using a different TTRPG system, or other unique quirk that set it apart drastically enough to free itself from that looming shadow, that’s a pretty hefty risk for a TTRPG or studio to take up, with no guarantee that the game itself will come out okay. You only need to look at Shadowrunn Returns, a CRPG for Shadowrun a cyberpunk fused fantasy world. Sounds like a great time, no? Well, I wouldn’t say it did badly, but that it didn’t do well enough for the people making or funding to entertain the risk of a sequel, and thus the ‘tightening of the noose’ that he’s referring to.
With a step down in price, or for new entrants to enter a market, we’ll either need to understand that new games likely won’t have the same polish or quality of current ones, but they will still need to earn a profit from these games. This either translates into enough sales (which I doubt people would do as people generally don’t care about things unless they’re incredibly passionate, which naturally limits the quantity of people) or a high enough price to still make a profit with a lower amount of sales, which means that smaller scale 20-30$ CRPG is just not feasible if they don’t have some other way to raise funding or keep costs down. You’d basically be looking at maybe 5-10 hours of gameplay for that kind of price, and the quality still would not be the same, missing a lot of things we take for granted in a AA or AAA setting.
It’s not really about consumer interest in a genre or style of game, it’s more to do with people’s flawed perspective that games are constantly getting better, and while it’s not to say new ideas aren’t being tried, and those can be done with indie teams, they just need to be either completely distinct when compared to it’s competitors, so the flaws aren’t fixated on, and accepted as a form of the medium, or reinvent the wheel in a way to subvert the genre they’re currently in. I could go on all day, but this is already a wall of text, and you get my point.
What is the alternative? For nothing to ever be successful? To let the gaming market continue to degrade into microtransaction hell?
I don’t even agree with their premise that it makes it harder for similar games in the genre to succeed. The popularity of BG3 will probably make people more interested in the genre regardless of how amazing it is. As long as it is priced accordingly. I would buy a smaller scale CRPG game if it were $20-$30.
I think that’s where his point kind of lies tho. Don’t get me wrong, I share the same sentiments, but scale doesn’t necessarily translate to production costs. Larian has been in the CRPG genre for a while, and they have engines, proprietary tools, and design philosophies based off their past successes and failures. Other companies won’t really have that edge, and will likely make many of the same mistakes that earlier titles did, which is what Rami Ismail is probably fearing.
There aren’t many other ideal solutions to deal with this tricky problem. Capital like engines and tools aren’t really built so easily, and even when they are built, there’s tons of tiny little details that CRPGs make, ranging from camera to how dialogue is handled, to control schemes, character building (I don’t think Larian got away with utilizing the 5E system without a hefty licensing fee) and plot.
Not to say all these things need to be at quality and comparable to BG3, but that due to it’s popularity and success, it will be a frame or point of reference when thinking about another CRPG, and thus when a game doesn’t do anything new or drastically different, it’ll be framed as a ‘lower quality BG3’ because it won’t have anything to help it escape that direct comparison.
As for doing something different, using a different TTRPG system, or other unique quirk that set it apart drastically enough to free itself from that looming shadow, that’s a pretty hefty risk for a TTRPG or studio to take up, with no guarantee that the game itself will come out okay. You only need to look at Shadowrunn Returns, a CRPG for Shadowrun a cyberpunk fused fantasy world. Sounds like a great time, no? Well, I wouldn’t say it did badly, but that it didn’t do well enough for the people making or funding to entertain the risk of a sequel, and thus the ‘tightening of the noose’ that he’s referring to.
With a step down in price, or for new entrants to enter a market, we’ll either need to understand that new games likely won’t have the same polish or quality of current ones, but they will still need to earn a profit from these games. This either translates into enough sales (which I doubt people would do as people generally don’t care about things unless they’re incredibly passionate, which naturally limits the quantity of people) or a high enough price to still make a profit with a lower amount of sales, which means that smaller scale 20-30$ CRPG is just not feasible if they don’t have some other way to raise funding or keep costs down. You’d basically be looking at maybe 5-10 hours of gameplay for that kind of price, and the quality still would not be the same, missing a lot of things we take for granted in a AA or AAA setting.
It’s not really about consumer interest in a genre or style of game, it’s more to do with people’s flawed perspective that games are constantly getting better, and while it’s not to say new ideas aren’t being tried, and those can be done with indie teams, they just need to be either completely distinct when compared to it’s competitors, so the flaws aren’t fixated on, and accepted as a form of the medium, or reinvent the wheel in a way to subvert the genre they’re currently in. I could go on all day, but this is already a wall of text, and you get my point.