“We believe RPGs are big … So we always believed the audience was there,” says Adam Smith
It seems like the BG3 devs tried to make a good game and hoped it’d be popular vs other devs who try to make a profitable game and hope it’s good.
That’s exactly it. Pretty much every five meters you think “Whoever created this actually gave a shit about the whole product”. It never feels like things are worse than they should be, or that they could have been better with a little effort.
It’s the kind of game where everyone who worked on it can be very proud. Do you think the average Blizzard developer these days can say the same?
that they could have been better with a little effort.
Clearly, you are still in the first or second act.
No, I’m in the third. Sorry. There are definitely things that could be better, but not “with a little effort”.
There’s a lot of griping about the third act, and yeah, I get it, it’s incomplete and comparatively poorly optimized. But it’s still really good. :P They clearly bit off more than they could chew with the City, that maybe they could’ve solved with another year or two of dev time. (Hopefully, will be solved in a Def Ed a year or two down the line.) That isn’t necessarily dev time they had, though. Not without taking out a ton of loans (do you really want tencent to own more than 30%?) and risking ill-will with consumers and WotC. (The game was meant to come out over a year ago.)
I’ve played through A3 and loved it. I don’t think your “beast of a PC” is as good as you think it is.
I don’t know what your problem is with Act 3. It might not be as good as the rest, but it’s still plenty good and better than most modern games. I just killed >!Gortash!< after completing nearly every side quest I could find and I haven’t really had any issues. Sure, there’s a few things that could be a little more fleshed out or that feel like cut content, but not much. I also don’t know how many of those things are actually cut content and not just references. Like in Cazador’s manor there’s >!a body with a note talking about a sleep potion and acid poison. I’m pretty sure it’s just a Romeo and Julie reference. He took the sleep potion to fake death, his lover found him apparently dead and killed herself. He found her dead and killed himself.!< There may have been plans for a quest there, but idk.
Spoiler tag ain’t workin
It depends on your client. It works on Sync.
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Trusting your audience to appreciate the depth of work that isn’t just flashy graphics, plus respecting players by not filling it with micro transactions.
People are desperate for games with some heart.
I’m so worried that starfield is going to be the opposite of BG3.
As a huge lover of all thing Fallout, I heard and read a lot about Starfield, then saw some videos and was and absolutely hyped. SPACE FALLOUT. Then I saw the game play and I hope I’m wrong but man it looks like they just took new vegas and slapped a space skin on it.
Don’t just go for the flashy graphics upgrade 😭
I’m worried about it too. So much so that I’m going to wait for reviews. I’m expecting it’ll be a buggy mess for at launch anyway, considering it’s Bethesda, the delays, and the unusually high minimum specs listed.
I just don’t trust Bethesda anymore, I’m waiting for reviews, patches, mods to fix everything, and a sale. So maybe Xmas time but probably next spring. BG3 should hold me for most of that
They had massive success with Divinity, the ground work already laid out. They bought rights to a big IP, kept to their Divinity formula and actually spent on marketing. Plus it happened to come at the right time when people needed the RPG itch scratched.
D&D is also as big as its ever been, especially with a latent audience of viewers who maybe don’t play very often, and at a time when there aren’t enough DMs for everyone who wants to play to find a table. Plus, Baldur’s Gate is prime 30-year-nostalgia-cycle bait for millennial+ PC gamers.
And the recent D&D movie was basically free advertising for Larian.
Less of it than Hasbro anticipated, though.
There’s pretty big overlap between the kind of people who play PC games or even a lot of console games and who may be interested in this other genre of games, and especially the biggest name in that genre. It didn’t translate to the general public, though.
Which is crazy to me because the DnD movie was better than both Avatar movies IMO and those are 2 of the top 3 grossing movies of all time
Moviegoers are a fickle audience.
“Dungeons & Dragons” just doesn’t have the kind of appeal outside of geek circles that it does within it. There’s still a stigma there, even if it’s lessened, and different from what it used to be.
And, like, you need a lot more people to show up to a theatre to make money on a summer blockbuster than you do logging in to Twitch to watch you play a game.
Honestly, the BG3 PS5 launch may do more for D&D than anything else in the last few years. Critical Role, and shows like it, have cracked the door open and made 5E a big seller, and that’s naturally aided the BG3 PC launch immensely, but the current hype around BG3 could push sales of the console version of the game into a whole order of magnitude more hands that have never ever considered even looking at a d20. No one is calling the game D&D BG3, so it won’t have that stigma that the movie did. It does lack the level of D&D branding that BG1 and 2 had, but anyone who starts the game and starts looking up things online about it will come across the name repeatedly.
The game will further break down the walls. The potential for this to come full circle and boost Live Play views and D&D book sales is not small.
D&D as a name means nothing to me, because it’s so close to the “baseline” for what fantasy is, that it’s hard to say it really has much of an identity of its own…
That said, you’re creative and know how to just go all-in on what a fantasy universe can do for you… you can get some amazing results, like BG3 and the recent D&D movie
It’s also a great primer for the game itself. It introduces Faerun and (most) of the races while being a fun story in its own right. Although I have played Baldur’s Gate 2 and Neverwinter Nights back in the day I (re)watched the movie before starting BG3 and it was a nice apéritif to the main course.
Indeed, DnD has been catching my interest but have never known any players, and jumping in the DM role is daunting. BG3 lets me play something very close to DnD without any hassle.
Exactly this
Been wanting to play dnd but i only know one person who dms
Exactly, it’s no surprise it’s blown up really. Doesn’t take a team of analysts to figure it out.
Yeah, the only gambles they actually made with this game were changing the camera to be complete shit and making the game harder to run smoothly than their previous games. The only way this game was ever going to do poorly was if they completely shit the bed and released it in an unplayable state.
Camera was still complete shit in DOS2, they must not play their own game, because how they think that it’s acceptable is beyond me. Thank fuck for modders though, their camera mods make the games so so so much more enjoyable (even if the camera still has the larian jank attached).
They should just give people free cam, let me look around wherever I want and stop taking control of it to try and focus on actions, I am constantly wrestling with the camera for no reason. Bizarre they kept it like this.
I don’t remember the camera in Divinity being this bad, but it’s been a few years since I played it, so I could definitely be wrong.
I purchased BG3 after I heard that the devs did not include micro transactions. I simply purchased it to support the devs, I had no intentions of playing it. But, I have a Steam Deck and decided to download it and just try it out. I am 30 hours into the game and I don’t have the physical or mental ability to put this game down. Please send help. Thank you Larian for taking video games back to their roots.
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It’s OK. It’s certainly playable. I have mine capped at 40 fps and I’m sinking a lot of time in the game without really any problems.
Mind you, I get a around 1-2 hours of game play on battery power.
Even when it’s connected to a charger, the graphics aren’t great, also not horrible, but again it’s certainly playable!
Oh, to have such wide-eyed innocence still! I wish you the best of luck as you progress… but given how very poorly the 3rd act runs on my beast of a gaming PC, I fear you may run into problems. Granted, until they actually finish the 3rd act this is all moot - you’re better off starting a new game before entering the city proper.
Midway through Act 3 with my Ivy Bridge i7 and GTX 1060. Frame rates are certainly lower in the city, but I’ve encountered zero crashes or serious bugs. And while I’ve yet to finish the game, I’ve observed no drop in quality or quantity of content in Act 3. I must concur with another poster in questioning the avowed beastliness of your machine.
I think you’re over exaggerating, either how poorly the game runs or how good your PC is. Mine is quite old, and the city does run noticeably worse but not unplayable by any means. It defaulted graphics to ultra (which is crazy for how old my machine is) and the city runs at about 25fps, which for a first person or action game would be unbearable, but a top down strategy game I don’t even notice unless I look at the FPS counter.
I had a few issues when I got to town but I had been playing for hours at that point. Restarting the game made a lot of the low framerate issues that had been occurring go away.
I’m observing a few-year-long pattern where players’ demands shift between better tech (visuals, new ways to play) and deeper narrative. We’re now at the peak of where people expect deeper games with latest tech, and Larian -maybe knowingly- hit that jackpot.
The game will be remembered as the best of the decade, how wonderful.
This game gives me the same vibes as Bioware games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age, I was craving for something like this, without the microtransactions and gambling bullshit infesting most modern games.
I’m not fond of DnD mechanics but it’s ok, it’s worth it nonetheless, BG3 is truly spectacular.
The BioWare vibes are exactly why I’m loving this game so much. Larian was never in my radar before, because I just can’t get into isometric games for some reason, but they definitely are now. Whatever they put out next, I’m probably going to get.
I didn’t even know who Larian was before BG3 blew up lol, I can’t get into isometric either nor turn-based combat, I’m mainly a MMORPG player, but when I saw reviews for this game and AAA devs shitting on it I decided to buy it and give it an honest try.
I fell in love with it immediately, still struggling a bit with mechanics but I’m learning :D
You might like Divinity 2: OS even more than DnD based combat, which is a bit…crunchy around the edges.
Playing BG3 has definitely made me curious about their other games and I’ll have to give them a shot
You’ve got probably a decade before their next big title so settle in for the wait lol
I’m a Dragon Age fan. I’m used to decade long waits by now.
Just a heads up, the game isn’t isometric. It’s top down. Isometric is flat, not 3d. It’s viewed from a corner angle only usually and uses parallel projection (the view is rendered onto a plane where all lines of sight are parallel).
It was all fun and games with CD project red until Cyberpunk came along. Let’s see how Larian handles explosive growth.
Larian have already had major hits though: Divinity Original Sin 2 is more popular on Steam than huge hits like Sea of Thieves, Hogwarts Legacy, Hollow Knight, The Forest, GTAIV, and Borderlands 3.
BG3 is already a strong indicator that Larian have a strong identity as a developer and a commitment to quality.
CDPR’s biggest issue was investors as they were pressured to get the game out to reap dividends whereas Larian are private and the owner and biggest shareholder is also the director for their games. It’s a rare thing in our industry today and, so long as Swen Vincke can keep a hold of the reigns, we can be relatively hopeful for their future.
Public trading ruins every company in every industry, not only gaming, lets hope Larian doesn’t fall in that trap.
Actually, CDPR’s biggest shareholders are also its owners. But they don’t have a majority share.
Cyberpunk wasn’t a bad game after the patches, it just should’ve definitely been delayed and polished more. But they boldy went for a new ambitious IP in a genre and gameplay they haven’t done before.
Maybe it’s just because I wasn’t following it super closely before release, but what promises did they even make that fell through? I only ask because I think there’s also a Reddit effect of people hyping themselves up about a game to the point where the final product can’t ever live up to expectations. This is a similar feeling I had to no man’s sky. How many of these promises were just things the community decided were in the game based on speculation from trailers and interview quotes?
This isn’t to say there weren’t problems. The game was obviously buggy and needed another year of development time to fix some issues (fortunately never experienced game breaking bugs like some did). There were perks that obviously weren’t working, and it simply never should have been attempted on old gen consoles. But overall I fell in love with that game I think because I went into it with zero expectations and now I’ve put like a thousand hours in since release.
Plenty of promises weren’t kept up.
The marketing mentioned that your choice of background would basically mean an almost completely different experience. In the end you have 20mins of gameplay + some cutscenes and then all of it is mostly the same apart from some dialog options.
They hyped that the city would be vibrant and almost a sim in its own way. That you could just “live a normal life” go to the barber and interact with people. When I played most NPCs didn’t have any dialog, there was even like a brothel that you couldn’t visit. Honestly GTA San Andreas was miles ahead and it’s like a 20yo game at this point.
A lot of people like to reduce it to the bugs but BG3 is also very much a bit of a buggy mess and no one is complaining about that. The main issue is that we were sold an ocean and we realized that it has the depth of a puddle. And that you can’t fix with any amount of patches.
I personally think that 2077 is a great game. It was overshadowed by legitimate problems at launch, but on PC, I was not disappointed. I really enjoyed every minute of it. The world that they were able to recreate in 3D is so detailed and fun to explore. If anyone was looking forward to that game and hasn’t played it since launch, try it out. It is very good.
I honestly have no idea why people expected that much from the studio that made “horse is on the roof and the hardest part of the game is looting corpses” simulator.
Judging Witcher 3 purely from a game mechanic standpoint, 2077 actually blew my expectations out of the water. Plus the bugs were funny and the story was good.
CD:PR made way too many unrealistic promises during development. It was already obvious they’d never be able to fulfill all of them, and the bugginess etc. came on top. I really hope Larian sticks with the EA (=Early Access) model, because it protects against exactly these shenanigans. I wouldn’t have bought BG3 on launch day if the EA reviews weren’t as stellar.
If you’re like me and wondering what was ever good about the Electronic Arts model, here it means Early Access
Good point, that’s a bit confusing. I’ve added the whole word after the first use of the initialism :)
I’ve just completed my first playthrough and it’s going down as a top 3 favorite for me. Can still move up but Ocarina of Time and God of War are pretty dug in. Already theorycraftong what my evil playthrough will look like. Wrote down soooo many ideas from this game in my DM notebook as well.
Doing my evil playthrough now and it hurts my soul. Never had this problem betraying the brick walls in skyrim.
Well, I decided to roll a nature loving ranger who speaks to animals and very early on in the game I absolutely wrecked a very notable animal npc. Whelp, I’m evil now.
Oh no! Which one? Not the, um, bear, right?
Please tell me it wasn’t Scratch! I make sure to play fetch with and pet that good boy every time I return to camp!
I put on Talk with Animals just to have him call me “friend.”
Totally worth the effort 🥰
That’s a good question… I knew it was in early access but I kept just hearing negative shit about it and it fell off my radar until it just exploded again because of the finalized release. The things I see it praised for it tells me all y’all youngsters need to get on GOG and get the old classics and see just how much better those games are to most shit that comes out now. The old farts like me want those, but to look like games these days. BG3 did that. And it’s amazing.
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Ubisoft: we love it. Let’s do it. But also let’s figure out how to add microtransactions first.
Also Ubisoft: Interesting characters, good story, engaging and complex gameplay? Well I think what the players really want is to climb someplace high to unlock more of the map and slowly sneak after someone for 20 minutes while they randomly walk around the city. That sounds good let’s do that for every game.
Let’s be honest, they could have put out a large stinking turd with a “BG3” sticker on top and I would have bought it.
I’m so happy it turned out to be really good!
I think the point out that Larian knew this too, and used the guaranteed market to invest in content, not profit.
You’ve just summoned beamdog!
I appreciate what they’ve done in terms of making the older games more accessible, but I wish they’d kept their fanfiction out of the Enhanced Editions. Especially with no access to the voice actors for the original characters the integration becomes really clunky.
I think you mean updog.
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It’s, pretty damn easy… It’s an RPG where my actions actually feel like there’s weight to them. There’s just no room for turning my brain off, normally I’d consider that a bad thing… But here… it’s just so damn engaging
