Baldur’s Gate 3 is Causing Some Developers to Panic
Baldur’s Gate 3 is Causing Some Developers to Panic
While Baldur's Gate 3 is being widely celebrated by fans and developers alike, some are panicking that this could set new expectations from fans. Good.
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I think by "some developers", they're referring more toward the AAA studios who have spent the last couple decades baking MTX into every nook and cranny they can find in their games, and not indie devs.
Honestly, nowadays it feels more like an indie studio is more of an indicator of quality than AAA. Most of the games I buy and enjoy are indie/small studios.
Honestly, nowadays it feels more like an indie studio is more of an indicator of quality than AAA. Most of the games I buy and enjoy are indie/small studios.
Larian is about as indie/small as Bethesda was when Skyrim released.
AAA games are very rarely as innovative as indie games, it's all just the same rehashed stuff I feel like. Just whatever is "safe".
So, I very much agree, the typical AAA stuff from studios like EA, Ubisoft, etc. Don't interest me.
Although maybe Starfield will be interesting, we'll see. I didn't really like Fallout 4 though, I wished the RPGs were a bit more like the more old school ones lol.
I'm willing to be surprised by it, but I'm not optimistic for Starfield. What I've seen of it so far looks mainly like they grafted chunks of No Man's Sky onto a Bethesda Fallout game and are trying hard to pitch it as The Next Big Thing. Frankly, I'd much rather have the next mainline Elder Scrolls game instead, but at this rate I'm going to be 40 before I get to play a sequel to a game that came out in my 20s.
They also lifted chunks of Star Citizen.
I'm fairness, incomplete chunks is all that exists of Star Citizen.
Well, that and a whaling operation on the scale of Victorian England's.
I am in the SC club and it's a glitchy, broken, incomplete mess while also being one of the coolest gaming experiences I've ever had when it works.
About $500 of the ~$600 million they've raised is mine, dating from the original crowdfunding campaigns and the first year or two of development. I still check in every year or two to see if they're any closer to having a complete game, and every time I do, I come away with the sense that they've put vastly more effort into developing and selling spaceship JPEGs than they have into making the game those spaceships are supposed to be used in.
Whenever I play I just assume there's a reason no one else has tried to make star citizen before. Though they def have a problem with management and scope creep though
I saw a tier list meme that some teenager made on Discord of every game they'd ever played. You know what didn't appear once on the list? Not a single Grand Theft Auto game nor a single Elder Scrolls game. I asked them why and they said because GTA5 and Skyrim are "old"
They're taking so long between releases now that they missed an entire generation of gamers
because it's more profitable to re-release those games over and over again and sell shark cards
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Even so they won't be panicking. They can just pull a trusty piece of IP out and slap some microtransactions on it and the core target group will be all over it.
The video tries to imply it's industry wide, but only show 3 tweets. I've also seen nothing but praise from other game developers I know.
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It a headline says "some" in it, it's clickbait.
I sware that's happened with all big games of late, Elden Ring, TotK, etc. A few Devs decide to be contraian to the praise and then the media decides it a huge backlash.
That’s just modern media, they often write about the internet exploding about something and then it’s just a few tweets from random people.
A few Devs decide to be contraian to the praise and then the media decides it a huge backlash.
They are not even criticizing the game.
The opinions are basically either "Smaller studios won't be able to replicate BG3" and "Not all games/RPGs need to be as deep and long as BG3".
The bar has been reset and folks like you are eager to meet the challenge :)
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I’ve not played…
Then go play it and then judge it. This game is a seismic as Mass Effect 1 or even Doom.
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I remember a lot of people were saying Half-Life: Alyx was a huge industry changer
That was a very fringe take by VR enthusiasts, and to say ME1 didn't have a huge impact on the industry is incredibly bizarre to me. Here's a very short piece that gives a decent overview
Let's say that didn't have a big impact though, to say Doom didn't? I don't even know where to begin. Doom + Quake basically shaped the next 20 years of FPS's with goldeneye being one of the other major iterators on how MP was handled.
Not even close. I'm playing it right now, well into act 2, and while it is THE ultimate example of what a cRPG should be, that doesn't necessarily mean the breadth and scope would work in other genres. You're WAY overestimating the impact this is having on the gaming industry, and that's evidenced by how other developers are responding to it.
Also. I've played through all the Mass Effects (even Andromeda, which I actually enjoyed more) and to say that it was industry-defining is a fanboy take. Full stop. From where I'm sitting ME1 did not introduce anything groundbreaking that hadn't been done already by that point, and to be honest the early Fallout games had way more gravity when it came to choices and decision-making. I'd say of games in that era, the original Borderlands was more ground-breaking given it kind of kickstarted the looter-shooter genre, and that's a stretch.You are free to disagree, but to hand wave me away as having “fan boy takes” is pretty rude and does not make me want to engage further. Thanks and have a great weekend. 
Then again, it might have just preemptively killed Starfield.
They're pretty different games. They're both RPGs, and there's some overlap, but turn based is ultimately very different gameplay than action, and one isn't going to scratch the itch for the other to a lot of us.
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I'm fully expecting to go pretty hard at both, and BG3 might have me engaged enough to not jump straight into Starfield at launch, but I need immersive 3D games, too, and except Elden Ring which is it's own thing (even if it does pretty comfortably check the boxes of ARPG), I've been waiting for something of comparable scope to Skyrim that doesn't have a fatal flaw for a long time. Even as old and janky as it is now, it's still a scale that's only matched by a handful of games in the decade since.
The beauty of Bethesda's flagship titles (namely Fallout and TES) is even if they end up as buggy messes upon release, or have empty maps, the modding community corrects those flaws relatively quickly.
It's one of the reasons that I, a long-time veteran of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., am not worried if GSC Game World fucks up S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2. Today, the best part of the first titles is the mods that fix, improve, and add content to the games. It'll be the same with this one, and I'm excited to see what people do with A-Life 2.0.
in the last decade we’ve started to see games really take shape as cinematic masterpieces. Experiences that truly top movies.
Metal Gear Solid is from 1998
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Real talk. I don't game on console anymore, but Metal Gear Solid is the crowning jewel of console game plots.
Ever tried explaining the series to someone unfamiliar with it? You end up sounding like a fuckin meth head coming off a binge, and to me that makes it a narrative worth diving in to.
Yeah, it can and should be a warning to studio heads, but as game consumers we absolutely should raise our expectations (and stop buying micro transaction crap). There are plenty of big studios with money who could buy the licence and spend years making the game, but those studios belong to the big publishers who optimise for profit not for game quality.
Man, parts of Death Stranding were so interesting they should have won movie awards. Brilliant supporting character/mocapped actors. Couldn't agree more on that front.