After $90 million driven by Baldur's Gate 3, Hasbro says games will be "huge" for D&D and Larian's hit RPG is "just the first of several new video games" to come
People seem to forget their gaming history. William SRD has an entire channel dedicated to incredibly broken, brain dead, pushed out the door for a quick buck D&D games.
It's going to be like that time that GTA3 was a huge success, and a million shitty and broken "open world" games came out (Excluding Simpsons Hit and Run that game was great)
Or when WOW was a huge success and we were buried with a million shitty and broken MMO WOW clones.
What made Baldurs Gate 3 great wasn't DnD it was Larian. Same for BG 1/2 and old BioWare.
You can't just create that level of care by pumping out lots of games, they'll probably fill them with MTX or GaaS bullshit to try and get more money from it as well.
Better yet, they see MTX games making money and D&D games making money, so they think combining the two will make even more money. I hope they're wrong.
Concur. Larian is a breath of fresh air in a field saturated with pay-to-win, monetized, microtransaction nonsense. I'm not convinced they haven't traveled across dimensions to restore fun and sanity to a hobby that has been all but ruined by greed and laziness.
You can absolutely license a crap load of games and be successful with it. Games Workshop does that with 40k. They haven't had much that's as huge as BG3, but the generally are reasonable games. Some are garbage mobile games, but a lot aren't that as well.
I doubt Hasbro/WotC can actually handle licensing out IP as successfully as GW, but it's totally possible to do.
Yep. I'd go so far as to argue the game is vastly worse than it could be because it's dnd. If it was shadowrun? World? Nobilis? Hell, a high schoolers first BESM campaign? It would have been so much better.
Loved BG3. but it was the hit it was because it was done by people who love the D&D world and didn't attempt to live up to any specific monetary goals, nor did it rush out to try and beat some arbitrary deadline. it was done in the old style of development, by a relatively small team over long periods of time to showcase their labour of love.
given the history of D&D the company itself and it's more recent copyright monetization and attacking the playerbase for profit, I cannot see them pumping out other games that are anywhere CLOSE to what Larian produced.
Wee're going to get a whole lot of bullshit shovelware trying to ride BG3's excellence.
Yeah, the reason BG3 was so good was because unlike Hasbro and WoTC, they love the Forgotten Realms, and they love video games. If either weren't true, it would be an awful game.
Oh god, they're gonna Fox it up. Listen: dozens of cool shows came out circa 2000, did pretty darn well, and were thrown in the fucking garbage for not being The Simpsons. That show's firehose of money funded brilliant new productions - most of which were cancelled for not instantly creating an equal firehose of money.
This is how Firefly, Futurama, and Family Guy were shitcanned despite intense demand. But games don't get revivals or movies the same way. They can't be pulled back together with a writer and some key actors. Game franchises just die. Their original creators get scattered to the winds, and the rights get tangled up in a heartbeat, so anything with the same name is just an empty brand and inadvisable hope.
Baldur's Gate 3, in so many ways, was a miracle among miracles. And these geniuses are liable to expect that, every time, in ways that make life hell for any studio whose quality is merely exceptional.
Both Futurama and Family Guy were cancelled early in their runs in 2002/2003 and only revived years later. Firefly was cancelled around the same time and just never revived.
Its on my list, and I've played Solasta (loved it, but they level higher than BG3 does).
However, I think Pathfinder games do better Legendary adventures. The characters attain godlike strength in the end whereas D&D 5ed is not very good at that so far in the Video game space.
What ever happened to games like NeverWinter Nights where you could literally do a raid on the hells themselves or Neverwinter Nights 2 where you can make an attack on the God of the Dead's Domain.
Developers complain about how hard it its to do spells and powers past a certain level and yet their predecessors still found a way to do it even if they had to make certain limitations on them.
Still, I am glad to see BG3 a thing even if the characters are weak compared to the original ones from BG2.
That turned out to be incorrect. From what I remember:
It was one news outlet in China, unconfirmed by anyone else, and denied by all parties mentioned as involved. It could have been malicious, but it also could have been a misunderstanding / mistranslation.
I would prefer to see something that uses the IP that isn't just a card game port. Something new. If MMOs weren't all (Except for destiny I guess) hamstring by their own 90's era hotbar mechanics, I'd think an MMO would be cool.
That's very weird, but i do feel the same way about the 5e system. I can't finish bg3 despite seeing the quality of it due to the shitty base system. I'll never get why they did dnd. Larian could do so much better, they could have picked up any ip they wanted.
They tried an action game a couple years ago. It was aggressively mid... I hope they try a BG3 again and get a studio that's actually good at making games to make the game
Larian is independent. They're not owned by Hasbro. I think Hasbro has done some serious layoffs lately, but I haven't seen anything about layoffs at Larian.
Larian Studios, the developer of Baldur's Gate 3, has been "affected" by layoffs at Wizards of the Coast, the company that manages the Dungeons and Dragons brand. The CEO of Larian Studios, Swen Vincke, revealed that almost all the people who were in the original meeting when Baldur’s Gate 3 was approved are no longer working at Wizards of the Coast after the recent layoffs[1][4]. This includes several prominent names from the D&D team, such as Mike Mearls and Breeanna Heiss[1]. The layoffs at Wizards of the Coast were part of a larger trend in the gaming industry, with several other companies also having laid off employees in the same year[1][5]. The impact of these layoffs on the future of Baldur's Gate 3 and other projects is not yet clear.
We need more Eye of the Beholder and classic Bard's Tale and classic Wizardry, and less fucking Baldur's Goddamn JRPG Story-Heavy Bullshit Gate. Story-heavy shit has basically killed gaming. Go watch TV for your fucking story, kids, and leave games alone.
"Boo hoo games have changed it's all different now story is good blah blah". Bullshit. Do you want to play chess and every other move have to stop and be forced to watch a part of some fucking medieval war movie? No? THEN WHY DO YOU WANT THIS IN VIDEOGAMES?
Okay okay. So let me get this straight. Story bad. You realise story has been a centre point of gaming for a long long long time.
Second. As someone who has played games for 25+, there's plenty of games out there if you just want constant combat. Doom for example. Halo. Overwatch. Apex. Dark souls.
Even combat heavy games have stories though. Overwatch has background lore and in game story now.
Doom gotta save everyone from bad alien dudes.
Halo. Stop the covenant using the rings.
Dark souls... Well dark souls is so lore heavy it's hard to keep up with the story.
So if you don't like story in games. Well maybe stick to space invaders and leave the good games to people who actually appreciate good games.
Story killed gaming? Nah... story-driven games are what took games out of the basement and into the mainstream. One can only make so many "I have a gun / sword and I kill the things" games before it gets repetitive.
You know the story isn't between moves in combat (with rare exceptions)?
A lot of video game writing is bad, but computers allow storytelling that isn't possible through other mediums. BG3 is choose your own adventure but actually good.
I grew up on SSI gold-box games, Eye of the Beholder, and other similar games. I think those games would have had many elements from BG3 were it technically possible, if a bit more wargamey in some respects.