Why did Baldur's Gate 3 blow up? Larian lead writer says it's thanks to "a big gamble" with CRPG standards

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.

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.
- 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, 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 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.

- 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.
- 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.
- 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 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’ve got probably a decade before their next big title so settle in for the wait lol
- 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's a direct sequel to a bioware game.
- Really? Which one?
DnD 5e mechanics works ok-ish, nothing really wrong with them. But 4e would have been waaaay better. Imagine more battlefield manipulation, more pushes and pulls. And a bit more dangerous ground, not DOS levels but a bit more. 4e would shine then.
- Imagine more battlefield manipulation, more pushes and pulls. And a bit more dangerous ground
  Ok, I'm imagining something much more complicated than it needs to be. I just want to kill goblins, not win the battle of Waterloo!
- I do agree with the person you're replying to, in that I'm not a huge fan of DnD mechanics - "works ok-ish" is what I would also say about them. It does do its job just fine, so this isn't a big issue by any means.
  Related to game mechanics in BG3, my personal issues are as follows:
  Heavy reliance on RNG in combat. In turn-based games, I always prefer game mechanics which work as I planned, maybe with small variance (i.e. look at Advance Wars). Basically I prefer when my planning is the part determining how the combat flows (damage or cc? Which target? Where do I move to?) - there'll always be some "I'm not sure what happens on next round" due to just not being able to know what the enemies will do on their turn, so I don't really need even more RNG in the form of hit/miss (& save) rolls. Basically: chess is a good game as it is, I wouldn't want to have a 50-50 coin toss determining if I can kill a unit or not.
  I do think that some form of randomness is fine, but I don't like that there's just so many layers of RNG in all things. Damage abilities: first roll if you hit or miss, and if you hit, then the damage variance is often like 5d6 (5 to 30) - it's almost like doing two rolls to figure out if you actually deal any notable amount of damage or not.
  Practically everything related to the resting mechanic. I really feel like I would enjoy the game more if I just had fully recharged spells (and other stuff) in the beginning of any fight - and obviously then balance the game with that in mind. Where needed, devs could tag a certain area as "no resets here" so you know you'll be forced to do a couple of fights in a row without resets.
  One reason making me think this way is just the amount of available food, since you get more than enough resources to do a full rest after practically any fight anyway - so now it just becomes a QoL issue. It's not "do I want to use my resources to reset here?", in practice the choice is just "do I want to spend a couple of minutes going through loading screens?".
  If there was less food available so that you'd need to be careful about when/where you do a full rest, progress through the game would be: go forward until you fail a fight, load the game, do a full rest, fight with full resources - this really doesn't sound fun in practice. I don't think there's a way to implement this style of a resting mechanic in such a way that I'd personally like it (at least without changing a lot more about the game).
  I do want to finish this with another disclaimer that I do think BG3 is a great game, and these are really just minor issues - I completed it yesterday and enjoyed my time for the whole ~120 hours. But my two biggest issues that I can point out about the game's mechanics are both just base mechanics of DnD.
- I know very little about DnD so I don't know what you're talking about, but if you mean more difficult or complicated, please no, I'm mainly a MMORPG player, having more complicated mechanics would make it almost impossible for me to get into this game.
  I believe BG3 is attracting a wider audience than pure DnD/cRPG players, having it accessible is a very good thing IMO.
- 4E would have been a mess. Non DnD players already struggle with the mechanics of 5e in BG3, trying to get them used to 4e would have been worse. But I really hope DnD One is coming out soon and the next project will use that. That should get rid of the biggest issues of 5e, mainly that just a handful of builds are "competitive". Not having to take Great Weapon Master as a fighter anymore is something I am so looking forward to.

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.
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
The main problem with Cyberpunk was the drive to release the game on older consoles. The effort consumed dev time and didn't really work even after that.
The game on release on platforms that could actually run it was great, despite a few bugs.

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.

- 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.

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.

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.

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

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.