“We believe RPGs are big … So we always believed the audience was there,” says Adam Smith
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.
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.)
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.
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.
It’s a direct sequel to a bioware game.
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.
