“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’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’s a direct sequel to a bioware game.
Really? Which one?
Baldur’s Gate 2.
Now I feel stupid lol, I didn’t know Bioware did the first 2.
Old bioware was a force to be reckoned with
Honestly I didn’t realize BG2 was by Bioware until about a week ago so I can’t say much there LOL
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!
Imagine not just punting goblins into the chasm but punting them into fire. Or that one on a scaffolding you drag towards you. And the bookshelf is now a projectile!
BATTLEFIELD CHAOS!
The thing to know is 4E (and every edition going back to the original, which was just a dungeon crawler) was much more combat focused. 5E is much more roleplay focused. That’s fine, but I think the strengths of the game (since the RP has to pre-built options, not full freedom which is what 5E does well) is the combat.
I started playing TTRPGs with Pathfinder (which is basically DnD 3.5 expanded into it’s own system, now on 2E). The amount of viable options in combat is so much better. Im fine with tabletop being dnd 5e because it’s simpler and more accessible, but a video game where the rules are baked and you don’t need to look things up or rule lawyer, something like Pathfinder or other versions of DnD might be better, at least for the combat portion.
There are Pathfinder games though that I haven’t tried yet but I’ve heard are good. I’m planning on checking those out sometime after BG3 (and Armored Core, and Starfield, and Payday 3, and maybe other things about to come out).
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:
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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.
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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.
Re point #2… was completely agree. Resting has always been horrible in every Baldurs Gate game. There is little to no consequence to resting in these games. Start fight, alpha strike, rest, repeat. It takes me out of the game when the mechanics don’t match the environment. I’m aware that resting is optional, but still… Unless you’re running a pure martial team, you’ll need to rest before the sun hits high noon.
The Owlcat Pathfinder games solved this problem brilliantly. They baked it into the gameplay by adding fatigue after so many in game hours, and the camp was something you setup in place, not some static map you revisit every very time. By far my most favourite resting mechanic I’ve seen in cRPGs. If I could change one thing about BG3, it would be this.
The Pathfinder PC games have one fatigue problem IMO and it’s that fatigue/resting should just happen while you travel (literally just add time based on fatigue timing) so you can just click somewhere, go there, and play without needing to manually rest.
Otherwise I was a big fan, especially with corruption in WOTR
Solid argument. It was a pain to pop into a map supe up with buffs do half the map then have someone bitch about being tired.
But that’s the Seela always took remove fatigue for her lay on hands blessing.
But that’s a solid qol upgrade for sure.
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Pillars of Eternity 2 took a different approach to resting by making pretty much everything encounter based, except for some “ultimates”. Was a while since I played it last but boy was it refreshing to not “needing” to rest after every encounter. The first game was more traditional with most things returning on rests. Two classes though were entirely encounter based and I used them in pretty much every run. Chanter (Bard) and Cipher (Psyker). Also Larian’s two previous cRPGs (Divinity: Original Sin 1 and 2) don’t use rests.
But resting is a core feature in D&D and in the tabletop there is the trope of the five minute adventuring day for a reason.
Personally, I like the RNG. It means you can’t guarantee much. You have to plan on what you might do if you fail. Some players won’t like planning for possible failure, which I understand, but I think it adds depth. You can choose to use a spell like magic missile, which is a guaranteed hit but low damage, or you can choose to use a more powerful ability but it may fail, and what will you do if it does. It’s one more thing to consider. If it’s a guaranteed hit/kill then you don’t need to think of how you may have to mitigate what happens on a fail. You can also never be totally safe. Even if you have a lot of armor/health/saves you can still fail, so you need to decide on equipment that might help you when you fail rather than stuff that will just keep you from failing.
I didn’t anticipate liking the dice rolls as much as I do in conversations and actions like lock picking. Like, I love how you can completely whiff something. My character’s got all these stat boosts for lock picking, but sometimes you roll a CRIT fail with a 1. To me, it’s like the tools slipped and broke the lock. It feels oddly realistic because we all have just fumbled something in real life that we dang well know how to do.
Although in combat a bunch of bad dice rolls recently almost got Halsin benched because HOW ARE YOU MISSING THIS MUCH HOW PLEASE BITE THAT DUDE WITH ONLY THREE HP LEFT ALREADY.
Without the ability to revive, I totally agree combat could be tough. I dint use the karmic dice, just pure random. You sometimes just end up on a bad luck streak and it’s rough. As long as you can finish the fight, you’re fine though. You may spend more resources than you wanted, but that’s how it goes. (I also don’t just long rest after every fight. I try to play like tabletop and only rest when it’s critical. It makes spell slots much more of a resource to manage and spend.)
Yup, I have to say that I completely understand why some people like it - it adds to the chaos, and your job is to mitigate/control the chaos (by eg. choosing to use Magic Missile like you mentioned). It’s just not something I personally enjoy. :D
If you dislike these, check out Divinity 2:OS. Lot less random, more fluid combat, doesn’t have that familiar 5E crunch. Keeps most of the good stuff, and even adds in its own unique stuff that makes combat and game play even better imo. BG3 brought some improvements, but also was forced to work with WOTC kinda outdated systems…
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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.
Dungeons and Dragons is very old now. When they release a mechanics update, they change the edition. 5e is the current edition of D&D. 4e was the previous edition, 3.5e before that, etc.
The older versions are generally more complex than 5e as it’s designed to be a bit more streamlined and accessible, but the old versions aren’t strictly harder in terms of difficulty, more just mechanic complexity.
Thanks for the explanation :)
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.
Some of my favorite parts of One DnD are the things that Larian already changed. Starting proficiencies tied to class instead of race? Perfect. Physical features tied to race seems fine to me, i.e. elemental resistances or a free spell or 2. But linking proficiencies limited your choices when creating a new character. Some races were just built better for some classes and some are built really poorly for some classes. That was the first thing they fixed and it made me happy. WotC knows that the majority of people just want a streamlined way to have fun when playing without having to do hours of research and they’re clearly moving in that direction. If you want to have a fun game with a large player base, the entry fee needs to be reasonable. I love 5e but when I was first learning the rules and making a character, I realized that if I wanted to actually be happy with my character months later I would need to spend a lot of time planning. If you don’t already know all the features and how they work with/against each other, it’s real easy to find yourself with an ineffective member of the party if you’re just picking whatever feels fun at the time. That can put a lot of people off and the new edition is fixing a lot of that by basically including a lot of house rule stuff that people were already doing to make their own games more fun.
You can beat BG3 on Tactician with a jank-ass build tho. You don’t need to do anything “competitive” if you play well. Great Weapon Master is definitely not necessary in BG3.
Source: I beat it on Tactician with a jank-ass build and didn’t respec or multiclass any companions at all. Didn’t even bring a wizard. Just Wyll (melee even!), Karlach, Sheart, and my bard.
Don’t think 4e would have been a mess. It was a streamlined “computergamey” edition that wasn’t that well received, hence the creation of Pathfinder. It had a vastly different approach to the battlefield forcing it to be dynamic. So many abilities moving a target in one way or another. As a skirmish game it is pretty neat but severely lacks in the roleplaying department.
Have you considered mods? Extra feat at first level could give you the edge you want.
That doesn’t fix the underlying issue of the potential dmg that GWM gives you. I am not a full on min maxer but having a feat that is objectively so much better than basically all other options makes it hard to ignore it. The only true choice is between GWM and Sharpshooter. But they are the same, just one uses two-handed weapons while the other uses ranged (and you will end up with heavy crossbows). An extra feat won’t make a dual wielding fighter outperform a great weapon master.
And I am not necessarily just talking about BG3, I don’t find the game particualry hard even on Tactician, so there isn’t a need to cheat to make it easier. And I am not using any broken builds either. Mostly sticking to builds that fit the theme of the companions.
Okay so then your issue isn’t with BG3, your issue is with 5e it seems. Yeah GWM is partially power attack, which should be available to any, similar to disengage or withdraw.
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 :)
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.
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.
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 🥰
He 100% threw the rock
What rock? Do I even want to know? 😬
Oh no! Which one? Not the, um, bear, right?
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.
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.
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