All this says is that large game studios don’t see anything but money.
Game development should be about making the best product you can. It isn’t about getting paid 200 million for “development” costs.
Indies know this, and large game companies are A F R A I D. So when someone makes a product that’s good, and it threatens their model of minimal effort/maximum profit, they start making hitpieces like this.
Customers do not decide what games you make. Quit game development if you think we set the bar.
Customers choose the best product for their time, and I’m sorry, if that’s Baldur’s Gate 3 tier standards, and you can’t as an AAA studio with 10000 employees make as good of a product, that’s on your lack of skill. Stop crying, git gud.
The author is the creator of Hypnospace Outlaw. He’s an indie game dev, not a representative of a large game company.
Yes, I know a lot of indie devs are also in this conversation, but their fears are also misplaced. Indie devs already get a free pass on expectations, because more often than not, it’s a team of <10 people. So you don’t hold them to the same standards as large game companies.
Didn’t Jay Tholen create Hypnospace? That isn’t the author’s name unless I’m missing something obvious.
Xalavier Nelson Jr. wrote it, Jay was lead designer.
Gotcha, thanks for the info!
Also, frankly, even the concept of a “baseline” is a damaging concept.
This is all a bit alarmist, isn’t it? My baseline is a sensible user interface, responsive controls, and fun. Very high-budget games from the biggest studios have come and gone (often failing those modest criteria) yet my baseline remains the same. Having experienced the epics doesn’t raise my expectations or damage my opinion of the less advantaged ones.
Or to put it another way, I’ve been lucky enough to have a few very impressive multi-course meals, yet I still love a good taco.
I would include “well written” in my baseline, since it is an RPG. If the writing is bad, even if everything else hits, it would be super disappointing.
I think this is a case of the people most likely to receive the message being the least likely to need it. At the very least it’s a good twitter thread to keep in your back pocket should you encounter someone complaining that some other RPG doesn’t match up to BG3.
I wonder if it is really about an insurmountable scope from years of development–or is that just a red herring on the fact that a lot of developers, particularly in the AAA range, have just forgotten how to make games actually fun to play that caters to their demographics rather than casting a web to the common denominators?
What I love is that it really focuses on gameplay and player choice and options.
It’s so fun to risk different rolls, etc. and different ways of doing things.
I just wish it had a day-night schedule, NPC schedules and a living world like Ultima VII / Oblivion, but it’s hard to balance with the hand-crafted quests.
A lot of CRPG fans have been hoping for games that can approach the tabletop RPG experience for long time. It inevitably leads to a large scope, but I don’t think that’s the same as appealing to the common denominator.
Sounds like a lot of devs throwing shade at a great game. I can’t excuse AAA games for not putting out effort. CoD2k24, Assassin’s Creed Season Pass, or whatever crap they’re churning out that rides the coattails of games now over a decade old, doesn’t cut it.
Everything is more expensive now, and if you can’t make a better game, that’s on you. You don’t automatically get my money. I won’t lower my expectations just because you have shareholders.
I don’t know a single person nor do I think most people would hold small studios and indie devs to the same level as Larian, which has 400 people working on BG3.
What’s embarrassing is the AAA devs making excuses, trying to use this concept as an excuse for half backed lackluster AAA releases. When most of them have released great games in the past. Most of which likely isn’t even the individual devs (people) fault, but rather their corporate leaders and shareholders pushing for quick profits. Which has resulted in a toxic release environment.
People will hold devs accountable, and they should.
Maybe it should be the new standard though.
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I feel the core genre identity of RPG is a known thing and not as uncertain as you paint it. There’s the iron-clad center-point with CRPGs and JRPGs. Then games that venture off from those identities into more action-y RPGs (a la The Witcher or Mass Effect). Or games that go more action-y but in a different way (Diablo-clones). There’s games expanding out from the JRPG core like tactical RPGs (though there’s an intersection with CRPGs somewhere there e.g. X-Com). And so on.
Sure, there will be games out there where people will ask “is this truly an RPG?” but that doesn’t mean the genre itself is fuzzy and poorly grasped, even if it will be difficult to come across a satisfying definition.
The name itself is vague and a poor guide… but that’s true across most gaming genres. People use “strategy” in shooters or RPGs or puzzle games, but we all know what a Real Time Strategy game is. Almost every game has “action” and a smaller but still nearly-every game has “adventure” to it, but action-adventure is another known quantity. I’m not sure there’s any genre that is perfectly encapsulated within the name given to it, or one where there are not people questioning games at the fringes of that genre.
So we should expect indies with a comparatively tiny budget to match the scale and scope of BG3?
No - you don’t expect indie games to do AAA standards
It should be the standard for AAA games though
Not what Ubisoft or EA throw out as AAA that’s just very polished with fancy graphics but kind of bare one 8n terms of story or mechanics
The fuck do even “Rockstar Level nonsense for scope” even mean? I consider both RDR2 and Stardew Valley to be the greatest of the games. One had a massive team behind and the other doesn’t. But both games are the best games the developers could have made. All these developers are saying sounds like an excuse to me. They really should try to make a good game rather than a game that has no soul. Case in point, Destiny 2 and Diablo 4…
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I don’t think I understand why it even needed to be mentioned. The type of person who is going to dismiss a game purely because it doesn’t live up to another game isn’t the kind of person who is going to take this advice to heart.
And no matter the costs to make a game, it’s not going to stop people from trying to make a game like Baldur’s Gate 3 anyways. Just look at any game that tried to copy Skyrim. It’s a very highly specialized game in a very well known franchise and takes several years to make, often longer than most development periods for other studios.
I think I agree with you - I don’t understand why it needed to be said.
It’s kind of condescending to both their own customers and those of Baldur’s Gate 3 that they feel they need to explain that different games are different 🙄
Also, whilst I may be in a minority on this, I’m primarily rating a game on its story and gameplay (obviously I’d also like it not to be as buggy as hell). Since all games should be starting on an even footing with that (you need at least 1 creative human brain), you can’t blame studio size. There are plenty of great games with small budgets. And plenty of crap games with big budgets.
I like that you’ve mentioned Skyrim - part of its success (and longevity) has been the ecosystem of mods that built up around it. But I think we all understand that not every game develops this same ecosystem, and we don’t need that explained to us in Twitter threads, just like we didn’t need it explaining to us how budgets work.
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Mods are definitely a part of the success, but yeah, it’s likely not the biggest reason it’s so popular. Their games are popular and console mods didn’t even exist until 2016 and I don’t doubt you’d fine people who loved the games regardless on consoles prior to that.
Bethesda, back in 2015, during the Steam Paid Mods fiasco, released a quote stating that “Only 8% of the Skyrim audience has ever used a mod.” And some time before either Legendary Edition or Special Edition released, I had done the maths on the number of copies sold of Skyrim and how many unique downloads the Unofficial Skyrim Patch had. Seeing as Nexus is the only official way to get the patch, I figured the number is decent enough and I got around 10-12%. If you’re going to use mods, there is no reason not to use it. If people really think that mods, at the time, were so widespread, then you’d have to believe that nearly 90% of users who modded didn’t use the Unofficial Patch.
Let’s not pretend that Baldur’s Gate 3 wasn’t one of the highest priced Early Access titles on Steam for mostly all of its development. Usually Early Access games start at $20, get bumped up to $30 half way through and have a release price of around $40. Baldur’s Gate 3
came out swinging with $40 on day one, and now, on “release”, sits at a hefty $60. While reviews on Steam remained “Very Positive” through it’s development, most positive reviews read like: “This is going to be good when it’s done” and “This is an improvement on older BG titles”, while the negative ones read like: “The game is riddled with bugs and missing content.”. Those are pretty much telltale signs of a little bit to overambitious Early Access game. My opinion back then was, paying a $40 price tag to essentialy be a playtester is to much. But still I kept an eye out for progress.What genuenly kept saving their face, was them being always prettier then the competition and having a very strong intro section to their game. The visuals were clearly the focus in early development, as well as the character design. The characters (male and female) looked so good, they could have been straight out of a porn mod for skyrim. And those sharp looking characters were highly represented on the Steam storepage. The intro was a proven “shit’s going down, we gotta her out of here” trope, that many games use to through the player into epic action early in the game. You reel the player I with fancy looks, and keep them by throwing them into fun.
Would they have slipped into “Mixed” or “Mostly Negative” reviews, nobody would’ve been willing to excuse the $40 price. They would either bleed funds or have to adjust the price down to $30 or$ 20, both of which would affect further progress.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is an anomaly in a sense off a gamble playing out in their favor. They asked to much and hoped nobody with lose their patience and reviewbomb them. They relied on their community and got lucky again of having basically zero competition to tear away their player base. If say Dragon Age: Inquisition would have taken the pedestal instead of just being mediocre, BG3 would have had a hard time taking back their playerbase in time when income is most important. But in the end it worked out because the devs delivered an actually functioning and excellent game.
I would not like to see the gaming market if every Early Access game asking for $40 on the promise of “Thrust us, it’s going to be good, …maybe.” would become the new standard.
Uh…BG3 was always $60. I bought it Oct 6th 2020.
Way to out yourself like that. You just don’t preorder games. Especially in this day and age.
Larian has an exceptional track record on early access.
Doesn’t matter if there’s few or a bunch of nice apples in the basket. Few bad ones will spoil everything. Nothing will change in the industry if we don’t shame people for preordering. There is nothing to gain from preordering in the age of digital distribution. There’s just artificial incentives they use to fool us.
They have a good record and I had the money at the time to purchase it that I wasn’t guaranteed to have when it came out. I’ve already got like 40 hours into the game and it’s not even fully released. I think I’ve already got my money’s worth and I’m certain to put in many more hours.
Why the aggression? Think before you type, please.
I checked SteamDB, and you are right. I must be missremembering. But that just makes it worse.
Every Larian game so far was exactly like this, they always did early access for cheaper then went full price when it came out of early access.
BG3 was full price from the start, probably because of the money they had to pay WotC for licensing
Larian made one of the best RPGs ever with D:OS2 - that’s really what allowed them to take that gamble.
That might be very true, but ironicaly it had the complete opposite effect on me. When I was looking into buying BG3, the slight hint of negative reviews kept be from spending money on an possibly incomplete game. But Dvivinty: Original Sin 2 was basically the full package and on sale for just a fraction of the price. The reviews praised the game as being the staple of turn-based RPGs, so I bought that instead. I’ve played the intro and a little bit further and never touched that game again. It just didn’t click with me, no harm no foul. But I thought “if that’s the communities highest praised game, then Baldurs Gate is going to be a Big Oof™”. But I was an idiot - when I finally tried BG3 it was so much better than Divinity in nearly every aspect. I got hooked immediately, partial due to the better more refined DnD type combat system, but most importantly, because the NPCs weren’t absolute assholes from the first second you talk to them. So the combat was fine, the characters were fine, the music and graphics were more than fine - in conclusion, this is 'bout to be a good game.
Yeah, BG3 has a much more interesting story it seems. Whereas D:OS2 was better for multiplayer and the GM mode really.
I’d recommend watching some videos on the BG3 backstory, particularly the Descent Into Avernus story and the Gith vs. the mindflayers.
I’ll keep that in mind, thanks.
You should try D:OS2 again. The first act is a little hard to get through, and I stopped their my first time playing as well. But after I tried again (this time in co op with a friend) and got to act 2 I really started loving the game.
this time in co op with a friend
It’s easier to lick my own elbow that to talk one of my friends to play a narrative driven, turn based, multi chapter RPG.
But I could give it another go solo.
And it would be a real shame if something bad were to happen to that arrogant reptile looking wannabe prince dude on an unspecified beach… a real tragedy.
Or that skeleton looking Mofo that thinks he’s better than everybody because technicaly, he can’t die yeah, we’ll see about that.
The most irritating thing is probably the narration. You have a visual medium of a video game and the only major rule of “Show, don’t tell.” is being broken in the first line of dialog. The moment were you talk to the sailor on the ship and the narrator does the “squeal”, I thought “Oof, this is going to be a douzy”. Like really, you couldn’t have somebody jump on a wooden pallet to record a sound effect?
Larian stated at the beginning that they deliberately set the early access at full price to try and discourage too many people from buying it. They wanted to try and keep the early access relatively small, and they wanted the people who did buy the early access to be the more passionate fans who would be more likely to provide feedback. That plan backfired because a shitload of people still bought it at full price anyway, but apparently that was their original intention.
I understand their point - the bar has been raised a lot for indies over the year - localisation, controller support, ultrawide support, scalable UI and text, colorblind support, modding, multiplayer, etc. are all much more “required” nowadays, but that’s just the way things go - there was a time when even save-games weren’t necessary.
But saying it’ll harm the indie CRPGs is bizarre. This will greatly increase the audience for CRPGs as far more people try it out, and then want to try other titles when they finish it. I’d expect Solasta, Pathfinder, Pillars Of Eternity to all benefit in a few months (the only down-side being that none of these have multiplayer).
But I wish more companies would release their tooling as Open Source like id Software used to. It’d help to alleviate this a bit, even just auxiliary stuff for popular engines.
Everything you listed as “the bar” are just things everyone knows already. And don’t contribute towards game development time, aside from localization, which isn’t expected except by chinese players.
Thing is, the tools and literal hand-in-hand tutorials for indies are what make those a non-issue. It’s extremely easy to make a game these days, and release it.
Rockstar-level nonsense for scope
So… It’s got a lot of pointless bullshit in it that you’ll see once, go “oh, cool” and then never even think about again? 🤔
I’ve been a fan of Larian since Divinity 1 because there was a lot of quality for that little game. And they stepped it up for Divinity 2. Divinity 2 looks so good, has great story telling, great voice acters, and many different ways to do things and styles of play, i.e. choice. So I bought the EA version of the game as soon as it was available because I felt I had a relationship with Larian and could trust they would make a great game. And Larian when up a many steps with the quality and dept of this game. They listen to the EA players and had many changes and improvements. It wasn’t a mechanism for microtransactions but a great game with dizzying choices. The game was made with passion and obliously a work of love. AAA developers should take note of why this company is successful. Gamers don’t want microtransactions, NFTs, small games that you have to buy the expansion to get the whole story.
Larian Studios will deserve their fame this game will bring them. Hey AAA developers, look at how it done.
We have a Baldur’s Gate 3 community in the Fediverse. Come join us.
@baldurs_gate_3This is very interesting, seems like everything lined up well for this to be a homerun.
