While Baldur’s Gate 3 is being widely celebrated by fans and developers alike, some are panicking that this could set new expectations from fans. Good.
I’m a game developer. No game developers are panicking about this game. I’ve not played it but I’ll probably play it soon. It looks great but even if it blows my mind it doesn’t cause me to panic. It inspires me. I don’t know of a game developer that gets panicked at the sight of good games. I know monetary goblins that might realize they can’t push heartless games anymore but in the last decade we’ve started to see games really take shape as cinematic masterpieces. Experiences that truly top movies. This is the inevitable next step. Games with more interactions and more meaningful choice out of those interactions.
I think by “some developers”, they’re referring more toward the AAA studios who have spent the last couple decades baking MTX into every nook and cranny they can find in their games, and not indie devs.
There are even great AAA studios out there that aren’t pushing mtx. I just played uncharted 4 and I can’t believe that is almost a decade old. It still holds up. Far better than Rockstar’s red dead redemption 2. That said there is room in the industry for everyone. The indie team that takes 6 years to make high quality games to the AAA studio pushing games out every 2 years. Including small indie studios of 5 people making huge hit survival games and indie games that were made in 9 months but have a lot of heart.
Quality is subjective and I think we’ll start to see our genres break down as people go towards more and more specific definitions. We’ve already seen this a bit with the fps reverting back to doomlike with games like prodeus.
Even so they won’t be panicking. They can just pull a trusty piece of IP out and slap some microtransactions on it and the core target group will be all over it.
The video tries to imply it’s industry wide, but only show 3 tweets. I’ve also seen nothing but praise from other game developers I know.
Absolutely what I noticed too. The tweets didn’t seem like they were even “panicking” but just saying to players “Don’t expect this because most studios aren’t going to devote the same resources and ability to the party-based classic isometric-inspired RPG genre because the genre is fairly niche.”
It a headline says “some” in it, it’s clickbait.
I sware that’s happened with all big games of late, Elden Ring, TotK, etc. A few Devs decide to be contraian to the praise and then the media decides it a huge backlash.
A few Devs decide to be contraian to the praise and then the media decides it a huge backlash.
They are not even criticizing the game.
The opinions are basically either “Smaller studios won’t be able to replicate BG3” and “Not all games/RPGs need to be as deep and long as BG3”.
The bar has been reset and folks like you are eager to meet the challenge :)
I also question how much that bar has truly been raised. I’ve not played Baldur’s Gate but I have seen people treat games like generation-defining games for them to just kind of not exist outside of their bubble. Like Uncharted 4, Last of Us, Spiderman, and God Of War. I just finished Uncharted 4 and it was truly amazing but for a lot of people, it did not raise their standards for the entire industry. I feel like, if anything, Baldur’s Gate 3 will raise standards for AAA RPGs. Then again, it might have just preemptively killed Starfield.
I’ve not played…
Then go play it and then judge it. This game is a seismic as Mass Effect 1 or even Doom.
See, that’s what I am talking about. Mass Effect 1 didn’t have a huge impact on the industry as a whole. Doom only had a huge impact on the industry because it was very small and they started licensing out their engine with groundbreaking tech. The industry is huge now.
I remember a lot of people were saying Half-Life: Alyx was a huge industry changer and that it would prove that games are far more enjoyable in VR. It is the best-reviewed VR game on Steam. Yet, now, VR is essentially dead.
I remember when people were saying PUBG just changed the entire industry and we’d never look at it the same again. Which honestly, PUBG did have a large but temporary impact on the games industry. A lot of battle royals came out after. Now though, you’d be lucky to find a successful battle royal release in the last 2 years.
I’ll certainly play it when I can but a 20+ hour game commitment is not what I am honestly looking for anymore. I like far shorter experiences. So overall, it feels like counting the chickens before they hatch. Is Baldur’s Gate 3 really going to stay in people’s minds? Is it going to influence the next games that come out? Are AAA studios building more classic isometric-inspired RPGs because of it?
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Doom did have a significant impact on the industry but only because the industry was small. Doom 2016 was released and people said it was “industry” changing but realistically counter-strike, valorant, and other FPSs are the same as before. I am just cautious between the whole industry changing and realistically only transforming a small subset.
True industry-changing games can be felt today. I will say that Doom is industry changing but again because it was so small. Half-Life 2, was that industry changing? Frankly, between Half-Life and Half-Life 2, the first feels far more influential to me. I’d say Doom’s offshoots are more influential than actual Doom at this point. Minecraft feels industry changing and was around that time indie game development got huge. In part, because of Minecraft’s success. Mass Effect though? I remember it being called a fine RPG with terrible combat mechanics. I think people far remember more about Mass Effect 2 and 3 rather than Mass Effect in 2007. Your article was written in 2021 and the only other one I found was written in 2012 and talked about Mass Effect 3’s ending and how it changed the industry because Bioware listened to fans and caved to change it.
Actually, let me put it this way. An industry-influential game is a game that any game developer should absolutely play even if they are making a console or PC game or mobile game. It doesn’t truly exist anymore but even if you cut off the mobile game developers and stick t just console or PC, BG3 is probably not industry-influential because someone making Slime Rancher or Survival Crafting games doesn’t really need to have knowledge from BG3. BG3 will probably influence RPG games and probably solely RPG games. That’s a subset of games that a lot of developers do not need to worry about. I do not need to go rush out and play BG3 in order to build any game.
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Not even close. I’m playing it right now, well into act 2, and while it is THE ultimate example of what a cRPG should be, that doesn’t necessarily mean the breadth and scope would work in other genres. You’re WAY overestimating the impact this is having on the gaming industry, and that’s evidenced by how other developers are responding to it.
Also. I’ve played through all the Mass Effects (even Andromeda, which I actually enjoyed more) and to say that it was industry-defining is a fanboy take. Full stop. From where I’m sitting ME1 did not introduce anything groundbreaking that hadn’t been done already by that point, and to be honest the early Fallout games had way more gravity when it came to choices and decision-making. I’d say of games in that era, the original Borderlands was more ground-breaking given it kind of kickstarted the looter-shooter genre, and that’s a stretch.You are free to disagree, but to hand wave me away as having “fan boy takes” is pretty rude and does not make me want to engage further. Thanks and have a great weekend. 
Then again, it might have just preemptively killed Starfield.
They’re pretty different games. They’re both RPGs, and there’s some overlap, but turn based is ultimately very different gameplay than action, and one isn’t going to scratch the itch for the other to a lot of us.
Yeah, honestly, I doubt BG3 is going to cover the same ground for a lot of players. I don’t think people are going to play BG3 and expect more from Starfield. People will understand that they are far different games and BG3’s influence is probably going to stay in turn-based CRPGs rather than being an industry-wide influential game.
I’m fully expecting to go pretty hard at both, and BG3 might have me engaged enough to not jump straight into Starfield at launch, but I need immersive 3D games, too, and except Elden Ring which is it’s own thing (even if it does pretty comfortably check the boxes of ARPG), I’ve been waiting for something of comparable scope to Skyrim that doesn’t have a fatal flaw for a long time. Even as old and janky as it is now, it’s still a scale that’s only matched by a handful of games in the decade since.
The beauty of Bethesda’s flagship titles (namely Fallout and TES) is even if they end up as buggy messes upon release, or have empty maps, the modding community corrects those flaws relatively quickly.
It’s one of the reasons that I, a long-time veteran of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., am not worried if GSC Game World fucks up S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2. Today, the best part of the first titles is the mods that fix, improve, and add content to the games. It’ll be the same with this one, and I’m excited to see what people do with A-Life 2.0.
Yeah, it can and should be a warning to studio heads, but as game consumers we absolutely should raise our expectations (and stop buying micro transaction crap). There are plenty of big studios with money who could buy the licence and spend years making the game, but those studios belong to the big publishers who optimise for profit not for game quality.
BG 3 is so stupid, it’s not even optimizing micro transactions for maximum profits
How am I supposed to feel a sense of pride and accomplishment without paying for my dice rolls?
Wonder what a divine crit roll would cost, $5 in combat $3 outside? Heck that’s too complicated $10 for all, $7 for season pass holders.
For those wondering there is no season pass.
How can I save time and pay to skip playing the game?
“Leaving money on the table” must be the exec’s perspective.
Unity CEO has entered the chat
Click baiting video. Other devs don’t care. As long as they can make money pumping out mediocre games then they will continue to do so. Acting like this is the first good game to come out in a decade or something.
“Oh no fans might demand good games at release! The horror!”
Won’t anybody think of the stockholders‽
If you have to panic because a competitor makes a good game maybe you should reconsider why you’re a game developer in the first place. If it’s not to make the best games you can make, you shouldn’t be a game developer. I’m guessing the developers panicking aren’t the ones who pour their heart and soul into every game they make.
Maybe release 1 good game every year or two instead of 10 mediocre games a year to make as much cash as possible.
I don’t have a convenient way to play this game at the moment, but I’ll pick it up as soon as I get a steam deck.
The companies we’re all complaining about stopped making 10 games per year a long time ago.
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My counter to that is the last 2.5 BioWare games - I say 2.5 because Dreadwolf has been in development for ten years total now and still isn’t out. Andromeda was in development for 5 years. Anthem had money galore thrown at it until it came out. Too many devs, not just BioWare, are wasting years of development time because they haven’t got a clue what they can feasibly make then rush to get things out the door.
Instead of making excuses for why gave dev is the way it is now - a way that isn’t working - maybe look at what Larian did right and ask why more studios aren’t doing that. Early Access is normal used by indies with overinflated budgets? Well, why aren’t larger studios taking advantage of it or using systems like it?
The new normal for a have to be developed is turning into 5+ years, and there’s no excuse for the hot messes that have been coming out lately.
I’d like to ask…why are publishers even required anymore? Games don’t need physical releases anymore. You don’t need a publisher to host a zip file on a web server. Storefronts let indie developers self-publish so why do the big names still fall for the publishers who exist only to enshittify gaming anymore? They bring negative value to the industry.
They bring funding when you have none. Also marketing. How likely are we to have heard of The Plucky Squire without it being featured alongside several other Devolver games?
The only thing I can think of is branching dialogs in RPGs. J. Sawyer said that better than I can: https://youtu.be/eeUwPLxsp7Y
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Making bad developers panic maybe?
I can’t imagine something like this makes the Redfall devs feel good about themselves.
Actually Redfall likely doesn’t make the Redfall devs feel good about themselves.
Wasn’t the whole thing with Redfall that it was Bethesda mismanagement? I’m not going to put that on the Redfall team. Does make me completely disinterested in buying any Bethesda games that aren’t mainline TES though.
Looks like it went way deeper than that…
https://www.escapistmagazine.com/redfall-development-lost-70-percent-staff-arkane-austin-prey/
Such a shame, I was immensely sold on the initial trailer. I did not even end up playing it
For what it’s worth, I thought it’d be horrible from the reviews and ended up trying it anyway, and I actually really enjoyed it. shrug Rather feels like I played a different game than everyone else.
I’m sure it’s partly the difference between starting with rock bottom expectations vs starting with Prey/Dishonored expectations, but I think even without that I’d like it.
Also, it has no micro transactions! Zero. Not even for cosmetics - those are just unlockables. Credit where credit is due.
Anyway if you liked the look of the trailer and you have gamepass, it’s worth at least trying, imo.
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The most significant change I noticed was you can cast any number of leveled spells per turn. That’s a pretty significant shift from 5e’s rule of only one leveled spell (excluding using action surge if you dip into fighter) per turn.
However it makes the player stronger so I doubt anyone is really complaining about it.
I’ve been playing BG3 and perhaps I’m misunderstanding but you only have one action and one bonus action per turn and you only have so many spell slots per caster. Unless you have a leveled spell as an action and a separate leveled spell as a bonus action and enough spell slots for both you’d be hard pressed to cast more than a single spell per turn per character
Plenty of spells cast as a bonus action. With a cleric I can cast Spirt Guardians and Spiritual Weapon on the same turn. Or polymorph and mass cure wounds. It makes a significant difference for bonus action spells.
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It gets a little silly if you exploit it. Sorcerer can get pretty ridiculous.
Larian has been absolutely phenomenal through their process on both of these. Kept with the ‘it’ll release when it’s ready’ model, the exception with the alpha/early release on BG3 which I would say helped improve the quality of the Release product that much more, through testing/reports and cash influx without the ‘pre-order today, get whatever you get tomorrow’ mantra.
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BG3 is what games used to be and what they should have been like. It bring me back to my KotOR1/2, and Witcher 1 days. It’s great.
How does it cost millions of dollars to make a current AAA game, and they’re rarely worth it?
If you have 5,000 people on your payroll for a game what the hell are they doing? Every game should be fantastic.
I love indie and AA games. Smaller teams. More focus. More fun. Usually more quality content.
It’s an issue of time and scalability. Going from 100 employees to 200 employees wont make the game in half the time. And corporate accounting would rather have 2 mediocre games per year than 1 extremely good game every 2 years, even if it sold 4 times as well since revenue is analyzed within fiscal years and financing isn’t free. Capitalism sucks.
Capitalism sucks.
All the greatest games ever made were created in capitalistic economies so i cannot see how that is a determining factor. I don’t know what games your thinking of. Tetris?
I think you’re missing the point. They’re just saying the incentive structure of capitalism doesn’t necessarily encourage the best types of games. We see this with borked EA launches, predatory MTX, loot boxes, battle passes, etc
I think there is a difference between “capitalism” and “capitalism”.
I think a more nuanced argument is that better games come from companies that are not primarily driven by the quarterly revenue cycle of Wall Street, that is defined as “capitalism”.
I think it’s more of a hit-and-miss, and good corporate leadership is the kind that people forget it’s there when good games come out. I mean CDPR had a CEO both when Witcher 3 was the thing, and also when Cyberpunk 2077 was the thing that flopped. Obviously, people were more interested in the beancounters’ influence in the latter case.
Without capitalism Tetris would have remained an obscure piece of shareware probably vaguely known outside of ex-soviet nations. It’s only the desire to monitise the IP that saw it on every platform under the sun and packaged with every Gameboy.
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Yeah, the creator didn’t profit at the time because of communism and their belief that his creation belonged to the state. If he had been in a capitalist country at the time he could have copyrighted his game asap and exploited it for profit himself.
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At the very least a smart creator in the US can go to a solicitor and make sure he isn’t being mugged off before they sign a deal, you didn’t have that that with the Soviet Government.
Yes lots of creators have been screwed by the people that worked for, notably in the comics field. But a lot of the time it’s because they signed a contract having no inkling how big the work would be.
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Counter point: Baldur’s Gate is selling well within capitalism because it satisfies what the customer wants, which capitalism rewards in an environment with lots of competition, and video games have lots of competition. As big publishers like Ubisoft, EA, Activision-Blizzard, and Take Two have scaled back their offerings of lots of different types of games, including the type of RPG that Larian makes, it’s no surprise that the likes of Larian are rewarded for making that type of game. It’s why companies like Embracer, Anna Purna, Devolver, and Paradox are going to be growing a ton over the next decade.
I know that’s probably rhetorical, but probably a similar problem to modern movies where (as described in the video
Why Modern Movies Suck - They're Too Expensive) they are going after spectacle (rather than story or other elements) and due to cost they must make a ‘safe’ product to stay profitable, where a bland but universally palatable product will sell more tickets/copies than a stellar niche thing.I’d also add that companies know they can usually ride the success of their own name/brand recognition. Even worse here with games because of pre-ordering, early-access as a product, and crowd-funding (which some wildly successful publishers still do–on top of unpaid self-promotion and all the other things–because people still think of them as indie).
Did you intend to link you the video you mentioned? Because I’d like to watch it.
I gave the title of it and I figured that would easily be found (title only because it was something I saw in not-logged-in YT recommendations, figured others may have seen it too).
But here it is since I’m making a comment now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FQgp_sLGjg
Thanks!
games are art projects at the end of the day and there are often many non-art people (or just people without the right skills or vision) making executive decisions on direction, deadlines etc.
Usually they don’t. Something like Horizon Forbidden West credits almost 3500 people even though Guerilla Game has less than 500 employees, most of the rest is absolutely massive bloat from different outsourced teams and Sony departments - like the “Head of Opportunity Markets Business Operations Tim Stokes from Sony Interactive Entertainment Inc.: Global Business Operations” was undoubtedly very important for the development of the game.
As for Baldurs Gate 3, Larian Studios currently has 450 employees in 6 different locations, so they are actually around the same size as Guerilla. I wouldn’t be surprised if the credits end up being well above a thousand people (D:OS2 has around 500 credits even though Larian back then had only 130 people).
No… no its not.
Other developers appreciate art.
This reminds me of the time Ubisoft developers decided to have a bitchfit about Elden Ring because it didn’t have any of the same shitty monetization or trash formulaic design choices as their games.
It’s like these developers think that because they’re painfully mediocre, every other studio is required to be as well.
Or Hogwarts Legacy, which did the Ubi formula without the nonsense.
HZD is also extremely Ubisofty, but done right.
The expectations have been set for a long time. BG3 isn’t the first good game. It’s just the first in a while, after mountains of AAA garbage ultimately driven by shareholders and MBAs.
The sad thing is: those people are so clueless that they dont see they’d make more money by just not getting in the way of a good dev team.
The problem with your second statement is that it is patently untrue.
That is why rocketed has been milking GTA microtransactions. The GachaGaming reddit tracks a series of microtransaction-heavy mobile games. They make hundreds of millions (as much as an entire AAA very hyped game release) quarterly through microtransactions.
Companies have come out and said that microtransactions are more profitable than making new games which is why they are shoehorned into every damn piece of game possible by AAA studios.
I hate microtransactions and I wish it wasn’t the case, but stupid kids with daddy’s credit card and stupid gamers and whales make bad games with microtransactions very profitable.
I get everyone’s sentiment here, boiling it down to “better games are better” but also keep in mind the development costs and times for making new games are constantly going up. Yeah of course there are fantastic indie games out there (and I love them myself) that have a fraction of AAA game budgets and dev time but those are the gems in the rough, not the norm.
I’m all for better gaming experiences but they do come with tradeoffs. Also, flops are now death sentences for studios so the pressure to perform is even higher
you sound like EA public relations
He’s not wrong, though. Game development is a business, like any other, and larger-scale games require exponentially more resources to produce than smaller indie titles.
Obviously one could make the argument “Well they shouldn’t be making every single game into a huge, multi-billion dollar blockbuster title that costs the player an arm and a leg to gain access to, then they wouldn’t need that amount of resources to begin with”, and that would be a fair argument. But ultimately, people keep buying those games, anyway. And not by force, they buy them of their own volition. So those games continue to be profitable. There’s no incentive for big studios to change their ways when consumers keep giving them money, so they’re going to keep making huge games that require huge resources and huge payments from the players.
yeah you guys are working really hard here
I’m not sure what you mean. Were you offering some sort of insight into what I or the other person was actually saying, or just whining? Some of us are having a conversation here.
you’re working really hard to try to stipulate something, i agree
Okay, thanks for sharing that. Much appreciated. Have a nice day, then.
my day’s fine, and your point isn’t very interesting… it sounds like corporate spin…
It’s mind boggling when the costs of games get leaked (or revealed during court cases). It makes me sad that so many studios have pivoted to the strategy you’ve described because it means we’ll have less games of a franchise I enjoy since the development takes so long or the developement is never even started because people have decided the profit won’t be as high as making a blockbuster game. Hell, look at Rockstar milking whales with GTA V, that’s a slightly different conversation, but it’s crazy how long the gap between GTA V and GTA VI are
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it’s interesting that you needed to try to insult me
If EA is willing to cut me a check for telling you that games are getting more expensive and take longer to make then tell me where to sign
i wonder if you think you are even trying to pretend to discuss Baldur’s Gate 3
What if games have to be good, not just eventually but on the day we sell it to someone.
Worse yet, what if we have to do some QA on PC and optimize our games instead of just hoping that they don’t continuously crash on launch?
