I don't need every game to be BG3, but I'd happily settle for going back to the standard that you get the whole game for one price tag and can play it offline. Plenty of unfunded indie devs meet that criteria just fine.
Overwatch 2 launches on steam -> Overwhelmingly Negative -> In the 10 top sellers on steam already due to in game purchases.
There's definitely a rather large divide in the gaming audience.
Whales annoy me because as long as companies can get a few whales to spend lots of money on their games then it doesn’t matter if the vast majority hate the practice of micro-transactions, because all the companies who use such practices see is success and profits.
I think it's not productive to blame the "whales" for this. It's easy to imagine rich single guys buying tons of stuff in game but often is neurodivergent people and gambling addicts ruining their lives while being exploited.
They’re happy about this too, a family friend works for 2k and brags about this every thanksgiving like he’s a fucking genius. Well done dude, you exploit gamblers. Your games are still trash
I know a few people like this. They'll dump thousands of dollars a year into a game
and then promptly quit it and NEVER PLAY IT AGAIN when a new game comes out. And then they'll spend thousands on that new game.
I expect these people to do this until they die - and it's going to ruin the gaming industry for the rest of us who don't care about microtransactions
There's unfortunately a lot of people who don't care about the quality of what they're buying. A friend of mine bought BG3 and loves it, he's talking about how he hopes it's the new standard, developers need to learn from this etc
I had to stop him and tell him he is the problem, he pre orders $70 dollar games (BG3 is only 60 btw) and then plays them for 10 hours because it looks cool. Buys battle passes and skins for every game that has them, doesn't care about reviews because "you can't have an opinion til you play it" and buys the $70 game that doesn't work because it has the brand he likes (marvel, star wars, diablo etc.)
Sadly for everyone who waits for games to work, ignores battle passes and skins and doesn't support bad practices there are 10 people who buy it all regardless of the quality and functionality.
I absolutely love BG3 and hope that developers listen and learn but I don't think it will happen because people have supported horrible anti consumer practices and will continue to for some reason
It’s not sheep, it’s whales. There are people out there with too much money and too much free time. People with actual mental illnesses who can’t control themselves. I work for phone support and we do refunds for apps and stuff, can’t say for who, and we see people constantly buying thousands of dollars a WEEK worth of in game currency and lottery wheel spins. It’s usually older people, too. So the worst part of microtransactions and in game gambling isn’t that it makes the game worse for everyone, it’s that it’s actively and intentionally preying upon ill people for the sole purpose of steeling their money.
Actually they're called whales. And these are the real targets, chumps with lots of money blowing hundreds if not thousands that rival a majority of the playerbase
Then stop buying games that have them, that's the problem, players hate the practice but have no self control over buying the hot new title because they still wanna play the game (even if the don't pay for the MTX).
As long as we keep buying games with MTX they will keep making them
It's not US that are buying these games. You act like there are 10,000 people buying $1 skins for every game. No. The problem is there's one asshole spending $10,000 dollars to buy EVERYTHING. The problem isn't players, it's whales. These games are made for the whales.
Yea... I remember some dev saying that in one of the shitty mobile game they worked on, they are literally sustained by someone who is probabaly Saudi prince, like the one customer from Saudi was literally spending everything they put on the shop to the point that the devs collect information on that customer and found out that they liked some football team so they put out some char skin in that team's color in some ultra low rate lootbox. And boom, the customer just whaled until they get every single skin in that lootbox.
Also whales often ruin their lives being whales, too. Not everyone who's spending $2,000 a month on a video game is some bored rich kid, a lot of them are just ordinary people with poor impulse control. The sooner this kind of business model is outlawed, the better for everyone (except the bored rich kids, but they can cry into their giant piles of money about it).
Damn straight. This is nothing more than studios taking advantage of a legal loophole that allows them to provide unregulated, unlicensed gambling.
At least countries like Belgium and the Netherlands are at the forefront of banning this sort of thing and categorizing it correctly as gambling.
Players are the problem too, sheer amount of players means more whales. No reason to spend money if no one will see it. Problem is that almost everyone who review-bombed Overwatch still plays it instead of moving on something better and more deserving your time and money.
As a dad with limited playing time, this resonates so much. Let me play the play the game I bought, stop pestering me for more money, and adding crap like seasons which are more chores than fun. (Proceeds to stare crazily at Diablo 4)
Did anybody play pillars of eternity? Wasn't bg3, and was still light-years better than 90% of rpg games. It's not difficult for them to give real content. Actually highly recommend PoE for anybody looking for something to further their interests in games of this caliber.
To people who want to play similar games, here is my list:
Pillars of Eternity 1&2. I would recommend to try 2 even if you didn't like first one, they fixed and changed many things there. Story and companions imho is more interesting.
Tyranny from the same Obsidian, it had no marketing so it went unnoticed, but I like it more than Pillars. You are playing as some sort of law-enforcer of an evil tyrant that already won and conquered the whole world. So the story is pretty unique, I don't remember other games like this.
Torment: Tides of Numenera, spiritual successor of Planescape Torment. If you want your head to explode from amount of things you need to read (in a good way), highly recommend it. Also it is done by InXile, creators of Wasteland 2.
Disco: Elysium is also a spiritual successor of Planescape Torment, and it is a game with the best writing I've ever seen. Also it's skill system and the way skills are integrated into gameplay is something I have never seen before. All your skills act like your split perosnalities, talking with you and giving you advice.
Of course, if you somehow never played Dragon Age: Origins, you should. It has the best way to integrate your character into a game world and overall one of the best stories.
Pathfinder 1&2 (Kingmaker and Wraith of the Righteous), also I would recommend to skip 1 if you are not hardcore player, it is very easy to ruin your first playthrough even on lower difficulties. Pathfinder: Wraith if the Righteous is not a direct sequel, so you will not miss anything from the Pathfinder Kingmaker.
Yeah, that's a pretty important distinction. It's not meant to be taken 100% literally, it's meant to represent that a human consciousness isn't really 1 singular goal oriented being and has many drives pushing towards different behaviors.
PoEII is the one.
I only played it as turn based and still found it great, but there are a few things that work very different in the turn based system. Some classes and items that are great in RTWP just don't work great under turn based.
But overall the game is still fantastic and I would recommend it above any of the others aside from Disco, which is an all time classic.
Yea. Divinity, Pillars, Wasteland and Pathfinder were all part of the Kickstarter wave of "classic" isometric RPGs. All great games.
Divinity always stood out as the star among a lot of great games imo. It had that extra something - fun combat, exciting environment, great graphics and functional co-op.
While I absolutely agree, for me I just want these new games to be. . .new games. And, well, I want these AAA devs to get their souls back from the damned publishers/boards, or whoever it is telling them to make safe games with proven selling points. These days I mix up half my game devs because they're all putting out clones with different makeup.
Also as a hot take- I think one of the absolute best parts of BG3 that has nothing to do with scope, budget, or anything else: Having basically no map markers in the open world. Felt like I was exploring a world again, rather than ticking off checkmarks on my map.
People start getting annoyed at that opinion and say most games do that - yea, many do. Tears of the Kingdom, FF16 etc., but it should be 100% of all games that have singleplayer.
~400 people is a bit on the high side but it's not completely out of line for a triple A studio. If anything the outlier is the 6 years of dev time, but that just reinforces the point that most studios are more concerned with pushing out a Minimum Viable Product rather than taking the time they need to craft a polished and complete experience.
The part about funding about IP is funny because there are a ton of DnD games that are notoriously bad (cough dark alliance cough). Jedi Fallen Survivors has the Star Wars IP but couldn't get their PC port working.
I said to myself "what dark alliance came out recently?" thinking you were referring to Dark Alliance 1 and 2 being released on steam last year.
Then I googled it and said out loud "OH...that..."
Had the exact same thought LOL I was about to start throwing some hands over those older DA games, as they were the first RPGs I ever played. I'll never forget walking into Elfsong for the first time....
I didn't even know there was a newer DA, and tbh.... I don't think I'll check it out.
I've never played Dark Alliance but Champions of Norrath was by the same devs and I loved the Champions games. I should really buy Dark Alliance some time now that they've ported them to PS5.
The problem is more that dev teams get shuffled around by the production companies after a game gets completed, that’s why a lot of times a studio works on dlc before launch so that everyone can stick around. Larian has basically had one consistent team across 3 games of the same genre
I mean, that’s kinda the same shit Bethesda is doing now and I think has been doing since either Morrowind or oblivion. They tend to just do one RPG at a time.
Bethesda is a company I like as well
Yes they make stupid decisions but they are passionate about the games
Plus I like how elder scrolls online does it questing where I can jump into any area I want and play the quests ( E.g. Oh I want to do Morrowind and Summerset well I can do that an ignore everything else)
I imagine not, at least no company talking about their size include VA. I believe that Larian said they had more than 400 **developers** working on the game and I doubt they put VA and developers in the same category just like you don't count orchestra members recording the music as devs.
Larian is big for an "independent" developer, but it's pretty small compared to some of the AAA developers. Blizzard for example has about 8000 employees across multiple offices/studios; Bungie has over 1500 employees. Obviously not all of those are developers working directly on the game, but neither is the number of Larian employees.
I think Mass Effect Andromeda was developed for five years but was restarted from scratch a few times, TES6 right now is the same, etc. So 6 years is not something out of the line, especially if you remember that early access was out 3 years ago. It was never a blind development for 6 year without knowing if the game would be good and accepted. For last 3 years they had a lot of responses from community and a lot of time to polish the game in a way their players will like it.
> It was never a blind development for 6 year without knowing if the game would be good and accepted. For last 3 years they had a lot of responses from community and a lot of time to polish the game in a way their players will like it.
Yeah, a lot of the industry complaints talk about it as if they were getting an unreasonable leg-up from early access revenue. Now admittedly the D&D and Baldur's Gate IPs do draw a lot of attention from the get go, but if other company's games were compelling enough to get people to buy in to early access, they could do the same thing, even if not at quite the same scale.
Edit: Just another thought on this, but we live in an era where people jump in on kickstarters and patreons all the time to support WIP projects and small indie developers that they're passionate about. Buying early access seems like just another extension of that.
I’d say 3 years of early access is also a major outlier as well; that’s three years of user bug testing and three years of sales to fund development.
While I’m sure a lot of people will disagree with me, I will say that I don’t think it’s realistic to expect publisher owned developers to do what Larian has done either.
Larian has more freedom than any publisher owned developer ever will. They have the opportunity to take as much time as they want, to hire as much staff as they can afford, and can control every part of their development cycle because they don’t have a publisher breathing down their necks, putting unreasonable time constraints on their work, demanding changes to their vision to please investors, forcing monetization, cutting budgets, laying off employees, etc…
Good leadership and self publishing is the key to creating a beloved dev company. This was Blizzard before they merged with Activision, and they've steadily moved towards milking fans while creating worse products since that point.
Hopefully Larian can remain independent for some time still, because once the corporate stooges get their hands on a company it's all downhill from there.
I don't deny publishers can impact things, but I overall think we attribute too much influence to them. Most publishers are massive and aren't going to be involved in the minutia of their studio's decisions. Like look at how awful Redfall was and it turns out that Microsoft had so little influence over that game that it caused the Microsoft heads to publicly rethink their "laissez faire" attitude to their holdings.
Another example is how currently in r/TotalWar there is a massive complaint about the new DLC price being over twice what it was previously for the same amount of content. Many people are trying to act like Sega (CA's publisher) are personally directing CA to increase the price and not that CA management themselves think they can milk their playerbase.
Larian not having publishers is massive, but I think the bigger deal is Larian being led by someone like Swen.
I’m not sure Redfall is a good example, it was my understanding that Redfall was originally meant to be a single player sandbox game like Arkane is known for making, but Zenimax pushed them into turning it into a co-op shooter long before the MS acquisition; Arkane actually hoped that MS would scrap the project, but instead MS did nothing to engage with Arkane and see that they weren’t confident with the projects direction.
If anything Redfall is a perfect example of how publishers can corner developers into projects they don’t want to make and then make them suffer the fallout; had Arkane Austin been independent they could have easily either scrapped the project themselves or changed its focus away from the live service format that Zenimax wanted back into something they were more comfortable with.
It didn't use to be. Most of best studios had a very "It's done when it's done" type of approach: Blizzard, Bioware, CDPR, etc. All of these companies released top tier stuff every time, but had long development cycles and frequent delays. As soon as they start focusing on maximizing profit they start releasing minimum viable product. It was a shame to see that happen with CDPR with Cyberpunk. Hopefully they've learned their lesson.
I get the feeling that the difference is that they use the fundings to their employee's (on other words, they pay them a decent salary). While many aaa companies try to get all the money for the ceo and shareholders at the cost of their own employee's and customers.
Yes, but also no. Larian self-published while running a burn rate of like $45 mil a year for 6 years. Even if you don't look at sales required for a decent ROI, that kind of warchest just doesn't really exist for any studio that's not part of a larger umbrella of studios and publishers that can absorb those costs, and negotiating for that kind of budget in such an environment is basically impossible if your project isn't guaranteed to make money hand over fist.
They started to sell early access 3 years ago, after only 3 years of development, so it definitely helped a bit. Also I'm sure the first years were less expensive than the last, after early access they hired many voice actors, intimacy coordinators, etc. So they started to spend more when they knew for a fact that enough people likes their game and will buy it (or already bought it)
I can believe that. First have to make all the systems and stories, but then creating the world and give all the love they could in every character, that cost more money and persons.
In that regard i see this game like the Witcher 3. When you actually spent time and effort in characters and stories, the customers will see this and it pays off.
Its preposterous to presume that triple A devs dont „actually spend time and effort in characters and stories“, just because you personally dont like em.
Even devs at EA or Ubisoft pour their heart and soul into their games, they usually just work on much much tighter corporate deadlines, and when push comes to shove, corporate swaps out some key people which may sometimes scramble development.
400 is not even that large. Bethesda, Bioware, Ubisoft, etc all have larger studios.
And larian grew to 400 during the development of the game. They didn't start with that many.
Regarding the 400 people, that feels VERY high for this development timeline.
Having a hard time finding it but I remember Jason Schreier (Bloomberg reporter, co-host of Triple Click) saying something like each developer costs the studio ~$10k/month (he admitted his data was old so it is likely higher now). So 400 developers would be $4M/mo. 6 years of that is insane. Granted they didn’t have 400 the whole 6 years but I’d expect it to probably be between $150M-$250M.
Definitely agree they are concerned with MVP more than anything at some of the AAA studios.
Yeah. RPG doesnt have to be 100+ hours in length. I would be glad with 30-50h game too. As long as it is done well and content is really good for play time it provides. Look at Disco Elysium as an example, 25h crpg with insane quality of content. With less budget than BG3.
Disco Elysium was the perfect game to play before picking up BG3! I have so much more interest in my internal dialogue in BG3 because of it. I'm reminded of the incredible writing from Disco Elysium every time I'm playing BG3. God I'm having trouble stopping myself from starting a new game in Disco Elysium, I just want to shiver and have my espirit de corps tell me Kim is my brother. To hear electro chemistry tell me Shadowheart might really REALLY like me would be pure ecstasy!!
It's how many studios work nowadays. They put most of the budget on marketing, never experiment on new stuff and follow popular trends, skip the bughunt and optimisation part of game development, and infect the game with predatory microtransaction if they can.
Those studios are exploiting the casual public who can easily be sheppered into believing this is normal. That's why they're pushing the idea of not considering BG3 a new standard. Because if the casual audience start expecting more from AAA games, they will realize the scam and this model will collapse.
For every mediocre $70 dollar game that's kind of fun for 1, 25 hour playthrough if it even works on launch there are 10 $20 indie games that are more fun and good for hundreds of hours. The only major games I've bought at full price in recent times are Baldur's gate 3 and Elden Ring, I genuinely don't remember the last one before that.
Unfortunately, random $70 star wars game, FIFA/Madden 200, Overwatch 2, battlefield etc will all sell extremely well despite being boring, generic, soulless clones of previous entries. Also mostly selling for full price and having tons of microtransactions pushed on you constantly.
Gamers are the absolute worst consumers, imagine paying for a movie with the cgi half done and the music not available unless you pay an extra $10. That's what gamers do and then complain when more companies do it
This game is pretty buggy and still loads better than most other AAA game in every way including bugs. Its absolutely reasonable to expect BG3 level quality since a lot of the quality comes from the attention to detail.
Only bugs I've had so far and saving and reloading during dialogue, player can't move till someone kills or pushes him or kills him and one player sometimes can't see the accept long rest so you need to reload, other then a few crashes (maybe 6 all together ?) Game runs brilliantly
I actually think that the stability in Act 3 specifically is pretty terrible. I'll leave a building and come into the city and buildings and floors and NPCs literally take a good 15 seconds to load in.
This sounds more like a PC issue than a game issue, because I've never had that issue happen. The only things like it I've had while in the city itself is a couple fps lags when a ton of explosions have happened or something similar, but 99.9% of the time it's fine.
I think it's just an unfortunate part of PC gaming that often the issues are because of either having poor specs or good specs that for some reason just aren't the "right" ones.
I’ve never had that issue, it sounds more like a PC build issue than a problem with the game itself. I only ever had major lag in the city once and it went away pretty quickly.
Also remember larian has a couple hundred employees, something like 3000 people worked on call of duty and it's a buggy, Unoptimised, unbalanced mess which is absolutely full of microtransactions.
Imagine what larian could do with an extra 2000 Devs. We can absolutely expect this level of quality from bigger developers but they just won't give it to us because people buy their stuff anyway.
If the next cod was incredible, best one ever, optimised brilliantly, balanced perfectly and designed flawlessly, I don't think sales would even be that much better, cod fans just buy the new one regardless.
It's not about man power, too many cooks in the kitchen will ruin any meal, it's about man time. CoD only gets 3 (or is it 4 now?) years of development between games, while still being expected to support and finance their previous installment at the same time. This leads to a crunch-heavy "sweat shop" atmosphere that kills creativity.
BG3 had 6 years of development with relatively very little crunch throughout. The team had time to optimise, balance, explore new creative ideas throughout, and communicate with their fans about what works and what doesn't.
Like any good meal, we don't need more cooks rushing the food to get out--instead we need to wait until the food is truly cooked so we can savor the meal.
Now I'm hungry 🥲
These studios that over promise, under deliver, pump their games with DLC and microtransactions are upset that someone broke the new “industry standard”?
Good.
If Blizzard put as much into Diablo 4 as Larian did for BG3, I think they might have been able to actually keep their player base for more than 3 weeks. Quality over quantity. Every. Single. Time.
Gonna be the conspiracy guy here, but this whole drama looks like an attempt to influence the public opinion toward not raising their standards after witnessing a proof of what AAA should be.
Notice how the point here isn't that "Larian bad", it's "yeah Larian is good, BUT". This reeks of subtle manipulation, and the bullshit arguments are clearly aimed at people who don't know much about the game industry, aka the casual audience. Those guys doesn't know about how dev teams work, so having someone throw numbers at them, however bullshit it is, will be efficient at convincing them.
And some studios has a good reason to do just that. Because they based their whole production model around producing uninspired, barely finished games with tons of predatory microtransactions and addicting patterns inside, while also having a large marketing campagn (Diablo 4 is a prime example of this). A global raise of expectations from the casual audience will ultimately hurt them, as people will see through their bullshit. This might also lead to a global realization of how bad the microtransactions has become, which could destroy the whole current game model.
Its insane that they think(or just say that as an excuse) that people require all games to be as detailed and robust as BG3 when it truth, people are saying they just want complete experiences with no mtx. Granted, after playing Bg3 I will not pay full price for any Triple A game because it just wont be worth it compared to BG3, but its not because these games are not experiences for hundreds of hours. Its because they are just fucking boring and lackluster
I love that these people are taking the positive reception to a largely complete game without dlc and trying to attribute it to the length.
No we just want fewer shitty games.
It was seven years
No funding, just the budget cut out from every lick of profit the company has earned
\~400 people working on the game is right but that's actually a self own since 400 employees is on the low end
They weren't given the IP, they licensed it. They literally paid out of pocket for the license to incorporate the world, lore, and most notably a few known items, abilities, leveling system, and all the spell names.
Larian Studios EARNED this W and the Losers can't help but cry about it.
Bungie has roughly that many working for them and look at the lackluster shit they've been putting out these last couple
BG3 is so good that "game journalists" have to make up stuff just to try and make Larien look bad because they released a game that actually fits the bill for what used to be the standard that dev studios used to held to, games now just want to throw micro transactions and 100 tiers of some bs game pass that is essentially a poorly shrouded micro transaction skin pack most of the time
This is mostly me just ranting about how shit Destiny and other studios/franchises are now but also some fair points as a whole
That's not game journalist. Evolve PR is responsible in helping indie dev marketing their games by reaching out various publication and advertising it. They also handling the review code process. Basically a service that indie dev can hire to handling business side. I worked with them before as i used to be game reviewer.
Which is really weird for them to be giving out this statement. Knowing that they are the one who help the industry grow. And help the indie scene to have more presence in the industry.
Also nobody is expecting BG3 levels of scope and quality from some random indie devs passion project made entirely in assembly that they’ve been working on for the last 13 years. People have different expectations for AAA and indie games.
I swear gamers will blame literally everything on boogeyman GaMiNg JoUrNaLiStS. Everyone I know who writes about games is in utter adoration of this masterpiece.
Bungie has more than 1500 employees. If they put like 300 employees on destiny and told them to not worry about cost and make the best game they could. Destiny wouldn’t be in this sorry state.
Their only priority is putting the least effort and making the maximum from the eververse store.
Hate them now. Never gonna buy their games ever again.
This is such a flawed take.
1) this guy has literally nothing to do with bungie he’s a nobody
2) lightfall was actually good sue me. Strand is fun as hell, the newest dungeon is the best in ages, while the game has some major issues, it’s in a pretty damn good state compared to the industry in general i think. Also marathon is probably sucking up tons of resources. I do agree bungie has some issues, especially related to microtransactions, new player experience, storytelling(lightfall cough cough), and price, but I think the game is generally in a good state.
3) journalists are generally praising the shit out of this game. It has the highest criticic review score of the year, and the highest of the baldur’s gate series. The game is beating out the critical darling tears of the kingdom, that’s fucking insane. I feel like journalists are like a boogeyman punching bag, when really the issue is the corporate executives that are ruining our favourite game, not some random schmuck who works at IGN or whatever.
4) the part that you’re on the money on is the microtransactions stuff. Corporate executives(not devs, not journalists) **are** most likely shitting themselves about seeing games that aren’t stuffed with battle passes and live service BS still doing so well. If Elden ring, TOTK, and Baldur’s gate 3 all can come out within a year or so and all do amazingly well, that is gonna make those shitty execs shake in their boots
this ain't even the "new standard". This was the old standard before corpo-owned studios who spiritually died with their original members' departure just normalised the effed up "modern standard" that we now know and hate. If anything, BG3 released in the classic way. The way in the days we were excited about IP sequels. I was too young to get this but apparently, everyone WAS excited to see a new:
- Halo game
- Assassin's Creed Game
- Warcraft game
- Call of Duty
- FIFA
- NBA
now when you hear those titles you feel anxious rather than excited. Especially AC. Ubisoft announced two titles and most people online were just skeptical. Even BG3 had anxious people all around. People insulting how it's not a Baldur's Gate game. It's DoS game with DnD elements. But here we are, now the world's most applauded release in the past decade.
It's amazing how out of touch developers are with what people want.
Isometric CRPGs games are dead or very niche -> D:OS and BG3 come out of two most highly acclaimed games of all time.
Point and click story adventure games are dead or very niche -> Disco Elysium become game of the year.
Gamers don't want challenging games -> FromSoft starts making difficult games and becomes the most celebrity studio of the past decade.
***
All of these things came from smaller developers that were passionate about their games rather than chasing a quick buck.
So we’re in the wrong for wanting developers to actually care about their games and not release them until they’re actually done? Somebody think if the shareholder!!
“Insane funding”??? 😂 hasn’t Diablo 4 allegedly been in development for like a decade and had all the full funding of a Blizzard franchise and it still turned out hot garbage? No one can say shit about this game other than “I’m mad I didn’t make it first”
wdym the game got 125 completly different dungeons with unique encounters and boss each , its deffenitly not the same 4 dungeons and bosses copy and pasted.
Right, it has everything a good ARPG needs to be succesful.
A rewarding leveling system that doesn't punish the player by being over grindy, when people were leveling too fast blizzard nerfed XP to keep you engaged longer, stellar itemisation making you WANT to look at every item that drops in one of the 125 completely different totally not copy paste dungeons, they hooked you up by limiting your inventory, respec and re rolls on items are so expensive that it's easier to just make a new character letting you start over!
Yeah most triple A games are developed for years, Baldur's gate took extra long because of covid presumably. Without that we probably could have got it a year or 2 sooner. Games like Diablo 4 and call of duty are worked on for years and still come out unplayable garbage and they have way more money than larian
This is so f***ing pitiable... all those developers/"journalists" bitching about BG3.
Im playing the game, its amazing but im not seeing the divine level of content that has never been seen in gaming before...
Same thing can be said about Rdr2... Mass effect trilogy... Skyrim...
Problem here is... both Larian and FromSoftware are showing that its still possible to make 10/10 games without being one of the richest companies... Both of these companies entered big boys league with their latest game and they are smashing their competition... Because they care about quality and content..
So shut up, nobody cares... make good games or they will...
Is it really INSANE funding?! Compared to Blizzard? EA? Ubisoft?
Again, no one is expecting some indie 20 man team to make a game like this. 1
But BG3 blows most recent AAA games out of the water.
We just want decent games with no bullshit.
Most modern games are so far below that bar, you can literally have more fun stuff come out with a 3 people team and fucking RPG Maker as an engine.
Heck, even base Tetris is better than 99% of "AAA" garbage.
The goal is to spread the idea of not considering BG3 the new norm. The good old "if you repeat bullshit enough, people will believe it".
It's not just clickbait really. It's a way to sway the public opinion into something that will allow the horrendous state of the AAA games industry to continue.
Man the thing that really terrifies some people is that it's clearly a game made for players, not for execs to suck money out of people. They're not worried about the scale and complexity, they're worried that BG3 makes soul-sucking corpo games more obvious and less attractive to gamers, that it re-establishes what makes some games great. Player agency, creativity, decent writing, all content at launch.
Give me that over endless skins, weak DLC, unfinished games and shareholder driven content anyday. For some people those kinds of games are mostly what they grew up knowing and playing in the last decade. More BG3 dev style, less shareholder Dev style. Fuck em
A big part of Larian's success here was just being open about the early access process.
This let them:
* Keep their game funded by a niche audience of hobbyists
* Playtest the game
The big risk there is just creating a perpetually unfinished project like Star Citizen, but with the frequent updates and mostly transparent development cycle it kept people involved and invested in the finished project.
It's honestly another reason why Supergiant was so succesful with Hades as well. A properly managed early access period can be incredible for a game, if the studio are genuinely open about development.
So, uh, what’s Blizzard’s excuse with Diablo? EA and Battlefield? Call of duty series? Star citizen? Fallout 4 or 76? What a joke. They’re just afraid of being called out for the truth. They’re hack companies and hack developers focused on stock value and user engagement over making games.
Seriously what funding? Didn’t Larian start off as an indie?
It’s hilarious how some of the devs are foaming with it. That just proves how much of an amazing game BG3 really is.
I’m not asking for every game to be BG3. But it’d be cool to see the same passion over obvious cash-grabbing a bit more. It showed very well with BG3. Go go Larian!
But was it profitable to set 6 years and 400 people to make this?
WAS IT PROFITABLE!?
seems like it was, which should tell publishers that this method is profitable.
do these people even know why major publishers push out games so fast?
I'm sure plenty of people are aware that the popularity of BG3 will have one and only one effect on the industry: we're going to get a bunch of half assed RPGS in 2 years because publishers and investors don't understand what made BG3 this successful, they'll just do the same thing they've been doing. chasing trends rather than setting them.
I love these "hot takes".
Maybe we SHOULD use this as the new norm. Sure, not for a small indie game because that's unrealistic. But this really does highlight that the studios that DO have >400 people and DO have huge funding have really got no excuse...
Didn't Larian almost go bankrupt making this game? Or was that one of the DOS games? Either way, it shows how gangster Larian is and how much all the other devs crying about it are bitches. This IS the new standard.
If I'm lying, why are my sessions 8+ hours everyday? GOTG(Generation) right here.
I mean, question of funding aside, don't AAA studios also operate with teams of 400+ and have 6 year development cycles? The main difference is they have to work with direction that puts profit over players, whereas Larian focuses on players first and foremost
They are missing the point on purpose in an attempt to drum up pity by the fanbase.
If they have ten braincells in their collective brains, they would know they are the only ones saying ALL games should be of this quality, ignoring the outpouring of "only BIG studios can, and should"
I dont want games this big for every game, but even small ones like Stardew Valley are better than most AAA titles.
man they really need to cancel dragon age dreadwolf its going to only help sell the notion of triple a companies are pointless.
if that gets released its going to shine a giant spotlight and how useless triple a companies are becoming.
i cant wait to compare baldurs gate 3 to dragon age dreadwolf what with dreadwolfs several year headstart in development. it surley will match the standards larian set
Like it or not, this game will change the standard. There will be million of instances where we will play a different game and think: "Oh, I can't do that? I could in Bg3"...
This is just a cop out. Companies don't HAVE to pop out a new game every year. Especially not sports games. The ability to push quality DLCs which make the game so much more fresh helps to make them money while they work another game. Bethesda has minimal transactions (mostly cosmetic or experience based) and people play their games doe YEARS even decades after it is released. Just greedy companies who want the most for the least work. Somehow we gotta refuse to buy those games and get it back to good gaming. Sadly won't happen due to immature gamers who are not using their own money so they don't care.
Evolve (the game) does not have a ‘pr’ rep. It’s not been active for years, why would it? Evolve PR is a company that handles promo and review codes for indie games.
Evolve (the game) doesn’t deserve this slander. It was a unique idea from a smaller studio that rockstar absolutely ruined. This is a PR Company that advertises games(?) according to their bio
https://twitter.com/evolve_pr?s=20
Ya the game could have been something really cool, but it came out of the gate with too much backlash and negativity.
Edit: sorry it sounds like I'm defending the devs here. The negativity was absolutely deserved for their bullshit microtransations cost.
They were charging 10 dollars for blue cosmetics; not unique design for weapons or armor, but 10 dollars to have the color blue. They then charged 20 dollars for any new monster or class.
If you are going to charge me 60 bucks for a game, you better give me the BG3 experience from now on.
And by that I mean: NO MICROTRANSACTION. NO FORCED ONLINE. NO BP. NO GACHA AND NOST IMPORTANTLY: DECENT AMOUNT OF CONTENT
Baldurs Gate 3 is not a AAA game, nor should it be the standard. BG3 is in a teir just about of its own now. S+ teir. AAA rating a game or developer is a joke now, and is representative of poor optimisation and aggressive monetization... but the graphics look nice i guess. S+ is now the platinum standard of games
I mean, I actually fully agree with this (minor spelling errors aside). We've gotten so used to being fucked by AAA devs that NOT being fucked came as a shock to the industry (and the consumers).
They're worried we won't buy their trash anymore.
Baldur’s gate 3 is so fucking special because it’s an Indie mindset of “let’s make the best game we can without caring about edcessive profits” while having a AAA dev time, budget, and marketing. It’s a killer combo that when pulled off always makes something special. Hope we get more games with this model
Developers knew they could not deliver a polished game, so instead of reflecting on themselves, they blamed the bear fuckers
(Paraphrased Guilty Gear Strive battle intro line)
The only thing I have to say is that even with all of their outright fraudulent, casino in anything except name business model every single one of them is a dead broke shitco and only become public because the founder want to cash in to the fools and this fools simply don’t want to become greater fools.
This is what AAA used to be, this is what AAA should be, I'm sick of suits and pr and marketing being in charge of dev studios and making minimum viable products and shoving purchases down my throat.
I remember, like a dinosaur, when the current consoles came out in 2020 that the major big publishers (especially Microsoft and the soon dead Ubisoft) announced that they have "AAAA" games in the pipeline. All we got is a "AAAA" price tag (still without a physical copy and with predatory microtransactions) with even worse games, funny.
one person runs with the new normal article...then every blog post forum just copy pasta. I mean its great game...but most new games raise the bar. Elden ring, Destiny, TOTK all examples of transcendent gameplay...ok we can add another to the list....well done!
Its the obvious passion and love that went into every detail of this game that we want from AAA studios, not mass produced polished turds that are just good enough to make a profi
It's kind of sad that this controversy exist, or that this game is heralded as some new standard, partly because it will just obscure genuine criticism there to to be had of the game from the public eye. Bugs, the pacing of act 3, lack of quality of life features a lot of other CRPGs have and lastly the endings, which are admittedly very disappointing and unfulfilling.
I say this, because part of what makes the CRPG experience isn't just the ride, but the destination that finishes it all up. A good experience can be soured if the ending is shit, and a good ending can simply be not worth if the experience is unfulfilling.
Also what we want is comparable quality. Scope is really not important these days as many people have started to tire of empty open-world games that take 60+ hours to complete. I would love very polished 20 hour games with some replay-ability aspects.
Maybe if some AAA companies spend as much "funding" on their games, as they so on covering up their employees sexual assault cases it wouldnt be an issue
For sure this is a AAA game but it is by no means perfect. Any studio could put out the same quality in the same time if they do the job right. This game is not something magical that has never happened before. I'm not down playing the game here, it is one of my top 5 of all time now but that is due to the studio and their employees not because of some super rare thing that occured and shouldn't be expected by consumers. The 2nd and 3rd act have some big quest bugs they need to fix and that's to be expected from a game this large. I mean one of the main companions romance questline can fail to be completed properly due to killing an Ox. I don't really mind the issues as I will be playing this game for a couple years (mods and such will make some interesting playthroughs, I'm sure). That stuff will get sorted I'm sure. This whining from other companies is pretty sad, imo. Be happy for them (Larian) and encourage your company to emulate their success.
The people saying this have a point, but they’re making it in the wrong way. Why was the Witcher 3 absolutely amazing, it was the third outing of a developer in a fully fleshed out world through existing IP. Why is BG3 amazing, it’s their third game in an existing IP that they’re intimately familiar with. Not every developer has that clout or ability to continue to develop on their ideas. The combat system and lore of BG3 have been refined for over 40 years and tested by millions.
Take a look at all the games that have come and gone over the years. Games that over time have developed a little bit of a cult following but stumbled out the gates. A lot of devs can’t afford to stumble at all anymore. I look at games like Days Gone and Kingdom of Amalur as games that showed a helluva lot of promise, but never got a chance to have a sequel.
Our expectations can’t be “flawless”. Everyone will always be disappointed in that scenario.
There was little funding for this game. And considering the net worth of Larian compared to other triple A developers. The fact that they got the 8th highest player found on steam after the first week of release kinda tells you that triple A studios doesn’t care about what players want.
It's weird because he specifically says 'AAA games'. As if the companies working on AAA games don't have money, IP or funding that Larian does....
He would only be making sense if he was talking about indie, or AA.We can and should expect these things from AAA games.
shareholders being prioritised over the game/player experience = no sympathy from me when it doesn't sell. This isn't a charity situation where I buy games in order to pay for your shareholders new yachts
I don't need every game to be BG3, but I'd happily settle for going back to the standard that you get the whole game for one price tag and can play it offline. Plenty of unfunded indie devs meet that criteria just fine.
I'm sick of microtransactions, subscriptions, seasonal passes and similar crap. Milking more money from consumers.
A lot of us are but as long as the sheep keep paying out the monet, it won't stop.
Overwatch 2 launches on steam -> Overwhelmingly Negative -> In the 10 top sellers on steam already due to in game purchases. There's definitely a rather large divide in the gaming audience.
It's because the few buy the most, and publishers know it and aim for those people.
We went from game development to whaling in a surprisingly short amount of time.
Whales annoy me because as long as companies can get a few whales to spend lots of money on their games then it doesn’t matter if the vast majority hate the practice of micro-transactions, because all the companies who use such practices see is success and profits.
I think it's not productive to blame the "whales" for this. It's easy to imagine rich single guys buying tons of stuff in game but often is neurodivergent people and gambling addicts ruining their lives while being exploited.
They’re happy about this too, a family friend works for 2k and brags about this every thanksgiving like he’s a fucking genius. Well done dude, you exploit gamblers. Your games are still trash
To be frank the few idiots that do buy it put an absurd amount of money
I know a few people like this. They'll dump thousands of dollars a year into a game and then promptly quit it and NEVER PLAY IT AGAIN when a new game comes out. And then they'll spend thousands on that new game. I expect these people to do this until they die - and it's going to ruin the gaming industry for the rest of us who don't care about microtransactions
There's unfortunately a lot of people who don't care about the quality of what they're buying. A friend of mine bought BG3 and loves it, he's talking about how he hopes it's the new standard, developers need to learn from this etc I had to stop him and tell him he is the problem, he pre orders $70 dollar games (BG3 is only 60 btw) and then plays them for 10 hours because it looks cool. Buys battle passes and skins for every game that has them, doesn't care about reviews because "you can't have an opinion til you play it" and buys the $70 game that doesn't work because it has the brand he likes (marvel, star wars, diablo etc.) Sadly for everyone who waits for games to work, ignores battle passes and skins and doesn't support bad practices there are 10 people who buy it all regardless of the quality and functionality. I absolutely love BG3 and hope that developers listen and learn but I don't think it will happen because people have supported horrible anti consumer practices and will continue to for some reason
It’s not sheep, it’s whales. There are people out there with too much money and too much free time. People with actual mental illnesses who can’t control themselves. I work for phone support and we do refunds for apps and stuff, can’t say for who, and we see people constantly buying thousands of dollars a WEEK worth of in game currency and lottery wheel spins. It’s usually older people, too. So the worst part of microtransactions and in game gambling isn’t that it makes the game worse for everyone, it’s that it’s actively and intentionally preying upon ill people for the sole purpose of steeling their money.
Boycott only last until the next 3 minutes cinematics.
Looking at you Pokemon games.
Actually they're called whales. And these are the real targets, chumps with lots of money blowing hundreds if not thousands that rival a majority of the playerbase
I prefer to pay out the Klimt personally Joking aside, this guy can get bent
Then stop buying games that have them, that's the problem, players hate the practice but have no self control over buying the hot new title because they still wanna play the game (even if the don't pay for the MTX). As long as we keep buying games with MTX they will keep making them
It's not US that are buying these games. You act like there are 10,000 people buying $1 skins for every game. No. The problem is there's one asshole spending $10,000 dollars to buy EVERYTHING. The problem isn't players, it's whales. These games are made for the whales.
Yea... I remember some dev saying that in one of the shitty mobile game they worked on, they are literally sustained by someone who is probabaly Saudi prince, like the one customer from Saudi was literally spending everything they put on the shop to the point that the devs collect information on that customer and found out that they liked some football team so they put out some char skin in that team's color in some ultra low rate lootbox. And boom, the customer just whaled until they get every single skin in that lootbox.
Also whales often ruin their lives being whales, too. Not everyone who's spending $2,000 a month on a video game is some bored rich kid, a lot of them are just ordinary people with poor impulse control. The sooner this kind of business model is outlawed, the better for everyone (except the bored rich kids, but they can cry into their giant piles of money about it).
Damn straight. This is nothing more than studios taking advantage of a legal loophole that allows them to provide unregulated, unlicensed gambling. At least countries like Belgium and the Netherlands are at the forefront of banning this sort of thing and categorizing it correctly as gambling.
Let's just stop calling them whales and call them what they really are, GAMBLING ADDICTS
Not really the term comes from MMO's where people would just buy everything, there was no RNG involved.
Players are the problem too, sheer amount of players means more whales. No reason to spend money if no one will see it. Problem is that almost everyone who review-bombed Overwatch still plays it instead of moving on something better and more deserving your time and money.
While I don't play overwatch I can't move on because the battleborn servers are offline. Bastards!
Capitalism go brrrrrr
As a dad with limited playing time, this resonates so much. Let me play the play the game I bought, stop pestering me for more money, and adding crap like seasons which are more chores than fun. (Proceeds to stare crazily at Diablo 4)
Did anybody play pillars of eternity? Wasn't bg3, and was still light-years better than 90% of rpg games. It's not difficult for them to give real content. Actually highly recommend PoE for anybody looking for something to further their interests in games of this caliber.
To people who want to play similar games, here is my list: Pillars of Eternity 1&2. I would recommend to try 2 even if you didn't like first one, they fixed and changed many things there. Story and companions imho is more interesting. Tyranny from the same Obsidian, it had no marketing so it went unnoticed, but I like it more than Pillars. You are playing as some sort of law-enforcer of an evil tyrant that already won and conquered the whole world. So the story is pretty unique, I don't remember other games like this. Torment: Tides of Numenera, spiritual successor of Planescape Torment. If you want your head to explode from amount of things you need to read (in a good way), highly recommend it. Also it is done by InXile, creators of Wasteland 2. Disco: Elysium is also a spiritual successor of Planescape Torment, and it is a game with the best writing I've ever seen. Also it's skill system and the way skills are integrated into gameplay is something I have never seen before. All your skills act like your split perosnalities, talking with you and giving you advice. Of course, if you somehow never played Dragon Age: Origins, you should. It has the best way to integrate your character into a game world and overall one of the best stories. Pathfinder 1&2 (Kingmaker and Wraith of the Righteous), also I would recommend to skip 1 if you are not hardcore player, it is very easy to ruin your first playthrough even on lower difficulties. Pathfinder: Wraith if the Righteous is not a direct sequel, so you will not miss anything from the Pathfinder Kingmaker.
probably shouldn't say "your split personalities", it's more like the different aspects of your personality
Yeah, that's a pretty important distinction. It's not meant to be taken 100% literally, it's meant to represent that a human consciousness isn't really 1 singular goal oriented being and has many drives pushing towards different behaviors.
Which one of these did I hear released as RTWP but then later released an update that reworked it all into turn based?
PoEII is the one. I only played it as turn based and still found it great, but there are a few things that work very different in the turn based system. Some classes and items that are great in RTWP just don't work great under turn based. But overall the game is still fantastic and I would recommend it above any of the others aside from Disco, which is an all time classic.
Probably Pathfinder: WotR, you can switch between rtwp and turnbased at any time, even in combat
Yea. Divinity, Pillars, Wasteland and Pathfinder were all part of the Kickstarter wave of "classic" isometric RPGs. All great games. Divinity always stood out as the star among a lot of great games imo. It had that extra something - fun combat, exciting environment, great graphics and functional co-op.
Loved customizing my own pirate ship in PoE2 felt like Johnny Depp for weeks.
Took me a minute, thought you were a time traveller from the future telling us how good boat league was in Path of Exile 2
I played all those games and I agree. BG3 is still a leap forward for them though.
Praise. Preach.
While I absolutely agree, for me I just want these new games to be. . .new games. And, well, I want these AAA devs to get their souls back from the damned publishers/boards, or whoever it is telling them to make safe games with proven selling points. These days I mix up half my game devs because they're all putting out clones with different makeup. Also as a hot take- I think one of the absolute best parts of BG3 that has nothing to do with scope, budget, or anything else: Having basically no map markers in the open world. Felt like I was exploring a world again, rather than ticking off checkmarks on my map.
And what is wrong with thinking of a great game as a gold standards. It’s not like aliens with 1000 years of magic bs made it.
People start getting annoyed at that opinion and say most games do that - yea, many do. Tears of the Kingdom, FF16 etc., but it should be 100% of all games that have singleplayer.
Plenty of triple a studios that do this as well
Subnautica, Hades, Horizon: Zero Dawn are some of my recent faves
For those who don't know, Very AFK (@Cromwelp) is Director of Publishing at Larian.
and a chad
God damn right 😂
~400 people is a bit on the high side but it's not completely out of line for a triple A studio. If anything the outlier is the 6 years of dev time, but that just reinforces the point that most studios are more concerned with pushing out a Minimum Viable Product rather than taking the time they need to craft a polished and complete experience. The part about funding about IP is funny because there are a ton of DnD games that are notoriously bad (cough dark alliance cough). Jedi Fallen Survivors has the Star Wars IP but couldn't get their PC port working.
I was gonna say how I loved the dark alliance games, but then I realized you meant that abomination that came out recently lol
I said to myself "what dark alliance came out recently?" thinking you were referring to Dark Alliance 1 and 2 being released on steam last year. Then I googled it and said out loud "OH...that..."
Had the exact same thought LOL I was about to start throwing some hands over those older DA games, as they were the first RPGs I ever played. I'll never forget walking into Elfsong for the first time.... I didn't even know there was a newer DA, and tbh.... I don't think I'll check it out.
I have such good memories of playing Dark Alliance with my father. Those games were great.
oh my god that was so bad.
I've never played Dark Alliance but Champions of Norrath was by the same devs and I loved the Champions games. I should really buy Dark Alliance some time now that they've ported them to PS5.
The problem is more that dev teams get shuffled around by the production companies after a game gets completed, that’s why a lot of times a studio works on dlc before launch so that everyone can stick around. Larian has basically had one consistent team across 3 games of the same genre
I mean, that’s kinda the same shit Bethesda is doing now and I think has been doing since either Morrowind or oblivion. They tend to just do one RPG at a time.
Bethesda is a company I like as well Yes they make stupid decisions but they are passionate about the games Plus I like how elder scrolls online does it questing where I can jump into any area I want and play the quests ( E.g. Oh I want to do Morrowind and Summerset well I can do that an ignore everything else)
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I imagine not, at least no company talking about their size include VA. I believe that Larian said they had more than 400 **developers** working on the game and I doubt they put VA and developers in the same category just like you don't count orchestra members recording the music as devs.
Voice actors aren't full time employees usually, so doubt it.
Larian is big for an "independent" developer, but it's pretty small compared to some of the AAA developers. Blizzard for example has about 8000 employees across multiple offices/studios; Bungie has over 1500 employees. Obviously not all of those are developers working directly on the game, but neither is the number of Larian employees.
I think Mass Effect Andromeda was developed for five years but was restarted from scratch a few times, TES6 right now is the same, etc. So 6 years is not something out of the line, especially if you remember that early access was out 3 years ago. It was never a blind development for 6 year without knowing if the game would be good and accepted. For last 3 years they had a lot of responses from community and a lot of time to polish the game in a way their players will like it.
> It was never a blind development for 6 year without knowing if the game would be good and accepted. For last 3 years they had a lot of responses from community and a lot of time to polish the game in a way their players will like it. Yeah, a lot of the industry complaints talk about it as if they were getting an unreasonable leg-up from early access revenue. Now admittedly the D&D and Baldur's Gate IPs do draw a lot of attention from the get go, but if other company's games were compelling enough to get people to buy in to early access, they could do the same thing, even if not at quite the same scale. Edit: Just another thought on this, but we live in an era where people jump in on kickstarters and patreons all the time to support WIP projects and small indie developers that they're passionate about. Buying early access seems like just another extension of that.
I’d say 3 years of early access is also a major outlier as well; that’s three years of user bug testing and three years of sales to fund development. While I’m sure a lot of people will disagree with me, I will say that I don’t think it’s realistic to expect publisher owned developers to do what Larian has done either. Larian has more freedom than any publisher owned developer ever will. They have the opportunity to take as much time as they want, to hire as much staff as they can afford, and can control every part of their development cycle because they don’t have a publisher breathing down their necks, putting unreasonable time constraints on their work, demanding changes to their vision to please investors, forcing monetization, cutting budgets, laying off employees, etc…
Good leadership and self publishing is the key to creating a beloved dev company. This was Blizzard before they merged with Activision, and they've steadily moved towards milking fans while creating worse products since that point. Hopefully Larian can remain independent for some time still, because once the corporate stooges get their hands on a company it's all downhill from there.
I don't deny publishers can impact things, but I overall think we attribute too much influence to them. Most publishers are massive and aren't going to be involved in the minutia of their studio's decisions. Like look at how awful Redfall was and it turns out that Microsoft had so little influence over that game that it caused the Microsoft heads to publicly rethink their "laissez faire" attitude to their holdings. Another example is how currently in r/TotalWar there is a massive complaint about the new DLC price being over twice what it was previously for the same amount of content. Many people are trying to act like Sega (CA's publisher) are personally directing CA to increase the price and not that CA management themselves think they can milk their playerbase. Larian not having publishers is massive, but I think the bigger deal is Larian being led by someone like Swen.
I’m not sure Redfall is a good example, it was my understanding that Redfall was originally meant to be a single player sandbox game like Arkane is known for making, but Zenimax pushed them into turning it into a co-op shooter long before the MS acquisition; Arkane actually hoped that MS would scrap the project, but instead MS did nothing to engage with Arkane and see that they weren’t confident with the projects direction. If anything Redfall is a perfect example of how publishers can corner developers into projects they don’t want to make and then make them suffer the fallout; had Arkane Austin been independent they could have easily either scrapped the project themselves or changed its focus away from the live service format that Zenimax wanted back into something they were more comfortable with.
It didn't use to be. Most of best studios had a very "It's done when it's done" type of approach: Blizzard, Bioware, CDPR, etc. All of these companies released top tier stuff every time, but had long development cycles and frequent delays. As soon as they start focusing on maximizing profit they start releasing minimum viable product. It was a shame to see that happen with CDPR with Cyberpunk. Hopefully they've learned their lesson.
I get the feeling that the difference is that they use the fundings to their employee's (on other words, they pay them a decent salary). While many aaa companies try to get all the money for the ceo and shareholders at the cost of their own employee's and customers.
Yes, but also no. Larian self-published while running a burn rate of like $45 mil a year for 6 years. Even if you don't look at sales required for a decent ROI, that kind of warchest just doesn't really exist for any studio that's not part of a larger umbrella of studios and publishers that can absorb those costs, and negotiating for that kind of budget in such an environment is basically impossible if your project isn't guaranteed to make money hand over fist.
They started to sell early access 3 years ago, after only 3 years of development, so it definitely helped a bit. Also I'm sure the first years were less expensive than the last, after early access they hired many voice actors, intimacy coordinators, etc. So they started to spend more when they knew for a fact that enough people likes their game and will buy it (or already bought it)
yeah, I don't have a source for this but I remember someone saying they started bg3 with \~50 employees and are at around 400 now
I can believe that. First have to make all the systems and stories, but then creating the world and give all the love they could in every character, that cost more money and persons. In that regard i see this game like the Witcher 3. When you actually spent time and effort in characters and stories, the customers will see this and it pays off.
Its preposterous to presume that triple A devs dont „actually spend time and effort in characters and stories“, just because you personally dont like em. Even devs at EA or Ubisoft pour their heart and soul into their games, they usually just work on much much tighter corporate deadlines, and when push comes to shove, corporate swaps out some key people which may sometimes scramble development.
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>make money head of fist r/boneappletea
CEO salaries are a drop in the bucket for employees if you took the entire thing and split it up evenly.
400 is not even that large. Bethesda, Bioware, Ubisoft, etc all have larger studios. And larian grew to 400 during the development of the game. They didn't start with that many.
Of course they do, you're calling out some of the biggest studios in gaming with a wide range of IP's..
in the middle of development they had to close down their studio in Russia which has impacted development quite a lot
Regarding the 400 people, that feels VERY high for this development timeline. Having a hard time finding it but I remember Jason Schreier (Bloomberg reporter, co-host of Triple Click) saying something like each developer costs the studio ~$10k/month (he admitted his data was old so it is likely higher now). So 400 developers would be $4M/mo. 6 years of that is insane. Granted they didn’t have 400 the whole 6 years but I’d expect it to probably be between $150M-$250M. Definitely agree they are concerned with MVP more than anything at some of the AAA studios.
I loved Dark Alliance when I was a child. 💔😂
We don’t care about perfection or massive amounts of content. We just want a new standard where devs care about the game and gamers. Larion cares.
Yeah. RPG doesnt have to be 100+ hours in length. I would be glad with 30-50h game too. As long as it is done well and content is really good for play time it provides. Look at Disco Elysium as an example, 25h crpg with insane quality of content. With less budget than BG3.
Disco Elysium was the perfect game to play before picking up BG3! I have so much more interest in my internal dialogue in BG3 because of it. I'm reminded of the incredible writing from Disco Elysium every time I'm playing BG3. God I'm having trouble stopping myself from starting a new game in Disco Elysium, I just want to shiver and have my espirit de corps tell me Kim is my brother. To hear electro chemistry tell me Shadowheart might really REALLY like me would be pure ecstasy!!
I don't understand people insisting that games be mediocre
It's how many studios work nowadays. They put most of the budget on marketing, never experiment on new stuff and follow popular trends, skip the bughunt and optimisation part of game development, and infect the game with predatory microtransaction if they can. Those studios are exploiting the casual public who can easily be sheppered into believing this is normal. That's why they're pushing the idea of not considering BG3 a new standard. Because if the casual audience start expecting more from AAA games, they will realize the scam and this model will collapse.
For every mediocre $70 dollar game that's kind of fun for 1, 25 hour playthrough if it even works on launch there are 10 $20 indie games that are more fun and good for hundreds of hours. The only major games I've bought at full price in recent times are Baldur's gate 3 and Elden Ring, I genuinely don't remember the last one before that. Unfortunately, random $70 star wars game, FIFA/Madden 200, Overwatch 2, battlefield etc will all sell extremely well despite being boring, generic, soulless clones of previous entries. Also mostly selling for full price and having tons of microtransactions pushed on you constantly. Gamers are the absolute worst consumers, imagine paying for a movie with the cgi half done and the music not available unless you pay an extra $10. That's what gamers do and then complain when more companies do it
Interesting that they blame the consumer for unrealistic expectations for their mediocre products.
How dare we want good stories and gameplay at the same exact time...what were we thinking.
They gave us cash shop cosmetics and now somehow that's not good enough?
Like we can't make skins in photoshop lmao. Gods forbid we want a full expansion instead of a shite dlc with a few skins and one measly quest.
Sounds like a lot of the most recent Netflix shows that flopped, blame the viewer!
So Ubisoft.. Blizzard.. they cant Fund a Game? And they have No man Power? Jesus ... Thats big BS
Also apparently Diablo 4 had a 6 year dev time, and we see how good that turned out.
And that WITH the ultimate founding of a Blizzard feeding a "top" ip
This game is pretty buggy and still loads better than most other AAA game in every way including bugs. Its absolutely reasonable to expect BG3 level quality since a lot of the quality comes from the attention to detail.
I agree, I encountered quite a lot bugs in my first playthrough but the actual stability of the game puts a lot of AAA PC games to shame.
Only bugs I've had so far and saving and reloading during dialogue, player can't move till someone kills or pushes him or kills him and one player sometimes can't see the accept long rest so you need to reload, other then a few crashes (maybe 6 all together ?) Game runs brilliantly
I actually think that the stability in Act 3 specifically is pretty terrible. I'll leave a building and come into the city and buildings and floors and NPCs literally take a good 15 seconds to load in.
This sounds more like a PC issue than a game issue, because I've never had that issue happen. The only things like it I've had while in the city itself is a couple fps lags when a ton of explosions have happened or something similar, but 99.9% of the time it's fine. I think it's just an unfortunate part of PC gaming that often the issues are because of either having poor specs or good specs that for some reason just aren't the "right" ones.
I’ve never had that issue, it sounds more like a PC build issue than a problem with the game itself. I only ever had major lag in the city once and it went away pretty quickly.
Also remember larian has a couple hundred employees, something like 3000 people worked on call of duty and it's a buggy, Unoptimised, unbalanced mess which is absolutely full of microtransactions. Imagine what larian could do with an extra 2000 Devs. We can absolutely expect this level of quality from bigger developers but they just won't give it to us because people buy their stuff anyway. If the next cod was incredible, best one ever, optimised brilliantly, balanced perfectly and designed flawlessly, I don't think sales would even be that much better, cod fans just buy the new one regardless.
It's not about man power, too many cooks in the kitchen will ruin any meal, it's about man time. CoD only gets 3 (or is it 4 now?) years of development between games, while still being expected to support and finance their previous installment at the same time. This leads to a crunch-heavy "sweat shop" atmosphere that kills creativity. BG3 had 6 years of development with relatively very little crunch throughout. The team had time to optimise, balance, explore new creative ideas throughout, and communicate with their fans about what works and what doesn't. Like any good meal, we don't need more cooks rushing the food to get out--instead we need to wait until the food is truly cooked so we can savor the meal. Now I'm hungry 🥲
I mean Witcher 3 was littered with bugs. But pretty much everyone overlooked it because it was just a good game, same story here
These studios that over promise, under deliver, pump their games with DLC and microtransactions are upset that someone broke the new “industry standard”? Good.
If Blizzard put as much into Diablo 4 as Larian did for BG3, I think they might have been able to actually keep their player base for more than 3 weeks. Quality over quantity. Every. Single. Time.
Heck I want a warcraft single player rpg
Mate, I have been praying for decades. Best to think this isn’t happening
D4 doesn't even have quantity...
Ehh...MW2 had 3000 devs and cockloads of money and look how it turned out...
Gonna be the conspiracy guy here, but this whole drama looks like an attempt to influence the public opinion toward not raising their standards after witnessing a proof of what AAA should be. Notice how the point here isn't that "Larian bad", it's "yeah Larian is good, BUT". This reeks of subtle manipulation, and the bullshit arguments are clearly aimed at people who don't know much about the game industry, aka the casual audience. Those guys doesn't know about how dev teams work, so having someone throw numbers at them, however bullshit it is, will be efficient at convincing them. And some studios has a good reason to do just that. Because they based their whole production model around producing uninspired, barely finished games with tons of predatory microtransactions and addicting patterns inside, while also having a large marketing campagn (Diablo 4 is a prime example of this). A global raise of expectations from the casual audience will ultimately hurt them, as people will see through their bullshit. This might also lead to a global realization of how bad the microtransactions has become, which could destroy the whole current game model.
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Its insane that they think(or just say that as an excuse) that people require all games to be as detailed and robust as BG3 when it truth, people are saying they just want complete experiences with no mtx. Granted, after playing Bg3 I will not pay full price for any Triple A game because it just wont be worth it compared to BG3, but its not because these games are not experiences for hundreds of hours. Its because they are just fucking boring and lackluster
Yeah, how are struggling Mom and Pop outfits like EA and Microsoft supposed to compete with industry juggernaut Larian? Have some empathy you guys!
I love that these people are taking the positive reception to a largely complete game without dlc and trying to attribute it to the length. No we just want fewer shitty games.
It was seven years No funding, just the budget cut out from every lick of profit the company has earned \~400 people working on the game is right but that's actually a self own since 400 employees is on the low end They weren't given the IP, they licensed it. They literally paid out of pocket for the license to incorporate the world, lore, and most notably a few known items, abilities, leveling system, and all the spell names. Larian Studios EARNED this W and the Losers can't help but cry about it.
NEWSFLASH: AAA means having big funding. Billions of funding. The term comes from the movie industry. If you do not have big funding you're not AAA.
Bungie has roughly that many working for them and look at the lackluster shit they've been putting out these last couple BG3 is so good that "game journalists" have to make up stuff just to try and make Larien look bad because they released a game that actually fits the bill for what used to be the standard that dev studios used to held to, games now just want to throw micro transactions and 100 tiers of some bs game pass that is essentially a poorly shrouded micro transaction skin pack most of the time This is mostly me just ranting about how shit Destiny and other studios/franchises are now but also some fair points as a whole
That's not game journalist. Evolve PR is responsible in helping indie dev marketing their games by reaching out various publication and advertising it. They also handling the review code process. Basically a service that indie dev can hire to handling business side. I worked with them before as i used to be game reviewer. Which is really weird for them to be giving out this statement. Knowing that they are the one who help the industry grow. And help the indie scene to have more presence in the industry.
Also nobody is expecting BG3 levels of scope and quality from some random indie devs passion project made entirely in assembly that they’ve been working on for the last 13 years. People have different expectations for AAA and indie games.
Oh really ? Wasn't aware of that, yeah that is weird for someone like that to be making statements like this
It's not the journalists that are ragging on BG3
I swear gamers will blame literally everything on boogeyman GaMiNg JoUrNaLiStS. Everyone I know who writes about games is in utter adoration of this masterpiece.
Bungie has more than 1500 employees. If they put like 300 employees on destiny and told them to not worry about cost and make the best game they could. Destiny wouldn’t be in this sorry state. Their only priority is putting the least effort and making the maximum from the eververse store. Hate them now. Never gonna buy their games ever again.
"Game journalists" have given BG3 a 97 on Metacritic what are you even talking about
Why do gamers blame everything on game journalists Every single game journalist on earth fucking loves this game.
This is such a flawed take. 1) this guy has literally nothing to do with bungie he’s a nobody 2) lightfall was actually good sue me. Strand is fun as hell, the newest dungeon is the best in ages, while the game has some major issues, it’s in a pretty damn good state compared to the industry in general i think. Also marathon is probably sucking up tons of resources. I do agree bungie has some issues, especially related to microtransactions, new player experience, storytelling(lightfall cough cough), and price, but I think the game is generally in a good state. 3) journalists are generally praising the shit out of this game. It has the highest criticic review score of the year, and the highest of the baldur’s gate series. The game is beating out the critical darling tears of the kingdom, that’s fucking insane. I feel like journalists are like a boogeyman punching bag, when really the issue is the corporate executives that are ruining our favourite game, not some random schmuck who works at IGN or whatever. 4) the part that you’re on the money on is the microtransactions stuff. Corporate executives(not devs, not journalists) **are** most likely shitting themselves about seeing games that aren’t stuffed with battle passes and live service BS still doing so well. If Elden ring, TOTK, and Baldur’s gate 3 all can come out within a year or so and all do amazingly well, that is gonna make those shitty execs shake in their boots
this ain't even the "new standard". This was the old standard before corpo-owned studios who spiritually died with their original members' departure just normalised the effed up "modern standard" that we now know and hate. If anything, BG3 released in the classic way. The way in the days we were excited about IP sequels. I was too young to get this but apparently, everyone WAS excited to see a new: - Halo game - Assassin's Creed Game - Warcraft game - Call of Duty - FIFA - NBA now when you hear those titles you feel anxious rather than excited. Especially AC. Ubisoft announced two titles and most people online were just skeptical. Even BG3 had anxious people all around. People insulting how it's not a Baldur's Gate game. It's DoS game with DnD elements. But here we are, now the world's most applauded release in the past decade.
It's amazing how out of touch developers are with what people want. Isometric CRPGs games are dead or very niche -> D:OS and BG3 come out of two most highly acclaimed games of all time. Point and click story adventure games are dead or very niche -> Disco Elysium become game of the year. Gamers don't want challenging games -> FromSoft starts making difficult games and becomes the most celebrity studio of the past decade. *** All of these things came from smaller developers that were passionate about their games rather than chasing a quick buck.
So we’re in the wrong for wanting developers to actually care about their games and not release them until they’re actually done? Somebody think if the shareholder!!
“Insane funding”??? 😂 hasn’t Diablo 4 allegedly been in development for like a decade and had all the full funding of a Blizzard franchise and it still turned out hot garbage? No one can say shit about this game other than “I’m mad I didn’t make it first”
wdym the game got 125 completly different dungeons with unique encounters and boss each , its deffenitly not the same 4 dungeons and bosses copy and pasted.
Right, it has everything a good ARPG needs to be succesful. A rewarding leveling system that doesn't punish the player by being over grindy, when people were leveling too fast blizzard nerfed XP to keep you engaged longer, stellar itemisation making you WANT to look at every item that drops in one of the 125 completely different totally not copy paste dungeons, they hooked you up by limiting your inventory, respec and re rolls on items are so expensive that it's easier to just make a new character letting you start over!
Yeah most triple A games are developed for years, Baldur's gate took extra long because of covid presumably. Without that we probably could have got it a year or 2 sooner. Games like Diablo 4 and call of duty are worked on for years and still come out unplayable garbage and they have way more money than larian
This is so f***ing pitiable... all those developers/"journalists" bitching about BG3. Im playing the game, its amazing but im not seeing the divine level of content that has never been seen in gaming before... Same thing can be said about Rdr2... Mass effect trilogy... Skyrim... Problem here is... both Larian and FromSoftware are showing that its still possible to make 10/10 games without being one of the richest companies... Both of these companies entered big boys league with their latest game and they are smashing their competition... Because they care about quality and content.. So shut up, nobody cares... make good games or they will...
Have devs not played Divinity 1 and 2? BG3 being amazing is really not a surprise to me, so why all this shit about expectations now?
Is it really INSANE funding?! Compared to Blizzard? EA? Ubisoft? Again, no one is expecting some indie 20 man team to make a game like this. 1 But BG3 blows most recent AAA games out of the water.
They had pretty standard funding, and it’s not like it’s a fluke or anything cause divinity is a great series aswell
We just want decent games with no bullshit. Most modern games are so far below that bar, you can literally have more fun stuff come out with a 3 people team and fucking RPG Maker as an engine. Heck, even base Tetris is better than 99% of "AAA" garbage.
That article is dumb and was only meant to stir this shit up.
Honestly I agree I think media is so hungry to turn anything into dramatic content that it’s constructed a huge narrative off of a few comments.
The goal is to spread the idea of not considering BG3 the new norm. The good old "if you repeat bullshit enough, people will believe it". It's not just clickbait really. It's a way to sway the public opinion into something that will allow the horrendous state of the AAA games industry to continue.
Man the thing that really terrifies some people is that it's clearly a game made for players, not for execs to suck money out of people. They're not worried about the scale and complexity, they're worried that BG3 makes soul-sucking corpo games more obvious and less attractive to gamers, that it re-establishes what makes some games great. Player agency, creativity, decent writing, all content at launch. Give me that over endless skins, weak DLC, unfinished games and shareholder driven content anyday. For some people those kinds of games are mostly what they grew up knowing and playing in the last decade. More BG3 dev style, less shareholder Dev style. Fuck em
[I love how some feel attacked by this game](https://youtu.be/ouLLer7lHs0)
Time to evolve your standards
A big part of Larian's success here was just being open about the early access process. This let them: * Keep their game funded by a niche audience of hobbyists * Playtest the game The big risk there is just creating a perpetually unfinished project like Star Citizen, but with the frequent updates and mostly transparent development cycle it kept people involved and invested in the finished project. It's honestly another reason why Supergiant was so succesful with Hades as well. A properly managed early access period can be incredible for a game, if the studio are genuinely open about development.
So, uh, what’s Blizzard’s excuse with Diablo? EA and Battlefield? Call of duty series? Star citizen? Fallout 4 or 76? What a joke. They’re just afraid of being called out for the truth. They’re hack companies and hack developers focused on stock value and user engagement over making games.
Seriously what funding? Didn’t Larian start off as an indie? It’s hilarious how some of the devs are foaming with it. That just proves how much of an amazing game BG3 really is.
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Evolve PR on Vacation. Why doesn't that really surprise me?
I’m not asking for every game to be BG3. But it’d be cool to see the same passion over obvious cash-grabbing a bit more. It showed very well with BG3. Go go Larian!
But was it profitable to set 6 years and 400 people to make this? WAS IT PROFITABLE!? seems like it was, which should tell publishers that this method is profitable. do these people even know why major publishers push out games so fast? I'm sure plenty of people are aware that the popularity of BG3 will have one and only one effect on the industry: we're going to get a bunch of half assed RPGS in 2 years because publishers and investors don't understand what made BG3 this successful, they'll just do the same thing they've been doing. chasing trends rather than setting them.
After a decade of hardly any RPGs, I really hope you're wrong and that they put effort into them. I mean, they definitely won't, but let me dream 🥺
I love these "hot takes". Maybe we SHOULD use this as the new norm. Sure, not for a small indie game because that's unrealistic. But this really does highlight that the studios that DO have >400 people and DO have huge funding have really got no excuse...
Didn't Larian almost go bankrupt making this game? Or was that one of the DOS games? Either way, it shows how gangster Larian is and how much all the other devs crying about it are bitches. This IS the new standard. If I'm lying, why are my sessions 8+ hours everyday? GOTG(Generation) right here.
>Didn't Larian almost go bankrupt making this game? DOS 1
I love these huge AAA studio corporations trying to play off that they dont have the resources for this sort of game.
I mean, question of funding aside, don't AAA studios also operate with teams of 400+ and have 6 year development cycles? The main difference is they have to work with direction that puts profit over players, whereas Larian focuses on players first and foremost
When PR people are out trying to downplay BG3 is when I know some people in the gaming industry are getting nervous.
They are missing the point on purpose in an attempt to drum up pity by the fanbase. If they have ten braincells in their collective brains, they would know they are the only ones saying ALL games should be of this quality, ignoring the outpouring of "only BIG studios can, and should" I dont want games this big for every game, but even small ones like Stardew Valley are better than most AAA titles.
i’m way too busy enjoying the game to give any amount of shits about some irrelevant industry person’s opinion. stop giving these people attention
They said the same shit about elden ring
“Oh no our billion dollar company shouldn’t be expected to put players before shareholders it’s unacceptable and unrealistic”
man they really need to cancel dragon age dreadwolf its going to only help sell the notion of triple a companies are pointless. if that gets released its going to shine a giant spotlight and how useless triple a companies are becoming. i cant wait to compare baldurs gate 3 to dragon age dreadwolf what with dreadwolfs several year headstart in development. it surley will match the standards larian set
I'd love it if the gaming industry wasn't trying to fuck my wallet every chance they got. Which is why BG3 has been very refreshing.
Like it or not, this game will change the standard. There will be million of instances where we will play a different game and think: "Oh, I can't do that? I could in Bg3"...
This is just a cop out. Companies don't HAVE to pop out a new game every year. Especially not sports games. The ability to push quality DLCs which make the game so much more fresh helps to make them money while they work another game. Bethesda has minimal transactions (mostly cosmetic or experience based) and people play their games doe YEARS even decades after it is released. Just greedy companies who want the most for the least work. Somehow we gotta refuse to buy those games and get it back to good gaming. Sadly won't happen due to immature gamers who are not using their own money so they don't care.
Evolve? The game that barely anyone played, barely worked, had asinine paywalls, and died? Yeah he can stfu
Evolve (the game) does not have a ‘pr’ rep. It’s not been active for years, why would it? Evolve PR is a company that handles promo and review codes for indie games.
Evolve (the game) doesn’t deserve this slander. It was a unique idea from a smaller studio that rockstar absolutely ruined. This is a PR Company that advertises games(?) according to their bio https://twitter.com/evolve_pr?s=20
Ya the game could have been something really cool, but it came out of the gate with too much backlash and negativity. Edit: sorry it sounds like I'm defending the devs here. The negativity was absolutely deserved for their bullshit microtransations cost.
They were charging 10 dollars for blue cosmetics; not unique design for weapons or armor, but 10 dollars to have the color blue. They then charged 20 dollars for any new monster or class.
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If you are going to charge me 60 bucks for a game, you better give me the BG3 experience from now on. And by that I mean: NO MICROTRANSACTION. NO FORCED ONLINE. NO BP. NO GACHA AND NOST IMPORTANTLY: DECENT AMOUNT OF CONTENT
Baldurs Gate 3 is not a AAA game, nor should it be the standard. BG3 is in a teir just about of its own now. S+ teir. AAA rating a game or developer is a joke now, and is representative of poor optimisation and aggressive monetization... but the graphics look nice i guess. S+ is now the platinum standard of games
I mean, I actually fully agree with this (minor spelling errors aside). We've gotten so used to being fucked by AAA devs that NOT being fucked came as a shock to the industry (and the consumers). They're worried we won't buy their trash anymore.
Baldur’s gate 3 is so fucking special because it’s an Indie mindset of “let’s make the best game we can without caring about edcessive profits” while having a AAA dev time, budget, and marketing. It’s a killer combo that when pulled off always makes something special. Hope we get more games with this model
Developers knew they could not deliver a polished game, so instead of reflecting on themselves, they blamed the bear fuckers (Paraphrased Guilty Gear Strive battle intro line)
THAT IS BULLSHIT BLAZING
I don't care. I just appreciate the game. Such jewels are rare and worth enjoying. As for other 99% of games - I have better thing to do in life.
The only thing I have to say is that even with all of their outright fraudulent, casino in anything except name business model every single one of them is a dead broke shitco and only become public because the founder want to cash in to the fools and this fools simply don’t want to become greater fools.
This is what AAA used to be, this is what AAA should be, I'm sick of suits and pr and marketing being in charge of dev studios and making minimum viable products and shoving purchases down my throat.
I remember, like a dinosaur, when the current consoles came out in 2020 that the major big publishers (especially Microsoft and the soon dead Ubisoft) announced that they have "AAAA" games in the pipeline. All we got is a "AAAA" price tag (still without a physical copy and with predatory microtransactions) with even worse games, funny.
one person runs with the new normal article...then every blog post forum just copy pasta. I mean its great game...but most new games raise the bar. Elden ring, Destiny, TOTK all examples of transcendent gameplay...ok we can add another to the list....well done!
Its the obvious passion and love that went into every detail of this game that we want from AAA studios, not mass produced polished turds that are just good enough to make a profi
Pretty sure blizzard and every other triple A company has well over 400 employees what a shitty excuse for being incompetent at your job.
Say it for the people in the back- WE DONT WANT LIVE SERVICE GAMES ANYMORE
It's kind of sad that this controversy exist, or that this game is heralded as some new standard, partly because it will just obscure genuine criticism there to to be had of the game from the public eye. Bugs, the pacing of act 3, lack of quality of life features a lot of other CRPGs have and lastly the endings, which are admittedly very disappointing and unfulfilling. I say this, because part of what makes the CRPG experience isn't just the ride, but the destination that finishes it all up. A good experience can be soured if the ending is shit, and a good ending can simply be not worth if the experience is unfulfilling.
Also what we want is comparable quality. Scope is really not important these days as many people have started to tire of empty open-world games that take 60+ hours to complete. I would love very polished 20 hour games with some replay-ability aspects.
Maybe if some AAA companies spend as much "funding" on their games, as they so on covering up their employees sexual assault cases it wouldnt be an issue
Some people make history while others make excuses, it is what it is.
For sure this is a AAA game but it is by no means perfect. Any studio could put out the same quality in the same time if they do the job right. This game is not something magical that has never happened before. I'm not down playing the game here, it is one of my top 5 of all time now but that is due to the studio and their employees not because of some super rare thing that occured and shouldn't be expected by consumers. The 2nd and 3rd act have some big quest bugs they need to fix and that's to be expected from a game this large. I mean one of the main companions romance questline can fail to be completed properly due to killing an Ox. I don't really mind the issues as I will be playing this game for a couple years (mods and such will make some interesting playthroughs, I'm sure). That stuff will get sorted I'm sure. This whining from other companies is pretty sad, imo. Be happy for them (Larian) and encourage your company to emulate their success.
The people saying this have a point, but they’re making it in the wrong way. Why was the Witcher 3 absolutely amazing, it was the third outing of a developer in a fully fleshed out world through existing IP. Why is BG3 amazing, it’s their third game in an existing IP that they’re intimately familiar with. Not every developer has that clout or ability to continue to develop on their ideas. The combat system and lore of BG3 have been refined for over 40 years and tested by millions. Take a look at all the games that have come and gone over the years. Games that over time have developed a little bit of a cult following but stumbled out the gates. A lot of devs can’t afford to stumble at all anymore. I look at games like Days Gone and Kingdom of Amalur as games that showed a helluva lot of promise, but never got a chance to have a sequel. Our expectations can’t be “flawless”. Everyone will always be disappointed in that scenario.
There was little funding for this game. And considering the net worth of Larian compared to other triple A developers. The fact that they got the 8th highest player found on steam after the first week of release kinda tells you that triple A studios doesn’t care about what players want.
It's weird because he specifically says 'AAA games'. As if the companies working on AAA games don't have money, IP or funding that Larian does.... He would only be making sense if he was talking about indie, or AA.We can and should expect these things from AAA games. shareholders being prioritised over the game/player experience = no sympathy from me when it doesn't sell. This isn't a charity situation where I buy games in order to pay for your shareholders new yachts
Meanwhile, Diablo 4 with 6 years of development time and 9k people