Baldur's Gate 3

TheMysteriousGX

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Edit: Nearly forgot, your party is thirsty as hell. I recruited the druid in act 1 and talked to him the night you recruit him, didn't say a word to him for the rest of the game, then he propositions me for a three way at the end of the game. Like damn dude, chill. Yes, but chill.
You know, I remember how many people were wielded out when Anders prepositioned you in DA2 back in the day and I'm glad that gamers collectively got over that
 

sXeth

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Shadowheart? Shadowheart?!? Is Larian's writing department chiefly made up of 14 year old goths?
She's not even the sexy anime-boi vampire dude (who for some reason I'm not aware of but maybe the game explains at some point why he doesn't self-immolate in the sunlight)
 

Zykon TheLich

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She's not even the sexy anime-boi vampire dude (who for some reason I'm not aware of but maybe the game explains at some point why he doesn't self-immolate in the sunlight)
Does he sparkle in the sunlight instead?
 

SilentPony

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You know, I remember how many people were wielded out when Anders prepositioned you in DA2 back in the day and I'm glad that gamers collectively got over that
Did they? 'cause it seems like every other game causes a "Gays in my game! Woke agenda! Stop trying to push a narrative!" outcry.
And its reminds me of those self own posts politicians make about how the front page of Pornhub is filled with trans sex and gays, and its like dude, it posts suggestions based off your search criteria. If ya'll are so anti gay, why do you keep coming to the gay romance options?
 

crimson5pheonix

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She's not even the sexy anime-boi vampire dude (who for some reason I'm not aware of but maybe the game explains at some point why he doesn't self-immolate in the sunlight)
There is a lore reason why, and at the end of the game that lore reason wears off as everyone's standing in the sunset, and he has to run off screaming as he starts to burn again.
 

Phoenixmgs

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Lets also be real. Most of these studios dont have the talent even if they had the time and money. Blizzard lost all its talent and now even when a game takes 7+ years to develop it still fucking sucks.

You take talent and put together a good team, then you dont need a decade to develop a game. Naughty Dog, Sony Santa Monica, Insomniac all have great teams making blockbuster high quality games that all come out complete and microtransaction free.

The Ubisofts, Ea's, and Activisons are not capable of making games like BG3 because they dont have good developers, not really. These publishers make games using massive teams of people figured between the group they'll figure it out. Not to mention they dont want creative games, they want games that are proven to work in the market. So even if there were good devs on the teams, the creativity is fucked.

How creative can you be making your 37th Call of Duty game? Oh boy how can we make the guns go bang this time!?
AAA companies have devs prioritizing stuff that really doesn't make games great, they prioritize stuff like graphics and big worlds and skinner boxes. They have the talent and resources to make a game like BG3, they just aren't allowed to or choose not to. It's like how much better FarCry Blood Dragon is vs FarCry 20 or whatever they're on. Look at how bloated all these open world games are. There's no reason why an Assassin's Creed game is 50 hours long. This is why there's almost no AAA games I care about because they focus on everything I don't care about.

Call of Duty devs could've made something like Rainbow 6 Siege for example (environment/map destruction being the hook). They could simply add a leaning mechanic, it's literally a required SIMPLE feature for me to even consider playing a multiplayer FPS. They could have come up with a new game mode that's the next big thing. Metal Gear Solid 4 was the originator of so many things that became standard and popular features of multiplayer shooters; you'll find the SOP system in some form in basically every multiplayer shooter in the past 10 or so years (whether Uncharted or Call of Duty) and it also created the framework for battle royale with it's stealth deathmatch game mode. You can innovate in the AAA space.

I hate this game now becuase its popular.

I don't know why I have this reaction and I don't like having this reaction, but its there.

Now this game is not cool anymore because the its now getting the attention of the mainstream, that means eventually the game will change to suit the mainstream. Its the Skyrim phenomenon all over again.

And also because this game is making Diablo 4 look bad and I hate that too I want both games to stand equally, but no people are just using this game to snipe at Diablo 4 and I hate that.

And yes I haven't played both games and I am just having this reaction and impulse because of some old Blizzard fanboy in me even though I like games like Baldur's Gate.

Yeah my mind is weird when it comes to this game right now, sorry if this post comes off as unhinged and unfocused.

---


Alright one thing I can say definitively

Baldur's Gate 3 getting this big mainstream attention and reception is going to be bad for it because once something goes mainstream its going to eventually lose what made it special to appeal to the mainstream as much as possible and we have examples:

After Skyrim became this big success it eventually resulted in the Bethesda we know today. The Bethesda that gave us Fallout 76, the Bethesda that tried to make its own app launcher, the Bethesda that tried to make mods be put behind a paywall

After Witcher 3 came out, Cyberpunk 2077 happened and the general fall from grace of CDProjeckt RED

Heck in some ways this happened with Resident Evil when 4 came out or Final Fantasy when 7 came out

Going Mainstream has never been good for video games imo

And I fear something will happen with Larian Studios in the future after they get drunk on all this success and mainstream attention.
Just wow...

Diablo 4 isn't even an RPG in my book. Dungeon crawling and looting is not an RPG to me. It's like calling Borderlands an RPG. BG3 and Diablo are completely different type of games.

The difference between CDPR and Larian is that CDPR never made a good game (gameplay-wise) and Larian has. The things that made Witcher 3 good was the writing and effort put into the graphics. Outside of that, Witcher 3 is kinda ass. The combat is just wrong in the sense they made a combat system that was better at fighting humanoid enemies instead of the monsters that are the highlight of what witchers fight, then the combat was pretty bad and completely unbalanced. I still can't believe how anyone was impressed with that horrid griffon fight at E3 when Dragon's Dogma did that fight 100 times better. You can look back at my posts about Cyberpunk and I completely called it being shit from the get-go. I really don't get how any fell for Cyberpunk. You're gonna tell me a developer with no experience making a 1st-person shooter or immersive sim is going to make an open world RPG immersive sim 1st-person shooter, the DC on that deception check is too high to pass against me. Also, making something like an open world immersive sim FPS requires pretty solid AI experience, Witcher 3 enemies had like no AI and even the NPC pathing AI was pretty noticeably bad.

Larian is far above CDPR and the guy in charge knows exactly the type of games he wants to make. Nick from here interviewed the guy and he's legit great.

Er, dude. Obsidian is not a "big developer": it's a sort of medium one. Larian is a much larger development studio than Obsidian.

Pretty much none of Obsidian's games in the last 20 years have generated the sort of sales to justify the description of AAA, and if they'd been making games on AAA budgets they'd have been bankrupt many years ago (actually, they were shaky for a while). There are rumours the latest might be AAA, if only because Microsoft recently bought them and may have shunted a lot of money their way.

Secondly, I repeat, these guys are not slagging BG3 off. Exactly the opposite. Their issue is that creating something like it requires resources that most studios who do these sorts of games simply do not have. Their concern is that if BG3 causes increased expectations from the genre that developers who make those games can't meet, then the whole genre takes damage. And you know what? We play those games. We do not want the devs to go bust or give up working on them, because then we don't have games.

This comes across as the usual bullshit where a bunch of emotionally immature fanbois get all hurt because someone isn't uncritically sucking the cock of the objet d'amour that they are obsessing over, and can't even listen to reasoned commentary without spitting out their dummies.
How is Obsidian not bigger than Larian? Obsidian has been making RPGs longer than Larian. Obsidian has made KOTOR2, Neverwinter 2, Fallout New Vegas, South Park, Alpha Protocol, The Outer Worlds. How is Obsidian not more accomplished and more experienced than Larian? Are you gonna say Bioware isn't bigger than Larian too?

Studios prefer not to make games like BG3 because it's fucking hard, not because they don't have the resources. If you don't put your resources into making your game look super good and big worlds, guess where you can reallocate those resources to? You can make a game like BG3 much shorter and less content if you don't have the resources of Larian like, oh I don't know, Disco Elysium. Anyone say that BG3 makes Disco Elysium irrelevant?

You're literally just disagreeing because I said something and whatever I say must be wrong. Everyone is laughing at this, even IGN is making fun of it.

 
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Ag3ma

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How is Obsidian not bigger than Larian?
Because it has under half as many employees (unless it has expanded recently) as Larian. Employees = game-making resources.

Obsidian has been making RPGs longer than Larian.
Wrong. Larian was founded in 1996, Obsidian in 2003. Although if you consider Obsidian was a semi-successor to Black Isle and thus include the experience of key personnel at Black Isle, that would also be 1996. Incidentally, Bioware also currently has fewer employees than Larian.

You're literally just disagreeing because I said something and whatever I say must be wrong.
I'm disagreeing because you're saying stuff that is objectively wrong, as per the above.

* * *

In fact, you know what? You are demonstrating these opinions from Insomniac and Obsidian employees have some truth.

In your eagerness to jizz over BG3, just look at the way you have started shitting all over one of the best and most reliable providers of cRPGs over the last couple of decades. Without Obsidian, cRPG lovers would not have had a load of the best content produced in the last decade or two. Obsidian's reward for that? Being accused of being shit and lazy devs by people like you now that BG3 has hit the shelves.
 

sXeth

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After Skyrim became this big success it eventually resulted in the Bethesda we know today. The Bethesda that gave us Fallout 76, the Bethesda that tried to make its own app launcher, the Bethesda that tried to make mods be put behind a paywall
Is the attention span of the collective "gamer counciousness" truly so short its forgotten HORSE ARMOR
 

Dreiko

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She's not even the sexy anime-boi vampire dude (who for some reason I'm not aware of but maybe the game explains at some point why he doesn't self-immolate in the sunlight)
I believe that's due to the tadpole.


No but I rezzed Shadowheart and she had sex with me in return. So that was nice.
I read that as rizzed. Zoomer slang is infecting my brain, halp.
 
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Satinavian

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I had to look that up, and you're not wrong. ~450 across 6 locations. That feels really weird to me, because in my head they're still the plucky underdog I visited some 20 years ago, some two dozen people working in a 19th century manor in downtown Ghent. I'm also wondering if Swen Vincke is still kind of an asshole.
Size of studios change. For the longest time Larian was rather smallish but DoS2 was a huge success and most of that money funnelled into BG3.

Same thing happened with CDPR, but they were not able to adjust their internal procedures and thus fell flat with Cyberpunk.

On the flipüside there are many studios that downsize tremendously after every launch of a big project.
 

Dreiko

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Size of studios change. For the longest time Larian was rather smallish but DoS2 was a huge success and most of that money funnelled into BG3.

Same thing happened with CDPR, but they were not able to adjust their internal procedures and thus fell flat with Cyberpunk.

On the flipüside there are many studios that downsize tremendously after every launch of a big project.
I think Cyberpunk was a good game, just the performance issues were inexcusable and they shoulda scrapped the ps4 ver. Though it definitely was a step down from the witcher 3.
 

Zykon TheLich

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Remember Blackheart? As much as I like Ghostrider, they ruined his design. From this:



To This:

Not familiar with Ghost Rider in general although I did see the first Nick Cage one (assume there's been more) when it came out.
Spiky dreadlocked muscle guy to bloke with weird teeth is a bit of a downgrade.


 
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Dreiko

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I know blackheart from the older marvel fighting games, he summoned weird devil minions and threw ice and explosions. Fun char.
 

Satinavian

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I think Cyberpunk was a good game, just the performance issues were inexcusable and they shoulda scrapped the ps4 ver. Though it definitely was a step down from the witcher 3.
Yes, Cyberpunk was not actually that bad a game, but :

- They should have realized that they couldn't get it done on PS4 With proper management they would have scrapped that version or planned a seriously downgraded port
- They knew all those bugs. At least the testers and dvelopers knew them. Why was it shipped in that state anyway ? Got too much lost in communication ?
- They overpromised all the time. Particularly they advertised subsystems that were not shipped or even implemented. How did marketing and the executives not have an idea what is actually in the game ? Where they not updated on direction and scope changes ?
- Speaking of direction changes : There was a lot of complaining from developers of these being made way too late or by people who don't know what goes into doing them.
- There were reports of hierarchy uncertainties and unclear responsibilities of decision makers. That led to a lot of work for nothing and a lot of other work being forgotten.
- And there was a lot of crunch. Crunch is not normal, especially in the EU. If crunch is needed, management made a mistake. If constant crunch is needed for years, then the whole of project management has been utterly incompetent.

Now, it is still not a bad game, at least on PC and especially now after many patches. But one could hardly say that the company worked well during development. Nearly every complaint (aside from crunch) was about communication. Communication between company branches or between levels of hierarchy. That means at least middle management was not doing its job.

Those are very typical growth issues.
Larian does seem to do significantly better.
 
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Ag3ma

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I've finished the game and I have to say. The beginning is a bit of a slog until you get to ~level 5 and some options open up, the midgame is fantastic 10/10 material, and the ending goes downhill, but would be fine except that the game programming falls apart hard. Overall there's a lot of lack of polish, some of the controlling is janky, it's sometimes bad about explaining things, and is buggy as all hell.
I think this fits my feelings, too, although I've not reached the endgame. I really enjoyed exploring Grymforge, for instance.

The bulk of the game is genuinely well done (bar some clumsy camera controls and UI) but there really is a degree of poor design. Like the point where you're set up to launch an ambush. It takes you into a cutscene with some desultory options, where you launch your surprise attack and... the main bad guy says 'we're under attack!' and it goes from the cutscene into standard combat where said bad guy has the highest initative and moves first.

Did the devs not understand what an ambush is?

I know it's not huge, but it's this sort of consistent sloppiness in scripting that brings the game down from the highest standards for me.
 
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