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.
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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.