Why devs consider Baldur’s Gate 3 anomaly, not new standard for RPG genre
- Thread starter Era of not Yakuza
- Start date
The insecurity that breaks out from some devs on social media every time some game gets successful somehow in the wrong way or something - thinking of Elden Ring as another example - because they did their own thing and worked hard to play to their audiences instead of selling out at every opportunity for passing trends, is honestly just sort of embarrassing. Larian has earned this, it wasn't an accident. Maybe people would be praising EA too with their new Dragon Age if they were developing it in early access in tandem with the community as opposed to whatever development hell its in because no one knows what the hell to do with it.
I suppose for smaller devs I have some sympathy with them feeling like it creates unrealistic expectations but like, I'm sorry a game is good?
I suppose for smaller devs I have some sympathy with them feeling like it creates unrealistic expectations but like, I'm sorry a game is good?
I agree. Larian has taken the time and effort to do something that only they can do. Other studios should be doing their own thing too. If instead they wanna try and make a Baldur's Gate clone then yes it only makes sense that there will be a certain standard to reach.
I guess it feels like a very odd conversation to have around a game. Where the general message seems to be "Don't expect this because it might be unfair to us", or something to that effect. Ultimately the average player won't really care to do that, right or wrong. They'll make the comparison regardless. Of course I don't expect smaller studios to match the quality in terms of production values and scope, but the general level of commitment to excellence and polish should be expected. Then again, we're saying this before even playing BG3 and knowing if it lives up to the hype.
This thread sure is something. The idea that there are *tons* of developers on Larian's level or higher doesn't take into account how many of them are making cRPGs. Most of the studios that make cRPGs aren't on Larian's level, most of them are smaller, but they'll be held to the same standard anyway. Saying "Oh well no one but terminally online people would do that" is making excuses for those online people, folks developers will still have to deal with.
Oh it won't. They are going to learn from it (if it's very successful) that consumers want character sheets, and a party, and levels, and attacks of opportunity, and lots of schools of spells, and complicated rules heavy classes, and large inventories. And elves, and dragons, and bear sex.
And probably not learn anything about world consistency, about characters arc, about player agency, about meaningful player choices and making an open and dynamic game from the consequences. Especially that last part, which is the characteristic of roleplaying-games (and not sheets or dices or levels or items, all of which can be removed if necessary from a rpg).
It's already reasonably successful in early access; it will hopefully be very successful outside of it, but given the absolutely gargantuan expansion of Larian as a studio during the development of BG3 (like, increasing in staff count several times over), I don't know if it will be as profitable in relation to it's budget as Divinity OS2 was. I know that Sven is very passionate about this game on a personal level, and maybe if someone with more of a strict business brain was behind it it wouldn't have ever scoped this high to begin with.
Buuut we'll see when it comes out.
Buuut we'll see when it comes out.
It being "the new standard" doesnt have to mean that every CRPG going forward needs to do everything BG3 does. Itll serve as an inspiration for the team wants to one day achieve. They can try to hone in on one area of excellence, or sell your game at a lower cost etc.
I feel like the conversation doesn't end at CRPGs, BG3 is jarring because it looks like a AAA game but the interactivity and player reactivity (a couple reasons people enjoy RPGs in the first place) are just way way above what other AAA RPGs are offering
WRPG Studios:
Console Priority, Multiplayer Focus, NFTs, Market Consolidation = I sleep
Larian gives fans what they want = Shit just got real!!!
It looks like a AAA RPG, but I'm not gonna lie that zoomed out isometric shit is a turn-off for me as a fan of AAA WRPGs. The question becomes do you wanna take that risk to emulate what they're doing here and just hope the casual RPG fans will enjoy it as much as the core ones do?
On release day there are going to be a bunch of people that feel completely overwhelmed by character creation alone, and I've experienced the same sort of thing with other genres, but if you actually make an effort to learn and understand what the game is doing you might find that you actually love it.
I hope BG3 is that for a lot of people.
Xalavier makes a lot of great points in that thread and in the follow-up videos. I honestly don't know if any other studio in the world could make a CRPG of the scope and quality of Baldur's Gate 3 and make a profit (or not flat-out bankrupt their studio if not EA or Activision Blizzard). CRPGs just do not sell that well, especially compared to action RPGs like Skyrim or The Witcher 3.
OP
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I understood the tweets as compliments to the game and the devs involved, not passive-agressive attacks
To be fair the devs are probably speaking to the ones who will harass them in the future
To be fair the devs are probably speaking to the ones who will harass them in the future
Wow, you know you've made a great game when other devs are like "guys, it's not reasonable to expect us to make games this good"! Congrats Larian
Yeah I am baffled as to the amount of people trying to imply these are attacks on Larian.
Yea BG3 is one of the most ambitious games coming out this year. And possibly won't be surpassed genre wise for a long while. It took them six years and a metric fuckton of people to make the game.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2gVLzWpw_k
It wasn't a "Don't throw a ton of money at it or just have good writing" situation. You got the whole package
-Every moment of the game making it apparent that it was at the time the most expensive media project ever produced in Poland
-incredible writing
-a super huge focus on making the player feel like they have agency
The Witcher 3's DOES have tons of expensive cinematics. There's a ton of custom animation during the conversations which is why it became a new standard and made games liek Horizon Zero Dawn come off as stiff in comparison. And for the type of game that it is there is a ton of alternate scenes/outcomes that exist in the game. It's an incredibly well thought out game which is how it earned its status as one of the greatest games ever made.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2gVLzWpw_k
It wasn't a "Don't throw a ton of money at it or just have good writing" situation. You got the whole package
-Every moment of the game making it apparent that it was at the time the most expensive media project ever produced in Poland
-incredible writing
-a super huge focus on making the player feel like they have agency
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These are still reasons from a fan of the series to be upset, which are reasonable but not really that of a shareholder.
Good games are good games.
BattleBit remastered is thriving in a genre that is generally defined by billion dollar budget insanity.
Valheim punched 10 leagues above its weight and did really, really well.
Gamers might "start expecting things", but just make a good game, and gamers will love it.
BattleBit remastered is thriving in a genre that is generally defined by billion dollar budget insanity.
Valheim punched 10 leagues above its weight and did really, really well.
Gamers might "start expecting things", but just make a good game, and gamers will love it.
Diablo 4 is Blizzard's fastest selling game ever. Making the game isometric, even on a AAA budget, is not a risk.
Never go full gamer™. Because the venn diagram between people saying this should be the standard and the peopel who'd complain about games taking too long to make is a circle.
If anything games should cost more than what the current standard for "full price" is. And technically they do when you factor in post launch support. A game that can be played for 100-200 hours and then replayed in order to get an entirely new experience over that amount of time made in 2023 should most likely not cost as much as the full price standard set during the 360/PS3 era. Let alone establishing a standard when it's clearly an anomaly.
I think it's a bit complex. I wouldn't say top down camera makes your game automatically a huge gamble, but I would say there are audience expectations for certain genres. If the next Last of Us was a first person only game you'd probably see rioting in the streets, even though first person perspectives are extremely common and popular in gaming. In the past even quite successful franchises like Dragon Age shied away from top down cameras over time in lieu of more cinematic angles and so on for the console releases. Were they mistaken to do so? Maybe. I would also say that despite both being "RPGs" I don't think you could at all assume an audience match between Diablo 3/4 and Baldur's Gate 3, they're radically different types of games. Some people will like both but only in the same way that some people love Call of Duty and Mario at the same time. They're giving you borderline unrelated game experiences.
A little more philosophically, I don't think you could have jumped straight to Bloodborne or Elden Ring without first releasing the games that built up the audience and culture around that. And here, I don't think BG3 is a game anybody would have dared attempt make without first seeing an increasingly successful series of games built up by Larian from D:OS, to D:OS2, and now this. Being attached to D&D helps given it's immense popularity over the last 5 years, boosting production values helps (but comes with equal amounts of risk if you calculated wrong!). Arguably BG3 might be a break out title for this type of game targeting the broader console RPG audience at this scale of budget.
I do think that the project is risky, not necessarily because of the perspective of course. I think that's a maybe... small risk, compared to the very big risk of the fact that they've got several hundred staff for half a decade or more on this project.
I think Bloodborne and Elden Ring are pretty perfect comparisons because although there was already an established fanbase for those kinds of games from that studio they also simultaneously brought in a ton of new fans who were experiencing that type of game for the first time.
I mean, that is nothing new. The 3D Zelda games, especially Ocarina of Time, set new standards in 3D movement and interaction, parts of which are used even today (especially camera lock-on), but very rarely did anyone even attempt to make a full 3D action adventure game on a scope as these games. And these who attempt it, like Beyond Good and Evil, Legend of Kay and Sphinx and the cursed Mummy, these are typically shorter games with a more limited inventory.
Idk all I'm saying is that claiming a game should be priced based on the cost of production is just overly parochial and simplistic a view of how the world works. I wouldn't really draw a distinction between 'cost of making' and 'cost of production', certainly no gamer is either. Labor costs for games have gone up, but labor might make up a smaller portion of total budget, so how do you want to index that? Should the price rise? Should a publisher be allowed to have a larger margin? What's the morally acceptable opinc margin for a publisher?
We had a thread on this forum back when Soul Hackers 2 came out that argued that the game should be like $30 because the game probably cost $1m to make. That's the sort of bs that these devs are trying to preempt against. That perhaps, god forbid, there might be a $60 game that comes out in the future that doesn't have 17000 endings and let let you fuck a man disguised as a bear. Maybe the ULC for the labor for that game was more expensive when translated into dollars, maybe labor regulations require certain standards and additional departments for a company that is a certain size. Maybe the dev cycle was more protracted because more bespoke tools needed to be made but that result is invisible to the end consumer. Maybe the dev cycle was abysmal and they went over budget for a worse product. Should the product still be indexed to labor costs? For certain games if you really indexed everything to costs + a fixed margin, some games produced in certain ways might be straight up $100 dollars or more, and even then ignores implementational challenges like sensitivity to what your reference price is. E.g. games were $60 in the PS3 era, should they be $120 now?
Literally no gamer is going to understand this. No twitter fucko is gonna be like, ah I can see, probably the marketing budget was higher for this game, and that was important and makes sense because naturally the publisher needs to reach the target demo, so the marketing budget is inescapable because otherwise the project might not be economically viable. Gamers (like capital G Gamers), by and large, are awful awful people that lack empathy and nuance in regard to the products they consume.
Like idk, I'm inclined to believe devs. If so many of them are saying these kinds of things, I'm sure as fuck not gonna be like "work harder and prove your value" which is what a lot of the rhetoric ITT is verging on. The pushback is to avoid and preempt lazy devs rhetoric. I can't imagine any dev rolled out of bed and thought, knowing how the internet worked, "oh shit, BG3 looks fire, better tell people to go easy on me". I just genuinely don't believe that is the intent behind any of them. The tweets in the article in the OP are some of the most milquetoast shit imaginable, and some of them are talking about all costs and resources that go into development in general.
Any steam game you can go to the discussions and you'll find some fuckwit saying "why pay $60 for this?!? Better games are cheaper. Do better devs!" or the like. This is who they're speaking to. Not the intelligentsia. Like fuck, there's literally a post on this page basically doing exactly this.
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In an ideal world it "could" become the new standard.
But since we live in a capitalistic hellscape where money rules everything, there's no fucking way a regular game company will ever let a studio have the fundings to do anything close. Only really special cases and crowdfunding could let such ambitious stuff be attempted. Sadly.
So yeah, i never expected this could become a standard. (but i'd like to)
But since we live in a capitalistic hellscape where money rules everything, there's no fucking way a regular game company will ever let a studio have the fundings to do anything close. Only really special cases and crowdfunding could let such ambitious stuff be attempted. Sadly.
So yeah, i never expected this could become a standard. (but i'd like to)
I see a lot of people not refuting anything the dev thread said btw. Which makes me wonder how many people read the tweet thread cause, there wasn't a single lie. And there's even a followup video that directly refutes the concerns raised ITT.
View: https://www.tiktok.com/@writnelson/video/7255876794841238830
View: https://www.tiktok.com/@writnelson/video/7255876794841238830
Well, what I'm trying to get at really is that I think even as late as BB you could have had a serious debate with somebody about whether making a game in the same style with a much larger budget and an intent to sell 20+ million would be practical or possible. At that time you might have seen that the peak of their sales were somewhere in the 5-6 million range, and you might have been met by comments like - "well, they've hit about as high as they can go, because only so many people want really hard games", or similar. "Oh, this is popular for what it is, but it can never be a Skyrim type experience". Or maybe they'd express skepticism about ideas for "going bigger" - like that if you took it open world it would ruin what made it good, so people wouldn't like it, and so on.
I can definitely understand why the devs in the OP are worried that people will start expecting everybody to "go big" in the CRPG space. It's not even proven yet if BG3 will pay off commercially - I'm hopeful it will of course. I know Sawyer in particular already struggled with some of this stuff in Pillars 2, where they had a budget increase to compete with Larian's full voice acting (something they said was very painful but they believed was necessary). Even if it isn't fair, it can certainly make being a smaller guy in a certain space a lot tougher. Caveat 2 is of course that we don't yet know if everyone will start shitting on smaller games in the subgenre as a result, although the fear is there.
Breath of the Wild is a very interesting, and funny example. Because the main thing it does and shame other games with, at least from the discourse I have seen from gamers and industry people and games media, is its open world. Similar to Elden Ring, how it creates a real sense and joy of pure exploration. Which contrast to Ubisoft collectathon, and almost all other AAA (and many AA and indies) games.
And I say those two games are funny in that way, because that what we old farts customers of the crpg genre, have been asking for and talking about and demonstrating the superiority of, for many, many years. That was the crux of the the critique going from Morrowind to Oblivion then to Skyrim. These developers killed the exploration, and the marvel and joy, sense of wonder and trepidation of wonder, and engagement that goes with it. They killed it with their magical gps, and quest markers, and methods of fast travel, and so on.
That sense of "modern exploration" (as in designed with restraint, care, attention to details, depth of thought, giving a emotion of exploration and being intrinsically rewarding) is not a Breath of the Wild, or Elden Ring, thing. Morrowind did it. Ultima did it extensively (albeit with much less immersive graphics and camera). Fallout (talking about 1 & 2, of course) did it in their own way. Arcanum did it. Hell even outside the genre, Elite did it in the early 80s. Even in a more guided and limited way, Freelancer did it. Of course not to mention the games that goes hard on it, like Arma.
But it was killed by AAA for a host of reasons, one big seminal one was the console market... publishers having zero trust in the intelligence of their customers, and the skill of their gamedevs to adapt exploration to a more distant TV and a shitty gamepad.
No it's not. I said BG3, if as good as it is presumed (big if, but we'll see), should absolutely raise the standard of design quality for the crpg genre (not the base level of content, but quality of design and attention to details). And I never complain about games taking too long to make, in fact I often publicly say the opposite, and support announced delays.
Apart from joke productions, like Duke Nukem or Skulls&Bones, the only way I can think of to not support production delays is when the team is crunched by its management, and months of delays will just mean months of crunch turning into a death march (which on top of everything else, very rarely lead to a great game).
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Kinda? It was approximately the peak of the millenial PC RPG in popularity but when it came time to move forward basically everybody transitioned to 3d and the type of game it belonged to went largely extinct until the kickstarter reboots. When they came back, they were very modestly budgeted because nobody was investing major captial into those experiences out of fear nobody wanted them.
I mean the overall topic of the dev's thread is about how games like that are a huge gamble just by virtue of the part where if they fail that could have drastic consequences for the studios involved. Elden Ring's level of success was not predicted at all, like they expected revenue and to make a profit, but not for it to blow up the way it did. Similarly I expect BG3 to be one of those moments.
Skyrim would not have been such a massive success if it "failed" at making the player feel a sense of exploration, sense of wonder, or joy. It just approached that differently than older games. Even to this day it maintains its status as one of the most influential games of the generation it was made in. Which yea, comes back to BOTW, wherein the devs played it to see how a game can elicit the feelings they wanted their game to have and then, as Skyrim did with the games that inspired it, did things differently.
That's how genres evolve with the times. Even BG3 is an example of a genre title evolving with the times because it's approach to the sheer amount of story that can be engaged with, as well as the presentation is indicative of things people want in a modern title.
I don't understand the point of this discussion at all. They spent a ton of money and time and managed to make something great? Okay? Other companies don't manage to do this sometimes and it has consequences? Okay?
Waste of time and space. I don't even know what there is to engage with here other than concern and insecurity.
I watched this. Yes, games are a huge risk. Baldur's Gate 3 maybe paid off. They worked for decades building up their studio, etc. So? This should be seen a a success story about a new classic, not a moment of concern for other people/games who aren't Baldur's Gate 3.
Really weird.
Waste of time and space. I don't even know what there is to engage with here other than concern and insecurity.
I watched this. Yes, games are a huge risk. Baldur's Gate 3 maybe paid off. They worked for decades building up their studio, etc. So? This should be seen a a success story about a new classic, not a moment of concern for other people/games who aren't Baldur's Gate 3.
Really weird.
They're concerned about bad discourse derived from unrealistic expectations. They're not saying that it's a bad thing that BG3 is poppin off, they're just pointing out the obvious fact that it is in and of itself an anomaly in the same way that something like RDR2 or The Witcher 3 is an anomaly. Like it's amazing that such games exist, but it's important to note the factors that led to the reasons why and how.
I don't think it's supposed to be a standard, but the fact that even people who work at huge studios are trying to lower expectations is...well, very sad, in a way.
Nobody asks small or medium size studios to pull off Baldur's Gate 3. However, people aren't being too unfair if they ask more from Bethesda, Ubisoft and company.
Why? Because large publishers and their developers can, in fact, afford to take risks. Whether they're properly planned or if the scope is realistic, that's another issue.
Nobody asks small or medium size studios to pull off Baldur's Gate 3. However, people aren't being too unfair if they ask more from Bethesda, Ubisoft and company.
Why? Because large publishers and their developers can, in fact, afford to take risks. Whether they're properly planned or if the scope is realistic, that's another issue.
I wonder if this purely preemptive or if they are already getting questioned by execs and stakeholders (or even play testers) around "why does it not look like Baldurs Gate 3 yet".
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You're speaking anecdotally but "games are taking too long to make" is one of the most common complaints on this forum and in the gaming community. Hell we JUST had a thread about Wonder Woman no having any gameplay trailers yet.
BGS3 is by no means an effort made by a small studio. It's 100% a AAA game and arguably more of the more expensive ones when you look at the logistics.
What Larian is doing here is quite the achievement. It's fair to not expect this of other crpg devs but I hope they take inspiration from part of things that BG3 does well, as I assume they do.
When I read a senior designer at Diablo 4 is saying it though, I think Blizzard is precisely the kind of dev in a spot to make a huge and critically acclaimed game. Blizzard could aspire to make something akin to Baldur's Gate 3.
When I read a senior designer at Diablo 4 is saying it though, I think Blizzard is precisely the kind of dev in a spot to make a huge and critically acclaimed game. Blizzard could aspire to make something akin to Baldur's Gate 3.