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this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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Baldur's Gate 3
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All things BG3!
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a story-rich, party-based RPG set in the universe of Dungeons & Dragons, where your choices shape a tale of fellowship and betrayal, survival and sacrifice, and the lure of absolute power. (Website)
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It was all fun and games with CD project red until Cyberpunk came along. Let's see how Larian handles explosive growth.
Larian have already had major hits though: Divinity Original Sin 2 is more popular on Steam than huge hits like Sea of Thieves, Hogwarts Legacy, Hollow Knight, The Forest, GTAIV, and Borderlands 3.
BG3 is already a strong indicator that Larian have a strong identity as a developer and a commitment to quality.
CDPR’s biggest issue was investors as they were pressured to get the game out to reap dividends whereas Larian are private and the owner and biggest shareholder is also the director for their games. It’s a rare thing in our industry today and, so long as Swen Vincke can keep a hold of the reigns, we can be relatively hopeful for their future.
Public trading ruins every company in every industry, not only gaming, lets hope Larian doesn't fall in that trap.
Actually, CDPR's biggest shareholders are also its owners. But they don't have a majority share.
Maybe it’s just because I wasn’t following it super closely before release, but what promises did they even make that fell through? I only ask because I think there’s also a Reddit effect of people hyping themselves up about a game to the point where the final product can’t ever live up to expectations. This is a similar feeling I had to no man’s sky. How many of these promises were just things the community decided were in the game based on speculation from trailers and interview quotes?
This isn’t to say there weren’t problems. The game was obviously buggy and needed another year of development time to fix some issues (fortunately never experienced game breaking bugs like some did). There were perks that obviously weren’t working, and it simply never should have been attempted on old gen consoles. But overall I fell in love with that game I think because I went into it with zero expectations and now I’ve put like a thousand hours in since release.
Plenty of promises weren’t kept up.
The marketing mentioned that your choice of background would basically mean an almost completely different experience. In the end you have 20mins of gameplay + some cutscenes and then all of it is mostly the same apart from some dialog options.
They hyped that the city would be vibrant and almost a sim in its own way. That you could just “live a normal life” go to the barber and interact with people. When I played most NPCs didn’t have any dialog, there was even like a brothel that you couldn’t visit. Honestly GTA San Andreas was miles ahead and it’s like a 20yo game at this point.
A lot of people like to reduce it to the bugs but BG3 is also very much a bit of a buggy mess and no one is complaining about that. The main issue is that we were sold an ocean and we realized that it has the depth of a puddle. And that you can’t fix with any amount of patches.
I honestly have no idea why people expected that much from the studio that made "horse is on the roof and the hardest part of the game is looting corpses" simulator.
Judging Witcher 3 purely from a game mechanic standpoint, 2077 actually blew my expectations out of the water. Plus the bugs were funny and the story was good.
CD:PR made way too many unrealistic promises during development. It was already obvious they'd never be able to fulfill all of them, and the bugginess etc. came on top. I really hope Larian sticks with the EA (=Early Access) model, because it protects against exactly these shenanigans. I wouldn't have bought BG3 on launch day if the EA reviews weren't as stellar.
If you're like me and wondering what was ever good about the Electronic Arts model, here it means Early Access
Good point, that's a bit confusing. I've added the whole word after the first use of the initialism :)
The main problem with Cyberpunk was the drive to release the game on older consoles. The effort consumed dev time and didn't really work even after that.
The game on release on platforms that could actually run it was great, despite a few bugs.