Think most people are more interested in what Larian is cooking up, the IP barely matters.
Yeah anyone apart from Larian making BG4 is basically fucked. Maybe if they wait 5-10 years and a studio with an established brand comes in, but that isn't what's going to happen.
Prior to BG3 I held BG1&2 somewhere in the top 5 games of all time. BG3 had an impossible bar to meet and they not only met it, but far surpassed it.
I'm genuinely sad at whatever BG4 releases as. It's like someone who loved Diablo 1&2 looking at Diablo 3&4. Diablo 3 was a shell of Diablo 2 and I literally just had to check if Diablo 4 was a released game. Maybe it's fun to someone, but I've completely checked out of the series.
So here's to BG4, BG:TCG, & BG:Mobile, shells of the greatness that came before them.
~~Oblivion~~ Obsidian is the only other company that can hold expectations currently
Exactly. This headline read as "Interested investors want to throw money at someone because BG3 did so well and then demand they release a half finished product so they can meet their quarterly financial date."
I think people are sort of over wotc ever since the OGL fiasco, plus milking mtg for all it's worth. This is probably a result.
You'd be surprised how many people don't know about that or think everything is fine now.
I'm in the opposite group. I don't care for Larian's games (though I wish them the best) and I was very let down when they made the latest Baldur's Gate.
Don't think people should downvote you for this opinion, especially with you even being respectful about it.
I had a good time with BG3 (though I'm less high on it than most people), but at the end of the day it's clearly a Larian-game. If you didn't like the Divinity series you probably won't enjoy BG3, and if you had hoped for a BG 1&2 feel, you would probably be a bit let down.
Not sure why you're being down voted, it's a reasonable opinion to have if you don't like their games. I feel the same about the originals. I tried them and respect them a lot, but they're just not for me.
BG3 has insane fanboys who don't accept any criticism of it. It makes it difficult to review games any more
That's not how IP holders think. Their ego ruins our fun.
I think Paizo would be a good collab. Personally I'd love to see Larian do something with Starfinder.
Idk if anyone could do half the job Larian did.
I have a feeling this will just be a cash grab to milk the IP for as much as they can.
Imagine if bg4 is a mobile game with micro transactions? Hasbro would totally do it
Is that the corpse of blizzard being piloted by Activision I hear??
Don't you guys have phones‽
Obsidian could maybe, they did a couple classic BG-style Infinity Engine games in Pillars of Eternity I & II.
...but that's a little bit like a step back/down from what we saw in BG3.
One huge advantage Larian had was years of experience making games in this genre, and I doubt many other studios have that sort of corporate knowledge. Obsidian may be the only sizable one that comes close. Maybe Beamdog too, as they are responsible for the Enhanced Editions of all the old Infinity Engine games, including some original content.
I have full faith in Tactical Adventures. Solasta is the closest translation of tabletop D&D to CRPG ever made IMO. All they need is a better than indie budget and permissions to use the full license and content instead of just the SRD.
The gameplay is good but from what I played, outside of combat, it was a bit lackluster, and rations were a pain when I played. Though it's hard not to compare it to BG3 in that regard. I did like Larian's system to interact with the environment and liquids too that made some battles more dynamic. Maybe there's more of that is Solasta than I saw too, I didn't get far, should give it another go, it has solid combat which is at least half of a good DnD game.
You need to install the unfinished business mod to really make Solasta shine. It’s… unofficially endorsed by the devs (in the sense that the UB mod discord channel is hosted on the official Solasta discord). It adds races, subclasses, and more to bring the game fully in-line with tabletop options, including multi-classing.
Besides that, while the official campaign is decent enough, some custom campaigns are incredible, like full games in and of themselves, and some take more advantage of the game engine and dialogue options than the official campaign.
To me, Baldur’s Gate 3 is an interesting experiment, but in terms of gameplay it’s just not D&D. It’s a weird relationship sim with some (very) loose D&D mechanics. It has fun moments but the game is inconsistent, buggy, and generally becomes very un-fun, especially in multiplayer.
BG3 is very much a Larian game with D&D trappings, not a D&D game just made by Larian, if that makes sense.
I put something like 50-60 hours into BG3 and just couldn’t be bothered to finish it, stalled out once in act 2, and again on a second attempt in act 1. By contrast, I’ve got over 500 hours and counting in Solasta.
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Edit - oh, and with regard to rations, stack up early as you can (at least 20) and from there you’ll gather plenty in the field map if you have someone with high survival. Alternate option would be to have a Ranger or dries with goodberry, and later on other classes get the create food spell.
Or you could just disable the food mechanic altogether, it’s your game.
BG3 being less dnd and more larion is a major win. It's the only reason it is when vaguely playable, imo. 5e is an absolute train wreck of a system.
This is hyperbole for sure. What could possibly be that bad about 5e?
Hahaha oh your poor soul you don't know what you risk conjuring up with a question like that.
I have to write this all out in a blog post so I can just link it one day.
The core mechanic of 1d20+stuff produces flat probability. Every outcome on the die is equally likely. That's ridiculous. Go throw some darts at a dart board. Do you get an equal distribution around the board? Just as many hit the floor as the bullseye? No. So the underlying math is kind of trash.
The entire game is predicated on its rest cadence. You're expected to have like 5-8 medium encounters and then take a long rest. This generates a ton of problems for pacing and balance. Chief among them, most people don't want to play that way. Polls show people typically do like one fight per rest. Welp. Now all your long rest classes are over performing and your short rest classes suck.
Don't even start with "not every encounter has to be a fight". Don't even fucking start. Most people can't consistently come up with interesting non combat encounters in DND that tax resources the same way fights do. There are no real social conflict rules, for example, as mentioned below.
But even if you do somehow manage to do the suggested amount of encounters per rest, that severely limits the pacing of the story. There are so many hacks and variants to try to fix this. Gritty realism, sanctuary resting, heroic mode. They're all bandaids on a poor foundation.
The magic system is trash. It's just fucking bad. It had no real internal consistency. Every spell is bespoke. What's the difference between a third level spell and a fourth level? Fuck if I know. Can you make your own spells? Not really. Can you be creative with spells? Ehh kind of but they tend to be very specific about what they do, with few inputs.
Also like the way magic works is boring. There's no real flavor. You say you cast the spell and check off the box, and it happens. Maybe you need a material component. That's about it. It's shallow as heck. It's also weird that rangers paladins wizards clerics arcane-tricksters all basically have magic that works the same way. You could do so much more.
The social system I would say it was trash if it existed. You meet a pack of bandits in the pass. You want to fight them. The rules have a lot to say here. Hit points, armor, saves, actions and reactions, equipment, etc. Ok wait, you want to scare them off with your words instead. Well get fucked, the book has some vague guidelines that quickly turn into "the dm decides".
There are very few decisions to make about your character. Species and class. Maybe a feat or two depending on how long you play, but those compete with ASIs, and most games don't even get to 8th level. Subclasses sometimes have a few things to pick, but sometimes you literally get zero choices.
The skill system is extremely basic and you can't really specialize unless you're a class with expertise, and even then your options are kind of limited.
Magic items also have no real internal consistency. Why is the flying broom a like uncommon item despite being extremely powerful? Who knows.
Low level combat tends to also be very "I move and attack once". Some DMs might give you bonuses for taking advantage of the environment, but that's not well defined. It could be. It's not. Also making a single attack that has a like 40% chance of doing absolutely nothing sucks.
The main strengths of DND are brand recognition, and it's shallow enough that you can't really fuck up a character. Every human fighter is basically the same mechanically, which means your idiot 10 year old brother can play. But that also means you don't really have much depth to explore.
Pretty much every other part of the game is bad, under baked, or not suited for general purpose RPG stuff.
The economy is non-existent, actual balancing is literally impossible, you can't make a character yours (reflavoring your eldritch blast doesn't count), so many rules just don't exist or are on some random designers Twitter account instead of the damn books. If you want to argue it's a simple system; it isn't, it's stupidly convoluted for how little it actually offers.
Edit: look at Pathfinder (chosen because it's the closest comparison); it actually gives DMs a rough guide to how much money a player should be expected to have at any level, a decent idea of what players should fight in an encounter (2e even tightened that math up even more), a myriad of ways to customize your character on a real mechanical level, and all the rules are easily found on the same online resource. 5e doesn't do any of that.
it's an aggressively mediocre system that's had years of a huge community polishing it to a mirror shine.
You can praise it for the community content, or go off-book like you can with any other system, but that's applicable to any system with the same community size.
Whatever you look for in it it's lacking in comparison to another system. Tactical combat? PF2e. Rules light? Worlds without number.
It's a decent middle ground of a system only because of community hard work. But that's only for the GM side. Players still need to deal with the poor character creation, unless they get a lot of support from their GM.
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Old series that has a decent following of mostly niche dedicated fans is left to sit without a new installment for many years.
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New title is announced. It's sells gang-busters and flips the community on its head.
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Corporate Executives prioritize short term profits and begin planning a quick and easy cash grab. !
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Second new installment comes out. It is a shell of the previous title with the soul sucked clean out.
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Fans are dissapointed and outside of a small niche following the game series falls into obscurity.
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Repeat.
! we are here right now
Look.. Maybe BG4 will be good. But after watching this exact cycle play out over and over again for the past decade I'm not sure how you can expect anything else.
When will the business world realize that anything business majors are given control of turns to shit. Like I know that it's not impossible for a AAA game to be good but I also know that most companies that can handle that kind of a budget are run by people who just think gamers love throwing money at anything labeled "video game", proved by so many out of touch quotes.
Like the BlizzCon "don't you have phones?" showed that Blizzard didn't even realize that their main demographic and shitty f2p phone games didn't have much overlap.
Or EA's "sense of satisfaction" was transparent when they give a paid path to skip a ridiculously tuned grind.
Or Ubisoft's "AAAA" said they hadn't even noticed that "AAA" was starting to be considered synonymous with "shit".
The funny part is that they aren't even wrong about the potential to make a lot of money from video games, it's just not by using business major tricks to extract the maximum short term gains or approaching making a video game by thinking about how to make the most money from it.
I’m good. Not really interested in supporting Hasbro after all that’s happened since BG3 released.
Let's see ~~Paul Allen's~~ Owl Cat's ~~card~~ Baldur's Gate.
Please no, i want owlcat to work on good things. Things very, very far removed from dnd.
BG2 was a huge game too, and it took 25 years for a sequel.
They're not going to pick a studio and crank out bg4 in just a couple years.
I'll be surprised if it takes less than a decade.
WOTC can put the name "Baldurs Gate 4" on whatever they want. They could make a Farmville clone in 2 months and release it as "Baldurs Gate 4" if they want. They own the copyright.
It just won't be good.
But it'll probably sell decently well.
Isn’t Wizards of the Coast scummy af?
Larian are the studio with integrity, why wouldn’t Wizards of the Coast go for the cash grab?
The problem is that Hasbro is desperately trying to make more money from WotC. But fairly recent actions indicate that they don't have players' best interests at heart. They fired all the contacts that Larian worked with. So nobody is left who has even a modicum of insight into how BG3 was done so well.
I fear several cheap cash grabs are in store for us. The first will probably be a quick and dirty DLC that will come out in a year or two.
Yeah, cranking out another entry to capitalize on BG3's success would be a terrible move. I'm so glad Hasbro/WotC are not known for making terrible moves. That would be so unlike them to trade in goodwill for short-term profits.
It took less than 2 years to release BG2 after BG1. In the meantime Bioware licensed Infinity Engine to Black Isle who released Planescape Torment and Icewind Dale one year apart.
It took Larian 6 years to develop BG3 after Divinity 2. They moved on to their new game but that engine and assets could be similarily licensed to other studios to churn out some games using similar or simplified formula.
I believe the engine is larian's
Definitely is. Try playing Divinity 2 and you will realize it's the exact same engine just with a modified ruleset to match Baldurs gate more. I actually prefer Divinity, they just have more freedom as far as setting and the ruleset than a liscensed ip owned by another company
Okay. I mean that's fine but I won't be buying shit until after it comes out and has reviews.
RIP Baldur's Gate, at least you had one final hurrah with 3
It's gonna be blizzard isn't it...
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