Discourse might be a total waste of time but it does make for some spicy podcastin'. Support Inside Games! Patreon: / insidegamesyt RU-vid Membership: / @insidegames
A CRPG dominating the charts. A game dev company actually delivering a finished game without microtransactions. Lawrence and Bruce uploading an hour-long video. Nature is healing.
"Finished" is a strong word. I love it, but it's buggy. I can forgive that, because it's a fantastic experience nonetheless, but let's not be rosey-eyed.
@@HiIThinkImReal Agreed, and I'm a Larian "fanboy". This happened in DoS2 as well where the final acts were very unpolished and buggy as hell, though to their credit they always patch them up tremendously and the games come out better than they started on the other side. I'm super excited for the BG3 Definitive edition.
When people say "this is how you make an RPG" they're not comparing it to some small AA studio putting out buggy bespoke games. They're comparing it to Assassins Creed, Starfield, Horizon. AAA games from larger studios with bigger budgets that still come out as railroading piles of homoginate built explicitly to waste your time.
And the funny thing is that larian studios was just an AA studio when they started BG3... I can't even imagine how they were able to pull this off, they had no funding, they have to pay wotc for the D&D and baldur's gate branding and it was in development for 6 years... If an AA studio was able to pull it off, you would think it's peanuts for a company like blizzard, but apparently not
Why are you implying that both Starfield and Horizon are ""railroading piles of homoginate""?? Starfield has not even come out yet, and Horizon is awesome. Wtf is wrong with you people...
Starfield is still going to sell more than BG3 and everyone's going to laugh at how buggy and unplayable it is because oh gosh, that Bethesda is just so quirky and incompetent tee hee.
They all have the budget. The difference is, instead of fat bonuses for bosses, they spent that money on voice actors. The worst thing you can do is make excuses for these greedy AAA developers. No cash shop, no micro transactions. AAA developers are making excuses about budget and Larian have shut down every argument.
Pretty sure Sven paid himself fairly well. Not AAA studio CEO salaries but pretty sure he's well paid for his work. The difference with Larian from a financial standpoint is that it's a private company. The CEO and his wife are the majority owners. This means no need to keep shareholders happy with the business's ongoing income stream from live service sales. They could run at a huge loss for years before reaping the profits in a very large way after 6 years of development, and the only people the CEO had to convince were his employees and his wife.
And PLENTY of big studios with time and money spend 3, 5, 7 + years and having it flop on release. I was personally upset by KSP2 keeping our hopes up for so long, then delay another 3 years only to come out how it did. So you're right. Don't excuse their bad behaviour. This is what a game could look like with competent leadership that isn't designing the game to be a cash extractor first.
I feel like the "everyone should do this" is an argument reserved for those devs and publishers that COULD take their time to make a banging work. When people write "why dont other devs do it like that" I read it as "why dont activison, ubisoft and EA allow their devs to do it like that"
Nobody was asking indie devs to match what Larian did. We're questioning why companies WAAY bigger than Larian are making toilet trash. Overwatch 2, Redfall, Forspoken, Diablo 4 ( yes, im including this), all came out this year, developed by AAA studios. Why are they making garbage?
Because they are money driven. Not customer driven. You can hate Amazon and Jeff Bezos but I can see the parallel in their model of being incredibly customer focused business models. They show if you take care of your customers first the money will flow. Most of the big "AAA" publishers have their priorities bassackwards.
Larian's early access is different from every other early access. Larian's early access, until full release keeps the majority of the game story locked behind the full release, including many aspects of Act 1. Other games' early access ends up slowly morphing into a full release until it feels like the studio arbitrarily stamps their seal of approval and releases the 1.0 version.
I’m pretty sure Swen was just good at managing the inflow they had with the Divinity games. Instead of giving himself massive paychecks, he actually invested in Larian’s future, and it payed off. Maybe because he owns the company? Maybe he’s not in a position to get millions of dollars whether he gets it through bonuses after a win or “golden parachutes” after he completely fails.
Whats funny is that Baldurs Gate III was announced so long ago, that they said it would ship on the Stadia LOL, also have to disagree with the "no one liked Witcher 3 when it came out" narrative, I quite literally built my own pc just to play witcher 3 in summer of 2015, I might be the minority but there are dozens of us!
This is just based on my assumption but i think Larian studio made enough money/funds with their Divinity Original sins series. The first one was a sleeper hit but second one was massively popular. Not to mentioned that they later released both games on console after the PC success.
Larian Released an opening weekend stats sheet and it inspired me to do some clown math like you guys Here are some facts from Larian Studios: Players spent a combined 88 years in character creation nearly 10% of players spent at least 1 hour in character creation the game sold around 2.5 million copies in early access Using clown logic and these 3 facts we can guess how many copies the game has sold. Some assumptions we'll be making: 100% of all early access sales will only contribute 5 minutes each to the total character creation time because early access players will be more familiar with the game and thus make their character faster. for the remaining players 10% will have spent exactly 60 minutes to create their character and 90% will have spent 30 minutes to create their character. every player will have only created one character. each sale is a unique player. Clown math begins: 88 years = 46,252,800 minutes (not accounting for leap years but that doesn't really matter because we are already deep in clown math territory going by our assumptions above). 2.5 million confirmed players spend 5 minutes each = 12,500,000 minutes Remaining minutes = 46,252,800 - 12,500,000 = 33,752,800 minutes 10% of remaining players spent 60 minutes each = 0.1x * 60 90% of remaining players spent 30 minutes each = 0.9x * 30 clown equation: (0.1x * 60) + (0.9x * 30) = 33,752,800 where x is the number of copies sold after official launch 6x + 27x = 33,752,800 33x = 33,753,800 x = 33,753,800 / 33 x = 1,022,842 (rounded to the nearest integer) million copies sold after launch total sales = 1,022,842 + 2,500,000 = 3,522,842 million So there you have it. The game has sold 3.5 mil copies so far which is a completely accurate and correct guess🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡
For me I wouldn't normally think an early access game should be eligible for goty because it's usually the whole game in early access. BG3 only had the 1st act in early access and when it fully launched it added 40 to 50 more hours of content and changed 35 to 40% of act 1. I think that is why people are "ignoring" the early access part because it didn't feel like a typical early access game.
What I would really love to see is if you have a situation where a huge studio like CD Projekt runs out of funds or gets pressure to push a game out, I would love to see them NOT just release the game and pretend like everything is fine to trick people into buying it. Instead, I would want them to just honestly tell us that the game isn’t ready, but they need more runs to finish it, so they are going to release it in early access, and anyone who wants to buy the game in its current state can help with its development and refinement. This is honest, it will help finance the game, and it still gives a gesture of good faith to gamers because they will see all the work the dev team has done so far.
they didn't start off with 400 staff, they worked up to that number over time as they needed more people. They also nearly went bankrupt a few times. Nobody wants every game to be like BG3, everyone wants the primary goal to be "making a good game", and not "making a profitable game" as the primary goal. Just try to make a good, feature complete game and trust that will generate profit.
For myself the thing I'm happiest about is that BG3 is offline, and put opposite the last AAA game I played, Diablo 4, that is such a nice relief. Noe wait times to play, no getting kicked off during a boss and having to google some obscure error code then have the game tell me my character doesn't have permission to play right now. And I can Flame Strike the ever living shit out of a wonderful variety of things.
Im usually so tired of the same type of discourse in this industry, but MAN you guys make so many incredible points about the reallity of video games. Gosh, i LOVE it.
I think we're seeing the next/current gen Crpg equivalent of the likes of Mass Effect, The Witcher 3, etc where there's a high level of quality in terms of player agency and the quality and quantity of what you get when you buy an rpg game.
Larian didn’t take any investment money. They took the profits from Divinity 1&2, reinvested it into BG3, and then they sold 2.5 million copies in the BG3 early access period. They didn’t have 400 employees over the whole 6 year development cycle. They expanded as time went on, but they started BG3 development with around 100 employees. I’d imagine they definitely recouped the investment by now.
Can we all just agree that yes, it is unrealistic for all games to have this much dev time AND still push for a higher standard of games without micro transactions trying to milk the player everywhere? I really dislike how the whole discourse has been centered on the "unrealistic" expectations rather than what can be done better.
i take issue with the witcher 3 being disliked at launch, i got it a few days after launch because there was so much buzz saying how good it was, by the time hearts of stone, the fist dlc launched it was a phenomenon
So BG3 got announced at the same time as Stadia and then Stadia died before launch. Anyone think maybe this was possible due to a Google cash injection that they never had to deliver on?
the CEO of Larian said they'd expected about 100,000 concurrent players for launch weekend - so at 800,000 I'm pretty sure they've well exceed their break even
Larian funded BG3 with early access and the money they made with DOS2. DOS 1 and 2 were funded with kickstarter. There's 2 "documentaries" showing in details how they became the Larian we know today.
Actually there are fantastic CRPGs that are comparable in terms of writing, story, audit design. Visuals and voice acting etc might not be up to BG 3 standards, but they're still fantastic. DOS 2 Pillars of eternity 2 PAthfinder : WOTR are all goated CRPGs
I've lost interest in most of AAA space and I wholly expect execs to learn the wrong lessons. But I am very curious how other smaller devs will consider prolonged self-published projects. We've got a growing list of well made indies with longer dev timelines and I think enthusiast players are willing to be far more patient for projects like Silksong. I'd personally love to see studios develop towards these grand visions. In a vaccume it seems easy, develop skills, foster a community, build up that war chest with growing projects and then hunker down for the opus. But of course reality gets a vote and I'm sure there's a million failures for every BG3.
16:55 I had to pause the vid here because Bruce is saying "we're making a lot of people angry saying this..." and Bruce maybe you are but personally, I came here for that HARDCORE gamer news! And I honestly wanna know if something like this is even feasible again. I'm so use to the $60 CD's for N64 Cartridges or PS2 discs back in the day and how companies have managed to keep that price for the most part or less due to sales. People have to realize companies NEED to make money somehow or else how the hell are they gonna make great games/ care for their employees? A lot of consumers are trending to just vote with their wallets now and it's because it's the only way these companies actually listen to consumers anymore. It's a shame but I hope companies can find a way to keep this standard for the future.
I’m pretty good at accepting that some games are good at this and others are good at that, but BG3 is making me reevaluate some of my favorites…Every BioWare game is suffering from the comparisons.
AAA companies with double/triple/quadruple the amount of staff should be able to make games of this standard. Imagine if COD or Pokemon got 1/3 the effort BG3 did.
The heartbreaker was Kerbal Space Program 2. Took an extra 3 year delay and still shit the bed. It's not all about time - it's about vision and leadership as well. And as many Fromsoft game show us, some passion from the top instead of only 'MAKE US ALL THE MONAY FIRST!" from the top.
No clown math required! Larian announced BG3 had sold 2.5 million copies while in early access, so that's not counting 1.0 launch sales. To put that into perspective, the last big indie game I can think of that was in early access for years and didn't brake huge until it hit 1.0 was Hades...which took two years to break a million copies sold...and that's in a way more popular and newcomer friendly genre. That's pretty huge not just for a CRPG, but an indie CRPG and considering Divinity Original Sin 2 sold 7.5 Million copies so I could absolutely see BG3 hitting 10mil when it's all said and done.
I don't get what you mean when you say "400 employees for 6 years, how many other studios have that kind of budget?". That's a small budget for a AAA game, and most triple AAA studios have way more than that. For comparison, Diablo 4 had 9,100 employees for 6 years, and yet they still delivered a much smaller overall game. The internet is right on this one. We absolutely expect games of this magnitude for AAA studios that have 5-10x the budget that Larian had. No one expects this type of game from indie studios. The pushback is against the AAA devs from much larger studios who are jumping on the "we can't expect this as the standard" bandwagon.
Grounded and Sea of Thieves basically in EA on Steam constantly being updated until becoming feature rich games. What BG3 did is nothing new or original. What is different is the critical reception on actual release that as much as some try to downplay separates it from the rest of the pack. It's okay to give credit where credit is due instead of trying to downplay its accomplishment in some backhanded defense of actual triple A publisher and dev studios. Definitely more in favor of a bit more chastising of the gaming industry instead of tempering Larian's possibly beneficial effect on the industry as a whole.
I dunno, Bruce. I think you should experience Planescape Torment. You're right, on a technical and gameplay comfort level it's not going to be as good. The story, world, conversations, writing, are absolutely fucking amazing!
Buy game -> get good experience. I dont give a flying fuck about the logistics of it. If its bad then most likely company making it is dysfunctional. For example Bethesda was on trajectory of badly made games since morrowind, hell could argue it was Redguard. People gave them a pass one too many times. Bioware just made wrong choices along the way, but they actually made original work. Just stop buying slop and repeat offenders go away.
Sounds like these guys care more about the 'money sentiment' rather than the 'good product' sentiment. One thing to remember is that all poor products (including games) will become forgettable and therefore will be unused. So really, what we are asking here is are you a cheap sellout or someone who wants to improve life and experience via a quality product (games included). An example of this is Diablo 4 (Poor with no longevity) and Larians Baldurs Gate (Rich with high future use potential).
We don't want a Baulder's Gate 3 level of game everytime from developers. We just want worthwhile experiences that aren't just designed to waste our time or drain our wallets. Don't care if your game is 10 hours or 1,000 hours, just make it run well and give me some fun content at launch and I'll be happy.
Lol, Bethesda can absolutely develop a game for 3 years, 4 or 5 for that matter. Microsoft won't allow them because it's all about shareholder value, minimize cost and maximize profit; but not because they can't. Give me a break
I feel like you guys are missing the point at the beginning. I think that most people don’t want every game to be a crpg. Take Diablo 4 for example I would be perfectly happy with it if they only patch bug fixes once or twice a month and only do balancing changes once per season. Instead they are balancing the game every two weeks killing builds people spend time to farm for. As a player I feel like blizzard does not respect my time spent in game. On top of this the way they try to monazite everything after people already paid $80+ for the game and the toxic community to bashes people for not liking the changes made. What I’m saying is that we just want studios to respect the paying customers time and money and not treat us like cash cows in a concentration farm so CEOs like Bobby Kotick can get another private jet.
Of course we as gamer/customer wont expect every and each game to be as big as BG3, what we trully want that any devs could take a lesson from BG3 is giving complete full experience out of a game like the old day, no feeling of artificial restriction because somehow the game design need to incorporate Microtransaction,battlepass or season pass in it. Deep down We knew it as a gamer that there is something lack in each games after microtran,battle pass or season pass fused inside it, we just cant say it because we didn't have point of comparison when all AAA doing the same thing. Then BG3 come out ita become an aha moment and just open our eye that complete uncompromised game design to satisfied player can actually be made when the money pinching design are taking out of the equatiom like what BG3 did. Make ane game in any scope you want ,hey developer. Just give us full fat complete experience out of it that uncompromised with publisher mandated game design to squeeze every penny out of our wallet...
I see the success of BG3 more as an attack on publishers rather than AAA studios. Larian had to take a major gamble 20 years ago by remaining independent after they got shafted by publishers, and thank God it worked out for them, but it was at points a cointoss. But also a gamble other studios could have made but didn't, so yes Larian has a head start on a lot of those. The problem I see is that if Divinity Original Sin wasn't a (niche) success, this wouldn't have happened. And when you try new things, some will fail and at this point neither AAA or Larian and studios like larian are in a position where they can fail while trying new things. AAA studios can't try new things because they're beholden to their shareholders, who don't allow studios to take risks. And smaller studios can't afford to take risks and fail. Larian makes games somewhat in an old school manner where they use the money of previous projects to (partly) fund new projects. While the AAA industry gets investors who get money from investors who want their money back. When the AAA industry is run that way you simply can't make games as good as they possibly can be, you make games as good as they possibly can be as long as dev time doesn't eat away at the profits.
@@Justjoshinh Cool trick, selling 2.5 million Early Access copies at full price while no one was watching. Larian has been making games since 1996, they made only one game that was less than stellar and that one they fixed as soon as they had the money to turn the lights back on. Not to sound belittling but your radar is a dud.
All these big game companies take their time with their major IP’s 😅 wth they talking about, this is not FIFA or NBA 2k or AC..the Witcher, gta5, etc took a long time to come out but these guys are actin like it wasn’t
I don't think its the fact that players want every game to be exactly like BG3. I think its more we all want more Feature complete games with no Micro-transactions or Macro-transactions. It is their phiolosphy on how to treat their projects and customers.
These games companies are making more money and charging more than ever before. We pay 70 to 100 dollars for games that literally don’t work at launch with little to no way to get refunds on consoles. Having early access to test your games out should be standard
I appreciate the comment about cost of development but there’s no way that the average cost per employee is $100k. Average dev salary in Europe is probably closer to $50,000. They also didn’t have 450 employees at the beginning of development, most of the growth is in cinematics team which would be in the final half of development. So dev costs probably more like 12-15m per year. Break even comfortably about 2m units on that basis after factoring other non staff costs and steam share which based on concurrent users has probably already been met. Edit; Larian previously confirmed they’d sold 2.5m copies in early access alone
the way I am playing BG3 is trying to pick all of the options that might break the story. surprisingly it allows you to do everything I could think of so far. nearly all of the neutral people in my game are either dead or really dislike me and it is the most fun I have had with a game in a while.
Oh yeah, even basic reactivity is insane. I saw someone kill astarion and then resurrect him before recruiting him and he had a comment for it, AND it even changed based on whether he saw you or not (i.e. you enter a combat with him and he knows it's you versus you sneak attack him and kill him). The game is wild in how it responds to what you do.
Nice chat :D I am quite astonished that a lot of people play BG3 who never played a ttrpg :D Perhaps this will bring new people to the table and the whole culture (me playing and DMing for over 30 years now is still hoping for fresh blood :D). Because when somebody asks me (I finished early access a few times before now starting fresh with the full version) "Hey, how is BG3?" and most of my mates (this includes all genders) are all ttrpg veterans and regular ttrpg players. different systems, from Call of Cthulhu to homebrew to others, I answer "It's a perfect digital ttrpg and DnD campaign, nothing more, nothing less, so it is perfect and great." Even my wife, who does not like CRPGs, although she is an avid ttrpg player for 30 years and plays twice a week a classic dice driven ttrpg, too and also did a lot of LARPing and similar rpg stuff, starts to get interested. I think a lot of people are missing an important point: difference in culture. A European studio like Larian has totally different values. It is not primarily about business. "Turbo capitalism" is nothing that is that popular in Europe. And this is a good foundation for a good game that shows love towards roleplaying, storytelling and the whole ttrpg culture in general. Swen has dedicated his life to this culture and there were a lot of almost desastrous events along the road, eg the LMK disaster where Larian developed at one point a game for/with the biggest German ttrpg DSA "Das schwarze Auge" which was never published. But from the ashes of the codes rose the first Divinity. They have connections to the ttrpg scene for 1/4 of a century. Interestingly DSA shares a common history with DND when it was started in 1984 by the people who translated the first DnD edition in German and later became the most played ttrpg game with around 50% market share. If you do something for money, or even worse, for your shareholders or management boni, it won't have heart. It will lack love and dedication. It will be a shallow money grab, nothing more. If you want to to something outstanding for the scene, the players, the culture the chances are higher that small teams will be successful. And if they make tons of money, so mote it be. And btw people in the industry earn a lot less in Europe compared to the USA. Cause they do not need that much money. University is free (yepp, not a dime), healthcare is free, the pension scheme is organized by the states, you do not need to save a lot of money. You can live with less money pretty good. In the USA I would earn easily over 100k and more, compared to 70k here in Europe for a "normal IT guy". But I have a lot of benefits of a social system that makes life much easier and less expensive. Excuse my bad English, not my native tongue. Cheers from Germany, Frank
Honestly, I would sayd any AAA-studio can do it, and kinda does it in terms of "time". Every each one of them are on 5-6 years cycle. As for Early Access, which sold 2mil copies, or 2,5mil (full 60 for the copy), yes it's just the EA. It is THE funding, for self-publishing company, alongside previous sales of DOS2 (7,5mil copies sold overall made by a team of 100+ people). Any AAA has much more money, much much more. And it's not like they had 400 from the start, they grew 4x (from 150) just to make this particular game. Yes, people gave their feedback, said what they wanted, etc. What stops any other AAA doing this, why don't they have time, recourse, etc? Is it only "publishers problem"?
BG3 is going to be one of those games that I recognize is a masterpiece that just isn't for me. I have no real history with Larian, but a lot of history with the original Baldur's Gate games and a number of the "isometric revival" games from the last 10-15 years or so (with the standout for me being Owlcat's Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous), and BG3 really is just a different sort of game from those, and the ways it's different just aren't really for me But I'm glad it's doing well. Its success is showing that there's a real appetite for deep RPG experiences, and there's no microtransactions or live service stuff going on here. Hopefully its success bodes well for Bioware's upcoming Dragon Age Dreadwolf, which will likely be much more to my tastes
The studio who's last game (Divinity Original Sin 2) only had an 11.5% completion rate...is fixing the industry. What a load of crap. They took your money before you could play it and they don't care that 90% of people won't finish it. Deeply anti consumer
Oh you are such fun. Small indie manages to sell 2.5 million EA copies at full price. Either there's 2.5 million idiots or there is a developer they TRUST. If I was you, i'd not call those 2.5 million idiots because you are pretty alone....
This game is awesome but it's pretty damn hard if you aren't familiar with this type of game. I'm slowly starting to get the hang of it. I have no idea if I'll even finish it but I'll have a blast trying.
I agree with the idea of how many studios aren't able to do something of this nature.. but the main reason that I think is the case, my own opinion included, is the idea of a game that I can play in full, without the idea of a shop, microtransactions.. promises of a complete game in the future with expansions.. this game fully made you feel like you paid what you got, and then some. When, to me, MOST games that are coming out today don't feel at all worth their price, and are so filled with microtransactions, and it feels like those microtransactions are getting more quality content than the base game offers. Just feels like in order to play games recently, you have to shell out $100+ to get a complete game. TLDR: I do not like the idea of buying a game for $60+ as a bouncer fee, where you pay just to get in, but if you want the good stuff, you have to continue to pay well beyond the $60. Balders Gate is just a nice thing that has happen.
Not sure if lawrence will see this before he gets to play it, but BG3 made me feel the same way DAO did. I skipped school for an entire day to play DAO when I started playing it--it truly brought me back, but it's even better. I am so excited for him to experience it!
I WANT to buy it for my PS5, but even though this is the first game I've wanted to pre-order since Cyberpunk, it's not available anywhere. Like, Amazon and BB don't have listings. If it's for quality checks or whatever, then fine, bit it's still weird.
From what i heard from a few gaming channels most funding for the early access time was sales from previous game divinity and people that payed during EA
Because early access is risky for most titles. You are telling a consumer base that lacks any nuance to play your game in its raw and unfinished state and to reserve judgment until release. They won’t reserve judgment. You are essentially imprinting a mostly negative experience. The phrase “first impressions last a lifetime” exists for a reason.
@@TheTinyTimmyTimTim I did say "this sort of game". The reason it works here is because CRPG's were up until now a very niche part of the industry and the people who play them ARE nuanced and are prepared to reserve judgement. This whole "comeback" for the genre was started with crowd funding by people who wanted this sort of game and were ready to take a gamble to see it happen.
I kinda love the JRPG. Because essentially they are interactive book or movie. You have the story in the meantime you can run around while it is happening.
Surprised the lads didn’t compare this development and release cycle to Star Citizen… as a causal filthy pc gamer… how many years has that “game” been in development for now?
Bruce is right about the "time" Larian got. So many games get released and the game studio claim they work on it for years but then departing devs from those studios claim earnest work on their games only began a year before release. Larian put forth earnest work with evidence of it from the beginning of early access.
I found BG3 dropping equipment lists or dialogues for one second, then returned the next check. So at least the breaks are semi-repaired. That is at the top.
the CEO of Larian has said they will work on much smaller projects next, so not a Cyber punk. Reading the Larian community updates could've provided some really useful context to this conversation. But not reading them has made me comment a lot, so that's a win for you.
The opening back and forth about the context and nuances of the game development is why you guys are favorites of mine. Willing to explore and discuss the subject even to the degree of walking down paths that will have people potentially internet pitchfork. Thanks for your work and talk ^_^
Reasonable people aren't saying that EVERY game and game dev should follow Larian's exact lead. It's just frustrating seeing every game publisher pursuing our wallets 24/7, sacrificing their product's quality for it. I know BG3 won't really change the industry because stupidly rich stakeholders don't care about anything but their dragon's hoard, but that won't stop me from complaining about the state of the games industry. Attacking devs is unjustifiable though.
Even though CRPGs aren't my thing (too overwhelming, I enjoy linear tightly focused games that encourage player expression more personally), I've put about 12 hours into BG3 and yeah I understand the hype. It's not my personal GOTY but it is dope that a CRPG of this scale can deliver especially when going through 3 years of early access. I remember the early reviews were not kind and I assumed this game was doom to fail, I'm always happy to be wrong. A lot of the discourse is focused on a game without microtransactions but be real guys, tons of games still release without microtransactions (Dead space remake, Hi-Fi-Rush, Tears of the Kingdom, FFXVI and most Sony first party titles at least all the single player ones). My biggest hope developers take away from this is being able to commit to a vision and be able to stand up to publishers (realistically) and show that "hey we don't need this BS in our game to be successful, look at 2023". also yeah, 2023 is probably the best year in gaming in recent memory.
Yes Larian’s achievement here is absolutely an anomaly and unrealistic, BUT… Bobby Kottick made 150 million in 2020. Does anyone seriously believe that he provided 150 million dollars worth of value either to the company or artistic value to the game? Of course not. If that money was spent on development, overwatch 2 might be a real video game and not just Overwatch stacked on top of Overwatch in a trench coat. I’ve watched bungie for 5 years reskin literally every single piece of content in their game, name it something else, and then charge 40-60 for it and call it an “expansion”. A majority of the NPC dialogue is delivered to you through static filled lofi transmissions from your ghost as you run down a corridor because they don’t even want to pay to animate a character speaking 9/10 times. Meanwhile the Micro-transaction store has the most in-depth, high quality, and clearly intensively made armor/animations in the entire game & they’re pumped out weekly. This is a 4 billion dollar company with over 1000 employees that has made 1 new (awful) PvP map in half a decade. There are game breaking bugs that have been persistently ruining the experience since Destiny 1 that have been left to fester, but if there’s a bug that allows you to dupe an item you paid real money for, it’s fixed before anyone knows it even exists. I’ve have been playing the SAME cheaters on PC week over week. Is what Larian did unsustainable and untenable for most studios? Yes. Is like 80% of what they did possible in a majority of instances from every other triple A publisher? Yes. Do most other triple A publishers reach even that conservative (given their size and capital) standard? Not even close. That’s the issue.
So the key difference between CDPR/Blizzard and Larian... is that Larian are self-published. They don't have shareholders telling them "BG3 only made a 20% profit! What are you even doing!? That's not how capitalism works!" Larian have expressed that they feel they grew too big while making BG3. I hope that means they're aware that if they try to make anything bigger than this, they'll collapse under their own weight They clearly have the talent. As long as they keep things manageable and treat their employees right, they can keep making games of this quality (If not scale) for as long as they darn well like
1:24 - Yes, more devs should take the time to make a game instead of shit out garbage every year, but even with that time look at Cyberpunk. Don't get me wrong CP2077 is one of my favorite games, but it doesn't stand near to BG3, it has a lot of redundant garbage AAA mechanics and game design choices as well as not really giving players a proper breadth of role-playing opportunities. Truth is BG3 is so good, because Larian is an indie studio with people passionate about making games in charge and not CEO's who write themselves 100 million checks every day and force devs to crunch to shit out another Assassins Creed every year with regurgitated mechanics and microtransactions in a single-player game. 1:47 - It's also not a budget question, come on guys ... AAA studios like BioWare and Ubisoft have much more money, manpower and much more recognizable IP's than Larian does. WOC didn't give them any money, LARIA HAD TO PAY to make Baldrus Gate game. There is nothing special about Larian except the fact that it's an indie studio. They have 400 people working, meanwhile most AAA studios have thousands of people across the world working for them and can't make a good game for shit.
The discourse around this game is seriously stupid. People bitch and moan (rightfully so 90% of the times), that AAA gaming is dead because games come out unfinished and yet, this game is getting praised AFTER being in early access for literally YEARS! Unless it's an indie game or a AAA game in a very specific genre (like a 50-500 hour long RPG meant to be replayed), early access is simply not feasible. This game changes nothing because 99% of games coming out each year are nothing like it, how are so many people missing this fact is beyond me.
Starfield (2016) and diablo 4 (2014) both had development times that were longer, and with larger teams then bg3. If they wanted to do a 3 year early access, they had plenty of time for it. It was a decision not to. The upcoming dragon age game has been in development even longer (2015) again with a much larger studio behind it. There is nothing unusual about bg3,s development timeframe, aside from how they chose to interact with the community. I don’t want to see everyone making “bg3” clones. I want them to look at why bg3 was so successful, and use that to improve their own games. Although I do hope this gives some devs they confidence to jump into making more crpg’s, as they are by far my fave genre of games.
Larion is by no means the biggest developer out there. Sony, Microsoft, Activision et al have budgets that could buy Larion five times over. The reason these other developers 'can't' do it is because of their shareholders who demand quarterly and yearly profits. So it's weird to say we should lower our expectations. We can't demand good games because shareholders want to get richer? And that's somehow just and fair? An artificial reason that keeps developers from developing good games is somehow the consumers' problem? Similarly how Blizzard and CD Projekt Red chose wealth over quality and that's somehow totally cool and we shouldn't complain. They wanted to push out trash for maximum prices but as long as they get rich we should just bend over and do as we're told? No. It's my money they want, I can have expectations. The expectations can be as unreasonable as I want them to be as well, it's MY money. More than anything, BG3 has shown us how rotten the game industry is. The idea that we get our money's worth is balked at not just by the studios but by journalists and even other gamers. Plus it's become almost a kneejerk reaction that anytime this happens people will go 'actually you have to see it in context, making a game is really expensive'. I don't care. All I care about is what I get for the money I pay. And if it's unsustainable then maybe it should die. Finally, the Witcher comparison is weird because you say that developers can't do what Larion did (release an early access build, use the funds to improve the game, release the finished product) while that's basically what CDPR did with The Witcher 3, except their initial release wasn't early access and the finished product was the Gold Edition. Seems like that approach to releasing games does work.
Depending on publishers is where devs go wrong. There needs to be a different way to make it. 3 years isn't a long time you are wrong. All of the major devs can take 6-8 years like all the big games. And technically BG3 took 6 years to develop but released 3 years early access. They didn't have 400 employees until after. And no financial help from any publisher. Activision Blizzard has thousands of devs and took a decade to develop their latest game, with multi billions of dollars. Larian kicked their ass with a better product and with no sleazy transactions.
Biggest take away from BG3 isn't the release. Yes its crazy and costly. I celebrate more the lack of micro transactions, the fact that they are only considering expansions. This is a company the put it ALLL into the GAME itself. Its games like D4 and other relevant titles that release a buggy, not fully flushed out game while having departments working on crap to buy or dlc to "improve" the game (aka should have been in the full release). Sure do dlc and sell armors. but have a full team dedicated to building and releasing a finished amazing game, then sell me crap.
"grow up" or "got greedier"? blizzard doesnt make games.. they make products.. you are comparing a slow careful caringly painted masterpiece with a cheap photocopied mass produced stick figure drawing ... there is love and care poured into BG3... there is nothing like that in Overwatch 2...
Is it so crazy to think that Larian figured out how things should be done? I know the scary thing is studios folding trying to make so ambitious a game, but, shouldn't the reaction speak volumes? Why is it ridiculous to make a demo of the game you want to make and sell it as early access? The last E.A. update from Larian was Dec. 4, 2022. So much of their game was never shown.
Most gamers know baldurs gate 3 is an anomaly. The frustrating thing is all these devs seeing baldurs gate 3 and doubling down on their subpar products! Like I'll be happy to get 1 more game like baldurs gate 3 in my lifetime! But I'm tired of seeing studios, AAA studios, parcel out a full game bit by bit in unfinished states, with large bits of the game behind multiple paywalls. I don't need every studio to be Larian studios, I just want them to actually make complete games!
I mean hey, if you cant make good games, sucks for you. I will just buy from the people that can, let the "free" market sort it out. Also why are you guys acting like people are saying a game needs to be so insanly complex like Baldurs Gate to be good? Games like Terraria, Stardew Valley are better than most AAA games released by the likes of EA and Activision...and they are not anything near Baldrus gate level!
