Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Is BG3 bad for the genre?

I think Skyrim had a far more negative impact on rpgs than BG3 ever would. Dragon Age Inquisition in particular was pressured by EA to play more like Skyrim. Which I think negatively impacted the game.

With BG3 I see it leading to more turn based and strategic rpgs being greenlit. As well as more tabletop centric rpgs. It could very well reverse the trend of the last decade of rpg just being something slapped ontop of another genre like FPS altogether.

Do you have a source for that? Because Bioware has a history of chasing trends on their own volition, which is why ME went more shooter and why they decided to make Anthem. I wouldn't be surprised, but all I've really heard that would be on EA is an insistence on Frostbite engine.

I'm not sure you can say Inquisition is an example when Witcher 3 was open world out the very next year or that Ubisoft's descent into nonsense cancels out Breath of the Wild? Just being open world isn't inherently bad. However, a 'chilling' effect on RPGs that can't get the funds for big presentation is a negative all around. If those turn based strategic RPGs or tabletop port RPGs don't have full VO, who's playing it and will it be enough to offset the cost?

My understanding is that with e.g. Dragon Age 2, though EA pushed them with the probably unreasonably short timescale, the artistic choices with spiky graphics and a soundtrack to match, waves of combat with abseiling goons (popularised by the SAS 40-odd years ago, and later revealed that they actually thought it was a terrible idea but tptb insisted as it made good TV) and perhaps most egregiously the "awesome button" were entirely Bioware decisions; as was the notoriously bad ending of ME3. In comparison, I actually preferred Inquisition and thought it was far better realised, though it was clear that some elements of the game really suffered due to them being the ones who were forced to figure out how to make the suddenly compulsory Frostbite engine do something it was never designed to do.

I think there is a tendency to assume some studios can do no wrong and others can do no right; the divide between the practically identical Fallout 3 and New Vegas highlights the issue, at least from my perspective, and some people are still going on about it today. What I found especially amusing was the claim that if left to their own devices, Obsidian would do a pre-first-person-style game in the fixed isometric style with complicated and awkward gameplay and bad graphics, just like a proper game should be. And they produced The Outer Worlds, which was more like a Bethesda game than ever. Though still with that very dry Obsidian humour, obvs., because that's what they do.

IMHO the main "chilling effect" is large publishers chasing deadlines and wanting the widest possible audience at any cost; and the ability to bilk customers monthly, hence the usual suspects forcing multi-player into single-player games.

It's mostly logical inferrence. There's an interview Mark Darrah did back in 2014 where he talked about how after Skyrim released it forced them to hard pivot production towards making an open world game. He also cites sales figures as the reasoning.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/biowares-inquisition

EA was known to cite sales figures as the reason to greenlight or cancel projects at the time. Like Andrew Wilson famously asked Amy Hennig about their upcoming singleplayer Star Wars game "FIFA Ultimate Team makes a billion dollars a year.' Where's your version of that?”"
The Witcher 3 is a bit more of a complex example as CD Projekt wasn't strictly inspired by Skyrim. They were also progressing in a more open direction as their games evolved. The Witcher 2 for example had extremely massive worldspaces and while it wasn't a true open world game it was pretty close. With The Witcher 3 the game felt less Skyrim and more like Red Dead Redemption. CD Projekt is also an independent studio that self finances their games similar to Larian. And they were known even back then for not bending to publisher or investor demands. Like a good example is they mentioned one of their earliest publishing agreements for the Witcher 1 demanded adding the option for Geralt to be a woman. Which they rejected as it was an RPG series based on a set of novels with a set protagonist.
It's not necessarily a bad thing, however the devil's always in the details. When a publisher mandates a genre change like this it often causes issues which leads to the story and pacing suffering. Open world games overwhelmingly tend to suffer from pacing issues due to the player being able to access most of the content right at the start of the game. Bioware in particular I don't think adapted to this very well.
BG3 doing as well as it does means more turn based strategic or tabletop based rpgs might get greenlit with larger budgets. I think that's a far better net positive.
This is true yes not all of the issues with Bioware's post DAO games were EA's fault. A huge amount of issues were Bioware's fault. And I personally think it was the slow exodus of developers that left the studio after the EA buyout. You can see it with how few developers worked on ME1 stayed until ME3. Bioware went from a studio where developers would work at the same job for 10-15 years (Casey Hudson started at the company working on Baldur's Gate 1's FMVs) to one where developers work short term contracts and they rely on outsourcing.
I agree with this as well. With regards to New Vegas people often forget that the game was largely Obsidian repurposing their ideas from Interplay's cancelled Fallout 3 (Which many of the developers also worked on). So it effectively had a really long pre-production period that most other games don't have the luxury of.

Another factor is more of an industry wide issue that started during the 2010s. Tim Cain referred to it as the loss of "generalists". Which are developers that can work more than 1 job on a project. It ends up leading to a too many cooks issue and the game takes far longer to make. (Games now take a decade or more to finish). Additionally individual developers end up having very little say or impact on the project which causes it to also creatively suffer. In the distant past with games like Doom you'd see developers like Sandy Petersen suggest off the cuff "maybe the shotgun should feel satisfying to fire" and they'd put it in.

Ironically I think the multiplayer in Mass Effect 3 was the best aspect of the game.

That said it "Ill Nuce", my friend.
When I first read that question I groaned under my breath,reminded of the innumerable sports reporters asking the football coach the most asinine of questions imaginable on live TV.

Listen, BG3 hit a home run, it's fun, so play it, don't sweat it and get on with it.

Yes and No.. at the Same Time..
Its good becouse bring a Bunch of Players that never even Bother to Try this style of Game..
But its Bad becouse i bet some people that Hate how its too Much Hollywood way of telling a Tale..

I Bet a Bunch of people old like me did not Like this Scenematics and stuff like Romance in games
They are from a Time when we didant Have this so its quite Normal that most of then dont Like and want a Classic Experience like it was back in a Day.

This was always more normal in Action RPG..
This start to Pop Up in Games not Long ago when yu stop to think about it..
Thats why i bet a Bunch of Old dudes like me actually Hate it and dont Like the Game at all.
Its like the Youtubers that use to Play games like these..
Most of then did not like the game and even call it a NETFLIX flicker.. get it ?!

No, because all those people are not playing the game for any cRPG reasons. They're playing the game because they get to sit there and watch a pretty movie, and have interactive virtual sex in a variety of ways. My bet is that less than 1% of them will have any interest in playing any other cRPG (unless of course that other cRPG also gives them pretty cinematics and interactive sex). So hopefully other cRPG developers are smart enough to see and understand this, and thereby WON'T go down the path of making games similar to BG3.

Kani, that is a bit of anexaggeration. There are a lot of pen & paper player, that tried out BG3 as their first crpg and liked it - I know that from people, I know personally and from rpg forums and communities, I frequent. BG3 is not a pretty movie with sex scenes, it is a game with story and fights. I know, you don't like it and that is very valid, I have the same feeling towards Mass Effect, but it is not just a movie with sex scenes.

Agreed with Fylimar.

I am someone who never played a single turn-based game prior to BG and avoided them like the plague while internally screaming "WHY WOULD SOMEONE WASTE THEIR TIME ON BORING TURN-BASED GAMEPLAY WHEN REAL-TIME EXISTS?!"

Well, I was never more wrong in my life...

Fell in love with BG3 instantly for all the right reasons when Early Access started, so much so it converted me from a real-time to a turn-based lover. Which is why I also got DOS2 and then got DOS1 as well because of how much I loved DOS2. So it was a chain-reaction of turn-based games back to back which all started with BG3, because of which I'm now also considering getting BG1&2 to play through too.

So it had nothing to do with the shallow reasons of sex and monkey brain neurons activating.

Larian's games are simply great and widely loved RPGs for good reason. One may love'em or hate'em, but their biggest advantage is that they are accessible and quite unique turn-based games because they do not come with that typically boring turn-based feeling from which most people do run away from. And most importantly do not require a DnD Bible to be read three times over while scribbling notes and holding a calculator in hand just to enjoy it.

It's a DnD experience somewhat mainstreamed and accessible to people of all kinds, even those who may just be starting to experience it for the first time ever. Larian is unique in this regard because of how they approach their games to create a fun adventure, which evidently a ton of people do love and enjoy because a turn-based game absolutely annihilated this year's game awards and keeps maintaining hundreds of thousands of players each day. It speaks for itself.

Naturally that doesn't mean that BG3 is the pinnacle of gaming or whichever other superlative "hype gamers" like to overblow. What it means is that it's a really damn great solid game, which is why it stands out so much in today's day and age of gaming because gaming became so perversely rancid with all the utterly disappointing shit the other companies have been dumping for years now. Gaming stopped being gaming and instead became a corporate bloodsucking business infested with micro-transactions, sub-par products carrying premium price tags, battle-passes, live services, subscriptions etc...

BG3 is simply a reminder of simpler golden age of gaming when RPGs used to be fun, huge, deep and high quality because they were made and treated with love and care... without any micro-transactional bullshit and corporate meddling trying to squeeze every single consumer dry down to their last penny.

And I would say those people you are talking about are precisely the exceptions I already accounted for in what I said. 1% of 12-15 million is a pretty good number of people. I also didn't say the game doesn't have anything beyond cinematics and sex. I said those non-cRPG fans who are playing BG3 (which is the vast majority of people playing the game) are playing it because of cinematics and sex, which is to say those are the only things they care about in BG3 and they don't really care about any cRPG elements that may be present in the game.

So I stand by what I say here. cRPGs post-BG3 will continue to remain a very niche gaming genre, and without lots of pretty cinematics and interactive sex they will continue to attract only the 2-5 million or so hardcore cRPG fans out there <shrug>. To get to sales numbers 10 million-plus you have to do what Larian has done with BG3. And I personally would MUCH rather see a cRPG developers make games without all of BG3's bad stuff that sell only 2-5 million than BG3-style games that have huge sales numbers. And I am confident other cRPG developers will see this too, because ultimately it will come down to net profit generated by a game and not net revenue. Net profit is net revenue minus net costs, and in the case of BG3 my estimate is Larian's net costs associated with making, testing, and marketing the game were easily around half a billion dollars. What a colossal waste!

I had to read several times by now variants of "I played BG3 and wanted to try out other crpgs, but they were too much reading..."

So I also think BG3 will not bring a rennaisance of crpgs or even turn based crpgs, after all they never went away, see Solasta, Kingmaker, PoE or Wrath, but rather a downgrade of crpgs as more companies try to attract the people for whom the past crpgs required too much effort and only picked up BG3 because of the promise of naked waifus and sex (PoE 2 showed that just voice acting doesn't work).

I doubt we will see many "Sister Argenta" type companions, attractive characters that you can't romance, in the future as companies will copy BG3s harem collection.

So let me get this straight, making hugely popular and critically acclaimed games is a waste of money because you don't like that you aren't the target audience? I'd say we need to "waste" a whole lot more then!

kani: I don't agree at all here. Most players seem to be somehow connected to RPGs in some form or another. And those that aren't are usually still gamer, who try the game, because it got a lot of praise. The horny people, you have everywhere nowadays and even back in the times of BG 1 and 2. Just look at some mods for those games.

Yes, saying it is a waste is my opinion obviously. Are you saying I can't have my opinion?

@fylimar, I guess we will have to just disagree. As I've noted many. many times, the people actively posting in this forum are a very tiny, miniscule fraction of the total fanbase of the game. And I am certainly not talking about these people. But when I go to other places such as Steam or Reddit etc., hardly anyone there cares about anything related to the game we would generally identify as elements of a good cRPG (story, characters, character development, world-building, writing, meaningful choices and consequences, etc.). For the vast majority of BG3 players I encounter out there in the cyber-universe, they gush about graphics, cinematics, and voice-acting, and/or about all the nudity and sex and especially about how cool it is that they can personalize their genitals. That's what I see out there.

BG3 might have an impact on the games that AAA companies make. But lets be realistic, with or without BG3, the AAA companies were never going to make a niche game. Big development dollars have to chase big sales. BG3 will probably change what big AAA money thinks their money should chase, but they were never going to chase a late 90's early aughts style cRPG.

If Skyrim didn't come out in 2011, the same year that Game of Thrones dropped on HBO, who knows right? If BG3 didn't materialize during a world ending plague, things could have wound up rather differently too. Being successful or well received as a game such that it's able to achieve that critical mass for broader appeal has gotta be at least as much down to those sorts of externalities. I mean at least as much as anything inherent to the gameplay or the game per se. Peeps also tend to reserve special derision for anything that achieves pop status, regardless of how it gets there, like even if it's earnest or on the sly, so this all complicates the scenario and the overall takeaway for me.

Trying to figure out the genealogy of a game doesn't become all that interesting I think until a few years out, when I can see what sort of stuff has been spawned in its wake. So if someone sees sex and sex sells and that's all it is, perhaps, but also these are more repressive times we're living through than many would probably countenance, so if it starts to take on an added dimension there that people are particularly responding too, I could see that. Probably something in the rearview mirror already though. I don't know, seems to me they met the moment. It gave me enough of what I need from a BG game that if it were a pass/fail of course it's going to pass - with flying colors. For my part I want more to gush over. Everything just listed as superfluous - the graphics, the cinematics, the voice, the sex. All that ribald nonsense like up to the hilts. I'm so down. It could have been twice as libertine and I'd show out.

This game is memorable. I remember all the characters names. Like even the rando bit players. Usually I can name names on a small handful of characters from any given game. Even the greatest cRPGs I can think of, I'll still only have a few names pop into my mind immediately, but how often do I feel that way for an entire ensemble? I can't remember the last time (unless we could count Baldur's Gate games, in which case I recall them all) but I just think it's pretty wild. Not like I haven't been here the whole time watching it variously take off or crash and catch fire on the launchpad several times. Frankly if you'd asked me in 2021 whether I thought this game would be rad or "suck Gnolls" and be a blight on the BG legacy, I'd have had only pensive answers and the dread fear at the time. But it sucked way less on delivery, and they didn't even do half the things they could have done, like blow out the Char customization and such which I thought they'd be holding in reserve.

I mean they legit gave me all the same heads as in EA pretty much, even after all those multi-colored screens at every angle lol. Now it's comical to me how many times I gotta see Aradin and Zevlor duke it out with different haircuts, still swinging in every chapter. This is the B flick element, and also that love it garners from me, the absurdism there. Nothing could be more sketch comedy theatrical than a wig and wardrobe change, but still I enjoyed it heartily. I think they could do the same again with 240 more heads and voices, maybe a whole new gang, maybe some returning favs. All I really want is for BG3 to inspire the creation of a BG4 within the same framework. Continuing Adventures style. Then shore up the cam controls, but that's just going to always be what I have to say there. Fix the camera first, everything else can follow heheh

Remember, those places are still only a tiny fraction of the overall playerbase.

Just because they might be "Bigger than these forums" doesn't mean they're a majority of the overall playerbase.

In general, the vast majority of a playerbase, don't care to talk about the game online.

Games sell in the millions. Steam, Reddit and these forums contain a collective... Few hundred? Maybe a thousand at best?


Ironic, since whenever I go to any other game discussion, people are CONSTANTLY bringing up BG3 in terms of its story, its versatile and impactful choices that can be made, the character development and world building. I've yet to see anyone in these settings bring up its graphics, cinematics, voice acting or nudity/sex.

Plenty of people talk about many aspects of the game.

BG3, in my opinion is currently the World of Warcraft of CRGPs and that is bad thing.

When WoW released, MMORPGs already where a thing but they where a bit more hardcore, lacked real polish, they where not as pretty. This meant they appealed to a smaller, more involved RPG audience. Blizzard to the premise, dumbed down the game mechanics, made the game pretty and represented to the world. The world EXPLODED. WoW was not the best MMO from a technical view point and only fair from an RPG angle at all. However the pretty colors and simpler mechanics gave the game a larger appeal. What followed was the slow, inevitable decline of the MMO. Every new MMO tried to follow the base model of the WoW (EVE might be the one exception) and catch the same genie in the bottle. They of course all failed in that final goal and the result for gamers where MMOs that catered to trying to please everyone instead of having a well defined target audience.

Fast forward, the CRPG genre was doing, well not great. We had some solid offerings with Divinity, Pillars, Wasteland, Pathfinder and others keeping the genre alive. However none of them was a breakout hit that made genre changing audience sizes. Then Larian, either on purpose or accident, stumbled on the Blizzard model with BG3.

They took the DnD franchise and BG name for instant recognition. They took the already fairly simplified 5E game system and dumbed it down a bit more, for wider appeal. They threw high visual production value at it and made the game with enough teen angst that the proper name of the game should be Baldur's Gate: As the Wrym Turns and market it as a soap opera.

At this point they could have and, in my opinion, should have thrown the hardcore RPG gamer a bone and given us the option to turn off some of the simplification, give is a more "pure" 5e experience. Instead they doubled down on the teen approach with a near idioticly simple character creator that of course took the time to add genital modification but could not give us decent voice options or more than a couple of body types.

Reading this you might think I loathe the game, you would be wrong, I have had a blast playing it. Bad a true fan of a game or even a genre does not settle for mediocrity when they know greatness was so close.

All this then leads back to the original question, "Is BG3 bad for the genre?" There is no singular answer. On one hand it has parked interest in the CRPG style of gaming in a way that has not been seen since the early days of computer gaming and all the DnD geeks migrated from table top to computers. However it has given the industry a formula for success that is not great for the industry and the CRPG community as a whole, when looked at from the perspective of the core RPG gamer. The POTENTIAL for it to be bad for the genre is real, but if that potential is realized will have to be seen.

RPGs are not inexpensive to create, especially a game with this level of polish. A lot of devs will still avoid RPGs because of that extra cost and complexity in design. The bigger studios will likely try to duplicate the success of BG3, however the CRPG genre has left the bigger studios behind some time ago. The hope for the genre and the hardcore CRPG gamer has for a while lay in the hands of the smaller studios. This level of polish will be beyond most of their resources, so perhaps we will still see a more rough, less polished game that goes back to the RPG roots.

Only time will truly tell.

I don't think you have pinpointed where BG3 value really is. It clearly isn't in its simplicity since Larian have made simple CRPG with moderate success for a while now. I am pretty sure that BG3 would have been as popular if they used the Divinity rule set. In the past years, if you wanted to play a RPG, you had to choose between a game with good production value but shallow depth or the contrary. The true game changing argument this game has is that it simply has both.

Also the WoW argument doesn't apply for a single player game. MMO games are meant to be relevant for the longest amount of time. What companies who tried to make a WoW killer failed to realize is that players were already deeply invested into it. Why take the risk to play a clone when you have already spent years into your character? Sinking cost fallacy is a hell of a drug.