Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General "So what is BG then?" This is what I think it is.

And which game was more successful, DOS2 or PoE2?

How many backers to PoE1 ?
How many backers for DoS1 ?

19K for DoS1
74K for PoE1

If you are not a video game company, sucessfull is differents than unit sold.

Players still LOVE RTwP.

I like to call Deadfire "Dumpsterfire" rather than "Deadfire". Real talk for a minute: Dumpsterfire is one of the worst games to be released in the last 10 years, without question.

But what made it fail wasn't the combat system. In fact, RTwP or TB mod, people loved the combat. Dumpsterfire improved on just about every technical element of Pillars (not PoE to avoid Path of Exile confusion).

What happened to Dumpsterfire was twofold: first, Fergus Urqhart sold Obsidian to Microsoft and pissed off a bunch of the staff causing a fallout; then, to recover, they relied too heavily on fan/kickstarter content which is why you have the color-by-numbers romances and really bad Amber Scott level writing. The whole thing was an unmitigated disaster from start to finish, from the development side of things.

But Pillars literally rejuvenated interest in the genre, and is regarded as one of the best games to come out in the last 10 years, and despite a few flaws (like the Endurance system, and how small the maps really are, and their reliance on trash encounters), is a masterpiece of narrative gaming.

I am hesitant to comment on sales numbers, because I do not count high sales as being indicative of quality - only consumption. And to that I caution: Trump, Twilight, the Kardashians, etc. ... I would not like to be in the company of popular culture. But still, this is me.

The first Baldur's Gate sold 1.5 million unites in 2 years. This was unheard of for video games - if you "counted for inflation" today, you'd be looking at numbers in the tens of millions. Pillars of Eternity sold about 1.5 million units before the expansions were released.

At the very least, this shows a consistent audience hungry for that style of game.

No one is going to argue that Wizards chose Larian because they wanted wider sales. That's exactly why I say they sold out.

I know popular doesn't necessarily mean better (fast food?). But, sometimes, it does.

If you know for sure that the people at WotC thought a format like Pillars would have been a better match for what they envision a D&D game to be, but decided to go with Larian anyway, then sure, you can say they sold out. But it just as easily can be the case that they saw how what Larian did resonates so well with what D&D is and thought it was a win win for them (better product, better sales).

Wizards is yet another element of the debate. In its very DNA, Wizards is a turn based company, their brainchild being Magic the Gathering. It is under Wizard that D&D has been gradually simplified ... sorry, "streamlined" ... to widen the audience. This is a mixed bag. I am so happy to see D&D popular, but I am also sad to see it being played like a simple board game, which is precisely what Gygax and Arneson never wanted.

Wizards has the ownership, so they can do what they want, but there is no doubt in my mind that they chose Larian because of the simplified presentation of combat in their TB systems.

BG3 has to be a popular game in addition of good sales.

Turning the legendary series into a DoS_like is obviously not popular.
Taking the same old receipe as PoE probably won't lead to great sold.

They still have LOTS of work to convince lots of old fans .
Of course, players that just don't care about the "3" are happy... As nearly everyone would have if this game was called differently.

Again, like I say in my OP, I like both RTwP and TB. I think that if it is going to be TB, it should be a bit closer to Shadowrun games in looks, meaning I would like to see the combat grid like I do on table top. I do not really like the "theater" style maps that Larian makes (meaning each map is just a stage with fixed props)

That remains to be seen. I expect it to be massively popular.

I expect it to "sell well".

Do you really ever saw such citicism/attack after the first gameplay preview?
I don't. Lots of us are waiting for 20 years, that will not be forgotten in 1 month.

Don't forget the other part of the message. This is just about the name.
Of course this new game looks great. That's not the question.
Everyone is happy to see a new D&D video game but if it stay more DoS than BG while being named BG3, I hope the worst because they'll definitely ruined my old dreams.

When I was seven, I didn't want to take a shower. I protested and protested. My mom yelled at me and made me get in the bathroom. So I went in the bathroom, turned the shower on, and stood by the sink. Figured that would show her. But after a while, I figured, I was standing there, might as well be in the shower. After 30 minutes of splashing around and having fun, she's banging on the door yelling at me to get out.

I suspect you and your gang of upset buddies will be doing lots of splashing around in BG3.

What does that have to do with whether we think it is actually BG3 or DOS3 though?

No one is saying it won't be a good game.

Seems you've exposed your real self with this patronizing BS. Thanks for that.

With all the complaints, and a seeming desire to see it fail (see the bold text), I expect you'll be enjoying the game anyway, just like so many of us probably did when BG1 came out and saw the RTwP stuff.

It's a true story from my childhood. What you wrote genuinely reminded me of it.

The game you wanted isn't coming right now. If there is such a demand for it as you claim, WotC will get it made eventually. Yeah, maybe it won't be named BG3, but whatever man. Hang in there.

Let's not start fighting please. I like to think I am introducing a unique perspective with good information, I do not want this derailed.

This is hilarious

okay, thank you.

What is Baldur's Gate?

Above all, I think BG was the best visual representation of what the world of AD&D was like at the time in the imagination of the players. And we could evolve in it with the real rules of AD&D!

Like many other AD&D players, I already knew about classes, races, monsters, spells, magic items, artifacts and even the Forgotten Realms.
With this game, I was offered the opportunity to live a video-game adventure in a universe that was already very familiar and that I loved. It was just amazing!
Baldur's Gate is inseparable from D&D.

The popularity of Baldur's Gate is obviously due to the combined talents of Bioware, TSR and Black Isles (and also Interplay, which we often forget) but it is also a story of context and period which largely contributed to its fame .
All these talents could be found in the right place at the right time and quite simply gave birth to a historical reference in the history of video games and to THE REFERENCE in the history of cRPG.

We could venture to define BG according to technical criteria (isometric, rtwp fights, 6 playable characters, D&D rules) and artistic criteria (story of the Bhaalspawns, representation of the Forgotten Realms, scenario and dialogues, music) but I don't think that would be enough.
It would be like wanting to analyze music that we love without ever being able to define the essential: real magic. The one that gives birth to unforgettable emotions and experiences.
Because yes, for me, Baldur's Gate is a masterpiece of its kind and has gone beyond the simple framework of a video game.

I guess behind the initial question of this topic that another question is hidden: now that you have said what Baldur's Gate was, how can a game deserve the name of Baldur's Gate 3?
 
The first obvious ingredients are:
- D&D rules
- the Forgotten Realms
- a story which has a relation with the previous BG if not why the 3?

In the useful ingredients to strengthen the identity of BG, I would put:
- rtwp fights (much more dynamic and demanding than TB)
- 6 characters
- numerous references to the previous saga

In the ingredients that have nothing to do in the BG franchise:
- a universe and a gameplay too marked by another license (big problem of identity!)
- a story that has absolutely nothing in common with previous games
- half-respected D&D rules (with ignored, neglected and other invented rules)
- designers and developers who have neither a real desire to respect the BG franchise nor the talent necessary to succeed in making a quality game, well written and with a BG identity.

I am consistently confused as to how people expect a continuation of the same story, when the story definitively ended at the Throne of Bhaal. The Bhaalspawn arc is over, and the Lord of Murder is very much alive and part of the pantheon. BG leaned on the Time of Troubles, and the Time of Troubles is over, long over.

I think ultimately what is conflating the issue is that you have a segment of the fans, perhaps a large segment of the fans, whose connection to tabletop DND is sketchy at best, and nonexistent at worst, as such, they seem to treat Baldur's Gate as divorced from the setting it takes place in, the pantheon, which is apart of that setting, the history of that setting, the linear progression of said history, and so on so forth.

What also is a bit baffling to me is that Larian even mentioned that the dead three: Bane, Bhaal, and Myrkul play a prominent role in this game, and that the illithids invasion, while concurrent with rumors of a cult, and the involvement of the dead three, are possibly just there to provide the initial backdrop, perhaps as a sort of 'iron crisis'.

Since we are all talking about the diverse differences of what constitutes a game being called Baldur's Gate, I'll just add mine, because why not:

1) A strong storyline, well defined characters, likable and unlikable companions that provide flavor while adventuring, an assortment of city/regional/and world saving adventures as well as a lot of mini-quests that provide context to the motivations of the main character, his or her companions, and the larger nature of the events happening within a city or region.

2) A good power curve, being able to go from missing wolves 9 out of every 10 rounds, to basically demigod status over the course of a lengthy saga. Whether this is done in the context of one game with a lot of hours worth of content or spanned across several titles obviously remains to be seen, but a power curve is critical in DND as per the 'tiers of play'.

3) A contemporary attempt to port the tabletop experience to a video game format. Now obviously this is where a lot of the opinions begin to unravel. Bioware was unable to faithfully adapt turn based combat to ADND, so they settled for RTWP. If you don't believe me, look up the old interviews. Yes, you read that correctly, the entirety of RTWP was a workaround. An innovative, genre defining workaround, but a workaround none the less that obviously has its own interpretation in the present day given that we have the capability of having a robust tabletop turn-based inspired gameplay experience that attempts to faithfully implement the tabletop experience into a video game environment.

4) An attempt to faithfully represent the setting in a video game, and this is where I begin to have my own issues as I hope Larian does not level-lock areas and other gameified decisions that do come from D:OS2, and while I was fine with it in that game, DND is not about MMO level-locked mechanics, you should be able to stumble into the crypt of a lich in an Inn just as easily as encountering a herd of gibberlings or a pack of orcs as easily as you would a few slimes in some underground sewers, just next to a secret door with a hidden illithid lair. This variation, and the thought of 'well, I will need to come back later rather than just bounce from level locked area to level locked area, was very smart and really gave a strong DND flavor to the older games.

There are more, but this is already too long, so I'll simply say, you don't see RTWP in there, you don't see Bhaalspawn in there, you don't see the naming convention of Baldur's Gate being conflated with a game name rather than a city in a setting of which the first one was based on. I saw this debate in Deus Ex with the new games, and I can simply point to NWN 1 and 2 being completely different games that were completely unrelated both citing the name of a city, also the original Neverwinter Nights was actually an AOL pseudo-MMO that had nothing to do with either but I didn't see people complaining about it at the time.

So I will simply end with, perhaps we should give them more than the pre- pre- pre-alpha to showcase whether or not they are willing to check the boxes for us, or perhaps you need to understand that their patron, WOTC, in this case, also has their own vision, likely a bit more in line with my 4 points than a nostalgia-fest and the divorcing of a game series from the world, setting, system, and history that actually had to have been created for them to even be realized at all.