Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Better without the Baldur's Gate name?

Exactly as I said earlier about combination of medieval ruins and generic statues. This represents 90% of repetitive DOS2 scenarios.

Some months ago people criticized me when I said that Larian should aim for the Intro cinematic trailer portrait of color/look. Many people said it was ridiculous.

Now Swen gives an interview that they pushed the team to achieve the exact same goal.

The engine argument has already been refuted.

Didn't say I wanted it to look "Baldur's Gate." Just said I wanted it to NOT look D:OS. As I've stated repeatedly, I don't care what it looks like as long as it is NOT the D:OS look.

Let's see how things change as thing progress. The game isn't close to being finished yet and it makes perfect sense that they would use a lot of placeholder assets while they work on story, quests, characters and mechanics then polish it up later for visuals.

Just check the list of all different kind of games that were made with Unity to understand that you can nearly do what you want with your engine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unity_games#2020

For some reason this discussion begins to remind me of the intense disappointment I felt on landing at Orly in summer 1970. I had expected Europe to look more different, but the dirt looked a lot like American dirt, and the trees looked a lot like ... trees.

Fair enough. I'm willing to wait and see. But I just get this gut feeling that the game devs' attitude on this issue is: it worked for D:OS2, so it'll be just fine for BG3. But this just doesn't make any sense to me. You're not going to bring to the game anyone who wasn't already into the game because this game "looks" just like D:OS2, whereas you definitely will alienate anyone who disliked how D:OS2 looked.

If I was in Larian's shoes, i'd do the same. Their assets/style works and look great. There's still plenty more time for BG3 to find its visual identity, either through special effects or charater models, as Im sure some of those visuals are indeed placeholders. I just saying I dont mind the similar visual style. But some people will hate no matter what.

Its funny everybody seems to have forgotten Icewind Dale...it came out after BG1. Different developper, same engine, riding off on the success of a great game. It was an EXACT visual copy of BG, no one complained at the time, why now?

Im aware you cant please everyone, but my guess is there are way more people that like the D:OS style than people that dont. And I personally believe that using it for BG3 is a good move.

I think people are just way more critical of games these days. It makes sense, there's so much more available that it's easy to pick anything you see apart because options abound. The rise of the "we value your feedback" era really made it a thing, too. Especially when a developer emphasizes the desire to feedback, the criticism tends to rise astronomically and I think we see the cause of that quite often here. It presents this idea that anyone's voice can change the course of development, and people take that a little personally, and present it personally, too. There's good and bad in it, but when you start seeing so much "I don't like this, so it's objectively bad" replace constructive criticism, it tends to become just a bunch of boring opinions and pointless arguments.

The engine has NOTHING to do with how the game looks. Prey (2017) and DOOM (2016) also have the same engine and future-tech style (before the hell levels), yet they look different. Do you know how many games are built on the Unreal engine, for example? You wouldn't even know for most games, even if you played them, would they not advertise that! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games



That's a straw man argument.

In order for something to be eligible for fitting the 'strawman argument' definition, they'd need to take a quote of yours out of context to misrepresent it in a way that suits your counterargument while not representing what they actually meant with its context in its entirety. So unless Gt27mustang quoted someone's argument and twisted it to mean something else, I'm not sure that allegation is very accurate.

Play nice though, we're all here to discuss opinions on a thread, not to actively try to dismiss or invalidate other opinions just because they differ from our own.

Thank you 😊

Quick clarification. While Black Isle, the developer of Icewind Dale, was only a publlisher for BG2, they actively helped with development in BG1. It's not a very good comparison; Black Isle was already working with BioWare and Interplay on the other games, it wasn't a passing of the IP to someone brand new.

EDIT; clarity note; iirc Black Isle was part of Interplay, as well.

Icewind Dale was something like a copy of Baldur's Gate yes, and.you're right, no one complained about it because it was a new game builded on a game that players loved and that will become legendary.

Baldur's Gate had it's history, it's absolutely not the same. Many players won't care that much about the game if it wasn't called Baldur's Gate...
(That doesn't mean those players won't buy it or enjoy it)

I guess lots of players don't want BG3 to just be a copy of DoS. BG don't deserve to become a DoS-like.
Speaking about visual of course.

The number of people who like or dislike the D:OS look is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is whether liking/disliking the D:OS look is a deal-breaker for a person. BG3 and D:OS2 are supposedly two completely unrelated games. So one looking like the other is not even something one could or should expect. As such, if BG3 did NOT look like D:OS2, that's not going to alienate a D:OS2 fan. OTOH, for someone who disliked the look of D:OS2, it IS a turnoff to have this game have the same art-style look of a game they disliked. So Larian absolutely loses out by mimicking the D:OS2 look. And Swen and other Larian folks themselves have acknowledged as much by saying, in interviews back in February, that they are concerned about the criticism that this game looks too much like a D:OS game.

As for your BG-IwD comparison, it is apples to oranges. BG and IwD are BOTH D&D games and are BOTH using the exact same setting. For all intents and purposes, one (IwD) is a spinoff of the other. So those two games sharing a common "look" is to be expected and perfectly reasonable. There are absolutely no such connections between D:OS2 and BG3.

Sorry that Larian Studios didn't design every aspect of their game to cater to your opinions and only your opinions, I guess.

Don't worry The Composer, I'm not a native english speaker, I ďon't even understand what "strawman" argument means exactly. 😊

Didn't know that. The Interplay/Bioware//Black Isle trio was a bit confusing on who did what honestly.

It was, the three were so intertwined in those times. Totally understandable, I forget who made what sometimes :p

That's entirely a matter of opinion

Then leave them a little room and some time to prove that they can make something unique, maybe?

As for the BG-Icewind Dale comparo, I was going by a "different studio same look" argument. It worked back then, I dont see why it wouldnt today. Is one medieval fantasy setting really that different from another? Look at BG1: if you looked at the wilderness area and I told you it was the Grewhawk setting, could you have proven me wrong?

But I just explained why there can be no comparison there. BG and IwD (and one might even throw in Ps:T) were all part of the same family of games. But this is not true of the D:OS games and BG3.

Let me try it this way. Remember that D:OS Tactics game that Larian contracted out to someone else to make a few months back and then ended up canceling it? Well, that game sharing the same "look" as D:OS2 would have been totally okay. BG3 sharing the same "look" as D:OS2: not okay.