Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Which one of BG3, PoE, PK the worthy successor ?

Oh, for sure, I wasn't trying to imply you were doing that, the correction was welcome

Theyre in an interesting spot with 5 locations and 300 employees now. To give you an idea of that Redbox, a 2.2 billion dollar a year company, has 2 locations and 200ish people? They need copies out the door. So you have to ask WHO they are targeting. There are, by their guestimate, 40 million D&D players worldwide. The cross section that games and knows larian and is aware of something like this is questionable. But if they target the 2.5 million DOS2 purchasers and its "Different enough" - youre right, that is pure business. I know they probably have it in their heart somewhere to be good to D&D, but I don't think its a passion of theirs and if it falls by the wayside as they target THEIR group and then see how many D&D folks they can hook...I just haven't seen the flame for D&D. They have a neat story and have an audience, but if the option is decrease sales and bear the D&D torch or make a boatload of money...I haven't seen a company yet choose not money.

These aren't the small groups of dude like Carmack writing the book on rounded architecture and specular lighting as they put out shareware. Regardless of opinion, John Roberts of Star Citizen is PASSIONATE about it, and dude has chops - helped write directx codecs, personally helped take the CryEngine from 32 to 64 bit and then migrated to Amazon Lumberyard. Those are the nerds you want when youre going for cult classics and rabid (and you ignore size) fanbases because you had a friggin vision and could personally do it. Larian seems fun, and their studio can obviously produce good content. I think the question is going to be whether or not they WANT to be a successor. I threw up the numbers mainly to say they COULD and they are technically in the genre with DOS2 and drew a crowd. I also wanted to point out that some of these games didn't "do well" even though the people on this forum are probably the hard core fans and loved them. I cant play some anymore, some from 1998 like torment I still get a kick out of. Numenera was straight up OG, it was the same developers and they wanted to make another one.

The other recent games had their charms, I liked being a pirate in PoE2 more than I liked playing the game - unless Im a ranger, go straight to Nekataka, go southwest and get the bow that bounces between all enemies close to each other and is a game breaker. spiritual successors? I havent seen one other than Numenera and it succeeded itself but was a short ass game, as much as I loved it. I just feel like we are ultimately getting a tradeoff here for scope and story for mechanics and soul. Im currently at 233 hours in EA so its not like I hate it, but ive seen a few false prophets in the last 5 years, and Im not seeing this as the messiah yet.

But, like I said, I think its good to take of the rose tinted glasses when referencing some of these other games that were when we were young, when there was a game drought, and when there was a severe genre drought for this and we were dying in the desert and found water which was now the most amazing thing EVER. I can wax eloquent on the pros and lots of cons of these recent games and, other than graphics, its hard to remember anything bad about the old games. In context, they were perfect. Objectively, I think its more helpful to verbalize specifics about the old games because otherwise its just kind of masturbatical and going down memory lane saying "Man, that game made me feel good and I liked it and this doesnt".