Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous vs BG3

I think WotR is awesome on Normal and am having a lot of fun. I'm actually waiting, now, to finish it because I just got Season Pass 2 at Christmas. It put a serious halt on the game for me. I reached the Midnight Isles and I did Through the Ashes with Arla, Havvah, and a few others I added to my Demon Hunters story. That substory DLC was a blast! I can't wait until I'm able to finish it once the newer DLC comes out.

I'll probably finish the Midnight Isles since I'm fairly certain I can do that without screwing up anything from Season Pass 2, but I may wait until later to complete it. I don't know. Still looking into all the season pass includes.

I'm in no rush since I still have Kingmaker and Solasta Lost Valley to get through plus I'm playing BG3 again to see all the new stuff, Shadowrun Hong Kong, Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Crisis Core Reunion, and so many more. And I'm trying to write my playthrough of Our of the Abyss besides. Too many games! Too many!

So you'd want more games exactly like BG3? Like I said in my response, where would that leave a critic of BG3 like me?

Wanting more D&D games is an entirely different thing from wanting more games exactly like BG3.

I think we want the same thing 🙂 This is where the OGL discussion come in. I don't want to deny the people who like BG3 model to be denied their game but I don't want it to be the only model. I want dozens and dozens of games. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

It think you are saying you are concerned that BG3 can be like the Starbucks that drives all the indie coffee shops out of business? If so, that's a very bad thing, but I don't think that's inevitable - yet.

Part of the reaction against the OGL is a flurry of activity on the part of small devs to come up with DnD variants that aren't tied to WotC. Which would be sad - because Faerun is the world I like - but this looks like a classic case of the pattern identified by Princess Leia: the tighter your grip, the more slip through your fingers. One of two things are likely to come out of this - 1. either we will get lots of RPG games from small devs or 2. WotC will be forced to reverse course.


And they've done it before - WotC was forced to shelve 4e

The same place that more Souls like games leaves people that don't like or can't play them? We're left playing other games that suit us instead. I can't even begin to tell you how many times I've wished that Dark Souls had come out 30 years ago, because it looks like it's a lot of fun, but today? I'm too old for that stuff. Literally, I don't have the manual dexterity now that I had 30 years ago. Not every game, regardless of genre, has to be built for me. More games like this means that I have more options, regardless of whether someone else is critical of it or not.

Incidentally, I want less DnD games now, given what's going on with the OGL. I want to support those creators, and not have to support Hasbro/WotC. I won't be buying the Season 2 pass for WotR until I know what's happening with the Pathfinder stuff as a result of this.

Not telling you what to do with your money but I don't think that works against Hasbro. As I read the OGL it's really designed to hamper Paizo's / Pathfinder's business. It actually says something to that effect in surprisingly explicit terms.

It really reminds me of Battletech vs. Robotech vs. Macross. Pathfinder took their material from someone else, profited big time on it, and now the original source is going after them for it.

In the same respect, it's like Digimon vs. Pokemon. Anytime you have a successful story, game, etc. that makes hugely big bucks, others are going to try to copy you and maybe even do it better. Is it right? Should WotC just let other people constantly profit off of their material?

Depends, quite frankly. We're talking RPGs, here, people. Their primary profits come from rulebooks and sourcebooks, and any other items they can sell to compliment the game. With everything being digital, physical dice and maps and lead figures are going away, and that was a HUGE RPG staple. With computers replacing everything, it's got to be hard to keep making money. Once you've bought all the rulebooks and sourcebooks and a single software program to manage dice and initiative and such, that's it. No more sales.

On the other hand, allowing others to create their own D&Dish versions keeps the genre alive and thriving and people hungering for more. The more GOOD fantasy games that are made that appeal to a wider audience, the more fans of the whole genre they create. The more fans, the more customers, even if what you are creating in particular isn't exactly what they're looking for.

I don't know. I wouldn't want to be the people who has to make the decisions on this stuff.

It's closer to saying "sure, go ahead and use our open license that we won't revoke" for YEARS and then once your competition gets good enough saying "oh, yea, now we're changing that". It's a nasty move, and I doubt it would hold up in court.

If I'm the only one, then it will have 0 effect. However, when content creators start killing off any connection to DnD, and people that think like I do start looking to them instead, it starts to mean something. However, net 0 effect or not, I plan to stand on my principles. Whether it does anything to Hasbro et al or not is not my main concern, my main concern is sticking to what I believe. Some of the things I've seen thrown about are:

Do you dress up as an elf and do a cooking show on YouTube? Hasbro wants to talk to you.
Hey, you can continue to publish your work, to these spots, but you're not allowed to publish anywhere else, because we're planning on taking your work, and publishing it there, and we're not going to pay you when we do.

Yeah, I'm not keen on supporting that. Royalties are fine, within reason. But 25% of your gross earnings? That's a bit extreme. I mean, the background systems are the equivalent of a game engine for PC/Console games, and if you're using someone else's engine, you're going to pay them for a license, but I'd be willing to bet, with no knowledge of exactly how it works, that it's nowhere near that.

25% of total earnings is a "we want you out of business" number.

I plan to support the alts - I'll pay for the DLCs from both Owlcat and TA because I think they're the one's being wronged. I also answered the survey asking WotC to support open gaming.

Now I do think that WotC is in the right in wanting to shut down NuTSR but they already have the power to do that, if only because NuTSR is pretty good at shooting themselves in the foot.

But as @Boblawblah points out 25% is a "time for you to go away" percentage.

I'm also of the mind that it probably wouldn't hold up in court if challenged, they're probably spending most of there energy determining how to thread the needle to make the cost of a legal challenge seem counterproductive.

The crossover of people who play other systems or OGL games, and D&D is probably pretty large, they're maybe not considering how much they might be cannibalizing their own business. All in a hopes of pushing people online, I thought we were past the streaming wars.

I remember there was a shake up at Hasbro a few months back, which resulted in them axing a number of multimedia initiatives, those games you guys were talking about, and movies. I guess they're looking to make up the lost potential diversification through One D&D.

Too soon for this question. We cannot compare a full game (WotR that already has expansions) that has been out for at least a year (or more? Not sure), with an early access BG3 -- that shows less than a third of the entire thing, and half of its companion roster. We don't even know what the full BG3 story is about (we can't know, bc again, we have less than a third of it).

It's like comparing an excellent apple tree with fruit that's ripe and ready to eat, with a brilliant young apple tree with incredible life-changing potential, but with green fruit that's too green to consume.

Speculating is fine, but comparing makes zero sense at this point.

A fair comparison will only happen about a year after BG3 comes out, lest we forget what WotR was like at launch.... yeah, remember? Ok then.

Sure, this is true if we were providing a final critique of the game 2 games. But we're not, well not all of us anyway. We are trying to point out some of the good things that you can find in the different games, nothing what from WotR would make BG3 even better versus what BG3 does better.

That, I think, is actually quite beneficial. Well, provided anything we say at this point still matters.

Yeah, seems contradictory to me. It's studios like Owlcat and TA that we ought to be supporting.

But to your main point, @KillerRabbit, WotC has also, in parallel with their OGL BS, canceled five other D&D games that were currently being made. Two of those had been in development for quite a while with a lot of sunk costs for those studios. So WotC is literally saying to D&D fans: BG3 is all you are going to get for D&D games, and if you don't like it we don't care.

Agreed.

It's not contradictory at all. If WotC is going to be absorbing profits from the DLC, I'm not going to support WotC. What seems contradictory, to me, is saying that you agree that 25% is go away levels of royalties, while going on and supporting it anyway, thus encouraging WotC to go ahead with it.

Your'e starting from a point that wotc already won and has total control over pathfinder, which is not remotely true yet

I think the point would be, that Paizo would stop making a version of Pathfinder that WotC could claim royalties on. That we would then support.

Can WotC actually claim anything off of Owlcat's Pathfinder games? It's one thing to claim royalties from a game that uses a derivative of your ruleset (something that it's not yet certain they can actually do) but it's another to interfere with an agreement made to a third party to claim revenue for a product that's already mostly complete. I mean, would WotC be able to claim a chunk from the profits the two Pathfinder games have already made? It's bound to be a legal quagmire.

Past profits no, you can't retroactively change an agreement, but going forward is another matter.
Just the fact that we can't easily answer this would be enough for most companies not to want to find out.

Only half paying attention to this topic, I've heard that 1.1 would be a modification to the agreement that Pathfinder 1 was made under, I don't know Pathfinder 2 was made under the OGL.

As a few have noted, this is pretty much what happened with the roll out of 4e, which backfired for WotC, I'm guessing they think they have all their ducks in a row this go 'round.

Not at all. I said, initially, that I wouldn't be buying the next Season Pass until I knew how this all shook out.