Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Could BG3'S ambition kill the RPG as we know it

No one can often expect another game to meet the expectations and scope of another, especially if the latter is iconoclastic. But people should certainly try. This article reads like a defense of mediocrity, because that's what we've been spoon fed for the last 5 years, minimum value products that often try to chase silly trends, putting out minimum value with a deluge of DLC, lootboxes, and other gimmicks to bilk as many people as possible while cutting down on as much production costs, production quality, and imagination as possible to boost their bottom line.

I'm not saying that this isn't a business, it is. But a lot of media has been lackluster at best, and garbage at most.

Elden Ring showed that you can take a game's formula, refine it, expand the scope, keep the fundamentals tight and make a ton of money. I remember when it came out and people at Ubisoft and other dev studios were criticizing it, "where are the question marks on the map" they say, "where is the cluttered UI and the laundry list of pointless tasks?" they say, "how could something that didn't follow our formula, that we basically copied verbatim from Witcher 3 be as successful as this?" "Inconceivable!"

When we are in an era of media that refuses to innovative, relying instead of nostalgia and remakes ad nauseam, it's important to remember that games, movies, books, are supposed to be, at their core, art. And in art, you innovate, or try to, not just iterate. Hell, I'm not overly criticizing Larian here, but even the contract they won with WOTC was completely predicated on taking advantage of nostalgia, but what I think Larian DID do, is they took this project and instead of doing a Sword Coast Legends with it, really tried to take the ball and move it forward, pouring passion and talent into it in an attempt to make something extraordinary. And, at the end of the day, that's what all forms of art should be doing. Will they always succeed? No, but you should try. If you build it, they will come. A lesson, I think, that many publishers, developers, would be wise to remember given the last two years of utter mediocrity in the AAA sector, buggy messes, broken features, over-promising and under-delivering. That's where we are now.

So yeah sure, the article is right about one thing but not for the reason they think, BG3 is an anomaly, because rather than just a cash grab, they are genuinely trying to do something innovative, new, expansive, and interesting.