you know you people remind me of something. In these articles the talk is always about the poor indies.
As ive said in my previous post: 1. disingenuous, Larian started as a poor indie dev while Bioware was making Dragon Age Inquistiion and it clearly didnt stop them 2. Indie games arent impacted on this, nobody expects tripple A quality from a 20 euro indie game. Also since they tend to be cheaper, people will not decide between them or BG3, theyll just buy both. At least i do.
What seems to realy be the issue behind this is lets say semi big Companies. Bioware, but also Obsidian, the failed giants of yesterday. That and other publisher yoked companies.
theyre afraid of the future because people are beeing shown that you can make a real RPG without concessions. Without loot boxes, without the 200th take on Arkham Asylum combat (yes witcher 3, i mean you too, youre bareley an RPG), without Ubisoft open world checklist maps.
Very much the same was true when Elden Ring came out.
Everyone collectiveley cowered in fear that people would be demanding actual Video Games from them. You know with a creative spark, with an idea what the game is supposed to be.
This sounds like a 16 year old whining about Activision back in the day, but its true when it comes to modern RPGs. They dont dare anything. Witcher 3 was hailed as some Masterpiece when in reality it was a Normified Story game with Arkham Asylum combat and checklist open wrold quests. Yes it had good presentation and better cutscenes than lets say skyrim: but it was also less of an RPG than the already watered down Bethesda RPGs are.
And here comes an RPG with Spell slots, dice rolls and Falling Paladins. they must be thinking this is some sort of Bizarro world. Its all this stuff theyve been told they cant get away with. The same they felt when elden ring just... didnt do map markers. Or hiding progression behind some generic door that you can easily miss. Or just making quests that the majority of players will never see. It BAFFLES them. And it makes them angry because they realize that theyve compromised and will continue to compromise.
EDIT: For companies like Obsidian, i think its more that they realize that they arent the top dog companies like Larian looks up to anymore. They realize that they cant hide behind successes from 20+ years ago anymore and that chasing the past gets them nowhere. We already saw that years ago when Sawyer compared PoE to OS2, the talk that sent Codex into an absolute madness spiral.
