Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Overhype and its Disconents

Is anyone else worried that this game is being overhyped and framed as more than it is?

We could easily hit a Cyberpunk situation where people expect a game of one level, and when expectations are not met, irreparable damage is done to the studio and genre.

Thoughts?

Don't think so.

Game was lunched in EA and 1.0 is not much different in terms of gameplay or quality. People know what to expect.

I'm not too worried about that. EA was more smooth for me, than a lot of finished games. I mean, yes, there will be a lot of untested stuff, but I'm fairly confident, that the game won't be a buggy mess.
DId Cyberpunk had an EA? I didn't really follow that, so don't know much about it, other than the launch was a bit of a mess (but I heard from a lot of people, that the game per se isn't bad)

Absolutely.

I’m reserving my judgement until full release, and I’m not pre-ordering. There’s definitely stuff in the game that stopped me from buying other games.

Especially because I’m gonna be playing the PS5 version, so need to see how the performance is first.

You live in a world where the inability to properly use language has become widespread. Almost everything now is superlative-riddled, hyperbolic nonsense. Everything is 'awesome'; a witty retort becomes a 'brutal takedown'; what was previously 'unpleasant' is now 'toxic'.
If money is involved then the situation is generally even more worser [sic].

I don't remember being able to test a third of Cyberpunk before its release like I did with BG3.

Potential buyers who did not buy the EA version do not have the benefit of that knowledge and the OP is not about the game itself but the hype surrounding the upcoming release.

I am happy there is a lot of hype, so that hopefully BG3 will sell a lot of copies and be a big success! This is a busy year for games as well as being Larian’s first AAA game, so I think BG3 can use all the hype it can get!

Still, there is so much material out there.

CP2077 was thrown in as example so let's use it. We had nothing more than the devs telling us about the game and an outdated 1-hour gameplay that promised a lot.

BG3 has a 3-year long EA, lots of people played it so that we all know what to expect. There is no excuse to saying "I didn't know what I was buying."

To all:

We have played the EA. There are a large number of consumers out there who have not and are expecting universal reactivity, 17000 endings, in-depth romances and sex scenes (in the vein of this shit) , and a world with 100-200 hours of content with limitless replayability. WE know it’s exaggeration, but do they?

I'd guess that a lot of people who spent tens if not hundreds of hours in EA have a pretty realistic expectation of what the game may turn out to be.

To me the game is hopelessly over hyped when it comes to quality as a lot of the things I've seen sound good in marketing, but experienced in game were average and definitely a far cry from groundbreaking. Easiest example for me to point out are the cinematics which are large in quantity, but not AAA level in many ways.

Gameplay and narration are up for tastes, personally I am not a huge fan of what we have seen in the EA. I think top tier devs in the industry deliver above that, similar as with before mentioned cinematics.


For me the one thing Larian could excel though is choices and reactions. If they really feel like a big impact on the game this could be the unique selling point of the game that makes it a game that defines the genre - if it turns out to be shallow then and only then I would say the game was over hyped. But I'm definitely not on the hype train for this game. So far it looks on par with WotR - each having strong and weak sides, but while enjoyable neither of them will make it into a list of games that had an influence on me like other titles had that (despite their weakness) I found to be memorable.

Well you know the Cyberpunk 2077 EA was...

wait...hmmm...

Nope.

You HAVE to hype your game. I have not seen anything in the hype that is particularly inaccurate. The 17,000 permutations/endlings is just puffery and most people are going to understand the context of what that means.

Everybody is excited, which is really good!

The game has been in early access for three years and Larian is giving press opportunities to play the game hands on.

CDPR lied to customers and investors about what their game was, what kind of content they were capable of producing, and released BS demonstrations that were not at all indicative of the product they released.

Even if BG3 disappoints some people, it’s not going to be another CP2077.

I don't know. I'm super-excited. To me it feels like the entire world is too, but that's just algorithms at work. If I were to watch nothing but Skyrim Mods for a month on end, that's what I'd get instead. I'm pretty certain this game is exactly what it's advertised to be. There's also things that worry me, and a handful of things I just don't like. With a game this big, I can overlook that. And, in the future; if that becomes a nuisance, I will mod it out.

No. As others have pointed out the game has been playable for three years, and there is plenty of footage and hands-on experiences, that anyone interested in BG3 can access.

Secrecy was Cyberpunks issues - it promised a lot, showed nothing of substance - so imagination took over.

Yeah, there's plenty of footage out there of BG3, and a lot of folks have played it and commented on the actual gameplay.

There are people who are unhappy with aspects of the game, and they have been more than vocal.

I get the concern of course. When you get overly excited, it's easy to be let down.

But, in general, I think the hype is good. In fact, I think it's long-fun helpful for folks who want great reactive versions of these type of games in the future. The hype seems to be sending a clear message to devs across the community. just my opinion.

I'm super stoked, but I think I have realistic expectations. PoE2 claimed a strong degree of reactivity ("your choice have real consequences"), and while it's one of my favorite games, it seemed pretty average in that department, and I think we'll get something similar here.

What excites me is the size, and that given the dialog is all cinematics, the differences in playthroughs will be much higher than in other games

I'm sure there are people with unrealistic expectations because of the marketing, so they get to play a great game and learn to take marketing as marketing, and not as tablets from the mountain

We had so much faith in CD Project Red - how naive we were - we couldn't even imagine they would pull that, but looking back the warning signs were all there.

It's sad because that game is an incredible work of Art that does an amazing job of portraying a hyper-capitalist Ultra-Libertarian Dystopian world. it saddens me that more people won't get to explore that because I think it's a relevant criticism of modern culture and political systems.*

*I am not criticizing anyone's political leanings, I use 'hyper' and 'Ultra' to denote the danger of extremism.

But +1 Larian has done it right, this should be an example to other AAA studios on how you develop a game for gamers.

I never had faith in CDPR, but I don't really have hype in any game dev, if they make a good game, great, if they make a shitty one, that sucks. It's dangerous to blindly get hyped about things without seeing the final product. That said, I've purchased my share of early access titles, but I accept the risk that they might not turn out how I wish they would.

I'm not expecting too many surprises with BG3 though, just more of the same as Act 1, which I'm fine with.