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

The whole POE thing shows you can't make a secuessfull franchise by catering to nostalgia and people who liked crunchy dnd. Obsidian needs to just launch a new world at this point.

Also the “Rockstar Level Nonsense” idea came from James Berg, previously of Electronic Arts, whose hit contributions include Dragon Age Inquisition, Anthem, the FIFA, NBA, and NHL games. While he is more of an accessibility dev, he’s far from the voice people should be listening to on making games people would want to play. You could not find a more soulless group of games.

Nah. Pathfinder shows that nostalgia and 'crunchy dnd' does work. BG3 does show this as well. I have issues with it but comapred to many rpgs, BG3 will be 'nostalgic' and 'crunchy'.

Also, PE was pretty successful. PE2 on the other hand.

The key is the devs have to care. Obsidian big wigs no longer care. They became lazy just like Bioware. Hence why both are now trash.

Is BG3 REALLY that crunchy? It seems very entry level tabletop to me…

Compared to most crpgs. You have a lot of races, classes, subclass, skills, weapons, armour, spells, other magical items, etc., etc.

Lots of things going on to decide success or failure.

This doesn't mean it'll be hard or easy. But, it is definitely gonna be crunch.

Take FO. A game known for its fun and often challenging turn based combat (well... before you get the power armour lol then it becomes rather easy). It has no more 'crunchy' stuff than BG3 does.

BG2 had less races, classes, and subraces.

My biggest issue with BG3 is respecc since it makes character creation/choices LESS meaningful since it can so easily be changed.

But, yeah, BG3 is definitely in the 'upper tier' of 'crunchy' crpgs. Quality we will see...

Pathfinder is an example of it not working though. It's not even in the top hundred right now, while multiple older rpgs are.

PoE sold on hype. By PoE 2 people know the game wasn't their thing.

Pathfinder games a pretty niche, appealing to a fairly small group of fans whom are already on board with that style of game.

BG3 is going big and trying to appeal to as many people as possible. It’s relying on innovation and giving people experiences they haven’t had in video games before. That’s not banking on nostalgia.

That was definitely my experience with PoE. I was quite excited for it leading up to launch, but after beating it and looking back all I could say was that “it was fine, I guess.” Combat wasn’t very fun and story was pretty forgettable. I hoped both of these would be improved in PoE2 but Obsidian somehow managed to make both of these so much worse. It makes sense to me why so many people who bought PoE1 avoided that game.

So.. nostalgia does sell... but you also gotta make the game good enough as well. Imagine that. Nostalgia gets your foot in the door, just like dnd does, but you gotta do more. PE sold on hype. Yeha, hype of nostalgia. That is my point.


Pathfinder does sell. It does work. It did well enough to get a sequel. Not to mention their new game (which I dont care about as much because no dwarves lol). Pathfinder not in top 100 of what? What is the context?

Also, what 'innovation' is BG3 doing? And, yes, BG3 did bank on nostalgia.. why else pick BG3? Why not a whole new game? Why bother including Minsc and Jaheira who seem so disconnect to the rest of the content and the other characters? It is because of nostalgia.

The thing Larian/BG3 is doing is that it isnt just relying on nostalgia, but they're trying (even if I disagree with some of their choices nor do I think the really like bg or dnd for that matter) to make as good a game as they possible can.

Obsidian with PE were simply lazy and didn't do anything with it. For the record, I actually kinda like both PEs - Obsidian's last decent games - but they are flawed by choice thanks to the guiy who was basically in charge who absolutely hated dnd/bg/bio style of games and it showed.

Thankfully, Larian while making BG3, are also in many ways making DOS3. And, it shows. Which means, it'll be really good in that regard with a lot of dnd tint to it. Thankfully, it includes dwarves. Too bad about no dwarf party members or romances, though.

I happen to love PoE2 and think it's absolutely fantastic. I actually enjoy it more than the original even, I also really enjoyed The Outer Worlds and am looking forward to its sequel and to Avowed. And beyond that, talking about PoE and Pathfinder, not every game has to be the biggest thing, nor should they be. Both in terms of scope or popularity. Making the best game possible doesn't translate into making it the biggest. A lot of games benefit from being smaller, and in contrast a lot of games suffer for being made bigger than they should have been, and would have been better if the devs had allowed them to be somewhat smaller in scope. I think every AAA game should absolutely be polished and tested and complete in a way far too many are not (I also think it' presumptuous to assume BG3 is gonna come out a pristine work, not that I think it will be a buggy mess, but best not to tempt fate) but I think gaming, AAA gaming in particular would be better and healthier if everyone from executives to customers internalized the fact that scope doesn't translate to quality.

A combination of systems driven gameplay and narrative, where you character build gives you tremendous room for creativity and self-expression with how you choose to tack challenges, overcome obstacles or just move around the map.

Think about the approach to Aunt Ethel’s cavern. There is a multi-tiered descent covered with poison gas. How many different ways are there to bypass that? How many different spells or abilities can get you past it? It’s a simple puzzle that illustrates the strength of Larian’s system driven approach.

BioWare and Obsidian never gave players that much freedom in gameplay. Bethesda did, but at a significant cost to narrative and presentation. Their world’s are reactive but only in a shallow way.

You don’t think BG3 is innovative? I’ve never played a game quite like this before. DOS2 is obviously very similar, but this is pushing the idea much further (a bigger budget tends to do that).

Blind nostalgia only sells only once. Then the well is dry. Also the amount of people nostalgic for pure dnd 5 e is probably in the hundreds, if under a hundred, much smaller consumer base than crpg fans

Steam charts.

Minsc and Jaheria are likely a wotc call, they put minsc in everything. And even if not, they are relativly minor parts of the game. Baldur's gate is also, in the words of Ed Greenwood the perfect setting for a campaign. As it's big yet remote enough for players to be able to do whatever they want

I don’t relate to your tastes or vision, so we are just going to have to understand that we are coming from dramatically different places; HOWEVER,

I think games are propelled forward by the megaprojects. Sure, smaller scale games have made contributions here and there, but the characteristics of the RPG have marched along with ambition, not with replication. I think of Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim developing massive open worlds for their time with interactable items and environments. The development of procedural generation. I think of BG2 and its immediate successors bringing in more lifelike characters. I think of Rockstar breaking the mold with every release. Or of Nintendo’s mainline of products. Or of Minecraft 10 years ago. Or Paradox simulating centuries of history.

So much of a quality gaming experience is rooted in novelty, or doing something that hasn’t been done in that way or to that scale before. It’s possible to innovate without scale or scope, but you have fewer opportunities to do so simply because there is less “game” to do it within.

Is there really room for small dreams in the AAA space?

FO did this. In the mid 90s. WL did this. Larian's own DOS games did this. DA series did this to varying degrees. KOTOR series did this in spades. This is the whole point of crpgs - your character gets different ways to do things. This isn't innovation. That's not an insult to Larian as it is good that they are doing it but innovation means 'new' or 'never done before' not 'more of' or 'slightly improved'.

In FO, you can literally plant bombs on npcs. You can sneak around. You can convince the 'main villain' to blow himself up.

Early on you get a quest to deal with some radscorpions. The easy way through is just kill but you can simply plant a bomb at the entrance and complete the quest. An early bandit camp can literally be solved under the right circumtsances/stats by pretending to be the 'ghost' of the leader's father who he had murdered.

I'm looking forward to the different ways to complete quests but it is not innovative to do what crpgs are supposed to do.

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Millions of people play 5e. There are ceterainly more than hundreds that want as 'pure to 5e dnd as much possible'. I personally know dozens myself who would want it as 'pure as possible'. I guessing over half the audience for BG3 are dnd players. The BG fanbase alone is in the millions.

Now many players play the pre game release? I bet a good chunk of them were 'hardcore' dnd players mized in with 'hardcore larian' fans. I doubt casuals even bothered with it. I skipped it to avoid spoilers as much as possible.

Do not underestimate the dnd fanbase.

Fair enough. Obsidian and others are certainly open to critiques on their business decisions and their approaches to making games (going first-person, for example). However, based on the core topic of the thread, given that I consider Larian's games to not be good games (including BG3), the last thing I want is for other RPG studios to start cranking out games similar to Larian's games.

Also, people continue to keep furthering the falsehood that PoE2 performed poorly. That is factually not true, and Obsidian have officially stated that PoE2 (eventually) ended up being a financial success for them.

So ...,
Larian: make a few big games that are all very smiliar to one another (D:OS, BG3), and which are all games I don't care for;

Obsidian: make a range of games where games like their PoE games don's sell as much as Larian's games but are awesome niche games, and profits are made up my also making games like Grounded and TOW that make a lot of money for the studio, allowing them to get by with a smaller profit margin for their PoE games.

In this scenario, I'd MUCH, MUCH rather have Obsidian than Larian.

The only 'innovation' I see with BG3 is making it a highly cinematic game. Critics of traditional cRPGs often claim they don't like those games because: "if I wanted to read a novel, I'd go do that." Well, for me with BG3: If I wanted to watch a movie, I'd go do that. BG3 is a long and tedious movie where I am given the false feeling that my interractions with the movie matter, even though they're rather superficial, trite, and often also silly. Everything else about BG3 can be found in plenty of other RPGs, and often done better. But, for a great many people in today's social-mdia-driven society where superficiality dominates in every aspect of life, a hyper-cinematic video game is surely going to be "awesome."

You and Gray Ghost made some good points that I overlooked in my own self-righteous fury. People have different preferences, and there are those individuals who prefer a studio focus on multiple smaller-scale projects rather than go all-in on one. One of Xalavier's points was that by making megagames the standard, consumers will get games made for everyone instead of the one game that was meant for each of us. We need to respect the idea that all developers have their own way of doing things, and the vertical megaproject is not a "one size fits all." Having said that, I do believe there are important conclusions for viable business strategies in development that people are learning:

-There is a need to renegotiate the investor-developer relationship if creative autonomy can achieve the same level of profits and brand recognition as financially-prioritized control.
-Crowdfunding can be very powerful if paired with an active playerbase and player feedback. Larian did not invent the kickstarter or early access, but it is showing the potential for these tactics to carry megaprojects.
-The way an EA is structured can give different impressions to a playerbase as to what that EA is for, and how their contributions help the game. Compare BG3 with other EAs that develop the whole product over the course of the EA, ending with the final release of the game where version 1.0 is marginally different than EA version 0.90.
-While it is attractive to build one's own IP for creative control and profit exclusivity, big name IPs can draw players that otherwise would not play your game. BG3 has the BG fanbase, the Larian fanbase, the CRPG fanbase, and the DND fanbase as a starting point, and is building on that to start with.
-Maintaining enthusiasm over a long development cycle is essential. If you are not Rockstar or Bethesda, people are not waiting for your game with bated breath.
-This one is still up in the air, but I am interested in the idea that company growth can scale with project and revenue growth, only to be consolidated after the project is finished. I don't think of game development as an industrial endeavor, but if it works, this approach could be huge for catapulting indie devs into AAA-sized devs.

I really like Pathfinder Wotr...its not perfect but it does pretty well so many things. Particularly in the UI / control/ presentation, classes and companions. I can truly make the character class I imagined. And make him/her literally a GOD or DEMON.

You’d have a better reputation if you found a way to express your opinion without casting shade on others’.

Maybe someone remembers Larians "Dont make boring characters"
i think: Horns, oh no the villager will think im a evil hellspawn.
Larian: thinks horns are cool, make them bigger

20 more classes and 40 more races makes the game not better.

Larian is maybe the pinnacle of a CRPG Standart from 20 years ago but the combat alone looks so dull compared to modern systems that another crpg with realtime combat, placeholder animations, combat sounds etc... can compete with Larian simply because the combat looks fun. Larian has in my opinion a open flank in some areas.