Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Great Steam Numbers

Oh please! This is silly. You both are better than this. I thought I was passed this kind of nonsense reactions from you both to things I have to say. I guess I was mistaken, which is unfortunate.

I'm merely stating facts in the face of hype devoid of facts. That BG3 would be a sales success was something I fully expected from years ago, if for no other reason than because of the draw of D&D, which has something like 15 million people playing it TT.

Join the Elder Brain Collective Mind, Kanisatha. We have cookies.

Okay, my bad. Sorry I misconstrued your intent.

At the moment, BG3 has BOTH the highest metascore and the highest user score for PC RPGs. The only other game in the history of the website to have achieved this was Baldur’s Gate II. This is likely not to hold, but it is satisfying to see for now. At the same time, the Steam release is 2% away from Overwhelmingly Positive overall.

Other PC RPGs that have come close to the highest metascore and userscore and very to overwhelmingly positive on Steam include (in order of how highly regarded, closest to top to least close):
-Witcher 3
-Planescape Torment
-KOTOR
-Mass Effect 2
-BG1
-DAO

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a GOAT.

Anyway, i do think Wizards has something else cooking. In 2019, they hired BioWare veterans Ohlen (lead designer for most of BioWare’s golden age games), Drew Karpyshyn (Mass Effect writer), and a few other BioWare veterans to start their own autonomous internal game development studio: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archetype_Entertainment

They’re working on a new IP, but I wouldn’t be surprised if lessons about cinematics, reactivity, character customisation, tabletop simulation, and companion driven storytelling are being learned once more. The CRPG renaissance could go on for longer than anyone thought.

https://www.pcgamer.com/wizards-of-...at-least-five-videogames-in-development/

Wizard of the Coast is aiming to a D&D MMORPG, they need a digital permanent business. It could be Baldur's Gate MMORPG if Larian agrees and cooperates.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: MMOs and MMORPGs are garbage and no one could pay me enough money to play them. Elder Scrolls is probably my favorite franchise, but goddamn, ESO’s gameplay and exploration are shallow as fuck.

Garbage or not, WOTC is trying to create a permanent online world to catch up digital only players. In addition, just why MMORPG are "garbage", there's enough market opportunity to create a great MMORPG based on D&D ruleset.

Sorry but no. Archetype's game is confirmed to be a sci-fi game in a new IP (and not necessarily an RPG). And WotC canceled five D&D-based games that were in development earlier this year, including two that had been in development for as much as three years, so they were quite far along, and one that was being developed by another internal WotC studio.

And for me, cRPG and AAA do not go together. BG3 is certainly an RPG, but it is not a cRPG. The cRPG is a dying genre, to be replaced by big-budget, fancy graphics, cinematic, full VO AAA RPGs, for better or worse.

It's been a good week now and even tonight BG3 only slightly missed Hogwarts Legacies all-time peak. A fairly "casual" open world action RPG sporting one of the biggest media licenses around... really makes you wonder what numbers BG3 had if it was a Potter game... or LOTR.

Sitting at no. 1 spot in the Steam top sellers too. Plus still rocking P5 preorder charts.


Hmm.... https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=785882#Post785882

(I was fishing for an older thread I remember participating in, to check for estimations back then out of curiosity. As I don't think anybody saw these kind of numbers coming... and yeah, barely anyone did. Just like on a German forum I frequent. Always interesting in retrospect. )

I don't think that it's bad thing to see a "proper" RPG doing pretty darn fine on all accounts (even on console preorders) for the time being. Not after the AAA RPG market has largely been dominated by games blurring the lines between action adventure games, and oft sporting pretty shallow character (and gameplay systems) for many years to boot. All in the ever ongoing quest of reaching an ever bigger target audience, of course.

Don't think it will change much though, no less as the bigger studios don't have the experience (and personell) anymore to do this kind of thing (and it's taken Larian years to get there). See what happened with Redfall after many Imm Sim specialists had left Arkane Austin and/or weren't onboard with the concept to do a "looter shooter" to get an idea of how it's people making games -- not brand / company logos. This naturally goes doubly so for pretty specialized kind of games. Such as RPGs -- and Imm Sims. Additionally, the biggest publishers aim for the biggest fishes in the pond.

And that's still gonna be Skyrim, WItcher et all. There's stuff that may influence, such as the systemic gameplay, quest design/outcomes, branching, etc. But neither Bethesda nor Bioware nor anybody is now suddenly going to do a turnaround because of one BG3 (with AAA projects taking years nowadays to get off the ground anyways, sometimes half a decade+). Much like nobody's going to try a couple of Elden Ring copycats. Additionally, smaller studios won't have the funds.

There is a D&D MMO its Called NEVERWINTER.

Nothing will change. There is a mass group of gamers that seem to only move from the newest thing to the next thing. After a month or two we'll see the numbers drop by 50% or so, then more, etc. Being multiplayer will keep things higher than normal, but it won't be hundreds of thousands all the time.

Also, I doubt devs will change much, gamers will still be looking for other games to play, although, rpgs will now be compared to Baldur's Gate 3, at least in the media. When I'm playing Armored Core VI, I most definitely won't be thinking "oh man, if only they did 'x' like BG3", or with Cyberpunk DLC, same thing.

Yeah, I mean, no shit. It's prevalently a single player game. There will be a bunch of very dedicate users who will stick around and replay it over and over, but for the most part people will just move on to the next thing after one full playthrough, when even that.

This should be in NO way be considered as a factor that discredits the quality of the game.

That said, I'll take the chance to point that this Sunday the game broke a new record of concurrent users: 875,343.
The mere fact that it climbed even higher after the first weekend (which is typically when most single player games peak, only to fade away over time) is impressive in itself.

Lmao some of my buddies who are in the military are playing this. Those guys only ever play Paradox games with me.

Yay that this weekend’s number of concurrent users was even higher than last weekend!

I really hope this game inspires more studios to take a look at AAA CRPGs. BioWare and Obsidian have both moved away from the genre, but it has so much potential.

"How can we monetize the shit outta that?"

Yeah, probably. But a man can hope. I would be happy to live in a world with one good AAA CRPG a year. That would be amazing.

Yes, but it's action, not turn based and the overall quality is poor, many players say it doesn't resemble the Forgotten Realms, the quests are boring, the world is small, graphic is meager.

Larian quality without compromise makes the difference.

You speak as though Larian invented these things in BG3. Hardly. Many RPGs have done all of these things for years, and done them very well. Speaking of "systemic gameplay" for example, it's not systemic gameplay per se that matters and rather the specific form of systemic gamepley in a game. To me Larian's systemic gameplay in BG3 is focused on shallow and superficial aspects of the game (ex. talking to all animals, raising the dead, blowing up barrels, shoving people, etc.), and as such I don't give Larian any credit for these systems. And from all I've been seeing since full launch of the game, Larian's story and quest design and their outcomes, the way in which the PC is often railroaded in dialogues, and the extent to which the custom PC's decisions and actions are *not* honored by the game and often completely ignored, does not make BG3 any kind of "standard" for other future RPGs. So I am going to be extremely happy to see other RPG studios like Obsidian, CDPR, Bethesda, and Bioware ignoring BG3 and continuing to do their own thing, because their games I generally consider to be very good. Furthermore, I also do not want other studios to copy the specific AAA aspects of BG3, such as cinematic exposition and full voice acting, which I consider a complete waste of huge amounts of resources that would be better spent on traditional core elements of good RPGs such as storytelling, character development, and world building.