Stuff like Starfield isn't my cup of tea, but judging by news and reviews, yeah absolutely - if the only competitor is Starfield, even BG3 can get GOTY.
If would like BG3 to win GoTy just as a strong message to the AAA gaming industry. That alone would be great.
Strong - yes, no doubt about that. But I wonder what kind of message it will be. Keep in mind, most people are rather daft (C-level execs are doubly so), so what was
shown matters little; what matters is what was
seen.
"So yer wanna get yerself GOTY, laddies? Make sure you piggyback on an established franchise, and include plenty of pre-rendered sex scenes!"
This is what happened to a certain other industry, which
in the last decade or so has turned into a place where everybody is a step relative to everybody else.
We've already seen this, too many times to bother counting. After the initial success of Ultima Online, Lineage 1 / 2 and WoW, everyone and their mother jumped onto the hype train and started producing MMOs of varying quality. And where all of them are now?..
After Dark Souls hit the market, a lot of companies tried to mimic From's success. Most, if not all of them have failed miserably, which is no surprise.
Should we expect the same wave of copycats with BG3? Absolutely. With predictable results? Oh yes. Not because BG3 is so fucking great and outstanding, but because the executives' minds (or whatever they have in place of cerebral cortex) work differently from ours. Not playing the games, not understanding their attractive and repulsive aspects, being able to think only in terms of TTM and ROI prevents them from making decisions that result in great products. The three pillars of business strategy: gut feeling, hand-waving and meme copying. "It worked for BG3, it should work for our game!" Sure, but what are these "it"s? Sex sells, but this is old hat; let's outdo Larian in bestiality then! Oh, and maybe aliens? BG3 doesn't have aliens; let's add them and have sex with them!
I'm going to have a lot of fun watching new CRPG releases in the next several years.
P.S. Just caught a bug - party stuck between 2 different camps, cannot proceed. And it's only Act 1. Give them GOTY, my arse... As one Steam reviewer has put it succinctly, "Developers loved their Early Access so much, they released Early Access 2".
