[quote=crst] In the case of Baldur's Gate 3 I do think that the motion capture, voice acting, and cinematics are so good that they carry the game. So here the gamble paid off. It is possible for devs to flub this and waste a lot of money on this stuff, and I am perfectly happy playing games that DON'T have a massive graphics budget too.
Well, the gamble was pretty much: CRPG "proper"+AAA-style cinematic presentation=mainstream success. If it's that "easy", somebody should tell all the other guys.
There was no way I wanted to come back to triple-A, making another thing where you focus 90 percent of your efforts on having the feet not sliding on the floor," said the developer. "This is not what I'm making games for."
Additionally, if every game was cinematic, then that would be both hugely boring as well as disrespectful to games as an interactive medium. Maybe I'm a bit optimistic here. But I think that in a couple of decades people will look at games full of cinematics like they do at very early movies, which likewise mimiced what was already there in theatre and stage plays et all before they fully learned to tell stories in their own way. The crucial difference being naturally is that early movies were static mediums aping older static mediums all the same, and not interactive mediums aping static ones (such as games with movies). Therefore... who knows what's gonna happen. The first one to invent the Holodeck is gonna kill the cinematic game for good though.
Meanwhile, I think there may be a HUGE charme in a D&D game that mimics the actual table top kinda storytelling. So instead of going all-out Hollywood blockbuster, it is a dungeon master and his lines/voice constantly spinning the tale. There's elements of that in here also (also the original games, like the chapter narrator). But I think this could be explored far further, by actually letting you interact with that narrator/storyteller/dungeon master, if probably not for a blockbuster game audience, mind. One of the biggest reasons why so many games ape Hollywood is that people are familiar with movies. They're popular and tried and tested. So the prospect of say a fantasy game looking just like Lord Of The Rings on the big screen is a draw in and on itself. And that draw extents far further than tabletop, let alone typical video game audiences.
