I'm actually more or less in that field and let me tell you: it has nothing to do with being a "5th edition purist" or not. In fact, perfect adherence with the rules of the 5th edition are quite possibly on the of the topics I discussed about the least.
It's just a matter of fact across all genres and styles: the general, casual audience has nothing more than casual expectations.
Give them a neat package, production vaue with enough polish, and they will never question the minute details of what you are selling them, if not months later in hindsight.
Of course, you two are purposefully putting it in the most unlikable way, as if being "causal" about something was some sort of shame or mark of infamy, but that's disingenuous, because it's meant to be a generic consideration, not a qualitative judgement.
I don't really blame people who aren't that much into a topic for not being able to make distinctions on nuance, but that doesn't make that nuance meaningless.
I mean, I can't understand shit about motors, I don't see why MY opinion about what's the best motorcycle on the market and what feature it should offer should be valued above the one of an expert in that field.
EDIT- Oh well, look at that, I didn't even remember we basically had this very same topic discussed in the first page of this same thread. So, there's that too.
I have, in the past, held this view. Its what I call the, "expert argument." You assume that you (or someone else) is an expert on a particular topic, then because you (or they) are an expert, you assert that clearly the weight of expertise makes your opinion more valuable. To quote myself when I made this argument, "you would not go to a guy on the street for medical advice, you would want to speak to a specialist." This begs 2 important questions, the first is how do you know you are an expert? The second is, does the expert argument hold up under all scrutiny.
So, to address the first question. Have you made any games? How many years in game development do you have? When did you study? Also, while you are at it, define what metric you think is applicable for expertise here and explain why we should use that one. I can tell you with certainty, many of the people at Larian have made games before and they do have some time in game development. They also studied it and I am sure some of them have a background in D&D as well. They are, almost without a doubt, experts. Does that mean they get to make the expert argument and dismiss your feedback? Does this mean that your feedback has no value?
Now, to address the 2nd argument of, "does it matter?" In some cases, I would say yes. Evaluating when though is difficult, subjective and would take more time than I care to dedicate to this post. In many other cases though, I would say the answer is no. A mantra I personally live by is, "if an argument cannot stand on its own 2 legs I do not care who makes it, be it Stephen Hawking or the guy on the street." If the reasons given for taking a path is good and elucidated well, then it does not matter who said them, all that matters is the argument itself.
When I made this argument, it was on a topic which I do consider myself an expert on and I had written a fair amount of material on, with a large body of evidence to back it up. It was still probably a mistake to do so, because, as I said in the above paragraph, a good argument is able to stand on its merit alone.
Yeah that's a straw man and pretty badly draw caricature. It's really asking that game provide what it's offering on the tin. It's labeled as D&D, it's face of D&D and I want it to inspire a new generation of D&D games. And I can do so if its not representing the ruleset accurately.
Its not a straw man because, I never wanted you to, "attack it" to begin with, I was just explaining why I was asking (more to determine whether or not its an argument I should engage with). There are actually people making this argument on the forums and I am more or less paraphrasing them, but I consider it bad form to demean others, so I am not giving their names.
Well said but problematic. A. I'm not sure how you were able to divine this criteria [...]
I'm glad we agree that things can be changed via feedback but I am less certain than you are that we are able to divine their core design philosophy.
I was able to "divine this criteria" because many developers in the past have said that this is the type of feedback they find valuable, both in blog posts and to me personally. I made the assumption that if this is something which is true for many of the developers that I am aware of, it is likely true for most of them. I cannot prove whether this assumption is true or not, but there are good reasons to take this, "leap of faith," and for now I will do so. If you like, I can find some of those articles and link them to you to read.
and B. I think you are ignoring or dismissing the many reasons given for the changes to the mechanics. Reasons like "I think this game plays more like DOS than BG2" is a reason for a 6 person party. I want to use a buffer cleric and melee cleric and still have room for a thief, mage and fighter is a reason. I miss the BG2 multi party banters . . . and I could go on for pages. I think the proposed changes are backed by plenty of reason for the dislike.
Likewise, I want the combat in D&D game to feel like D&D combat is the "feeling" and the elimination of the homebrew is the solution.
Reasons, "why I think the party limit should be 6 and not 4," is not entirely the same as, "reasons why I dislike the current party size," although there is some overlap between both. If you like, I can provide examples of why this is the case, but I think you are able to understand this without me illustrating it.
I get the sense you don't understand why that statement is unpersuasive -- it's trivially true. And problematic in others ways. Of course you have sampling bias on any forum -- that much is obvious. But how is biased? It's biased because you only sample the most dedicated fans of the genre. The question then becomes whether or not that is bad group to poll. Clearly you think it is but I really don't -- those fans understand the genre best and they will do the best job of spreading the word about the finished product.
The, "expert argument." See my above post about it. In addition, lets say you were to make a game for experts of the genre. People who know the ins and outs of every PC RPG and the D&D system. If this is your target audience, they have markedly different expectations than that of the general public and there are a LOT of things they likely want, which the general public does not. If you made a game to appeal to experts, it would not be played by the general public, because the learning curve would be too steep and the game would likely be very unforgiving. I am not saying it would be a bad thing to make a game for experts, but if you do so, you do so knowing that you are severely limiting the pool of people for which the game is appealing to.
On the popularity of the rulese t-- Forbes tells me that WotC sales grew by 53 percent last year. And this is to say nothing of the revenues coming from the popularity of the youtube and netflix series. I think Larian is smart to try and ride that wave of enthusiasm. And "the unexpected bump in sales numbers" that Larian reported is the same thing that other devs have experienced. Beamdog's servers crashed and crashed again for months because they were so unprepared for the number of downloads (sadly, the first of a set of mistakes) The second set of mistakes was not understanding how popular the BG EEs were with non gamers. The graphics wouldn't work on integrated intel video cards this despite the fact vanilla version did. Their beta testers all had gaming machines and the devs lost months of sales rewriting program to accommodate crappy laptops. The lesson -- non gamers will buy it because of the D&D and BG labels. It's why I'm here. Hell, I haven't played the Witcher which I think in enough to get me excluded from the gamer club.
My point was that, tabletop gaming as a whole is a niche genre. Take a sample of 1000 people on the street. Ask them if they play any PC or console games. Then ask them if they play any tabletop games. Then, if you like, ask more in depth questions like if they can name the games, what are their favorite games and to name some characters. You will find in doing so, that gaming has a much bigger audience than tabletop.
Yeah, cool, WoTC grew 53%, its still tiny in comparison to the gaming market. I can also bet you that the bump in sales was anything but "unexpected." They spent a lot of money on advertising the game during early access. It was for a time, the banner on the front page of steam. Being featured in the release of a new flagship apple product is likely also not cheap. I was completely unaware that they were demoed at apple, I do not watch apple presentations, but a friend of mine, who does not play games at all, neither tabletop nor pc games and had no knowledge of either told me he was excited for Baldur's Gate 3 because he saw it at an apple presentation. Widescale marketing like that, has a much bigger impact than whether or not a game happens to be from a popular tabletop franchise.
There was reason so many devs made a bid for rights to make BG3.
If you think about it, there actually were not many devs who made a bid for it. There were 3 or 4 companies including Larian, Obsidian and Beamdog. Bethesda did not make a bid for it and if they did, you can bet they would have got the rights to make it. Nor did Bioware and they were the ones that made BG 1 and 2 to begin with. The companies that made a bid to make BG 3 were companies which had other reasons to want to make a sequel to BG aside from sales, they were companies which are heavily invested into making RPGs and likely have people passionate about those games to begin with.
