Think most people are more interested in what Larian is cooking up, the IP barely matters.
Yeah anyone apart from Larian making BG4 is basically fucked. Maybe if they wait 5-10 years and a studio with an established brand comes in, but that isn’t what’s going to happen.
Prior to BG3 I held BG1&2 somewhere in the top 5 games of all time. BG3 had an impossible bar to meet and they not only met it, but far surpassed it.
I’m genuinely sad at whatever BG4 releases as. It’s like someone who loved Diablo 1&2 looking at Diablo 3&4. Diablo 3 was a shell of Diablo 2 and I literally just had to check if Diablo 4 was a released game. Maybe it’s fun to someone, but I’ve completely checked out of the series.
So here’s to BG4, BG:TCG, & BG:Mobile, shells of the greatness that came before them.
Oblivion Obsidian is the only other company that can hold expectations currently
Obsidian’s last open world game, The Outer Worlds, was best described as “whelming”
Exactly. This headline read as “Interested investors want to throw money at someone because BG3 did so well and then demand they release a half finished product so they can meet their quarterly financial date.”
I think people are sort of over wotc ever since the OGL fiasco, plus milking mtg for all it’s worth. This is probably a result.
You’d be surprised how many people don’t know about that or think everything is fine now.
I think Paizo would be a good collab. Personally I’d love to see Larian do something with Starfinder.
I’m in the opposite group. I don’t care for Larian’s games (though I wish them the best) and I was very let down when they made the latest Baldur’s Gate.
Don’t think people should downvote you for this opinion, especially with you even being respectful about it.
I had a good time with BG3 (though I’m less high on it than most people), but at the end of the day it’s clearly a Larian-game. If you didn’t like the Divinity series you probably won’t enjoy BG3, and if you had hoped for a BG 1&2 feel, you would probably be a bit let down.
One thing I appreciate between BG3 and their Original Sin series is that the latter games felt like turn based Splatoon whereas the former has much less surface spam barrelmancy (though it is still present)
Not sure why you’re being down voted, it’s a reasonable opinion to have if you don’t like their games. I feel the same about the originals. I tried them and respect them a lot, but they’re just not for me.
BG3 has insane fanboys who don’t accept any criticism of it. It makes it difficult to review games any more
Just curious, what was the let down(s) for you? I feel like they were pretty transparent about what the game was gonna be through the whole dev cycle
I simply do not like how Larian handles combat encounters or their reliance on environmental damage/restrictions that are always against the player.
Idk if anyone could do half the job Larian did.
I have a feeling this will just be a cash grab to milk the IP for as much as they can.
Imagine if bg4 is a mobile game with micro transactions? Hasbro would totally do it
Obsidian could maybe, they did a couple classic BG-style Infinity Engine games in Pillars of Eternity I & II.
…but that’s a little bit like a step back/down from what we saw in BG3.
One huge advantage Larian had was years of experience making games in this genre, and I doubt many other studios have that sort of corporate knowledge. Obsidian may be the only sizable one that comes close. Maybe Beamdog too, as they are responsible for the Enhanced Editions of all the old Infinity Engine games, including some original content.
What’s up with Obsidian these days? Outer Worlds was a really fun empty box. I enjoyed it like a Fallout game, but after ~30 hours I was done. The hype for that game was setting it up to be “the better Fallout”, but alas, the whole thing just felt rushed and empty to me.
I love their old games and I’m tentatively excited about OW2, but I’d be lying if I said I haven’t lost some faith.
I have full faith in Tactical Adventures. Solasta is the closest translation of tabletop D&D to CRPG ever made IMO. All they need is a better than indie budget and permissions to use the full license and content instead of just the SRD.
The gameplay is good but from what I played, outside of combat, it was a bit lackluster, and rations were a pain when I played. Though it’s hard not to compare it to BG3 in that regard. I did like Larian’s system to interact with the environment and liquids too that made some battles more dynamic. Maybe there’s more of that is Solasta than I saw too, I didn’t get far, should give it another go, it has solid combat which is at least half of a good DnD game.
You need to install the unfinished business mod to really make Solasta shine. It’s… unofficially endorsed by the devs (in the sense that the UB mod discord channel is hosted on the official Solasta discord). It adds races, subclasses, and more to bring the game fully in-line with tabletop options, including multi-classing.
Besides that, while the official campaign is decent enough, some custom campaigns are incredible, like full games in and of themselves, and some take more advantage of the game engine and dialogue options than the official campaign.
To me, Baldur’s Gate 3 is an interesting experiment, but in terms of gameplay it’s just not D&D. It’s a weird relationship sim with some (very) loose D&D mechanics. It has fun moments but the game is inconsistent, buggy, and generally becomes very un-fun, especially in multiplayer.
BG3 is very much a Larian game with D&D trappings, not a D&D game just made by Larian, if that makes sense.
I put something like 50-60 hours into BG3 and just couldn’t be bothered to finish it, stalled out once in act 2, and again on a second attempt in act 1. By contrast, I’ve got over 500 hours and counting in Solasta.
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Edit - oh, and with regard to rations, stack up early as you can (at least 20) and from there you’ll gather plenty in the field map if you have someone with high survival. Alternate option would be to have a Ranger or dries with goodberry, and later on other classes get the create food spell.
Or you could just disable the food mechanic altogether, it’s your game.
Solasta was a great solo game. The multiplayer issues killed it for me and my SO.
Weird, wife and I have played it co-op the entire time. There’s occasional desyncs (saving and reloading fixes that) and otherwise all good.
I think Owlcat makes fantastic dnd games. They made Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, and Rogue Trader. They could certainly do more than half as good as Larian. However, their big problem with pathfinder games is that they are stupid long and kinda bog down with so so so many items and talents in the late game.
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Old series that has a decent following of mostly niche dedicated fans is left to sit without a new installment for many years.
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New title is announced. It’s sells gang-busters and flips the community on its head.
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Corporate Executives prioritize short term profits and begin planning a quick and easy cash grab. !
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Second new installment comes out. It is a shell of the previous title with the soul sucked clean out.
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Fans are dissapointed and outside of a small niche following the game series falls into obscurity.
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Repeat.
! we are here right now
Look… Maybe BG4 will be good. But after watching this exact cycle play out over and over again for the past decade I’m not sure how you can expect anything else.
When will the business world realize that anything business majors are given control of turns to shit. Like I know that it’s not impossible for a AAA game to be good but I also know that most companies that can handle that kind of a budget are run by people who just think gamers love throwing money at anything labeled “video game”, proved by so many out of touch quotes.
Like the BlizzCon “don’t you have phones?” showed that Blizzard didn’t even realize that their main demographic and shitty f2p phone games didn’t have much overlap.
Or EA’s “sense of satisfaction” was transparent when they give a paid path to skip a ridiculously tuned grind.
Or Ubisoft’s “AAAA” said they hadn’t even noticed that “AAA” was starting to be considered synonymous with “shit”.
The funny part is that they aren’t even wrong about the potential to make a lot of money from video games, it’s just not by using business major tricks to extract the maximum short term gains or approaching making a video game by thinking about how to make the most money from it.
I remember when Disney fired Avalanche from Disney Infinity… Apparently some guy at Disney learned how cheap it was to make Mobile Games and how much money they made, erroneously assuming that this was where the gaming market was going and how development studios would soon be “Out of jobs” with how “Simple” it was getting…
He was a god damn moron
God, “Do you guys not have phones?” was just… embarrassing, the fact that they needed to be asked if this was an April Fools joke before the crowd understood what was happening is… yeesh
I’m not saying business majors shouldn’t be involved at all, they just shouldn’t be making major game design decisions that the people who have a passion for making a great game disagree with.
It all comes down to the main motivation for doing the work. If the passion guiding the overall operation is about making a great x, then IMO it is much more likely to succeed than if the passion is about making money from making x.
When it’s a large company involved, that can be mitigated by finding people who are passionate about the x instead of just the money, but all the orders of “do it this less fun way because it will make us more money” can kill that passion over time or even just cancel out the positive effect that passion had on the game.
BG4 is going to be BGOnline 😂
Yeah, but it’s a straight terrible port from a mobile game with a solid gacha foundation and Baldur’s Gate skins tacked on. Also you need to subscribe and pay a weekly fee to get access to the premium lockboxes that may or may not (spoiler: they do not) give you the characters/skins/whatever that you actually came for. Everything is time-gated unless you pay more of the premium currency to be allowed to grind more for a chance that won’t proc anyway unless you go into debt to buy enough crates.
Let’s see Paul Allen’s Owl Cat’s card Baldur’s Gate.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpLQXR116cLVUa1LRY8KS4w
Maybe OwlKitty will do it instead
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/channel/UCpLQXR116cLVUa1LRY8KS4w
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.