“We believe RPGs are big … So we always believed the audience was there,” says Adam Smith
It seems like the BG3 devs tried to make a good game and hoped it’d be popular vs other devs who try to make a profitable game and hope it’s good.
That’s exactly it. Pretty much every five meters you think “Whoever created this actually gave a shit about the whole product”. It never feels like things are worse than they should be, or that they could have been better with a little effort.
It’s the kind of game where everyone who worked on it can be very proud. Do you think the average Blizzard developer these days can say the same?
that they could have been better with a little effort.
Clearly, you are still in the first or second act.
There’s a lot of griping about the third act, and yeah, I get it, it’s incomplete and comparatively poorly optimized. But it’s still really good. :P They clearly bit off more than they could chew with the City, that maybe they could’ve solved with another year or two of dev time. (Hopefully, will be solved in a Def Ed a year or two down the line.) That isn’t necessarily dev time they had, though. Not without taking out a ton of loans (do you really want tencent to own more than 30%?) and risking ill-will with consumers and WotC. (The game was meant to come out over a year ago.)
I don’t know what your problem is with Act 3. It might not be as good as the rest, but it’s still plenty good and better than most modern games. I just killed >!Gortash!< after completing nearly every side quest I could find and I haven’t really had any issues. Sure, there’s a few things that could be a little more fleshed out or that feel like cut content, but not much. I also don’t know how many of those things are actually cut content and not just references. Like in Cazador’s manor there’s >!a body with a note talking about a sleep potion and acid poison. I’m pretty sure it’s just a Romeo and Julie reference. He took the sleep potion to fake death, his lover found him apparently dead and killed herself. He found her dead and killed himself.!< There may have been plans for a quest there, but idk.
Trusting your audience to appreciate the depth of work that isn’t just flashy graphics, plus respecting players by not filling it with micro transactions.
People are desperate for games with some heart.
I’m so worried that starfield is going to be the opposite of BG3.
As a huge lover of all thing Fallout, I heard and read a lot about Starfield, then saw some videos and was and absolutely hyped. SPACE FALLOUT. Then I saw the game play and I hope I’m wrong but man it looks like they just took new vegas and slapped a space skin on it.
Don’t just go for the flashy graphics upgrade 😭
They had massive success with Divinity, the ground work already laid out. They bought rights to a big IP, kept to their Divinity formula and actually spent on marketing. Plus it happened to come at the right time when people needed the RPG itch scratched.
D&D is also as big as its ever been, especially with a latent audience of viewers who maybe don’t play very often, and at a time when there aren’t enough DMs for everyone who wants to play to find a table. Plus, Baldur’s Gate is prime 30-year-nostalgia-cycle bait for millennial+ PC gamers.
Less of it than Hasbro anticipated, though.
There’s pretty big overlap between the kind of people who play PC games or even a lot of console games and who may be interested in this other genre of games, and especially the biggest name in that genre. It didn’t translate to the general public, though.
It’s also a great primer for the game itself. It introduces Faerun and (most) of the races while being a fun story in its own right. Although I have played Baldur’s Gate 2 and Neverwinter Nights back in the day I (re)watched the movie before starting BG3 and it was a nice apéritif to the main course.
Indeed, DnD has been catching my interest but have never known any players, and jumping in the DM role is daunting. BG3 lets me play something very close to DnD without any hassle.
Yeah, the only gambles they actually made with this game were changing the camera to be complete shit and making the game harder to run smoothly than their previous games. The only way this game was ever going to do poorly was if they completely shit the bed and released it in an unplayable state.
Camera was still complete shit in DOS2, they must not play their own game, because how they think that it’s acceptable is beyond me. Thank fuck for modders though, their camera mods make the games so so so much more enjoyable (even if the camera still has the larian jank attached).
They should just give people free cam, let me look around wherever I want and stop taking control of it to try and focus on actions, I am constantly wrestling with the camera for no reason. Bizarre they kept it like this.
I purchased BG3 after I heard that the devs did not include micro transactions. I simply purchased it to support the devs, I had no intentions of playing it. But, I have a Steam Deck and decided to download it and just try it out. I am 30 hours into the game and I don’t have the physical or mental ability to put this game down. Please send help. Thank you Larian for taking video games back to their roots.
It’s OK. It’s certainly playable. I have mine capped at 40 fps and I’m sinking a lot of time in the game without really any problems.
Mind you, I get a around 1-2 hours of game play on battery power.
Even when it’s connected to a charger, the graphics aren’t great, also not horrible, but again it’s certainly playable!
Oh, to have such wide-eyed innocence still! I wish you the best of luck as you progress… but given how very poorly the 3rd act runs on my beast of a gaming PC, I fear you may run into problems. Granted, until they actually finish the 3rd act this is all moot - you’re better off starting a new game before entering the city proper.
I think you’re over exaggerating, either how poorly the game runs or how good your PC is. Mine is quite old, and the city does run noticeably worse but not unplayable by any means. It defaulted graphics to ultra (which is crazy for how old my machine is) and the city runs at about 25fps, which for a first person or action game would be unbearable, but a top down strategy game I don’t even notice unless I look at the FPS counter.
Midway through Act 3 with my Ivy Bridge i7 and GTX 1060. Frame rates are certainly lower in the city, but I’ve encountered zero crashes or serious bugs. And while I’ve yet to finish the game, I’ve observed no drop in quality or quantity of content in Act 3. I must concur with another poster in questioning the avowed beastliness of your machine.
I’m observing a few-year-long pattern where players’ demands shift between better tech (visuals, new ways to play) and deeper narrative. We’re now at the peak of where people expect deeper games with latest tech, and Larian -maybe knowingly- hit that jackpot.
The game will be remembered as the best of the decade, how wonderful.
