I am a bit shocked by how popular this game is. All the signs were there, though.
- Their previous game Divinity: Original Sin 2 was critically acclaimed, very popular for a pretty hardcore CRPG, and had long legs.
- DnD has a lot of brand power and has been strongly in the zeitgeist for years.
- There's a big cohort of millennials who have strong nostalgia for Baldur's Gate and who have plenty of money to buy games (if not time to play them).
- The Early Access release for this game was wildly popular beyond the developer's expectations, and maintained interest for years.
I definitely underestimated the brand power of DnD and Baldur's Gate because they aren't very important to me, personally. But also there have been a load of really good CRPGs in recent years and there seemed to be a pretty low ceiling to how much interest they could get. Tyranny, Pillars of Eternity, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and a few others were amazing and beloved CRPG games but were lucky to have a tenth of the success of BG3. But those games were generally less accessible, mostly not multiplayer, and again lacked the brand power.
I don't want to attack you personally but I think your post illustrates an common error in thinking that caused gaming to stagnate for the past decade. I can just hear the army of MBAs making spreadsheets and checklist reflecting exactly this "paint by the numbers" style of thinking. This in turn means that the next ten AAA titles starting production are going to check all these boxes and then ... will still fail. In reality there is no formular for making a hit game. You need people who care and know what they are doing and let them do what they love.
I think you’re right but also making a good or beloved game is not really the same endeavor as making a massively profitable one. Stardew Valley is beloved. If you described the vision to a 10k employee game studio, they could probably make something that is stardew-like, widely played, and absolutely rakes in cash through micro transactions, $49.99 variegated eggplant DLC, etc. and has the charm and soul of a cold baked potato.
Beloved games have heart, vision, and they don’t establish a predatory relationship with their customers. There will always be a place for them to gamers, because these attributes can’t be faked. There will also always be a place for soulless AAA because, as you said, the MBAs can bake these on paper, reliably, and procedurally.
The GP is analyzing some dimensions to figure out if the success of Baldur's Gate is surprising or not. He/she finds that, given the limited dimensions we can consider, the success is surprising.
I read your reply as saying "no, it's not possible to analyze why games fails / succeed, because they're all different". I feel that's usually unhelpful: assuming we can't explain things because they're all idiosyncratic is usually not productive. It's more productive if you, for example, point to something extra that is missing.
I think OP is putting too much emphasis on brand and reputation. Blizzard had the best of both and they still manage to produce failure after failure (at least as far as critical acclaim goes). BattleBit had none is also a massive success. What makes a game fail or succeed? I don't think anyone knows. But I am fairly sure that whatever AAA mainstream is doing isn't really working. The biggest games are almost all either old franchises that usually have their roots in mods or some kind of simulator that just packages up and polishes something from the real world. So where has the innovation, the joy of video games gone? I think it's being smothered by spreashsheets and processes. If that's true then the solution is quite simple: Let people who actually like games and who can make games, make the games that people want.
I've not been in that industry but was for a while, the closest input metric I ever saw that correlated to success was how fast your tools let you iterate on ideas to find the core of what was "fun" and the polish it until it shined. Same applied to the art side of the pipeline, the more headache importing/iterating in-engine the more things diverged from render -> in-game.
Oh and how much publishers meddled in games and/or set constraints. At one point one of the big 3 wasn't approving games that didn't have multiplayer regardless of genre, got to spend ~5mo working on multiplayer that was totally broken until we got sign-off that we could pull it from the title.
> You need people who care and know what they are doing and let them do what they love.
That includes Pillars of Eternity, and the other games I mentioned. They made great games but they just weren't that popular. I agree in general about checkbox thinking.
Nit: POE _is_ a success story (bootstrapped by a Kickstarter, proved that people still buy isometric CRPGs) but I get your point. Personally I grew up playing games and DnD campaigns in the Forgotten Realms setting and am thrilled to see it with modern graphics
Sure there's no general formula, but it's really not a surprise that the first big D&D videogame in a long time would be a huge success, after several years of tabletop D&D skyrocketing in popularity.
This game also has the meta that most recent D&D games missed. If you know the tabletop game, you can build an optimized character in the bg series, because the game system is close wherever it can be. Some spells are just too freeform to work without a human DM, but they seem to have done very well, perhaps a bit too much focus on environmental damage like the divinity series, but they toned that down right? I haven't looked at it in over a year.
Main thing I'm missing so far is you can't ready an action, which makes it nearly impossible to play defensively.
If your turn doesn't give you enough movement to run up to the enemies and stab them, you can't say "I run next to the doorway and wait to stab the first person who runs through it."
Instead, you have to waste your turn and then stand around getting attacked. So it's often to your advantage to roll worse in the initiative order, because the enemies will spend their turn dashing to within your movement range and then you actually get to hit them on your turn. Kind of hate it, rolling high initiative is supposed to let you get the drop on people or set up the battlefield more to your liking.
BG3 players, please let me know if I'm missing something here.
Interesting, the way other games have dealt with this problem, is a wait option. you roll to move first, decide to wait, now everyone with lower initiative must move before you do. It’s a version of first in last out, if everyone waits, the last to wait must move first. Sort of an elegant solution to part of this problem. Other games might also have a generic guard move. Move+guard and you attack first thing to come in range
3e used to have a "delay" option where you could opt to move down the initiative order (and stay there going forward), but 5e did away with it and the only way to change when you act is via the Ready action.
The way readying usually works is basically "move + guard", though it's more flexible than that in regular D&D with a human DM where you can line up whatever action you want like "I'll stay put, but if the goblin comes toward me I retreat into the next room" rather than only being for attacks.
But if they wanted to only implement it as letting you attack or cast a spell when an enemy enters a target area, that would be a lot better than nothing.
Ready an action could get really complicated from a design perspective, but I really miss the "dodge" action. It would've been easy to integrate and support offensive play. I use it in the tabletop often when I play tank characters to hold chokepoints. Interested in the reason why they don't have it, maybe some EA players involved in the feedback process know why?
Agreed on the dodge action, that's also a great default to have around too when you can't find something useful to do.
As far as readying an action, at minimum it could work like XCOM's "Overwatch" action, targeting the first enemy you see within range.
But it would be nice to give you a choice of targeting options so that you can designate a smaller area, just in case that's useful. But fine leave it as "first enemy in this area" instead of trying to give you full pencil and paper D&D flexibility. There is a UI for picking between options in an action, such as Enhance Ability needing you to pick an ability.
If it's limited to readying an attack, it would look like pretty much all the tactical games which have an "overwatch" mode. They already have most of the logic they need with attacks of opportunity. Just need a slightly different trigger.
Works for some characters, not really a strategy for a heavily armored fighter.
And either way, if there's a crowd of archers in the next room I wouldn't want to walk in (sneaking or no) where I have no cover, so I'm going to try and hold at the door. Still the better play even if it costs a whole turn of not being able to use my action.
The missing Ready action really tilts things toward those "alpha strike" characters made to hit first and hit hard, which isn't a design choice I like much. I want to be able to lure enemies into a room with minor illusion or other sounds and have the whole party readied the jump them.
Ready an action is only usable in combat, so RAW outside of combat readying actions to jump on people you lured with an illusion into a room is not possible. This is an ambush and would be dealt with stealth / surprise rules and THAT is in the game, so it is possible if you play it by the rules.
The ready action is designed to get used for delaying actions to bypass initiative order.
Is it considered weird to drop into combat grid and initiative order to handle action strategy like trying to dodge around a guard patrol, even if nobody's been stabbed yet and nobody might get stabbed at all?
Speaking of delay, I know that's not part of 5e (it was in 3.5), but if we can't have ready action could we at least have the delay option? A lot simpler to implement and it'd at least help with the situations where you would have been better off at worse initiative.
Even the ones I would never have expected to work do, I had a couple of potions of speaking to animals, which led to a lovely (fully voice acted) conversation with some oxen.
And I think this is one of the things modern games have missed for a lot of BG-era players -- discovery and delight.
AAA production costs make it difficult: you can't just spread the game's budget equally into niche content most will never see.
But if you do it smartly, it seems like there's still financial and development space for "Wouldn't players find it cool if...?" things.
One of the major turn-offs of post-TES3 Bethesda style games has been just how soul-less the tracks through their content have been. It's obvious anything "weird" had to get approved through a committee and was watered down in the process.
Games were the better when there was a path for a development team member to have 10% time to implement some kooky feature.
And maybe now that needs to flow through approval... but don't soften it into pablum in the process.
My first attempt with Speak with Animals led to a somewhat awkward conversation with a boar, whom an absent druid had recently promised a mate. His "haunches" clenched and quivered with anticipation.
Given almost every single D&D movie has been horrible it would be surprising if it wasn’t a well known studio like Larian doing it. It’s pretty common for games from existing “high profile” IP to be lazy, lackluster, money grabbing products.
The last D&D game I remember, Dark Alliance, is horrible.
I had fond memories of Dark Alliance. You maybe didn’t like it, and coming out for a console with no PC release was an odd choice for the series, but there was fun gameplay and story there. At least, 13 year old me playing co-op with my Dad through Dark Alliance 1 and 2 on my PS2 is a fond memory I have that maybe nobody else got.
Anyway, I was just surprised because I guess I never looked up a review of the Dark Alliance games but my general impression was actually pretty good.
edit: Apparently there is a Dark Alliance game with a naming collision that came out much more recently than the Dark Alliance series I'm thinking of. Smart move, Wizards of the Coast/DnD.
I had the same reaction as GP, thanks for the explanation! I don't think the original DA games hold up too well nowadays, but they were good at the time and still provide me with fond memories.
Fair observations broadly, but gp’s points are fair too. It’s hard to predict hits but the points listed are all factors that helped the title out. Larian got the contract precisely because they proved themselves to be what you describe in your last sentence through the Divinity releases gp mentions. And even that was no guarantee here.
It reminds me of the montage scene in Matrix 4 where all these business types are telling Neo how to make a new hit game, when he already had made one, so he should be telling them.
This difference, is the key difference I've seen in my career between successful startups and ones that fail.
This game is huge. It's 4 modern games in one. I am curious how one keeps a budget for a game like this. I agree love and passion are the reason this game is doing well, but honestly how do you convince the money to invest in something like, besides the trend of copying BG3 simply due to success?
> honestly how do you convince the money to invest in something like, besides the trend of copying BG3 simply due to success?
you cannot. The money is interested in making more money. Good art may, or may not make money - and that's because the goal of the artist(s) aren't aligned with making money. It just so happens that it _could_ make money, and thus that became the pitch to investors.
If given the chance (imagine an unlimited UBI for example), the same artists would make such a game without investors (and might make an even better one...).
Depends what you mean by "fail". The MBA is going to be perfectly happy with a profit margin even if the metacritic score is well within the yellow range. Plenty of rehashed sports games and even beloved but ultimately fairly lazy franchises like Pokémon and Sonic (most recently ticking that open world.. er, excuse me, zone box) seem to do fairly well from that point of view.
Are there any companies continuously making widely different critically acclaimed games? or do they typically have a hit and then make games in the same vein? Bioware had a certain take on RPGs, same with Bethesda's modern Fallout/Elder Scrolls, FromSoft make DS derivatives, etc.
If I'm missing some studio which has a diverse catalogue of consistently successful games, then please tell me which. But I feel they usually find a niche and then work that.
Supergiant is pretty close? Bastion, Transistor, Pyre and Hades have all been pretty big hits in different genres and styles. They're consistently high production value in terms of art/soundtrack/writing, but the gameplay varies a good bit. About the same release cadence as Bethesda in my memory while being a smaller studio.
Valve and Obsidian Entertainment have such catalogue but even great studios fail from time to time.
Most will find a formula that works for a niche and stick with it. Which is smart because innovation increases both the chance of achieving something great and of releasing a fiasco.
I’m not sure I follow the point of this criteria. They find niches and leverage their experience. This is what everyone in the professional world does.
The point is that there must be a formula if studios can consistently deliver.
I wonder what the "new game onboarding" process at Nintendo looks like. Thinking of something relatively more left-field and recent like the Mario Rabbids tactical thing for Switch.
Was that pitched to them? Solicited to studios by them? In the latter case that would be a fascinating process to observe.
Rabbids are a spinoff from Rayman. I would assume Ubisoft was the driving creative force behind it. And it's somewhat damning that the "relatively recent" innovation is currently two expansion packs into its second installment.
That's all well and good, but all of this success is happening before reviews are in or anyone has even had time to play and recommend the game. People are buying it solely based on criteria like the parent described.
> I definitely underestimated the brand power of DnD and Baldur's Gate
I think you're trying to put too much of its success on "brand power". Social proof is a thing, but it's not powerful enough to overcome a bad game. Just look at what happened to the Call of Duty and Battlefield franchises.
I think it's doing so well because they nailed the execution. The graphics are great. The game hasn't had any opening week disasters despite getting more than 7x the expected numbers. The intro hook of the game really grabs you and keeps you wanting more (which is why everyone's still so excited about it 3 years later). Also, it's FUN to play.
That last one is probably the biggest factor. When was the last time a AAA game was truly fun to play? It wasn't too long ago that online streamers were publishing videos lamenting the lack of good games to play.
I mentioned many other great games in this genre which were lucky to have 1/100th of the success of this game. But okay, those didn't have the multiplayer, or the presentation, or the accessibility.
But Larian's previous game was extremely similar to this one in all respects. It's not even that flippant to say BG3 is DOS2 with the lore and rules swapped for DnD ones which isn't that much of a practical difference (I'd argue a slight downgrade). And yet BG3 is on track to be maybe 4x as successful. It's hard to argue the BG and DnD brands didn't play a big part in this.
4 people in my friend group have been rearranging their schedules this weekend to get more BG3 time (after previously planning on playing once a week). It's possible that a DOS3 might've had that happening, at least 2 of the 4 played DOS2 but I am skeptical.
They all have preexisting affection for both D&D and BG. They went into character creation with strong opinions about their favorite races and esp. classes.
The DOS system was great, but the lore and stories were relatively formulaic. I was super, super worried about Larian doing BG3 because of this, but they really do appear to have nailed it.
At least so far, the difficulty curve is much less steep which I suspect put a lot of people off DOS2. I certainly resented needing to kill everyone to remain on track with the XP curve, but that's presumably because Pillars has spoiled me.
I love DOS2, but BG3 is SO much more polished in just about every aspect, better visuals, better writing, better combat, that I expect this accounts for a lot of the difference.
I've never played BG (I did play icewind Dale when I was a kid but it was annoying to read the dialogue without voice acting). I did play all Neverwinter Nights games so I have some background in this genere and DnD rules - but that was always the tedious part for me.
I heard of Divinity but just not into gaming anymore (too much other stuff going on). That said I'll probably find the time to play this on PS5 because it seems like a super polished immersive experience. Just like cyberpunk (although that was a bit disappointing).
My point is there's probably a bunch of "ex" gamers that pick a few games to play occasionally - it's very much down to quality of execution - if this game didn't have the graphics/voice acting/story I've seen from early access and was divinity level I'd just skip this as well.
> I've never played BG (I did play icewind Dale when I was a kid but it was annoying to read the dialogue without voice acting)
I genuinely am surprised that there are people out there who think this way.
I'm the complete opposite. I skip all voice acting, because I read faster than anyone can deliver lines, and frankly I'm not there for the performance or the "experience". I'm there for the game. The voice acting doesn't add anything to the gameplay for me. I wish games that have dialog boxes would let me turn it off entirely, honestly.
Interest in Tears of the Kingdom dropped off pretty quickly.
Is that all?
edit: I didn't play the other two games. One's a remake of a game I never played (I never owned playstations) and I don't really play fighting games. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
According to Metacritic, in addition to the already mentioned people had fun with
Metroid Prime Remastered
Diablo IV
Persona 4 Golden
Dead Space Remake
Final Fanatasy XVI
Pikmin 4
Star Wars Jedi Survivor
Hogwarts Legacy
Remnant II
So this year actually seems to be pretty great w.r.t. AAA games, and the next months will be pretty ridiculous, with Armored Core VI, Starfield, Mortal Kombat 1, Forza Motorsport, Alan Wake 2, Spider-Man 2, Cities: Skylines 2, Super Mario RPG... all still being released.
So if anything, there's probably too much AAA games worth playing out there.
You must have missed the 2.2 score that it currently has after being review bombed due to recent development decisions.
On a personal level, I will say that they got the campaign right, but the rest of the game is incomplete. This game should have been released as a public beta — it’s currently not close to being a complete experience, imho.
The low score is not completely unwarranted, though. The game itself is pretty wonderful. But the balancing and QOL decisions made by the developers has been; abysmal, and getting worse with each patch. It sounds like 1.1.1 is going to help a bit, but every the game started with serious issues, and each patch since release has made it worse. Add to the fact that many of the issues have been know since before release, and you get players getting really made about the game.
If you actively make decisions to upset the players, then don't act confused when your player rating tanks.
I don't play Diablo IV (I just don't have the time), so I cannot judge if these scores are warranted. Seeing that it currently sits between Lego Drive 2K and Gollum, I'd go out on a limb here and say that this score seems a tiny bit harsh to me.
Games get review-bombed for the silliest reasons nowadays. Often times, a fundamentalist minority of gamers feels overly protective about "their" franchise, reacting to even the tiniest disturbance with maniacal anger. If a game has a high score from critics and a low score from users, to me that's actually a good sign that the game might even try something interesting (Last of Us II would be an example here). Of course, the critics score for Diablo IV was the post-release score, not including these new patches, so it might very well be that it really is worse now...
I'm not a fan of review bombing, and I think it's current player score (2.2 / 1-) is an unfair result of that; the over the top backlash to the changes. That being said, I certainly wouldn't say the 86 / 100 critics view isn't reasonable either. It had issues at release, and it's gotten worse since then. My recommendation would be to give it a few seasons to get into a better shape before picking it up.
It's worth noting that Diablo 3 went through similar pains upon release; though with less "read the room" type issues like they're having now.
As a long-time Pikmin fan it is absolutely wild to me to see Pikmin 4 in a list of AAA games.
There's nothing else like that series in terms of aesthetics, in-game lore or gameplay. It's always been its own singular sub-genre which screams "indy game", and the mediocre sales reflected that. Except that it just happens to also be a first-party Nintendo game that Shigeru Miyamoto is personally invested in.
And now Pikmin 4 suddenly blows everyone's expectations away.
That has actually been my experience for about ten years now.
I've tried TOTK, Elden Ring, Hogwarts Legacy, BG3, and quite a few more and found them not engaging at all.
It's not quite as bad as the movies yet, but still bad enough as to not warrant simply playing older or more indie titles.
If you don’t know anything about large franchises such as street fighter and resident evil then you’re probably not well positioned to make sweeping comments about the state of AAA games.
Not going to go all doom and gloom but resident evil was a(completely unnecessary, in my opinion) remaster of a game from the ps2 era, and I'd wager the vast majority of people that play AAA games don't really play fighting games.
I do think the AAA market is recovering a little however in the last few years, pretty much exclusively thanks to japan.
I don’t think it’s gate keeping to suggest you should be familiar with the biggest titles of the year if you want to make confident statements about the state of games.
Not the parent, but the gate keeping is coming from you. Your question, assuming good faith, was simple:
"When was the last time a AAA game was truly fun to play?"
The comment in reply answer the question.
You then preceded to gatekeep by redefining what "AAA game" meant but dismissing the ones listed out of ignorance.
I can think of numerous AAA games that are fun to play. the first one that came to mind was Elden Ring. I know others that while I didn't play, others loved, such as God of War.
Rather than ask a question and start dismissing answers, gate keeping what "AAA game" means, instead accept the fact that there are numerous AAA games that have been released this year alone that people are having lots of fun with. That doesn't take away from smaller, indy titles, nor does it mean AAA is without fault.
So in order to have an opinion, you must play every game that ever comes out, regardless of whether you enjoy the genre, the franchise, or even have the console required to play it? And you think that's not gatekeeping?
Why are you building a strawman? No one said anything about "playing every game that ever comes out" in order to have am opinion, just that it's useful to have some knowledge of a topic before forming said opinion lest they be dismissed as yours seem to be currently.
It just kind of puts everything else you said into question when you make a statement which is easily disproved by anyone vaguely familiar with the subject.
If you're wrong about the one sentence in your comment that I have knowledge of, what other bits are wrong? Why should I assume the one sentence I can relate to is wrong but the other sentences are not?
Most people don’t get over 50 to 100 hours in any game, regardless of how fun the game is, so players dropping off playing a single player game after they’ve finished the story is pretty much normal, even on highly replayable games.
Zelda was a massive hit in sales and social media-reception for months. Interest did not dropped quickly, it was just at instant peak from the beginning, and now everyone is done with it. Which is more a proof of how much fun people had with it.
> Interest in Tears of the Kingdom dropped off pretty quickly.
So are you now talking about what AAA games are fun to play or how big the interest is in them? Tears of the Kingdom is definitely an AAA game that is really fun to play and was also very successful. Elden Ring last year was also great. Your perception of fun AAA games is just warped. Baldurs Gate 3 is the first fun AAA game for years in its own genre, but if you include all genres there are actually quite good and fun AAA games that came out recently.
Street Fighter 6 literally gave players something they've been dreaming about for years: the ability to customize a character to one's own liking based off of the moves of the existing characters in the game.
Want to dragon punch like Ryu, throw a sonic boom like Guile, and kick like Chun Li? You can do that now.
Maybe I'm a purist but that sounds awful.. If you want Ryu's moves you have to take his shortcomings. Don't super charge your player into something a backstory can't support
I did start putting time into other games besides Tears of the Kingdom....after I put over 100 hours into the game (still not done with it, just want to be able to return to it later and still have more I can do, savor it a bit). I'll still watch a TOTK video whenever one gets suggested to me on Youtube or Facebook.
Even 100+ hours (without getting sick of it) is insane for a modern game for me. Like I put 35 hours into God of War Ragnarok and did most of the things (left maybe 10-15 hours worth of samey boring or overly difficult side activities) and I felt that overly padded that game out, I would have been happier with that game if it were about 20 hours long, I think. Still a great game though. One of the small handful of games I've completed the story for in the past five years.
Persona is the only other series I can usually get close to that many hours in without getting sick of it (I think I put 80 into Persona 5).
Resident Evil 4 first came out on Gamecube, later on it also came out on PS2 and PC. Then there was an HD re-release on every single console and PC/Steam. And now the remake on PC and consoles.
oh and the original is regarded as one of the best games of all time
I'm not sure if I trust your opinion on anything if you so confidently spread misinformation and then deflect with "oh but little me don't know that!! emoji"
>When was the last time a AAA game was truly fun to play?
Tears of the Kingdom just recently is hella fun to play. Elden Ring last year was also great. You make it sound the last fun AAA game is decades ago, but the truth is that most years have 1-2 really fun AAA games. But Baldurs Gate 3 is definitely the first fun AAA game for years in its genre. Pillars of Eternity was great, but lacked the AAA production values/
> You make it sound the last fun AAA game is decades ago
That wasn't my intention. My intention was to point to the fact that production of fun AAA games is much lower than it was a decade ago. As a result, the few big hits hit even bigger.
FWIW, whatever issues the BF franchise had in the past, BF42 is super fun today, and stole me away from multiplayer Halo Infinite, which is also pretty great.
I like the CRPG genre a lot, but I think one reason that BG3 is taking off is that it _looks_ like a modern AA(A?) game while the rest look basically like Baldur's Gate did in 1998. BG3 lets you see the world in a lot more detail and it helps immerse you in Faerûn.
Many people will claim "graphics don't matter", but the reality is that they do help.
TBH it looks and especially feels much more like a reskinned Divine Divinity OS2 with DnD rules implanted than BG1 and BG2 (which isn't necessarily a bad thing of course, but I don't feel a lot of BG1 and BG2 nostalgia when playing BG3, instead I'm constantly reminded of OS2).
PS: One thing that is a lot better than in BG1 and BG2 is that combat with low-class characters feels a lot more interesting. Not sure how much of this is because of the ADnD vs DnD5 rules or whether Larian has added some tweaks to the DnD5 rules.
Haven't play BG3 yet, but my DM has been and noted a few tweaks that Larian made to 5e, especially around spell durations and moving shoving to a bonus action.
> Not sure how much of this is because of the ADnD vs DnD5 rules or whether Larian has added some tweaks to the DnD5 rules.
That's entirely on D&D 5e rules. Combat with chars under lvl 5 is essentially 1 mechanic per class, and really boring.
Tabletop suffers from exactly the same issue, even if you use all the extra/optional subclasses and backstories. So does Solasta (the other 5e PC game)
And yet the graphics are obviously better and more immersive than BG 1 and 2. Of course they build their technology from their previous games, but it doesn't change the fact that most other CCRPGs are less immersive for most gamers. I am pretty confident that high fidelity 3D graphics attract more gamers than isometric 2D, no matter if these look like the studios previous game.
TBF, BG3 is still at its core a top-down "feels-like-an-isometric-camera" game, this is still the best solution for managing a whole party of characters, especially in combat (unlike Witcher3 for instance, which has a traditional 3rd-person camera - but has no party to manage).
Graphics might be good in BG3 but the art style is non-existent.
Generic clear skies or scorching red purgatory fantasy setting. People flying around on dragons fighting Cthulhu's aunt.
Man I'd love being able to love that.
Speak for yourself, I've found the world art assets in BG3 both high quality and well made. The detail on the characters and their arms and armor is intricate, too.
I feel slightly offended being thrown into the same pot as those weird millenials ;)
Absolutely everybody who owned a PC for gaming in the late 90's played BG1 and BG2, no matter the age. Video games are not just for teenagers you know.
While I think "everybody" is stretching it... the general idea here is accurate. From my memory, the first two "rounds" of good D&D games on the PC were the SSI games (Eye of the Beholder, Pools of Radiance, etc) and then Baldur's Gate. Both of those series, when they came out, set the bar for D&D RPG games (and RPG games in general, to some extent). If you played that type of game, you played those games (and likely Bards Tale and Wizardry).
To this day, there are quotes that live on from Baldur's Gate ("Go for the eyes, Boo!"). It has place in a lot of people's hearts. Had BG3 been bad, it would have been a horror show of hate for the developer. But it looks like they delivered, and the adoring fans of decades ago appreciate that.
Eh, I am an exception - I played Eye of the Beholder a bit (but never completed it), and I had Bard's Tale (and never completed it), but I never got the Baldur's Gate games (despite being an active computer gamer at the time, and liking TTRPGs).
To be fair, though, that's partly because my experience in not being able to finish the above too games due to the difficulty of the combat put me off CRPGs almost completely (until the more recent era of combatless or near-combatless RPGs with things like Disco Elysium).
I'm about 40 and am usually grouped as a millennial (at least for the common purpose of blame, e.g. killing cinemas), though I somehow missed Baldur's Gate; played the hell out of the Ultima series though!
The Ultimas were (mostly) wonderful, especially Ultima 7, but I don't think there's anything particularly valuable about the "IP".
It was really about Garriott exploring innovative ways in how to translate the tabletop RPG experience into a computer game. You don't need an Avatar or Britannia to pursue ideas like Ultima 4's virtue system or Ultima 7's interactivity.
> Absolutely everybody who owned a PC for gaming in the late 90's played BG1 and BG2, no matter the age.
Maybe among your friends? Sales numbers don't back that up and anecdotally among my friends and classmates barely anyone played BG, but everyone played Quake, StarCraft, Diablo, Need For Speed, etc. Even among RPGs Morrowing and Fallout were much more popular and accessible back in the day.
I have games plenty, but had never even heard about the Valeurs Gate franchise until last week. I must have been in a different bubble with Dune 2, Red Alert, Some City 2000, Tomb Raider, GTA3, Dungeon master and probably some more that I can't recall now. But the whole fantasy RPG wasn't really my thing I guess
I agree with you, but eventually realized there was a specific reason. RPGs at that time were much less immersive, so much so that I had no interest whatsoever in the genre. And no I neither enjoyed eye of the beholder 2, nor lands of lore, nor ultima underworld , nor ultima, nor baldurs gate.
Modern rpgs ( Witcher 3, dos2, etc), on the contrary, are amazing : technology has finally caught up, and my mind no longer has to compensate for the rather bland visual/sounds/lack of voices/limited freedom/etc.
I used to play dune2, red alert, sim city, etc but these days I play rpgs !
I had a gaming PC in the late 90s and absolutely did not play BG1 or 2.
I briefly tried PlaneScape: Torment several years after its release on the urging of one of its fans, but didn't make it past the early parts due to being annoyed by the random thugs that would assault you if you stood still for too long, and the pseudo-realtime 2e-based combat being Byzantine and off-putting.
1. As it's been said before, if you go at it MBA style you'll end up with a crap soul less design by commitee game.
2. DnD has a lot of brand power? The only thing related to DnD that I did was play some computer RPGs. The Infinity Engine games could have had any other RPG system in the background and they'd have been as much fun.
3. Getting Early Access wrong too. It got popular in early access because some people considered it good.
4. You may be right about Baldur's Gate nostalgia, that is probably the greatest driver behind this. Personally I will get the game because of said nostalgia, but I'll wait for enough reviews to have something to read between the lines and decide if the game is any good.
And it's had a consistent presence in Stranger Things on Netflix, helping expose it to a younger generation who missed out on the D&D moral panic, BG/NWN, the first movie, and so on.
It's actually a pretty fun movie. It has references to lots of fun D&D history, including the old cartoon. I enjoyed it, my wife enjoyed it, and my daughter (who knows nothing of D&D and doesn't really like fantasy) enjoyed it.
You missed a lot in the last 5 years, DnD has become huge. Not in the video game sector, but thats why the huge DnD fanbase is craving for a good video game and BG3 delivered. I think most buyers are actually driven by that and not BG nostalgia.
I've made a habit of not buying games at launch anymore. Most of them are nagging me for microtransactions (rant: don't like that word for repeated $10 purchases on top of a $70 game, that's not "micro" at all), they require an internet connection for single player, or are otherwise full of bullshit that to me makes them not worth $60+.
This one doesn't do that, so I bought it!
I've never played any of the previous Baldur's Gate games, but I did play Neverwinter Nights (2002) so I have some nostalgia for computer D&D.
Haven't tried the multiplayer yet, but I probably will. I heard there are some kinks to work out with drop in/out characters, but maybe that's just how it's going to work and you're expected to commit to one group the whole way through.
I think I just like different genres of games, because all the games I bought at launch in the last years never had these issues you describe. Zelda, Elden Ring, God of War eg.
Yeah there's lots of reasons I didn't buy it, even though I enjoyed a lot of Diablo 3 and thought the Diablo 4 beta was fun enough. I got D3 after the expansion unfucked the loot drop rates that had been tuned super rare to drive people to the real money auction house.
Fingers crossed that Diablo 4 will eventually be on sale for $30 and have reached a point where it's worth that much. That's my price cap for anything with always online single player, and I can't see that being fixed.
Maybe I can be generous and bump it up to $35 now to give them 50% of the launch price.
A lot of it is also that lots of big AAA non-live-service games were delayed by the lockdowns of 2020 and this year is when their releases have all piled up.
Divinity 2 did about 700k units in the first month. I think this is about on par with expectations with a bigger brand.
I think Larian’s approach to multiplayer is the important bit. I would be curious about the stats of how people play it.
I feel like once you have done a couple CRPGs you’ve kind of seen it all. I’ve done divinity and kingmaker. I can’t really be motivated to do tyranny or the other pathfinder game by owlcat. It’s just so samey.
I will grant, Larian’s divinity 2 did feel a bit different. They managed to make combat feel more interesting. And playing split screen with the wife made it much more enjoyable. Optimistic they’ve done it again here.
> I think this is about on par with expectations with a bigger brand.
No, this is wildly beyond expectations. They sold 2.5M copies of BG3 in Early Access (>500k in July alone) which is already amazing, but one might have expected it to eat into their launch day numbers as most of the fans already bought in during EA. Instead it it looks like they probably sold ~10M more copies just in the 3 days after launch.
Hmm interesting. I guess consider me confused then too. I don’t get how a crpg has this much appeal. I’m not expecting this to be substantially better than divinity 2; which isn’t meant to be an insult any way.
Because it is actually an RPG, there is actually choices there, even in Act 1 there are quite few major choices that have big ramifications in Act 2. Take something like Pillars of Eternity, it mostly had the illusion of choice and not much real reactivity, the npcs might say few different lines but it really did not matter much.
I am tired of the games that present you with illusion of choice but it actually doesn't matter. In BG3 you can actually be the evil character so that by itself lends the game at least for 2 playthroughs. Personally I am playing it through as Dark Urge first, and later going to do another run with good druid.
Also the graphics are really nice, almost everything is voice acted, companions have interesting stories. Story is already much better than divinity 2. I have 39 hours in now and I bought it at launch
I think you've hit the nail on the head here with the illusion of choice in some games it really feels like the story is on rails and your character had very little agency. Mass Effect series in particular I think is to blame for this the series became incredibly popular but the actual role playing elements were not really there - these games had a Hero/Villain slider and every conversation had basically 3 dialogue options, the edgy sarcastic reply, the goody two shoes reply or the neutral reply. You would arrive at same place on dialogue tree. The story proceeded the same way regardless of how you chose to act. Because of how popular Mass Effect was I think it had a warping effect on the genre.
Voice acting as well is another key thing I think easy to overlook but it helps a lot with the immersion and getting invested in the world. Pathfinder Wrath of Righteous was a fun game but lack of voice acting made it a slog to get through there were what felt like paragraphs of text to read through constantly. By mid way through the game I found myself skipping over a lot of it. Imagine if tabletop roleplaying the DM handed you a stack of paper to read every conversation instead of narrating what was happening - that was kind of how I felt.
I’m curious to see if Baldur gate avoids this. It’s basically impossible imo. Act 2 is always Act 2.
But I can’t agree with your second statement. The problem with long boring text is not the lack of voice acting’s it’s the text itself. I’m not going to listen to some guy ramble about lore that seems unlikely to matter.
Its the brand. DnD had a major grow in the last years. DnD live play shows are getting their own animated series produced by amazon prime video. It became huge. There is your divinity 2 delta.
Yeah the Divinity: Original Sin 2 combat system had the huge emphasis on elemental effects and surfaces and interactions which I found a lot more fun than the traditional RPG systems which feel more like solving a math equation.
So far there has been a lot less of that in BG3 which is disappointing but maybe I just need to level up my spellcasters more. (I hate the DnD spell preparation system but that's another matter)
The element interaction from Divinity: Original Sin 2 are still there. Grease works and will catch fire, you can get ice spike and it'll create an ice surface where enemies and players will slip, then turn into a puddle next turn. They will also slip on a sufficiently large puddle of blood. The intro ship has vats of mysterious liquid that will catch fire.
Huh. Interesting. Grease in kingmaker is probably the most powerful early game spell. I would think this translates to Baldurs gate too. Not so much in real world dnd where there will be fewer enemies and more theatre of mind.
utilizing elements is a little bit less useful in Baldur's gate because of the action economy. In divinity you had action points where you move things around with telekenesis and light them on fire in one turn, it's harder to get the ball rolling in BG3
> Divinity 2 did about 700k units in the first month.
The new is about 700k concurrent players though (the next evening it was already over 800k), not 700k units sold, and that's just a few days into launch. Don't know how concurrent players translates into units sold on Steam after such a short time, but I think you can easily multiply by 5..10.
What surprised me the most is that the game's first act has been in early access for everybody to try since 2020 (so most hardcore fans most likely bought the game already in early access), and yet the launch exceeded the wildest expectations.
This means that Larian must have done an exceptionally great job of balancing the expections of their hardcore fanbase and the general RPG audience.
There's a lot more to it than just Larian. It's mostly about a niche community developing into a mainstream one, and the public growing tired of the same stuff.
After the golden age of late 90s, CRPGs went into shadows of a very narrow niche until maybe 2012-2013. Larian were unlucky enough to work during that winter, and their games weren't particularly successful, although well known in the niche community. Pure RPGs were always niche, and it was hard for them to survive because the market has been split into AAA and indie, leaving no space for anything in between.
Then the non-mainstream communities like RPG Codex produced several indie RPGs like Age of Decadence which also piqued curiosity of the people outside of the niche who grew tired of the constant stream of shallow same-face sandbox action soups with RPG elements like Skyrim.
Larian in particular decided to have their presence on RPG Codex and 100% cater to their desires. They crowdsourced Divinity Original Sin development and implemented almost every reasonable advice RPG nerds gave them under their own vision. The result was a solid and fun game that was a breath of fresh air in the context of 2014. Since about that time, pure RPGs formed a much larger following that steadily grew over the years.
The current sales are mostly because the genre itself got popular again - without it they couldn't have possibly reached those numbers regardless of the quality of their game, as they never did in the previous 2 decades.
2011-2014 were transformative years after the massive boredom of the "next-gen" treadmill of the mid-late 2000s. CRPG is not the only genre that benefited from that. Military-like sandbox games skyrocketed in popularity, giving birth to various offshoots like Battle Royale; soulslike games multiplied; there was even a short revival of arena shooters, although not really successful.
It’s also the only high production game with native MacOS & M1 support I could find.
I got the early access just to see what M1 GPU can do and was impressed.
> But those games were generally less accessible, mostly not multiplayer, and again lacked the brand power.
Creative Assembly's Total War series had good and popular games but their popularity exploded when they made a Warhammer game despite the original fanbase preferring historical games and many hoping for a TW Medieval 3. Most games with the Warhammer IP at that time were mediocre at best. So brand doesn't carry on it's own and it helps when your target audience has nothing else that they might be interested to play when your game is released. Diablo 4 sucks and Pillars 2 was released in 2018.
> There's a big cohort of millennials who have strong nostalgia for Baldur's Gate and who have plenty of money to buy games (if not time to play them).
I don't think that demographic is driving the sales. Anecdotally I hear/read fans of originals mostly complaining about how this is some turn-based reskinned D:OS with Zoomer-oriented Critical Role-themed writing and VO.
Success can also be relative. I am not a huge gamer anymore, but from what I noticed, this year wasn't really filled with many large releases yet and some that came out, like Diablo 4, are found out to be the soulless crap many more wise consumers expected it to be. So people might just be hungry for some quality games again.
Also the studio was already known for quality and some of their own brands were already quite successful, making them more or less the top CRPG developer that also brought a lot of innovation to the genre. Although Baldurs Gate certainly is a brand that draws additional people. I could imagine that their other games will also get in the focus again when people are finished with the new title.
That said, all the games you mentioned were a success I believe. Maybe not that large, but I think they all were "surprisingly" successful compared to many AAA titles that wished they were.
I would put BG3 easily in the top10 of most anticipated games in 2023. Even if one does not know the franchise, the amount of articles and mentions in the last weeks was a good sign. Especially as it was an Early Access-Game, and not something that just drop from a void. So people already knew for a while that it will be pretty good. But I guess, especially because of this, it was also easy to filter out if one is not in the bubble.
I think a lot of games over the years have borrowed elements from DnD and so there's a massive audience out there of people primed to be interested in the real deal when it arrives.
The fact it had such a great reputation from the fanbase who'd been playing it in early access probably pushed a lot of people to go ahead and get it.
> Tyranny, Pillars of Eternity, Pathfinder: Kingmaker
I nominate adding Torment: Tides of Numeneria to this; I discovered it's a spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment (which I never got to play); I had never played a CRPG before and I could not put it down until I was done.
> But also there have been a load of really good CRPGs in recent years and there seemed to be a pretty low ceiling to how much interest they could get
CRPGs aren't a genre, but RPGs are. wRPGs like Mass Effect, Fallout, TES, The Witcher are some of the most popular franchises in all of gaming. Then you have jRPGs like Zelda, Elden Ring... The ones you listed are similar to Divinity & BG3, but the fact is the games are either on the extreme end of hardcore (Pathfinder especially), or are made without the production values or marketing. You've got examples like
The main difference that would still throw a lot of games is that BG3 is turn based combat, but I'd argue that with the dialogue, branching trees etc its more akin to Mass Effect or Fallout. Ultimately its its own thing, and it is a well crafted game, in a setting that many core fans already know and love.
- Their previous game Divinity: Original Sin 2 was critically acclaimed, very popular for a pretty hardcore CRPG, and had long legs.
- DnD has a lot of brand power and has been strongly in the zeitgeist for years.
- There's a big cohort of millennials who have strong nostalgia for Baldur's Gate and who have plenty of money to buy games (if not time to play them).
- The Early Access release for this game was wildly popular beyond the developer's expectations, and maintained interest for years.
I definitely underestimated the brand power of DnD and Baldur's Gate because they aren't very important to me, personally. But also there have been a load of really good CRPGs in recent years and there seemed to be a pretty low ceiling to how much interest they could get. Tyranny, Pillars of Eternity, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and a few others were amazing and beloved CRPG games but were lucky to have a tenth of the success of BG3. But those games were generally less accessible, mostly not multiplayer, and again lacked the brand power.