I don’t think it was a slog, but I do find DND 5e an unsatisfying system. You spend a long time waiting to get to the cool parts of your character, and unlimited resting breaks dnd’s already dubious balance.
I tried a Pathfinder mod, but it wasn’t quite doing it for me. I’m not sure what would do it for me exactly. I’m being a stereotypical customer where I don’t know what I want, but I can tell you what I don’t like, heh.
There’s a single mod that purports to convert the game to pathfinder 2e. I’m not sure if the balance isn’t to my taste or if I was doing something wrong, but my characters all had very low hit chances on their first attack. Missing isn’t fun for me
The story was excellent, the combat was a slog. Still finished it and overall enjoyed it, but it felt like they were being limited by the DnD system a lot, ultimately worsening the experience.
At first, Larian had planned to continue working with Hasbro’s Wizards of the Coast division on Dungeons & Dragons, but Vincke said he and his team spent a few months working on a new project before realizing they weren’t feeling the excitement they once did. “Conceptually, all of the ingredients for a really cool game were there except the hearts of the developers,” he said. They abandoned that game last year and pivoted to Divinity, a franchise that Larian also happens to own.
It’s crazy they have the finances to be working on a D&D franchise game and decide “…Nah. Let’s do something else.”
They recently switched to a new engine…
Uh oh.
I know folks like to hate on Unity, and Borderlands 3. Rightfully so. But let me list out some “in house engine” releases:
Cyberpunk 2077, which Nvidia backing
Mass Effect Andromeda, after previously being Unreal
Starfield
Paradox Grand Strategy, like Stellaris
A “smaller studio” example, Distant Worlds 2
All these drug their developers through hell, and we’re still technical messes at release. And after.
Now let’s look at some others:
KCD2: CryEngine
Expedition 33: Unreal
Black Myth Wukong: Unreal
Stray: Unreal
As a “smaller studio” example, Satisfactory: Unreal
…I’m just saying. Making a modern engine from scratch is hard. There are just too many things to worry about. And the record of “RPG studios rolling a new in house engine” is not great.
So what I hope this means is Larian moving to CryEngine or something like that, and not making something from scratch. But if they’re talking about early access so soon, I bet they licensed another engine.
They said very little about what that new engine entails, but much like Starfield, I suspect it’s largely reusing their old engine and only remaking select parts of it. Larian is doing something in the RPG space that, to me, makes nearly all of their competitors feel outdated, and it makes sense to me to make their own engine to do that as efficiently as possible. To make one of their games in an off the shelf engine like Unreal, with all of the bespoke physics objects and the ways every entity interacts with spells, elements, and other effects, could easily result in huge performance costs above and beyond what we saw in Act 3 of BG3.
I’m utterly terrified of them pulling an Andromeda/2077 and getting stuck in dev hell trying to debug the new engine bits instead of actually building the game. This is the advantage of prebuilt engines: someone else has already one all the hardware support/optimization and contemporary architecture stuff for you.
I’m less afraid of them pulling a Starfield, I suppose. The “divinity engine” in BG3 already runs okay. It’s not sleek like CryEngine KCD2, but it doesn’t feel janky or dated either, and even the mildest refresh over BG3 would be fine.
Much less is determined by engine than the average person thinks. Andromeda wasn’t a new engine; it was an engine that was made to make Battlefield games that then had to be used to make action RPGs and racing games after the fact. Capcom made an engine for the games they had in mind 10 years ago, and it’s fantastic at Resident Evil, Devil May Cry, and even serving as an emulation wrapper, but it’s showing cracks under the support for open world games that they added more recently. Larian’s engine is made to support the systems driven RPGs they conceptualized in the early 2010s, and there’s little chance some other engine will do it just as well or better without plenty of custom code anyway. Ask Digital Foundry about all of the “optimization” Unreal 5 has done for developers already.
If they can shoehorn in something akin to KCD2’s or Satisfactory’s Global Illumination, but keep their dev workflows and existing systems in place, that’d be perfect.
From the other Larian article in this community, it seems their engine improvements are largely things that they claim will allow them to iterate on ideas faster, like going right from mocap to a usable animation more quickly.
I truly love that Larian leadership frames everything they talk about around devs and their needs/wants. Another D&D game? “Oh, that’s great and all, but our devs hearts weren’t in it so we dropped it like a rock.” New engine? They ramble about improvements to dev workflows. It is so obviously a top priority.
Keep in mind that also comes with Vincke championing AI, and though he says no genAI assets will make it to the final product, there’s still some dissent. Here’s hoping though.
Well that can be reasonable. Obviously don’t vibe code an engine, but LLMs are great for basic code autocomplete, or quick utility scripts, things like that.
Really specialized AI (not LLMs/GenAI) can be great at, say, turning raw mocap into character animations. Or turning artist sketches into 3D models. Cogs in their pipeline, so to speak, which has nothing to do with GenAI slop making it into a final product.
The line is very fine though, and most in the business world skew to the side of pushing slop.
I think very little about AI compared to most people, for or against, but it largely seems to me like a solution in search of a problem, and it’s very cult-like how many CEOs get on board with it so quickly despite its very public lack of actually good results. On paper, the way Vincke describes their use of it sounds fine to me, but hopefully he’s not doing something so idiotic as to mandate its usage, as is happening at workplaces for friends of mine right now.
“Mandate its usage” could mean the motion cap/animation people have to learn some kind of automation tool, that’s now part of the engine.
That’s fine.
And that’s very different from the “you MUST make X hits to Microsoft Copilot” type garbage that’s so common now.
I’m harping on this because I’m afraid Larian will try something reasonable, yet get immense, unwarranted backlash (both internally and publically) because of other workers’ experiences with enshittified ML. And how politicized “AI” is becoming.
Machine learning is not bad. Tech Bro evangelism and the virus they spread among executives, is. And I don’t want the garbage they sell to poison tools studios like Larian could use to get ahead of AAA publishers.
Hasbro could have done nothing and made a bunch of money, but they chose temporary short term gains. Baldur’s Gate 4 will arrive far sooner than you think, and it will be terrible.
WTF. That’s awful, and also totally baffling. “This single game is responsible for a huge chunk of revenue and introducting countless people to D&D; let’s lay off its staff and leadership.”
Baldur’s Gate 4 will arrive far sooner than you think, and it will be terrible.
What do you mean by this? An outsourced spinoff is already in the works? I don’t see that in the linked article.
Nothing has been announced as far as Baldur’s Gate 4 goes yet. It looks like Hasbro is being a little bit smart and are going to try and make (“make”) a handful of other smaller games, like the recent Warlock game announcement.
But at some point Baldur’s Gate 4 will be announced, but Hasbro isn’t going to be willing to invest properly into it in order to make a good game.
…I’m just saying. Making a modern engine from scratch is hard. There are just too many things to worry about. And the record of “RPG studios rolling a new in house engine” is not great.
Larian’s track record is good. They used an in-house engine for Divinity: Original Sin, Divinity: Original Sin 2, and Baldur’s Gate 3. They also made their own game engine for their older Divinity titles (Divine Divinity and Beyond Divinity). And Vincke attributes at least part of their success to using in-house tools instead of “off the shelf” engines.
Thats depressing, i really liked larian’s whole thing and their attitude toward games development. Seeing them kick artists while they’re down means I’ll be skipping this :/
I can understand this hesitation, but I don’t expect that from Larian, they’ve delivered in the past and I suspect they’ll deliver again.
(So had CD Projekt Red of course, but Cyberpunk’s launch issues were largely stability/performance related, IIRC. Whereas Hello Games over-promised and under-delivered core features on No Man’s Sky.)
Let’s be straight: as amazing as Baldur’s Gate 3 is today, Act 3 launched half baked and half broken. My first playthrough experience was horrible, largely thanks to broken flags and missing content from the Upper City, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have comparable experiences with early versions of Original Sin 2. Hell, they rewrote basically the entire final act of that game with the definitive edition, and I’m under the impression Original Sin 1 had a similiar situation, though I didn’t play it enough between the original and the definitive edition to experience it.
Now, part of all this is because Larian opts to make decisions to cut content and reduce scope rather than abuse their staff or delay a project. In Baldur’s Gate specificslly, I won’t say I am perfectly happy with the outcome, but they are a good studio that practices reasonable employee ethics, and ultimately puts in the work to get there with the product as well. I’d have no issue buying Divinity day one or even pre-ordering, but I do not expect a perfectly complete and polished experience on release.
It still has bugs to this day. I played through the whole game two months ago. The printing press mission was extremely broken. It’s a mission where you are supposed to swap out the headline in a printing press so a magazine doesn’t shit-talk your party. The mission progressed as intended, the press even praised me for swapping the article out and on the next day I still got shit-talked.
I had to do the whole mission again and talk to the printing press twice (for no reason) to fix it. Yenna in my camp also never cooked for me.
Larian announcing their next game to be even bigger than before makes me a bit cautious. I hope they don’t bite off more than they can chew.
I think with CDPR people had conveniently forgotten how much of a broken, buggy mess Witcher 3 was at release tbh. It wasn’t as broken as Cyberpunk but I think that it was also easily forgotten because people weren’t remotely as hyped for the game when it came out. CDPR actually has always had a track record of putting out really buggy games that get patched into great ones later.
Cyberpunk’s launch issues were largely stability/performance related
I played the first release when it came out. There were a LOT of mission-breaking bugs, missing content, much less customization options, entirely missing features, a really messy perk system etc. It feels like a very different game now, since they patched in more content that was initially missing.
They should’ve pushed back the game at least for another year. 1.0 mostly focused on the cutscenes and Johnny Silverhand/Keanu Reeves since that’s what sold the game initially and left a lot to be desired in other areas.
If I remember correctly, you couldn’t even skip the first training mission. You also had to combine clothes that looked like ass because the armor rating was tied to them and there was no cosmetics system (that came with 2.0).
I need some piece of LLM generated code to make it into some critical TCP library that’s used for the internet everywhere.
Maybe then I can get some peace from the individuals that cry when a company mentions they used LLMs.
Aside: This looks like a proper use of LLMs - we’re not displacing artists with something trained on stolen art. Maybe it impacts some interns that needed to create PowerPoints.
Edit: Fine. I’m wrong. Vote with your wallet and don’t buy the game.
Except for the “developing concept art” bit. That’s not some unimportant intern’s work and does have the potential to displace artists. And while no AI-generated content may make it into the game, it does suggest that there will be art in the game that’s based on the AI-generated content. That’s what concept art is for, after all.
To add to this, concept art is one of the places I would least like AI to be used in. It utterly fails at being creative and actually creating something fundamentally NEW and the more we use it the more our media will just devolve into remixed homogeneity.
Stirring hype has failed too many times. I’m sure they have big plans for the game and it’s going to be very good. However, promising so much so early just screams incoming drama to me.
Shovel Knight is one of the most successful indie games ever released. We’re not talking of a “moderately” successful game that sold a few hundred thousand copies, like Hyper Lighr Drifter or CrossCode: SK sold over 2.5m copies back in 2019, and I’d wager at least as much since then. How do you go from there to almost bankruptcy?
They did a lot of extra work on it without charging for it, and it’s been a long time since they put out a hit. California salaries and real estate are expensive.
Paying a bunch of salaries when your revenue streams are Shovel Knight (good but old game that kept getting free DLC and made a lot of its money before release) and… Shovel Knight Dig. They had to go back to Kickstarter for Mina, after all.
If it was one guy or a tiny team, SK’s success would be enough for them to be “set for life”, but a business is more expensive to run than a team is. They probably don’t expect Mina to be a phenomenal income stream either, since (like SK) it’s already mostly done making them money.
As far as I understand it, the vast majority of ‘successful’ indie studios are in the same boat. You need to continual decent hits to keep afloat in an ever turbulent and flooding market. Even if the next title is successful, they already mentioned the other looming problem, burnout. You might be able to push yourself through one game, two is a struggle, and very few make it to three.
To me, and maybe I’m being a bit cynical, but this feels like a very foreboding article.
That’s what. I’ve been trying to get into game dev myself multiple times the last few years and it’s difficult. I can’t imagine getting one game out, let alone a second one. Getting that far I imagine has to drain a person
It most definitely takes a toll. Most devs don’t even talk about the weird sadness you get after finally getting something out the door either.
I don’t mean to make it all sound bad though, there is some genuine joy in making something and seeing it come together. Anyways good luck on your game dev projects.
bloomberg.com
Aktywne