They made a D&D video game. The most popular and successful board game ever made. They had BUCKETS of funding from wizards of the Coast for this. They also had a massive studio with more than 400 people working on it.
James Stephanie Sterling did a fantastic video about Baldur’s Gate 3. Essentially, everything came together in just the right way for this game to be made. It’s not responsible to call this the new standard in the same world where we vilify overwork and ‘crunch-time’, but that’s not to say you shouldn’t expect more from game developers. You absolutely should. But you should do so reasonably.
Other triple A devs have massive funding, a giant staff and other unlimited resources and they still can’t make a game devoid of microtransactions or bugs. Are you stunned?
I’m pretty sure EA and Activision-Blizzard have similar or bigger budgets for their AAA games and they either make shit or microtransactions-filled games.
2K is huge and they always make NBA2K decent/good but full of terrible microtransactions
I’m no financial expert so maybe I’m mistaken in some figure, but the bottom line is WotC is not the only big (and growing) company, so this are nothing but excuses.
They had BUCKETS of funding from wizards of the Coast for this. They also had a massive studio with more than 400 people working on it.
They had the IP; they did not receive a single cent from WotC. They funded the game with money from their previous games, and in fact, they paid WotC for the IP.
People have been saying this game is exciting because of the lack of mtx, but it seems to me that any big rpg gets a lot of attention. Eldan Ring got similar praise last year. Bioware was making these kinds of games fairly consistently about a decade ago and then stopped to make shit like Anthem. It’s a design decision not a budget problem.
Microtransactions come with specific challenges. Specifically, you have to give the players a reason to pay them, and that’s usually done by making the game purpously worse for those who don’t pay.
Or the other trend these days, Wich is to remove content from the base game and sell it as dlc or just money-gate it even if it’s on the base disk/release.
I don’t necessarily believe this to be universal. I’ve played plenty of games with cosmetic mtx that I can absolutely play without the desire or need to spend money.
I mean we can have large games with detailed graphics and have employees treated well. We just need to accept 10+ year timelines for releases on big games which I’m ok with as long as we get quality results and the team is treated well.
I follow star citizen though so I could be the weird one here lol
That’s a valid point. As long as there’s a publisher and investors we’re more than likely never going to see what I suggested, I kinda forgot star citizen is what it is because it’s funded by us.
It’s always the same crunch time for employees and rushed buggy products to feed the investors from “AAA” corps. Hope we can push for some positive change :/
I can’t understand why crunch time has become so normalised. There’s no other software development project where constantly failing to plan for the needed time requirement would be accepted. Crunch is a sign of bad project management, it isn’t normal.
At some point, people figured out that during a couple of weeks of mad rush right before a deadline, if you’ve got committed, well-rested employees who know they’re going to get a rest afterwards, they tend to be much more productive than they normally are. Some bad managers only paid attention to part of that, and determined that eighty hour weeks are more than twice as productive as forty hour ones, and intentionally started inducing crunch. They somehow didn’t notice that the third week of crunch is only about as productive as a regular week, and after that, it’s way less productive as everyone’s exhausted. Combine this with the fact that people with management knowledge tend to flee from the games industry rather than to it, and you end up with the software engineering industry’s least effective managers running things with easily debunked dogma.
The main differences with Star Citizen are that it’s
Funded in advance
Funded by people who have no say in how the product/company should work
Massively overfunded
This means, CIG has no pressure to ship soon or even at all (if the project fails, they have no liability). They also have nobody telling them what to with the money. They have already made their profit.
I am not knocking CIG for this situation, but if you put it like this, it’s easy to see why for each CIG out there, there are tens of thousands of games on crowdfunding sites that either
Failed to raise funds
Failed to get a decent company/legal structure running with the money they raised
Failed to actually ever deliver anything in an usable state
Are just pure scams
So as a general business model rather than just an insane stroke of luck, I don’t think this is a good option.
A business model that only earns money after release (like the classic publisher-funded development model) is bad for the obvious cash-grabby and buggy reasons, but at least it consistently delivers games. Contrary to the “earn money before you start development” model that is enabled by crowdfunding, which in general does not deliver games.
In my (not very educated) opinion, early access is probably the best middle ground. You start off with little initial funding required, but by the time you turn to the crowd, you already have a working prototype and company structure. That makes it much more likely for the game to eventually be released in a full version. This option obviously comes with its own downsides as well, but many of my favourite games have been small studios or even individuals who use early acces to fund development.
Who the f is Shawn, wtf is evolve? Why is every shitty game dev crying that other people make good games, without shame? Oh that’s right, based on their releases, they have no shame.
He didn’t have anyone’s attention and he craves attention and now he has lots of attention, so I guess everything is coming up Milhouse as far as Shawn is concerned.
BG3 with my wife. As great as it was I'm already enjoying this a lot more than DoS2, I just enjoy DnD mechanics more and those shields felt suffocating on build options. When she doesn't feel like gaming, I've also been working on Disco Elysium, which has also been great. I'm not really sure how I wound up in this double whammy of games about WORDS. MANY WORDS.
Returnal (PC) - Still playing the Tower of Sisyphus even though I beat the game. This is the most impressed I’ve been with a Playstation “exclusive” since the PS2, it’s so good. I bet a lot of people give up on it pretty quick because of the difficulty, but I find it’s less difficult than a Souls game once you get a handle on it.
Horizon Zero Dawn (PC) - I kinda want to get to the part where they explain the robot animals (Dr. Eggman?), but the half-assed combat and boring open world are making me not want to bother.
20XX (PC)- It’s fun, but it’s also giving me a new appreciation for how well-designed the Mega Man games were. You’re not supposed to be hitting your head on the bottoms of platforms in games like this, lmao.
My boyfriend and I are playing through Division 2 together. It’s my first time playing through the story, his 3rd or 4th. We just got to world tier 4 and are gearing up to go to New York!
I’m playing through Dragon Quest 11 when I have time! I’m really enjoying the characters and the art! The story is… Okay. Nothing to write home about. The music was good, but then after having it repeat over and over and over and over it has kind of started making me grit my teeth. I also kind of wish the game was a little shorter? It feels extremely long, but I think that’s a side-effect of me hearing the same songs over and over and the plot not really clicking with me as well as some other stories have.
Critiques aside, I really love Sylvando; I think he’s the best character I’ve seen in a long time! So flamboyant, yet so caring and complex. And the art is really pretty and pleasant to look at at times.
I’m still gonna stick it out to the end, because I feel like I’m close to the end now anyway and maybe it’ll leave on a really high note :)
Gave Underrail another go after a dropped attempt years ago. After I heard that looking up a build is the only way to really get into the game, I tried that and I get it now. Pretty fun and engaging! Other than that, Battlebit with the buddies. I want the L96 so bad
I’m playing the latest, hottest crpg: divinity: original sin 2! I played the first years ago but had to kind of skog through it, tried playing the second one and just couldn’t get into it. With bg3 out, I want to give it a other chance, otherwise I think I have to realize that crpgs aren’t for me anymore.
Gave Baldur's Gate 3 a try, I don't think it's for me. I didn't realize before starting that I absolutely fucking hate that kind of RNG, the Mindflayer "aesthetic" (body horror á la HR Giger-on-some-less-friendly-hallucinogenics? Check. Eye scream? Check. ), the threat of having content locked behind "lol, fuck you, you got the wrong dice roll hours ago", and, under the hood, a bunch of spreadsheet-esque mechanics I don't know jack about, never having played DnD.
I save scum in this play through, but I dont intend to on the next one. Part of the magic is that the game adapts to your bad dice rolls. Just because you succeeded a roll doesn’t mean it’s the “good” option. It’s just a different one.
And the eye horror stuff is really only in the intro (although I’m only 20 hours in so it may come up later)
In addition to save scumming to get better results as others have said, the body horror stuff goes away after the intro and you end up in much more normal forests/towns etc. I definitely understand the difficulty of the mechanics for someone new to DnD, it is pretty complex relative to what video games generally expose to the player, but it also is mostly good about explaining how stuff works with the tooltips.
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