As someone that was a late teenager during the run of Infinity Engine games, and then witnessed the subsequent consolization and decline of CRPGs… seeing Baldur’s Gate as a CRPG again and having it be a marquee AAA-caliber release is kinda mind-blowing.
The 2000s were a mistake, and so much of modern indie development is about undoing those mistakes. “Boomer” shooters, immersive sims, CRPGs, point and click adventures? All back on the menu, baby.
There’ve been fantastic CRPGs in the last handful of years. Off the top of my head: Divinity Original Sin 2 (2017), PoE/PoE2(2015/2018), Tyranny(2016), Torment: Tides of Numenera(2017), Pathfinder Kingmaker/WotR(2018/2021), and Disco Elysium^1^ (2019).
There’s definitely been a comeback, I feel like I’ve been eating good on that side for a while now.
^1^Play this game if you haven’t. It’s so fucking good
I really liked Obduction. It was a rock solid puzzle game but omg the loading screens were a huge detractor. You had to move between multiple areas to solve some of the puzzles and to do so you got a loading screen which took it’s toll on the immersion factor.
I have been replaying Divinity 2. I had forgotten how good this game plays and looks. AND I was watching a "Let's Play" of DOS2 and noticed I missed some areas and stuff I didn't know I could do. So much dept and different ways to do things.
I was replaying DOS2 on my Linux gaming PC with an XBox controller because I think the controller will play similar on Baldur's Gate 3.
Fun days ahead soon exploring the world of Faerun and Baldur's Gate.
This is what I’ve been saying. We don’t even own digital products, all it takes is a server to be taken down or an account to be lost and all you bought is taken away. Pirating also can’t be stealing because we aren’t taking something away from someone else, other people are not deprived of the chance to have this just because we downloaded it.
Major reason not to buy ebooks from amazon: you can’t lend, give, exchange, sell them and you may lose all of them if you anger the right people. They are not yours, you are not buying them, you merely paid for conditioned access to them.
This whole thing is especially heartbreaking because at its core, the game is great. Running around and shooting feels better then Halo has in a long time. It was just ruined by corporate fuckery.
In a nutshell: corporate greed. The only part of the game that was live service was the paid cosmetics.
At launch, their entire idea of more ‘content’ was just visual cosmetics. If you look at their communications at the time it will all make sense.
They constantly referred to an internal ‘live service’ team separate from the rest of the game, and that team was effectively the ‘cosmetics team’.
People talk about contractors, but this was the real problem. They thought they could get away with barely adding any real content and selling tons of cosmetics.
lemmy.world
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