We should make sure to label games exactly like this. Beta at release? Depending on microtransactions? -> It’s an AA game at most, no matter the production costs.
From what I gather, there is a real fear in develper spaces that executives will take the wrong lessons from BG3. They will want the same scope, choice, narrative, & mechanics but through crunch, shutting down smaller projects, & homogenized visual & narrative focus. IE all the shiny bits without the time, work culture, & creativity that came with creating BE3. It isn’t developers just being pissy this is their way of trying to stop their idiot boss from ruining their current project or making massive projects without enough time or staff.
So the answer is for the ones who make nice things because of a nice system they have to just stop because the other crabs can’t get out of the bucket. Maybe their beef should be with their idiot boss, not with the guys who do the work.
Whatever happened to companies learning from other’s successes instead of trying to keep others down?
The above post isn’t saying that Larian or other devs shouldn’t make games like BG3. It’s saying that we shouldn’t expect the massive amount of content and options in BG3 for every game
My bad, I have interpreted it as apologetic for the people yelling at Larian for ‘ruining it’ for everyone.
I agree that we should not expect this sort of quality from everything, after all Gauss’ curve applies universally and this is quite far from the mean as I see it. We would just maybe like… less shite.
But it’s not like Larian are the first to raise the bar. I remember the days when Blizzard was an awesome company. Then I remember Bethesda being awesome. Now it’s Larian on the spotlight. I may not have followed the news back when the others were good, but I don’t remember such attitudes around as mentioned in the original post, to basically discredit instead of leaving it alone.
I mean, we didn’t have nearly as much social media back then and a 24/7 news cycle that causes random tweets to be blown up into IGN articles. I think the initial tweet was just a random thought that got spun way out of proportion
It isn’t developers just being pissy this is their way of trying to stop their idiot boss from ruining their current project or making massive projects without enough time or staff.
Yeah, to the OP in the posted tweet... I did put a lot of thought into it. If a game that's just $60 can do this, then all new games are measured against it. Go compete. If your business model is outdated, convince your investors to change or be downgraded to B tier game dev.
Don't come me, the consumer, complaining about your poor ability to hedge business markets. You saw BG3 in early access for 3 years, you knew it was coming.
I have a large backlog of games to play before I even think about buying anything new, but is this even a good game? Serious question because I know there has been a huge amount of press on it, but haven’t watched any reviews yet (on purpose because I hate spoilers and don’t want to be tempted with a new purchase yet).
If it doesn’t immediately spark the interest to buy it, go ahead and wait for it to go on sale. It sounds like you may have buyers’ remorse if it ends up not being your thing and you pay full price.
I’m not too fond of CRPGs and I’m hooked on this game. It oozes excellent workmanship and appreciation for the genre/source material which makes it hard to resist.
Yes. Yes it is. Excellent story so far. Gameplay is the best of DnD mixed with the best part of Divinity Original Sin 2. Difficulty is maybe a bit harsh the first few levels when an encounter with a bad initiative can take you out before its your turn. It looks graphically good and runs fine on older graphic cards. The companions have interesting backstories and related quests.
I havent tested it in co-op yet.
I have encountered a few bugs: Actors missing in cutscenes. Money-stacks getting corrupted. The ugly pre-order clothes just disappearing after a patch. But nothing serious.
Co-op is excellent. Drop in/drop out works flawlessly, no lag. It even has LAN options in the year of our lord 2023. One issue is that a player can start an encounter without the others and people can miss out on story. All in all highly recommended.
It looks graphically good and runs fine on older graphic cards.
Yes, but not older processors, apparently, as I found out. I sure as hell never expected a CRPG to be the first game that screams at me to get a better one.
Have you played Divinity: Original Sin 2? Because it’s literally just that game with a D&D skin on it. If you liked D:OS2, or you’re really into D&D/Forgotten Realms, then it’s fine. If you were frustrated by certain things in D:OS2, they’re probably not fixed here.
It uses DND 5e as the underlying rules set. I hate DND 5e. It’s a garbage system full of old bad ideas, and it has such tremendous brand awareness it sucks all the air out of the hobby space.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is still an extremely good game in spite of all that.
That sounds promising, because like you I really really really do not like the DnD system. But to hear that the game is decent in spite of that makes me curious about trying it soon, TYVM. :)
Controlling 4 digital 5e characters in rapid succession feels very different from controlling 1 character in a tabletop setting. Idk if it’s better or worse this way, but (to me) they’re pretty distinct experiences so it’s worth at least trying
Haven’t played it, but been reading/watching a lot of reviews. Seems like they got a lot right and a few things wrong, still some early bugs but not nearly the amount that most releases have, some people complain about length (very long playthroughs might drag out for some, especially the slow combat). But I suspect many people will love or hate this game based on whether they like turn based combat.
I bought the game early access a couple years ago. The reason they got so few things wrong is they actually listened to community feedback from the early access. They made a lot of minor changes on things (from what I saw most of that was to make the game feel more like DND)
Honestly I’d recommend watching someone play it to get an idea of if you like it. Steam also has the option to let you “borrow” someone’s account so I’m sure if you have friends playing this you could ask. That’s what I did and enjoyed it so much I ended up buying it.
If you approach it with a standard videogame attitude (get the strongest weapons and most powerful skills, steal everything that is worth good money and so on), then it is a solid game.
If you approach it as a simulated tabletop rpg game, it is fantastic. You can experiment with all sorts of things. For example: in one fight I was outnumbered and cornered in a small room, with enemies coming from outside. I pulled some furniture in front of the door to block the passage, threw some oil on the ground in the other side and lit it with a torch, then hid my characters behind the walls out of any projectile’s path until I could fully heal them.
Unlike other games those weren’t things that the devs put there specifically for this fight. There was no button prompt suggesting the furniture could be moved or anything like that. They just put a bunch of stuff in the world that can be interacted with in many ways depending on what sort of skill you have and leave it up to you to find a way to use them, or not. You can still min-max your stats and ignore all that. You won’t even know you’re missing anything.
"what funding?"is a dumb question. all companies have funding. especially software. very few companies legit started in a basement and progressed to international status relying purely on profit and loss sheets.
you are ignorant.. you don't understand what he's talking about.. they are both talking about VC funding.. that means Venture Capital, which you did not know.. for some reason you are here being ignorant and loud about something you do not understand..
Larian recieved debt funding to found in 2009, late stage VC in 2011 (presumably to offset loan repayments), recieved ongoing support from Arkafund VC and has crowd funded every year 2013–2019. Tencent bought 3006 shares for 30% stake in either 2020 or '21 (not sure exact date).
Uhh… today’s AAA studios have THOUSANDS of employees, hundreds of millions of dollars in budgets, and huge IPs on which to draw. Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Assassin’s Creed, Diablo, Warcraft, Mass Effect, Dragon Age… these studios have VASTLY larger resources than Larian. Like, an order of magnitude larger. This is gaslighting and whining. I’m not having it. Do better, AAA devs. Do a lot better.
Well I wouldn’t say that exactly. GTA 5 had a huge budget and a huge team and it’s objectively a better product if you compare the two (which is only to say they’re both great games but the bigger budget game has and does more).
It’s a matter of the motivations of the developers and their financial backers. If your goal is to make an ok game that maximizes profit focused mechanics, most of these AAA developers are hitting the mark perfectly. If your focus is to make a good game like it seemed to be with the BG devs, they absolutely hit the mark and are being rewarded for it.
This is just a reminder to an industry that is trying to tell us that pay to win mechanics are the standard that they do not in fact get to dictate what those standards are. We do. If a game is shit people will abandon it even if you poured millions into that product. The recent battlefield game is a prime example of this. Even something as guaranteed as a new battlefield game isn’t enough to overcome a shitty leadership team emphasizing the wrong things. The community bailed on their product and they’ll never get them back. All those millions in guaranteed revenue are gone forever.
GTA V story mode was an excellent game, but it’s hard to realistically say a game from one genre is better than another, apples and oranges and all that.
GTA V’s online multiplayer, however, at this point is such a shitstain that I think it alone is enough to make the distinction clear.
It is. But only in so far as the content and scope of the game far surpasses anything a smaller developer could ever hope to accomplish. You may prefer one over the other, totally fine, but objectively speaking you get way more out of gta 5 content and scope wise than bg3.
As others point out gta online is a dumpster fire but it’s still massive and allows you to do endless amounts of things, racing, heists, owning property, running businesses, etc.
This is just a reminder to an industry that is trying to tell us that pay to win mechanics are the standard that they do not in fact get to dictate what those standards are. We do.
Quoting for emphasis. We control the purse, we have the voting power of the wallet.
Blaming consumers, in this instance. You could well be right that the problem is internal but in that case that’s where it needs to solved. Or if they want to get the support of consumers, be honest with their reasoning. Crying that the expectations of consumers are too high doesn’t help at all. It just makes them seem out of touch with reality.
Just clarifying what you meant. I thought I missed something. DLC to my mind is like... an extra race or somthing a bit more relevant than purely cosmetic stuff. Not going to argue semantics here, fair enough to call that a micro transaction and it's certainly DLC.
That’s a courtesy for people who didn’t pre-order but want the dice cosmetic. It was originally a pre-order exclusive but they changed it when asked to.
$10 purchase for soundtrack, dice skin and some DSO2 cosmetics that everyone who bought the game in early access gets. This allows everyone else to purchase.
Even excluding the cosmetics, this DLC includes the soundtrack. I haven’t purchased it myself (yet), but I’d imagine that a soundtrack to a game with over 200 hours of cinematic would be rather extensive (again, I have not seen it, so I don’t know). Even if it’s only 30 to 40 minutes of music, at $10, that’s at least on par with the cost of most albums anywhere else. I feel it’s got to be more than only 30ish minutes of music, though, so, for the album alone the price seems legit.
Edit: Maybe I’m just too old, but I thought microtransactions were something you get prompted to purchase while playing the game. Is that no longer the case?
Microtransactions are 'small' purchases made in a game (or via some kind of store that allows you to buy stuff to be used inside of a game).
DLC is any additional downloadable content that is not included with the game (so something like a day 1 patch wouldn't be considered DLC, I'd say).
All microtransations are DLC, but not all DLC are microtransactions, generally (before someone comes along with some kind of physical microtransaction or something I guess)
I personally just view microtransations as anything that isn't 'playable content'. So buying a mount from an in-game store would be a microtransaction, while buying an expansion wouldn't be. Map packs kind of blur the line in this instance, because one could argue that they're essentially 'world cosmetics', but its a hard and fast rule and not something I'd try to enforce as a law, ya know?
It’s clear that there are multiple different definitions that people have for “microtransactions”. I think it’s safe to assume that larian has a definition similar to mine. No time in the game that I’ve noticed did I get prompted to buy the DLC. In fact, I didn’t buy it; it seems early access people got it for free.
It's the soundtrack and some DSO2 cosmetics that everyone who bought the game during early access got for free. They're selling it to everyone else for $10.
Technically it's DLC, not MTX as MTX almost always entails individual purchases of items, usually in-game. It's more of a Collector's Edition than anything. That no one seems to care about, even the people who detest predatory practices.
Do you mean the Mask of the Shapeshifter? That allows, once per long rest, to change appearance to another random character. Effectively a Disguise Self cast.
There's also the dagger that's 4-7 weapon. But I replaced that before I even dealt with the goblin camp. There's so many magic items I wasn't worried about it.
The biggest coup is the hat and cape. They offer no bonuses but they look so fly I'm probably never taking them off.
Edit: Looked it up a bit, the shares are 70% Sven and wife, 30% Tencent. Honestly not too bad considering at the time those shares were sold, Larian was almost bankrupt.
Love seeing you edit your comment and correct yourself/validate the other user’s statement. Breathe of fresh air from the toxic doubling-down 99% of the time on reddit.
their 1 Child per family policy for decades has left them with a gigantic pile of elderly and not nearly enough working age people to support them. not to mention the young people have no training on how to support their infrastructure or manufacturing tools.
This doesn’t even mention the gender ration disparity either that is going to hit even harder as well for them. China is gonna have even more issues in the next few decades
because if you can only have 1 child to support the family in the future you need to have the one that gets educated and paid. it went on for decades. if you search youtube for the word ‘china’ theres countless recent explanations of the various ways they are collapsing.
I loved sports games growing up, but they are absolutely terrible now. Over priced, full of cash grabs and needlessly complex. I just want to hit x to pass. I don’t want a fucking story line, I just want to play the game.
If people buy it anyway at the full price, then the game publisher will correctly deduce that it indeed worth at least that much money for enough people (otherwise those people would not part ways with that much money to get it) to get that game as soon as it comes out.
In Economics, perfect pricing (which is not yet possible but, damn, they’re really trying hard) from the point of view of a seller (i.e. for maximum profits) is when they get exactly as much money from each individual as that person is willing to pay for it, so the “ideal” world for them would be individually-tailored prices going as high as it could possibly go for each person whilst still managing to sell to that person.
As they can’t as of yet sell at different prices to each and every individual, they’ve gone as far as they can (regional pricing, different prices in different stores with different audiences and, maybe more importantly, time-from-publishing pricing) and then push prices up and up slowly whilst checking if in total the price increase has yielded more money or not (they have no issue with loosing customers due to higher prices if in total they still make more money at the price point than at a lower price point).
IMHO, in the face of this, the easist and best reaction for somebody who wants the game but does not think it’s worth $70, is to wait until the price falls down to how much they’re willing to pay for it (even better, let it fall some more and buy a couple more games with the savings). In fact if enough people do it the price will fall much faster as the publisher’s sales data analysis will signal to them that they’ve put the game at too high a price point and they’ll lower it trying to pick up the “money left on the table” from those who are interested but not at that price point before those people lose interest.
So you just had to write what in your eyes is “obvious” for everybody as a comment, which hence is redundant, about how some other comment is “redundant and obvious”…
Jokes on them, my limit is wildly low compared to this. Most sports games are worth 20 bucks max at this point, the main content is just reskinned gameplay with updated stats and an unnecessary twist on controls. Its DLC.
I was playing Cyberpunk for a couple days last week as it was on sale on PSN but lost interest as soon as I got the final mission (I played it at launch but inevitably returned it due to the state it was in).
the past couple days I’ve been busting through all of my unfinished Warhammer 40k pile instead and have been feeling pretty good about that.
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