If I was Microsoft and I saw Baldur’s Gate 3 pop off, and I owned Obsidian and Pillars of Eternity, I would leverage the work they’re doing with Avowed to prop up Pillars of Eternity III as “our Baldur’s Gate 3”. In a worst case, I’d imagine Obsidian would continue to intelligently manage their development resources to work more efficiently and release games more regularly than basically any other developer their size.
Then again, if I was Microsoft, I wouldn’t shutter the studio that just made a game of the year contender, so who knows?
I don’t know if a higher up will see the numbers on PoE 2 and decide they should invest like 20 times the game’s budget to match BG3 on a sequel. Specially a Microsoft higher up. Even if they made a CRPG I think they’d go for a different franchise.
Come to think of it, that will depend on how well Avowed does.
You think Pillars of Eternity II was only made for $5M? I’d be shocked. But still, assets made for Avowed could be ported right over to a theoretical PoE3, and that saves time and money. Here’s hoping. I’ll bet it happens, even if it isn’t the BG3 competitor version.
Could be. If so, they did fantastic work for only $4.4M. The entire console business is in the process of being turned on its head, so nothing is predictable anymore, but if the world still worked now the way it did a few years ago, you’d eat the cost of making a must-play game knowing that you weren’t going to make your money back just to get eyes on your brand and console. Two years ago, Microsoft might have agreed. Now it’s anyone’s guess.
The problem is that basically EVERYONE has an overwatch game this year. We had, what, three different Overwatches during the Keighleys proper? Fucking Valve have a god damned Overwatch game.
And… Overwatch 2 failed horribly. So did the Gundam Overwatch.
A proper CRPG will take years. And, as Owlcat et al have pointed out, it is a lot harder to sell people on a CRPG that is not “fully voiced” which drastically increases costs. But also? Baldurs Gate 3 largely benefited from early access but MS can’t rely on that with how much of a cluster everything has been. Unless POE3 is “as good as Baldurs Gate” in early access? it is a “failure”. So there isn’t going to be a “hey, let’s see if this is still cool in four years” project.
My hope is that POE getting that patch a few days ago is a good sign. But my money is on Avowed underperforming (because, like Outer Worlds, “Waa, it isn’t Skyrim!!!”) and Obsidian becoming a support studio for Bethesda.
Pillars 2 was already fully voiced, give or take some narration, and RPGs are more evergreen than a subgenre of first-person shooter. And I’ll never forgive reviewers for dinging Outer Worlds for its scope. That’s not a bug; it’s a feature.
It still significantly increases development costs over the CRPGs of olde. Especially because BG3 felt like the first game that had:
GOOD voice acting
Significant “choice” and branching narratives
Plenty of content that players will “never” see.
Whereas POE2 and similar games very much felt like we were “losing out” a bit to support the VO. Because… we were. We have known that ever since Bioware started doing it.
And yeah. Outer Worlds was basically the same scale as Fallout 3. But people want a giant empty open world. Never managed to finish it (the two times I played I lost interest around the time I got to the capital-ish planet) but had a great time.
Whereas POE2 and similar games very much felt like we were “losing out” a bit to support the VO. Because… we were.
It’s funny, because I thought POE2 proved quite handily that we very much were not losing out. Yeah, it raises the cost, but we’ve had a decade now of CRPGs bucking the trends of the AAA RPGs that motivated them, most of them fully voiced at this point if they didn’t launch that way. POE2 launched fully voiced, and it’s still one of the best of those.
I don’t think we need transformers and flying in doom tbh, but it looks like we’ll have to deal with it now.
Otherwise this joke on a hexen reboot is the ultimate meme of the reboot. And is much more intriguing than doing “doom eternal plutonia experiment”.
The ancient holy wars part of the lore that you read in sentinel prime is the most intriguing part of the doom guy’s story. Links back to seraphim too. Walking through sentinel prime and reading all those things I really felt like I’d like to have seen those days. Oh boy, here we come!
Okay so caveat first: It is just Far Cry wearing a Pandora mask. That’s it. I’d say it’s even slightly less than that because they had to thin some mechanics to make space to fit the theme a bit more.
But, that theme? It… it makes it work! Even the mechanics being watered down works, because making it fit the theme just ends up being more important. Yeah, you play this for playing on Pandora. But fuck does the game sell this well! Incredibly well. I found myself just stalking the jungle (or plains, or forest, of which the plains are the weakest but still incredibly beautiful) half the time, genuinely doing the grindathon entirely willingly, just because of the lush atmosphere the game presents and how it feels to be roaming in this alien nature.
Plus, I played Horizon Forbidden West right after this, and while I give HFW that it has much higher fidelity overall and is really pretty, the actual jungle and forest in particular are leaps and bounds above it in Avatar. You can notice the artists focused their entire effort on that, and even at daytime it looks amazing. Nighttime and they did the bioluminsensce we know from the movies incredibly well.
So erm… recommended? In a weird way? It’s really just Far Cry: Pandora, but it turns out that despite not expecting to, that’s kinda what I wanted? 😅
(Caveat though: I don’t think it’s worth €70. However given how much I liked it, €50 or so seems perfectly adequate.)
I’ve played only Origins but this trailer is not doing a whole lot for me. Even visually I don’t like it (which is bizarre because I think Origins looks like shit and still I somehow prefer it). Don’t really like this art direction, personally.
If you’ve only played the most tactical of all of the Dragon Age games and not the Action based variations that are literally the other 2 games, please stop talking
What do you mean “same combat”, like Amalur made some novel innovation? They’re both just 3D, third-person action combat; it’s a mechanic. This is like knocking Fallout New Vegas because it still had you shooting guns, and we already shot guns in Fallout 3.
The game looks disappointing for plenty of legitimate reasons, so let’s stick to those.
I think you misunderstood me, Amalur has a bland combat without much depth and that what I’m comparing to. The new combat looks like a generic third-person combat, they got rid of the tactical combat and didn’t offer anything substantial.
The boss fight with the pride demon looks okay, but the normal enemies are like smashing the button 3 times to kill them.
The opinions are all over the place right now. As someone who loved DA2, I have no problem with actiony combat and linear world, as long as the storytelling and companions stay the same quality.
Thank you! People forget that this hasn’t been a tactical series since the first game. It’s like people complaining that Zelda BOTW wasn’t a top down 2D puzzler.
Don’t listen to the whiners. There are 3 games in the Dragon Age series and only one of them can be considered a “Tactical” game. Hell, I remember all of the fallout and whining from fans when Dragon Age 2 became more of an arcade hack and slash. And then Inquisition was just a combo of the two styles that leaned towards Action over Tactics.
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