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.
That looked far better than I expected. It had a lot of Horizon Forbidden West vibes to the gameplay, but the graphics definitely felt like being in the Star Wars universe.
Don’t have an Xbox but I remember these games really fondly. This looks cool, but like, kind of insanely polished for a Fable game? Interested to see what the vibe of the finished game is like.
I really liked the first reboot, but felt Eternal overcomplicated it and made it like a memory game of working out which gun was best for each enemy, which isn’t really what I wanted from it. Too much finicky precision (like shooting the goddamn turrets off things), and not enough wanton carnage.
It took the story way too seriously as well, and the most enjoyable thing from the first game’s story was somebody starting some exposition, followed by Doomguy smashing the radio.
Just wasn’t feeling it as much as I was with the first. It was only the soundtrack that got me through it tbh, and with Mick Gordon very much not on speaking terms with id Software, I’ll keep my expectations lowered for this.
I’ll just keep my excitement at bay until Micrisoft proves they didn’t fuck it up by something like requiring a constant online connection for the single player campaign like Black Ops 6.
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