... proceeds with another yearly installment of game X that could have been released as DLC, but instead built it as "a new game", selling at 1 cent per bug.
If you have to panic because a competitor makes a good game maybe you should reconsider why you’re a game developer in the first place. If it’s not to make the best games you can make, you shouldn’t be a game developer. I’m guessing the developers panicking aren’t the ones who pour their heart and soul into every game they make.
My counter to that is the last 2.5 BioWare games - I say 2.5 because Dreadwolf has been in development for ten years total now and still isn’t out. Andromeda was in development for 5 years. Anthem had money galore thrown at it until it came out. Too many devs, not just BioWare, are wasting years of development time because they haven’t got a clue what they can feasibly make then rush to get things out the door.
Instead of making excuses for why gave dev is the way it is now - a way that isn’t working - maybe look at what Larian did right and ask why more studios aren’t doing that. Early Access is normal used by indies with overinflated budgets? Well, why aren’t larger studios taking advantage of it or using systems like it?
The new normal for a have to be developed is turning into 5+ years, and there’s no excuse for the hot messes that have been coming out lately.
I’d like to ask…why are publishers even required anymore? Games don’t need physical releases anymore. You don’t need a publisher to host a zip file on a web server. Storefronts let indie developers self-publish so why do the big names still fall for the publishers who exist only to enshittify gaming anymore? They bring negative value to the industry.
They bring funding when you have none. Also marketing. How likely are we to have heard of The Plucky Squire without it being featured alongside several other Devolver games?
Because all those things make it possible to release independently, it’s still not easy. Marketing and getting exposure is hard, it’s a totally different skill. With a publisher, you don’t have to worry about any of that - you might even get funding up front.
Personally, I still think it’s worth doing - I’m in that position, and although I’m having a lot of trouble getting off the ground, at least I’m free to follow my visions
But I get why people would do it. A slice of a big pie is worth more than all of a tiny one.
It’s also stressful if it’s not in your skillset - I’ve started using chat gpt to rewrite my announcements and such. Before I’d stress trying to put them together and focused on being clear and honest, but no one was reading them. I find it worse than public speaking, at least when I get on stage I’m too busy to feel self conscious.
The stuff I come up with using chat-gpt is a bit cringe, but at least people read them - sadly corpo speak draws people in
I loved Q1 and custom maps Machinehead (devs behind new Wolfenstein) added to it, but Q2 is fucking boring. Like, really, besides the cool engine, it was just a slow and unimpressive bullshit. Not a Doom 2 level of making a comeback. What I disliked the most, besides irritating enemies, is backtracking to previous maps. It could’ve been shown as creating a consistent world across maps, but in the end it’s just bad design.
I suggest to those reading it to take Q1 instead. Surprisingly, the remastered version runs on Linux without problems. As do many engines created by fans’ community. It’s just better.
I turned 10 in 1995, and had a decent (for the time) gaming PC. Quake, and Quake 2, were a huge part of my childhood.
I’d agree that Q1 is probably the better game all-in-all, especially for single-player. But for internet multiplayer, Q2 was genre-defining. It was the fast-paced arena FPS by which literally all games were compared until like UT2003.
Yeah I felt that while Q2 was technically superior, it just lost all the charm that Q1 had, in the enemies, the general ambience, etc. It just seemed so generic to me. Happened to Blood 1 & 2 as well. It’s much like how many movies rely on special effects instead of their story and characters.
This is my favorite generation of graphic style. It’s simple and doesn’t get in the way of the game. I swear new games will add trash and random objects in your way just because…
In new games with up to date graphics I end up losing attention on the game and start looking at all the random objects.
To populate the community, maybe, but QuakeLive, original Q3 servers and open alternatives still have people. And what I love about them more than the idea of a remaster is that they aren’t gated by software or hardware. This possible remaster may require a W10-11 and lots of powerful hardware to show all these fancy things you, by default, disable to participate in competitive Quake.
Quake Champions (or how it’s called) is what current gen have instead, while old people don’t care having old Quake 3 Arena things running.
It seems the summary of most of the posts are "smaller studies can't create games as big as BG3" and "not every game/RPG needs to be as big and complex as BG3".
Are those responses incorrect and how is that being critical of BG3?
If anything, they are critcizing the idea that BG3 is the game all RPGs need to strive to be.
"I would not be surprised if this was more dev effort than the next 2 or 3 games in the genre combined. It's Rockstar-level nonsense for scope.
Only a few studio groups could even try this. I cannot wait to play, but this kind of effort likely won't be replicated this decade"
Yes the original starter of the thread Xalavier Nelson Jr. has a very fair point that this can set a standard for indie games however most people have big problems when these complaints are also coming from other AAA developers. James Berg works for bloody microsoft one of the largest companies that is absorbing huge portions of the gaming industry in a monopolistic pattern. Josh Sawyer is a Design Director for Obsidian who is a company who basically follow a very similar path as Larian, its just they sort of failed with their Pillars of Eternity series especially after Deadfire. Maybe Avowed will turn out well but their recent stuff has not found much favor at least in terms of RPGs.
BG3 is what AAA development should be if it was about making good products but at the end of the day these companies are here to make as much money as possible. I mean there is nothing wrong with making money but its clear many publishers have been pushing quite hard on consumers to paying more for less. As long as gaming budgets are this expensive we should be getting things of this quality more frequently but its not likely. I doubt we will see anything close to BG3 from Bethesda with ES6 a game they have teased for nearly 5 years now with almost nothing beyond that little teaser.
Like gamers especially RPG gamers just want a complete game. Its clear the success of BG3, DOS 1 & 2, and Owlcat's pathfinder games show there is a clear market for this. It just needs to be handled with well.
Plenty of games are "complete" and have a similar or larger scope then BG3, and they're not getting the attention that BG3 is getting now. On the other side of the coin, people really responded to Disco Elysium, and a lot of that had to do with what they did within a small space. If all I wanted was "big" and "complete", I'd be interested in Starfield, not Baldur's Gate 3.
I think you are confusing my term for complete with big and shallow. BG3,DOS2, Disco Elysium did well with their confines. The world felts very reactive to your decisions as a player and there is connecting sinew to most of the game with itself. Starfield and Bethesda's game are in a way glorified puddles they may be miles wide but typically underneath there is very little depth to it. Typically modders are the ones who add the depth that Bethesda didn't want to deal with. So you basically have a game where the puddle dips in an irregular fashion. This was honestly the biggest problem of CP2077. It was just a huge puddle, it had a fantastic writing for its main and side stories but almost everything else was pretty meh. I rather they just had a smaller world but pack it fuller with far more cool stuff than have vast spaces of nothingness.
No, I thought you were saying that a game was incomplete just because they added an expansion pack to it at any point, ever, which is a definition I find to be pretty absurd but plenty of people use. In this case it sounds like you're saying that some games are incomplete just because you prefer a modded, remixed version of the game rather than the one they actually made, which is a definition I'd also disagree with. Large swaths of empty space, particularly in Elder Scrolls and Fallout, is an aesthetic and design choice, among other things, and more or less reactivity may or may not mean that there isn't as much depth in the story, but those games have other strengths, like build variety, exploration, and such.
you're saying that some games are incomplete just because you prefer a modded, remixed version of the game rather than the one they actually made, which is a definition I'd also disagree with.
I would argue no, its more the systems in place feel like a first pass. For instance, the civil war of skyrim feels like a very unfinished concept. Its something that was slap together to just say they have it as content. You do a few side missions then a siege and repeat. There is little ebb and flow to it, it is a straight line, you as a player are on a monorail. Your actions have little impact on the world besides what arbitrary flag is being flown. Also build variety of Stealth archer? There is very little reason to change your playstyle compared to DOS 2 or BG3 where your different classes/attributes do have a major factor in how you solve encounters. The teleportation gloves of DOS 2 are the perfect example of how equipment can easily change how people interact with the game. Sure we don't need games where there are exclusive routes but the common Open world approach is keep it as open as possible. Like cyberpunk 2077 suffered from problems with the empty space that Witcher 3 didn't because you are on the hunt for recipes for new armor sets and witcher potions.
Hell even some of the games I recommended do suffer from some mechanics not hitting well. Pathfinder Wrath of Righteousness had some issues like the crusade minigame since it feels like the devs said hey would it be cool if we had a HOMMlike minigame in our already packed crpg. That sounds badass but the minigame wasn't that fun however everything around it was phenomenal like the troop recruitment even though it didn't matter had some very interesting talking points and choices. Like you pick the lich route, should you use death row inmates as undead meatshields to liberate your nation under assault of demons. Like it didn't hit well but it felt like the mechanic was thought about and had effort put into it from other sections of the game. It isn't some isolated system that is just there.
I am not a fool who thinks expansion packs are the devil. Hell I am in favor of hefty expansion packs since I remember when you got 1 or 2 and that was about it for the game.
None of what you said makes those games incomplete though. It's just something about it that you didn't care for. The systems are hardly a first pass; they've been making that game for about 15-20 years before Skyrim, and they're not going to deviate too far from the formula for Starfield either, I'll wager. It doesn't mean they didn't finish making it. They've finished making games that way over and over again.
Those aren't criticisms of Larian or Baldur's Gate 3. They are opinions that creating games at a certain scale isn't something developers can just replicate at will. Just like Rockstar games aren't something any studio can't just go out and put together.
It's like how someone would argue that not all books/novels need to be as long and complex as the Song of Ice and Fire series. Not all books need to be like those books, just like not all games need to be like BG3 (or GTA or RDR to use the other comparison).
BG3 is what AAA development should be if it was about making good products but at the end of the day these companies are here to make as much money as possible.
I think the quality of game, and lack of monetization, is certainly something that AAA games should strive for. I wouldn't agree that all AAA needs to be as big and complex as BG3 though. Just as Elden Ring being a great game doesn't mean that all similar games need to be massive and open-world in the same way.
Those aren't criticisms of Larian or Baldur's Gate 3. They are opinions that creating games at a certain scale isn't something developers can just replicate at will. Just like Rockstar games aren't something any studio can't just go out and put together.
It's like how someone would argue that not all books/novels need to be as long and complex as the Song of Ice and Fire series. Not all books need to be like those books, just like not all games need to be like BG3 (or GTA or RDR to use the other comparison).
Except my point has very little to do with complexity or how long it is. I rather a game be short than waste your fucking time, we don't need 200+ hour games. It is one of those things I hate about modern gaming where if a game is less than 20 hours of enjoyment it is worthless to many. I want quality yet many AAA studios don't pump out the best stuff. Halo infinite ended up as a trash fire that didn't respect its players and has basically been put down because of pointless money grubbing. Every Ubisoft game follows the very same formula make a large empty world where you clear towers.
We as gamers should strive for games like BG3 because they were quality works that were made for the enjoyment of the player. They aren't meant to fuck with you and hand over your wallet. Hell one of the biggest games this summer was a fucking roblox Battlefield game. People just want to play a good game that isn't trying to always nickle and dime them. Its a plus when there is complexity but its not a requirement for it to work.
Edit: Larian is a studio that has basically been the poster child for "crowdfunding" and I personally am fine with that. This can be what happens when we support studios with an idea. There will be a ton of failure but crowdfunding has brought many top tier indie games especially in genres thought dead in modern gaming (FTL, Divinity Original sin, Shovel Knight, Wasteland 2, Superhot, Yooka-Laylee, Night in the Woods, A Hat in Time, Elite Dangerous, Ready or Not, etc.)
We as gamers should strive for games like BG3 because they were quality works that were made for the enjoyment of the player.
But that's what the comments that people are taking as "criticisms of BG3" are talking about, and is the context for the video from OP. There aren't developers saying "High quality games shouldn't be the standard".
I asked for examples of developers criticizing the scope of BG3, and you replied with examples. I guess I'm confused as to how I was supposed to know you weren't talking about "complexity or how long it is" (aka. scope)?
But yes, if your point is "developers should make good games, and not bad games" (yes, I'm being reductionist) then sure, I agree with that, but that's not really what I was trying to point out, and that's not what the video was about.
I think saying you can make 2/3 games out of the effort of 1 is a more cynical approach of you should be milking your consumers, you don't need to put this much effort into the game when 1/3 of that would have been "worthy" of release in the modern AAA space.
Since yes in a reductive point I'm just saying "Make good games, not bad ones idiot AAA devs" I'm just anti devs (more realistically publishers) trying to milk consumer's wallets.
Setting appropriate expectations for one’s own work is one thing, but I’ll never understand why some people feel the need to deride others for exceeding them.
Because they don't want to be held to the new standard, obviously. They're comfortable and are preemptively taking offense at the idea of having to do more in the future. Like the normal kids who want to punch down the one overachiever who reminds the teacher to assign homework.
But this isn't a homework assignment; these are businesses competing for consumer dollars, and Larian is winning with their investment into a happy team and good product.
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