The other point to setting the game 100 years later is that they’re not beholden to the same exact geography, architecture, or, most importantly, the choices the player made in the previous game. And it allows people to step into this one without feeling like the previous two were mandatory. They did still choose a canon, and they can handwave others away as hearsay told in legends where multiple conflicting things are true, but the game was unmistakably made by enormous fans of Baldur’s Gate and Dungeons & Dragons. It is still a story that revolves around the city of Baldur’s Gate and Bhaal. It is the most authentic D&D game made since those old infinity engine games and arguably more so, given the ways their games are made to allow you to get more creative with systems, like the tabletop experience.
I haven’t noticed it getting worse, and I think Valve is doing the best thing they can to mitigate it by way of recent reviews and the review graph. When you can see when a review bomb started, you can cross reference that date against news for that game in your favorite search engine. If the review bomb is truly frivolous, it will pass in no time at all.
I never encountered her in my playthroughs of 1 and 2, so I couldn’t say. The guy I spoilered was fine, and I’d say Larian showed a ton of reverence for those original games throughout. The entire format of the game is one BioWare made famous via Baldur’s Gate II, after all.
EDIT: Also, I know they motion captured everyone for BG3, and when some of these guys are getting older, maybe it was less about PR and more about who they believed they could get into mocap gear.
No, I get that. But likewise, Denuvo doesn’t have access to a second Earth either, and their pitch meeting will never include data of customers you’ve convinced not to buy the game due to the presence of their product. At some point, I don’t think those pirated copies are moving the needle, and that it’s just a cost of doing business like some units of physical goods breaking during shipping. The games that are most pirated are the ones that also sell the best. The anti-piracy case for the consumer is made pretty well these days by being downloaded faster, getting bug fix patches instantly, and keeping cloud saves.
Yeah, it’s a pretty easy conclusion to come to from the outside looking in, but BG3 can launch on GOG day and date, and KC:D2 can communicate the GOG release ahead of time and still sell multiple millions of copies, so…it’s a practice I’d like to see change regardless.
If anything, purely anecdotally with no data-based analysis, it looks as though GOG is getting more new releases than it used to. So I think as long as we show that DRM-free matters to us by buying there first, the situation will continue to improve.
Yeah, I’ve had this experience, too. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II communicated ahead of launch that the GOG release would come only a few months later (I did get the sense this was a publisher decision). Great! I can wait a few months. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 made no such mention, and despite waiting several months to see how it would shake out, I bought it in the summer, and the GOG version came out right after I finished it. The developer behind Knights in Tight Spaces, when asked directly, said they were only focusing on the Steam release. Likewise, the GOG version came out shortly after I finished the game. From here on out, of the games on my radar, I’m playing the ones on GOG first, and maybe the other ones will get GOG releases in the meantime.
Worth noting that the remastered versions have no multiplayer. There’s no bringing back multiplayer for Crysis 2 and 3, but the original Cryis Warhead is still available on GOG, where you can play old-school Crysis Wars multiplayer via LAN.
I don’t have to troubleshoot anything most of the time, and I’ve bought dozens of games through GOG of late, for what it’s worth. And in the case of The Alters, the Steam version has many of the same problems. Just letting you know it’s an option, anyway. You can even route some of your GOG purchase to go toward development of Heroic by buying through the Heroic client, so that it makes sure it only gets better and so that GOG knows how much of their revenue they’re giving up to people who want this sort of functionality.