But when a game like BG3 comes out, with all the stuff no indie studio can afford to do and it has this level of passion without sticking its hand in your pocket, it absolutely reminds us that AAA doesn’t have to be like it is.
As good as indie RPGs are, Disco Elysium was only able to afford voice acting after being a giant commercial success. No small budget team is going to be able to have mocap work on the level of BG3. These things cost a lot of money and involve paying a lot of workers. BG3’s Kickstarter got to be carried by the name recognition of Baldur’s Gate and Dungeons & Dragons in general, following a huge popularity surge for the latter thanks to the rise of real-play podcasts and such.
Do games need hundreds of voice actors and incredible mocap to be good? No. But it’s something that only AAA studios have the ability to add, and it’s a shame that it’s all going into the next fifa/COD/whatever other money pit GAAS the industry is shitting out.
The standard argument here is that you’re not supposed to look in every container for loot. However yep everyone I’ve seen play this game including myself is an absolute loot goblin. What if this rotten fruit basket has a +2 greatsword or boots of elvenkind!
I think there’s a mod that adds a button you can click to “loot the room” - characters make perception rolls and “find” anything of value and put the items into their inventories. Haven’t tried it but might be your jam.
BG3 has plenty of bugs, some of them game breaking. Look at the litany of fixes they delivered in each patch. It’s not about that. It’s about releasing a game that isn’t a “service”, and just a purely high quality game - tactical combat that works well, characters with good writing, a solid plot hook, a distinct graphical style, phenomenal voice acting and mocap (which matter more for this genre than they would in, say, a third person shooter).
I’ve been watching a friend play and absolutely noticed that the romance stuff is a lot slower. everyone wanted to jump my wizard bones about 18 hours in, though it’s very easy to just not flirt with them. Meanwhile she’s 28 hours in and Shadowheart (who was trying to get me in bed with her in the first 10 hours of my play through) still hasn’t propositioned her.
Subscriptions and those that use them are a worse deal for indie devs, and it only becomes an even worse deal as big name publishers put their new AAA games in the subscription and demand a proportionate slice of the pie.
My opinion / analysis of the situation is that it’s only going to get worse for non-AAA and non-backed indies as “$180 a year gets me aaaaallll thiiiiiis, why would I spend a whole month’s of gamepass on your one game” becomes more and more common.
Furthermore, there was never a world where Netflix stayed as “$15/mo for everything”. Other corps want their own Netflixes. So they pull their content and put out another subscription. There’s no world where MS Gamepass stays the only subscription-based game service in town, and when users are paying for three gamepasses, they’re even less likely to buy a cool game that’s lacking AAA polish for $10.
However, unlike movies and TV, no game has really become exclusive to Gamepass (some tried with Stadia, which thankfully died). There are shows that were exclusive to HBO Max that cannot be legally acquired anymore. Players that want some degree of ownership of their games can buy them on Steam/Epic, or if they want full ownership of their games they can buy them DRM-Free like on GOG. Those guys can keep on doing that through the rise of the “wow it’s genuinely a good deal” gamepass, the “more corporations want their own gamepass” phase, the “prices go up and quality goes down now that we’ve got an audience” phase, and the “service is going away forever” phase.
It’s game buyers that’ll keep indie games alive. Subscription models are a poisoned treat that benefit indie games right now but are already shifting to be a huge blow to the indie game scene.
The win comes later once gamepass gets netflix’d. It’ll only go on like this for so long before there’s UbiPass and EAccess and Sony Prime and so on and so forth. Then a few years after that, when the services finally get pushed back against and die, everyone who just kept buying games on steam/gog/itch/whatever (or pirating) just keeps on not paying sub fees. Like nothing ever happened.
If you pick up container items like satchels and backpacks, you can use them as nesting storage in your inventory (perfect for all the letters and notes you pick up for example). But you can’t name the container, it’s just “pouch”
You don’t need a switch (hacked or otherwise) to use yuzu. The “dump the keys from your own console” stuff is cover-your-ass doctrine, the keys are easily available online