While Baldur's Gate 3 is being widely celebrated by fans and developers alike, some are panicking that this could set new expectations from fans. Good.
What’s the Enthusiasm About?
Hello there! Are you familiar with Go High Level? If not, let's break it down. Imagine managing multiple apps for marketing. Sounds busy. That's where Go High Level comes in. It's like that friend who has a solution for everything. Whether you are working on creating an outstanding sales funnel or sending out an email campaign, this platform has your back. The best part? They let you test drive everything with a 14-day free trial. It's like trying out a new car but for your business. And if you ever need assistance, their support team is just a click away. Pretty exciting, huh?
So, How Much Does It Cost?
Alright, let's talk about the financial side. Go High Level offers 3 main plans. The Agency Starter Plan is perfect if you're just starting or have a small business. It's loaded with all the essential tools, and it's quite cost-effective. But if you're looking to scale up, the Agency Unlimited Plan is your best choice. It's like the VIP pass at a concert, giving you access to everything without any limitations. Not sure about committing? Remember that 14-day free trial I mentioned? It's a great way to give it a try without any obligations. Lastly, they offer a Pro plan that includes "SaaS mode," where you can white label the product under your brand. Fantastic!
Why Everyone's Raving About It:
In a world full of sophisticated digital tools, Go High Level is like that all-in-one Swiss Army knife. There's no need to switch between apps because it has everything under one roof. Whether you're a newcomer or an experienced marketer, it's super user-friendly. It's not just about launching impressive campaigns; they ensure you understand their performance with top-notch analytics. There's even a white-label feature for marketing agencies, so you can add your brand and impress your clients.
The expectations have been set for a long time. BG3 isn’t the first good game. It’s just the first in a while, after mountains of AAA garbage ultimately driven by shareholders and MBAs.
The sad thing is: those people are so clueless that they dont see they’d make more money by just not getting in the way of a good dev team.
The problem with your second statement is that it is patently untrue.
That is why rocketed has been milking GTA microtransactions. The GachaGaming reddit tracks a series of microtransaction-heavy mobile games. They make hundreds of millions (as much as an entire AAA very hyped game release) quarterly through microtransactions.
Companies have come out and said that microtransactions are more profitable than making new games which is why they are shoehorned into every damn piece of game possible by AAA studios.
I hate microtransactions and I wish it wasn’t the case, but stupid kids with daddy’s credit card and stupid gamers and whales make bad games with microtransactions very profitable.
The most significant change I noticed was you can cast any number of leveled spells per turn. That’s a pretty significant shift from 5e’s rule of only one leveled spell (excluding using action surge if you dip into fighter) per turn.
However it makes the player stronger so I doubt anyone is really complaining about it.
I’ve been playing BG3 and perhaps I’m misunderstanding but you only have one action and one bonus action per turn and you only have so many spell slots per caster. Unless you have a leveled spell as an action and a separate leveled spell as a bonus action and enough spell slots for both you’d be hard pressed to cast more than a single spell per turn per character
It’s been a while since I played 5e, but if I remember correctly you could do some fuckery with Haste and/or Sorcery Points if you don’t follow that rule.
Plenty of spells cast as a bonus action. With a cleric I can cast Spirt Guardians and Spiritual Weapon on the same turn. Or polymorph and mass cure wounds. It makes a significant difference for bonus action spells.
It’s faithful enough to 5e that my partner and I broke out the players handbook to do some long term class planning together. A couple of things are different, like buffs to frenzy barbarian and changes to roleplay feats or spells to have a more mechanical benefit.
But yes, as a long term DM for 5e, it’s faithful to 5e.
Larian has been absolutely phenomenal through their process on both of these. Kept with the ‘it’ll release when it’s ready’ model, the exception with the alpha/early release on BG3 which I would say helped improve the quality of the Release product that much more, through testing/reports and cash influx without the ‘pre-order today, get whatever you get tomorrow’ mantra.
Developers? Panicking? Developers will rejoice that they don’t have to build these garbage mechanics. Publishers and game studio execs? Yeah they’ll panic
They would have to also start charging to save scum. Why would I pay $5 for a crit when I can just reload my save and try until I get one? Every new save is $0.50 and every reload is also $0.50.
Click baiting video. Other devs don’t care. As long as they can make money pumping out mediocre games then they will continue to do so. Acting like this is the first good game to come out in a decade or something.
The managers who make the decisions don’t. Doesn’t matter if they are a publisher or the development company itself. It’s a bit blurry these days anyway, what with how easy it is to self publish and how many publishers have their own internal development studios.
The managers who make the decisions is also unclear as power differs on the company. They could care all the way up to the CEO but if the CEO puts an unrealistic deadline, the game has an unrealistic deadline
Looking at how many games have stood in Dragon Age: Origins’ shadow over the past decade, I get the sense that lots of studios wanted to create the true spiritual successor but couldn’t come up with the resources to do so.
Sorry, but the other methods are demonstrably better at it. We didn't arrive at them by accident. There are outliers like Civilization keeping people hooked for years; the people still playing Skullgirls all these years later sure aren't doing it for any type of reward system. But the fast track to keeping people playing your game is to use all the scummy bullshit.
I wonder why they haven’t tried the model airport books and comics use, though. We could do it with games at this point. Like, make a series of games that are low budget, relatively short, and easy to pump out very quickly, but with a distinct series identity and maybe a consistent writer/artist across games. Then make a lot of them and get people hooked on the series instead of on 1 mega game.
Even just text adventure style games, wireframe arcade style games, bullethells, shooters like Vampire Survivor & etc, visual novels, syuff like Undertale, whatever? I think it’s clear that a low budget or small team doesn’t equate to unpopularity these days, if the game is made with care and attention to detail.
We do have series now but they’re high budget and long and kind of also trying to be the 1 mega game at the same time.
There’s also a lot of options for reaching new/underserved audience. Like. Make a high quality horse game for once, please? And profit off a bazillion horse girls who’ve been waiting for just that for decades.
Or make games for other countries that don’t have a big video games market yet, maybe. Like sell a console real cheap, at a loss, and then sell games in an area where there’s less competition? Maybe.
a series of games that are low budget, relatively short, and easy to pump out very quickly, but with a distinct series identity and maybe a consistent writer/artist across games
I wonder why they haven’t tried the model airport books and comics use, though. We could do it with games at this point. Like, make a series of games that are low budget, relatively short, and easy to pump out very quickly, but with a distinct series identity and maybe a consistent writer/artist across games. Then make a lot of them and get people hooked on the series instead of on 1 mega game.
I think that's exactly what Fortnite and Destiny 2 do, even though I object to the way they do it for so many reasons.
Like, make a series of games that are low budget, relatively short, and easy to pump out very quickly, but with a distinct series identity and maybe a consistent writer/artist across games. Then make a lot of them and get people hooked on the series instead of on 1 mega game.
Urban Games currently does this with Transport Fever. They flat out said while hyping the release of Transport Fever 2 (which was their third transport tycoon style game) that their goal as a development studio is to make the best transportation tycoon game they can. So they intend to continuously iterate.
N3V Games, who developes the Trainz simulator game was literally formed to buy up the property and talent from its original developer Auran and continue the franchise
There’s a third example I was going to give but got distracted while writing this comment and forgot
One example might be Fnaf (before security breach or help wanted), since they are relatively simple, short games made by one guy, not on high budget. Most of them launched like 3-6 months after each other, keeping up interest in the series.
Something big aaa games also miss is the creativity, since a cool gimick can be implemented as a main mechanic in a 1-2 hour game, since it doesnt over stay its welcome.
So yeah, most games are getting too long for their own good (like ubi sandbox games), not to mention the ‘games as a service’ games.
As much as I prefer this model that actually isn’t what creates engagement and retains players over several games and years. They don’t do it because it’s fun to make predatory things. They do it because it makes them heaps of money. If it didn’t work, they wouldn’t do it. That’s the sad truth here.
Re: hats and paint jobs…hats dominated TF2 for how long? There was a black market and widespread scamming for cosmetics, that’s how nuts it got.
EA is an immensely useful tool for game devs, the issue is EA as an excuse to ship unpolished games or to leave games unfinished forever. Neither of which are problems intrinsic to early access, they’re just bad business practice that should be shunned like any other
As a gamedev: Early Access was useful for devs, back when it was real Early Access. Think: Kerbal Space Program (the first, not the second).
Nowadays it’s mostly a marketing tool, that allows to generate the hype for launch twice… Publishers and players expect “Early Access” games to be feature complete and polished before the “Early Access” launch…
I liked what Daemon X Machina did, where they released a demo, sent out questionnaires to everyone who downloaded it, published a video about the results save how they were planning to act on it, and a few months later released a new demo with a new questionnaire.
Ubisoft did (does?) it to a degree with their Rainbow 6 TTS (beta) servers to test the sandbox and did so for a few technical alpha/beta releases acting as selected pewviews to see how the game is received and where bugs are.
Yep, that’s probably the most helpful thing for devs. This sadly often conflicts with publishers’ announcement schedules. There are, however, companies that do NDA-protected play-tests, where you get the same kind of information, without publicly announcing the game.
Early access worked well for them, part of the start of the game was able to be play tested, the community got to give feedback, and they actually listened, its how it should be done
Yeah but not how the remaining whole industry treats it.
I saw literally no outcry regarding BG3 and early game bugs. Comparing it to CP2077 it was a stellar release in terms of PR.
For what it’s worth, I thought it’d be horrible from the reviews and ended up trying it anyway, and I actually really enjoyed it. shrug Rather feels like I played a different game than everyone else.
I’m sure it’s partly the difference between starting with rock bottom expectations vs starting with Prey/Dishonored expectations, but I think even without that I’d like it.
Also, it has no micro transactions! Zero. Not even for cosmetics - those are just unlockables. Credit where credit is due.
Anyway if you liked the look of the trailer and you have gamepass, it’s worth at least trying, imo.
Wasn’t the whole thing with Redfall that it was Bethesda mismanagement? I’m not going to put that on the Redfall team. Does make me completely disinterested in buying any Bethesda games that aren’t mainline TES though.
What worries me is that one of the leakers who was leaking shit about Redfall prior to release who was 100% correct about everything, also said he saw Starfield and it was in worse shape than Redfall was. It’s obviously coming out later, but not that much later.
That’s upsetting. I was never going to play Starfield, but I want games coming out to be good. We don’t need another dumpster fire like the CP2077 launch was.
While true, the state of Redfall was far worse than the expectation for a mainline Bethesda RPG (comparatively), even as bad as they have been in the past. So saying Starfield was in worse shape still has some hefty weight to it, if the leak is true. It will have at least had more time in the oven for things to be fixed up a bit more in line with normal expectations. And that’s my hope.
Add comment