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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
I largely agree, but there is one thing to consider: the amount of money and time they were given for this game is incredibly unusual. Three years of early access is also very unusual for AAA-level games, that’s mostly relegated to over ambitious indies with inflated budgets. It’s also rare to see that kind of budget with so much autonomy and trust.
We need to remember that some developers simply do not have the same resources and time as others. BG3 has set a whole new bar and matching that with the current industry will be difficult. Who we really need to put pressure on is publishers who are rushing them to market and damning the consequences. They are by and large responsible for this mess and they control the vast majority of the money flowing into games.
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
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’m a game developer. No game developers are panicking about this game. I’ve not played it but I’ll probably play it soon. It looks great but even if it blows my mind it doesn’t cause me to panic. It inspires me. I don’t know of a game developer that gets panicked at the sight of good games. I know monetary goblins that might realize they can’t push heartless games anymore but in the last decade we’ve started to see games really take shape as cinematic masterpieces. Experiences that truly top movies. This is the inevitable next step. Games with more interactions and more meaningful choice out of those interactions.
Man, parts of Death Stranding were so interesting they should have won movie awards. Brilliant supporting character/mocapped actors. Couldn’t agree more on that front.
I also question how much that bar has truly been raised. I’ve not played Baldur’s Gate but I have seen people treat games like generation-defining games for them to just kind of not exist outside of their bubble. Like Uncharted 4, Last of Us, Spiderman, and God Of War. I just finished Uncharted 4 and it was truly amazing but for a lot of people, it did not raise their standards for the entire industry. I feel like, if anything, Baldur’s Gate 3 will raise standards for AAA RPGs. Then again, it might have just preemptively killed Starfield.
See, that’s what I am talking about. Mass Effect 1 didn’t have a huge impact on the industry as a whole. Doom only had a huge impact on the industry because it was very small and they started licensing out their engine with groundbreaking tech. The industry is huge now.
I remember a lot of people were saying Half-Life: Alyx was a huge industry changer and that it would prove that games are far more enjoyable in VR. It is the best-reviewed VR game on Steam. Yet, now, VR is essentially dead.
I remember when people were saying PUBG just changed the entire industry and we’d never look at it the same again. Which honestly, PUBG did have a large but temporary impact on the games industry. A lot of battle royals came out after. Now though, you’d be lucky to find a successful battle royal release in the last 2 years.
I’ll certainly play it when I can but a 20+ hour game commitment is not what I am honestly looking for anymore. I like far shorter experiences. So overall, it feels like counting the chickens before they hatch. Is Baldur’s Gate 3 really going to stay in people’s minds? Is it going to influence the next games that come out? Are AAA studios building more classic isometric-inspired RPGs because of it?
Doom did have a significant impact on the industry but only because the industry was small. Doom 2016 was released and people said it was “industry” changing but realistically counter-strike, valorant, and other FPSs are the same as before. I am just cautious between the whole industry changing and realistically only transforming a small subset.
True industry-changing games can be felt today. I will say that Doom is industry changing but again because it was so small. Half-Life 2, was that industry changing? Frankly, between Half-Life and Half-Life 2, the first feels far more influential to me. I’d say Doom’s offshoots are more influential than actual Doom at this point. Minecraft feels industry changing and was around that time indie game development got huge. In part, because of Minecraft’s success. Mass Effect though? I remember it being called a fine RPG with terrible combat mechanics. I think people far remember more about Mass Effect 2 and 3 rather than Mass Effect in 2007. Your article was written in 2021 and the only other one I found was written in 2012 and talked about Mass Effect 3’s ending and how it changed the industry because Bioware listened to fans and caved to change it.
Actually, let me put it this way. An industry-influential game is a game that any game developer should absolutely play even if they are making a console or PC game or mobile game. It doesn’t truly exist anymore but even if you cut off the mobile game developers and stick t just console or PC, BG3 is probably not industry-influential because someone making Slime Rancher or Survival Crafting games doesn’t really need to have knowledge from BG3. BG3 will probably influence RPG games and probably solely RPG games. That’s a subset of games that a lot of developers do not need to worry about. I do not need to go rush out and play BG3 in order to build any game.
I’m literally not disagreeing that Doom was industry-changing. I said it multiple times. You seem to be just reaching through any hole to continue to argue about something we both agree on.
Doom only had a huge impact on the industry because it was very small and they started licensing out their engine with groundbreaking tech. The industry is huge now.
So I said 1) doom had a huge impact on the industry because it, (the industry) was small and they started licensing out their engine. Now that the industry is bigger it’s not really a good comparison to any game.
You then said:
Let’s say that didn’t have a big impact though, to say Doom didn’t? I don’t even know where to begin. Doom + Quake basically shaped the next 20 years of FPS’s with goldeneye being one of the other major iterators on how MP was handled.
I literally said the opposite and said Doom had a huge impact on the industry.
So I made that clear:
I will say that Doom is industry changing but again because it was so small. […] I’d say Doom’s offshoots are more influential than actual Doom at this point.
This is absolutely true and you agreed by saying:
You would not have doom off-shoots without doom. You’re really reaching here to disagree with me over something that is pretty much consensus. 
We agree Doom was industry-changing, but Doom is currently not as directly influential to the industry today. We both agree and you state that’s somehow a point of disagreement.
So I fail to see why you are pulling at this small nitpick part that we both agree on when I’ve made a slew of points in the comments above that you ignored. If you want to engage, try to do so in terms of having a conversation rather than just trying to point out something you feel is wrong. Take into context the things I’ve said, don’t just focus on one little thing you think you disagree with. If you actually disagree with what I said, please be clear in how you think I’ve said something because it might just be a point of clarity rather than actual disagreement.
When you said we wouldn’t have the games that influence the industry today. The argument only works as a point if you don’t think the argument that doom directly influences the industry today. Otherwise you would have argued that which is a stronger point.
Not even close. I’m playing it right now, well into act 2, and while it is THE ultimate example of what a cRPG should be, that doesn’t necessarily mean the breadth and scope would work in other genres. You’re WAY overestimating the impact this is having on the gaming industry, and that’s evidenced by how other developers are responding to it.
Also. I’ve played through all the Mass Effects (even Andromeda, which I actually enjoyed more) and to say that it was industry-defining is a fanboy take. Full stop. From where I’m sitting ME1 did not introduce anything groundbreaking that hadn’t been done already by that point, and to be honest the early Fallout games had way more gravity when it came to choices and decision-making. I’d say of games in that era, the original Borderlands was more ground-breaking given it kind of kickstarted the looter-shooter genre, and that’s a stretch.
You are free to disagree, but to hand wave me away as having “fan boy takes” is pretty rude and does not make me want to engage further. Thanks and have a great weekend. 
Then again, it might have just preemptively killed Starfield.
They're pretty different games. They're both RPGs, and there's some overlap, but turn based is ultimately very different gameplay than action, and one isn't going to scratch the itch for the other to a lot of us.
Yeah, honestly, I doubt BG3 is going to cover the same ground for a lot of players. I don’t think people are going to play BG3 and expect more from Starfield. People will understand that they are far different games and BG3’s influence is probably going to stay in turn-based CRPGs rather than being an industry-wide influential game.
I'm fully expecting to go pretty hard at both, and BG3 might have me engaged enough to not jump straight into Starfield at launch, but I need immersive 3D games, too, and except Elden Ring which is it's own thing (even if it does pretty comfortably check the boxes of ARPG), I've been waiting for something of comparable scope to Skyrim that doesn't have a fatal flaw for a long time. Even as old and janky as it is now, it's still a scale that's only matched by a handful of games in the decade since.
The beauty of Bethesda’s flagship titles (namely Fallout and TES) is even if they end up as buggy messes upon release, or have empty maps, the modding community corrects those flaws relatively quickly.
It’s one of the reasons that I, a long-time veteran of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., am not worried if GSC Game World fucks up S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2. Today, the best part of the first titles is the mods that fix, improve, and add content to the games. It’ll be the same with this one, and I’m excited to see what people do with A-Life 2.0.
I sware that’s happened with all big games of late, Elden Ring, TotK, etc. A few Devs decide to be contraian to the praise and then the media decides it a huge backlash.
Absolutely what I noticed too. The tweets didn’t seem like they were even “panicking” but just saying to players “Don’t expect this because most studios aren’t going to devote the same resources and ability to the party-based classic isometric-inspired RPG genre because the genre is fairly niche.”
Real talk. I don’t game on console anymore, but Metal Gear Solid is the crowning jewel of console game plots.
Ever tried explaining the series to someone unfamiliar with it? You end up sounding like a fuckin meth head coming off a binge, and to me that makes it a narrative worth diving in to.
Sure but I am talking about games as a whole. You see more cinematography today in most games than you saw in MGS 1998. In fact, MGS 1998 has cutscenes and it has gameplay. Games today are removing that divide. Your gameplay is in your cutscene. In MGS1 you’d hit a video and walk away for 10 minutes while listening to it and it’d be fine. Today you hit a cut scene and you stay because you’ll have to shoot someone as the conversation breaks down or the building collapses and you have to jump out.
That’s what I am talking about when I say cinematic masterpieces. They don’t have jarring cuts between a cutscene and gameplay and they feel like cinematic moments while you are never taken out of the gameplay. Eventually, we’ll get to the point where you could show a game in a theater and people wouldn’t know the difference.
I think by "some developers", they're referring more toward the AAA studios who have spent the last couple decades baking MTX into every nook and cranny they can find in their games, and not indie devs.
There are even great AAA studios out there that aren’t pushing mtx. I just played uncharted 4 and I can’t believe that is almost a decade old. It still holds up. Far better than Rockstar’s red dead redemption 2. That said there is room in the industry for everyone. The indie team that takes 6 years to make high quality games to the AAA studio pushing games out every 2 years. Including small indie studios of 5 people making huge hit survival games and indie games that were made in 9 months but have a lot of heart.
Quality is subjective and I think we’ll start to see our genres break down as people go towards more and more specific definitions. We’ve already seen this a bit with the fps reverting back to doomlike with games like prodeus.
Even so they won’t be panicking. They can just pull a trusty piece of IP out and slap some microtransactions on it and the core target group will be all over it.
Honestly, nowadays it feels more like an indie studio is more of an indicator of quality than AAA. Most of the games I buy and enjoy are indie/small studios.
Honestly, nowadays it feels more like an indie studio is more of an indicator of quality than AAA. Most of the games I buy and enjoy are indie/small studios.
Larian is about as indie/small as Bethesda was when Skyrim released.
AAA games are very rarely as innovative as indie games, it’s all just the same rehashed stuff I feel like. Just whatever is “safe”.
So, I very much agree, the typical AAA stuff from studios like EA, Ubisoft, etc. Don’t interest me.
Although maybe Starfield will be interesting, we’ll see. I didn’t really like Fallout 4 though, I wished the RPGs were a bit more like the more old school ones lol.
I’m willing to be surprised by it, but I’m not optimistic for Starfield. What I’ve seen of it so far looks mainly like they grafted chunks of No Man’s Sky onto a Bethesda Fallout game and are trying hard to pitch it as The Next Big Thing. Frankly, I’d much rather have the next mainline Elder Scrolls game instead, but at this rate I’m going to be 40 before I get to play a sequel to a game that came out in my 20s.
About $500 of the ~$600 million they’ve raised is mine, dating from the original crowdfunding campaigns and the first year or two of development. I still check in every year or two to see if they’re any closer to having a complete game, and every time I do, I come away with the sense that they’ve put vastly more effort into developing and selling spaceship JPEGs than they have into making the game those spaceships are supposed to be used in.
Whenever I play I just assume there’s a reason no one else has tried to make star citizen before. Though they def have a problem with management and scope creep though
I saw a tier list meme that some teenager made on Discord of every game they’d ever played. You know what didn’t appear once on the list? Not a single Grand Theft Auto game nor a single Elder Scrolls game. I asked them why and they said because GTA5 and Skyrim are “old”
They’re taking so long between releases now that they missed an entire generation of gamers
Yeah, it can and should be a warning to studio heads, but as game consumers we absolutely should raise our expectations (and stop buying micro transaction crap). There are plenty of big studios with money who could buy the licence and spend years making the game, but those studios belong to the big publishers who optimise for profit not for game quality.
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.
Developers? Panicking? Developers will rejoice that they don’t have to build these garbage mechanics. Publishers and game studio execs? Yeah they’ll panic
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.
Battlefield 1 is still good. God it’s fun to play. Though they left balance kinda weird on the last update. I wish standard issue rifles were better than the theoretical automatics that most soldiers didn’t have, or the ones that were invented in the last week of the war.
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