“We believe RPGs are big … So we always believed the audience was there,” says Adam Smith
The first game in ages where it actually feels like the company/ developers actually put in effort and released a complete product. It’s not that hard to understood why consumers are flocking to it. People are just fed up with the garbage EA and ubisoft have been putting out. Honestly, I’d be fine with ubisoft dissolving and going out of business.
It’s the same as when Elden Ring dropped. Even people who never played Souls games prior were picking it up because it was just a complete, solid open world RPG.
I’ve never played Baldur’s Gate before, but I’m probably gonna pick 3 up to play with my roommate in splitscreen.
The first game in ages where it actually feels like the company/ developers actually put in effort and released a complete product
I miss the time when this was common
The first game in ages where it actually feels like the company/ developers actually put in effort and released a complete product
Ironically the only people who say this about BG3 have not reached the third act yet. Still my favourite game in years, but the later stages of the game really could have done with more playtesting. there are bugged quests, disappearing characters, people ignoring story events in dialogue, missing cutscenes and multiple outcomes for storylines happening at the same time.
I just started Act 3, and yeah, there are some bugs with the dialogue, like Gale chewing me out for making a decision in a quest I hadn’t even started yet (I was very confused when he started chewing out my character for making a deal with a devil, a deal I had not even gotten offered because I hadn’t started that quest line, and I was like, “Wait, what?”) With luck, the next patch will fix stuff like this.
For some reason, my game really likes bugging out with Gale dialogue, like Gale acting like we were in a relationship when I had just turned him down flat. He now is benched and doesn’t get to come out anymore.
I think I know exactly which dialogue bug you are referring to. Happened to me as well, although after I turned down the deal. The second part might just be Gale being Gale
This. No matter how talented the game devs are, it feels like the suits do everything they can to squeeze every last drop out of the game. And the game feels incomplete because they often take things out of the game so that you have to pay to get it back in.
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He focuses on the visual aspects of the game, which are indeed wonderful and contribute a lot to immersion, but to me, a host of other elements contribute at least as much to making this game stand above the rest. The writing, acting, world richness, player agency, variety of story possibilities, battle mechanics, and sound design, for example. There’s so much to love that even with all the bugs, it’s still a lot fun.
I think I agree with him. It’s not just that it looks good and that it’s cinematic; it’s that it brings what they were doing well already to that cinematic standard that we got from the big studios for years. But those big studios were frequently sacrificing the depth of the RPG in the process. Mass Effect 1 had a full character sheet and a bunch of mechanics that never really came together. Mass Effect 2 had fairly simple skill trees. That series was good for lots of reasons, but in order to make each sequel in only 2 years, they threw away what didn’t work rather than iterating on it to fix what didn’t work. BG3 is iterating on Larian’s previous successes and still letting us get that cinematic experience from Mass Effect. It’s definitely what caught my attention when it was previously barely on my radar.
I think live play podcasts and shows might help also. I’m a big live play DND/ttrpg listener despite having never played in person with people. I bought it pretty much instantly and I’m loving how much it feels like those podcasts.
I know CRPGs based on ttrpg mechanics still hit with people back in the 90s and early 00s but I’m guessing it wasn’t the selling point. Like I’m pretty sure people didn’t buy Fallout back in 97 because it used a system that was similar to GURPS.
The Adventure Zone podcast by the McElroy brothers came out in like 2014 and the live play podcast genre skyrocketed since. Pretty much every podcast network has at least a few DND shows plus a few more using other unique systems. There’s even podcasts parodying live play like Offices and Bosses, an improv comedy where they play fantasy monsters playing DND with human characters. Theres no way people would have come up with that format before the adventure zone.
Yeah DnD is going through a resurgence in pop culture right now. It’s not just for sweaty nerds in their mom’s basements anymore
To this day, I really wish BioWare had iterated on their mechanics in Mass Effect instead of trying to make it more of a shooter in RPG clothing. I liked how certain classes could only wear certain armor or use certain weapon types, and how you had more choice in how your Shepard was built.
To be fair, audiovisual and name recognition is huge. People talk about the game as if nothing like it has ever existed. DOS 1/2, Kingmaker/WotR, PoE I/II, and many more are similar games, also varying levels of amazing, but without large cinematic budgets and mo cap and extensive voice acting and DND name recognition, they don’t even get mentioned in most comparison articles which always just go to DragonAge.
So I bought the game a while ago, but haven’t really been playing it (I need to get into the right headspace). However, I’ve come to realise something.
This is the first game I’ve bought for over £40 in a while where I haven’t felt scammed or that I’m complicit in something immoral. I feel like they “deserve” the money, which is a strange feeling considering the AAA industry right now.
The game doesn’t even include DRM, not even the “free” one you can enable through steam.
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I know the feeling. It is the first time I have spent more than 30€ on a game and not regretted it.
Just the split screen coop alone is done better than any other game I’ve played, among games that still have the feature.
Could you expand on this? We just pre-ordered a copy for this reason- to play co-op.
In my experience it’s like 2 players have full agency to play independently, unlike other coop games where the experience for player two is often driven by player one.
In BG3 you can run off in completely different directions, engage with your own NPCs in conversation while the other player starts a fight and it’s seamless
I’ve played both divinity games in co-op with my partner. You have an entire (quasi) open world game fully explorable by both players independently. At one point in the main town in DOS1, I was running around tracking clues for a mystery while my partner (a rogue) was stealing everything she could get her hands on from the market. Once I reached the climax of the mystery quest, we joined back up for the final battle.
This freedom engenders a lot of creative flexibility and is just overall a chill way to play a game together. I agree that it makes for the best co-op experience I’ve ever played (especially when you’re playing with an otherwise non-gamer).
And for that reason I’ve also pre-ordered BG3 😀.
It was because you could fuck the bear.
Spoilers suck.
I honestly don’t intend to be rude, so please don’t take this the wrong way. But this is a very minor detail that was featured in prelaunch marketing and went heavily viral. I understand not wanting to encounter spoilers about important events in a game, but this is not that.
I’ve had people on here yell “spoilers!” over a thing you literally find out in a character background video in the character creator before the game starts. It’s wild.
I stand by my feeling that if someone is that sensitive about what they think is a “spoiler,” then they’ve really got to not click on anything related to the game, especially comment sections, where people talk about playing the game. It’s on them at that point, because most folks don’t define “spoilers” that broadly.
IMO some people are way too sensitive about spoilers. Why should the entire world have to cater to their desire to not hear about a game? Taken to its extreme it means nobody ever gets to make casual covnersation about a video game. I always wonder whether most people actually care about this or it is just an extremely loud and angry minority. I only have two friends who care about spoilers.
It’s completely acceptable to not want to hear about major plot points when a game has only been out a month or so, but folks getting mad about stuff that was in promo materials and you can learn before you even start the game proper have really got to recalibrate.
I want to play FF16 but can’t until it comes out on PC, in a good year or two. So am I on game forums or posts about FF16? Nope. I even avoid twitter threads (or did when I was still used twitter), after clicking on one and finding out about a character death randomly, that everyone there knew about because they were playing the game and assumed everyone reading it was, too.
If you’re going to a place where people are talking about a game, you had best be prepared to be spoiled. If you’re not, stay off them until you’ve played the game. You can’t police people talking about minor or funny events in a game they figure other people know about, just because you haven’t played it yet.
I had it spoiled for me as well when the game launched. I didn’t consume any of the promotional material and didn’t see anything about it across my algorithm so fuck me right?
I don’t really care that it was spoiled, like you said it’s not integral. I do care about the flippant attitude that just because 100 other people knew about it already, that means you should too. Real “crabs in a bucket mentality”.
Yeah. It baffles me that some people prefer to make excuses for being inconsiderate, and even suggest that anyone who doesn’t like it leave, rather than simply add a spoiler tag.
this is a very minor detail that was featured in prelaunch marketing and went heavily viral
It is a mistake to assume just because you have encountered something that everyone else has as well. Not everyone follows viral media. Some of us actively avoid it.
And yes, this was indeed a spoiler for me. I would rather it had been a surprise in-game.
It’s totally fair game to discuss what is in official promotional material from months ago in a diacussion thread about the game.
It’s also fair to try to avoid spoilers about the game, but if you are so spoiler averse that you don’t even want to know what was in the games advertisements, you should avoid all discussion threads about the game.
We as a community should hold ourselves to a higher spoiler standard than the marketing teams.
While I know that sounds like a reach at first, consider other media. Movie trailers tend to give a lot away, but that isn’t within the control of the directors. It’s done by the studios who are trying to generate as many eyeballs and clicks. Not deliver a complete narrative experince.
I have had the bear bit spoiled for me as well, would have rather seen it blind in game. But oh well, however I don’t think that should preclude folk from discussing reviews, mocap and how unusual of a production cycle this game has had. Discussing the game itself doesn’t require specfic story points. Much like discussing the Barbie movie set production require details on plot.
Knowing you can fuck the bear isn’t the same as knowing what it is like to fuck the bear. I’m glad I know fucking the bear is possible, because now I can go fuck it.
I’ve missed the launch week so I’m going to wait for sales on this one. Steam sales have conditioned me to avoid buying games that are not brand new at full price.
I have no ragrets paying full price for this one. And I don’t get why missing the launch week means you have to wait for sales.
Because the hype of buying brand new games is what makes me overlook all the great games I need to play in my massive library.
looks at steam library
Yup, this last month-ish has been wild for my backlog. Remnant 2, BG3 (Which I honestly expected to bounce off of), AC, Starfield next week.
Honestly I’m just skipping Armored Core until I can give it some actual time.
