Baldur's Gate 3 is Fixing the Games Industry - Inside Gamescast
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- Опубліковано 14 сер 2023
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A CRPG dominating the charts. A game dev company actually delivering a finished game without microtransactions. Lawrence and Bruce uploading an hour-long video.
Nature is healing.
Don't be like that. It leada down a dark road.
Funny thing is it isn't even finished... The whole act 3 is a massive letdown.
@@ceno10101 what about mods? better yet, the community does it and it is free for players and you do not bring greed to the party
"Finished" is a strong word. I love it, but it's buggy. I can forgive that, because it's a fantastic experience nonetheless, but let's not be rosey-eyed.
@@HiIThinkImReal Agreed, and I'm a Larian "fanboy". This happened in DoS2 as well where the final acts were very unpolished and buggy as hell, though to their credit they always patch them up tremendously and the games come out better than they started on the other side. I'm super excited for the BG3 Definitive edition.
They all have the budget. The difference is, instead of fat bonuses for bosses, they spent that money on voice actors.
The worst thing you can do is make excuses for these greedy AAA developers.
No cash shop, no micro transactions.
AAA developers are making excuses about budget and Larian have shut down every argument.
Pretty sure Sven paid himself fairly well. Not AAA studio CEO salaries but pretty sure he's well paid for his work.
The difference with Larian from a financial standpoint is that it's a private company. The CEO and his wife are the majority owners. This means no need to keep shareholders happy with the business's ongoing income stream from live service sales. They could run at a huge loss for years before reaping the profits in a very large way after 6 years of development, and the only people the CEO had to convince were his employees and his wife.
And PLENTY of big studios with time and money spend 3, 5, 7 + years and having it flop on release. I was personally upset by KSP2 keeping our hopes up for so long, then delay another 3 years only to come out how it did. So you're right. Don't excuse their bad behaviour. This is what a game could look like with competent leadership that isn't designing the game to be a cash extractor first.
Facts
When people say "this is how you make an RPG" they're not comparing it to some small AA studio putting out buggy bespoke games. They're comparing it to Assassins Creed, Starfield, Horizon. AAA games from larger studios with bigger budgets that still come out as railroading piles of homoginate built explicitly to waste your time.
And the funny thing is that larian studios was just an AA studio when they started BG3... I can't even imagine how they were able to pull this off, they had no funding, they have to pay wotc for the D&D and baldur's gate branding and it was in development for 6 years... If an AA studio was able to pull it off, you would think it's peanuts for a company like blizzard, but apparently not
@@jervey123They had millions from the early access sales.
@@frank234561the highest concurrent player count in EA was like 15000 people when it first was released, they weren’t exactly raking in cash
Why are you implying that both Starfield and Horizon are ""railroading piles of homoginate""??
Starfield has not even come out yet, and Horizon is awesome. Wtf is wrong with you people...
Starfield is still going to sell more than BG3 and everyone's going to laugh at how buggy and unplayable it is because oh gosh, that Bethesda is just so quirky and incompetent tee hee.
Larian didn’t take any investment money. They took the profits from Divinity 1&2, reinvested it into BG3, and then they sold 2.5 million copies in the BG3 early access period. They didn’t have 400 employees over the whole 6 year development cycle. They expanded as time went on, but they started BG3 development with around 100 employees. I’d imagine they definitely recouped the investment by now.
I feel like the "everyone should do this" is an argument reserved for those devs and publishers that COULD take their time to make a banging work. When people write "why dont other devs do it like that" I read it as "why dont activison, ubisoft and EA allow their devs to do it like that"
If they are ALLOWED by their boss to take their time. They are not the one who control the funds.
@@nntflow7058Yes, that's the point.
Larian's early access is different from every other early access. Larian's early access, until full release keeps the majority of the game story locked behind the full release, including many aspects of Act 1.
Other games' early access ends up slowly morphing into a full release until it feels like the studio arbitrarily stamps their seal of approval and releases the 1.0 version.
Hades 😂
Nobody was asking indie devs to match what Larian did. We're questioning why companies WAAY bigger than Larian are making toilet trash. Overwatch 2, Redfall, Forspoken, Diablo 4 ( yes, im including this), all came out this year, developed by AAA studios. Why are they making garbage?
Because they are money driven. Not customer driven.
You can hate Amazon and Jeff Bezos but I can see the parallel in their model of being incredibly customer focused business models. They show if you take care of your customers first the money will flow.
Most of the big "AAA" publishers have their priorities bassackwards.
I’m pretty sure Swen was just good at managing the inflow they had with the Divinity games. Instead of giving himself massive paychecks, he actually invested in Larian’s future, and it payed off. Maybe because he owns the company? Maybe he’s not in a position to get millions of dollars whether he gets it through bonuses after a win or “golden parachutes” after he completely fails.
This is just based on my assumption but i think Larian studio made enough money/funds with their Divinity Original sins series. The first one was a sleeper hit but second one was massively popular. Not to mentioned that they later released both games on console after the PC success.
Whats funny is that Baldurs Gate III was announced so long ago, that they said it would ship on the Stadia LOL, also have to disagree with the "no one liked Witcher 3 when it came out" narrative, I quite literally built my own pc just to play witcher 3 in summer of 2015, I might be the minority but there are dozens of us!
What I would really love to see is if you have a situation where a huge studio like CD Projekt runs out of funds or gets pressure to push a game out, I would love to see them NOT just release the game and pretend like everything is fine to trick people into buying it. Instead, I would want them to just honestly tell us that the game isn’t ready, but they need more runs to finish it, so they are going to release it in early access, and anyone who wants to buy the game in its current state can help with its development and refinement.
This is honest, it will help finance the game, and it still gives a gesture of good faith to gamers because they will see all the work the dev team has done so far.
they didn't start off with 400 staff, they worked up to that number over time as they needed more people. They also nearly went bankrupt a few times.
Nobody wants every game to be like BG3, everyone wants the primary goal to be "making a good game", and not "making a profitable game" as the primary goal. Just try to make a good, feature complete game and trust that will generate profit.
Larian Released an opening weekend stats sheet and it inspired me to do some clown math like you guys
Here are some facts from Larian Studios:
Players spent a combined 88 years in character creation
nearly 10% of players spent at least 1 hour in character creation
the game sold around 2.5 million copies in early access
Using clown logic and these 3 facts we can guess how many copies the game has sold.
Some assumptions we'll be making:
100% of all early access sales will only contribute 5 minutes each to the total character creation time because early access players will be more familiar with the game and thus make their character faster.
for the remaining players 10% will have spent exactly 60 minutes to create their character and 90% will have spent 30 minutes to create their character.
every player will have only created one character.
each sale is a unique player.
Clown math begins:
88 years = 46,252,800 minutes (not accounting for leap years but that doesn't really matter because we are already deep in clown math territory going by our assumptions above).
2.5 million confirmed players spend 5 minutes each = 12,500,000 minutes
Remaining minutes = 46,252,800 - 12,500,000 = 33,752,800 minutes
10% of remaining players spent 60 minutes each = 0.1x * 60
90% of remaining players spent 30 minutes each = 0.9x * 30
clown equation: (0.1x * 60) + (0.9x * 30) = 33,752,800 where x is the number of copies sold after official launch
6x + 27x = 33,752,800
33x = 33,753,800
x = 33,753,800 / 33
x = 1,022,842 (rounded to the nearest integer) million copies sold after launch
total sales = 1,022,842 + 2,500,000 = 3,522,842 million
So there you have it. The game has sold 3.5 mil copies so far which is a completely accurate and correct guess🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡
For myself the thing I'm happiest about is that BG3 is offline, and put opposite the last AAA game I played, Diablo 4, that is such a nice relief. Noe wait times to play, no getting kicked off during a boss and having to google some obscure error code then have the game tell me my character doesn't have permission to play right now. And I can Flame Strike the ever living shit out of a wonderful variety of things.
the CEO of Larian said they'd expected about 100,000 concurrent players for launch weekend - so at 800,000 I'm pretty sure they've well exceed their break even
For me I wouldn't normally think an early access game should be eligible for goty because it's usually the whole game in early access. BG3 only had the 1st act in early access and when it fully launched it added 40 to 50 more hours of content and changed 35 to 40% of act 1. I think that is why people are "ignoring" the early access part because it didn't feel like a typical early access game.
Also, the Early Access game peaked at around 80,000 players. Most of the people playing the game and talking about their experiences didn't play EA.
I would fucking hate if the 'new' way to develop games was to release half of a product as "early access" then finish the game a few years later.
I'm not save scumming. I firmly believe that failure is part of the experience of this game.
This is 100% the way to play
I've never said a game has ruined other games for me, but looking at starfield after having played Baldur's Gate is definitely making me feel that way
I’m pretty good at accepting that some games are good at this and others are good at that, but BG3 is making me reevaluate some of my favorites…Every BioWare game is suffering from the comparisons.
Man, I'm just so happy you guys are still around and can just do your thing. Refreshing fun, inspiring!
The heartbreaker was Kerbal Space Program 2. Took an extra 3 year delay and still shit the bed. It's not all about time - it's about vision and leadership as well. And as many Fromsoft game show us, some passion from the top instead of only 'MAKE US ALL THE MONAY FIRST!" from the top.
AAA companies with double/triple/quadruple the amount of staff should be able to make games of this standard. Imagine if COD or Pokemon got 1/3 the effort BG3 did.
No clown math required! Larian announced BG3 had sold 2.5 million copies while in early access, so that's not counting 1.0 launch sales. To put that into perspective, the last big indie game I can think of that was in early access for years and didn't brake huge until it hit 1.0 was Hades...which took two years to break a million copies sold...and that's in a way more popular and newcomer friendly genre. That's pretty huge not just for a CRPG, but an indie CRPG and considering Divinity Original Sin 2 sold 7.5 Million copies so I could absolutely see BG3 hitting 10mil when it's all said and done.
i take issue with the witcher 3 being disliked at launch, i got it a few days after launch because there was so much buzz saying how good it was, by the time hearts of stone, the fist dlc launched it was a phenomenon
These games companies are making more money and charging more than ever before. We pay 70 to 100 dollars for games that literally don’t work at launch with little to no way to get refunds on consoles. Having early access to test your games out should be standard
the way I am playing BG3 is trying to pick all of the options that might break the story. surprisingly it allows you to do everything I could think of so far. nearly all of the neutral people in my game are either dead or really dislike me and it is the most fun I have had with a game in a while.
Oh yeah, even basic reactivity is insane. I saw someone kill astarion and then resurrect him before recruiting him and he had a comment for it, AND it even changed based on whether he saw you or not (i.e. you enter a combat with him and he knows it's you versus you sneak attack him and kill him). The game is wild in how it responds to what you do.
Approx 9 min in you were wondering what their break even is in sales is. According to an interview with the Larian CEO, they had hit their break-even on launch day.
On investment and funding, the original funding was from the very significant profits of Divinity Original Sin 2. They also used some of the EA sales. They apparently don't have external investors; it's a 100% private company.
70% owned by the CEO/founder and his wife, 30% outside investor. The business arm of Larian Studios is Larian Group Holdings Limited, their company structure is public knowledge but requires some digging.
Can we all just agree that yes, it is unrealistic for all games to have this much dev time AND still push for a higher standard of games without micro transactions trying to milk the player everywhere?
I really dislike how the whole discourse has been centered on the "unrealistic" expectations rather than what can be done better.
I know this is from 7 months ago, but the reason this worked out for them is that the main fans of Divinity 2 had faith in the studio and bought the early access. All were willing to wait for the final release. I think a lot of people were fine with early access only act 1 as a "trailer" for the main game. Maybe more studios should do this and give just a taste before its fully released. I know that's not possible for most studios but it works specifically in this case for this genre.
So BG3 got announced at the same time as Stadia and then Stadia died before launch. Anyone think maybe this was possible due to a Google cash injection that they never had to deliver on?
I dunno, Bruce. I think you should experience Planescape Torment. You're right, on a technical and gameplay comfort level it's not going to be as good. The story, world, conversations, writing, are absolutely fucking amazing!
I think we're seeing the next/current gen Crpg equivalent of the likes of Mass Effect, The Witcher 3, etc where there's a high level of quality in terms of player agency and the quality and quantity of what you get when you buy an rpg game.
Not sure if lawrence will see this before he gets to play it, but BG3 made me feel the same way DAO did. I skipped school for an entire day to play DAO when I started playing it--it truly brought me back, but it's even better. I am so excited for him to experience it!
From what i heard from a few gaming channels most funding for the early access time was sales from previous game divinity and people that payed during EA
I appreciate the comment about cost of development but there’s no way that the average cost per employee is $100k. Average dev salary in Europe is probably closer to $50,000.
They also didn’t have 450 employees at the beginning of development, most of the growth is in cinematics team which would be in the final half of development.
So dev costs probably more like 12-15m per year.
Break even comfortably about 2m units on that basis after factoring other non staff costs and steam share which based on concurrent users has probably already been met.
Edit; Larian previously confirmed they’d sold 2.5m copies in early access alone
I found BG3 dropping equipment lists or dialogues for one second, then returned the next check. So at least the breaks are semi-repaired. That is at the top.
Honoring the long tradition of IG Clown math:
800,000 concurrent steam players * $70/unit = 56mil
Even at $50/unit it's 40mil.
For me, BG3 really did come out of nowhere. It was only after the full release that I heard there was an early access period, and another week before learning that period was 3 years. There are still a couple big releases this year that I'm looking forward to, but for the moment BG3 is my personal GOTY.
Im usually so tired of the same type of discourse in this industry, but MAN you guys make so many incredible points about the reallity of video games. Gosh, i LOVE it.
Quintessential Gamers
Bruce is right about the "time" Larian got. So many games get released and the game studio claim they work on it for years but then departing devs from those studios claim earnest work on their games only began a year before release. Larian put forth earnest work with evidence of it from the beginning of early access.
Larian already did. With divinity: original sin 2. Setting up their engine and skill. Then release their masterpiece 🎉
I've lost interest in most of AAA space and I wholly expect execs to learn the wrong lessons. But I am very curious how other smaller devs will consider prolonged self-published projects. We've got a growing list of well made indies with longer dev timelines and I think enthusiast players are willing to be far more patient for projects like Silksong.
I'd personally love to see studios develop towards these grand visions. In a vaccume it seems easy, develop skills, foster a community, build up that war chest with growing projects and then hunker down for the opus. But of course reality gets a vote and I'm sure there's a million failures for every BG3.
32:16 Your companions can die, or leave the party, and the game story just goes on another direction. Without spoilers a companion can kill another companion if you let them, and the story just keeps going.
Larian funded BG3 with early access and the money they made with DOS2.
DOS 1 and 2 were funded with kickstarter. There's 2 "documentaries" showing in details how they became the Larian we know today.
'I don't think it will sell $40 mil' Six months later, BG3 has sold around $90 mil! So crazy.
I don't think its the fact that players want every game to be exactly like BG3. I think its more we all want more Feature complete games with no Micro-transactions or Macro-transactions. It is their phiolosphy on how to treat their projects and customers.
I kinda love the JRPG. Because essentially they are interactive book or movie. You have the story in the meantime you can run around while it is happening.
Nice chat :D
I am quite astonished that a lot of people play BG3 who never played a ttrpg :D Perhaps this will bring new people to the table and the whole culture (me playing and DMing for over 30 years now is still hoping for fresh blood :D). Because when somebody asks me (I finished early access a few times before now starting fresh with the full version) "Hey, how is BG3?" and most of my mates (this includes all genders) are all ttrpg veterans and regular ttrpg players. different systems, from Call of Cthulhu to homebrew to others, I answer "It's a perfect digital ttrpg and DnD campaign, nothing more, nothing less, so it is perfect and great."
Even my wife, who does not like CRPGs, although she is an avid ttrpg player for 30 years and plays twice a week a classic dice driven ttrpg, too and also did a lot of LARPing and similar rpg stuff, starts to get interested.
I think a lot of people are missing an important point: difference in culture. A European studio like Larian has totally different values. It is not primarily about business. "Turbo capitalism" is nothing that is that popular in Europe. And this is a good foundation for a good game that shows love towards roleplaying, storytelling and the whole ttrpg culture in general. Swen has dedicated his life to this culture and there were a lot of almost desastrous events along the road, eg the LMK disaster where Larian developed at one point a game for/with the biggest German ttrpg DSA "Das schwarze Auge" which was never published. But from the ashes of the codes rose the first Divinity. They have connections to the ttrpg scene for 1/4 of a century. Interestingly DSA shares a common history with DND when it was started in 1984 by the people who translated the first DnD edition in German and later became the most played ttrpg game with around 50% market share.
If you do something for money, or even worse, for your shareholders or management boni, it won't have heart. It will lack love and dedication. It will be a shallow money grab, nothing more. If you want to to something outstanding for the scene, the players, the culture the chances are higher that small teams will be successful. And if they make tons of money, so mote it be.
And btw people in the industry earn a lot less in Europe compared to the USA. Cause they do not need that much money. University is free (yepp, not a dime), healthcare is free, the pension scheme is organized by the states, you do not need to save a lot of money. You can live with less money pretty good. In the USA I would earn easily over 100k and more, compared to 70k here in Europe for a "normal IT guy". But I have a lot of benefits of a social system that makes life much easier and less expensive.
Excuse my bad English, not my native tongue. Cheers from Germany, Frank
Thanks for being brave enough to have a great podcast
The opening back and forth about the context and nuances of the game development is why you guys are favorites of mine. Willing to explore and discuss the subject even to the degree of walking down paths that will have people potentially internet pitchfork.
Thanks for your work and talk ^_^
the problem is always companies growing and getting a bunch of shareholders that only want to see numbers... they are today's pirates, the jump into a ship, take all the money they can, and jump out when they see the ship sinking
This game is awesome but it's pretty damn hard if you aren't familiar with this type of game. I'm slowly starting to get the hang of it. I have no idea if I'll even finish it but I'll have a blast trying.
I agree with the idea of how many studios aren't able to do something of this nature.. but the main reason that I think is the case, my own opinion included, is the idea of a game that I can play in full, without the idea of a shop, microtransactions.. promises of a complete game in the future with expansions.. this game fully made you feel like you paid what you got, and then some. When, to me, MOST games that are coming out today don't feel at all worth their price, and are so filled with microtransactions, and it feels like those microtransactions are getting more quality content than the base game offers. Just feels like in order to play games recently, you have to shell out $100+ to get a complete game.
TLDR: I do not like the idea of buying a game for $60+ as a bouncer fee, where you pay just to get in, but if you want the good stuff, you have to continue to pay well beyond the $60. Balders Gate is just a nice thing that has happen.
The podcast I'm always looking forward too!
I don't get what you mean when you say "400 employees for 6 years, how many other studios have that kind of budget?". That's a small budget for a AAA game, and most triple AAA studios have way more than that. For comparison, Diablo 4 had 9,100 employees for 6 years, and yet they still delivered a much smaller overall game. The internet is right on this one. We absolutely expect games of this magnitude for AAA studios that have 5-10x the budget that Larian had. No one expects this type of game from indie studios. The pushback is against the AAA devs from much larger studios who are jumping on the "we can't expect this as the standard" bandwagon.
In my playthrough i rolled terribly on all of the checks to pull gale out of that portal to save gale and just kept going. Currently in act 3 and have not seen gale since.
16:55 I had to pause the vid here because Bruce is saying "we're making a lot of people angry saying this..." and Bruce maybe you are but personally, I came here for that HARDCORE gamer news! And I honestly wanna know if something like this is even feasible again. I'm so use to the $60 CD's for N64 Cartridges or PS2 discs back in the day and how companies have managed to keep that price for the most part or less due to sales. People have to realize companies NEED to make money somehow or else how the hell are they gonna make great games/ care for their employees? A lot of consumers are trending to just vote with their wallets now and it's because it's the only way these companies actually listen to consumers anymore. It's a shame but I hope companies can find a way to keep this standard for the future.
I know I'm a few months behind but... I don't understand why people think BG3 having early access is a reason it shouldn't be compared to non early access games! IMO we should expect more companies like Bathesda to do early access - Larian was able to make a full portion of the game available, set it up for early access, and begin selling games at that point for full price. At that point they had a sales stream of income that they could then use to plan further releases around and improve the game with actual player feedback - creating a game that players actually enjoy and want to play!
I think far more companies could do a beta period with their games. It feels like it wouldn't need to work much differently than pre-sales. You release the part of the game you are comfortable with, and as long as you have a solid vision for the rest of the game, you get a lot of good testing feedback and UI feedback that you can use to fine-tune things before release. Too many companies think they know what players will want, or how they will respond, only to fall woefully short. BG3 was a far different, less enjoyable game on release, but it's not because of early access alone they succeeded. It's because they cared enough about player satisfaction to enact player feedback and actually really listen.
I think people are too hung up on the standards convo with things like this. I think when people say this game should set a new standard, they mean a standard of focus on the game actually being fun to play vs just set to make as high a profit as possible. There's just patterns in the industry that people are tired of, that are standards, and that people say a game cannot be successful without. I think people just hope that this proves that wrong, and shows games like DA:O, with a good self-contained story and single content release, can absolutely succeed.
I haven't seen a game this good since Skyrim/Dragon Age origins
I see the success of BG3 more as an attack on publishers rather than AAA studios. Larian had to take a major gamble 20 years ago by remaining independent after they got shafted by publishers, and thank God it worked out for them, but it was at points a cointoss. But also a gamble other studios could have made but didn't, so yes Larian has a head start on a lot of those. The problem I see is that if Divinity Original Sin wasn't a (niche) success, this wouldn't have happened. And when you try new things, some will fail and at this point neither AAA or Larian and studios like larian are in a position where they can fail while trying new things. AAA studios can't try new things because they're beholden to their shareholders, who don't allow studios to take risks. And smaller studios can't afford to take risks and fail. Larian makes games somewhat in an old school manner where they use the money of previous projects to (partly) fund new projects. While the AAA industry gets investors who get money from investors who want their money back. When the AAA industry is run that way you simply can't make games as good as they possibly can be, you make games as good as they possibly can be as long as dev time doesn't eat away at the profits.
@@Justjoshinh It works for Larian because players TRUST Larian. Any other company that EARNS the trust first can do the money part later just fine.
@@Justjoshinh Cool trick, selling 2.5 million Early Access copies at full price while no one was watching. Larian has been making games since 1996, they made only one game that was less than stellar and that one they fixed as soon as they had the money to turn the lights back on. Not to sound belittling but your radar is a dud.
We don't want a Baulder's Gate 3 level of game everytime from developers. We just want worthwhile experiences that aren't just designed to waste our time or drain our wallets.
Don't care if your game is 10 hours or 1,000 hours, just make it run well and give me some fun content at launch and I'll be happy.
You can always not compromise on anything and have it in development for Start Citizen levels of time.
You gotta remember the cd might have sold less waiting on the console release but they gave a lot of refunds out during the release of cyberpunk
So the key difference between CDPR/Blizzard and Larian... is that Larian are self-published. They don't have shareholders telling them "BG3 only made a 20% profit! What are you even doing!? That's not how capitalism works!"
Larian have expressed that they feel they grew too big while making BG3. I hope that means they're aware that if they try to make anything bigger than this, they'll collapse under their own weight
They clearly have the talent. As long as they keep things manageable and treat their employees right, they can keep making games of this quality (If not scale) for as long as they darn well like
Honestly, I would sayd any AAA-studio can do it, and kinda does it in terms of "time". Every each one of them are on 5-6 years cycle.
As for Early Access, which sold 2mil copies, or 2,5mil (full 60 for the copy), yes it's just the EA. It is THE funding, for self-publishing company, alongside previous sales of DOS2 (7,5mil copies sold overall made by a team of 100+ people). Any AAA has much more money, much much more. And it's not like they had 400 from the start, they grew 4x (from 150) just to make this particular game.
Yes, people gave their feedback, said what they wanted, etc. What stops any other AAA doing this, why don't they have time, recourse, etc? Is it only "publishers problem"?
Played witcher day 1 when it launched on PC. Who hated it? Has been my favorite game since it released.
To Bruce; stop saying this isn't what we want to hear because these are exactly the type of conversations I follow Inside Games for. Lawrence comes in with a analysis and Bruce comes in with some logic.
Just FYI, As far as we know Larian used the warchest they gained from Original Sin 2 to make BG3.
I think with cyberpunk they had to make a game that appealed to more people because at the time the game was in development for 8 years, now I know that it wasn’t in “Active Development” for that entire time, but it’s also a new IP, not to mention that I’ve heard there were some complications with working with the REDengine, This is also the first game they have made that is set in a fairly “modern setting” with cars, weapons, and being an FPS, and those factors I think had an effect on development and would have them simplify some of the aspects of the game, and I think once there’s more people who have “dipped their toe” into the game, there could be a possibility of more complex mechanics in future releases now that there’s more of an idea of what a Cyberpunk game is. But this is all conjecture and speculation that I don’t have a lot of solid information on, and I might be too lenient on, but I think there’s a potential future and I can’t wait to see what the future of Cyberpunk looks like on Unreal 5.
Now I want to know more about the “Squishy” Quiet statue!
I just really want quality games where it’s clear as day that those that worked on it cared deeply about the world, characters, story they are creating. The fact they actually get their players is also a huge plus for me. I despise things that are shallow or clear as day money grabs. Love to reward studios that do what Larian has done and what studios like BioWare used to do(fingers crossed they can get some of that back).
i think this is one of those games that we'll never see anything like again. the way it was developed from the amount of interactivity it has. its just one of those that will go down in history and will help define the genres
I think larian will do another haha
Hades had a similar release schedule. But they went into early access because they wanted community feedback alongside development. Supergiant also had to crowd fund several times in order to get to ver. 1.0.
Of course we as gamer/customer wont expect every and each game to be as big as BG3, what we trully want that any devs could take a lesson from BG3 is giving complete full experience out of a game like the old day, no feeling of artificial restriction because somehow the game design need to incorporate Microtransaction,battlepass or season pass in it.
Deep down We knew it as a gamer that there is something lack in each games after microtran,battle pass or season pass fused inside it, we just cant say it because we didn't have point of comparison when all AAA doing the same thing.
Then BG3 come out ita become an aha moment and just open our eye that complete uncompromised game design to satisfied player can actually be made when the money pinching design are taking out of the equatiom like what BG3 did.
Make ane game in any scope you want ,hey developer. Just give us full fat complete experience out of it that uncompromised with publisher mandated game design to squeeze every penny out of our wallet...
I'm excited to watch their response. Was just announced that 5.2 million units sold on stream alone. Think they were off on their estimate.
Seriously love this podcast, you guys are hilarious 😂 Your discussion about Quiet was amazing 😂
Grounded and Sea of Thieves basically in EA on Steam constantly being updated until becoming feature rich games. What BG3 did is nothing new or original. What is different is the critical reception on actual release that as much as some try to downplay separates it from the rest of the pack. It's okay to give credit where credit is due instead of trying to downplay its accomplishment in some backhanded defense of actual triple A publisher and dev studios. Definitely more in favor of a bit more chastising of the gaming industry instead of tempering Larian's possibly beneficial effect on the industry as a whole.
I have to add that Snake's statue had a squishy butt!
Starfield (2016) and diablo 4 (2014) both had development times that were longer, and with larger teams then bg3. If they wanted to do a 3 year early access, they had plenty of time for it. It was a decision not to. The upcoming dragon age game has been in development even longer (2015) again with a much larger studio behind it. There is nothing unusual about bg3,s development timeframe, aside from how they chose to interact with the community. I don’t want to see everyone making “bg3” clones. I want them to look at why bg3 was so successful, and use that to improve their own games. Although I do hope this gives some devs they confidence to jump into making more crpg’s, as they are by far my fave genre of games.
I can agree BG3's development can be seen as an anomaly given the state of the industry for games its size. I don't know how Larian operates but they were able to show how passionate they were about the project and it convinced me to invest in it. I vote with my wallet.
World of warcraft did that and showed early on that if you have a big ass game, you need time for content development and testing.
I dont save scum other than at the start of fights, if I fail a convo I fail a convo
Actually there are fantastic CRPGs that are comparable in terms of writing, story, audit design. Visuals and voice acting etc might not be up to BG 3 standards, but they're still fantastic.
DOS 2
Pillars of eternity 2
PAthfinder : WOTR
are all goated CRPGs
The game is an example for publishers, not necessarily developers. If Larian, a self published game company, can pull it off, then publishers with unlimited money can give their publishers more time to polish their games and realize their creative vision
I haven't even played BG3 amd I don't play crpgs or even turn based games.
But the choice and player agency that I've heard about sounds incredible.
As a gamer, I'm not looking for devs to make games exactly like BG3. I am just looking for a game that upon release isn't a buggy mess as well as being Feature Complete with no microtransactions. I am tired of seeing live service after live service, online only, and a cash shop with confusing currency models at every turn. I want to be able to just go offline and play a game without it reminding me that I haven't bought the latest skin from the cash shop or that the battle pass ends in "x" days and all your time is wasted if you don't finish it because real life got in the way.
I understand that a lot of my gripes have to do mainly with publishers putting these requirements upuon the devs, but it just sucks to see some of my favorite IPs turn into live services that require all of the previous aforementioned gripes. I do my part and try to vote with my wallet, but I am just one person and it seems like I may be a minority in a sea of gamers because the publishers are still pushing this stuff on us because that is what sells.
The sad part is that dude's right... we'll see games like this only once or twice a decade...
I think the real reason rockstar wont make games like red dead redemption 2 anymore is because that game's budget surpassed 1.5 billion USD and only generate 54 million copies sold... so they probably are just now recouping the costs of development 5 years later. Only game they will spend that kind of budget on is GTA since the online will make billions of dollars in the blink of an eye.
you knew its been decades since FONV and years since DOS2 and Stanley Parable since the last time i experience Dynamic writing. that writing was so phenomenal its the complete players freedom experience since i get diff outcomes and consequences.
as of now its was cool seeing Shadow of Doubt a detective immersive sim use AI to make a finite writing.
I'm pretty sure Divinity: original sin 1&2 was Kickstarted, I could be wrong but I remember reading it somewhere.
So what is the excuse behind last year's hit, Elden Ring? 3 years of early access?
The best way to enjoy the game is to NOT save scum. You bear the full consequences of your decisions.
This should be a weekly podcast
Larian aaid they want to work on a much smaller title next to give them some respite
quality conversation as always gentlemen much appreciated
Loved this long podcast! It was great to listen.
I WANT to buy it for my PS5, but even though this is the first game I've wanted to pre-order since Cyberpunk, it's not available anywhere. Like, Amazon and BB don't have listings. If it's for quality checks or whatever, then fine, bit it's still weird.
Larion is by no means the biggest developer out there. Sony, Microsoft, Activision et al have budgets that could buy Larion five times over. The reason these other developers 'can't' do it is because of their shareholders who demand quarterly and yearly profits. So it's weird to say we should lower our expectations. We can't demand good games because shareholders want to get richer? And that's somehow just and fair? An artificial reason that keeps developers from developing good games is somehow the consumers' problem?
Similarly how Blizzard and CD Projekt Red chose wealth over quality and that's somehow totally cool and we shouldn't complain. They wanted to push out trash for maximum prices but as long as they get rich we should just bend over and do as we're told? No. It's my money they want, I can have expectations. The expectations can be as unreasonable as I want them to be as well, it's MY money.
More than anything, BG3 has shown us how rotten the game industry is. The idea that we get our money's worth is balked at not just by the studios but by journalists and even other gamers. Plus it's become almost a kneejerk reaction that anytime this happens people will go 'actually you have to see it in context, making a game is really expensive'. I don't care. All I care about is what I get for the money I pay. And if it's unsustainable then maybe it should die.
Finally, the Witcher comparison is weird because you say that developers can't do what Larion did (release an early access build, use the funds to improve the game, release the finished product) while that's basically what CDPR did with The Witcher 3, except their initial release wasn't early access and the finished product was the Gold Edition. Seems like that approach to releasing games does work.
It's not about every game or every studio. It's about the fact that the so called triple A studios keep shipping out trash, unfinished, micro transaction riddled games with zero substance.
i heard they got the money from divinity original sin games before, they didnt even ask for kickstarter