D&D 5E Baldur's Gate 3 won so many awards that it started to "affect development"

[Henadic Theologian]

Baldur's Gate 3 won so many awards that it started to "affect development", forcing Larian to send "rotating teams" of devs to ceremonies

Swen Vincke is suffering from success

www.gamesradar.com

That is alot of winning.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Talk about suffering from success. Though, really, I do think this is a bit of "pain now for benefit later" sort of thing...yes, it's rough to have people keep harping on something you'd rather move on from. But if people ARE still talking about it this long after, that just means you've made a crapload of money and will have tons of future guaranteed sales for other titles made by the same teams.

So...I get it, I do, wanting to move on and do something new. But I also can't help a feeling slightly less sympathy than I think Mr. Vincke might be hoping for, simply because this is just further proof that they made a bazillion dollars off of this work, and that that money is still rolling in nearly a full year after release.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

that that money is still rolling in nearly a full year after release.

It's still in the Steam top 10 revenue-makers. It's been pushed out occasionally and briefly, after like, several months where it couldn't be, but it keeps coming back in, even without sales.

It must have made a pretty incomprehensible amount of money at this point. It'll be very interesting to see Larian's post-BG3 trajectory.

 

[Meech17]

The bar is so high now, that both Larian's next game, and Baldur's Gate 4 will really struggle to match it. They will both live in the massive, overwhelming shadow of BG3 and hopefully can succeed despite that.

The article is funny though, because it's talking about actual, tangible effects the success is having on development, namely they're getting too many awards, and are constantly sending staff away to go receive them.

"Sorry, Mr. Vincke can't take your call today.. He's booked up with two awards ceremonies, and then an afternoon meeting with a guy who's coming in to install more trophy cabinets."

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The bar is so high now, that both Larian's next game, and Baldur's Gate 4 will really struggle to match it. They will both live in the massive, overwhelming shadow of BG3 and hopefully can succeed despite that.

Yeah I'm skeptical that they will, but one lives in hope.

BG4 I strongly suspect will end up being developed either by a studio which just doesn't have the talent and vision necessary, because WotC have such weird and stupid ideas about picking studios for this kind of thing (plus they literally fired everyone who picked Larian lol) and will inevitably greedily want a much larger cut than the 5-10% (I think we heard 8% specifically from one source, but I forget where) of gross revenue that they seemingly got on BG3, so will be unable to work with "real" studios. At absolute best, it'll be basically a faithful recreation of 5E D&D gameplay, with an uninspired and trite plot and characters. People will defend it aggressively, because people do, if you get the rules mostly right. Just look at how defensive people are about the Solasta campaign or the built-in NWN campaign, both of which were absolutely terrible, like embarrassingly bad (particularly NWN - how the hell did the people who did good with both earlier and later projects screw this one up so bad? It's like a child wrote it! And not smart or imaginative one!).

Larian I think will probably make a pretty cool CRPG, but the issue is Swen also has some pretty bad ideas, specifically:

1) He likes precisely one flavour of fantasy setting. Super grimdark, but with lots of jokes. Now, if he lets the writers run the show, I think he'll be fine, but I also think he'll be pushing pretty hard for "jokey grimdark" of the worst kind, and I don't think audiences are going to respond as well to that as they did to BG3 (which to be clear, is about 10% as grim as DOS2 was). I think what they'll get is millions of sales and millions of people quitting pretty early on and then having a negative attitude to Larian.

2) Whilst he has good "big picture" skills about like, how interactive the world should be and so on, Swen has no idea what good gameplay design actually looks like. He thinks entire screens full of hellfire and explosions are what "cool combat" looks like. He thought the combat and advancement designs in DOS2, which are essentially trash that they got away with because of other factors, were stellar. Certainly prior to BG3's launch, he had no comprehension whatsoever of the rather obvious-seeming fact that part of why BG3 was going to succeed was that, frankly, D&D 5E's mechanics are much better, and much more accessible and generally friendly to non-hardcore gamers than DOS2's were. That being forced to use those is part of why BG3 was an insane success. It combined the best aspects of DOS2 (the hyper-interactive world, for example) with much better combat and a much better setting.

So I worry. I think Swen is a blessing and curse. A blessing in that he will almost certainly prevent Larian from being bought or "going corporate" in any way, but a curse in that whilst he is clearly a lot of fun, his "taste level" is basically non-existent.

My feeling is his wisdom will win out, and he'll let the designers/writers make the big decisions rather than insisting on grimdark screen-fire-fests, but there still remains a potential issue:

3) Not making a CRPG and then being shocked when nobody buys it.

I think this is a more minor risk unless Larian pours huge amounts of money/effort into it, but I do think there's a possibility Larian will decide to make a non-CRPG as their next game, and assume that, because it's them, and because they think the game is great, they're going to get near-BG3 levels of sales. And they won't. If they make a tactical RPG or fantasy X-Com-ish deal or the like (as they've sort of hinted they might), they'll get decent sales, but it'll be a fraction of BG3.

 

[Vael]

I called BG3 my game of the decade, and it has raised the bar by an insane margin on both Larian and other RPG developers. Poor Bioware, already in trouble, Dragon Age Veilguard has the impossible task of righting a sinking ship and scaling raised expectations.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I called BG3 my game of the decade, and it has raised the bar by an insane margin on both Larian and other RPG developers. Poor Bioware, already in trouble, Dragon Age Veilguard has the impossible task of righting a sinking ship and scaling raised expectations.

I think Veilguard may be helped, ironically enough, by how action-y the combat and so on is.

I know lots of people moan about how it's not like DAO, and how "Look BG3 shows party-combat RPGs can succeed as AAAs!", but like, if DAV was also a turn-based or even RtwP CRPG going up against BG3, rather than an action-y RPG with heavy story/companion stuff, it would get judged a hell of a lot MORE harshly.

One thing I think will be a big decider for Veilguard's success, much as people might pretend otherwise, too, is the "dating sim" factor. Do players want to date these characters? Will some turn out to be extremely hot romances? Are these characters people will enjoy thinking about? And from what we've seen, it's impossible to say, because we just know absolutely nothing about them - we don't even know their voices in most cases. Are there characters who people will get obsessed with like Tali, Garrus, Astarion, or Karlach? Or just a bunch of annoying self-important bores like Andromeda?

BG3 succeeded in part because it is a pretty good dating sim, and has a character for everyone, more or less, and the characters are playersexual. DAV will ironically be helped by the lack of David Gaider here, because if he was running it, he'd have forced them to have character-specific sexualities, which whilst realistic and fun for the writers crafting nuanced characters, makes the game objectively and significantly worse as on the dating sim front, and frankly less fun for an awful lot of people. Andromeda was also hurt by this - the two companions with the most-developed romances were both strictly straight, which was not smart (esp. as neither of them had particularly super-hetero vibes - indeed Cora's vibes were quite the opposite!).

And there are a lot of companions in DAV, and I think it was confirmed they're all romance-able, and definitely playersexual, so if at least some of them are actually fun and likeable, I think that'll help Veilguard. It won't be a BG3-level success, but if it can sell solidly on multiple platforms, I think it'll be enough to get Bioware back on the upslope. It only really needs to be a sort of 8/10 game to do that, given its genre.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

It's still in the Steam top 10 revenue-makers. It's been pushed out occasionally and briefly, after like, several months where it couldn't be, but it keeps coming back in, even without sales.

It must have made a pretty incomprehensible amount of money at this point. It'll be very interesting to see Larian's post-BG3 trajectory.

Elegant swan dive off the top board.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

it'll be basically a faithful recreation of 5E D&D gameplay, with an uninspired and trite plot and characters

Solasta, then.

"jokey grimdark"

Warhammer, then.

 

[TheSword]

Comes across as slightly pompous.

It was good but I enjoyed the OG BG’s more than this one and would be more likely to replay one of them for the fifth time than this for the second.