this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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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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[–] MJBrune@beehaw.org 194 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

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.

[–] Chozo@kbin.social 104 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] notintheface@feddit.nu 44 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Goronmon@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Thrashy@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] Xero@infosec.pub 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They also lifted chunks of Star Citizen.

[–] Thrashy@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm fairness, incomplete chunks is all that exists of Star Citizen.

Well, that and a whaling operation on the scale of Victorian England's.

[–] cambriakilgannon@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I am in the SC club and it's a glitchy, broken, incomplete mess while also being one of the coolest gaming experiences I've ever had when it works.

[–] Thrashy@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] cambriakilgannon@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

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

[–] Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] cambriakilgannon@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

because it's more profitable to re-release those games over and over again and sell shark cards

[–] MJBrune@beehaw.org 18 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] peter@feddit.uk 9 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] MoonlitSanguine@lemmy.one 26 points 1 year ago (3 children)

The video tries to imply it's industry wide, but only show 3 tweets. I've also seen nothing but praise from other game developers I know.

[–] MJBrune@beehaw.org 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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."

[–] Steeve@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago

It a headline says "some" in it, it's clickbait.

[–] acastcandream@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The bar has been reset and folks like you are eager to meet the challenge :)

[–] MJBrune@beehaw.org 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] acastcandream@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I’ve not played…

Then go play it and then judge it. This game is a seismic as Mass Effect 1 or even Doom.

[–] MJBrune@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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?

[–] acastcandream@beehaw.org 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I remember a lot of people were saying Half-Life: Alyx was a huge industry changer

That was a very fringe take by VR enthusiasts, and to say ME1 didn't have a huge impact on the industry is incredibly bizarre to me. Here's a very short piece that gives a decent overview

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.

[–] MJBrune@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

So, to be clear, I didn't say doom didn't change the industry. I just said the industry was small and easy to affect the whole thing. It influenced games that at this point define the industry more than doom. It changed the industry at the time. Mass Effect doesn't seem like it did. I don't see a lot of Mass Effect's influence. I feel like of any, Mass Effect 2 is most influential because of how they wrote the characters and tied them into the story but not as an industry-wide influencer. GTA 3, World Of Warcraft, CoD 4, Minecraft, and Portal, these games feel like they truly changed the industry. Not just the genre they were in but influenced things outside of their genre.

[–] EremesZorn@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] acastcandream@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

You are free to disagree, but to hand wave me away as having “fan boy takes” is pretty shitty and does not make me want to engage further. Thanks and have a great weekend. 

[–] conciselyverbose@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] MJBrune@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] conciselyverbose@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] EremesZorn@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] lotanis@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] oce@jlai.lu 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

in the last decade we’ve started to see games really take shape as cinematic masterpieces. Experiences that truly top movies.

Metal Gear Solid is from 1998

[–] MJBrune@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] EremesZorn@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] Wahots@pawb.social 2 points 1 year ago

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.