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this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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Would it be so bad if games didn't have insane budgets? Most of my favorite games from the past decade are from small studios operating on pizza and hope.
BG3 did have a pretty huge budget though. I would totally be fine if games took notes from BG3 but reduced scope a lot. Bioware used to make games similar to BG, but they stopped and now make garbage. The idea other studios can't make similar games is wrong. They can't make games this big usually though without publishers telling them they need to include microtransactions and other bullshit.
BioWare didn’t just make games similar to Baldur’s Gate, they created Baldur’s Gate.
Yep, you're right. I didn't realize they were a studio at that point. Yeah, they have no reason to complain about new expectations. They could have created BG3 if they had kept doing what they were known for, but EA and the money were too good...
Wasn't that Black Isle? Or had they already evolved into their future downfall? It's been a hot minute since I've last looked at BG credits.
Lower budgets would probably be better. High budgets mean high risk, developers and publishers try to minimize that risk and you get bland games that try to cater to too many tastes. Movies suffer from the same problem. They get budgets in the hundreds of millions and you wonder what they spent it all for.
I can't remember who it was. A famous actor, anyway. They were talking about what's happened with movies. There's nothing in the middle.
It's either $100m+ or less than $3m. Either it gets a big producer and they pump so much money into it that it must be safe because it can't lose money. Or is a small producer doing it for the love, but a small budget doesn't go very far. The risky narratives done well would be funded somewhere between the two extremes but it's just not how it's done anymore.
In a strange way, to get more money in for the riskier productions, we need to get the money out of Hollywood. Can't see it happening, myself.
Yep. The final fantsay series was a bunch of lads in an attic. Now those lads are legends.. with a fantasic legacy. Yet I'm still waiting for ES5 and GTA 6..
You could give studios unlimited budgets and they'd still complain they don't have enough time / money to get things right. The rhetoric is that "games are just so complex nowadays" and that justifies their 4/5/6 year development periods.
I'm not seeing the complexity that warrants that type of long development period. The visual fidelity on some games is impressive, but is it actually worth that 5 year dev time?