The thing everyone misconstrues is that players want more BG3, no. Players want what BG3 represents. A return to finished, well polished, not monoetized to hell and back games, made with passion, flair, and a few wild ideas.
I mean, Nintendo is notorious for doing this. Why now are people acting like Baldur's Gate 3 is the first and only game doing this? Where was this conversation when Zelda TotK and Pikmin 4 came out?
@@Drstrange3000 Nintendo is an outlier in the industry, for many reasons. Same can be said about From with Elden ring and AC6. People already expect a certain level from them. No one was expecting BG3 to be what it is, thus everyone sees it as a slap in the face of AAA devs. Especially when every other RPG as of late has been going down a dark and shitty route. That's how I see it anyways.
@@GoingRampant92 Maybe it is due to playing Divinity Original Sin 2 and seeing the same devs work on an already big IP like Baldur's Gate. I wasn't as surprised at the outcome. Yeah Nintendo sadly is an outlier. PlayStation was great too but are now pushing for more Live service.
@Drstrange3000 I'd say the discourse hasn't happened before mostly because Nintendo does its own thing on its own platforms. It's a beautiful island of curiosities and quirkiness and fun, but it also has a separate experience expectation than much of the rest of the industry. I'd say this discussion is happening now with BG3 precisely because BG3 has dared to step into an experience previously defined by strings of disappointments and go "Wake up, we have expectations to burn down."
@@Drstrange3000 I don't disagree with you at all. Divinity went largely under the radar, most have never played an RPG like it, Or BG, or arcanum, or fallout 1/2. To many this is their first true "role playing" game as opposed to an "RPG". If that makes sense. Sony and Microsoft both tried to join Nintendo in their weird monopoly-niche thing they built as well, Sony almost did it.
“There is no game worth the inhumane treatment of another human being.” Thank you. As a (former?) game developer, thank you. As a former community manager who had to defend coworkers against harassment campaigns, thank you. As someone who’s privacy was violated by a Final Fantasy fan that “had an idea so good” they felt it was okay to dig up my personal contact info, thank you. As someone who would get routinely contacted by a disgruntled former customer who explicitly enjoyed knowing he was causing me anxiety, thank you. Players and audience members really underestimate how much damage is done by thinking harassment is “sometimes” justified.
“I am become debt, destroyer of credit scores.” The true gold of this vid. “Far be it from me to deny someone an asinine opinion on the internet. Where else are we supposed to put ‘em?” Tied with it IMO.
The delivery style in this video is so smooth it’s like listening to a saxophone solo whilst receiving the hydration from an IV drip… whilst ambient mood lighting surrounds you. Smooooooooth.
I think this is slightly unfair. Dev time isn't free so in a lot of cases to get the funding to jusitfy the upfront costs the money men want something as low risk as possible. What Larian have done is amazing but they must have been carrying significant financial risk for many years. If BG3 had flopped would the studio have survived?
@@SimuLordI don’t know if it’s the best way. Will it really make more profit then the games running kid’s parents credit cards dry for skins and emotes year after year? It’s why they want to put down that this isn’t what the norm will be because it won’t be that kind of easy cash.
It's also obviously made by fellow dnd players, and the community has a higher standard in general. There IS a thing called dignity, and honor that people just don't have nowadays. Blizzard literally hung themselves, trying to be greedy with D4 and overwatch 2. I'm happy there is still hope left for gaming.
@@DavidC-fk2wg They sold the game in early access. They probably wasn't in much financial stress. I think a closer comparison would have been kickstarter (the same way they funded the two D:OS games)
I feel the most frustrating part is the game developer media appears to be misrepresenting everyone's frustration as being targeted at devs and treating them like simpletons who need educated, when in reality we're exasperated with the companies and are 1) aware of the rigors of game development and 2) shouldn't need to understand the rigors of development in order to expect a quality product.
I don't think, anyone threats you as a simpleton. The whole thread that sparked the discussion was a reply to the "new standard" arguments. Clearly there's a side that was absent in this discussions - the devs. And a guy (a brilliant writer btw, if you can judge him by his work @ hypnospace outlaw) very politely stated his opinion, brought light to the other side of the matter. I think, we should care about and understand "the rigors of the development". Who worked on the product and how they worked is a part of the quality of this product. If there was crunch time involved, for example, it's a bad product, that's it. To reiterate that tweet for the thousands time - "i want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and im not kidding"
A lot of people ARE frustrated at devs, there's a big portion (or at least a loud one) that genuinely think that lazy and bad devs are the reason of the current state of AAA games. And it's not helped by the fact that a lot of people don't even know the difference between executives, publishers and devs.
@@StepanCavemani don't WANT shorter games with worse graphics. You do you. I WILL play shorter game with worse graphics but that is not what I want. You sound as if you want to have a less capitalistic worldview - better work life balance and more money. That has nothing to do with the quality of games
I have saw people that are aware of the rigors of game development, took the example of Baldur's Gate 3 and be like "if this studio can do it, why can't you? anyone that cannot do it like that are lazy". That's the point. Devs pointing out how Baldur's Gate can exist and why its dangerous, are being laughed at as "you are just too lazy/incompetent to do the same things".
To get even more meta on the discourse, maybe it doesn't feel like Christmas anymore because our lives are harder than they should be. Maybe we spend so much time bickering because we want to have input into how our games are made and how our lives are run, and we feel increasing disempowered.
And unfortunately, when you suggest solutions, people are quick to shoot it down, either due to pessimism dressed up as realism or because they've been brainwashed into hating everyone who isn't them. Think it was Malcolm X who said "If you aren't careful, they'll have you loving your oppressor and hating the oppressed." (I'm paraphrasing, but that's more or less the gist of it).
Yup. The more days I live the more I feel like I don't really have control over my life. I have to spend several hours each day on a boring 9 to 5 job (often longer then just 8 hours) just for lowest legal pay, with little to no free time unless I ruin my sleep schedule more then everchanging work hours do. It doesn't feel like I have any control over it, but someone in a manager position instead. I could be fired any day too, and knowing my luck, right in time for taxes and other expenses that I have to pay to not get in legal problems. Adding live service, always online, pay 2 grind, overpriced games with every nook and cranny filled with microtransactions and DLCs that triple A craps out annually... It's soul crushing.
We're also completely spoiled. Gaming itself isn't all that special anymore - there are more games out there than any one person could play in a lifetime at this point, with only more added daily. Makes it really hard to have that special experience when it's so common, even the "bad" games.
Our lives have been overtaken by late stage capitalism, working on project for other people to turn a profit. No power over our own destinies when our bosses can look at a spreadsheet and decide we're an excess operating expense tomorrow. There's only one way to win back control, and that's by gaining enough power to stand up to the bosses of the world. And the only way for us little guys to get such power is together. I'm talking unionisation. If we want to take back control of out lives, we need to come together to form a barrier the bosses can't cross, threatening to withhold our work at the cost of their precious profits. It feels hopeless right now, especially if you're just starting out. But hope is not lost. There's always the chance of a better tomorrow if we stand together today!
On a related note, I lost all hype for my brand new PS5 when I realized I can't play any games without internet.... its basically a brick if it doesn't have internet!
TBH lesson here is that general opinion wants more good games without bullshit attached. Also, projects like Hades, Hollow Knight, Disco Elysium, Stardew Valley shows us that high quality, smaller scale product, can be made if you pour into it your heart and a LOT of work. Indie devs can strive for quality - why AAA studios can't? Larian is an example that even with hundreds of people working together and a much, much bigger scale you can achieve that.a
My issue with the people calling it unrealistic and an outlier, is that it comes from AAA devs.... they say it's rediculous to expect something on that level because they had 6 years and 400 staff.... yet their own games are 3-10+ years with 1,600+ staff.... they are saying they can't possibly produce something so good and feature complete, despite having much greater resources and we know they are full of crap.
A lot of people are itching for an excuse to call others “lazy”. They live for that. Not even in just games or the arts in general, just in life I’ve seen a disturbing about of people jumping at any opportunity to label someone who makes things for them as “lazy”. It’s almost vindictive or something
Worst thing is most people, if anyone, is properly lazy. You see someone sitting on their butt after work watching TV and think "See what they do when not put to the grindstone?", not thinking that they're indulging in a low-energy activity due to being low-energy themselves. Not to mention they only have so much time for themselves. If you left such a person to their own devices, they're gonna run out of shows to watch eventually, or get bored with yet another action flick or romantic-comedy, and they're gonna do something else, something more fulfilling. But in current society we can't reach that point, as by the time the episode's over we gotta get to bed to get enough sleep to get through work tomorrow.
The only reason anyone could call Baldur's Gate 3 an "anomaly" is because it's a game with *real* triple A quality that doesn't milk the players out of cash at every turn in every imaginable way possible, it respects the player instead. And when it comes to what devs said... Yeah no, it never was about the devs, especially not of studios smaller then triple A. It was about publishers. Only reason people are so gung-ho on devs now is because the devs were the ones to speak out against BG3, not some shareholder or their publisher's CEO or whatever. People are mad as hell at all the scummy things publishers do for sake of profits, effectively turning what once was peak of gaming into the bottom of the barrel, hell, lower then that. And what's the funniest and most sad thing to me, is that it all started with an indie dev speaking out, AAA studio devs hopped on this afterwards. If only they didn't speak out about something that wasn't directed at them in any way, same for other devs that spoke out...
As much as I agree with this video I think it still misses the point. The counterargument to "why isn't every game like this" is "not every studio is Larian." Why? Why ISN'T every studio Larian? What are they doing differently that allows them to put out a game like this? That's the conversation we need to be having. People fall back on "devs are lazy" because they don't understand what's happening in the industry. They see a company that seems to not have more people or money than others and the only other thing they can think of is "they must not be trying that hard, then." I don't think that's the reason, but what IS the reason? Is it early access? Is it having the developer and publisher be the same company? Is it the quality of executives or team leads? Something about the internal structure of the company? I don't know, but we shouldn't be saying "other companies can't do what Larian did." They clearly can, they just aren't.
frost's work is great as ever, though i don't agree (as seems to be implied) that baldur's gate 3 is a case of everything lining up to deliver the game of the century. we can't humanise the developers that unfairly get called lazy for products that obviously have phenomenal amounts of effort put into them while also reducing the work of the people at larian who made baldur's gate 3 to serendipity. larian making baldur's gate 3 is the obvious next step of larian making divinity: original sin 2. anyway, i don't want "good enough". "good enough" (the vault boy is a fitting companion here) is just a way to describe games designed to be "safe", maximising sales at minimal risk. yes, if you care about your work you should try to make it great.
The thing that gets me in this discussion is the game also does still have a fair amount of bugs. Including things that have meant I need to reload to fix them. Like I'm not saying it to knock it, games's good, it just feels surreal to me that everyone seems to be acting like it's perfect on-release. I don't play most games on-release so idk if my standards are off, are other games just straight up CtDing all the time when they release?
I don’t think Baldur’s Gate 3 would have been as big a deal if it came out in the ‘00s. It stands out because it is a really good game, that also bucks trends players hate (micro-transactions, and functional on release). I’ve been starving for a game like this because BioWare is basically dead now, and I’m not getting a new Dragon Age anytime soon. And even back in the day EA immediately ensured the original Dragon Age would remain the best one
I think a big issue with the discourse is that everyone says that BG3 should be the new AAA standard but nobody agrees on what that means. Ive seen people say the standard it sets being the length and scope of the game, the narrative and choices, the voice acting, and the lack of microtransactions and corprate greed. But until we collectivly decide what the AAA standard should be we are never going to get anywhere making these games better
What it truly means is people wnat the good old triple A standard to be back, where triple A meant *quality* and a damn good innovative experience, not dime and dozen soulless cashgrabs fileld with overpriced microtransactions *in full price games* and pay 2 grind battlepasses, and constant fear of missing out on content locked behind timed seasons, alongside really scummy tactics to get people to spend, even on accident, all while the games release in buggy as hell states with empty promises of fixing the dumpsterfire of a game later on with dozens upon dozens of "apology posts" that hold no meaning anymore and just feel like someone forced to write it just to shut up the angry masses and ensure the blindly following fans don't realise what the hell is going on. We already had this standard. It's literally nothing new at all. BG3 just raises is back to where it *was* before corporate greed kept lowering down and down, until reaching rock bottom, and then digging further down.
@@jordanj809 Nobody wants microtransaction fileld, bugfest garbage that fills pockets of publisher CEO and shareholders. Players want games that provide good quality and respect them, that they are what they paid for and don't nickel and dime them on every corner in every way imaginable. People don't mind occassional cosmetics, especially if they aren't overpriced to the point where you can buy whole games for price of a singular skin, pay 2 grind battlepasses and RNG lootboxes were too much. Day 1 patches and ever so growing lists of empty promises only leading to the always online live service games getting abandoned and effectively scamming players who paid for the game out of their money isn't great either.
Ah.. I mean... we DO like our emotions. CGP Grey made a video "This video will make you angry" years ago that easily explained how the internet works. Media in general. Anger sells, anger spreads. Want reach? Make people angry.
@@christopherlyndsay8611 I've been dying of laughter over on Twitter about people rage-quitting instead of just trying new builds. Yeah, they can't do that for the tutorial helicopter boss, but I'm an AC newbie and still beat that boss in on 3 or 4 attempts. I figured out just how aggressive I really needed to be. I got the hang of firing weapons simultaneously and of making generous use of the sword. It really wasn't that bad. I know people have different concepts of what's difficult for them, but it seems to me that a number of gamers aren't even really trying to figure out how to play the game and what they need to be doing to clear missions and defeat bosses.
@@SolaScientia And look, some of us couldn't hack the tutorial boss of Dark Souls, either, even with time and effort, but.... that doesn't make it a bad game, even then. It's just a game I'm going to watch other people play. We need to get back the idea that every game doesn't have to be for everybody, but that's like the one take that the internet at large cannot possibly handle.
@@christopherlyndsay8611 I've been working a bunch of shifts that have absolutely wiped me out, so I'm still in chapter 1, but I love what I've played. I'm still getting the hang of the movement speed and controls, but it's clicking pretty well for me.
games in recent years have made me wrap all the way back around to even cosmetic micro-transactions are a failure and egregious. Every cosmetic you capitalistically lock behind the 16 digit cheat code in your wallet, you rob your player not only of money and immersion, but of the opportunity to explore your game, the opportunity to make a legendary experience to find and unlock that cosmetic that can be wielded as a badge of honor when discussing the game with other players. That cosmetic could be behind some niche achievement to get players talking like, "did you see that one quest in this far corner of the game? its challenging and hidden but you get this amazing looking cape from it!"
I wouldn’t even go that far. I’d just say lots of games have boring rewards like materials (that half the time you won’t even need/use), and nice cosmetics are a good way to keep you playing. I played Crash 4’s side content much more than I would have, despite being levels with just different filters, simply because of the cool costumes. Something that no battle pass could get me to do because most of the rewards are garbage and sometimes even the costumes/cosmetics aren’t even good. That, and cool unlockables (weapon, costume, mechanic, etc) are fun rewards that used to be standard. Now they’re not because it’s become more corporate and that’s something they can sell for more money and if not, they don’t make it. Because we can’t have fun things in our video games anymore unless it’s some cameo/4th wall break that’ll get attention on social media.
Back in the day the “horse armor” DLC for Elder Scrolls was a joke and the only acceptable kind of game add on was an expansion pack that added new levels
I no longer look at a player with some fancy cosmetics as someone with skill and a lot of time invested into a game, all I see now is a whale getting milked for cash by greedy companies. There's no longer skill involved in recieving a really cool cape, hat, or weapon variant, it's just a sign of you taking out your wallet nowadays.
"BG3 Is the giant whose shoulders you could stand on... But you still have to climb the giant" YES. This. As someone in the industry as a Narrative Designer/Game Writer, I *WISH* I had the time and co-writers and budget to make something as sprawling as BG3. But that's just not in the cards. And I do work at a small studio that actually really values its workers. BG3 just had SO much going for it that allowed this to happen, and I'm SUPER happy for them that they accomplished it. And you're right that AAA studio executives, money men and bean-counters are going to take all the wrong lessons from BG3 and use it as a reason to crunch developers even harder than before while also missing the entire point of what made the game good. :(
Yeah, so many people just don't understand that game developers are one of the most hardworking people out there. Like if you don't tell developers not to crunch themselves they will die trying to make a good game.
@@Knight1029 Very. At least one of our guys has to be told "Dude, *take your breaks.* " every once in a while, because otherwise he'll work right through them. XD
I don't think players are insisting that the average studio should be able to make something of this caliber and scope every time. I think the "BG3 proves they can do it, they just don't want to/are incompetent" comments are directed at the big publishers like Activision-Blizzard(-Microsoft?), EA, and Ubisoft. If anyone has the money, employees, institutional knowledge, and attention-grabbing IPs to make games on the level of BG3, it's them. That they instead fill their games with microtransactions and obvious content padding is a choice on their part and deserves to be called as such.
I feel like when people say, "400 people worked on this game for 5 years." Yeah...and diablo 4 had 9000 people working on it for over 10 years. It's a joke to say the 400 people for 5 years is the only reason it's good.
Games like the first console Ninja Gaiden, Prototype/Infamous, and Kameo: EoP. Games that delivered a new experience without relying on well-known IPs. Doesn’t have to be perfect, just has to be cool.
Yeah I only just recently started to get into these cold takes. The chill analysis is really refreshing from all of the standard rage. WHich is obviously the whole point of calling it "cold takes" but I appreciate it nontheless.
While yes, the BG3 argument got out of hand, it's due to angry people not being able to convey their true intentions correctly. People don't want a game that is exactly as ambitious and as massive as BG3. People just want complete games, and when one finally comes around, they fervently point to it and scream "THIS. WE WANT THIS." that being said, there's something to be said about the AAA devs coming out of the woodwork to comment and agree with the OP, who is an indie developer. When AAA is concerned, there is a certain level of quality that is rightfully to be expected. Larian studios is much smaller, took some serious financial risks, and has less overall resources than your average AAA company. The fact that AAA says "this game is an anomaly" or "the standard is impossible for us to meet" is a fucking joke. Of course the standard is possible to meet for AAA. The problem is that the current state of the industry demands that they don't.
I don’t think games that sell skins for over 2.99 should be called a MICROtransaction. There at that point a macrotransaction. This is also why I don’t like games that sell early access as a preorder bonus. Why am I paying for the opportunity to play your broken game when the day 1 patch isn’t out? Or if you know that it’s ready for launch then launch for everyone without having to shell out the extra cash for it.
The question to ask yourself is - would you rather pay twice as much for games on launch date, or swallow and live with these alternative monetization techniques? People are simply forgetting that the standard price of a AAA game has been $60 for a long time. Many years now. AAA game development has only gotten more expensive, and scopes larger, yet the price remained the same. And, most importantly, everybody seems to be just ignoring inflation altogether. A $60 dollar title bought in 2002 should cost adjusted for inflation about $100. There are no $100 games. It's obvious that the devs need to get their money elsewhere, since the games are artificially way cheaper than they used to be. DLCs and microtransactions are just a natural outcome of this stupid adherence to a 60 dollar price tag.
@@D1ndo that’s 60 if your American the price in Canada has increased 3 times for us. So your beginning point is moot but I don’t also agree with paying more because indie games do this thing called releasing a product and making another new one since they can’t eat the cost of a bad game. Multi billion dollar companies increase the price because they can. Remember when Microsoft tried to increase Xbox live and the entire internet was absolutely saying no? And look at what happened to that. So using the it’s more expensive to make games argument doesn’t make sense either since you can just make a smaller game. Remember the quote? “I want shorter games with bad graphics, from people who work less and get paid more. I’m not kidding “
I feel BG3 is done right, rather done fast. There's nothing stopping other studios to pace themselves, rather promise half-baked yearly instalments. Convince me why it's worth the purchase, rather than tell me blindly buy a promise of a worthwhile game.
I LITERALLY cannot overstate how much value your opinion carries, Frost.... It's people like you that keep me invested in the gaming culture even though I don't have time to play very much anymore. Keep doin' your thing you brilliant, velvet-voiced man! 💚
My hot take that's actually a cold take I've been making for an entire game-generation is: Dial back budget and scope, and Baldur's gate IS actually a gold standard for a very specific set of things: Games can be released in a complete, polished state with the correct amount of patience and virtue. Their tactic CAN be replicated, too: Move slow, play-test constantly, and resource your project well. And most of all: LET THE GAME HYPE ITSELF. That's the thing I think we learned most of all. You don't need to build hype through a constant stream gameplay sizzle reals and trickles of gossip. Games aren't movies. "In Presales" and "Opening week" and "Top trending" don't matter to a game, yet are how new releases are all talked about. ONLY shit games that need to make back their production budget as quickly as possible before they fade from the Zeitgeist never to be played again are the games that need to talk like that. ACTUAL GOOD GAMES have the return on their investment talked about over YEARS, not WEEKS. If a game costs $1bn to make, that money can be made back across 3-5 years, it DOESN'T need to be made back in 6 weeks like a blockbuster movie. THAT'S what BG3 shows us. Build a game that will last a decade, like Skyrim or Witcher 3, and you won't just make your money back, you'll make a lifelong customer. Blizzard USED to do this, Bethesda seems to still be trying, and it's obvious Larian got the memo too. Now if only Activision could see it that way....
I was basically sold on BG3 when I first started seeing footage of the early access build. I didn’t need anything other than seeing that proof of concept to put it in my shopping list
Baldur's Gate 3 wasn't released in a complete polished state though, it was released in Early Access with only the first chapter and not all of the races/classes implemented. It took three more yearse before it reached that "complete and polished" state. It's worth remembering that Early Access is always a gamble, both for devs and consumers. On average, an Early Access game is about as likely to get finished as a AAA live-service game is to fulfill its roadmap promises. "Let the game hype itself" is also easier said than done. "Baldur's Gate 3, from the makers of Divinity: Original Sin 2" markets itself, but have you even heard about Insomnia: The Ark? Do you know what Spiderweb Software's next project is? Did you know the Lords of the Fallen sequel/reboot is coming out in two months? Survivorship bias is huge in gaming, we all like to believe that great games can thrive on quality alone, but in truth most games die in obscurity, regardless of quality. A game can only succeed if people know about it, and feel compelled to buy it, that's why marketing/hype exists (and for the record: creators/influencers count as marketing). Case in point: _Neo: The World Ends With You,_ by all accounts an excellent game that _completely_ bombed because of insufficient marketing. "If a game costs $1bn to make, that money can be made back across 3-5 years" Not unless the game was entirely self-funded. Most games see the majority of their sales within the first couple of months to a year at most, so unless the game is built around recurrent spending, a publisher who's invested millions (and needs to meet quarterly projections to keep the shareholders happy) is NOT going to wait 3-5 years to see a return on that investment. Even live-service games with "10 year plans" barely last _one_ year if they don't perform to the publisher's satisfaction. What BG3 shows us is that to make a game like BG3, you need seasoned developers, creative and financial autonomy, and _really_ strong brand power.
Man. I miss the old Blizzard. Back when Warcraft 3 Reforged wasn't a thing. When Overwatch 2 didn't exist. And Activision wasn't stitched to the rotting corpse that Blizzard is nowadays.
There are studios that have been rather quietly putting out really good, complete, polished games that while lacking the scope of BG3, are lovely self-contained experiences that, importantly, focus on doing a few things really well. Obsidian, Square Enix, FromSoft, Firaxis, etc. - and each of those have been around long enough to have some... questionable entries... but I, e.g., didn't mind paying $60 for The Outer Worlds even though it's not as "deep" as BG3. And I certainly wouldn't call Obsidian "lazy" developers. BG3 is an absolute landmark achievement. And it should be treated as such.
When I buy a full course meal at a restaurant I expect it to be just that, and the last thing I want to deal with is the restaurant trying to nickel and dime every side, sauce, or option. The focus has become less about delivering a good product and more along the lines of how to extract every nickel and dime from my pockets. All while still delivering a shit product that doesn't justify the price.
I've been working in the gaming industry for more than 10 years. Here's my take on BG3 and Larian. Larian showed what corporate (and money obsessed) managers REFUSE to acknowledge. Larian showed that making A GOOD GAME/ART is more important than making the most money/engagement/whatever other metric you want to maximise. These managers are scared of BG3 because they can't measure what a good game is. They are not gamers. And if they were, they purposefully killed that part of themselves for their "career". Learn about Larian. Learn about Valve. Learn about pre-EA Bioware. Learn about dozens of successful indy developers who haven't sold out. Support those! And feel free to add more AA and AAA studios here which haven't sold out either!
A lot of people seem to slightly miss what the real outrage is about here, including this video. Gamers aren't angry that smaller devs like Xalavier aren't aiming for BG3-level games; no one in their right mind, even on the IQ vacuum of twitter, expects that. Larian literally had to go super saiyan, and temporarily grow to AAA level, just to finish it. The REAL problem is that devs representing AAA studios that have the experience, the manpower, and more money than god, chimed in and agreed with Xalavier's tweet like their company couldn't have made a BG3-level game a decade ago. They absolutely could have, but they didn't want to. And they didn't want to, because while it would have made money, it wouldn't have made ALL the money like another uninspired, bland, MTX-laden, live-service, season-pass scam. Baldur's Gate 3 could, and should, absolutely be the new standard for AAA effort. And it should have been the standard a long time before now.
Exactly. Many of the most prominently vocal folks protesting BG3 are from major studios that have multiple times the funding and at least twice the developer staff, with games on their resume that have taken as long if not longer to make than BG3 did, that are building on recognizable franchises and well-developed engine frameworks. Xalavier was talking about the studios smaller than Larian. Problem is he couched his statements in an argument that did not limit itself to the small indies, but seemed to be applied to the industry as a whole. And so the larger studios took those statements and tried to run with them as a shield for their shitty business practices.
Ubisoft is really the worst offender. They went from all time greats like Far cry 3 and black flag to releasing single player mom's (Valhalla) stuffed to the brim with micro transactions. Not to mention basically every far cry since 3 is the same thing with a different skin.
chiming in to add support for @burninghammerkai6164 's point. Yes, you might say "AAA studios don't want to make a good game like Baldur's Gate 3". And that's right and wrong -- there are plenty of developers who want to make something at the same level of Baldur's Gate 3 (or Tears of the Kingdom, or Elden Ring, or The Witcher 3 ... yadda yadda). But they're not the ones who decide. Executives at video game publishers are the deciders. They decide what kind of games are made, and generally they put money into game projects if they can show that game project will *make* a lot of that money back. They're focused on the money, how much their investment will make back. I guarantee that Baldur's Gate 3, even though it undoubtedly will be a top contender for game of the year, will not have made even as close to as much money as the top mobile MTX-hell game on the app store for 2023. I'd be surprised if it even made a tenth of the profit compared to that game. Games like Baldur's Gate 3 make money. But they don't make ENOUGH money consistently for executives to want to pursue them -- at least, not with the amount of budget and time this kind of game needed. (I do worry about Dragon Age 4, which is undoubtedly suffering a ton of executive meddling behind the scenes as we speak). Larian Studios is independent, so they didn't need to please executives. Baldur's Gate 3 took six years to make, along with a lengthy early access period for about half of that period. It's extremely rare for ANY triple-A games to be developed under those two conditions. Baldur's Gate 3 is a triumph, but largely because it wasn't developed in the same way as other triple-A games. And perhaps the real moral of the story is -- triple-A style games shouldn't be developed for corporate profit.
I feel that brief bit about folks assuming and misinterpreting what people say rather than asking what they mean. It's something I fall into myself, as my brain stereotypes folks that share the same outlook as being part of the same group even though they've likely never met each other and I address the latest offender as if they were there for the previous conversation. I do my best to catch myself from doing it, but it's tougher than it should be with the social conditioning of interacting in such spaces too much. Abstaining is of course an approach, but old habits die hard and rear their head the times you peek your head in again, or interact in similar mediums even if unrelated. Interacting with folks on Discord as if they were random Twitter users and you hadn't known them for months if not years and should consider them with more of a face.
What I find funny is that when some devs said the same things about tears of the kingdom (impossible physics engine, insane scale, shining polish...etc etc) no one made a fuss and kinda nodded along and went "yup, that's the type of effort nintendo puts behind its flagship franchise and you can't expect that from every studio"
Nintendo also did this crazy thing called “Not releasing the game until the developers were finished making it.” But there is probably also no way it would exist in a world where they also didn’t have BOTW to build off of.
Funniest thing about ToTK is that what it did was already achieved by Garry's Mod when it comes to physics of glueing together parts to make vehicles. It's nothing new really, at all, only new thing they introduced was physics for _flying_ creations.
Because Nintendo is a AAA studio. Larian isn't. It's a AA studio at best and put out a game that put the AAA studios of its genre to shame. People aren't saying every studio out there should be 200+ hour RPGs with the same level of quality that BG3 has. They're saying AAA studios, who have even MORE staff and MORE money and MORE years of experience should be able to put out games of a similar quality, and it's shitty that they aren't. EA, Bethesda and others do not have an excuse. Johnny Indiedev and his team of a dozen people with a budget of $500,000 *does* have an excuse.
As someone who is fresh to the discourse about this game, what i would like to see is more discussion about how to emulate the decisions that the developers of BG3 made *regardless* of budget. Many big studios have blown comparable amounts of time and money and created some utterly reviled shambling husk of a game that was immediately forgotten. The conversation shouldn't be about what money and time make possible; that's not what's unique about this game. What's unique about this game is its ability to use its vast resources to fulfil an equally vast ambition. How did it do that? There's certainly what was mentioned in the video: 1. They took the time to do it right 2. They avoided diluting their property, which meant... 3. They were free of corporate meddling changing the scope or trying to adapt to the trend of the moment (the killer of many, many a franchise) 4. Their business model relied on providing a game that was good *at launch* for a fair price, full stop, no microtransactions; 5. ?? There's gotta be more than that, right? Take Daikatana, for example, or Duke Nukem Forever. For them too: huge budget; free creative hand; long awaited. Failures. Clearly there is more to the story than "give developers a bunch of money and time and leave them alone, and they will make a good game". Many, many things had to go right, beyond those four points, for this game to be such a success. (I suspect one of them is, in addition to a lack of corporate meddling, there was a lack of internal meddling from a big ego at the top; and a lack of swaying to the winds of audience pressure.) Those decisions really should be studied. Game devs in the genre who don't study them really are doing their audiences a disservice, I think. The lessons here are not about what money and time can get you. The lessons are about how to use your resources well.
Regarding Daikatana and DNF, those went through multiple restarts throughout the development process. One of the more well known is Daikatana switching game engines years into development and having to start over from scratch because of it. So while the projects "daikatana" and "duke nukem forever" certainly were around for a long time, the development processes that formed the final products were shorter than that. As you say though, protection from internal meddling is important as well, as is having enough money to see development through to the end and not need to find someone to help fund the game which may require more changes.
I think the problem is 2 fold 1. No one expect some little indie studio to come out with Baldur’s Gate but there’s no reason actibliz should be making a bg3 every single time because there 3 times the size of Larian 9000 people worked on Diablo 4 to Larians 400 so yes If you call your self a triple A studio this is your benchmark now 2 I truly believe that in the games industry you have uncreative incompetent devs that have been around long enough to just get out into lead position and the integrity on the games shows.
Here's a conversation I want to have: who exactly was Mr. Nelson's tweet for? Who expects his little indie studio to make BG3? For that matter, who was shitting on Celeste because it isn't Assassin's Creed? Who was shitting on Spelunky because it isn't Tomb Raider?
There was a small portion of loud people saying *all* RPGs should be held to the standard of BG3, indies included, and Mr Nelson's tweet was intended to be a reminder that indie studios have budget, time and staff limits that make such a thing nearly impossible. Then the tweet went outside its target audience and was taken as a defense of the worst of AAA studios, for some reason, and things spiraled from there.
I think it's more about people setting the appropriate expectations based on the scope rather than setting the new standard across the board. But I have to ask: Do people think it's not buggy? Nothing experience ruining overall, but I've run into frequent bizarre animation issues, dialogue and sound that simply doesn't initiate, and quests that bugged and couldn't be completed without a reload. No microtransactions should be applauded and hopefully the worst of the tech issues will be fixed down the road. I think I'll be playing this one for years to come.
Players have been so burned by corporate game making over the years, that a game like Baldur’s Gate 3, which was a bunch nerds making exactly the kind of game their fellow nerds wanted to play made a huge splash that would have been impossible if it released when in the ‘00s. Players are STARVING for this specific type of game. But since it is a game you’d have a harder time pitching to investors, we don’t get a lot of them.
I don't it's a problem about being buggy or not. Skyrim and New Vegas are a nightmare of bug and crashes, that doesn't mean people dislike them. People just want to feel that their time and money is respected and most of all, not being lied to. It's probably sad that BG3 & Larian became an outlier on this
Ultimatley all we can do as consumers is reward developers like Larian who make good games by buying them and punish developers who make bad games (bad can mean whatever you want it to) by not buying them.
I think it's hard to expect every AAA studio to match the idea of BG3 as a norm, when even BG3 didn't even release perfectly. There are plenty of people who are having a hard time getting through Act 3 due to CPU bottlenecks, and I think this issue is being glossed over and BG3 is being used as a example of a perfect game front to back when it isn't. And I think that's perfectly reasonable, its not going to be a perfect release because developing something stable that translates to 100s ~ 1000s of different variations of a pc is really difficult. I agree with the sentiment of gamers needing to be better at being specific with their critique of studios and expectations. However, I do wish that studios would be a bit more specific with what is realistic in what is truly "modern" gaming. Which for the vast majority of people on earth this is not going to be 120fps, 4k graphics with raytracing. It's impossible to expect a 70+ hour game, with very little bugs, adequate working conditions for 400 ~ 4K workers, the best graphics, fully sound designed, voice acted, mixed, and mastered in a 2 ~ 4 year dev cycle without getting a serious amount of budget from publishing and investment and that's not going to happen with the vast majority of studios. My point is the industry has made promises it can't keep to the players and the players have unrealistic expectations because of it. "Modern" consoles sell at a loss in profit right now and have to recoup that money on software. This translates to games going on gamepasses, microsoft and sony approving more remakes and remasters and genuine low risk investments or microtransactions to make up for the losses. This just makes it an impossible environment for ambitious development because if it succeeds it's great, but if it doesn't it's fucked. Deadass, and I know PC gamers don't like reading this, but the reason why most of the finished games that are optimized are on Switch is because it's the only console right now that makes a profit on it's hardware, and it has an abundant amount of players on the system to make considerable amount of profits to cycle back into dev time and budget. PC, Xbox, and Playstation do not have these luxuries.
What reasonable take? All the big corps were liking the writers post because they are in fact, lazy and entirely profit driven rather than brand driven. None of this was mentioned. Why are EA, Ubisoft liking that post to begin with?! It’s gross.
@@kouyasakurada5547 The reasonable take being blame the big corps for the current state, not the devs. I have a few friends in the game dev industry, and I can tell you that all the ones I know are just as disgusted by the things the execs keep pushing on them, but the problem being is the corps have the money, so they make the rules. The execs are liking that tweet for different reasons than why he wrote it. He wrote it as "With everything they make us go through, we can't replicate what Larian has done" The big corps liked it to use it as a shield for themselves.
@@duman173 people that are actually able to read and comprehend the words they're reading, liked, understood and mostly agreed with that dude's comment. In fact, this whole video is literally just restating that dude's comment.
This is an incredible vid essay. Great work Sebastian!!! I think as gamers we need to recognize that BG3 is the new "gold standard" not the "minimum standard".
Wait. Since when is Larian a giant? Arguably, its not even a rriple a studio. And since when did people judge indies and bigger games under the same standard? You said it yourself: Vampire Survivor is considered one of the best games of the last year, and i cant think of any standard it delivered on.
I do think the standard should be "whatever you shoot for, hit it." Don't over-promise the audience, don't promise them _anything_ until you're positive you can deliver it. Don't even tell the marketing team the game exists until it exists. Son't attempt to make a massive breathing world if you can't actually do that. If you can only make a small game, that's fine, make a small game and make it great. Make it a two hour experience that everyone loves. If you intend to go big, then be willing and able to put in the work needed to achieve it.
Personally I would like the discussion to separate. We should absolutely talk about games and what is a fair price, anti-consumer practices, etc. On the flip side I’d like the focus on Baldurs’s Gate 3 to be about what it does as a video game. So many reviews I have read on online talk about how it is a pro consumer product yet rarely divulge in what makes it a great game, and I really can’t tell if it’s a good thing or a bad thing.
I feel like a critical factor that Frost stated and I see often overlooked in the comments is the lack of pressure from investors or publishers. A lot of the things we hate about modern games: over-monetization, rushed buggy releases, obscene crunch, mass layoffs, etc, usually come at the demand of the money men. Business execs with no real understanding or care for the art of the industry, and unrealistic expectations for profit margins. Most triple-A studios these days are already owned and run by these types, it's not like they really have the option of saying "no" to Mr. Publisher's money and the demands that come with it. I remember reading about Bethesda's investors blocking requests from the devs to use a newer better engine for Starfield for these same reasons. Why invest in a new engine when people will buy something made by the old beat-up creation engine? Im not saying the money men are the only problem with modern triple-A, far from it, but I am saying that that aspect in particular doesn't come up often enough in discourse around BG3.
I just want games to pick what they want to do and just do it well. Katamari Damacy wants you to roll stuff into a ball, so you...roll stuff into a ball in a really intuitive way with aesthetics that complement the game. Devil May Cry 5 wants you to do big combos with lots of freedom, so it moves you from encounter to encounter to facilitate that. Halo was originally supposed to be a story-based sci-fi RTS with sprawling maps, so they made it a sci-fi game where you're incentivized to keep as many Marines alive as possible. In later games, they went even further and let you swap weapons with your NPC allies to customize your small little squad. Give plasma weapons and watch them melt shields, lining you up for headshots. Give them snipers or battle rifles to be able to headshot unshielded enemies with great accuracy, etc. In the Flood levels, having any of your Elites carrying an Energy Sword is a huge boon, especially on Legendary difficulty. Strategy was a part of how you play this Action First-Person Shooter, it informed the way the player interacted with the game. I don't want games to be a million things. Just let me do THE thing and have fun doing it. Yakuza may have a ton of side activities, but it's all very much still "Yakuza" in its tone and execution. Lara Croft looking for hidden targets to shoot with her bow for XP while she's in the middle of trying to stop some bad guys from doing some very bad things, however, doesn't really fit with the game. StarCraft and Halo are exceptions in that they are both really great at what they do, but they let the player themselves do whatever they want with it (map settings, Forge) and then share it with other people to play and have fun together. Then again I also like Nier: Automata and Xenogears which both try to be like, 3 different games at points so wtf do I know lmao
I'm just tired of almost unplayable games riddled with micro-transactions, or good games ruined over time by monetization. The standard BG3 should set is that a game is finished before release and nothing pay to win or fomo is involved in the monetization.
I think it's one thing to think, "I can't make a masterpiece like that" and another to go out of your way to say, unprompted, "I hope you're not expecting that from me." It's like a kid telling you they didn't break the vase before you even know the vase is broken. Saying that shows that you're not confident in your own creation. Just congratulate Larian, and keep working on what you're working on, doing the best you can. I think of Sea of Stars coming out a few weeks after Baldur's Gate III. It's a fantastic game. It's not Baldur's Gate III but BG3's existence does nothing to diminish its greatness. It's the game that they wanted to make and they had the resources to make, and the passion they put into it shows. If the devs had come out before it's release and said "hey, this isn't Baldur's Gate III" everyone would have just said "Yeah, no one expected it to be Baldur's Gate III, and it's really weird that you're going out of your way to say it's not."
Well, any AAA studio that cant match Larian to some extent should not do RPGs. RPGs require some kind of passion for more than shiny moneys, so its best left to specialists. Gamers also know the difference between AAA and Bob in his basement, thus demands are set based on cost and complexity. But yeah, big studios can go fornicate themselves if they think they will not be judged based on what other studios manage to do, when they sell their crap at full price with microtransactions in them. One microtransaction, one seasonpass, and you will be judged according to the precedent set by BG3.
The issue is judgement means literally nothing to AAA Studios and publishers if the money keeps rolling in. Complaints will only go so far until people just stop giving them money, and unfortunately there are too many who will still buy the product regardless of quality. I agree 100% that at the very minimum AAA should be looking at larian and bg3 as the standard for a high quality release. I just don't know what else can be done to fix companies that see no issue in the way they handle business 🤷♂️
@@ItsRelf Absolutely true. Look at Pokémon games, the worst they are they best they sell. Brand recognition and induced addiction to micro transactions is more important than quality nowadays.
@@ItsRelf Thats very true. I was only referring to my judgement before I buy a product. The number of youtube active gamers is not enough as the real money is in casuals. However, active gamers is not a tiny fraction and they do not want to not make money from us either. Some may try harvest this market more than garbage companies (insert at least 90%). FromSoftware for instance, probably find this rather good, and thus a market of complete games with relatively higher standards will stand in opposition to garbage, that can have a long term effect if more casuals registers this.
@@snowolf494 aw it doesn't help that Pokemon's a series that's been around for so long that folk will just buy it hoping for a better game. Even when it's trending downwards. I'm just as bad with games like NBA 2k and FIFA. I buy the game every year and get pissed off with it for all the micro bs, more so with 2k cause I don't play ultimate team. Where as with 2k that shit is in almost every game mode 🤦
The thing is, it's both. BG3 is at the pinnacle of RPG games for this era right now and a lot of what it brought to the table should already be in RPGs. The polish of the mechanics, variety of choice, and quality of the world of BG3 is well above what should be expected of most RPGs. At the same time, most RPGs are missing the base level of freedom of choice/ consequence of choice, unique self-made moments, and immersive (not having things take you out of the "world" just so you can play the game). Yes, these things overlap, and yes that makes it a bit harder and games like Kenshi and Valheim show you that there can be a good balance regardless.
The message not being conveyed properly isn’t that we want more Baldur’s Gate, we want more games of quality like Baldur’s Gate. It’s an entertaining, fleshed out product with barely any flaws, no micro transactions, nothing exploitative and again is genuinely entertaining. Not every game needs to be this megalithic, Titan of a product with a million bells and whistles. But every game should strive to be as complete as Baldur’s Gate is. It’s what games used to be and what they should be again.
IMO even if the game is above the standard thanks to spending more time on the game... maybe it's a sign we should just spend more time on games to make good products instead of churning out crap?
If you want better games...you have to stop giving YOURSELF FOMO. Devs and publishers are greedy yes, absolutely, but they take advantage of your fomo. No fomo, no way to let them exploit it.
It has been said for so long now that it is impossible to release a big game at full price without tons of bugs, without half-finished core features, and without additional monetization options. Then we have BG3, which proves those claims to be false. The industry folks on the "this is an anomaly" camp are trying to find excuses to not learn from Larian on how to do better. If they can't measure up to Larian then they should all be asking them for pointers on how to do better, not justifying continued mediocrity.
The standard should be devs seeking to make good games that make money, not companies making great monetization with a game around it . Also I feel like many newer games neglect the importance of gameplay as the keystone of all the development.
It's also worth mentioning that BG3 is an RPG and not all games are RPGs. Saying that BG3 should be the standard for GAMES is really out of touch. Platformers, MMOs, strategy, puzzle and on and on - can't get much out of BG3 besides "don't be buggy" and "don't be greedy bastards, people don't like that".
Maaaaaan, thank you for offering conversation as opposed to just trying to encourage people speaking over one another 🙏 A cold take indeed when someone actually wants people to understand each other instead of staying bitter for essentially no reason. Cheers and thanks Frost for an amazing piece on this topic 👏🍻 Also, for the game, I was a Baldur's Gate II: Dark Alliance kid - borrowed it from a friend 😋 I won't be able to play 3 for a good long while so I have nothing for notes on the game itself.
I know in my line of work I get customers that sometimes want something that isn't practical because they have little knowledge about design standards and no matter how much I try to tell them that what they are asking for isn't practical and in fact will make things way worse they are so stubborn they want it anyway because they think they know what they are talking about. So I build it for them anyway and then after I finish they see that in fact what they wanted was a terrible idea and have me tear it all down and start again lol. I don't hate those kind of people but along with people I work with we do make fun of those people a lot. Devs don't hate us but I assure you they do laugh at us a lot, and that's ok.
Thing is, a lot of complaints people have were directed at publishers and shareholders. It never was about the devs, and especially not indie devs. No one in their right mind would ever hold that standard to smaller studios, only triple A. As triple A does have the money, rescources and mannpower to provide solid quality, hell people expect experience from them too they are triple A after all, but I bet after all this time churning out cash grab microtransaction filled trash shareholders and executives pretty much force upon the studios they own made them inexperienced in making good quality games.
It's simple: if a studio says they can't put the same resources and effort into a game to match BG3, then it shouldn't cost as much or even more than BG3
I think it's perfectly fair to hold up BG3 as a new standard not in quality of actual product but in designing process. Bigger teams with bigger budgets have produced games a fraction of the quality of BG3 with every measure to nickle and dime you. It's not as if this is some one in a million chance, it's just a company who made a game that was solid, used that success to make another game that was solid and used that success to make a third game that was solid. I don't even think BG3 is anything exceptional, it's a really good RPG with really good mechanics just like Divinity Original Sin 1 and 2 before it. The fact people are upholding what is, in reality, just a Solid Good Game as the fucking pinnacle of game development is wild both in that they feel it appropriate to do so and that they're not wrong in doing so. I'm going through BG3 in a co-op run and I legit said to my friend 'It's weird playing a game for 30 hours and not having any filler content, no grinding, no collect-a-thons, no running through an open world for 15 minutes with nothing happening' and it's completely true. Honestly I'd say Divinity Original Sin 1 was more revolutionary for the genre then BG3 but we got better more complete games back then so it wasn't as impressive. For me the minimum standard is exactly what BG3 has managed to pull off, not the quality of the material but the simple fundamentals of it instead. Games need to come out feature complete, story complete, without severely harmful bugs, with a minimum of filler content wasting my time (this can be ignored if the whole point of the game is filler, I will not deny the MMO crowd their grind even if I do not understand it), without egregious monetisation and without a graveyard of broken promises.
The giant upside for Larian here, after this long ass dev cycle, is they can recycle the engine for other games D&D based or original, they only need to craft the stories and landscaping.
This right here, this is proof that people don't know anything about the devs they're on their knees for. BG3 uses a modified version of the Divinity Engine. Most of the engine work was already done.
@@coolguyjki I spotted the arm-chair developer. Proof or get the fuck out of here. Acting like you have intimate knowledge about something you are obviously an outsider of is cringe as hell, dude.
@@coolguyjkigamers in general have always thought themselves to have a unique perspective into the industry just because they play games. You see people talking about engines, patching/fixing content, dev cycles etc with confidence but it's all conjecture
@@coolguyjkiWhat the heck are you talking about you weirdos, not only does that have nothing to do with the OP's comment, but If you've played any of their games you'd know that there is weirdly small number of reused assests from DoS2 and BG3
Reusing assets is very different to having a ready to use engine that your team knows the ins and outs, but I totally agree that gaming is one of the few hobbies where people think they have an idea of how the product is made and can weigh in on the topic.
Basically, I want a game experience that isn't marred by my internal compromises and excuses. I want to pick up a game, play it, and have fun. I do not want to pick up a game, play it, and think "I guess this is fun enough considering..." Getting "a fun game" with no reservations or extenuations should be normal, not extraordinary.
Way I see it, in the games industry the "BG3 sets too high a standard" debate is being used by two different groups with the same arguments, but for different reasons. There are developers, big and small, who either don't have the ressources for such a project or simply don't want to make a game like that (because as great as BG3 is, it's not the only valid type of rpg), but feel pressured to make one. And there are shit developers, big and small, who are used to selling cheap, lazy shit and pressing it for the maximum amount of money, who are afraid of rising standards and better competitive products that make people not buy their shit anymore. I have all the sympathy in the world for the former group. The latter can rot in hell.
I have no sympathy whatsoever for the useless executives whose hollowing out of the AAA game space has led to 'make good game for one sensible price' being beyond their meagre skills to return to - but we all know it's not the executives but the line developers who will be punished for failing to meet a standard their management made impossible to hit.
@@nicolasferreiro4492Lmao it's pretty clear you didn't actually read much from the devs talking about this then. How was JE Sawyer's statement "talking like a suit"?
To use your analogy of 'not expecting every basketball player to be as good as Michael Jordan's best game,' I will agree that that is an incredibly high standard that few if any players could meet. But, if I were a in the basketball scene, I think I would still expect every player to try to do so. Those players have an obligation to their fans to play the best game they possibly can, and it is that mentality that inspires people to push beyond what is accepted as 'good enough' and break records. Is every game going to be as good as Baldur's Gate III? Absolutely not. But I certainly don't think that it should be considered a "near impossible" (6:17) achievement. Especially coming from established studios who have "plenty of practice... making games," (1:48) hundreds of developers, and "major brand recognition." (1:58). For example, look at how BioWare seems to have systematically slaughtered itself. I grew up playing Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Knights of the Old Republic. Andromeda was such a buggy mess that is was comical. Inquisition bored me so much that I cannot remember anything that happened in the game aside from the general plot and two of the dragon fights, and all the news I have heard of Dreadwolf is about how they have rebooted the development cycle again and again only to lay off swathes of senior developers who made the games I loved. It feels like the AAA games industry has spent years taking the stuff I loved, gutting it, slathering it in shit, and then demand that I thank them for the service. I apologize if I seem overly antagonistic towards you; it is not my intent. I think that your Cold Take series is great and I do value your insight and journalism. If you think I am misunderstanding/misrepresenting what you are saying, please feel free to respond/reply. At the end of the day, I, a consumer, want the best games I can get, and I have been very frustrated by recent trends. I want more games of Baldur's Gate III's quality, and I think that that is a widely shared opinion.
The thing is, Baldur's Gate 3 _Isn't_ an isolated incident. We were having this conversation six months ago when Hi-Fi Rush dropped at the same time as Forespoken: a game with a smaller scope and far more modest budget stole the show from a grotesquely expensive AAA blockbuster with one of the industry's biggest studios behind it. The story hasn't changed since then. Gamers just want good, finished experiences at a scale befitting their price point. Baldur's Gate 3 is getting so much positive attention in part because it's a $60 game that feels like it's worth the price of admission in an era where games with far less effort and care are being sold at higher effective price points, in addition to being otherwise scummy.
I really, really think everyone is overthinking this. People are just looking at their own fandom and going "why is ours as much (if not more) and riddled with bugs and the bad faith practices we've gotten used to in this industry?" if not bg3, then something else.
Very nice video, but I couldn't help but be entranced by the trailer in the background. Why, exactly, were those dragons messing up that Illithid ship? Because that was awesome.
Funny how BG3 was singled out as an anomaly when both Tears of The Kingdom and Elden Ring where anomalies as well. I'm guessing they were given a pass because they were made by Japanese studios.
I watched and knew about the controversy before and Big Thanks to you, Frost for giving voice to the other side of the table. I want people with a soul and passion, indies, to make more games like Baldur Gate, and let AAA games burn off and die because they put algorithms, money, and burnout over developers
I agree on having that conversation: @5:48, I find it flawed that you think it is acceptable to have Day 1 DLC's, regardless of what it's for (this case, a costume). I think a lot of us remember when stuff like costumes, cheat codes, or the like were stuff you could unlock by playing the video game. By allowing any predatory practice into a game, you are partaking in lowering the bar, and continuing the trend of thought that this normalization should be such. I reject the notion we should accept to pay microtransactions for a video game you are also expected to pay full price for (assuming it's not a Freemium/FTP type game).
I don't think people are expecting every game to be as large or epic as BG3, that's not what's being said when we say it should be the new standard. All we want is competently made games that are a complete experience and not broken on release. That's it, that's the floor. Everything else Larian managed with BG3 is what makes it amazing
What I would like developers to take away from BG3 is the fact that it worked on launch. Larian took their time and did it right. AAA studios have absolutely no excuse to knowingly launch a game in a broken state.
Notice how everyone making negative articles about it, the devs complaining about it: Are all saying that making a game EXACTLY LIKE BG3 would kill their studio. But no one started out saying they wanted more Baldurs Gate, they said they wanted more quality. But the modern AAA gaming industry doesn’t know how to do anything but, in the wise words of Yahtzee Croshaw “REPLICAAAAATE, REGURGITAAAATE” so of course they need to complain about how it’s something they can’t copy
The irony is that other studios are saying they can't do what Larian did: release it in early-access, develop it for years using the income from that, then release the final product (which is free if you bought it in early-access). When really studios have been doing that for years, except it wasn't early-access but release, and the final product was the 'Gold Edition' or the 'Ultimate Edition' which meant the could charge us twice. See: Skyrim, Cyberpunk, Witcher 3, Battlefield 2042, etc.
The sad part about devs saying that 'make good game and sell once for fixed price' sets an unrealistic expectation for a business model is that they're right. BG3 could make nine trillion dollars and sell more copies than every game in the history of games combined, and it would still change nothing about the business models of corporate executives whose entire existence is only validated in the notion that there are clever exploits for taking more money for less game. I have no sympathy whatsoever for the useless executives whose hollowing out of the AAA game space has led to 'make good game for one sensible price' being beyond their meagre skills to return to - but we all know damned well that it's not the executives but the line developers who will be punished for failing to meet a standard their management made impossible to hit.
Anyone praising the game as "complete" has not finished it, Acts 1 and 2 are significantly more compleate than act 3 the ending / 3rd act is incredibly scuffed and clearly rushed, a damn shame
I definitely am on the side that this is what gaming advancement should look like and this is the standard all games should aim for. But to be clear, I'm not saying I want every game to be over 100 hours and with choices and and fully voice acted. If you can't do that. Then don't. Make a 4 hour game with no choices that tells an incredible story. But if you are going to put choices in your game, don't do the good or bad choice with two endings. And if you call yourself AAA, then you better spend the money to voice act every single thing in your game.
The thing is, BG 3 is not even a complete game. Everyone praising the game too early that they haven't even get into act 3 bug and incomplete mess. Just like Divinity 2, their full release is basically early access pt.2 and definitive edition is the actual complete release. For me, the game is 10/10 in act 1 & 2, but unfortunately stumbled in 7/10 act 3.
Not surprised. Most people don’t finish games, and move on rather quickly. That, and a lot of people’s standards are really low. I think the main reason why something like BG3 is big (socially) despite being a more niche genre, is marketing (ads and a sh*t ton of articles), and that “normies/casuals” were made aware of it. And given they likely never played a CRPG before, and is at least a decent game apparently, they think it’s amazing. Like a kid trying ice cream for the first time and thinking vanilla is the best flavour, because it’s the _only_ flavour they’ve tried. But if they tried others, it would be much lower. Now I could be wrong as I haven’t played any CRPG’s myself or BG3, but looking at it from an outside perspective, I don’t really see what BG3 does that warrants it as some “impossible standard”. Branching dialogue with 3D characters, cutscenes, and voice acting isn’t new, Mass Effect did it over 10 years ago. And the genre itself isn’t new either. Nothing about it looks like some impossible feat. It just seems like no one with AAA budgets/resources _tried_ to make a higher budget CRPG because it was/is a niche genre and not worth publisher’s time. Not because it was impossible to do. Larian may not be an indie studio, but they aren’t bigger or have more resources than EA, Activision, Ubisoft, Rockstar, and others either.
Yeah, but I think a lot of games have something like that. Act I in BG 3 is probably the greatest RPG experience ever made. I can not think of another game with this much depth so early on. If it was of the same quality as Act I throughout the whole game it would probably be one of the very very rare 10/10 games for me. Possibly among the greatest games ever made. Instead it is more like a 9/10.
I feel jaded after so many years, and BG3 reminds me it is possible. Every time i was upset at some game, looking at it thinking "I know these guys can do better" i was right, and now i can see it. Its possible.
The thing everyone misconstrues is that players want more BG3, no. Players want what BG3 represents. A return to finished, well polished, not monoetized to hell and back games, made with passion, flair, and a few wild ideas.
I mean, Nintendo is notorious for doing this. Why now are people acting like Baldur's Gate 3 is the first and only game doing this? Where was this conversation when Zelda TotK and Pikmin 4 came out?
@@Drstrange3000 Nintendo is an outlier in the industry, for many reasons. Same can be said about From with Elden ring and AC6. People already expect a certain level from them. No one was expecting BG3 to be what it is, thus everyone sees it as a slap in the face of AAA devs. Especially when every other RPG as of late has been going down a dark and shitty route.
That's how I see it anyways.
@@GoingRampant92 Maybe it is due to playing Divinity Original Sin 2 and seeing the same devs work on an already big IP like Baldur's Gate. I wasn't as surprised at the outcome. Yeah Nintendo sadly is an outlier. PlayStation was great too but are now pushing for more Live service.
@Drstrange3000 I'd say the discourse hasn't happened before mostly because Nintendo does its own thing on its own platforms. It's a beautiful island of curiosities and quirkiness and fun, but it also has a separate experience expectation than much of the rest of the industry.
I'd say this discussion is happening now with BG3 precisely because BG3 has dared to step into an experience previously defined by strings of disappointments and go "Wake up, we have expectations to burn down."
@@Drstrange3000 I don't disagree with you at all. Divinity went largely under the radar, most have never played an RPG like it, Or BG, or arcanum, or fallout 1/2. To many this is their first true "role playing" game as opposed to an "RPG". If that makes sense.
Sony and Microsoft both tried to join Nintendo in their weird monopoly-niche thing they built as well, Sony almost did it.
“There is no game worth the inhumane treatment of another human being.”
Thank you. As a (former?) game developer, thank you.
As a former community manager who had to defend coworkers against harassment campaigns, thank you.
As someone who’s privacy was violated by a Final Fantasy fan that “had an idea so good” they felt it was okay to dig up my personal contact info, thank you.
As someone who would get routinely contacted by a disgruntled former customer who explicitly enjoyed knowing he was causing me anxiety, thank you.
Players and audience members really underestimate how much damage is done by thinking harassment is “sometimes” justified.
“I am become debt, destroyer of credit scores.” The true gold of this vid.
“Far be it from me to deny someone an asinine opinion on the internet. Where else are we supposed to put ‘em?” Tied with it IMO.
It's almost like 280 characters are not enough to make a point, but way more than it takes to start an argument.
The delivery style in this video is so smooth it’s like listening to a saxophone solo whilst receiving the hydration from an IV drip… whilst ambient mood lighting surrounds you. Smooooooooth.
Your prose, however, is not.
Frost is great, yeah. His channel is TheOtherFrost
He kinda always does that. A true blessing this voice Frost has.
@@Freenure lol you take a positive comment and make a criticism out of it... classic internet 👍Have a nice day!!
"You still have to climb the giant" was amazing line
Man who knew all it, took to make a good video game was time and effort, and not listening to shareholders
who knew not following what makes money, makes money
I think this is slightly unfair. Dev time isn't free so in a lot of cases to get the funding to jusitfy the upfront costs the money men want something as low risk as possible. What Larian have done is amazing but they must have been carrying significant financial risk for many years. If BG3 had flopped would the studio have survived?
@@SimuLordI don’t know if it’s the best way. Will it really make more profit then the games running kid’s parents credit cards dry for skins and emotes year after year? It’s why they want to put down that this isn’t what the norm will be because it won’t be that kind of easy cash.
It's also obviously made by fellow dnd players, and the community has a higher standard in general. There IS a thing called dignity, and honor that people just don't have nowadays. Blizzard literally hung themselves, trying to be greedy with D4 and overwatch 2. I'm happy there is still hope left for gaming.
@@DavidC-fk2wg They sold the game in early access. They probably wasn't in much financial stress. I think a closer comparison would have been kickstarter (the same way they funded the two D:OS games)
I feel the most frustrating part is the game developer media appears to be misrepresenting everyone's frustration as being targeted at devs and treating them like simpletons who need educated, when in reality we're exasperated with the companies and are 1) aware of the rigors of game development and 2) shouldn't need to understand the rigors of development in order to expect a quality product.
Is that why everyone “hate” the game?
I don't think, anyone threats you as a simpleton. The whole thread that sparked the discussion was a reply to the "new standard" arguments. Clearly there's a side that was absent in this discussions - the devs. And a guy (a brilliant writer btw, if you can judge him by his work @ hypnospace outlaw) very politely stated his opinion, brought light to the other side of the matter.
I think, we should care about and understand "the rigors of the development". Who worked on the product and how they worked is a part of the quality of this product. If there was crunch time involved, for example, it's a bad product, that's it. To reiterate that tweet for the thousands time - "i want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and im not kidding"
A lot of people ARE frustrated at devs, there's a big portion (or at least a loud one) that genuinely think that lazy and bad devs are the reason of the current state of AAA games.
And it's not helped by the fact that a lot of people don't even know the difference between executives, publishers and devs.
@@StepanCavemani don't WANT shorter games with worse graphics. You do you. I WILL play shorter game with worse graphics but that is not what I want.
You sound as if you want to have a less capitalistic worldview - better work life balance and more money. That has nothing to do with the quality of games
I have saw people that are aware of the rigors of game development, took the example of Baldur's Gate 3 and be like "if this studio can do it, why can't you? anyone that cannot do it like that are lazy". That's the point. Devs pointing out how Baldur's Gate can exist and why its dangerous, are being laughed at as "you are just too lazy/incompetent to do the same things".
To get even more meta on the discourse, maybe it doesn't feel like Christmas anymore because our lives are harder than they should be. Maybe we spend so much time bickering because we want to have input into how our games are made and how our lives are run, and we feel increasing disempowered.
And unfortunately, when you suggest solutions, people are quick to shoot it down, either due to pessimism dressed up as realism or because they've been brainwashed into hating everyone who isn't them. Think it was Malcolm X who said "If you aren't careful, they'll have you loving your oppressor and hating the oppressed." (I'm paraphrasing, but that's more or less the gist of it).
Yup.
The more days I live the more I feel like I don't really have control over my life.
I have to spend several hours each day on a boring 9 to 5 job (often longer then just 8 hours) just for lowest legal pay, with little to no free time unless I ruin my sleep schedule more then everchanging work hours do. It doesn't feel like I have any control over it, but someone in a manager position instead. I could be fired any day too, and knowing my luck, right in time for taxes and other expenses that I have to pay to not get in legal problems.
Adding live service, always online, pay 2 grind, overpriced games with every nook and cranny filled with microtransactions and DLCs that triple A craps out annually... It's soul crushing.
We're also completely spoiled. Gaming itself isn't all that special anymore - there are more games out there than any one person could play in a lifetime at this point, with only more added daily. Makes it really hard to have that special experience when it's so common, even the "bad" games.
Our lives have been overtaken by late stage capitalism, working on project for other people to turn a profit. No power over our own destinies when our bosses can look at a spreadsheet and decide we're an excess operating expense tomorrow.
There's only one way to win back control, and that's by gaining enough power to stand up to the bosses of the world. And the only way for us little guys to get such power is together. I'm talking unionisation. If we want to take back control of out lives, we need to come together to form a barrier the bosses can't cross, threatening to withhold our work at the cost of their precious profits.
It feels hopeless right now, especially if you're just starting out. But hope is not lost. There's always the chance of a better tomorrow if we stand together today!
On a related note, I lost all hype for my brand new PS5 when I realized I can't play any games without internet.... its basically a brick if it doesn't have internet!
The subtitles are slightly faster than the audio. It starts around the three minute mark.
TBH lesson here is that general opinion wants more good games without bullshit attached.
Also, projects like Hades, Hollow Knight, Disco Elysium, Stardew Valley shows us that high quality, smaller scale product, can be made if you pour into it your heart and a LOT of work. Indie devs can strive for quality - why AAA studios can't?
Larian is an example that even with hundreds of people working together and a much, much bigger scale you can achieve that.a
It was worth clicking on this video just to have a noire detective tell me that Twitter is a terrible place.
My issue with the people calling it unrealistic and an outlier, is that it comes from AAA devs.... they say it's rediculous to expect something on that level because they had 6 years and 400 staff.... yet their own games are 3-10+ years with 1,600+ staff.... they are saying they can't possibly produce something so good and feature complete, despite having much greater resources and we know they are full of crap.
A lot of people are itching for an excuse to call others “lazy”. They live for that. Not even in just games or the arts in general, just in life I’ve seen a disturbing about of people jumping at any opportunity to label someone who makes things for them as “lazy”. It’s almost vindictive or something
When people feel crappy, the easy serotonin hit is to bring other people down, rather than try and raise themselves up in whatever small way they can.
Worst thing is most people, if anyone, is properly lazy. You see someone sitting on their butt after work watching TV and think "See what they do when not put to the grindstone?", not thinking that they're indulging in a low-energy activity due to being low-energy themselves. Not to mention they only have so much time for themselves. If you left such a person to their own devices, they're gonna run out of shows to watch eventually, or get bored with yet another action flick or romantic-comedy, and they're gonna do something else, something more fulfilling. But in current society we can't reach that point, as by the time the episode's over we gotta get to bed to get enough sleep to get through work tomorrow.
This comment could easily have been ten sentences longer. I can't believe you were so lazy as to make it this short! /joke
The only reason anyone could call Baldur's Gate 3 an "anomaly" is because it's a game with *real* triple A quality that doesn't milk the players out of cash at every turn in every imaginable way possible, it respects the player instead.
And when it comes to what devs said... Yeah no, it never was about the devs, especially not of studios smaller then triple A. It was about publishers. Only reason people are so gung-ho on devs now is because the devs were the ones to speak out against BG3, not some shareholder or their publisher's CEO or whatever. People are mad as hell at all the scummy things publishers do for sake of profits, effectively turning what once was peak of gaming into the bottom of the barrel, hell, lower then that.
And what's the funniest and most sad thing to me, is that it all started with an indie dev speaking out, AAA studio devs hopped on this afterwards.
If only they didn't speak out about something that wasn't directed at them in any way, same for other devs that spoke out...
As much as I agree with this video I think it still misses the point. The counterargument to "why isn't every game like this" is "not every studio is Larian." Why? Why ISN'T every studio Larian? What are they doing differently that allows them to put out a game like this? That's the conversation we need to be having.
People fall back on "devs are lazy" because they don't understand what's happening in the industry. They see a company that seems to not have more people or money than others and the only other thing they can think of is "they must not be trying that hard, then." I don't think that's the reason, but what IS the reason? Is it early access? Is it having the developer and publisher be the same company? Is it the quality of executives or team leads? Something about the internal structure of the company? I don't know, but we shouldn't be saying "other companies can't do what Larian did." They clearly can, they just aren't.
frost's work is great as ever, though i don't agree (as seems to be implied) that baldur's gate 3 is a case of everything lining up to deliver the game of the century. we can't humanise the developers that unfairly get called lazy for products that obviously have phenomenal amounts of effort put into them while also reducing the work of the people at larian who made baldur's gate 3 to serendipity. larian making baldur's gate 3 is the obvious next step of larian making divinity: original sin 2.
anyway, i don't want "good enough". "good enough" (the vault boy is a fitting companion here) is just a way to describe games designed to be "safe", maximising sales at minimal risk. yes, if you care about your work you should try to make it great.
The thing that gets me in this discussion is the game also does still have a fair amount of bugs. Including things that have meant I need to reload to fix them. Like I'm not saying it to knock it, games's good, it just feels surreal to me that everyone seems to be acting like it's perfect on-release.
I don't play most games on-release so idk if my standards are off, are other games just straight up CtDing all the time when they release?
Thank you, I will now also be looking for Cold Take as well as Zero Punctuation
I don’t think Baldur’s Gate 3 would have been as big a deal if it came out in the ‘00s. It stands out because it is a really good game, that also bucks trends players hate (micro-transactions, and functional on release). I’ve been starving for a game like this because BioWare is basically dead now, and I’m not getting a new Dragon Age anytime soon. And even back in the day EA immediately ensured the original Dragon Age would remain the best one
I think a big issue with the discourse is that everyone says that BG3 should be the new AAA standard but nobody agrees on what that means. Ive seen people say the standard it sets being the length and scope of the game, the narrative and choices, the voice acting, and the lack of microtransactions and corprate greed. But until we collectivly decide what the AAA standard should be we are never going to get anywhere making these games better
I don’t think the people saying that themselves even know what it means.
Just: this good
Developers with a passion for their projects, functional on release, no microtransactions... it's not rocket surgery.
What it truly means is people wnat the good old triple A standard to be back, where triple A meant *quality* and a damn good innovative experience, not dime and dozen soulless cashgrabs fileld with overpriced microtransactions *in full price games* and pay 2 grind battlepasses, and constant fear of missing out on content locked behind timed seasons, alongside really scummy tactics to get people to spend, even on accident, all while the games release in buggy as hell states with empty promises of fixing the dumpsterfire of a game later on with dozens upon dozens of "apology posts" that hold no meaning anymore and just feel like someone forced to write it just to shut up the angry masses and ensure the blindly following fans don't realise what the hell is going on.
We already had this standard. It's literally nothing new at all. BG3 just raises is back to where it *was* before corporate greed kept lowering down and down, until reaching rock bottom, and then digging further down.
@@jordanj809 Nobody wants microtransaction fileld, bugfest garbage that fills pockets of publisher CEO and shareholders.
Players want games that provide good quality and respect them, that they are what they paid for and don't nickel and dime them on every corner in every way imaginable. People don't mind occassional cosmetics, especially if they aren't overpriced to the point where you can buy whole games for price of a singular skin, pay 2 grind battlepasses and RNG lootboxes were too much. Day 1 patches and ever so growing lists of empty promises only leading to the always online live service games getting abandoned and effectively scamming players who paid for the game out of their money isn't great either.
Ah.. I mean... we DO like our emotions. CGP Grey made a video "This video will make you angry" years ago that easily explained how the internet works. Media in general. Anger sells, anger spreads. Want reach? Make people angry.
I guess Armored Core 6 is gonna be very popular then, considering a lot of people are angry about how challenging it is lmao
@@christopherlyndsay8611 I've been dying of laughter over on Twitter about people rage-quitting instead of just trying new builds. Yeah, they can't do that for the tutorial helicopter boss, but I'm an AC newbie and still beat that boss in on 3 or 4 attempts. I figured out just how aggressive I really needed to be. I got the hang of firing weapons simultaneously and of making generous use of the sword. It really wasn't that bad. I know people have different concepts of what's difficult for them, but it seems to me that a number of gamers aren't even really trying to figure out how to play the game and what they need to be doing to clear missions and defeat bosses.
@@SolaScientia And look, some of us couldn't hack the tutorial boss of Dark Souls, either, even with time and effort, but.... that doesn't make it a bad game, even then. It's just a game I'm going to watch other people play. We need to get back the idea that every game doesn't have to be for everybody, but that's like the one take that the internet at large cannot possibly handle.
@@SolaScientia same, I’m already on chapter 4 on new game plus and I’ve never touched an AC game before lmao
@@christopherlyndsay8611 I've been working a bunch of shifts that have absolutely wiped me out, so I'm still in chapter 1, but I love what I've played. I'm still getting the hang of the movement speed and controls, but it's clicking pretty well for me.
The main thing I’ve learned is that I could listen to this guy’s voice for ages
Who is he?
@@user-vi4xy1jw7eTheOtherFrost, he has a personal channel where he occasionally does stuff.
Baldur's Gate 3 is such a buggy game with so many overlooked design flaws it amazes me people are so determined to call it amazing.
Love the both side of the argument here and then a cold headed, rational, empathetic take.
games in recent years have made me wrap all the way back around to even cosmetic micro-transactions are a failure and egregious. Every cosmetic you capitalistically lock behind the 16 digit cheat code in your wallet, you rob your player not only of money and immersion, but of the opportunity to explore your game, the opportunity to make a legendary experience to find and unlock that cosmetic that can be wielded as a badge of honor when discussing the game with other players. That cosmetic could be behind some niche achievement to get players talking like, "did you see that one quest in this far corner of the game? its challenging and hidden but you get this amazing looking cape from it!"
I wouldn’t even go that far. I’d just say lots of games have boring rewards like materials (that half the time you won’t even need/use), and nice cosmetics are a good way to keep you playing. I played Crash 4’s side content much more than I would have, despite being levels with just different filters, simply because of the cool costumes. Something that no battle pass could get me to do because most of the rewards are garbage and sometimes even the costumes/cosmetics aren’t even good.
That, and cool unlockables (weapon, costume, mechanic, etc) are fun rewards that used to be standard. Now they’re not because it’s become more corporate and that’s something they can sell for more money and if not, they don’t make it. Because we can’t have fun things in our video games anymore unless it’s some cameo/4th wall break that’ll get attention on social media.
Back in the day the “horse armor” DLC for Elder Scrolls was a joke and the only acceptable kind of game add on was an expansion pack that added new levels
I no longer look at a player with some fancy cosmetics as someone with skill and a lot of time invested into a game, all I see now is a whale getting milked for cash by greedy companies.
There's no longer skill involved in recieving a really cool cape, hat, or weapon variant, it's just a sign of you taking out your wallet nowadays.
"BG3 Is the giant whose shoulders you could stand on... But you still have to climb the giant"
YES. This. As someone in the industry as a Narrative Designer/Game Writer, I *WISH* I had the time and co-writers and budget to make something as sprawling as BG3. But that's just not in the cards. And I do work at a small studio that actually really values its workers. BG3 just had SO much going for it that allowed this to happen, and I'm SUPER happy for them that they accomplished it.
And you're right that AAA studio executives, money men and bean-counters are going to take all the wrong lessons from BG3 and use it as a reason to crunch developers even harder than before while also missing the entire point of what made the game good. :(
Yeah, so many people just don't understand that game developers are one of the most hardworking people out there.
Like if you don't tell developers not to crunch themselves they will die trying to make a good game.
@@Knight1029 Very.
At least one of our guys has to be told "Dude, *take your breaks.* " every once in a while, because otherwise he'll work right through them. XD
@@AegixDrakan yeah man. Game developers are crazy and a danger to themselves.
I don't think players are insisting that the average studio should be able to make something of this caliber and scope every time. I think the "BG3 proves they can do it, they just don't want to/are incompetent" comments are directed at the big publishers like Activision-Blizzard(-Microsoft?), EA, and Ubisoft. If anyone has the money, employees, institutional knowledge, and attention-grabbing IPs to make games on the level of BG3, it's them. That they instead fill their games with microtransactions and obvious content padding is a choice on their part and deserves to be called as such.
I feel like when people say, "400 people worked on this game for 5 years."
Yeah...and diablo 4 had 9000 people working on it for over 10 years.
It's a joke to say the 400 people for 5 years is the only reason it's good.
Games like the first console Ninja Gaiden, Prototype/Infamous, and Kameo: EoP. Games that delivered a new experience without relying on well-known IPs. Doesn’t have to be perfect, just has to be cool.
Also feel like we also touched on the subject of “being heard vs being understood” in another Cold Take
I didn't know Escapist had good content besides Yahtzee's stuff. Good to know.
Missing out on The Stuff of Legends, Adventure is Nigh, Design Delve, In the Frame and more!
Agreed. I just started binging Adventure is Nigh and I have never even played DnD before.
Ye they have some banger content
Yeah I only just recently started to get into these cold takes.
The chill analysis is really refreshing from all of the standard rage. WHich is obviously the whole point of calling it "cold takes" but I appreciate it nontheless.
This is one of the best gaming channels on youtube.
While yes, the BG3 argument got out of hand, it's due to angry people not being able to convey their true intentions correctly. People don't want a game that is exactly as ambitious and as massive as BG3. People just want complete games, and when one finally comes around, they fervently point to it and scream "THIS. WE WANT THIS." that being said, there's something to be said about the AAA devs coming out of the woodwork to comment and agree with the OP, who is an indie developer. When AAA is concerned, there is a certain level of quality that is rightfully to be expected. Larian studios is much smaller, took some serious financial risks, and has less overall resources than your average AAA company. The fact that AAA says "this game is an anomaly" or "the standard is impossible for us to meet" is a fucking joke. Of course the standard is possible to meet for AAA. The problem is that the current state of the industry demands that they don't.
I don’t think games that sell skins for over 2.99 should be called a MICROtransaction. There at that point a macrotransaction. This is also why I don’t like games that sell early access as a preorder bonus. Why am I paying for the opportunity to play your broken game when the day 1 patch isn’t out? Or if you know that it’s ready for launch then launch for everyone without having to shell out the extra cash for it.
The question to ask yourself is - would you rather pay twice as much for games on launch date, or swallow and live with these alternative monetization techniques?
People are simply forgetting that the standard price of a AAA game has been $60 for a long time. Many years now. AAA game development has only gotten more expensive, and scopes larger, yet the price remained the same. And, most importantly, everybody seems to be just ignoring inflation altogether. A $60 dollar title bought in 2002 should cost adjusted for inflation about $100. There are no $100 games. It's obvious that the devs need to get their money elsewhere, since the games are artificially way cheaper than they used to be. DLCs and microtransactions are just a natural outcome of this stupid adherence to a 60 dollar price tag.
@@D1ndo that’s 60 if your American the price in Canada has increased 3 times for us. So your beginning point is moot but I don’t also agree with paying more because indie games do this thing called releasing a product and making another new one since they can’t eat the cost of a bad game. Multi billion dollar companies increase the price because they can. Remember when Microsoft tried to increase Xbox live and the entire internet was absolutely saying no? And look at what happened to that. So using the it’s more expensive to make games argument doesn’t make sense either since you can just make a smaller game. Remember the quote? “I want shorter games with bad graphics, from people who work less and get paid more. I’m not kidding “
I feel BG3 is done right, rather done fast.
There's nothing stopping other studios to pace themselves, rather promise half-baked yearly instalments.
Convince me why it's worth the purchase, rather than tell me blindly buy a promise of a worthwhile game.
I knew I recognized that voice.. congrats Frost! Been a fan since Smite. You’re crazy talented, glad you’re getting recognized
I LITERALLY cannot overstate how much value your opinion carries, Frost....
It's people like you that keep me invested in the gaming culture even though I don't have time to play very much anymore.
Keep doin' your thing you brilliant, velvet-voiced man!
💚
My hot take that's actually a cold take I've been making for an entire game-generation is: Dial back budget and scope, and Baldur's gate IS actually a gold standard for a very specific set of things: Games can be released in a complete, polished state with the correct amount of patience and virtue. Their tactic CAN be replicated, too: Move slow, play-test constantly, and resource your project well. And most of all: LET THE GAME HYPE ITSELF. That's the thing I think we learned most of all. You don't need to build hype through a constant stream gameplay sizzle reals and trickles of gossip. Games aren't movies. "In Presales" and "Opening week" and "Top trending" don't matter to a game, yet are how new releases are all talked about. ONLY shit games that need to make back their production budget as quickly as possible before they fade from the Zeitgeist never to be played again are the games that need to talk like that. ACTUAL GOOD GAMES have the return on their investment talked about over YEARS, not WEEKS. If a game costs $1bn to make, that money can be made back across 3-5 years, it DOESN'T need to be made back in 6 weeks like a blockbuster movie. THAT'S what BG3 shows us. Build a game that will last a decade, like Skyrim or Witcher 3, and you won't just make your money back, you'll make a lifelong customer. Blizzard USED to do this, Bethesda seems to still be trying, and it's obvious Larian got the memo too. Now if only Activision could see it that way....
I was basically sold on BG3 when I first started seeing footage of the early access build. I didn’t need anything other than seeing that proof of concept to put it in my shopping list
Baldur's Gate 3 wasn't released in a complete polished state though, it was released in Early Access with only the first chapter and not all of the races/classes implemented. It took three more yearse before it reached that "complete and polished" state. It's worth remembering that Early Access is always a gamble, both for devs and consumers. On average, an Early Access game is about as likely to get finished as a AAA live-service game is to fulfill its roadmap promises.
"Let the game hype itself" is also easier said than done. "Baldur's Gate 3, from the makers of Divinity: Original Sin 2" markets itself, but have you even heard about Insomnia: The Ark? Do you know what Spiderweb Software's next project is? Did you know the Lords of the Fallen sequel/reboot is coming out in two months? Survivorship bias is huge in gaming, we all like to believe that great games can thrive on quality alone, but in truth most games die in obscurity, regardless of quality. A game can only succeed if people know about it, and feel compelled to buy it, that's why marketing/hype exists (and for the record: creators/influencers count as marketing). Case in point: _Neo: The World Ends With You,_ by all accounts an excellent game that _completely_ bombed because of insufficient marketing.
"If a game costs $1bn to make, that money can be made back across 3-5 years"
Not unless the game was entirely self-funded. Most games see the majority of their sales within the first couple of months to a year at most, so unless the game is built around recurrent spending, a publisher who's invested millions (and needs to meet quarterly projections to keep the shareholders happy) is NOT going to wait 3-5 years to see a return on that investment. Even live-service games with "10 year plans" barely last _one_ year if they don't perform to the publisher's satisfaction.
What BG3 shows us is that to make a game like BG3, you need seasoned developers, creative and financial autonomy, and _really_ strong brand power.
Man. I miss the old Blizzard.
Back when Warcraft 3 Reforged wasn't a thing.
When Overwatch 2 didn't exist.
And Activision wasn't stitched to the rotting corpse that Blizzard is nowadays.
There are studios that have been rather quietly putting out really good, complete, polished games that while lacking the scope of BG3, are lovely self-contained experiences that, importantly, focus on doing a few things really well. Obsidian, Square Enix, FromSoft, Firaxis, etc. - and each of those have been around long enough to have some... questionable entries... but I, e.g., didn't mind paying $60 for The Outer Worlds even though it's not as "deep" as BG3. And I certainly wouldn't call Obsidian "lazy" developers. BG3 is an absolute landmark achievement. And it should be treated as such.
Cold Take is really one of my favorite videos on this channel. Seriously great work to everyone involved.
When I buy a full course meal at a restaurant I expect it to be just that, and the last thing I want to deal with is the restaurant trying to nickel and dime every side, sauce, or option. The focus has become less about delivering a good product and more along the lines of how to extract every nickel and dime from my pockets. All while still delivering a shit product that doesn't justify the price.
I've been working in the gaming industry for more than 10 years. Here's my take on BG3 and Larian.
Larian showed what corporate (and money obsessed) managers REFUSE to acknowledge. Larian showed that making A GOOD GAME/ART is more important than making the most money/engagement/whatever other metric you want to maximise. These managers are scared of BG3 because they can't measure what a good game is. They are not gamers. And if they were, they purposefully killed that part of themselves for their "career".
Learn about Larian. Learn about Valve. Learn about pre-EA Bioware. Learn about dozens of successful indy developers who haven't sold out. Support those! And feel free to add more AA and AAA studios here which haven't sold out either!
A lot of people seem to slightly miss what the real outrage is about here, including this video. Gamers aren't angry that smaller devs like Xalavier aren't aiming for BG3-level games; no one in their right mind, even on the IQ vacuum of twitter, expects that. Larian literally had to go super saiyan, and temporarily grow to AAA level, just to finish it.
The REAL problem is that devs representing AAA studios that have the experience, the manpower, and more money than god, chimed in and agreed with Xalavier's tweet like their company couldn't have made a BG3-level game a decade ago. They absolutely could have, but they didn't want to. And they didn't want to, because while it would have made money, it wouldn't have made ALL the money like another uninspired, bland, MTX-laden, live-service, season-pass scam.
Baldur's Gate 3 could, and should, absolutely be the new standard for AAA effort. And it should have been the standard a long time before now.
Exactly. Many of the most prominently vocal folks protesting BG3 are from major studios that have multiple times the funding and at least twice the developer staff, with games on their resume that have taken as long if not longer to make than BG3 did, that are building on recognizable franchises and well-developed engine frameworks.
Xalavier was talking about the studios smaller than Larian. Problem is he couched his statements in an argument that did not limit itself to the small indies, but seemed to be applied to the industry as a whole. And so the larger studios took those statements and tried to run with them as a shield for their shitty business practices.
Thanks.
I still can't fathom how people keep completely missing the point of the critique
Ubisoft is really the worst offender. They went from all time greats like Far cry 3 and black flag to releasing single player mom's (Valhalla) stuffed to the brim with micro transactions. Not to mention basically every far cry since 3 is the same thing with a different skin.
@@burninghammerkai6176 Doesn't matter. They made their choice, may they rot in it.
chiming in to add support for @burninghammerkai6164 's point. Yes, you might say "AAA studios don't want to make a good game like Baldur's Gate 3". And that's right and wrong -- there are plenty of developers who want to make something at the same level of Baldur's Gate 3 (or Tears of the Kingdom, or Elden Ring, or The Witcher 3 ... yadda yadda). But they're not the ones who decide.
Executives at video game publishers are the deciders. They decide what kind of games are made, and generally they put money into game projects if they can show that game project will *make* a lot of that money back. They're focused on the money, how much their investment will make back. I guarantee that Baldur's Gate 3, even though it undoubtedly will be a top contender for game of the year, will not have made even as close to as much money as the top mobile MTX-hell game on the app store for 2023. I'd be surprised if it even made a tenth of the profit compared to that game.
Games like Baldur's Gate 3 make money. But they don't make ENOUGH money consistently for executives to want to pursue them -- at least, not with the amount of budget and time this kind of game needed. (I do worry about Dragon Age 4, which is undoubtedly suffering a ton of executive meddling behind the scenes as we speak).
Larian Studios is independent, so they didn't need to please executives.
Baldur's Gate 3 took six years to make, along with a lengthy early access period for about half of that period.
It's extremely rare for ANY triple-A games to be developed under those two conditions. Baldur's Gate 3 is a triumph, but largely because it wasn't developed in the same way as other triple-A games.
And perhaps the real moral of the story is -- triple-A style games shouldn't be developed for corporate profit.
I feel that brief bit about folks assuming and misinterpreting what people say rather than asking what they mean. It's something I fall into myself, as my brain stereotypes folks that share the same outlook as being part of the same group even though they've likely never met each other and I address the latest offender as if they were there for the previous conversation. I do my best to catch myself from doing it, but it's tougher than it should be with the social conditioning of interacting in such spaces too much. Abstaining is of course an approach, but old habits die hard and rear their head the times you peek your head in again, or interact in similar mediums even if unrelated. Interacting with folks on Discord as if they were random Twitter users and you hadn't known them for months if not years and should consider them with more of a face.
What I find funny is that when some devs said the same things about tears of the kingdom (impossible physics engine, insane scale, shining polish...etc etc) no one made a fuss and kinda nodded along and went "yup, that's the type of effort nintendo puts behind its flagship franchise and you can't expect that from every studio"
Nintendo also did this crazy thing called “Not releasing the game until the developers were finished making it.” But there is probably also no way it would exist in a world where they also didn’t have BOTW to build off of.
Funniest thing about ToTK is that what it did was already achieved by Garry's Mod when it comes to physics of glueing together parts to make vehicles. It's nothing new really, at all, only new thing they introduced was physics for _flying_ creations.
Because Nintendo is a AAA studio. Larian isn't. It's a AA studio at best and put out a game that put the AAA studios of its genre to shame. People aren't saying every studio out there should be 200+ hour RPGs with the same level of quality that BG3 has. They're saying AAA studios, who have even MORE staff and MORE money and MORE years of experience should be able to put out games of a similar quality, and it's shitty that they aren't. EA, Bethesda and others do not have an excuse. Johnny Indiedev and his team of a dozen people with a budget of $500,000 *does* have an excuse.
As someone who is fresh to the discourse about this game, what i would like to see is more discussion about how to emulate the decisions that the developers of BG3 made *regardless* of budget. Many big studios have blown comparable amounts of time and money and created some utterly reviled shambling husk of a game that was immediately forgotten.
The conversation shouldn't be about what money and time make possible; that's not what's unique about this game. What's unique about this game is its ability to use its vast resources to fulfil an equally vast ambition.
How did it do that? There's certainly what was mentioned in the video:
1. They took the time to do it right
2. They avoided diluting their property, which meant...
3. They were free of corporate meddling changing the scope or trying to adapt to the trend of the moment (the killer of many, many a franchise)
4. Their business model relied on providing a game that was good *at launch* for a fair price, full stop, no microtransactions;
5. ??
There's gotta be more than that, right? Take Daikatana, for example, or Duke Nukem Forever. For them too: huge budget; free creative hand; long awaited. Failures.
Clearly there is more to the story than "give developers a bunch of money and time and leave them alone, and they will make a good game". Many, many things had to go right, beyond those four points, for this game to be such a success. (I suspect one of them is, in addition to a lack of corporate meddling, there was a lack of internal meddling from a big ego at the top; and a lack of swaying to the winds of audience pressure.)
Those decisions really should be studied. Game devs in the genre who don't study them really are doing their audiences a disservice, I think. The lessons here are not about what money and time can get you. The lessons are about how to use your resources well.
Regarding Daikatana and DNF, those went through multiple restarts throughout the development process. One of the more well known is Daikatana switching game engines years into development and having to start over from scratch because of it. So while the projects "daikatana" and "duke nukem forever" certainly were around for a long time, the development processes that formed the final products were shorter than that.
As you say though, protection from internal meddling is important as well, as is having enough money to see development through to the end and not need to find someone to help fund the game which may require more changes.
I think the problem is 2 fold
1. No one expect some little indie studio to come out with Baldur’s Gate but there’s no reason actibliz should be making a bg3 every single time because there 3 times the size of Larian 9000 people worked on Diablo 4 to Larians 400 so yes If you call your self a triple A studio this is your benchmark now
2 I truly believe that in the games industry you have uncreative incompetent devs that have been around long enough to just get out into lead position and the integrity on the games shows.
Here's a conversation I want to have: who exactly was Mr. Nelson's tweet for? Who expects his little indie studio to make BG3? For that matter, who was shitting on Celeste because it isn't Assassin's Creed? Who was shitting on Spelunky because it isn't Tomb Raider?
Wooooooooosh
@@addammadd I don't think it's unreasonable to ask why the man had a take on an argument literally no one was having.
There was a small portion of loud people saying *all* RPGs should be held to the standard of BG3, indies included, and Mr Nelson's tweet was intended to be a reminder that indie studios have budget, time and staff limits that make such a thing nearly impossible. Then the tweet went outside its target audience and was taken as a defense of the worst of AAA studios, for some reason, and things spiraled from there.
@@RatchetSly We talking quality or quantity? I can name a dozen games that easily clear the bar BG3 has set, at only a fraction of the scope.
I think it's more about people setting the appropriate expectations based on the scope rather than setting the new standard across the board.
But I have to ask: Do people think it's not buggy? Nothing experience ruining overall, but I've run into frequent bizarre animation issues, dialogue and sound that simply doesn't initiate, and quests that bugged and couldn't be completed without a reload.
No microtransactions should be applauded and hopefully the worst of the tech issues will be fixed down the road. I think I'll be playing this one for years to come.
Players have been so burned by corporate game making over the years, that a game like Baldur’s Gate 3, which was a bunch nerds making exactly the kind of game their fellow nerds wanted to play made a huge splash that would have been impossible if it released when in the ‘00s. Players are STARVING for this specific type of game. But since it is a game you’d have a harder time pitching to investors, we don’t get a lot of them.
I don't it's a problem about being buggy or not. Skyrim and New Vegas are a nightmare of bug and crashes, that doesn't mean people dislike them. People just want to feel that their time and money is respected and most of all, not being lied to. It's probably sad that BG3 & Larian became an outlier on this
This is my first cold take video. Holy cow this man’s voice!! I could listen to about anything if he narrates it.
Ultimatley all we can do as consumers is reward developers like Larian who make good games by buying them and punish developers who make bad games (bad can mean whatever you want it to) by not buying them.
I think it's hard to expect every AAA studio to match the idea of BG3 as a norm, when even BG3 didn't even release perfectly. There are plenty of people who are having a hard time getting through Act 3 due to CPU bottlenecks, and I think this issue is being glossed over and BG3 is being used as a example of a perfect game front to back when it isn't. And I think that's perfectly reasonable, its not going to be a perfect release because developing something stable that translates to 100s ~ 1000s of different variations of a pc is really difficult.
I agree with the sentiment of gamers needing to be better at being specific with their critique of studios and expectations. However, I do wish that studios would be a bit more specific with what is realistic in what is truly "modern" gaming. Which for the vast majority of people on earth this is not going to be 120fps, 4k graphics with raytracing. It's impossible to expect a 70+ hour game, with very little bugs, adequate working conditions for 400 ~ 4K workers, the best graphics, fully sound designed, voice acted, mixed, and mastered in a 2 ~ 4 year dev cycle without getting a serious amount of budget from publishing and investment and that's not going to happen with the vast majority of studios.
My point is the industry has made promises it can't keep to the players and the players have unrealistic expectations because of it. "Modern" consoles sell at a loss in profit right now and have to recoup that money on software. This translates to games going on gamepasses, microsoft and sony approving more remakes and remasters and genuine low risk investments or microtransactions to make up for the losses. This just makes it an impossible environment for ambitious development because if it succeeds it's great, but if it doesn't it's fucked.
Deadass, and I know PC gamers don't like reading this, but the reason why most of the finished games that are optimized are on Switch is because it's the only console right now that makes a profit on it's hardware, and it has an abundant amount of players on the system to make considerable amount of profits to cycle back into dev time and budget. PC, Xbox, and Playstation do not have these luxuries.
Finally, an actual reasonable take on this man omg. Thought that I was going insane.
What reasonable take? All the big corps were liking the writers post because they are in fact, lazy and entirely profit driven rather than brand driven. None of this was mentioned. Why are EA, Ubisoft liking that post to begin with?! It’s gross.
@@kouyasakurada5547 The reasonable take being blame the big corps for the current state, not the devs. I have a few friends in the game dev industry, and I can tell you that all the ones I know are just as disgusted by the things the execs keep pushing on them, but the problem being is the corps have the money, so they make the rules. The execs are liking that tweet for different reasons than why he wrote it. He wrote it as "With everything they make us go through, we can't replicate what Larian has done" The big corps liked it to use it as a shield for themselves.
@@kouyasakurada5547this is a straight lie, cus no one likes that dudes comment
@@scottwagner2566no execs were liking the tweet, how could you believe such a huge lie at face values thats easily verifiable
@@duman173 people that are actually able to read and comprehend the words they're reading, liked, understood and mostly agreed with that dude's comment. In fact, this whole video is literally just restating that dude's comment.
This is an incredible vid essay. Great work Sebastian!!!
I think as gamers we need to recognize that BG3 is the new "gold standard" not the "minimum standard".
Wait. Since when is Larian a giant? Arguably, its not even a rriple a studio.
And since when did people judge indies and bigger games under the same standard? You said it yourself: Vampire Survivor is considered one of the best games of the last year, and i cant think of any standard it delivered on.
So I guess indie studios are capable of making one of the top 15 most expensive games ever made?
It used to be more of a AA studio but with BG 3 it has basically just became a AAA studio.
@@ganshrio7336 Larian is literally an independent studio.
I do think the standard should be "whatever you shoot for, hit it." Don't over-promise the audience, don't promise them _anything_ until you're positive you can deliver it. Don't even tell the marketing team the game exists until it exists. Son't attempt to make a massive breathing world if you can't actually do that. If you can only make a small game, that's fine, make a small game and make it great. Make it a two hour experience that everyone loves. If you intend to go big, then be willing and able to put in the work needed to achieve it.
Personally I would like the discussion to separate. We should absolutely talk about games and what is a fair price, anti-consumer practices, etc. On the flip side I’d like the focus on Baldurs’s Gate 3 to be about what it does as a video game. So many reviews I have read on online talk about how it is a pro consumer product yet rarely divulge in what makes it a great game, and I really can’t tell if it’s a good thing or a bad thing.
I feel like a critical factor that Frost stated and I see often overlooked in the comments is the lack of pressure from investors or publishers. A lot of the things we hate about modern games: over-monetization, rushed buggy releases, obscene crunch, mass layoffs, etc, usually come at the demand of the money men. Business execs with no real understanding or care for the art of the industry, and unrealistic expectations for profit margins. Most triple-A studios these days are already owned and run by these types, it's not like they really have the option of saying "no" to Mr. Publisher's money and the demands that come with it. I remember reading about Bethesda's investors blocking requests from the devs to use a newer better engine for Starfield for these same reasons. Why invest in a new engine when people will buy something made by the old beat-up creation engine? Im not saying the money men are the only problem with modern triple-A, far from it, but I am saying that that aspect in particular doesn't come up often enough in discourse around BG3.
I just want games to pick what they want to do and just do it well. Katamari Damacy wants you to roll stuff into a ball, so you...roll stuff into a ball in a really intuitive way with aesthetics that complement the game. Devil May Cry 5 wants you to do big combos with lots of freedom, so it moves you from encounter to encounter to facilitate that.
Halo was originally supposed to be a story-based sci-fi RTS with sprawling maps, so they made it a sci-fi game where you're incentivized to keep as many Marines alive as possible. In later games, they went even further and let you swap weapons with your NPC allies to customize your small little squad. Give plasma weapons and watch them melt shields, lining you up for headshots. Give them snipers or battle rifles to be able to headshot unshielded enemies with great accuracy, etc. In the Flood levels, having any of your Elites carrying an Energy Sword is a huge boon, especially on Legendary difficulty. Strategy was a part of how you play this Action First-Person Shooter, it informed the way the player interacted with the game.
I don't want games to be a million things. Just let me do THE thing and have fun doing it. Yakuza may have a ton of side activities, but it's all very much still "Yakuza" in its tone and execution. Lara Croft looking for hidden targets to shoot with her bow for XP while she's in the middle of trying to stop some bad guys from doing some very bad things, however, doesn't really fit with the game. StarCraft and Halo are exceptions in that they are both really great at what they do, but they let the player themselves do whatever they want with it (map settings, Forge) and then share it with other people to play and have fun together.
Then again I also like Nier: Automata and Xenogears which both try to be like, 3 different games at points so wtf do I know lmao
You now have _Lonely Rolling Star_ stuck in your head.
AAA gaming should definitely pay attention; AA and indie gaming, keep doing what you do. Simple.
I'm just tired of almost unplayable games riddled with micro-transactions, or good games ruined over time by monetization. The standard BG3 should set is that a game is finished before release and nothing pay to win or fomo is involved in the monetization.
I think it's one thing to think, "I can't make a masterpiece like that" and another to go out of your way to say, unprompted, "I hope you're not expecting that from me." It's like a kid telling you they didn't break the vase before you even know the vase is broken.
Saying that shows that you're not confident in your own creation. Just congratulate Larian, and keep working on what you're working on, doing the best you can.
I think of Sea of Stars coming out a few weeks after Baldur's Gate III. It's a fantastic game. It's not Baldur's Gate III but BG3's existence does nothing to diminish its greatness. It's the game that they wanted to make and they had the resources to make, and the passion they put into it shows.
If the devs had come out before it's release and said "hey, this isn't Baldur's Gate III" everyone would have just said "Yeah, no one expected it to be Baldur's Gate III, and it's really weird that you're going out of your way to say it's not."
Well, any AAA studio that cant match Larian to some extent should not do RPGs. RPGs require some kind of passion for more than shiny moneys, so its best left to specialists. Gamers also know the difference between AAA and Bob in his basement, thus demands are set based on cost and complexity. But yeah, big studios can go fornicate themselves if they think they will not be judged based on what other studios manage to do, when they sell their crap at full price with microtransactions in them. One microtransaction, one seasonpass, and you will be judged according to the precedent set by BG3.
The issue is judgement means literally nothing to AAA Studios and publishers if the money keeps rolling in. Complaints will only go so far until people just stop giving them money, and unfortunately there are too many who will still buy the product regardless of quality. I agree 100% that at the very minimum AAA should be looking at larian and bg3 as the standard for a high quality release. I just don't know what else can be done to fix companies that see no issue in the way they handle business 🤷♂️
@@ItsRelf Absolutely true. Look at Pokémon games, the worst they are they best they sell. Brand recognition and induced addiction to micro transactions is more important than quality nowadays.
@@ItsRelf Thats very true. I was only referring to my judgement before I buy a product. The number of youtube active gamers is not enough as the real money is in casuals. However, active gamers is not a tiny fraction and they do not want to not make money from us either. Some may try harvest this market more than garbage companies (insert at least 90%). FromSoftware for instance, probably find this rather good, and thus a market of complete games with relatively higher standards will stand in opposition to garbage, that can have a long term effect if more casuals registers this.
@@snowolf494 aw it doesn't help that Pokemon's a series that's been around for so long that folk will just buy it hoping for a better game. Even when it's trending downwards. I'm just as bad with games like NBA 2k and FIFA. I buy the game every year and get pissed off with it for all the micro bs, more so with 2k cause I don't play ultimate team. Where as with 2k that shit is in almost every game mode 🤦
Well, I certainly would not be worrying about some "internet judgment" if I had the billion dollars that Blizzard recently made from Diablo 4.
Great take. My thoughts exactly. I'm glad someone with a big enough platform got this out there.
7:07 I like how thumbnails from previous videos cover the bits TH-cam won't like.
The thing is, it's both. BG3 is at the pinnacle of RPG games for this era right now and a lot of what it brought to the table should already be in RPGs. The polish of the mechanics, variety of choice, and quality of the world of BG3 is well above what should be expected of most RPGs. At the same time, most RPGs are missing the base level of freedom of choice/ consequence of choice, unique self-made moments, and immersive (not having things take you out of the "world" just so you can play the game). Yes, these things overlap, and yes that makes it a bit harder and games like Kenshi and Valheim show you that there can be a good balance regardless.
The message not being conveyed properly isn’t that we want more Baldur’s Gate, we want more games of quality like Baldur’s Gate. It’s an entertaining, fleshed out product with barely any flaws, no micro transactions, nothing exploitative and again is genuinely entertaining. Not every game needs to be this megalithic, Titan of a product with a million bells and whistles. But every game should strive to be as complete as Baldur’s Gate is. It’s what games used to be and what they should be again.
IMO even if the game is above the standard thanks to spending more time on the game... maybe it's a sign we should just spend more time on games to make good products instead of churning out crap?
If you want better games...you have to stop giving YOURSELF FOMO.
Devs and publishers are greedy yes, absolutely, but they take advantage of your fomo.
No fomo, no way to let them exploit it.
The best way I can put it is that we want these studios to make good games, not games that sell well. The motivation matters
It has been said for so long now that it is impossible to release a big game at full price without tons of bugs, without half-finished core features, and without additional monetization options. Then we have BG3, which proves those claims to be false.
The industry folks on the "this is an anomaly" camp are trying to find excuses to not learn from Larian on how to do better. If they can't measure up to Larian then they should all be asking them for pointers on how to do better, not justifying continued mediocrity.
The standard should be devs seeking to make good games that make money, not companies making great monetization with a game around it .
Also I feel like many newer games neglect the importance of gameplay as the keystone of all the development.
It's also worth mentioning that BG3 is an RPG and not all games are RPGs. Saying that BG3 should be the standard for GAMES is really out of touch. Platformers, MMOs, strategy, puzzle and on and on - can't get much out of BG3 besides "don't be buggy" and "don't be greedy bastards, people don't like that".
Maaaaaan, thank you for offering conversation as opposed to just trying to encourage people speaking over one another 🙏 A cold take indeed when someone actually wants people to understand each other instead of staying bitter for essentially no reason. Cheers and thanks Frost for an amazing piece on this topic 👏🍻 Also, for the game, I was a Baldur's Gate II: Dark Alliance kid - borrowed it from a friend 😋 I won't be able to play 3 for a good long while so I have nothing for notes on the game itself.
I know in my line of work I get customers that sometimes want something that isn't practical because they have little knowledge about design standards and no matter how much I try to tell them that what they are asking for isn't practical and in fact will make things way worse they are so stubborn they want it anyway because they think they know what they are talking about. So I build it for them anyway and then after I finish they see that in fact what they wanted was a terrible idea and have me tear it all down and start again lol. I don't hate those kind of people but along with people I work with we do make fun of those people a lot. Devs don't hate us but I assure you they do laugh at us a lot, and that's ok.
Thing is, a lot of complaints people have were directed at publishers and shareholders. It never was about the devs, and especially not indie devs.
No one in their right mind would ever hold that standard to smaller studios, only triple A. As triple A does have the money, rescources and mannpower to provide solid quality, hell people expect experience from them too they are triple A after all, but I bet after all this time churning out cash grab microtransaction filled trash shareholders and executives pretty much force upon the studios they own made them inexperienced in making good quality games.
Yeah it’s standard gross behaviour from the large companies, misrepresented the argument pretend they are protecting the ‘little guy’.
It's simple: if a studio says they can't put the same resources and effort into a game to match BG3, then it shouldn't cost as much or even more than BG3
I think it's perfectly fair to hold up BG3 as a new standard not in quality of actual product but in designing process. Bigger teams with bigger budgets have produced games a fraction of the quality of BG3 with every measure to nickle and dime you. It's not as if this is some one in a million chance, it's just a company who made a game that was solid, used that success to make another game that was solid and used that success to make a third game that was solid. I don't even think BG3 is anything exceptional, it's a really good RPG with really good mechanics just like Divinity Original Sin 1 and 2 before it.
The fact people are upholding what is, in reality, just a Solid Good Game as the fucking pinnacle of game development is wild both in that they feel it appropriate to do so and that they're not wrong in doing so. I'm going through BG3 in a co-op run and I legit said to my friend 'It's weird playing a game for 30 hours and not having any filler content, no grinding, no collect-a-thons, no running through an open world for 15 minutes with nothing happening' and it's completely true. Honestly I'd say Divinity Original Sin 1 was more revolutionary for the genre then BG3 but we got better more complete games back then so it wasn't as impressive.
For me the minimum standard is exactly what BG3 has managed to pull off, not the quality of the material but the simple fundamentals of it instead. Games need to come out feature complete, story complete, without severely harmful bugs, with a minimum of filler content wasting my time (this can be ignored if the whole point of the game is filler, I will not deny the MMO crowd their grind even if I do not understand it), without egregious monetisation and without a graveyard of broken promises.
The giant upside for Larian here, after this long ass dev cycle, is they can recycle the engine for other games D&D based or original, they only need to craft the stories and landscaping.
This right here, this is proof that people don't know anything about the devs they're on their knees for. BG3 uses a modified version of the Divinity Engine. Most of the engine work was already done.
@@coolguyjki I spotted the arm-chair developer. Proof or get the fuck out of here.
Acting like you have intimate knowledge about something you are obviously an outsider of is cringe as hell, dude.
@@coolguyjkigamers in general have always thought themselves to have a unique perspective into the industry just because they play games. You see people talking about engines, patching/fixing content, dev cycles etc with confidence but it's all conjecture
@@coolguyjkiWhat the heck are you talking about you weirdos, not only does that have nothing to do with the OP's comment, but If you've played any of their games you'd know that there is weirdly small number of reused assests from DoS2 and BG3
Reusing assets is very different to having a ready to use engine that your team knows the ins and outs, but I totally agree that gaming is one of the few hobbies where people think they have an idea of how the product is made and can weigh in on the topic.
Rage is addictive
Basically, I want a game experience that isn't marred by my internal compromises and excuses. I want to pick up a game, play it, and have fun. I do not want to pick up a game, play it, and think "I guess this is fun enough considering..."
Getting "a fun game" with no reservations or extenuations should be normal, not extraordinary.
Way I see it, in the games industry the "BG3 sets too high a standard" debate is being used by two different groups with the same arguments, but for different reasons. There are developers, big and small, who either don't have the ressources for such a project or simply don't want to make a game like that (because as great as BG3 is, it's not the only valid type of rpg), but feel pressured to make one. And there are shit developers, big and small, who are used to selling cheap, lazy shit and pressing it for the maximum amount of money, who are afraid of rising standards and better competitive products that make people not buy their shit anymore.
I have all the sympathy in the world for the former group. The latter can rot in hell.
I have no sympathy whatsoever for the useless executives whose hollowing out of the AAA game space has led to 'make good game for one sensible price' being beyond their meagre skills to return to - but we all know it's not the executives but the line developers who will be punished for failing to meet a standard their management made impossible to hit.
@@UnreasonableOpinionsThe problem is that the AAA who spoke were devs, not the suits. A dev talking like a suit was never going to go down well.
@@nicolasferreiro4492Lmao it's pretty clear you didn't actually read much from the devs talking about this then. How was JE Sawyer's statement "talking like a suit"?
Your voice is as smooth as James Earl Jones'.
A pleasure to listen to.
To use your analogy of 'not expecting every basketball player to be as good as Michael Jordan's best game,' I will agree that that is an incredibly high standard that few if any players could meet. But, if I were a in the basketball scene, I think I would still expect every player to try to do so. Those players have an obligation to their fans to play the best game they possibly can, and it is that mentality that inspires people to push beyond what is accepted as 'good enough' and break records. Is every game going to be as good as Baldur's Gate III? Absolutely not. But I certainly don't think that it should be considered a "near impossible" (6:17) achievement. Especially coming from established studios who have "plenty of practice... making games," (1:48) hundreds of developers, and "major brand recognition." (1:58). For example, look at how BioWare seems to have systematically slaughtered itself. I grew up playing Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Knights of the Old Republic. Andromeda was such a buggy mess that is was comical. Inquisition bored me so much that I cannot remember anything that happened in the game aside from the general plot and two of the dragon fights, and all the news I have heard of Dreadwolf is about how they have rebooted the development cycle again and again only to lay off swathes of senior developers who made the games I loved. It feels like the AAA games industry has spent years taking the stuff I loved, gutting it, slathering it in shit, and then demand that I thank them for the service.
I apologize if I seem overly antagonistic towards you; it is not my intent. I think that your Cold Take series is great and I do value your insight and journalism. If you think I am misunderstanding/misrepresenting what you are saying, please feel free to respond/reply. At the end of the day, I, a consumer, want the best games I can get, and I have been very frustrated by recent trends. I want more games of Baldur's Gate III's quality, and I think that that is a widely shared opinion.
The thing is, Baldur's Gate 3 _Isn't_ an isolated incident.
We were having this conversation six months ago when Hi-Fi Rush dropped at the same time as Forespoken: a game with a smaller scope and far more modest budget stole the show from a grotesquely expensive AAA blockbuster with one of the industry's biggest studios behind it.
The story hasn't changed since then.
Gamers just want good, finished experiences at a scale befitting their price point. Baldur's Gate 3 is getting so much positive attention in part because it's a $60 game that feels like it's worth the price of admission in an era where games with far less effort and care are being sold at higher effective price points, in addition to being otherwise scummy.
I really, really think everyone is overthinking this. People are just looking at their own fandom and going "why is ours as much (if not more) and riddled with bugs and the bad faith practices we've gotten used to in this industry?" if not bg3, then something else.
Very nice video, but I couldn't help but be entranced by the trailer in the background. Why, exactly, were those dragons messing up that Illithid ship? Because that was awesome.
"Everyone is mad, this is great!"
Funny how BG3 was singled out as an anomaly when both Tears of The Kingdom and Elden Ring where anomalies as well. I'm guessing they were given a pass because they were made by Japanese studios.
I watched and knew about the controversy before and Big Thanks to you, Frost for giving voice to the other side of the table. I want people with a soul and passion, indies, to make more games like Baldur Gate, and let AAA games burn off and die because they put algorithms, money, and burnout over developers
you want indies to make AAA-tier games, and AAA games die? K.
I agree on having that conversation: @5:48, I find it flawed that you think it is acceptable to have Day 1 DLC's, regardless of what it's for (this case, a costume). I think a lot of us remember when stuff like costumes, cheat codes, or the like were stuff you could unlock by playing the video game. By allowing any predatory practice into a game, you are partaking in lowering the bar, and continuing the trend of thought that this normalization should be such. I reject the notion we should accept to pay microtransactions for a video game you are also expected to pay full price for (assuming it's not a Freemium/FTP type game).
I don't think people are expecting every game to be as large or epic as BG3, that's not what's being said when we say it should be the new standard.
All we want is competently made games that are a complete experience and not broken on release. That's it, that's the floor. Everything else Larian managed with BG3 is what makes it amazing
What I would like developers to take away from BG3 is the fact that it worked on launch. Larian took their time and did it right. AAA studios have absolutely no excuse to knowingly launch a game in a broken state.
Notice how everyone making negative articles about it, the devs complaining about it:
Are all saying that making a game EXACTLY LIKE BG3 would kill their studio.
But no one started out saying they wanted more Baldurs Gate, they said they wanted more quality.
But the modern AAA gaming industry doesn’t know how to do anything but, in the wise words of Yahtzee Croshaw “REPLICAAAAATE, REGURGITAAAATE” so of course they need to complain about how it’s something they can’t copy
that concluding statement, pure gold.
The irony is that other studios are saying they can't do what Larian did: release it in early-access, develop it for years using the income from that, then release the final product (which is free if you bought it in early-access). When really studios have been doing that for years, except it wasn't early-access but release, and the final product was the 'Gold Edition' or the 'Ultimate Edition' which meant the could charge us twice. See: Skyrim, Cyberpunk, Witcher 3, Battlefield 2042, etc.
The sad part about devs saying that 'make good game and sell once for fixed price' sets an unrealistic expectation for a business model is that they're right. BG3 could make nine trillion dollars and sell more copies than every game in the history of games combined, and it would still change nothing about the business models of corporate executives whose entire existence is only validated in the notion that there are clever exploits for taking more money for less game.
I have no sympathy whatsoever for the useless executives whose hollowing out of the AAA game space has led to 'make good game for one sensible price' being beyond their meagre skills to return to - but we all know damned well that it's not the executives but the line developers who will be punished for failing to meet a standard their management made impossible to hit.
Anyone praising the game as "complete" has not finished it,
Acts 1 and 2 are significantly more compleate than act 3
the ending / 3rd act is incredibly scuffed and clearly rushed, a damn shame
I definitely am on the side that this is what gaming advancement should look like and this is the standard all games should aim for. But to be clear, I'm not saying I want every game to be over 100 hours and with choices and and fully voice acted. If you can't do that. Then don't. Make a 4 hour game with no choices that tells an incredible story. But if you are going to put choices in your game, don't do the good or bad choice with two endings. And if you call yourself AAA, then you better spend the money to voice act every single thing in your game.
The thing is, BG 3 is not even a complete game. Everyone praising the game too early that they haven't even get into act 3 bug and incomplete mess. Just like Divinity 2, their full release is basically early access pt.2 and definitive edition is the actual complete release. For me, the game is 10/10 in act 1 & 2, but unfortunately stumbled in 7/10 act 3.
Not surprised. Most people don’t finish games, and move on rather quickly. That, and a lot of people’s standards are really low. I think the main reason why something like BG3 is big (socially) despite being a more niche genre, is marketing (ads and a sh*t ton of articles), and that “normies/casuals” were made aware of it. And given they likely never played a CRPG before, and is at least a decent game apparently, they think it’s amazing. Like a kid trying ice cream for the first time and thinking vanilla is the best flavour, because it’s the _only_ flavour they’ve tried. But if they tried others, it would be much lower.
Now I could be wrong as I haven’t played any CRPG’s myself or BG3, but looking at it from an outside perspective, I don’t really see what BG3 does that warrants it as some “impossible standard”. Branching dialogue with 3D characters, cutscenes, and voice acting isn’t new, Mass Effect did it over 10 years ago. And the genre itself isn’t new either. Nothing about it looks like some impossible feat. It just seems like no one with AAA budgets/resources _tried_ to make a higher budget CRPG because it was/is a niche genre and not worth publisher’s time. Not because it was impossible to do. Larian may not be an indie studio, but they aren’t bigger or have more resources than EA, Activision, Ubisoft, Rockstar, and others either.
Yeah, but I think a lot of games have something like that. Act I in BG 3 is probably the greatest RPG experience ever made. I can not think of another game with this much depth so early on. If it was of the same quality as Act I throughout the whole game it would probably be one of the very very rare 10/10 games for me. Possibly among the greatest games ever made. Instead it is more like a 9/10.
I feel jaded after so many years, and BG3 reminds me it is possible. Every time i was upset at some game, looking at it thinking "I know these guys can do better" i was right, and now i can see it. Its possible.