Baldur’s Gate 3 is Causing Some Developers to Panic
While Baldur's Gate 3 is being widely celebrated by fans and developers alike, some are panicking that this could set new expectations from fans. Good.
Click baiting video. Other devs don't care. As long as they can make money pumping out mediocre games then they will continue to do so. Acting like this is the first good game to come out in a decade or something.
DEVs do care. As a developer working on something you want to be proud of it. Publishers do not care.
The individuals working on the game might care.
The managers who make the decisions don't. Doesn't matter if they are a publisher or the development company itself. It's a bit blurry these days anyway, what with how easy it is to self publish and how many publishers have their own internal development studios.
BG 3 is so stupid, it's not even optimizing micro transactions for maximum profits
How am I supposed to feel a sense of pride and accomplishment without paying for my dice rolls?
Unity CEO has entered the chat
"Leaving money on the table" must be the exec's perspective.
“Oh no fans might demand good games at release! The horror!”
Won't anybody think of the stockholders‽
Oh no, if people remember that games are supposed to be good, no one will buy our lootbox-infested crap anymore.
Good.
people remember that games are supposed to be good
I've played a lot of great games in the past few years 🤷♂️
If you have to panic because a competitor makes a good game maybe you should reconsider why you're a game developer in the first place. If it's not to make the best games you can make, you shouldn't be a game developer. I'm guessing the developers panicking aren't the ones who pour their heart and soul into every game they make.
Maybe release 1 good game every year or two instead of 10 mediocre games a year to make as much cash as possible.
I don’t have a convenient way to play this game at the moment, but I’ll pick it up as soon as I get a steam deck.
My counter to that is the last 2.5 BioWare games - I say 2.5 because Dreadwolf has been in development for ten years total now and still isn’t out. Andromeda was in development for 5 years. Anthem had money galore thrown at it until it came out. Too many devs, not just BioWare, are wasting years of development time because they haven’t got a clue what they can feasibly make then rush to get things out the door.
Instead of making excuses for why gave dev is the way it is now - a way that isn’t working - maybe look at what Larian did right and ask why more studios aren’t doing that. Early Access is normal used by indies with overinflated budgets? Well, why aren’t larger studios taking advantage of it or using systems like it?
The new normal for a have to be developed is turning into 5+ years, and there’s no excuse for the hot messes that have been coming out lately.
I'd like to ask...why are publishers even required anymore? Games don't need physical releases anymore. You don't need a publisher to host a zip file on a web server. Storefronts let indie developers self-publish so why do the big names still fall for the publishers who exist only to enshittify gaming anymore? They bring negative value to the industry.
The only thing I can think of is branching dialogs in RPGs. J. Sawyer said that better than I can: https://youtu.be/eeUwPLxsp7Y
Developers? Panicking? Developers will rejoice that they don't have to build these garbage mechanics. Publishers and game studio execs? Yeah they'll panic
Honestly I hope this does indeed set a new gold standard. Probably not with the whole early access thing, though. It’s a thing that needs to go away.
EA is an immensely useful tool for game devs, the issue is EA as an excuse to ship unpolished games or to leave games unfinished forever. Neither of which are problems intrinsic to early access, they're just bad business practice that should be shunned like any other
As a gamedev: Early Access was useful for devs, back when it was real Early Access. Think: Kerbal Space Program (the first, not the second).
Nowadays it's mostly a marketing tool, that allows to generate the hype for launch twice... Publishers and players expect "Early Access" games to be feature complete and polished before the "Early Access" launch...
Early access worked well for them, part of the start of the game was able to be play tested, the community got to give feedback, and they actually listened, its how it should be done
I don't think Early Access should go away as it's not inherently bad in and of itself.
What's bad about it is when it's used to sell a totally unfinished piece of shit that stays an unfinished piece of shit indefinitely.
Making bad developers panic maybe?
I can't imagine something like this makes the Redfall devs feel good about themselves.
Actually Redfall likely doesn't make the Redfall devs feel good about themselves.
Wasn't the whole thing with Redfall that it was Bethesda mismanagement? I'm not going to put that on the Redfall team. Does make me completely disinterested in buying any Bethesda games that aren't mainline TES though.
Looks like it went way deeper than that...
https://www.escapistmagazine.com/redfall-development-lost-70-percent-staff-arkane-austin-prey/
Such a shame, I was immensely sold on the initial trailer. I did not even end up playing it
For what it's worth, I thought it'd be horrible from the reviews and ended up trying it anyway, and I actually really enjoyed it. shrug Rather feels like I played a different game than everyone else.
I'm sure it's partly the difference between starting with rock bottom expectations vs starting with Prey/Dishonored expectations, but I think even without that I'd like it.
Also, it has no micro transactions! Zero. Not even for cosmetics - those are just unlockables. Credit where credit is due.
Anyway if you liked the look of the trailer and you have gamepass, it's worth at least trying, imo.
BG3 is what games used to be and what they should have been like. It bring me back to my KotOR1/2, and Witcher 1 days. It's great.
This reminds me of the time Ubisoft developers decided to have a bitchfit about Elden Ring because it didn't have any of the same shitty monetization or trash formulaic design choices as their games.
It's like these developers think that because they're painfully mediocre, every other studio is required to be as well.
In similar fashion, EA/Dice woukd have desperately tried to ignore battlebit.
4 devs made a game that is better in nearly every way than any of the last few battlefield games in their spare time.
I hope AAA studios clear house and find a new formula that doesn't ruin good IP.
dice is the perfect example of a studio with the worst kind of incompetent people in charge of game direction
they released a great game in battlefield 1 and went to shit after that chasing trends and monetisation strategies over everything else
(shoutout to the guys who worked on base gameplay of BFV, they got fucked over by dumb decisions from higher up)
Or Hogwarts Legacy, which did the Ubi formula without the nonsense.
HZD is also extremely Ubisofty, but done right.
How does it cost millions of dollars to make a current AAA game, and they're rarely worth it?
If you have 5,000 people on your payroll for a game what the hell are they doing? Every game should be fantastic.
I love indie and AA games. Smaller teams. More focus. More fun. Usually more quality content.
It's an issue of time and scalability. Going from 100 employees to 200 employees wont make the game in half the time. And corporate accounting would rather have 2 mediocre games per year than 1 extremely good game every 2 years, even if it sold 4 times as well since revenue is analyzed within fiscal years and financing isn't free. Capitalism sucks.
I know that's probably rhetorical, but probably a similar problem to modern movies where (as described in the video Why Modern Movies Suck - They're Too Expensive) they are going after spectacle (rather than story or other elements) and due to cost they must make a 'safe' product to stay profitable, where a bland but universally palatable product will sell more tickets/copies than a stellar niche thing.
I'd also add that companies know they can usually ride the success of their own name/brand recognition. Even worse here with games because of pre-ordering, early-access as a product, and crowd-funding (which some wildly successful publishers still do--on top of unpaid self-promotion and all the other things--because people still think of them as indie).
The main problem is they drop $20mil on effects and star faces and fucking spend $20/hr for a fucking committee to write a story in a week that wouldn't pass a screenwriting 101 course.
The problem with movies and games these days is where the money goes, not how much of it there is.
games are art projects at the end of the day and there are often many non-art people (or just people without the right skills or vision) making executive decisions on direction, deadlines etc.
Usually they don't. Something like Horizon Forbidden West credits almost 3500 people even though Guerilla Game has less than 500 employees, most of the rest is absolutely massive bloat from different outsourced teams and Sony departments - like the "Head of Opportunity Markets Business Operations Tim Stokes from Sony Interactive Entertainment Inc.: Global Business Operations" was undoubtedly very important for the development of the game.
As for Baldurs Gate 3, Larian Studios currently has 450 employees in 6 different locations, so they are actually around the same size as Guerilla. I wouldn't be surprised if the credits end up being well above a thousand people (D:OS2 has around 500 credits even though Larian back then had only 130 people).
Battlebit has 4.
4 people. That's it.
No.... no its not.
Other developers appreciate art.
Publishers are probably sweating a bit. But as a dev I love seeing any game succeed like this!
I get everyone's sentiment here, boiling it down to "better games are better" but also keep in mind the development costs and times for making new games are constantly going up. Yeah of course there are fantastic indie games out there (and I love them myself) that have a fraction of AAA game budgets and dev time but those are the gems in the rough, not the norm.
I'm all for better gaming experiences but they do come with tradeoffs. Also, flops are now death sentences for studios so the pressure to perform is even higher
you sound like EA public relations
He's not wrong, though. Game development is a business, like any other, and larger-scale games require exponentially more resources to produce than smaller indie titles.
Obviously one could make the argument "Well they shouldn't be making every single game into a huge, multi-billion dollar blockbuster title that costs the player an arm and a leg to gain access to, then they wouldn't need that amount of resources to begin with", and that would be a fair argument. But ultimately, people keep buying those games, anyway. And not by force, they buy them of their own volition. So those games continue to be profitable. There's no incentive for big studios to change their ways when consumers keep giving them money, so they're going to keep making huge games that require huge resources and huge payments from the players.
The expectations have been set for a long time. BG3 isn't the first good game. It's just the first in a while, after mountains of AAA garbage ultimately driven by shareholders and MBAs.
The sad thing is: those people are so clueless that they dont see they'd make more money by just not getting in the way of a good dev team.
The problem with your second statement is that it is patently untrue.
That is why rocketed has been milking GTA microtransactions. The GachaGaming reddit tracks a series of microtransaction-heavy mobile games. They make hundreds of millions (as much as an entire AAA very hyped game release) quarterly through microtransactions.
Companies have come out and said that microtransactions are more profitable than making new games which is why they are shoehorned into every damn piece of game possible by AAA studios.
I hate microtransactions and I wish it wasn't the case, but stupid kids with daddy's credit card and stupid gamers and whales make bad games with microtransactions very profitable.
What if games have to be good, not just eventually but on the day we sell it to someone.
Worse yet, what if we have to do some QA on PC and optimize our games instead of just hoping that they don't continuously crash on launch?
Nothing better then moving the benchmark forward.
Fans expectations for games are already insanely high. Baldur's Gate 3 isn't going to change much.
Also the video implies that this complaint is industry wide but only has 3 tweets (or X's?).
This just feels like an excuse of this IGN content creator to rant against developers.
I believe the correct term is "Xhit" or "excretion"
Your expectations from video game journalism is too high.
And that's a bad thing because?
This reminds me of the time Ubisoft developers decided to have a removedfit about Elden Ring because it didn't have any of the same shitty monetization or trash formulaic design choices as their games.
It's like these developers think that because they're painfully mediocre, every other studio is required to be as well.
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