this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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Baldur's Gate 3
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Baldur’s Gate 3 is a story-rich, party-based RPG set in the universe of Dungeons & Dragons, where your choices shape a tale of fellowship and betrayal, survival and sacrifice, and the lure of absolute power. (Website)
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BG3 is great. I'm at the end of act 1 in single player and a bit further back in coop. But "redefined what an RPG can be"? Am I going crazy or is this just the usual hyperbole for the latest game?
Starfield is probably going to be very similar to previous Bethesda games, as usual.
The thing is, BG3 hasn’t redefined anything. It has shown that there’s a market for games that do have extremely strong story and character writing and don’t have microtransactions and shitty mini-DLCs like skin packs and late-game equipment early on - basically, pre-Horse Armor gaming.
It’s the same as The Witcher 3 back when that released and also “redefined RPGs”.
"Redefined" is just an industry buzzword used to describe a title that AAA publishers can't understand why it's so successful. I firmly believe they are that out of touch with their consumers.
Redefined in quality and depth of choices, maybe. It's certainly a lot better than the vast majority of RPGs that have come out lately. I keep getting surprised while playing it at what's possible.
I haven't gotten to play it yet, but from the gameplay reveal and stuff, it looks... like a traditional CRPG? Like a right proper successor to BG 1 and 2? Bigger, more polished, and not THAC0 based, but an evolution of what used to be plentiful?
Is this not just like saying "this new remastered Duran Druan greatest hits album is really redefining music!"?
Yes and yes
One really cannot underestimate how important presentation and production values is to the vast majority of players, even those taking the hobby seriously enough to read reviews and post on serious gaming forums. If a game is all textboxes, doesn't feature decent enough graphics and isn't fully voiced people just won't be impressed with it or won't even give it the time of day.
Baldur's Gate 3 is just a CRPG with AAA production values, which we haven't really gotten since Dragon Age: Origins, which is 14 years old at this point. And there is something to it, going into some random cave and starting a questline with unique character models, voiced dialogue and cutscenes is kind of more fun than only getting textboxes, even if the actual things you do aren't any more involved or deep.
I agree this a statement from an ignorant. I love BG3 but it is just an Ultima but better. With today technology.
Upvote for mentioning Ultima and making me laugh this morning.
I compared the BG3's Start Screen that has the party opening the door in the cave and the party exploring with torches to Ultima's start screen with the party fighting monsters.
OMG thanks for the link. Nostalgia intensifie!
My first Ultima was the two, but I was super young. Then I played a lot to the six. Finally Ultima 7 with serpent Isle extension was the sweet slap in the coconuts.
In my book it stayed for years rhe best RPG (with underworld 2).
Good times.
I first played Ultima 3. I was a teen and thought the game was huge. Then Ultima 4 was a lot bigger. I love the music and have the music for the Wanderer as my cell phone ring. It sounds very different than any other ring I can always tell it is my phone.
Fun times.
Yeah I'd sooner say "gone back to its roots" than "redefined". This is how I remember RPGs.
I'm with you on the hyperbole. BG3 has been a massive success, but it's not really innovative or unique. In fact it's terribly buggy and is missing several features the community has been begging for over years of early access. It suffers all of the same problems other RPGs suffer from.
It's overall very high quality (other than the bugs), it serves a niche that is perpetually starving for content, and it encourages enthusiastic fans to buy copies for their friends. It has the names of Baldur's Gate, DnD, and Faerun all going for it. It landed smoothly in between the release windows of FFXVI and Starfield so it has no major competition. That's why it's blown up the way it has.
It's really good, I'm very happy everyone's loving it, but it's just... a good game that released with providential circumstance. Why can't it just be that simple?
Larian has been an indie developer for quite some time now and have been getting more and more popular with each game, similar to CDPR's trajectory before the CP2077 launch. They have been a clear ally of the anti-DRM and microtransaction movement since its inception to now, a day and age where publishers have gotten so cozy with monetization that we have glorified mobile games releasing as fully priced AAA games with minimum effort.
Here comes along this developer that has incrementally gotten better at this one, admittedly niche genre of games. Then, it is revealed that those games, already well-loved, were sorta an audition for the D&D franchise and Wizards of the Coast. And then the same developer gets the license to Baldur's Gate, takes 6 years with a massive, talent, and passionate studio, and delivers a game with legitimately hundreds of hours of interesting stories to tell.
This game is now the highest rated PC game of all time, highest ratest game in a year where a mainline Zelda game of all time, and has turned a NICHE genre to one of the games with a top 10 amount of concurrent players on a SINGLE platform. All while giving players so much.... freedom. Gameplay wise (choices, experimentation, splitscreen or online co-op, etc), monetization wise (no-DRM, no-MTX, etc).
I completely understand if, in your eyes, Baldur's Gate 3 is meh or even a great game that "isn't anything special." But this type of zeitgeist is only captured by a very few amount of games in existence, and the fact an indie-turned-AAA developer managed to do it while promoting the absolute best politics and sentiment in video games? That's a massive win, in my opinion. This moment is very special in gaming, mostly because of its significance in this current time in history.