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Wizards of the Coast "now talking to lots of partners" about next Baldur's Gate
(www.eurogamer.net)
this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2024
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Old series that has a decent following of mostly niche dedicated fans is left to sit without a new installment for many years.
New title is announced. It's sells gang-busters and flips the community on its head.
Corporate Executives prioritize short term profits and begin planning a quick and easy cash grab. !
Second new installment comes out. It is a shell of the previous title with the soul sucked clean out.
Fans are dissapointed and outside of a small niche following the game series falls into obscurity.
Repeat.
! we are here right now
Look.. Maybe BG4 will be good. But after watching this exact cycle play out over and over again for the past decade I'm not sure how you can expect anything else.
When will the business world realize that anything business majors are given control of turns to shit. Like I know that it's not impossible for a AAA game to be good but I also know that most companies that can handle that kind of a budget are run by people who just think gamers love throwing money at anything labeled "video game", proved by so many out of touch quotes.
Like the BlizzCon "don't you have phones?" showed that Blizzard didn't even realize that their main demographic and shitty f2p phone games didn't have much overlap.
Or EA's "sense of satisfaction" was transparent when they give a paid path to skip a ridiculously tuned grind.
Or Ubisoft's "AAAA" said they hadn't even noticed that "AAA" was starting to be considered synonymous with "shit".
The funny part is that they aren't even wrong about the potential to make a lot of money from video games, it's just not by using business major tricks to extract the maximum short term gains or approaching making a video game by thinking about how to make the most money from it.
I remember when Disney fired Avalanche from Disney Infinity.... Apparently some guy at Disney learned how cheap it was to make Mobile Games and how much money they made, erroneously assuming that this was where the gaming market was going and how development studios would soon be "Out of jobs" with how "Simple" it was getting....
He was a god damn moron
God, "Do you guys not have phones?" was just.. embarrassing, the fact that they needed to be asked if this was an April Fools joke before the crowd understood what was happening is... yeesh
I'm not saying business majors shouldn't be involved at all, they just shouldn't be making major game design decisions that the people who have a passion for making a great game disagree with.
It all comes down to the main motivation for doing the work. If the passion guiding the overall operation is about making a great x, then IMO it is much more likely to succeed than if the passion is about making money from making x.
When it's a large company involved, that can be mitigated by finding people who are passionate about the x instead of just the money, but all the orders of "do it this less fun way because it will make us more money" can kill that passion over time or even just cancel out the positive effect that passion had on the game.
I'm reminded of the guy who busted his balls trying to get Fallout 1 to be a thing when Interplay had no faith in it, only to be "rewarded" by being overly worked and underpaid to rush out a sequel....
And the release parties for Tomb Raider that the devs literally weren't invited to, just suits and press people acting like they were the ones who made the game.
Baldurs Gate 4: From EA. $99 for the base game. Then you have the season pass with unique characters (squirrels you can kick), as well as character DLCs, then don't forget all the skins. Oh! Did we mention that Act 2 and Act 3 are sold separately?