I hope some smaller games can take the lessons of content density and meaningful decision making from BG3 more than anything else. The incredible conversation cutscenes are super cool, but definitely where a lot of budget went, and I think you could make a really great rpg with a similar feeling of depth without that costly element.
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
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Personally I'd love to see more of a living world like Ultima VII, Oblivion and Dwarf Fortress Adventurer mode.
Well good thing Larian already made BG3, now Owlcat doesn't need to!
II know things doesn't scale but I would love a AA cRPG at BG3 standard but a fifth of the length. Then I may actually finish it. 20-30h experience would be just great.
Divinity: Original Sin 2. You want Divinity: Original Sin 2.
That game is in no way 20-30h...unless you speedrun the main quest and even that's questionable.
Working on it... Cleared tutorial island for the second time, took a breather and now its been a couple of weeks. Sigh. Soon I will have lost the feel for the run and start over.
I have like 300 hours in BG3 and have not even finished the main quest yet
As I barely have managed to squeeze in 5-10 hours of gaming per week this winter season the thought of spending 300+ hours in a single game is overwhelmingly daunting. A year with a single game. Ugh...
My best gaming experience this last year was with a short game that I knocked out in a weekend. Got a good satisfying experience and a conclusion to it. Git me rethinking things.
To sped that much time in BG3, you basically need to be trying to go as slowly as possible or restart a bunch of times.
You can easily beat the game in 50-80 hours without purposefully skipping content.
What was the short game? I want to play it now
Stray Gods, a roleplaying musical. More of an interactive musical than something with deep gameplay features. Kinda like a point-and-klick but you choose where the musical number goes. Inbetween the numbers there is a whole slew of talking to folks, investigating scenes etc.
Would have passed over it as it was far from my regular cup of tea. So I'm glad I "stumbled" into Overly Sarcastic Productions critique of it. May be the Detail Diatribe of theirs I've been the most glued to. And then I needed to play it myself.
That will be $199 million, please!
Overall it greatly expands the number of players though, even for niche games.
Like I found out about Shadow Empire after playing Stellaris a lot and then finding Dominions 6 as another 4X game, and eventually Shadow Empire.
Shadow Empire (and Dominions for that matter) have a much smaller budget than Stellaris, but they are excellent games that I only found out about after enjoying the genre.
I think BG3s success bodes well for Owlcat, since it brings more fans to the niche genre, that just went mainstream.
Also - Owlcat makes fantastic games. Kingmaker and its sequel, wrath of the righteous are some of the best CRPGs ever made. Pathfinder rules are a little crazy, there are redundant classes, but the character building and customization are a blast. In wrath of the righteous, you get a hero class that you can make completely broken, which is just a ton of fun. Especially considering the lower budget, they accomplished a ton and I've sunk hundreds of hours into their CRPGs.
He's not talking to us. He's talking to investors and board members.hes talking to the MBA bro VP that brags he's never even played a videogame.
A more apt comparison might be how much Divinity Original Sin, either 1 or 2, cost to make, and use that as a baseline instead of BG3, which is a significantly bigger project. From a quick search, DOS1 cost 4.5 million euros, make some adjustments like inflation, special interests, asshole marketers, and you're probably looking at a very well received CRPG nowadays costing around 8-10 million euros, which falls into his listed AA budget.
One thing Oleg noted that can balloon the cost is voice acting. For a CRPG with fuckloads of text, that's true. While I personally don't mind a game with too much text and no voice, I might be in the minority. I guess the expectation on having a voice over really depends more on the game and who's behind it.