It’s strange, I still have real difficulty getting ‘in’ to Baldurs gate 3, even with all the media hyping it for a long time. And one reason for that is I don’t find it all that ‘deep’, and its linear progression makes me lose interest partway through the starting areas (never gotten to the goblin camp or w/e).
Like take the romances. Even in the little bit that I played, the way affection is handled is just boring / tired / done. All the male chars are sorta femmy, all the female chars are sorta butch, and none of them seem to care that, like, I’m some tiny scrawny gnome bard. They all want to screw me, just cause I’m nice to them – all the men turned gay almost immediately after meeting me, something I guess they had to tweak in a patch. And it all seems to happen based on pre-determined/defined relationship algorithms - be nice, gain a point towards boning NPC X, if you cross a threshold trigger an event. That’s been done literally for decades and decades in the CRPG genre.
The encounters/combats are all really rigid and essentially scripted in nature, at least the parts I’ve seen. Go to point X, encounter monster group A, which is tooled to certain party level ranges. If you can’t win, you’ve gone to an encounter out of the general ‘order’ you’re meant to do them. Go back, find the encounter you missed to level up, then return and progress further. Again, very generic and something that’s been done for decades.
Rigid party size, camp with toons you can swap in and out, complete with a skill retrainer guy. Immersion breaking, but again, a trope / mechanic that’s been around for literally decades.
What is femme about Wyll, Halsin, or Minsc? What is butch about Shadowheart, or Minthara?
Also, did you consider that losing a battle meant you should consider alternative tactics?
I am not a huge fan of the game for the record.
Yes yes, tactics matter a bit, as does RNG. But it’s still a fairly linear progression line. Like it’s possible to get to the first on-land brain thing fight without hitting level 2. It’s possible to win that fight as a level 1, with just you and shadowheart, technically. But its far far easier if you just play the way they intended, get to level 2 before that fight, and cheese it.
As noted elsewhere, I haven’t even been interested enough to get to the goblin village. So Halsin, Minsc, Minthara are all people I never bothered to get to. Emo goth cleric girl is feminine, though it feels very niche – like a ‘token’ straight semi-human looking girl. So if you want a ‘traditional’ partner, you’re stuck with emo girl? meh. At least if you play as a girl you have a choice of more human looking partners at least.
Wyll I sorta just assumed was gay, cause all the others were already gay for my ugly little gnome – plus you meet him while he’s taking care of children in the camp, and he runs around in light armor/isn’t a ‘physical’ character class. The most physical male in the first bit is asterion, but he is more agility/dex, which are traditionally more female oriented in d&d (I think old editions gave women +1 dex, men +1 str or something along those lines) – and he’s obsessed with sucking my gnome.
In a broader sense though, its the assertiveness of the different characters that I think causes the impression on my side. All of the women are pretty direct / blunt / to the point about ‘most’ topics (outside of story elements like shadowhearts whatsit); the men are sorta coy and demure.
There’s a whole lot more they could’ve done in that space, but they left it essentially the same as previous games – while I get that it’s well executed, I don’t think of it as having more ‘depth’ in this area than anything previous. So I find it boring / unmotivating.
Yes, Hasbro wants to make another Baldur’s Gate game that continues to “raise the bar” without Larian
Pfffffff… Hasbro has a great reputation for being greedy as fuck, and completely deaf blind and dumb to what fans love and enjoy about established IPs. So I’m sure whatever travesty they release will be just great 👍
When they say “raise the bar” they just want to make a hornier dating sim.
No, whether say “raise the bar” they mean “increase the price.”
Buy these new subclasses for just 3,99 each, or 10 bucks for the bundle with all of them! This is a limited time offer, visit the Baldurian shop to grab yours fast!
Ahh, Dungeons and Dragons: Online, my beloved
Free Lasting Potion of Jumping (+20) x5 Coupon Code: SLAMDUNK Now through April 24th!
Jokes aside, what they literally mean is “make it on a budget expect a giant revenue since people want more”. And after it flops, they’ll moan and whine about how customers are ruining the industry by not knowing what they want and demanding something they wont buy.
TBH that would sell well.
I’d probably buy it. I have no shame.
they just want to make a hornier dating sim.
but we have two and a half studios for that
@[email protected] is right…I’d buy that!
The memes should be fun tho
Fair dues
“raise the bar” is big Amazon language. Maybe a bunch of ex Amazon folks in Hasbro now.
🤮
Yeah Hasbro will just dumb it down and ruin it
Optimus Prime skin on the Mother Brain.
I’ve tried to play baldur’s gate 3 a few times already and every time I felt like it was a fantastical game but I always ended up not playing it for long. After the last time I started wondering why that happened and reached the conclusion that it was the D&D universe that put me off. Not necessarily because it was bad but because I knew nothing about it and the game didn’t try to introduce me to it either.
So I read your comment on Hasbro as “want to make another great game but using only the bad parts of the last one”
Even though Larian did a great job modernizing pieces, D&D 5E is just really crunchy and outdated, imo. Larian’s own Divinity Original Sin 2 had a largely better combat, magic, and armor system, even if it is a slightly older title now.
Physical and magic armor, spell cooldowns (prevents spell spam and constant short and long rests), advanced elemental and cursed surfaces, and diversified healing and combat magic make characters more flexible.
5e’s rest system is good for taking care of (what was) useless food in inventory, moves the story along, and provides good places for more natural relationships. D&Ds lack of flexible healing and spell slots means a lot of annoying enemy encounters, however.
I’m on my second playthrough of both titles right now. BG3’s story is awesome. :)
hasbro: so more aaa schlock and treating our players as if they’re stupid it is then
Emphasis on the ass
Ah, so my first reaction is “what actual indie developer who knows what they’re talking about excludes BG3 from AAA”?
Turns out not this one, apparently, since the creative use of quotes seems intended to obscure that “AAA schlock” is not from the dev, it’s from the journalist rehashing a quote from an article about a quote from a podcast. Speaking of schlock.
Anyway, I’m on the fence about the core point. I agree on principle that “dumbed down” doesn’t make things mainstream. I agree that this is a lesson the industry insists on refusing to learn, even after The Sims doulbing as architecture software, WoW casual moms playing with a dozen UI mods, Fortnite core players building gothic cathedrals in five seconds and Roblox containing entire gamedev teams made of unpaid children.
Whatever the mainstream wants, “simple” has nothing to do with it.
Do I think BG3 means somebody should fund Pillars 3? Yeeeeah, not so sure. BG3 works because it was the literal best time to be making D&D stuff, because it had two extremely beloved brands propping it up, because it’s a sequel to two extremely well received, accessible CRPGs that both did a lot better than Pillars to begin with, because they were both focused on multiplayer and free-form systems instead of straight-up literature. Nuance matters here.
And then somebody (a lot of somebodies) gave Larian two hundred million to make it, so it also looks at least as good as anything Bioware ever did during their heyday. That’s probably why BG3 has 140K players on Steam right now and Avowed has 1K and never peaked past 10K.
There are lessons from BG I’d love to see the industry learn. I want them to learn the right ones, though, because if they go ahead and invest another nine digits in the wrong thing then we WILL actually have to wait another 30 years for another game like that.
If an indie studio can produce this, why not create a AA CRPG? Do you really need the third A?
Im sorry BG3 is triple A in quality they are indie since they published their own games not cause they are small or low quality. Indie just gets thrown around as most are solo devs. With digital distribution less indies have to sell out to work with big publishers to get on consoles. Honestly it’s why I think AAA publishers are dying they can no longer just buy the smaller fish.
Baldurs Gate 3 is a AA CRPG tho?
BG3 had a budget of over 100 million and several hundred people working on it, it’s well into AAA territory
pretty sure we’re at AAAA now
The As represents how much the employees scream while making the game.
Isnt bg3 simplifing DND to bring it to a more mainstream audience? Players definitely do not want deepass crpgs. Crpgs go very deep.
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Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Witcher 3, Baldurs Gate 3.
We don’t care about the game, we want boobies and sex and romance.
Edit: y’all feeling called out for being thirsty
we want boobies and sex and romance.
Literally the parts I couldn’t care less about.
Dude, same. I finally got around to the Witcher 3 and as am adult now, the sex stuff is just so awkward.
Yeah you’re like sitting in your game room alone watching cringe, only partially skippable, erotica. Nobody is watching me but damn if someone walked in…
I truly can’t tell if you can mean this. You play games to see the 3D polygonal breast
I don’t think it’s just the visual for people. They go on these epic quests and gain emotional attachments to their party members. It’s basically interactive erotica with dragons and shit.
It’s called Mass Erect for a reason bud
My four player game every one runs around naked it’s hilarious. The dicks twitch all over in the cutscenes. More of that yes. So funny.
Why can’t we have both?
You can, just pointing out games with sex appeal do well. The core gameplay has to be good too, but I don’t think that’s what propels a good game to the apex.
The new Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Cyberpunk all had an average mixed to negative reviews.
You might want to check Cyberpunk again.
Cyberpunk is still utter shait when compared to GTAV and still delivers on less than half of what they promised. If they hadn’t become the de facto hardware showcase for NVIDIA the game would have long been abandoned. NVIDIA’s marketing development funds sponsoring half of “gaming” youtubers did more for CDPR’s reputation than anything they added to the game. It was never going to be better than mid, and it’s still mid. Ai is still worse than GTA3.
Dang, sorry bud, sounds like a you problem. I thought it was great.
I only played it after the fixes years later and concur
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Please explain to me how GTAV was shallow. One can absolutely dislike the caricature like style of world building however, calling it shallow borderlines illiteracy. Especially when defending cyberpunk, there’s no underlying message of any sort in Cyberpunk. It’s like, shoot the baddies, corpos bad, mohawk and neon good.
I can tell you from the top of my head Cyberpunk issues that haven’t been solved to today or promises that haven’t been addressed:
Ai of NPCs Ai of police - both still much worse than even sleeping dogs… The promised branching narrative never happened, it’s wildly linear. No functional karma system. The writing of the main characters, the beginning is promising with the
Tap for spoiler
death of Jackie
The world is basically a ubisoft map minus interesting, organic things to do in the open world The driving is horrendous in cars, unbelievably bad in motorbikes The characters are wildly one-dimensional and villains are absolute moustache twirling levels of bad.
They failed on over half of the promised features to this day. It’s not a bad game, it’s just mid.
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The mission structure is shallow. No room for creativity at all. There’s only one way to finish most quests. If you step outside the path the developers created for you at all, instant fail.
The fact you unironically use this to detract from GTAV, a game released during the PS3 era, while ignoring the exact SAME issue for Cyberpunk, a modern RPG advertised as the epitome of choice, should inform anyone to the validity of any of the opinions you hold in this matter. The only staying power of Cyberpunk is people benchmarking with it.
You literally contradict yourself trying to defend Cyberpunk…
I didn’t play Cyberpunk for the police and NPC AI. I don’t give a fuck about that. I played it for the story, world-building, characters, dystopian themes, and shoot em up style hacker gameplay.
So you play it like a linear shooter, which is the exact opposite of what was advertised. Mayhap you are part of the population Kojima also mentioned as fundamentally unable to process anything that isn’t “shoot the baddies”.
On that subject, the story of Cyberpunk is pretty shallow. There’s one good arc, the tutorial, after that it reads like it was written by a completely different team and the original writing team was relegated to one or two side quests.
Edit:
maybe you’re just a cunt
Very classy, one can Tell Cyberpunk is one of your favourite games.
Just wanted to chime in and agree with you - waited to buy it for years (patient gaming ftw) then after loading it up the first npc phased right through me, just walked straight through me and I was like, wtf?
