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.
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.
I’m a game developer. No game developers are panicking about this game. I’ve not played it but I’ll probably play it soon. It looks great but even if it blows my mind it doesn’t cause me to panic. It inspires me. I don’t know of a game developer that gets panicked at the sight of good games. I know monetary goblins that might realize they can’t push heartless games anymore but in the last decade we’ve started to see games really take shape as cinematic masterpieces. Experiences that truly top movies. This is the inevitable next step. Games with more interactions and more meaningful choice out of those interactions.
I think by “some developers”, they’re referring more toward the AAA studios who have spent the last couple decades baking MTX into every nook and cranny they can find in their games, and not indie devs.
There are even great AAA studios out there that aren’t pushing mtx. I just played uncharted 4 and I can’t believe that is almost a decade old. It still holds up. Far better than Rockstar’s red dead redemption 2. That said there is room in the industry for everyone. The indie team that takes 6 years to make high quality games to the AAA studio pushing games out every 2 years. Including small indie studios of 5 people making huge hit survival games and indie games that were made in 9 months but have a lot of heart.
Quality is subjective and I think we’ll start to see our genres break down as people go towards more and more specific definitions. We’ve already seen this a bit with the fps reverting back to doomlike with games like prodeus.
Honestly, nowadays it feels more like an indie studio is more of an indicator of quality than AAA. Most of the games I buy and enjoy are indie/small studios.
Larian is about as indie/small as Bethesda was when Skyrim released.
AAA games are very rarely as innovative as indie games, it’s all just the same rehashed stuff I feel like. Just whatever is “safe”.
So, I very much agree, the typical AAA stuff from studios like EA, Ubisoft, etc. Don’t interest me.
Although maybe Starfield will be interesting, we’ll see. I didn’t really like Fallout 4 though, I wished the RPGs were a bit more like the more old school ones lol.
I’m willing to be surprised by it, but I’m not optimistic for Starfield. What I’ve seen of it so far looks mainly like they grafted chunks of No Man’s Sky onto a Bethesda Fallout game and are trying hard to pitch it as The Next Big Thing. Frankly, I’d much rather have the next mainline Elder Scrolls game instead, but at this rate I’m going to be 40 before I get to play a sequel to a game that came out in my 20s.
They also lifted chunks of Star Citizen.
I’m fairness, incomplete chunks is all that exists of Star Citizen.
Well, that and a whaling operation on the scale of Victorian England’s.
I am in the SC club and it’s a glitchy, broken, incomplete mess while also being one of the coolest gaming experiences I’ve ever had when it works.
About $500 of the ~$600 million they’ve raised is mine, dating from the original crowdfunding campaigns and the first year or two of development. I still check in every year or two to see if they’re any closer to having a complete game, and every time I do, I come away with the sense that they’ve put vastly more effort into developing and selling spaceship JPEGs than they have into making the game those spaceships are supposed to be used in.