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this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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Baldur's Gate 3
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All things BG3!
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.
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.