Why are people pretending baulders gate is the only high selling game with no microtransactions as of late? Off the top of my head Elden Ring and Tears of the Kingdom both released in the last year or so, no microtransactions or dlc as of now.
And they’re staring to have Battle Passes have multiple tiers of cost such as in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and NBA 2K24. What’s next? Multiple battle passes at once like in the free to play Monster Legends? In $69.99 priced games? Where the battle passes cost at least $19.99 per month?
Now if they’d just make it an actual game rather than a story-heavy romp that should have been a movie instead. BG has always aspired to be a Western version of a JRPG, and it’s terrible.
They made a D&D video game. The most popular and successful board game ever made. They had BUCKETS of funding from wizards of the Coast for this. They also had a massive studio with more than 400 people working on it.
James Stephanie Sterling did a fantastic video about Baldur’s Gate 3. Essentially, everything came together in just the right way for this game to be made. It’s not responsible to call this the new standard in the same world where we vilify overwork and ‘crunch-time’, but that’s not to say you shouldn’t expect more from game developers. You absolutely should. But you should do so reasonably.
Other triple A devs have massive funding, a giant staff and other unlimited resources and they still can’t make a game devoid of microtransactions or bugs. Are you stunned?
I’m pretty sure EA and Activision-Blizzard have similar or bigger budgets for their AAA games and they either make shit or microtransactions-filled games.
2K is huge and they always make NBA2K decent/good but full of terrible microtransactions
I’m no financial expert so maybe I’m mistaken in some figure, but the bottom line is WotC is not the only big (and growing) company, so this are nothing but excuses.
They had BUCKETS of funding from wizards of the Coast for this. They also had a massive studio with more than 400 people working on it.
They had the IP; they did not receive a single cent from WotC. They funded the game with money from their previous games, and in fact, they paid WotC for the IP.
People have been saying this game is exciting because of the lack of mtx, but it seems to me that any big rpg gets a lot of attention. Eldan Ring got similar praise last year. Bioware was making these kinds of games fairly consistently about a decade ago and then stopped to make shit like Anthem. It’s a design decision not a budget problem.
Microtransactions come with specific challenges. Specifically, you have to give the players a reason to pay them, and that’s usually done by making the game purpously worse for those who don’t pay.
Or the other trend these days, Wich is to remove content from the base game and sell it as dlc or just money-gate it even if it’s on the base disk/release.
I don’t necessarily believe this to be universal. I’ve played plenty of games with cosmetic mtx that I can absolutely play without the desire or need to spend money.
I mean we can have large games with detailed graphics and have employees treated well. We just need to accept 10+ year timelines for releases on big games which I’m ok with as long as we get quality results and the team is treated well.
I follow star citizen though so I could be the weird one here lol
That’s a valid point. As long as there’s a publisher and investors we’re more than likely never going to see what I suggested, I kinda forgot star citizen is what it is because it’s funded by us.
It’s always the same crunch time for employees and rushed buggy products to feed the investors from “AAA” corps. Hope we can push for some positive change :/
I can’t understand why crunch time has become so normalised. There’s no other software development project where constantly failing to plan for the needed time requirement would be accepted. Crunch is a sign of bad project management, it isn’t normal.
At some point, people figured out that during a couple of weeks of mad rush right before a deadline, if you’ve got committed, well-rested employees who know they’re going to get a rest afterwards, they tend to be much more productive than they normally are. Some bad managers only paid attention to part of that, and determined that eighty hour weeks are more than twice as productive as forty hour ones, and intentionally started inducing crunch. They somehow didn’t notice that the third week of crunch is only about as productive as a regular week, and after that, it’s way less productive as everyone’s exhausted. Combine this with the fact that people with management knowledge tend to flee from the games industry rather than to it, and you end up with the software engineering industry’s least effective managers running things with easily debunked dogma.
The main differences with Star Citizen are that it’s
Funded in advance
Funded by people who have no say in how the product/company should work
Massively overfunded
This means, CIG has no pressure to ship soon or even at all (if the project fails, they have no liability). They also have nobody telling them what to with the money. They have already made their profit.
I am not knocking CIG for this situation, but if you put it like this, it’s easy to see why for each CIG out there, there are tens of thousands of games on crowdfunding sites that either
Failed to raise funds
Failed to get a decent company/legal structure running with the money they raised
Failed to actually ever deliver anything in an usable state
Are just pure scams
So as a general business model rather than just an insane stroke of luck, I don’t think this is a good option.
A business model that only earns money after release (like the classic publisher-funded development model) is bad for the obvious cash-grabby and buggy reasons, but at least it consistently delivers games. Contrary to the “earn money before you start development” model that is enabled by crowdfunding, which in general does not deliver games.
In my (not very educated) opinion, early access is probably the best middle ground. You start off with little initial funding required, but by the time you turn to the crowd, you already have a working prototype and company structure. That makes it much more likely for the game to eventually be released in a full version. This option obviously comes with its own downsides as well, but many of my favourite games have been small studios or even individuals who use early acces to fund development.
Who the f is Shawn, wtf is evolve? Why is every shitty game dev crying that other people make good games, without shame? Oh that’s right, based on their releases, they have no shame.
He didn’t have anyone’s attention and he craves attention and now he has lots of attention, so I guess everything is coming up Milhouse as far as Shawn is concerned.
Not correct Larian reached out to WOTC coast first to try get the licence after Divinity Original Sin but were turned down because they felt that they were too new. Was only after DOS2 that they got the license.
I think that one (HUGE) part of BG3’s success is that it was in Early Access for, what, 2-3 years? During which it grew a dedicated modding scene, received a metric fuck-ton of feedback, and regularly dropped large content patches. This wasn’t an average dev cycle, and I think it shows. In some ways, the Dev. Feedback and interactivity reminded me a lot of the way Warframe does dev interactions.
Yeah, I agree with that similarity to Warframe’s level of developer interaction.
Sure, in the past they’ve been slower to respond to feedback about problems, and often times old things have fallen out of relevance because something else just outright does the same thing, and more, but better.
But as it is now, DE really seems to be prioritizing listening to feedback, almost exponentially so, and as an example, bringing things up to par with what they should be at the current level of the game, a concept that much more rarely got the implementation it deserved in years before.
And warframe has been rewarded with a practically methusalian lifespan for a game in its genre, I hope we see the same for baldurs gate 3 with a similar level of ongoing support and improvement.
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