Imagine listening to retailers over customers.
At the time, retailers were the customers. Before online storefronts took off, there was no way to sell one copy to Alice, one copy to Bob… you had to sell 50,000 copies to Best Buy with a promise to buy them back in a year if they don’t sell out. If they tell you up front, “we won’t buy that”, what are you gonna do?
It’s anecdotal, but a lot of my friends got bg3 simply because everyone said it was such an amazing, well made game. Most of them never finished a run and said it’s good, but not for them. I actually think it’s not impossible that the genre really isn’t that popular and the game performed so well because most AAA games aren’t made with that level of passion and creativity anymore.
I tried it and I’m not sure if I like it. It seems like the devs expect you to go nova and then rest after every second fight. I’ve put it down for now, and I’ll try again when I have lots of spare time and nothing better to play
That’s DND 5e for you.
The designers originally wanted people to do like 5 fights per rest, but players rightfully said that kind of sucks, and they want to use their cool powers. DND designers keep trying to make this work. It’s especially bad in video games where players hate timed quests.
If they had done something like dark souls “get from here to there on one rest” it might have worked better, but that’s a much harder game.
Yeah as the other user said, it’s the D&D backbone… I feel like that is the main thing that has prevented me from truly loving the game (and getting past Act 1). I kind of wish they wouldn’t have stuck so strictly to the D&D ruleset.
Maybe try Divinity: Original Sin 2? I’m pretty sure the combat in that one is not D&D based.
D:OS2 was really fun, I liked it a lot more. But it did take a couple tries for me to get into it, so maybe BG will be the same
I felt the same way about bg3. It’s an awesome game and my wife loves it, but it’s not for me.
Not sure how Pillars of Eternity: Deadfire sold, but i would love a new game in this series. I guess sadly not good enough to warrant a sequel :(
At least for now Obsidian announced an update which will introduce turn based mode to the first game, coming later this year: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/134573-patch-138087535-is-live/
I mean… Avowed exists. Not quite the same genre but it does lean on and expand lore of the world a bit more.
Deadfire felt… just kinda bland and mediocre to me. In fairness I never played PoE 1 so maybe I wasn’t fully invested in the world, but I kinda just got bored sometime around the halfway point of Deadfire and never finished it.
I absolutely loved deadfire. I loved, loved, loved iz
Deadfire was great. Good characters, good gameplay systems.
Loved my chanter with the heaviest armor and shield that popped out summons and sang until the enemies died. Or my cipher that would disintegrate enemies.
First one was a blast, especially with the whole fortress thing. Second one was good, but felt diluted and with “too much woke” shoved down your throat… Nothing against the themes per se, but not constantly in your face.
Second one was good, but felt diluted and with “too much woke” shoved down your throat… Nothing against the themes per se, but not constantly in your face.
Can you give any examples? I’ve been considering trying the game, I got it a while ago on sale but I haven’t picked it up yet.
Well you get to manage a fortress, and that is a whole quest line plus an infinite number of random quests. Then how the final battle goes depends on which quests you completed during the story (but not only), how you completed them and on which choices you make in the first half of the final mission. Lastly, there is a huge dungeon with multiple stories each more difficult and more lootable the deeper you go.
I had a blast.
Does it take a while to get going? Or is it awesome from the start?
Also, I was looking for maybe some examples of it shoving “woke” in your face. I know different people have different definitions of the word, so I was trying to figure out what you actually meant by that.
I don’t remember how much it takes, sorry, but if I got to the end it must mean that it was good from the start :)
For the woke part, the whole game is a critique of white colonialism: there are multiple factions, but it’s clear as the sun that the good one is the islanders oppressed by these new factions that came to.their territory ignoring or destroying their culture. Which it’s fine, I get and I agree with it, but after 20 hour I’m really full with it…
And that’s “woke” to you? Huh. Ok.
It can feel quite long, yeah. But i especially liked the non-standard theme for a CRPG and the stories.
I think it comes down to cognitive effort, and dopamine release. Some people like to spend their time indulging in lore that would fill up several books, others like seeing explosions on their screens every minute or so. More power to both parties, we have choice nowadays anyways.
I used to love theses long rpgs, but nowadays I like grinding some boars and ripping off their snouts for whatever pointless quest in wow. But I did love playing the original fallout 1 and 2, diving deep into its mechanics. Really loved spending an absurd time into the
Its funny, I did buy pillar of eternity a while ago, and got so overwhelmed by the prospect of having a seemingly multi day game that I just turned it off, pretty convinced that it would monopolise my time if I gave it a fair shot, something that would have shocked me as a kid (think of the dollar to time ratio!!!)
Even if I don’t have time to play them, I still find myself buying them.
That’s easy to say now, but BG3 wasn’t getting much attention during it’s early access and other CRPGs like the Pathfinder games weren’t that popular either. BG3 has been a phenomenon for a multitude of reasons, so saying developers stopped making games like BG3 isn’t too precise either. The only game that gets close to BG3 in both features and praise is Divinity: Original Sin 2, which was also made by Larian.
They’re talking about the original BG with the Infinity Engine. BG3 is the proof retailers had it wrong.
Wasn’t Baldur’s Gate 3 a massive success? 15 million copies, well over half a billion in gross revenue. Kingdom Come:Deliverance II, Clair Obsure, and Elden Ring also come to mind. Heck, even the VR TTRPG Demeo was a success, all in the last 5 years. I don’t understand.
This article is about the big gap in similar games that occurred after the release of Icewind Dale 2 in 2002. And as the article says, it has nothing to do with their popularity among gamers, it was due to retailers throwing their weight around. There weren’t as many good options for direct-to-consumer sales at that time, so you had to sell the game to retailers before you could sell it to customers.
Weird that you don’t listen to your fans and customers
The problem back then was saturation from other competitors who were also cheaper. Noawadays word of mouth through social networks is much more effective.
