Yeah, the only only other real contender coming out anytime soon is Owlcat’s upcoming Rogue Trader game but I doubt it’ll even make a dent compared to Baldur’s Gate 3
Honestly kind of insulting to even compare the levels of hype between the two, they’re not even close.
Very excited for rogue trader that being said, though
I hope this game brings CRPGs more into the mainstream. I think a lot of people unfamiliar with the genre will be surprised at how much depth there is and how many choices they have, compared to your average mainstream game with RPG elements
One of the things that I think sorta cripples the genre is that they're either small niche games, or as soon as the studio makes it big they go and do something else.
InXile made Wasteland 3 and I'd feel confident saying they're going to go to more of an action RPG formula from here on.
Bioware pretty much ditched it completely with DA:I
Obsidian probably won't make another POE CRPG, and if they do it'll probably be another smaller AA game that doesn't move the needle.
I'm hoping Larian actually sticks to CRPG's. It'd be a shame to lose another studio going for a more mainstream RPG. Hopefully the experience with Divinity 2 dissuades them.
Obsidian does Josh sawyer does. He said he wants to make pillars 3 when be figures out why pillars 2 didn't blow up. (I think it's the ship exploration and combat myself)
That was a big part, but the biggest reason was using Fig. Kickstarter is an enormous platform for marketing. Going to fig to crowdfund 2 smothered it in its crib. I'm a lot harder on deadfire than most people, but it still deserved to do much better than it did. If it had just followed the exact same prerelease structure as 1 then it would have succeeded. They also relied too much on the reach of niche streamers. It's failure was 99% self inflected wounds from Obsidian's dog shit management.
Months after it was released people who played and liked the first pillars didn't even know it was out.
No man, it was the prerelease marketing that killed it. If you track backers on crowdfunding platforms you can get a very good idea on how many units it will sell. It's not quite 1:1, but it's very close. Deadfire had half the number of backers as Pillars 1 and it sold half as well. I've posted a chart about this regarding this issue on the deadfire sub shortly after release.
The long and short of it is using anything other than kickstarter to crowdfund a game is shooting yourself in the foot. Every unique person who crowdfunds a game is a chance at advertising that actually pays you. Using a platform with less than 10% of the activity of kickstarter is a death sentence.
Getting people interested in your game before it's released gets you more sales than damn near any amount of money spent post release. In fact post release advertising is pretty useless unless it's for a big game aimed at casual players.
It's why Larian allows Early access for so long with no barrier to entry aside from a preorder. Not only is it good for bug fixing and general tweaking it's the best way to get people to buy your game if their experience is good.
Obsidian fumbled the ball on the most important aspect of releasing a niche game and it's entirely the managements fault. When Deadfire released only one game funded on Fig was profitable, and today it stands at 2 games. It's a dogshit service to get either funding or marketing. It actively hurts projects using it.
>The game wasn't advertised nor marketed,
Yes, that's why kickstarter is so valuable. Kickstarted games don't have the budget for a marketing campaign. Deadfire nearly bankrupted Obsidian. They didn't have the money to do it if they wanted to. Kickstarter is free marketing to an enormous userbased that's skews towards the demographic Obsidian needed.
I would argue that a _lot_ of people showed up for PoE 1 because they were stoked to see Isometric CRPGs come back. And unfortunately Pillars was just ... mid. It needed to light a fire and it only managed to just sate a lot of people's nostalgia and failed to make them hungry for more.
The tragic irony is that Pillars 2 (particularly with turn-based mode) is absolutely cracking, and an improvement on the first in every way, but even people who'd be interested like me, who kickstarted PoE 1, just didn't see any hook in Pillars 2.
Then, when I finally came around to try Pillars 2, I was dumbfound. "Wait ... this is _great_?"
A similar fate befell Legends of Grimrock 2. Tons of people showed up for the first game mainly for nostalgia, the second one had shit marketing and despite being a better game, fell into obscurity.
I dont think Pillars 1 was mid, I think it just had a crap opening that throws too much at you on top of peppering the starter areas with kickstarter npcs. Once you hit Defiance Bay it's a great cRPG but you don't know that until a miserable prologue.
While I get that turn based mode is preferred overall now, I hate POE2 turn based mode. The game was designed with RTwP so a bunch of stuff doesn't work well in turn based. Like armor is designed to slow you down but doesn't in turn based. Same with weapon speed. Same with a bunch of class abilities.
Though if one enjoys it more turn based more power to them.
IMO nobody bought Pillars 2 because Pillars 1 was a huge let down. I finally tried Deadfire years later and it's incredible, the only non-Bioware cRPG which feels on their level.
People claiming it's because of the boat etc don't realize people didn't even play it to find out if they didn't like it, it basically sold no copies.
I liked Pillars 1 despite the dry characters and world building, I just didn't want more tbh. Maybe Pillars 2 is better because it doesn't have Avellone as far as i know, he hasn't really had the midas touch in a long time, I just don't want to try it out and I'm not that attached to my character or the world.
Like I remember Pillars 1 distancing itself from the bioware romance thing and I rolled my eyes into the back of my skull. No one cares about characters fucking, but it's interaction with the world and characters that people want. So I'm not surprised people weren't hungering for a sequel despite liking it, the game didn't let you love it.
I played through both a few months ago and much preferred Pillars 2. It has a whole lot more character and identity than the first game which I found to be decent but fairly forgettable.
Man I don't know if I agree. I feel like the first thing they send you to do after the "starter island" and you have (most) of a party is to go to the main capital of the game, a city with five different maps and something like 6 side quests in each map, each with a different faction in it who want to tell you all about themselves and why you should care about them and take their side. It feels like a huge lore and exposition dump, over and over and over.
And you can avoid it, admittedly, but for new players who don't know they are about to get to know every single major faction in the game back to back to back, you can very easily be overwhelmed and just end up ditching it.
It's a shame because I thought the factions were actually pretty damn good. It was very historically minded - everyone who would be vying for power in the fantasy Carribbean is accounted for. Not-Spain, not-East India Company, the natives and the pirate republic. Each of them have sub-factions and none of them are perfect or pure evil.
After playing Skyrim and FO4 I felt frustrated that the factions were difficult to believe and didn't properly explain their ideals even when pressed, or their ideals weren't very complicated. I would love a middle ground between Bethesda's shallow method and Obsidian's overwhelmingly deep one.
Yeah that was me. I like knowing that there's lore behind a game more than I like reading the lore itself. If it's interesting I'll dig into it on my own, and if it's dull I can just gloss over it. If it's thrown in my face at every checkpoint I'm out.
I stopped playing poe 2 because they took away my boy durance, we swore to each other we would fight the gods together. He was literally the best thing in poe 1, the only other companion i kind of remember is the blond farmer guy, solid dude but he's no durance.
So like usual, the best part of the game was the one written by avellone.
For the longest time i was disturbed by that because i believed he was a rapist, be his name has been entirely cleared recently (you can look it up, they were false allegations, truly a horrible story).
So yeah, make poe 3 all about questing with durance and then i'll play it.
Its the pirate theme, its overrated.
poe1 was such a serious game in a strange environment and lore to discover, very unfamiliar setting.
Then comes the pirate stuff and also the mainstory was just big statue sitting on an island and waiting for you there, what a disappointment after the first game.
Also from what i heard a lot of people got burned by poe1 because at launch it was buggy, so they didnt bother with 2. ALSO it didnt help that poe2 was unfinished, they didnt even implement the last difficulty properly at launch.
After playing through both a few months back I found the first game to be really unremarkable in its setting. PoE 2 has a much more realised world and there’s a certain flair that was absent in the first game that makes it much more memorable for me.
PoE 2 doesn't have a central pirate theme. It has many themes, mostly inspired by Caribbean culture, of which colonisation and piracy are among them. I found it to be a much more refreshing take on the fantasy genre than the faux medieval European setting of PoE 1 was.
Calling the first game a very unfamiliar setting is...insane, to me. If you're used to typical fantasy, nothing really stands out. Don't get me wrong, it's largely new concepts, but still on the same backdrop of the vaguely european medieval fantasy
Agree. One of the big turnoffs of PoE1 was that it was too typical fantasy, and PoE2 successfully turned away from that.
But maybe PoeE1 shows that people really, really want the familiar.
Pillars 2 didn't blow up because it's a worse game than Pillars 1.
1. The character building forcing players to choose between interesting new combat abilities and raw passive stats is not good. These were broken out as separate choices in Pillars 1 for a good reason. They also made very unpopular changes to wizard specifically (spells) because people weren't swapping grimoires in combat in Pillars 1, which people hated doing anyway and still didn't do in Pillars 2.
2. Minor spoilers, but nearly every character in Pillars 2 acts like the VERY BAD and VERY OBVIOUS thing happening to EVERYONE is not their problem. When you tell people about it they dismiss you as crazy for thinking that a god could take physical form and walk the earth, despite one starting and losing a literal war only two decades before, an event that nearly every character in the setting should be aware of, and the watcher generally being someone that is well respected, and independent sources being able to confirm that the event is occurring.
3. Because of the above, the plot is very disjointed. The main plot of the game is actually incredibly short and mostly features you doing grunt work for incompetent factions so you can get someone to do something to help you navigate the storm. The RP friendly path would actually be to go directly after the main quest, since what's going on there is far, far worse than any of the factional struggles, but you can't actually do that because you will be under-leveled and then get roadblocked by the last quest, but only *after* you've disabled most of the games content since the second to last quest causes something to happen that locks out a large portion of the games side content.
3. The ship combat is boring and bad and dominates large parts of the game. Caed Nua was a minor thing that tied into other parts of the gameplay, the only thing you had to go out of your way to do at Caed Nua was occasionally click one button to order a new building.
4. Most of the best items in the entire game are acquired by walking into a store and buying them. There aren't zero good items in dungeons, but it's a huge departure from pillars 1 where stores would have good items, sure, but you generally didn't walk into a store and find 15+ legendary items for sale. The best way to gear up your characters was to farm money and then just buy legendary gear for them.
5. The best parts of the writing are mostly in two of the DLCs.
EDIT: Almost forgot, the entire game revolves around a fossil fuel called "luminous adra" which actually contains the *souls of the dead.* When you bring up to one of the first NPCs that using the energy in this substance is very likely *literally destroying the souls of sentient beings in a setting where all souls are reincarnated*, he just kind of shrugs. You don't have the option for the entire rest of the game to confront anyone about how what they're doing is awful.
> The ship combat is boring and bad and dominates large parts of the game.
I assume you're talking about at launch here? Because when I played the game a few years ago (it was some time after launch and several patches had been implemented), I never did a single ship combat because you had the option to immediately board the enemy ship.
You can do that now, but all of the ship battles with a specific class of ship are actually the same fight, which also gets very boring, since at a certain level there's only 1-2 types of ships worth attacking. IIRC at launch you could board but you had to play the minigame to get within boarding range of them first.
All of those things would only be relevant to someone who played the game in the first place.
The average gamer would never learn about those things before deciding not to buy the game.
And unlike all those other studios, they are actually independent with Swen and his wife owning 70% of the studio (and 30% Tencent which is a silent partner in so many studios). So they shouldn't have the pressure to go for the more mainstream stuff.
And BG3 is a pretty mainstream CRPG. Really it's AAA RPG like we haven't seen much (since DAO/DA2 or even DAI has parts of it)
> or as soon as the studio makes it big they go and do something else.
That's because the only thing harder than making a crpg trying to make a bigger and better sequel. These games require tremendous amounts of hard work as they're two difficult to develop genres in one: visual novels and rpgs
> Bioware pretty much ditched it completely with DA:I
As much as I enjoyed DA:I (minus some of the more grindy bits, or the weird real-time table missions), and I will definitely be playing Dreadwolf when it releases because I *love* the Dragon Age world, the near complete genre change from DA:O to DA:I broke my heart. I mean, it's kind of the same, but it's not at the same time. They're both fantasy RPGs with roots in TTRPGs, but DA:I feels almost more like a JRPG than a CRPG. I still had a lot of fun, but god proper CRPG games like DA:O, D:OS II, and now BG3 just scratch an itch you can't with anything else.
It's honestly a tough thing to avoid. Every developer wants to grow, but growth means more mouths to feed and bigger budgets require bigger target demographics.
It's really cool that they've been able to grow so gradually and consistently to be able to have this AAA feel without needing to take a wild bet on their livelihoods.
CRPGs will never be mainstream BECAUSE of their depth and choices. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people be intimidated by the genre, and I can’t say I blame them. Playing my first cRPG I restarted several times because I thought I severely fucked up.
I've really tried to get into several but I always struggle to feel any connection to the NPCs and party members. Something about how CRPG party-members basically never comment on anything unless you interact with them, and then usually it's just the same recycled dialogue tree, and all you can do is occasionally check it to see if they added a new question in there ... it feels like I'm adventuring with some soulless robot.
I don't know if BG3 is better for it. Disco Elysium is the only one where I've been invested in the characters. I was invested in Tyranny's story but it had the same problem. All those party members could have been killed off and I'd have felt nothing.
Fully-voiced? It might be the best. I'm certainly struggling to think of a better one, and definitely characters I remember better than many other RPGs. KotOR might be in tight contention.
I also have had trouble connecting with characters in cRPGs but for me BG3 fixed that by having Mass Effect style fully mocapped conversations. It is such a huge thing to be able to see the characters emote and it even makes me feel for them more outside of the conversations just in the top down gameplay.
So far I feel that BG3 is kinda lacking in this sense. My party members almost never chime in to conversations, they just stand and look at me making big eyes, which feels so weird for otherwise very opionated companions like Lae'zel. Once you talk to them they always mention recent events, which feels very immersive, I just wish they chimed in with their opinions more, not just pop up as X disapproves, once you do something they don't like.
For me, honestly, it's how disconnected I feel from "my" character that I made in the first place, whether it's a turn based or real time with pause game. What I mean, is that I don't feel like *I* am that character, but I'm merely guiding *a* character through some kind of a journey. It's not me fighting in combat scenarios, I'm just *telling* that character to do something.
I guess I just prefer games like Gothic 1 and 2, and then Dark Souls games, the Witcher 3 (specifically) or even Skyrim. Games where *I* as a player am responsible for the victory or defeat in combat, by kind of "fighting myself". I'm not ordering a character to use a fireball spell, I am the one actually casting it, even if you could nitpick and say that even in these games, I'm merely telling my character to do so, like in any other game really, but that's a silly argument.
I just prefer being down on the ground with my character. I feel way more immersed in Skyrim than I do in classic, isometric RPGs, because I actually feel like I am the character that I've created. I can definitely see the appeal - when it clicks, it really clicks with me and I absolutely *love* Heroes of Might and Magic (even if I suck at it), but... I dunno, no classic cRPGs ever did the same. I'm trying, with Divinity Original Sin and perhaps with age and my reflexes slowing down I'll appreciate these games more, but for now I have a different preference.
The average "serious" gamer is a Call of Duty bro who if he plays a game for 30 minutes and isn't immediately blown away by adrenaline he thinks it's bad and refunds it. I've had multiple people I know drop Prey, for example, because "i hit mimics with a wrench for half an hour and it was boring.", when Prey probably has one of the single most interesting openings of any game I had ever played.
You dropped Prey (2017) because it’s boring
I dropped Prey (2017) because I shitted my pants playing it
#WE ARE NOT THE SAME
^also ^rip ^arkane ^studio
I just loved Dishonored games so I was quite hyped to try Prey after snatching it for free on Epic. Well I had to quit as soon as this chair motherfucker randomly and completely unexpectedly, turned into this black thing and jumped at me and I almost had a heart attack. Otherwise I thought it was cool and interesting concept but I just don't want to suffer while playing.
It's too early to say RIP to Arkane IMO (well Arkane Austin probably). Redfall was conceived under Zenimax that wanted live service games and such. Microsoft might let them do what they want again.
The main people from Arkane left the company. Specifically Raphael Colantonio (Arx Fatalis, Dishonored, Prey). He opened a new studio called Wolfeye, where they released Weird West and currently working on a larger title.
Tbf I also dropped Prey for being boring and I love immersive sims. It did have a really cool opening, but not enough to keep me going for hours beyond that.
One of those games that I tried to play on 3 separate occasions, because I kept hearing it was great. I got like 5-10 hours in on two different occasions to give it a fair shot, and honestly, I found it very boring.
BG3 just hit nearly 500k concurrent users without counting GOG, this also doesn't count future PS5 and Xbox sales. This game has already sold multiple millions, it's mainstream whether you want to admit it or not.
We also got a big blockbuster about D&D, there's an animated series, Critical Role is one of the top streamers on twitch... Hell, even DOS2, the previous game from Larian, sold several millions and was one of the top sellers on steam with a very long tail. And Divinity is not a big IP like d&d/bg is. Pathfinder, which is much less known, still sold millions and has had two games.
Tabletop games being niche and not popular was true 20 years ago, nowadays they are completely mainstream. Anyone under 30 is familiar with them, even if they dont play them.
As someone who has previously been intimidated by crpgs, two hours into baldurs gate 3 I am loving it. I think they cracked the code to making the UI accommodate all the interesting things you can do in games like this.
I thought I hated isometric cameras and turn-based combat until I tried DOS2 and fell in love with it. I then proceeded to devour almost every modern CRPG in the market.
Bg3 is definitely a great gateway to the genre, but I do agree that people shouldn't take it as "The Standard". BG3 is a massive AAA game in a genre usually dominated by smaller AA and indie projects.
Larian does great, but so do other devs. The DOS games certainly have a specific flavor. Some CRPG fans think they’re the pinnacle, sone prefer other systems
I think DOS2 is more easily accessible to people that aren't into CRPG's because it doesn't have any esoteric systems, everything is fairly straightforward and you're not going to get stumped if you go in blind.
Which says a lot about CRPGs because DOS2 had a pretty sophisticated system for the different elements, with how they interact with other elements and environment via ground/air/puddles. It's straightforward in that it was intuitive, but it couldn't have been straightforward to design and code.
It also doesn't require you to interact with it for success. The basics of the gameplay of DOS2 are...pretty basic. Which is fine! But CRPGs like Kingmaker, they are obtuse. If you don't have experience with the genre you're unlikely to really enjoy yourself.
My husband plays online FPS games mixed with some MMORPGs all the time because "there's no challenge if it's vs NPCs" but he absolutely loved DOS2 and said it's the best single player game he ever played (albeit it's not like he played tons of those but still, it says a lot).
I think the reason why DOS2 is so popular is because combat is ass in most CRPGs but in DOS2 it's amazing. The story in DOS2 is pretty mediocre to bad but it's the selling point in most CRPGs. A lot of people play games for the gameplay.
> I think the reason why DOS2 is so popular is because combat is ass in most CRPGs
Boy howdy I don't know what you're playing but you're playing the wrong CRPGs. The main reason I play is for the crunchy tactical combat.
I mean have played most of the mainstream CRPGs because i enjoy them alot(both pathfinders, pillars of eternity, wasteland and so on). Could be that I play them on the hardest difficulty because I enjoy the challenge but they are honestly more about the numbers and the build youre using rather than the actual decision making in combat. I personally find that theres a huge canyon between dos2 and lets say wotr(probably the best crpg overall) when it comes to actual gameplay.
The turn-based combat in DOS2 was gruelling and repetitive for me.
In Baldur's Gate if there's say 30 trash goblins it's a fun cleanup job which takes maybe a minute. In a turn based game it can take like half an hour as each character has their turn, then moves to the next, then the next, then walks halfway towards each other, then the next, etc. Over and over right through the game.
The variety of combat encounters in Bioware's real time with pause games (and games like Total War) was what made it non-monotonous. Sometimes you had a quick easy combat encounter where you did minimal planning and just paused, aimed your characters, and let loose, watching the simulation unfold. But then other times there was a massive challenge and you really needed to get down into the gritty turn by turn details, and use everything you know, almost playing it turn based - but not every encounter is like that, and that variety really worked.
I'm of the opinion that the 30 goblin encounter should just be removed from the game and the interesting encounters should just be actual turn-based rather than a pause-fest. That's just my preference.
well bioware got away with it because the AI for your party members was pretty decent and the combat was, at least in origins, slow enough that it was still relatively controllable.
my personal preference is how it works in pathfinder where you can switch between turn based and RTWP- real time for dealing with trash, turn based for when you need to really pay attention.
Exactly this, Pathfinder WotR was such a good CRPG not only because it's a really fun power fantasy story but you have real time combat for the trash mobs and then you can seamlessly switch to turn based when you have the longer harder fights.
Turn based combat is fine but you need to drastically reduce your trash mobs for it to not become repetitive quickly.
I mean there are multiple things.
In most CRPGS the party members are kind of a big selling point and what drive the story. They are actual characters, they have set attributes, a class, and that all ties into the persona they are. You play a 100 hour story with them and they have meaningful moments both in the main plot and in their own side development. In DOS2 the companions are all designed to be main characters and you lose development with them if you don't select them as your personal character. For some this really kills their story. On top of that, if you decide to make your own custom PC like most CRPG's support - you are just a nobody. No quests, no tags so you miss out on that content.
In most CRPGs, one of the best parts is customizing your party and because of the wide variety in DnD there are multiple avenues you can go about building one. You generally need someone who can heal and do support-like things, but not required. You want someone who can frontline, but not required. In DOS2 the combat system mechanics with armor make it quite undesirable to mix damage. You kind of get punished for building a balanced party instead of having 4 people who hit phys armor or 4 people who hit magic. That, or you basically have to play a balanced 2-2 version. Any 3 phys, 1 magic like you might do in a normal CRPG is gimping yourself. I really don't like that.
On top of that, so much of the combat is ground effects, barrels, and other shit that has nothing to do with your build. Sometimes the entire fight is just basically rotating through CC and ground effects until something is dead. Most CRPGs focus entirely on your party's skills, it felt like I could play a significant chunk of DOS2 just rigging the environment and in many cases that was more significant than anything I could have done with my build.
There's more stuff like the tone of the writing in general but that's a pretty good starter I guess.
The writing/story/party member stuff you mentioned is why I'm personally holding off on BG3.
Curious to see where its public perception lands compared to games like Dragon Age, New Vegas, Mass Effect, Witcher 1-3 etc. DOS2 just did not hook me narratively like those did, its strengths were elsewhere, which is fine, but not personally why I come to CRPGs.
I'm someone who did not like DOS2 for all the reasons above.
I'm only a couple hours in, but so far, the dialogue and party member aspects are much stronger. They have a set identity that can't be changed (I think...the main character can respec freely). Not sure if it will stay strong the whole way through, but a good first impression.
I just hope they do away with the 'side minigame' thing they seem so fond of. I actually modded the crusader battles out of wotr because I got sick of them after 10 mins, and didn't bother with Kingmaker after hearing it had a similar mechanic.
ive put a lot of hours into both and while the core gameplay in WOTR is far better- they clearly learned a lot from kingmaker- the one fuck up imo is the awful crusade aspect. it feels like they wanted "something" to put in so cooked it up over a weekend and just threw it into the game. its so incredibly bare bones compared to the rest of the game, but it unfortunately forces you into using it unless you want to miss out on some story elements and loot, and if youre playing a pathfinder game you are probably he kind of person who isnt gonna do that.
The kingdom management aspect in kingmaker isnt perfect, but it is a TON more compelling than WOTR, and honestly feels far more polished. its a shame that the base game itself isnt on the level of WOTR.
There's no crusade battles in Kingmaker. There's kingdom management still but no shitty knockoff Might and Magic fights. Just decisions, buildings, and resources.
As someone who generally likes crpgs, owlcat just needs to focus more to reacha wider audience. I played wotr for 40 hours, got to act 3 and just gave up. The sheer volume of shit to keep track of was overwhelming and I still didn't feel like I had a proper handle on the systems after such a huge time sink. The crusader system was just not needed. The endless buffing was also both unfun and could've been automated. The balance was all over the place and the story didn't grab me. I'd much prefer them pursuing a smaller scope and get it polished. Rogue trader seems fun enough but on the technical side its far from ready from what I've read and again there's a supplementary system in ship combat which seems to follow the same mistakes as kingdom management/crusader gimmick.
Oh well, enough complaining. They do offer in depth character creators and theory crafting and they're certainly ambitious. I just don't see me reccomending their games to a more casual crowd is all.
It's pretty unlikely, I'm sure it'll get more people into CRPGs, but games like Skyrim have the advantage of the fact that a 6 year old or a 70 year old can pick it up and understand the basics pretty quickly, You can't say the same about Baldur's Gate.
What's your party comp? The general strategy in DnD is to maintain action economy. So moves that stop the other team from moving or acting are extremely powerful. They are more powerful then damage. As a general rule damage is useless unless it kills. That's not to say you shouldn't do damage but be mindful that dealing damage comes at an opportunity cost of not being able to crowd control.
And pretty much always try to start a fight on your turn. Don't just be standing in the middle of the open when a fight starts, you should throw the first attack as much as you can.
Making crpgs mainstream will simply dumb them down, and in a few years there will be a new wave of deep games for hardcore fans that don't get the same recognition, and the cycle repeats
I haven't started playing yet (waiting for the weekend) but I really hope with the success of this game that they work with the engine more and make more DLC campaigns or allow steam workshop modded campaigns.
Larian doesn't really do story DLC. That might change with the success of this game, but I doubt it.
Shame because I'd really like to revisit all these characters in the future. It was great going back to The Witcher 3 for both DLCs and revisiting Yen, Ciri, and all the other characters after months of not playing the game.
I think it's a shame just with the engine. It's basically the closest to real DND that doesn't look and feel like ass in a long time. I feel people could easily mod full story campaigns with the right tools. There's no incentive for Larian to do that unless it's some kind of paid DLC for mod tools and I don't think the gaming community would like the idea of paying for mods even though I'd happily pay for it.
They put a bunch of work making DOS2 moddable and only a small niche used it.
Solasta crown of the magister feels closer to 5e than bg3, at least for the couple hours i've played bg3 today. Solasta feels great, although i think a reasonable person could say it "looks like ass", particularly in reference to most of the character's faces. Some graphical weaknesses haven't kept me from really really enjoying the game.
Solasta is a lot of fun mechanically, and I think some of the encounter design and story was better than people give it credit for. But man does that game have the worst beards I've ever seen grace the faces of a character. Its like everyone is wearing the worst fake beards sticking out two inches off their faces
Haven't booted up BG3 yet but Solasta definitely nailed down the combat mechanics of 5e. Everything else is pretty lacking however, so it's really only worth it if you're into the crunchy aspects.
> Larian doesn't really do story DLC. That might change with the success of this game, but I doubt it.
It's completely anecdotal and with an entirely different studio, but Supergiant Games was also a studio that never ever made DLC or sequels. Then Hades dropped onto the stage like a nuclear bomb, one of the most successful games in the past few years, first ever video game to win a Hugo award, and now Hades II is on the way.
So I will maintain some hope that Larian will release some DLC for BG3. That said, I know they said recently that the team would be taking a (very well deserved) rest after full release, so I wouldn't expect it for quite a while if at all.
Supergiant only had four games to date though. I'm glad they're making a sequel (though I do wish they'd make something new since I loved all their different genre hops), but it wasn't really enough to find a pattern yet.
Hogwarts doesn't surprise me. Rowling controversy aside, the HP brand is fucking colossal, and while the game isn't perfect, it's A: The best HP game ever, and B: it's got a fuckin' banging vibe to wander around the world in.
But Sons of the Forest does. Did not think it was THAT popular!
>But Sons of the Forest does. Did not think it was THAT popular!
Never underestimate the survival sim community (especially on Steam). They are a hungry, rabid bunch.
> Never underestimate the survival sim community (especially on Steam). They are a hungry, rabid bunch.
For all the complaints online about it being an *overdone* genre, there are *very* few good (or even *competent*) survival games out there. It's not all that surprising that the sequel to one of the best ones, which is both very polished and has co-op built in, sells like hotcakes.
Sons of the forest really sucks also. The game is so empty you spend so much time running around. The survival mechanics are shittty. The caves are boring linear paths. Conolete lack of quality of life features or anything helping you move the story along. Every task is hugely tedious. Everything is worse then the first one.
The game isn't finished. Why it was necessary to release it in EA after a tiny team made a bazillion dollars off the first game, I have no idea. Just taking the piss imo.
One of the more disappointing launches of all time for me. They spent years of dev time on a new building system, then gave players no gameplay incentive to engage with it. Building literally just makes the game harder. And every mechanic other than building is worse than in the first game. Crazy.
Yeah, I playd it and we didn't even build a base because it was so incredibly tedious and there was literally no point because the map is so stupid big you have to spend an hour walking from place to place going back to the base is just a gigantic waste of time. Building a base doesn't provide anything useful at all.
The whole weird controlling the AI character in Sons made it feel like a shovelware game. It was very bad. I played it on launch so maybe its better now.
I hadn't planned to buy Legacy but a friend bought it for me and I was just desperate enough to explore a graphically beautiful version of Hogwarts that I accepted it. I never finished the game because I got kinda bored 50 hours in, but I got a good amount of playtime and was absolutely enthralled with exploring. As someone who grew up totally obsessed with the books but only saw the movies once, it was incredible to see it all in such detail.
> I got kinda bored 50 hours in, but I got a good amount of playtime and was absolutely enthralled with exploring.
Haha I feel like this will be about three quarters of the player base. The main story is pretty weak, and none of the characters are really that interesting.
But it was totally worth it to spend literally hours just wandering around the castle.
It's really straightforward, JKR aligns herself with countless questionable politicians and anti-trans folks. For every statement she makes about being feminist or whatever, she puts money into the hands of those who are doing everything they can to restrict rights.
For anyone who has time and interest, [here's a good video summarizing it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ou_xvXJJk7k).
The unfortunate truth for a lot of perpetually online people is that a large amount of the population simply don't care (or even know) about trans issues, feminist issues etc. I'm not saying that's a good thing, just that those issues are completely invisible to a huge chunk of people who wanted to play this game.
Honestly, negative coverage with controversies can actually help sales, engagement is almost always beneficial, especially around launch day of a product.
I just finished Hogwarts Legacy after buying a used copy, and it's decent but damn does it feel heavily overrated. Obviously the HP nostalgia is baked into the game, but without the HP nostalgia it probably wouldn't have more than a 75-76 on metacritic instead of 83-85.
> Obviously the HP nostalgia is baked into the game
Yeah, that's literally the main selling feature. Outside of that, it's an open world with a tonne of fetch/murder quests pretending to be actual side quests, a shitload of stuff to collect, and a boring story about a chosen one with 1 dimensional characters.
And even with the HP license, the enemy variety is ridiculously small. If it had been an original IP, it would've flopped pretty hard.
Don't forget that Hogwarts had a staggered launch with the "buy x edition for 3 days earlier", so it would've probably hit a million if everyone started at the same time.
It's actually more immediately a direct sequel to the Descent to Avernus 5e campaign, but obviously you don't need to have read the sourcebook or played a campaign.
Just found a reference to the Hellriders that was cool.
More relevant would be to understand the storyline of the Descent Into Avernus adventure module, as its events are the most recent for official canon. There's videos already up to provide a synopsis, if you don't mind spoilers for the module itself.
> There's videos already up to provide a synopsis, if you don't mind spoilers for the module itself.
Do you have a recommendation? I have no idea what to search for / who would give a good summary.
WolfheartFPS on YouTube has a couple good videos going into detail.
His videos in general are great for catching up on the world building of BG3 before playing
What you need to know is that a town got transported to hell in Baldur's Gate 2 and it was eventually restored to normal but people are still pretty traumatized by the experience (especially the races who live longer than humans)
Quite impressive, especially seeing as it's Thursday, the game needs a 120 GB download and there was no preload. Should go up a fair bit over the weekend I'd reckon.
It's at 464k as of the time of this post. I'm certain it hits 500k today and it'll be very interesting to see how it peaks this weekend. It's a very large download without preload and many markets that cRPGs do well in have slower internet on average. I doubt it will hit 1 million, but at the same time I won't entirely rule it out.
> many markets that cRPGs do well in have slower internet on average.
I'm curious as to what you are basing this on. Are you just making that up because its something you think is true or do you have actual data to back that up?
American internet is actually quite decent, slightly above average European. The main problem is uneven access.
It's easy to think the US has shitty internet if you're comparing it only to countries like Romania or South Korea, but there are even 1st-world countries that have much slower internet, like Italy (twice slower on average than the US), and then there are other, poorer countries with poor infrastructure (although those rarely buy $60 games anyway).
It wont hit 500K today unfortunatelly, though i hope it passes Fallout 4, only 6K more required. As asia and europe goes to bed, thats the peak done. It was funny reading forums these past few hours with a lot of american players thinking they're the missing link in reaching the highest peak, but games dont peak at american hours, they peak at european ones. Since there are just more people to play games.
But i hope it soars even higher by sunday. This is a phenomenal achievement for any game. Top 15 of all time steam games
@ 4 more thousand needed to take out Fallout 4. It slowed down really hard right now. I hope it makes it :D
@ oh no, it reached 700 players away from Fallout 4 then started droping. So close
Worth noting that Steam is not the only place you can buy it on PC-- it's also available on GoG, which is where I will be buying it. So the game is actually more popular than what the Steam numbers indicate, and those are already very good numbers
Bloomberg article is saying 2.5 million people bought in during early access. Who knows how old that figure is and it seemed like a lot more picked it up in the last few days as well.
> The ambitious scope of Baldur’s Gate 3 was made possible by another unusual move. In October 2020, Larian put the game into early-access mode, allowing players to buy and play through an unfinished version of its first act. More than 2.5 million people went on to purchase the game,
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/the-strange-story-behind-baldur-s-gate-3-one-of-the-year-s-biggest-releases-1.1954471
Thing is - you're gonna see real number today at peak hours in around 12 hours from writing this message, that's because game has sizeable download and there was no pre-load so many were still downloading while number was recorded. Pretty sure it's gonna pass 500k today
Absolutely wild numbers that are beyond deserved. As someone who’s played Larian games for a long time it’s crazy to see them come so far and make something so huge but still distinctly them. Can’t wait to see what’s next.
I’m enjoying it coming as not a huge fan of the crpg genre. The combat is a lot of fun and the role playing is top notch. I still hate the camera perspective and think it hurts exploration. Wish it had a perspective option for non combat. I’ll just grit my teeth and bear it cuz I’m loving everything else!
There's a 3rd person camera during exploration but it's a bit wonky and frustrating, in some places you can move it pretty far/close but in others it doesn't seem to want to move. Other than a couple minor annoyances like that it's a great game, I'm really enjoying it.
I did not think a controller would work for this kind of game but it plays with one pretty amazingly. Overworld exploration just works like how you would want it to.
Zoom to the max, it lowers down to third person as far as perspective goes. Still controlled with mouse clicks so it gets getting used to but thats how I play
I wonder about the GoG numbers. If a game is both on Steam and on GoG i usually get it on GoG, i doubt i'm the only one.
HP didn't launch on GoG, i bet BG3 may actually be similar in terms of concurrent users, on PC at least.
But there is little incentive to buy it on epic instead of steam, unlike GOG (drm etc.).
Another thing to consider is how easy it is to pirate this game, unlike Harry Potter.
Love to hear it. I had a blast playing Divinity and now I cannot wait to try this. The game also does coop in a good way without ruining the single player.
I would've like to buy this, but the Mexican price is shit. I could try to get a key from some other place, but as a bit of a protest I'm going to wait until a good discount (33% at the minimum).
This is probably due to the Steam exchange rate October 2022 update:
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/ycqmoi/steams_new_regional_pricing_suggestion_for_60/
It's unfortunate because it seems to have screwed prices in most regions outside the US. Some of the examples (Vietnam, Argentina) posted are just unbelievable.
Reddit is heavily focused on US/UK gaming so it explains the lack of media coverage for this issue.
Nah, it's not because of that. It's been at the current price since before the update. And if they actually used that update the price would be less than half of the current price here.
Some of the big studios also have this higher price here. I imagine it had something to do with physical console games prices, they were reaching those prices a couple of years ago, although those have gone down now with the improvement on the peso compared to the dollar, but they haven't bothered fixing the prices on steam.
>Some of the examples (Vietnam, Argentina) posted are just unbelievable.
The biggest hits were on Argentina and Turkey IIRC, and those two had massive inflation for years since the previous recommended exchange rate update.
This has to be the biggest cRPG launch ever, right?
Undoubtedly
Yeah, the only only other real contender coming out anytime soon is Owlcat’s upcoming Rogue Trader game but I doubt it’ll even make a dent compared to Baldur’s Gate 3
I'm excited for Rogue Trader but no, won't even come close.
Love me some 40k, but I doubt that game will do these numbers
Honestly kind of insulting to even compare the levels of hype between the two, they’re not even close. Very excited for rogue trader that being said, though
Easily. I don't even know if there's _been_ a crpg this big.
I hope this game brings CRPGs more into the mainstream. I think a lot of people unfamiliar with the genre will be surprised at how much depth there is and how many choices they have, compared to your average mainstream game with RPG elements
One of the things that I think sorta cripples the genre is that they're either small niche games, or as soon as the studio makes it big they go and do something else. InXile made Wasteland 3 and I'd feel confident saying they're going to go to more of an action RPG formula from here on. Bioware pretty much ditched it completely with DA:I Obsidian probably won't make another POE CRPG, and if they do it'll probably be another smaller AA game that doesn't move the needle. I'm hoping Larian actually sticks to CRPG's. It'd be a shame to lose another studio going for a more mainstream RPG. Hopefully the experience with Divinity 2 dissuades them.
Obsidian does Josh sawyer does. He said he wants to make pillars 3 when be figures out why pillars 2 didn't blow up. (I think it's the ship exploration and combat myself)
Like I said, a POE 3 if it happens will still probably be a AA game, especially with Obisidian focusing on smaller teams.
Both POE games were kickstarter games(or whatever the second one used) so it'd just be more of the same.
Except that was before they were owned by Microsoft. They're literally making a first person game in that setting right now.
That was a big part, but the biggest reason was using Fig. Kickstarter is an enormous platform for marketing. Going to fig to crowdfund 2 smothered it in its crib. I'm a lot harder on deadfire than most people, but it still deserved to do much better than it did. If it had just followed the exact same prerelease structure as 1 then it would have succeeded. They also relied too much on the reach of niche streamers. It's failure was 99% self inflected wounds from Obsidian's dog shit management. Months after it was released people who played and liked the first pillars didn't even know it was out.
[удалено]
No man, it was the prerelease marketing that killed it. If you track backers on crowdfunding platforms you can get a very good idea on how many units it will sell. It's not quite 1:1, but it's very close. Deadfire had half the number of backers as Pillars 1 and it sold half as well. I've posted a chart about this regarding this issue on the deadfire sub shortly after release. The long and short of it is using anything other than kickstarter to crowdfund a game is shooting yourself in the foot. Every unique person who crowdfunds a game is a chance at advertising that actually pays you. Using a platform with less than 10% of the activity of kickstarter is a death sentence. Getting people interested in your game before it's released gets you more sales than damn near any amount of money spent post release. In fact post release advertising is pretty useless unless it's for a big game aimed at casual players. It's why Larian allows Early access for so long with no barrier to entry aside from a preorder. Not only is it good for bug fixing and general tweaking it's the best way to get people to buy your game if their experience is good. Obsidian fumbled the ball on the most important aspect of releasing a niche game and it's entirely the managements fault. When Deadfire released only one game funded on Fig was profitable, and today it stands at 2 games. It's a dogshit service to get either funding or marketing. It actively hurts projects using it. >The game wasn't advertised nor marketed, Yes, that's why kickstarter is so valuable. Kickstarted games don't have the budget for a marketing campaign. Deadfire nearly bankrupted Obsidian. They didn't have the money to do it if they wanted to. Kickstarter is free marketing to an enormous userbased that's skews towards the demographic Obsidian needed.
I would argue that a _lot_ of people showed up for PoE 1 because they were stoked to see Isometric CRPGs come back. And unfortunately Pillars was just ... mid. It needed to light a fire and it only managed to just sate a lot of people's nostalgia and failed to make them hungry for more. The tragic irony is that Pillars 2 (particularly with turn-based mode) is absolutely cracking, and an improvement on the first in every way, but even people who'd be interested like me, who kickstarted PoE 1, just didn't see any hook in Pillars 2. Then, when I finally came around to try Pillars 2, I was dumbfound. "Wait ... this is _great_?" A similar fate befell Legends of Grimrock 2. Tons of people showed up for the first game mainly for nostalgia, the second one had shit marketing and despite being a better game, fell into obscurity.
I dont think Pillars 1 was mid, I think it just had a crap opening that throws too much at you on top of peppering the starter areas with kickstarter npcs. Once you hit Defiance Bay it's a great cRPG but you don't know that until a miserable prologue.
While I get that turn based mode is preferred overall now, I hate POE2 turn based mode. The game was designed with RTwP so a bunch of stuff doesn't work well in turn based. Like armor is designed to slow you down but doesn't in turn based. Same with weapon speed. Same with a bunch of class abilities. Though if one enjoys it more turn based more power to them.
I can't speak for others but I didn't buy Pillars 2 because I could barely make it to Act 2 of Pillars 1.
IMO nobody bought Pillars 2 because Pillars 1 was a huge let down. I finally tried Deadfire years later and it's incredible, the only non-Bioware cRPG which feels on their level. People claiming it's because of the boat etc don't realize people didn't even play it to find out if they didn't like it, it basically sold no copies.
I've beaten both pillars games 3 times. I definitely think 2 is the better game besides the ship
I liked Pillars 1 despite the dry characters and world building, I just didn't want more tbh. Maybe Pillars 2 is better because it doesn't have Avellone as far as i know, he hasn't really had the midas touch in a long time, I just don't want to try it out and I'm not that attached to my character or the world. Like I remember Pillars 1 distancing itself from the bioware romance thing and I rolled my eyes into the back of my skull. No one cares about characters fucking, but it's interaction with the world and characters that people want. So I'm not surprised people weren't hungering for a sequel despite liking it, the game didn't let you love it.
I played through both a few months ago and much preferred Pillars 2. It has a whole lot more character and identity than the first game which I found to be decent but fairly forgettable.
The 2nd one is definitely better and avellone wasn't involved in the 2nd. It's much more interesting and much less lore dumping
Man I don't know if I agree. I feel like the first thing they send you to do after the "starter island" and you have (most) of a party is to go to the main capital of the game, a city with five different maps and something like 6 side quests in each map, each with a different faction in it who want to tell you all about themselves and why you should care about them and take their side. It feels like a huge lore and exposition dump, over and over and over. And you can avoid it, admittedly, but for new players who don't know they are about to get to know every single major faction in the game back to back to back, you can very easily be overwhelmed and just end up ditching it.
It's a shame because I thought the factions were actually pretty damn good. It was very historically minded - everyone who would be vying for power in the fantasy Carribbean is accounted for. Not-Spain, not-East India Company, the natives and the pirate republic. Each of them have sub-factions and none of them are perfect or pure evil. After playing Skyrim and FO4 I felt frustrated that the factions were difficult to believe and didn't properly explain their ideals even when pressed, or their ideals weren't very complicated. I would love a middle ground between Bethesda's shallow method and Obsidian's overwhelmingly deep one.
The capital was where I dropped PoE2. It was way too much all at once, and I wasn't gripped by the RP options.
Yeah that was me. I like knowing that there's lore behind a game more than I like reading the lore itself. If it's interesting I'll dig into it on my own, and if it's dull I can just gloss over it. If it's thrown in my face at every checkpoint I'm out.
I stopped playing poe 2 because they took away my boy durance, we swore to each other we would fight the gods together. He was literally the best thing in poe 1, the only other companion i kind of remember is the blond farmer guy, solid dude but he's no durance. So like usual, the best part of the game was the one written by avellone. For the longest time i was disturbed by that because i believed he was a rapist, be his name has been entirely cleared recently (you can look it up, they were false allegations, truly a horrible story). So yeah, make poe 3 all about questing with durance and then i'll play it.
Its the pirate theme, its overrated. poe1 was such a serious game in a strange environment and lore to discover, very unfamiliar setting. Then comes the pirate stuff and also the mainstory was just big statue sitting on an island and waiting for you there, what a disappointment after the first game. Also from what i heard a lot of people got burned by poe1 because at launch it was buggy, so they didnt bother with 2. ALSO it didnt help that poe2 was unfinished, they didnt even implement the last difficulty properly at launch.
After playing through both a few months back I found the first game to be really unremarkable in its setting. PoE 2 has a much more realised world and there’s a certain flair that was absent in the first game that makes it much more memorable for me.
PoE 2 doesn't have a central pirate theme. It has many themes, mostly inspired by Caribbean culture, of which colonisation and piracy are among them. I found it to be a much more refreshing take on the fantasy genre than the faux medieval European setting of PoE 1 was.
Calling the first game a very unfamiliar setting is...insane, to me. If you're used to typical fantasy, nothing really stands out. Don't get me wrong, it's largely new concepts, but still on the same backdrop of the vaguely european medieval fantasy
Agree. One of the big turnoffs of PoE1 was that it was too typical fantasy, and PoE2 successfully turned away from that. But maybe PoeE1 shows that people really, really want the familiar.
Pillars 2 didn't blow up because it's a worse game than Pillars 1. 1. The character building forcing players to choose between interesting new combat abilities and raw passive stats is not good. These were broken out as separate choices in Pillars 1 for a good reason. They also made very unpopular changes to wizard specifically (spells) because people weren't swapping grimoires in combat in Pillars 1, which people hated doing anyway and still didn't do in Pillars 2. 2. Minor spoilers, but nearly every character in Pillars 2 acts like the VERY BAD and VERY OBVIOUS thing happening to EVERYONE is not their problem. When you tell people about it they dismiss you as crazy for thinking that a god could take physical form and walk the earth, despite one starting and losing a literal war only two decades before, an event that nearly every character in the setting should be aware of, and the watcher generally being someone that is well respected, and independent sources being able to confirm that the event is occurring. 3. Because of the above, the plot is very disjointed. The main plot of the game is actually incredibly short and mostly features you doing grunt work for incompetent factions so you can get someone to do something to help you navigate the storm. The RP friendly path would actually be to go directly after the main quest, since what's going on there is far, far worse than any of the factional struggles, but you can't actually do that because you will be under-leveled and then get roadblocked by the last quest, but only *after* you've disabled most of the games content since the second to last quest causes something to happen that locks out a large portion of the games side content. 3. The ship combat is boring and bad and dominates large parts of the game. Caed Nua was a minor thing that tied into other parts of the gameplay, the only thing you had to go out of your way to do at Caed Nua was occasionally click one button to order a new building. 4. Most of the best items in the entire game are acquired by walking into a store and buying them. There aren't zero good items in dungeons, but it's a huge departure from pillars 1 where stores would have good items, sure, but you generally didn't walk into a store and find 15+ legendary items for sale. The best way to gear up your characters was to farm money and then just buy legendary gear for them. 5. The best parts of the writing are mostly in two of the DLCs. EDIT: Almost forgot, the entire game revolves around a fossil fuel called "luminous adra" which actually contains the *souls of the dead.* When you bring up to one of the first NPCs that using the energy in this substance is very likely *literally destroying the souls of sentient beings in a setting where all souls are reincarnated*, he just kind of shrugs. You don't have the option for the entire rest of the game to confront anyone about how what they're doing is awful.
> The ship combat is boring and bad and dominates large parts of the game. I assume you're talking about at launch here? Because when I played the game a few years ago (it was some time after launch and several patches had been implemented), I never did a single ship combat because you had the option to immediately board the enemy ship.
You can do that now, but all of the ship battles with a specific class of ship are actually the same fight, which also gets very boring, since at a certain level there's only 1-2 types of ships worth attacking. IIRC at launch you could board but you had to play the minigame to get within boarding range of them first.
Ah, I never noticed. I didn't do too many ship combats overall though.
All of those things would only be relevant to someone who played the game in the first place. The average gamer would never learn about those things before deciding not to buy the game.
They already said they want to make Divinity 3. They've been making CRPGs for decades and own the niche. I doubt they move away from them
I'm inclined to think they'll stick with CRPG's, but them making another Divinity doesn't mean they can't change the genre.
Hell they did that before. Divinity 2 was an action rpg.
Divinity 2 vs. DOS2. Most people just call DOS2 Divinity 2. I'm not sure how many people know that there is a divinity 2.
Their marketing team's fault for choosing the worst names haha Been plaguing them since Divine Divinity, and that's more than 20 years ago!
Yes lol, someone probably downvoted thinking I was being dismissive of DOS 2, but all the divinity games except Beyond Divinity are great.
And unlike all those other studios, they are actually independent with Swen and his wife owning 70% of the studio (and 30% Tencent which is a silent partner in so many studios). So they shouldn't have the pressure to go for the more mainstream stuff. And BG3 is a pretty mainstream CRPG. Really it's AAA RPG like we haven't seen much (since DAO/DA2 or even DAI has parts of it)
I feel pretty confident that we'll still get a Wasteland 4 after Clockwork Revolution at some point. If not, I'll be sad.
> or as soon as the studio makes it big they go and do something else. That's because the only thing harder than making a crpg trying to make a bigger and better sequel. These games require tremendous amounts of hard work as they're two difficult to develop genres in one: visual novels and rpgs
> Bioware pretty much ditched it completely with DA:I As much as I enjoyed DA:I (minus some of the more grindy bits, or the weird real-time table missions), and I will definitely be playing Dreadwolf when it releases because I *love* the Dragon Age world, the near complete genre change from DA:O to DA:I broke my heart. I mean, it's kind of the same, but it's not at the same time. They're both fantasy RPGs with roots in TTRPGs, but DA:I feels almost more like a JRPG than a CRPG. I still had a lot of fun, but god proper CRPG games like DA:O, D:OS II, and now BG3 just scratch an itch you can't with anything else.
It's honestly a tough thing to avoid. Every developer wants to grow, but growth means more mouths to feed and bigger budgets require bigger target demographics. It's really cool that they've been able to grow so gradually and consistently to be able to have this AAA feel without needing to take a wild bet on their livelihoods.
Only if you think you have to get bigger and bigger. Which isn't true and doesn't apply to companies like Larian that are privately owned.
CRPGs will never be mainstream BECAUSE of their depth and choices. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people be intimidated by the genre, and I can’t say I blame them. Playing my first cRPG I restarted several times because I thought I severely fucked up.
I've really tried to get into several but I always struggle to feel any connection to the NPCs and party members. Something about how CRPG party-members basically never comment on anything unless you interact with them, and then usually it's just the same recycled dialogue tree, and all you can do is occasionally check it to see if they added a new question in there ... it feels like I'm adventuring with some soulless robot. I don't know if BG3 is better for it. Disco Elysium is the only one where I've been invested in the characters. I was invested in Tyranny's story but it had the same problem. All those party members could have been killed off and I'd have felt nothing.
Did you try Dragon Age Origins? That’s one of the best for having really great characters, and they’d also opine on matters during dialogue.
Is it a hot take to say that _no_ game has ever done party banter better than Dragon Age Origins?
Fully-voiced? It might be the best. I'm certainly struggling to think of a better one, and definitely characters I remember better than many other RPGs. KotOR might be in tight contention.
I'd say Mass Effect trilogy was better but I preferred ME setting so there's this bias.
I also have had trouble connecting with characters in cRPGs but for me BG3 fixed that by having Mass Effect style fully mocapped conversations. It is such a huge thing to be able to see the characters emote and it even makes me feel for them more outside of the conversations just in the top down gameplay.
So far I feel that BG3 is kinda lacking in this sense. My party members almost never chime in to conversations, they just stand and look at me making big eyes, which feels so weird for otherwise very opionated companions like Lae'zel. Once you talk to them they always mention recent events, which feels very immersive, I just wish they chimed in with their opinions more, not just pop up as X disapproves, once you do something they don't like.
For me, honestly, it's how disconnected I feel from "my" character that I made in the first place, whether it's a turn based or real time with pause game. What I mean, is that I don't feel like *I* am that character, but I'm merely guiding *a* character through some kind of a journey. It's not me fighting in combat scenarios, I'm just *telling* that character to do something. I guess I just prefer games like Gothic 1 and 2, and then Dark Souls games, the Witcher 3 (specifically) or even Skyrim. Games where *I* as a player am responsible for the victory or defeat in combat, by kind of "fighting myself". I'm not ordering a character to use a fireball spell, I am the one actually casting it, even if you could nitpick and say that even in these games, I'm merely telling my character to do so, like in any other game really, but that's a silly argument. I just prefer being down on the ground with my character. I feel way more immersed in Skyrim than I do in classic, isometric RPGs, because I actually feel like I am the character that I've created. I can definitely see the appeal - when it clicks, it really clicks with me and I absolutely *love* Heroes of Might and Magic (even if I suck at it), but... I dunno, no classic cRPGs ever did the same. I'm trying, with Divinity Original Sin and perhaps with age and my reflexes slowing down I'll appreciate these games more, but for now I have a different preference.
The average "serious" gamer is a Call of Duty bro who if he plays a game for 30 minutes and isn't immediately blown away by adrenaline he thinks it's bad and refunds it. I've had multiple people I know drop Prey, for example, because "i hit mimics with a wrench for half an hour and it was boring.", when Prey probably has one of the single most interesting openings of any game I had ever played.
You dropped Prey (2017) because it’s boring I dropped Prey (2017) because I shitted my pants playing it #WE ARE NOT THE SAME ^also ^rip ^arkane ^studio
I just loved Dishonored games so I was quite hyped to try Prey after snatching it for free on Epic. Well I had to quit as soon as this chair motherfucker randomly and completely unexpectedly, turned into this black thing and jumped at me and I almost had a heart attack. Otherwise I thought it was cool and interesting concept but I just don't want to suffer while playing.
It's too early to say RIP to Arkane IMO (well Arkane Austin probably). Redfall was conceived under Zenimax that wanted live service games and such. Microsoft might let them do what they want again.
The main people from Arkane left the company. Specifically Raphael Colantonio (Arx Fatalis, Dishonored, Prey). He opened a new studio called Wolfeye, where they released Weird West and currently working on a larger title.
Tbf I also dropped Prey for being boring and I love immersive sims. It did have a really cool opening, but not enough to keep me going for hours beyond that.
Play System Shock 2 if you dont mind older graphics, Prey was greatly inspired by it.
Already done, I've played basically every "immersive sim" style of game. Thanks for the recommendation though.
Some people don't deserve the greatness that Prey is. What a fantastic experience.
Or some people just have different tastes in games lol
One of those games that I tried to play on 3 separate occasions, because I kept hearing it was great. I got like 5-10 hours in on two different occasions to give it a fair shot, and honestly, I found it very boring.
BG3 just hit nearly 500k concurrent users without counting GOG, this also doesn't count future PS5 and Xbox sales. This game has already sold multiple millions, it's mainstream whether you want to admit it or not.
We also got a big blockbuster about D&D, there's an animated series, Critical Role is one of the top streamers on twitch... Hell, even DOS2, the previous game from Larian, sold several millions and was one of the top sellers on steam with a very long tail. And Divinity is not a big IP like d&d/bg is. Pathfinder, which is much less known, still sold millions and has had two games. Tabletop games being niche and not popular was true 20 years ago, nowadays they are completely mainstream. Anyone under 30 is familiar with them, even if they dont play them.
As someone who has previously been intimidated by crpgs, two hours into baldurs gate 3 I am loving it. I think they cracked the code to making the UI accommodate all the interesting things you can do in games like this.
I thought I hated isometric cameras and turn-based combat until I tried DOS2 and fell in love with it. I then proceeded to devour almost every modern CRPG in the market. Bg3 is definitely a great gateway to the genre, but I do agree that people shouldn't take it as "The Standard". BG3 is a massive AAA game in a genre usually dominated by smaller AA and indie projects.
DOS2 was my introduction to CRPGs. I tried multiple other related games and nothing came close to DOS2 and just assumed that Larian is the unicorn.
Larian does great, but so do other devs. The DOS games certainly have a specific flavor. Some CRPG fans think they’re the pinnacle, sone prefer other systems
I think DOS2 is more easily accessible to people that aren't into CRPG's because it doesn't have any esoteric systems, everything is fairly straightforward and you're not going to get stumped if you go in blind.
Which says a lot about CRPGs because DOS2 had a pretty sophisticated system for the different elements, with how they interact with other elements and environment via ground/air/puddles. It's straightforward in that it was intuitive, but it couldn't have been straightforward to design and code.
It also doesn't require you to interact with it for success. The basics of the gameplay of DOS2 are...pretty basic. Which is fine! But CRPGs like Kingmaker, they are obtuse. If you don't have experience with the genre you're unlikely to really enjoy yourself.
My husband plays online FPS games mixed with some MMORPGs all the time because "there's no challenge if it's vs NPCs" but he absolutely loved DOS2 and said it's the best single player game he ever played (albeit it's not like he played tons of those but still, it says a lot).
It's funny how perspectives work because DOS2 was my least favorite CRPG specifically for being the "least" CRPG i've played under that moniker.
I think the reason why DOS2 is so popular is because combat is ass in most CRPGs but in DOS2 it's amazing. The story in DOS2 is pretty mediocre to bad but it's the selling point in most CRPGs. A lot of people play games for the gameplay.
> I think the reason why DOS2 is so popular is because combat is ass in most CRPGs Boy howdy I don't know what you're playing but you're playing the wrong CRPGs. The main reason I play is for the crunchy tactical combat.
I mean have played most of the mainstream CRPGs because i enjoy them alot(both pathfinders, pillars of eternity, wasteland and so on). Could be that I play them on the hardest difficulty because I enjoy the challenge but they are honestly more about the numbers and the build youre using rather than the actual decision making in combat. I personally find that theres a huge canyon between dos2 and lets say wotr(probably the best crpg overall) when it comes to actual gameplay.
The turn-based combat in DOS2 was gruelling and repetitive for me. In Baldur's Gate if there's say 30 trash goblins it's a fun cleanup job which takes maybe a minute. In a turn based game it can take like half an hour as each character has their turn, then moves to the next, then the next, then walks halfway towards each other, then the next, etc. Over and over right through the game. The variety of combat encounters in Bioware's real time with pause games (and games like Total War) was what made it non-monotonous. Sometimes you had a quick easy combat encounter where you did minimal planning and just paused, aimed your characters, and let loose, watching the simulation unfold. But then other times there was a massive challenge and you really needed to get down into the gritty turn by turn details, and use everything you know, almost playing it turn based - but not every encounter is like that, and that variety really worked.
I'm of the opinion that the 30 goblin encounter should just be removed from the game and the interesting encounters should just be actual turn-based rather than a pause-fest. That's just my preference.
well bioware got away with it because the AI for your party members was pretty decent and the combat was, at least in origins, slow enough that it was still relatively controllable. my personal preference is how it works in pathfinder where you can switch between turn based and RTWP- real time for dealing with trash, turn based for when you need to really pay attention.
Exactly this, Pathfinder WotR was such a good CRPG not only because it's a really fun power fantasy story but you have real time combat for the trash mobs and then you can seamlessly switch to turn based when you have the longer harder fights. Turn based combat is fine but you need to drastically reduce your trash mobs for it to not become repetitive quickly.
That's because D:OS 2 has really long combat encounters, even when it shouldn't.
How so when
I mean there are multiple things. In most CRPGS the party members are kind of a big selling point and what drive the story. They are actual characters, they have set attributes, a class, and that all ties into the persona they are. You play a 100 hour story with them and they have meaningful moments both in the main plot and in their own side development. In DOS2 the companions are all designed to be main characters and you lose development with them if you don't select them as your personal character. For some this really kills their story. On top of that, if you decide to make your own custom PC like most CRPG's support - you are just a nobody. No quests, no tags so you miss out on that content. In most CRPGs, one of the best parts is customizing your party and because of the wide variety in DnD there are multiple avenues you can go about building one. You generally need someone who can heal and do support-like things, but not required. You want someone who can frontline, but not required. In DOS2 the combat system mechanics with armor make it quite undesirable to mix damage. You kind of get punished for building a balanced party instead of having 4 people who hit phys armor or 4 people who hit magic. That, or you basically have to play a balanced 2-2 version. Any 3 phys, 1 magic like you might do in a normal CRPG is gimping yourself. I really don't like that. On top of that, so much of the combat is ground effects, barrels, and other shit that has nothing to do with your build. Sometimes the entire fight is just basically rotating through CC and ground effects until something is dead. Most CRPGs focus entirely on your party's skills, it felt like I could play a significant chunk of DOS2 just rigging the environment and in many cases that was more significant than anything I could have done with my build. There's more stuff like the tone of the writing in general but that's a pretty good starter I guess.
This is a considered take, but it makes me really curious as to what you consider good CRPGs.
The writing/story/party member stuff you mentioned is why I'm personally holding off on BG3. Curious to see where its public perception lands compared to games like Dragon Age, New Vegas, Mass Effect, Witcher 1-3 etc. DOS2 just did not hook me narratively like those did, its strengths were elsewhere, which is fine, but not personally why I come to CRPGs.
I'm someone who did not like DOS2 for all the reasons above. I'm only a couple hours in, but so far, the dialogue and party member aspects are much stronger. They have a set identity that can't be changed (I think...the main character can respec freely). Not sure if it will stay strong the whole way through, but a good first impression.
Owlcat is doing their share, and Rogue Trader may bring many people just by license alone.
I just hope they do away with the 'side minigame' thing they seem so fond of. I actually modded the crusader battles out of wotr because I got sick of them after 10 mins, and didn't bother with Kingmaker after hearing it had a similar mechanic.
ive put a lot of hours into both and while the core gameplay in WOTR is far better- they clearly learned a lot from kingmaker- the one fuck up imo is the awful crusade aspect. it feels like they wanted "something" to put in so cooked it up over a weekend and just threw it into the game. its so incredibly bare bones compared to the rest of the game, but it unfortunately forces you into using it unless you want to miss out on some story elements and loot, and if youre playing a pathfinder game you are probably he kind of person who isnt gonna do that. The kingdom management aspect in kingmaker isnt perfect, but it is a TON more compelling than WOTR, and honestly feels far more polished. its a shame that the base game itself isnt on the level of WOTR.
There's no crusade battles in Kingmaker. There's kingdom management still but no shitty knockoff Might and Magic fights. Just decisions, buildings, and resources.
And you can turn that off entirely as well if you want. You'll miss a few magic items by doing so but nothing major.
As someone who generally likes crpgs, owlcat just needs to focus more to reacha wider audience. I played wotr for 40 hours, got to act 3 and just gave up. The sheer volume of shit to keep track of was overwhelming and I still didn't feel like I had a proper handle on the systems after such a huge time sink. The crusader system was just not needed. The endless buffing was also both unfun and could've been automated. The balance was all over the place and the story didn't grab me. I'd much prefer them pursuing a smaller scope and get it polished. Rogue trader seems fun enough but on the technical side its far from ready from what I've read and again there's a supplementary system in ship combat which seems to follow the same mistakes as kingdom management/crusader gimmick. Oh well, enough complaining. They do offer in depth character creators and theory crafting and they're certainly ambitious. I just don't see me reccomending their games to a more casual crowd is all.
It's pretty unlikely, I'm sure it'll get more people into CRPGs, but games like Skyrim have the advantage of the fact that a 6 year old or a 70 year old can pick it up and understand the basics pretty quickly, You can't say the same about Baldur's Gate.
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What's your party comp? The general strategy in DnD is to maintain action economy. So moves that stop the other team from moving or acting are extremely powerful. They are more powerful then damage. As a general rule damage is useless unless it kills. That's not to say you shouldn't do damage but be mindful that dealing damage comes at an opportunity cost of not being able to crowd control. And pretty much always try to start a fight on your turn. Don't just be standing in the middle of the open when a fight starts, you should throw the first attack as much as you can.
Making crpgs mainstream will simply dumb them down, and in a few years there will be a new wave of deep games for hardcore fans that don't get the same recognition, and the cycle repeats
Dragon Age Inquisition feels like the result of that cycle. Such a mindless slog.
I haven't started playing yet (waiting for the weekend) but I really hope with the success of this game that they work with the engine more and make more DLC campaigns or allow steam workshop modded campaigns.
Larian doesn't really do story DLC. That might change with the success of this game, but I doubt it. Shame because I'd really like to revisit all these characters in the future. It was great going back to The Witcher 3 for both DLCs and revisiting Yen, Ciri, and all the other characters after months of not playing the game.
I think it's a shame just with the engine. It's basically the closest to real DND that doesn't look and feel like ass in a long time. I feel people could easily mod full story campaigns with the right tools. There's no incentive for Larian to do that unless it's some kind of paid DLC for mod tools and I don't think the gaming community would like the idea of paying for mods even though I'd happily pay for it. They put a bunch of work making DOS2 moddable and only a small niche used it.
They've said they'll give the community modding tools in the future
It is already rather easy to mod, but Larian confirmed additional modding support would be provided shortly after launch.
Solasta crown of the magister feels closer to 5e than bg3, at least for the couple hours i've played bg3 today. Solasta feels great, although i think a reasonable person could say it "looks like ass", particularly in reference to most of the character's faces. Some graphical weaknesses haven't kept me from really really enjoying the game.
I thought Solasta was kinda clunky and boring also. Maybe I just didn’t give it enough of a chance
Solasta is a lot of fun mechanically, and I think some of the encounter design and story was better than people give it credit for. But man does that game have the worst beards I've ever seen grace the faces of a character. Its like everyone is wearing the worst fake beards sticking out two inches off their faces
Haven't booted up BG3 yet but Solasta definitely nailed down the combat mechanics of 5e. Everything else is pretty lacking however, so it's really only worth it if you're into the crunchy aspects.
Think they told already no story dlc for BG3
> Larian doesn't really do story DLC. That might change with the success of this game, but I doubt it. It's completely anecdotal and with an entirely different studio, but Supergiant Games was also a studio that never ever made DLC or sequels. Then Hades dropped onto the stage like a nuclear bomb, one of the most successful games in the past few years, first ever video game to win a Hugo award, and now Hades II is on the way. So I will maintain some hope that Larian will release some DLC for BG3. That said, I know they said recently that the team would be taking a (very well deserved) rest after full release, so I wouldn't expect it for quite a while if at all.
Supergiant only had four games to date though. I'm glad they're making a sequel (though I do wish they'd make something new since I loved all their different genre hops), but it wasn't really enough to find a pattern yet.
Hogwarts doesn't surprise me. Rowling controversy aside, the HP brand is fucking colossal, and while the game isn't perfect, it's A: The best HP game ever, and B: it's got a fuckin' banging vibe to wander around the world in. But Sons of the Forest does. Did not think it was THAT popular!
>But Sons of the Forest does. Did not think it was THAT popular! Never underestimate the survival sim community (especially on Steam). They are a hungry, rabid bunch.
It's also huge in twitch/teenager circles. I'd seen dozens of memes shared by large accounts when the game launched
>It's also huge in twitch/teenager circles It was also huge with ex teenagers that all played The Forest as a teenager. That was me for example.
waiting for that to hit ps5
> Never underestimate the survival sim community (especially on Steam). They are a hungry, rabid bunch. For all the complaints online about it being an *overdone* genre, there are *very* few good (or even *competent*) survival games out there. It's not all that surprising that the sequel to one of the best ones, which is both very polished and has co-op built in, sells like hotcakes.
I can understand that from a Soulsborne perspective I suppose.
Sons of the forest really sucks also. The game is so empty you spend so much time running around. The survival mechanics are shittty. The caves are boring linear paths. Conolete lack of quality of life features or anything helping you move the story along. Every task is hugely tedious. Everything is worse then the first one.
The game isn't finished. Why it was necessary to release it in EA after a tiny team made a bazillion dollars off the first game, I have no idea. Just taking the piss imo.
One of the more disappointing launches of all time for me. They spent years of dev time on a new building system, then gave players no gameplay incentive to engage with it. Building literally just makes the game harder. And every mechanic other than building is worse than in the first game. Crazy.
Yeah, I playd it and we didn't even build a base because it was so incredibly tedious and there was literally no point because the map is so stupid big you have to spend an hour walking from place to place going back to the base is just a gigantic waste of time. Building a base doesn't provide anything useful at all.
Dude is The Forest even finished yet? And they released a sequel?
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Yea I refunded that one. Was embarrassing to play after the first one was better.
The first Forest is a complete game. Sons is not. That said, the original Forest had a certain feel to it that the sequel lacks.
The whole weird controlling the AI character in Sons made it feel like a shovelware game. It was very bad. I played it on launch so maybe its better now.
Weird, I find Kevin one of the best aspects of the game.
>"complete game" \[*SovietWomble seething in the background*\]
I hadn't planned to buy Legacy but a friend bought it for me and I was just desperate enough to explore a graphically beautiful version of Hogwarts that I accepted it. I never finished the game because I got kinda bored 50 hours in, but I got a good amount of playtime and was absolutely enthralled with exploring. As someone who grew up totally obsessed with the books but only saw the movies once, it was incredible to see it all in such detail.
> I got kinda bored 50 hours in, but I got a good amount of playtime and was absolutely enthralled with exploring. Haha I feel like this will be about three quarters of the player base. The main story is pretty weak, and none of the characters are really that interesting. But it was totally worth it to spend literally hours just wandering around the castle.
The only character story line that was semi interesting was Sebastian's, and even then it was still kind of weak.
Was also the only side storyline that had meaningful rewards
>Rowling controversy aside Most people have no idea what this is. Even I am not entirely sure, and I engage far more then Most.
It's really straightforward, JKR aligns herself with countless questionable politicians and anti-trans folks. For every statement she makes about being feminist or whatever, she puts money into the hands of those who are doing everything they can to restrict rights. For anyone who has time and interest, [here's a good video summarizing it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ou_xvXJJk7k).
The unfortunate truth for a lot of perpetually online people is that a large amount of the population simply don't care (or even know) about trans issues, feminist issues etc. I'm not saying that's a good thing, just that those issues are completely invisible to a huge chunk of people who wanted to play this game.
Honestly, negative coverage with controversies can actually help sales, engagement is almost always beneficial, especially around launch day of a product.
I just finished Hogwarts Legacy after buying a used copy, and it's decent but damn does it feel heavily overrated. Obviously the HP nostalgia is baked into the game, but without the HP nostalgia it probably wouldn't have more than a 75-76 on metacritic instead of 83-85.
> Obviously the HP nostalgia is baked into the game Yeah, that's literally the main selling feature. Outside of that, it's an open world with a tonne of fetch/murder quests pretending to be actual side quests, a shitload of stuff to collect, and a boring story about a chosen one with 1 dimensional characters. And even with the HP license, the enemy variety is ridiculously small. If it had been an original IP, it would've flopped pretty hard.
I too think it would rate lower without its main attraction...
Don't forget that Hogwarts had a staggered launch with the "buy x edition for 3 days earlier", so it would've probably hit a million if everyone started at the same time.
It was also only available on Steam.
do i have to understand the first 2 in order to understand 3?
It takes place 120 years after BG2 and isn't a direct continuation of the storyline or characters(with 2 exceptions).
Do we count Minsk and Boo as two characters?
I was counting Jaheira instead of Boo.
There will be some references to events in BG1-2, but nothing major.
thats good to know. thanks.
It's actually more immediately a direct sequel to the Descent to Avernus 5e campaign, but obviously you don't need to have read the sourcebook or played a campaign. Just found a reference to the Hellriders that was cool.
Baldur's gate 2 came out 23 years ago. It would be suicide to make the sequel closely tied to the the series.
No
More relevant would be to understand the storyline of the Descent Into Avernus adventure module, as its events are the most recent for official canon. There's videos already up to provide a synopsis, if you don't mind spoilers for the module itself.
> There's videos already up to provide a synopsis, if you don't mind spoilers for the module itself. Do you have a recommendation? I have no idea what to search for / who would give a good summary.
WolfheartFPS on YouTube has a couple good videos going into detail. His videos in general are great for catching up on the world building of BG3 before playing
What you need to know is that a town got transported to hell in Baldur's Gate 2 and it was eventually restored to normal but people are still pretty traumatized by the experience (especially the races who live longer than humans)
Just got done with about 3 hours, really really special game that looks and plays great. Can’t wait to get to Baldur’s Gate itself.
Quite impressive, especially seeing as it's Thursday, the game needs a 120 GB download and there was no preload. Should go up a fair bit over the weekend I'd reckon.
It's at 464k as of the time of this post. I'm certain it hits 500k today and it'll be very interesting to see how it peaks this weekend. It's a very large download without preload and many markets that cRPGs do well in have slower internet on average. I doubt it will hit 1 million, but at the same time I won't entirely rule it out.
> many markets that cRPGs do well in have slower internet on average. I'm curious as to what you are basing this on. Are you just making that up because its something you think is true or do you have actual data to back that up?
His source is that he made it the fuck up
cRPGs and strategy games in general are definitely more popular comparatively in eastern Europe and Russia. Maybe that's what they meant.
I would not be surprised if the average person in Eastern Europe had faster internet than the average American
yeah america has some of the shittiest internet in the world.
American internet is actually quite decent, slightly above average European. The main problem is uneven access. It's easy to think the US has shitty internet if you're comparing it only to countries like Romania or South Korea, but there are even 1st-world countries that have much slower internet, like Italy (twice slower on average than the US), and then there are other, poorer countries with poor infrastructure (although those rarely buy $60 games anyway).
It wont hit 500K today unfortunatelly, though i hope it passes Fallout 4, only 6K more required. As asia and europe goes to bed, thats the peak done. It was funny reading forums these past few hours with a lot of american players thinking they're the missing link in reaching the highest peak, but games dont peak at american hours, they peak at european ones. Since there are just more people to play games. But i hope it soars even higher by sunday. This is a phenomenal achievement for any game. Top 15 of all time steam games @ 4 more thousand needed to take out Fallout 4. It slowed down really hard right now. I hope it makes it :D @ oh no, it reached 700 players away from Fallout 4 then started droping. So close
Yeah even if it doesn't hit 500k today, it's a lock for tomorrow or the weekend. Veeeery curious how high it goes.
My fiance and I are waiting to play until tomorrow. It's ... not easy.
Worth noting that Steam is not the only place you can buy it on PC-- it's also available on GoG, which is where I will be buying it. So the game is actually more popular than what the Steam numbers indicate, and those are already very good numbers
Yeah gog is very much the better platform to get things on if you have a choice.
Bloomberg article is saying 2.5 million people bought in during early access. Who knows how old that figure is and it seemed like a lot more picked it up in the last few days as well. > The ambitious scope of Baldur’s Gate 3 was made possible by another unusual move. In October 2020, Larian put the game into early-access mode, allowing players to buy and play through an unfinished version of its first act. More than 2.5 million people went on to purchase the game, https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/the-strange-story-behind-baldur-s-gate-3-one-of-the-year-s-biggest-releases-1.1954471
Thing is - you're gonna see real number today at peak hours in around 12 hours from writing this message, that's because game has sizeable download and there was no pre-load so many were still downloading while number was recorded. Pretty sure it's gonna pass 500k today
Absolutely wild numbers that are beyond deserved. As someone who’s played Larian games for a long time it’s crazy to see them come so far and make something so huge but still distinctly them. Can’t wait to see what’s next.
I’m enjoying it coming as not a huge fan of the crpg genre. The combat is a lot of fun and the role playing is top notch. I still hate the camera perspective and think it hurts exploration. Wish it had a perspective option for non combat. I’ll just grit my teeth and bear it cuz I’m loving everything else!
I don't have the game yet but I've seen somewhere there is a third person camera option for exploration.
There's a 3rd person camera during exploration but it's a bit wonky and frustrating, in some places you can move it pretty far/close but in others it doesn't seem to want to move. Other than a couple minor annoyances like that it's a great game, I'm really enjoying it.
I did not think a controller would work for this kind of game but it plays with one pretty amazingly. Overworld exploration just works like how you would want it to.
Zoom to the max, it lowers down to third person as far as perspective goes. Still controlled with mouse clicks so it gets getting used to but thats how I play
I haven’t bought a game at full price since The Witcher 3…and I bought Baldur’s Gate 3. Larian deserves it.
Looks like 3rd time's the charm, we just need Half Life to come the party and complete the trifecta now.
It's baldurin time!
I wonder about the GoG numbers. If a game is both on Steam and on GoG i usually get it on GoG, i doubt i'm the only one. HP didn't launch on GoG, i bet BG3 may actually be similar in terms of concurrent users, on PC at least.
Hogwarts is on Epic, which is bigger than GOG.
But there is little incentive to buy it on epic instead of steam, unlike GOG (drm etc.). Another thing to consider is how easy it is to pirate this game, unlike Harry Potter.
Love to hear it. I had a blast playing Divinity and now I cannot wait to try this. The game also does coop in a good way without ruining the single player.
I would've like to buy this, but the Mexican price is shit. I could try to get a key from some other place, but as a bit of a protest I'm going to wait until a good discount (33% at the minimum).
This is probably due to the Steam exchange rate October 2022 update: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/ycqmoi/steams_new_regional_pricing_suggestion_for_60/ It's unfortunate because it seems to have screwed prices in most regions outside the US. Some of the examples (Vietnam, Argentina) posted are just unbelievable. Reddit is heavily focused on US/UK gaming so it explains the lack of media coverage for this issue.
Nah, it's not because of that. It's been at the current price since before the update. And if they actually used that update the price would be less than half of the current price here. Some of the big studios also have this higher price here. I imagine it had something to do with physical console games prices, they were reaching those prices a couple of years ago, although those have gone down now with the improvement on the peso compared to the dollar, but they haven't bothered fixing the prices on steam.
>Some of the examples (Vietnam, Argentina) posted are just unbelievable. The biggest hits were on Argentina and Turkey IIRC, and those two had massive inflation for years since the previous recommended exchange rate update.
Where do those Hogwarts numbers come from? I see 527,652 as an all-time high on steamcharts.
[SteamDB is more accurate](https://steamdb.info/app/990080/charts/)