this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2025
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Baldur's Gate 3's Larian proved players “are not stupid” and want more “deep-a** CRPGs” instead of AAA schlock, says beloved indie publisher [Dave Oshry of New Blood Interactive] (www.videogamer.com)
submitted 1 week ago by alessandro@lemmy.ca to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca
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[–] MudMan@fedia.io 9 points 6 days ago

Ah, so my first reaction is "what actual indie developer who knows what they're talking about excludes BG3 from AAA"?

Turns out not this one, apparently, since the creative use of quotes seems intended to obscure that "AAA schlock" is not from the dev, it's from the journalist rehashing a quote from an article about a quote from a podcast. Speaking of schlock.

Anyway, I'm on the fence about the core point. I agree on principle that "dumbed down" doesn't make things mainstream. I agree that this is a lesson the industry insists on refusing to learn, even after The Sims doulbing as architecture software, WoW casual moms playing with a dozen UI mods, Fortnite core players building gothic cathedrals in five seconds and Roblox containing entire gamedev teams made of unpaid children.

Whatever the mainstream wants, "simple" has nothing to do with it.

Do I think BG3 means somebody should fund Pillars 3? Yeeeeah, not so sure. BG3 works because it was the literal best time to be making D&D stuff, because it had two extremely beloved brands propping it up, because it's a sequel to two extremely well received, accessible CRPGs that both did a lot better than Pillars to begin with, because they were both focused on multiplayer and free-form systems instead of straight-up literature. Nuance matters here.

And then somebody (a lot of somebodies) gave Larian two hundred million to make it, so it also looks at least as good as anything Bioware ever did during their heyday. That's probably why BG3 has 140K players on Steam right now and Avowed has 1K and never peaked past 10K.

There are lessons from BG I'd love to see the industry learn. I want them to learn the right ones, though, because if they go ahead and invest another nine digits in the wrong thing then we WILL actually have to wait another 30 years for another game like that.