Bioware. What happened to the giant?

Yeah I was just adding the context that BioWare setting their own record had almost no bar to beat, because BioWare games haven’t been on Steam since we started really tracking that data.

DA:V “setting the record” basically means it got a higher playercount than the Mass Effect remaster, which isn’t surprising because remasters almost never sell as well.

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EA? innovation and EA rarely go together. They like to milk IPs for every penny they are worth using a rinse and repeat formula (not along among big publishers doing it).

I seem to recall a few headlines from other studios annoyed with the success of BG3; saying it set the bar too high and that now gamers are going to have higher expectations for future titles. Maybe some truth to that sentiment since the new DA is being compared so frequently to BG3 in, mostly, negatives.

Will be interesting to see if any studios try to match BG3’s success in the future or try to pretend BG3 was just a fluke and stay their course.

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@sabetha behold my in discord avatar and response.

You act like larian isn’t an aaa studio producing aaa games

I’m not sure I’d call it innovation for EA to see Larian do something successful and go “Let’s do something like that”.

That’s what they did with Soulslikes when they had Respawn make the Jedi games.

I remember seeing some stuff about it but a lot of it was clickbait as the original Twitter quote was from an indie dev saying “please don’t expect this from small to mid sized developers, Larian is effectively a AAA studio now”.

Though I do think the internet has a habit of acting like if you aren’t the best you’re hot garbage, and masterpieces like BG3 don’t happen every day. Not to say people should accept anything and everything, but not everything is gonna be as good as BG3. Even Larian’s next game might not capture that lightning in the bottle again(though I have faith it’ll be really good).

It wont surprise me if some of them try to recreate the success. It also wont surprise me if they completely miss the mark on why BG3 is a masterpiece.

The difference is BG3 gives you the choice to do what you want, but doesn’t force it. Ditto CP2077. Pretty much everyone is fine with that model.

DA shoves it down your throat and then puts in a ramrod to shove it down even further. Most “woke” products lean more toward the latter than just passively giving people choices, because the activists usually can’t help themselves and don’t want people to have the option to make the “wrong” choice.

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The in question came from developer Xalavier Nelson Jr., who argued that Larian took a massive risk and the process it used to build the game can’t necessarily be replicated by other studios — even big companies. He expressed concerns that players will expect all studios to follow the same route regardless of feasibility and circumstances.
“Trying to do the same thing in the same way, especially without the same advantages, could kill an entire GROUP of studios,” Nelson cautioned. Numerous developers from studios like Obsidian, Blizzard, and Insomniac Games agreed with him.

I really want to try BG3. Mostly because Karlarch seems really cool, but I also like D&D based games. But, I’ve got so many unplayed games in my backlog that I really shouldn’t be buying new games for awhile :dracthyr_hehe_animated:

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it wasn’t, it was the very definition of an indie developer prior to taking on BG3 while reaping profits from Divinity Original Sin 2 but no one would confuse that game as a AAA title. They were very similar to CD Projekt Red when they only had the Witcher 1 & 2 under their belts.

I managed to defeat my backlog by just admitting I’m not actually likely to play those games.

These days I just maintain a wishlist and buy games when they go on sale when I wanna play them right away and have the time.

By the time of bg3s development they definitely were, and bg3 is a aaa game

I mean it is a fantasy game with elves, dwarfs, and dragons. I would say

would be expected

I don’t think BG3 would even fit the criteria of a triple AAA game. The graphics are too basic.

It was a large budget game, the only thing that it needs to meet is budget

definitely

they were on their way but not at the start, remember they got money from 1) Hasbro and 2) Early Access. In fact they said because of the sales of EA being so much better than expected they were able to increase the size and scope of the game. They were not a AAA developer prior to the start.

They were international with 300-400 employees when bg3 started, I’d call that pretty much aaa, or very very close

I think it’s far to say Larian was AAA at the start of developing BG3, though the actual definition of AAA has never been that set in stone about where the line between AA and AAA sits.

That makes sense with all the voice acting.

However, they’ve outright stated they aren’t interested in making another game at the scope of BG3 again.

Looking forward to divinity 3 and the outcries due to lack of voice acting and dialogue trees.

Dos 2 is voice acted

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