you know all that extra stuff is 100% optional right when it comes to microtransactions
But if it’s POE charging you for stash space “its cool because they need to make money”
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I love dragonflight. Wish we could bond with dragons in bg3
Nice superiority complex
Strategic Simulations Inc did the first D&D PC game.
I starting playing BG3 over the weekend. As a new-ish DND player, I’m quite happy with it. It has all the elements of a great tabletop session, but without the people and with more naughty stuff 
. It’s very polished and clearly took a lot of time and effort.
Obviously, it’s a totally different game from WoW.
Videogames are not monogamous marriages with legally binding contracts. We can play as many games as we want whenever we want.
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Now I’m gonna have to go back and play Gateway to the Savage Frontier, Treasures of the Savage Frontier, and Pools of Darkness.
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Right, it not like the devs get up on the morning and go i think " yha i want to make a bad game to day". Most devs i know including my self (not a blizzard dev) want to make the best version of the game we are passionate about, alsa passion doesn’t pay most devs rent, i feel things shaking up in the industry and we really have larian to thank
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Enjoy the wall.
TL:DR, Larian did good, Blizzard did good, Activision still sucks.
At the end of the day, we need to hold the CORRECT people accountable and not place blame haphazardly just because we’re angry our soup got cold.
Larian has never been about the money. CEO has said this.
Lets put this in perspective and give accurate information. All of this is easily searchable on any search engine and will turn up with the same results if searched correctly.
- Larian chose to scale up their team from 70 developers to around 400 over the duration of development for BG3.
- BG3 had a start to finish development cycle of 5 years, 9 months. (Not 20 as someone previously said, unsure where that number came from)
- Pre-orders were 2.5 million copies.
- Pre-order sales were $59.99 (Upgraded to digital deluxe when released FOR FREE)
This was only Pre-orders. Not since release. This WAS enough to carry a development team through the development cycle. They did well. And other companies should seek to emulate this. While their cycle was 6 years, Blizzard could do this in half the time with their development teams if they were treated correctly and given the proper direction. The marketing team could spike this number up easily.
Simple Maths time: Please note: I’m not an accountant, mathematician, or god. These numbers should be accurate, but I’m human and I make mistakes from time to time.
$59.99 × 2,500,000u = $149,975,000
- $59.99 (Cost of game at Pre-order)
- 2,500,000u (Pre-order sales/units sold)
- $149,975,000 (Gross Pre Order Sale @ $59.99/2.5m)
$149,975,000 ÷ 400 = $374,937.5
- $149,975,000 (Gross Pre Order Sale @ 59.99/2.5m)
- 400 (Estimated employees at end of BG3 Development Cycle/Release across all studio locations)
- $374,937.5 (Gross pay to each of the 400 employees, assuming there is only 400, and assuming they have 400 over the entire development cycle…
They did not have 400 over the whole cycle, but this is here because I'm lazy and don't wish to look up hiring waves.)
$374,937.5 ÷ 6 = $62,489.5833~
- $374,937.5 (Total Income to Development Team Member)
- 6 (Number of years in Development before Release)
- $62,489.5833~ (Average income if salary for each developer assuming they all get paid the exact same.
I understand this isn't accurate, just work with the numbers here... Again, I'm not god.)
This is honestly pretty good income. Considering they hired from 70 to around 400 over the development cycle to fit their requirements/needs, you would assume some of the newer developers weren’t getting paid this, and older developers/sr’s/execs on the team were getting paid more. This was enough to carry a team through the development cycle. Please keep in mind, this doesn’t contain investments from Shareholders which help produce marketing, paying executives, and anyone in the company as a whole. That money from Shareholders is usually recouped upon release or over time post release.
They simultaneously released a POLISHED product on release, while keeping to their release timeframe (Within 1 month, delayed to avoid conflict with another game’s release and with the exception of the PS5 release (September 5th)) and providing everything but a boob, butt, pp, ball slider.
They truly understood the assignment, executed, and are garnering insurmountable revel from the community, the PEOPLE who buy and play the game. They understood the audience on release. I would say they did a good job and were successful. And YES they should be praised for that. They did what most people though was dead or not possible anymore.
Comparing Larian to Activision however, is not a fair comparison.
Activision has been known for predatory and unnecessary payment schemes. This won’t change in any Blizzard game due to it’s parent company and won’t unless the parent company changes its goals, gets bought out, etc…
If you want an accurate representation of an unfiltered review section of a “New” Blizzard game, feel free to look at Overwatch 2 on Steam, where the reviews are by the players. Doesn’t look good. Additionally, compare that with Baldur’s Gate 3, or any of Larian Studio’s games that are on Steam for that matter. Public word matters.
I do wish Game Studios and Shareholders of those studios would understand that, yes you need to make money, but you make more of it when the customer is happy with your content. Even if the customer is broke, they will find a way to contribute via monetary ways.
Comparing BG3 to WOW is also not a fair comparison.
WoW is a live service, not a P2P hosted service.
WoW is an MMORGP (If you can call it that still…), not a Single-Player or Multi-Player game.
WoW has a fluctuating economy based on live transactions with other Players within the gamescape.
WoW has so much more than BG3. Period.
Comparing a Turn Based RPG to an MMORPG is like comparing a Gerbil to a New York Sewer Rat. At face value, very similar… ish. But extremely different.
I believe that BOTH games are good in their own right. I just dislike one Parent Company over the other. I’m sure others can figure out which Parent company I prefer.
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How the heck have you never heard of Larian?
Some gamers live under a rock I swear.
Or George R.R. Martin calling out Brandon Sanderson.
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Yes?
You can’t call BG3 an anomaly when they have done this before. Divinity, Original Sin II released in 2017 got 10/10 reviews on Steam and a 92% on PC Gamer as well as a nomination for game of the year by IGN.
Baldur’s Gate just got more hype because the name is more recognizable. The studio bought the rights to a big name DND world that they knew had tons of old fans who played through the old Baldur’s Gate games. It worked.
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Bingo
/10char
BG3 goes beyond just the name baldur’s gate, it wouldn’t be the sensation it currently is if we based it on its name-brand alone. You are right about the DnD world being the biggest seller, but aside from all that, it’s just a well made and complete, game.
Which is a rarity, especially in the AAA space.
I had 0 idea about what baldurs gate was even about till about a week from launch, 15 mins of research and one play session with some friends later, im beyond hooked.
It’s not. Like I said, they already had a really good game design team that knew how to deliver a modern DND product from Divinity Original Sin II, they just needed a big name like Baldur’s Gate to push them over the edge and explode onto the mainstream.
Except they did it in with Divinity Original Sin in 2014 and then again with it’s sequel in 2017.
I’ve played both those games and so I knew exactly what to expect from BG3. It was always going to be good. It’s literally just Divinity II (which was already a game of the year nomination back in 2017) with some minor improvements and set in the Baldur’s Gate universe.
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Except none of that ever happened except for the last sentence, because “gamers” mostly consists of people watching youtube and not doing any of their own research.
None of the devs from Blizzard, Bioware, Obsidian, etc, ever “threw shade at Larian” and Larian never “called them out on it.”
What actually happened:
Industry devs pointed out that holding other games to the same standard as BG3 was ignorant of the realities of the industry, and those industry devs are 100% correct.
Larian made a fantastic, game of the year contender game.
Larian also had:
- No publisher enforced deadlines to ship a product beyond early access
- An engine already pre-made to handle the exact use-case of this type of game
- Brand recognition and nostalgia hype from an existing, successful franchise
- Freedom to leverage the Forgotten Realms IP
- Creative control over their own monetization models
And the point was, that if we, as gamers, want games to be as good as BG3 when they ship, we need to be real that it’s publishers who are forcing things out the door before they are ready and publishers who are demanding live services and microtransactions. Even with those graces, Larian took 5 years from a starting point where half the work was already done for them.
Larian knows this and has acknowledged that their previous work and private control over timelines, features and monetizations has allowed them to build a game that normal studios simply don’t have the freedom to do.
This thread is born of youtube influencers intentionally taking the discussion out of context for outrage baiting views.
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same, i had no clue about it until i saw friends playing it. after watching a couple days of them having fun with it on stream, i bought it. never played BG games before, or divinity or whatever. i don’t play d&d.
Balders Gate 3 started development in 2017. Imagine if WoW stood still, no new patches, no new features or expansions for SIX years. Balders Gate devs game is nice but they had no hard timeline to adhear to and no community clamoring for new content while threatening to walk away.
Isnt blizzard known for having their employees do the same lol?
Same here. Tried logging on to do the Kalimdor cup… got through one race and decided to go back into the depths of the underdark.
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It was 6 yrs in development, about the same amount of time D4 was in development.
I guess the biggest takeaway is that Blizzard pushes things out and relies on hotfixes and patches to finish the game. Larian has pushed out a game that really has very little need for that and is well done with tons of content, alternate paths and convos for replayability, customization, engaging storyline and side stories worth paying attention to, etc. There are still bugs here and there, but nothing has been game breaking. Most are just an odd behavior easily overcome such as occasionally Laezel one of several characters, during combat the UI disappears. The fix is a quick save and quick load. I’ve seen it happen 3 times over the course of my 80+ hrs spent playing so far with her in my party that entire time.
Granted it is not an MMO, it is more single player/coop up to 4 people which doesn’t require the resources of live servers full of people, but there are issues in MMO style games right now that are not necessarily because of that factor. If the only thing Blizzard had to worry about was server strain and latency improvements, this whole thread wouldn’t even be a thing.