This is not a criticism - I love how much attention this game has been getting. I’m just not understanding why BG3 has been blowing up so much. It seems like BG3 is getting more attention than all of Larian’s previous games combined (and maybe all of Obsidian’s recent crpgs as well). Traditionally crpgs have not lit the world on fire in this way. Is it just timing of the release? Is it a combo of Divinity fans and new D&D fans and Baldur’s Gate oldheads all being stoked about this release for their own reasons? Or something else?
Note:I have not played it yet myself, just curious what folks think?
well, it’s a damn good game
Yeesh, I’m a “Baldurs Gate Oldhead” XD man I’m getting old.
I could just cry at the fact that BG3 is download only. If they never release it hardcopy I will never be able to play it. Being out in the boonies. Even if they could just put what they can on a disc ya know?
Been looking for a good split screen to play with my gal, and yet what I’m sure is a masterpiece is out of reach.
There’s also the Dark Alliance Oldheads, they don’t need to be quite as old as me to have played those. Just replayed Dark Alliance II with my gal and it was well worth the heavy price tag for such an old title. Unlike the new Dark Alliance garbage. Which I bought to play split screen and it is not.
Buy it on gog, head into town and download the installer to a usb stick.
Gonna need a fast connection in town or plenty of time. The GOG install is 108GB.
Not to mention it’s in 28 parts if you’re downloading the standalone installer and not using Galaxy.
Yep, probably a good two hours on a coffee shop wifi. Be sure to drink lots of coffee and leave a nice tip!
What’s gog? I was hoping for it on PS5, don’t have a powerful enough computer I imagine. Just a 10 year old laptop.
PCMR knows what GoG is, console users don’t need to know.
Have fun on ps5 when it releases!
Yeesh, I’m a “Baldurs Gate Oldhead” XD man I’m getting old.
Sorry pal 😂 for what it’s worth, I’m old enough that I played part of BG2 on PC as a kid. But I was too young to understand THAC0 back then. Lol
I could just cry at the fact that BG3 is download only. If they never release it hardcopy I will never be able to play it. Being out in the boonies. Even if they could just put what they can on a disc ya know?
This is my first hearing this. Damn this seems like a big deal for a game of this scale?
Yeah I was teenager playing Baldurs Gate and 2 on PC. I only knew THAC0 because I was a D&D enthusiast and read my uncle’s old books.
I’m still new to Beehaw not sure how y’all are clipping pieces of the conversation, and replying.
It seems like a big deal to me, but everyone has been saying the industry is moving to online only anyways. Like the new Diablo.
I read that BG3 is upwards of 150gigs and plenty of reasons and excuses for digital only. They can't fit it on one disc is the main one but still.
As I see it, it’s a confluence of things which have captured the zeitgeist:
- Larian D:OS games have been very well received.
- Baldur’s Gate and the Infinity Engine games are beloved.
- Final Fantasy XVI, the big JRPG for the year, is squarely an action game and some view that as off-kilter. Baldur’s Gate 3, the big CRPG for the year, is squarely an RPG.
- D&D is a big property and new D&D games often gain a fair bit of attention.
- People seem to appreciate having no in-game purchases.
These five things, in my opinion, have pushed Baldur’s Gate 3 to the front of media outlets and, in turn, to the forefront of conversations.
Larian D:OS games have been very well received.
This is a big part to me, in addition to your other points. D:OS2 didn’t have the same hype going into launch because (at least to me) D:OD was good, but not amazing. Given how well received D:OS2 was, I think the media was primed both to give it attention and praise.
D:OS2 was better? As you might tell if you dive into my comments history, I absolutely did not like D:OS.
D&D itself is close to the highest popularity it’s ever been at (I suppose with this game now it is at the peak), what with the movie having brought mainstream attention to it and Critical Role and other actual play shows bringing buckets of attention to the game/TTRPG hobby over the last 8ish years.
Marketing. It generally being a good game and part of a beloved series, set in a beloved franchise (D&D). WOTC has been marketing and growing the Hells out of D&D lately. The recent movie and this game are part of that.
I have managed to stay off the hype train quite a bit, so honest question: Is the game good? I’ve possibly perhaps all the 80s and 90s AD&D crpgs, and both Baldur’s Gates, and I mostly liked them.
I’ve never been much for crpgs (I do play DND though) and haven’t gotten very far into the game because it’s hot as balls right now in the PNW, but from the bit I have played it is very fun.
Part of the hype train is that the game is reviewing incredibly well. And Larian is well-known for making high-quality games in the vein of those old crpgs. I know they worked very hard to faithfully adapt 5th edition, so if you’re a fan of the old games, this seems like a good one to get!
The game is really, really good.
Genuinely, it’s just a really fucking good game and I think thats most of it.
It’s Minsc obviously
It seems like BG3 is getting more attention than all of Larian’s previous games combined (and maybe all of Obsidian’s recent crpgs as well).
Legendary brand name which the game actually lives up to.
I think what isn’t being discussed enough is how many fans of games like Dragon Age Origins this game is pulling in.
What this game does is straddles the difference between classic CRPGs like the original Baldurs Gate and modern, cinematic RPGs like Dragon Age Origins and Mass Effect, whose games began to veer into very action-oriented cinematic style as opposed to classic three-quarter-overhead-view turn-based style. It also brings the cinematic aspect to romancing companions as well, something that was also pioneered in DAO and ME. Other games had ability to romance as well, but not deeply like DAO and ME made it, with their cinematic style allusion-to-sex scenes.
This game does both and so it is grabbing the attention of people who loved classic CRPGs like Baldurs Gate, Fallout and Neverwinter Nights, but it’s also grabbing the attention of more “normie(?)” players who cut their teeth on Dragon Age Origins through Inquisition.
It’s a “best of both worlds” approach that has solidified success because it appeals to the people who loved classic CRPGs as well as the people who wanted the cinematic beauty as well as ability to cinematically romance companions. It has beautiful cinematic detail as well as a fully fleshed out CRPG system and non-linear CRPG story. It’s giving players of all types what they wanted out of an RPG.
Also, excellent console controls directly help this. Old CRPGs required a mouse and keyboard, but I can play this game split-screen with my SO who only ever played the Dragon Age games and who I struggled to get into D&D previously.
My SO fucking loves this game, and she wouldn’t have ever been opened up to such a style of game without the excellent cinematic graphics alongside the top tier classic CRPG gameplay. There is no way in hell I could get her to play a strictly top-down no-cinematics classic CRPG. This game opened her up to the genre. It’s essentially the perfect modernization of a classic CRPG.
This is it right here, at least for me personally. I’m a huge Dragon Age fan (played through DAO and DA2 before Inquisition’s release) who has always been vaguely interested in Larian’s Divinity Original Sin games but never made them a priority in my backlog. Seeing the cinematic cutscenes and the 3rd-person voice acted dialog for BG3 made me immediately interested and now I’m 10-ish hours deep into Baldur’s Gate and loving it!
Also slowly resigning myself to DA4 not even coming close to matching BG3 in quality given the circumstances of its development.
No in-game store
The game isn’t shit
People are beyond bored of 95% of the absolute trash that’s being pumped out by the asinine asshole accountants. (AAA Studios)
It’s nice seeing something that isn’t even close to trash be released.
Hey, leave the accountants out of this! We count things, we don’t set policy.
Are you aware of what a big deal Baldurs Gate series, especially 2, were when they launched back at the millennium?
No, I’m not OP but I’m on the same bandwagon and for me this is the first BG game I hear about.
Okay don’t fall off your rocker grandpa
My understanding is that it is a complete game with no microtransactions to shove along with it. After that I believe it is because it is really really good and not a common genre to get the spot light. Mainly the first part.
There’s also the reaction from other developers claiming that the game “sets an unrealistic standard for what to expect out of a game” despite it being exactly what people want from a triple A studio. Just a complete, well made, functional game with no microtransactions
I think its based on timing with the state of the game industry being fascinated with various versions of P2W and how to squeeze more out of gamers through monetization of both ‘nice to have’ and ‘need to have.’ Larian and BG3 are a breath of fresh air when all the others are prioritizing greed over quality.
If we could just overcome our addictions and vote with our wallet, EA, Blizzard, Activision, M$, etc. would eventually learn, but we can’t, and this is the true sad part of the story.
See I’ve been seeing this take in the headlines, but this doesn’t seem like enough to me. Folks have been sick of microtransaction-heavy games in the same way for at least 2 years now, and most studios (outside of the ones you listed) have been releasing games that are light on microtransactions. The System Shock Remake is a good comparison point - it was a modern release in a traditionally niche PC genre, it reviewed very well, and to my knowledge it has no DLC. I guess it didn’t release on console yet, so maybe that’s a key difference?
To be fair, System Shock remake is of incredibly niche interest. (I speak from personal experience being someone who was waiting a long time for it, heh.)
The style of this game hems closer to Dragon Age or Mass Effect in presentation, and those are much more popular game series, by far. So naturally it appeals to fans of those series, of which there are quite large fanbases.
I think that’s what I’m gathering - it’s that the increased production value has signaled to the mainstream gamer audience that “this is a Mass Effect”, and that is a powerful marketing message. The last game of that type was…Dragon Age Inquisition? So yeah, people have been starving for another one of these.
Well damn, I think we solved it. Larian basically reverse-engineered Bioware’s origin story, and this release is them fully stepping into old Bioware’s shoes.
Quite fitting considering BioWare made Baldurs Gate and Baldurs Gate II before they were acquired by EA and made into a shell of their former glory.
The difference is that System Shock Remake is as the name implies: a remake, of a very old game no less. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a full on modern AAA game, with all the bells and whistles. It doesn’t need to hide behind nostalgia, it can stand head to head with all the other big games out there. And it comes as the successor to the Divinity games which themselves already were massively popular.
Demon Souls might be better comparison here, started out as a rather niche PS3 title, build a fan base over the years, had numerous sequels and follow ups that all matched or exceed the quality, and Elden Ring is a gigantic hit now.
I guess doing quality games for a decade or more just accumulates a lot of fans and positive word of mouth, so much that even people that aren’t hardcore into the genre get sucked in.
Aside from it just being a very good game (a new game in the all-time top 10 over at Metacritic is going to be news regardless), if you’re hanging out in gaming enthusiast discussion a lot, there are a few other things going on that explain why it’s generating so much buzz.
It came out at a lull in the release calendar. August isn’t typically a hot month for gaming unless you’re an NFL fan. It also ended up being a de facto console exclusive, so once the game started blowing up, the usual console war chatter spun up with it.
The other dimension–and one that surprised me–is it fed the “developers vs. gamers” spat to the point where it’s been making headlines again. As you’ve said, one price for admission games have been coming out more, but I think there are some sour grapes around over Larian’s successful graduation from AA by way of passion projects. I invite these developers to join in celebrating this release, as the success of games like these are bound to get more of the kind of game they’d rather work on greenlit.
Vote with your wallet anyway. McDonalds sells a lot of burgers but few would say they are the best.
As someone who has never liked Elvis, it’s quite like the old “50 million Elvis fans can’t be wrong!”
Actually, pretty sure they can be. Also he co-opted his music style from the black community, so fuck him anyway.
Should Elvis really be vilified for liking blues and rock music and playing it himself? How does that hurt anyone?
Like should we be pissed at Django Reihnhardt? Or R.A The Rugged Man? What about Japanese bagpipe players?
It’s just a really good game. It’s complete, unlike the majority of things being released these days. The lack of monetization is really nice, but ultimately the fact that it’s basically an automatic dungeon master for 5e with compatibility for up to four cooperative players makes it the easiest entry point into Dungeons and Dragons in general. You can enjoy it by yourself solo and have a wild campaign that’s totally different than the group campaign you play with your friends.
I’ve always hesitated stepping into the dungeon master role because I’ve always wanted to help tell a story, but this negates the need for me to lead anything and I can bring friends with little to no experience and we have a blast. I can focus on helping people with the mechanics rather than having to focus on running the campaign.
Do you think the game has appeal for people who aren’t into DnD? I keep wanting to try it but every time someone calls it “DnD The Game” I get a bit turned off again. Might just be because I’ve had awful experiences in RL with DnD though.
What you gotta keep in mind is that this game is effectively “D&D as intended”, not “D&D as played by people who only care about number crunching” or “D&D, but really just 5 friends memeing while one dude kills literally everything no questions asked” or whatever else may have happened in groups you played with.
This is a deeply strategic roleplaying game with some difficult conversations and impressively hard combat. The game doesn’t put up invisible walls and say “if you tried that you’d die, so instead you can’t”, it lets you try and fail. Or if by some miracle you win and get some items way above your current power level, you can use them immediately unlike other RPGs that say “you have to be lvl 5 to hold this sword”. You wanna jump off a cliff? Game says “Okay… you died. Wanna reload?”
D&D 5e rules are there, but they’re operating sort of like the laws of physics. The heart of this game is its phenomenal writing and the sheer openness of the world it sets up for you to explore. You could argue this game is a full-blown immersive sim just because of how it sort of hands you a pile of problems and you build tools and skills along the way to overcome them.
Yeah, it holds overall mass appeal. It’s a good roleplaying game that happens to be in an established universe with known mechanics. If you play by yourself you have more than an entire party’s worth of companions to learn the stories of, and you don’t have to worry about playing with degenerates or weirdos. Unless you consider the NPC a degen or weirdo, but thems the brakes.
Side question:
Is it worth playing if you’re not into dnd? I saw lots of replies mention how it perfectly implements dnd 5e but that has 0 value for me. Is the game itself good not counting the dnd association, lack of anti features, release anticipation etc?
You’ll be fine. It’d be different if you were familiar with and disliked D&D.
What of I’m of the unpopular but firm belief that 3.5 was the pinnacle of D&D and therefore am heavily boased against 5e?
I’m a Pathfinder fan with vague disdain for 5e as a ruleset and active loathing for Forgotten Realms as a setting. I love this game.
If you already don’t like 5e, I don’t know if the game will change your mind. It’s not a 1-to-1 adaptation, which might help, but there are also still some bugs here and there (such as the Lucky feat not working correctly).
tldr: This is a great game if you enjoy rich storytelling, compelling character arcs, and actual consequences. This is also a great game if you enjoy turn-based, environment-aware combat of the likes of Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics. Overall, it’s a well-oiled machine, with polish in all the right places to make it very welcoming to dnd newcomers and veterans alike. If you have played Larian’s older Divinity: Original Sin games (which was not based on the dnd ruleset), there’s a lot of quality of life updates that fix a lot of the gripes that I had with those games.
My wife and I are loving it (individual saves, although co-op is supported in this game). We are not dnd tabletop players; the extent of my experience is the recent dnd movie that came out. I don’t know the difference between 5e and 3e, but I do know I’m having an (eldritch) blast playing this game. I bought it on a strong recommendation from my friends (although, these friends do have dnd experience), and I can confidently say it’s a fun game.
The most overwhelming experience you might have as a newcomer is during character creation, where a healthy amount of reading is involved to understand what classes, races, subraces, spells, and cantrips are (among other things). They provide very neat tooltips that provide the information you need, when you need it, without getting in your way - there is no pause-every-5-seconds-for-a-tutorial-notification deal here. You can get involved as much (or as little) as you wish. If you’ve ever made a character in a game like Cyberpunk 2077, Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic, or Dragon Age: Origins, and messed around with the relevant skill trees, it’s around that level of involved.
If you do get overwhelmed with character creators, fret not - you can choose one of the pre-built characters that come packaged with their own personalities, builds, and stories. Speaking of stories: I personally feel like the writing is compelling and is leagues better than previous Larian titles, if that means anything to you. Make no mistake, this is a fantasy story and you’ll have your fantasy tropes in this game, but I’ve yet to encounter a moment or twist in the story that feels cheap or unearned. It depends on how much you like this sort of genre. There are times when it takes itself seriously and times when it doesn’t, but it has never felt out of place.
Besides the narrative, the other major part of the game is combat, and I think it shines there too. From a non-dnd perspective, it’s a turn-based, environment-aware tactics game. It doesn’t feel exactly like any one type of system I’ve played before, but I feel a lot of different aspects that get utilized in ways that mesh well. Unit placement on the field matters. Typically your party’s makeup plays a role in how you approach encounters. I’ve never felt like my party couldn’t figure out their own way to solve a situation, and it never felt like it was just handed to me. The encounters are flexible enough to allow multiple approaches without depriving them of the depth each approach needs to remain engaging.
Just so you can gauge how well my suggestions will apply, I love playing tactics games but don’t always have a lot of time, so I typically adjust the difficulty when possible to emphasize story progression over tactical difficulty. I’m not a maddening-difficulty Fire Emblem: Three Houses player (more power to y’all out there); I just casually enjoy combat puzzles. I think games like Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Final Fantasy Tactics, Advance Wars, Tactics Ogre, Brigadine, Battle for Wesnoth, etc., are fun to play, and I don’t necessarily need to “win” every combat encounter to feel like I had a good time either. I really enjoy is a story that presents fresh ideas, even if it means remixing some old tropes here and there; Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age: Origins, etc. - any game that gives you characters who mesh well (or “contrast” well) with one another usually can maintain my attention.
Thanks for the in depth response! It’s probably too early to answer this, but does making your own character instead of choosing from the pre-built ones result in a more generic storyline? Are there stuff that are exclusive to those characters that you know of?
The pre-built characters are all recruitable party members, so you’ll be able follow their stories once you find them.
As @bigevildan said, they’ll all be recruitable. There is also the option to play as an amnesiac custom character that gets their own origin background. No spoilers as to what that is like, but it’s a possible option if you’re not quite sure. (I’ve seen it recommended to avoid that for your first playthrough, however).
Still has the shitty locked camera though and lots of the same little issues DOS2 had. They are great games, so the small problems stick out a lot more.
Whatcha mean by locked camera? Not disagreeing, just not sure what you’re referring to.
The camera is very restrictive. Dos2 had a mod that unlocked the camera allowing you to zoom in or out as far as you wanted or tilt it as much as youd like and it made the game infinitely more enjoyable. It still got stuck on terrain like, but it was still better.
BG3 has the same camera, constantly getting stuck on or in terrain, cant handle elevation changes, cant zoom out, cant tilt far. The game just needs a free cam where I can look wherever I like without it colliding with terrain and objects, there’s no reason for it to be so restrictive. Why build this beautiful world and then dont even let us look at it?
Well clarified. Thank you for that. While that doesn’t bother it nearly as much, it does find itself battling the camera more often than it’d like so it can definitely see where you’re coming from.
I have no exposure to dnd but am loving the game. I like turn based games in general though.
If you like RPGs in general, I think it’s worth playing. No need be a fan of DnD.
That seems like a good question.
I guess the marketing team did a really good job?
Yes, that too.
And dungeons & dragons is incredible popular at the moment.
And Larian did a very good job with the last games and gained a big fanbase.
And the original Baldurs Gate Games are considered cult among older pc gamers.
No micro-transaction bullshit.
And last but not least: It’s an incredible game.
It’s a combination of good timing, a perfect product and going against the direction of most AAA-studios.
Though BG2 is more than two decades old, a lot of us still considers it one of the best games ever. I think quite a few of us have been eager to return to forgotten realms. That’s one group.
Then there’s a group of Divinity fans (some overlapping the old BG group) waiting for Larians next RPG.
Those two groups would be the critical mass for creating hype. Would the game live up to the old games? Would it be as good as Divinty?
Then comes the first reviews and people get to play the beta, and though the first few months were rough, once we got close to release it was clear, that BG3 would not only live up to its expectations, it would smash through the roof.
Now you have your core fan base talking about how good this game is, how do you sell this to people who normally don’t play this type of game?
Well, talk to them in a language they understand. This game is complete from day 1. No DLC. No ingame shop. Just a complete game that you can play over and over again with new ways of completing it… oh, and you can co-op with your friends. Even on the couch in split screen.
There are simply not anything of major significance to criticize about this game. You may not like it, or the genre is not for you, but as a complete product it’s simply perfect.
As a player you get the feeling that Larian focus on the game first where others focus on money first. That may not be the whole truth, but it’s the feeling this is creating, and hopefully other studios will acknowledge that there are other ways to do things.
I was in my early 20s when BG1, BG2, NWN, and Icewind Dale came out. The hype was real, and it was a spectacular time in gaming.
yeah, nostalgia for me.
the other larian games didn’t register with me.I feel like there might be room for an old school PC gaming community here on Lemmy. There is usually a console/arcade game focus on the retro gaming communities, but it would be great to have a place to discuss releases from that 1990-2009 or so era.
Plenty of communities in that vein overe here on lemmy.sdf.org
Everyone else is playing the System Shock remake while I’m just sitting here hoping for a System Shock 2 remake, because it was a spiritual predecessor to BioShock that included class-based co-operative play. The netcode in the original was/is dogshit, so my friend and I never actually completed the game before our saves were totally corrupted.
Frankly, also wouldn’t mind a remake of the original Deus Ex either. Warren Spector was heavily involved in the development of System Shock and Deus Ex, while Ken Levine was instrumental in System Shock 2 and BioShock.
Same. And I grew up on Champions of Krynn and Eye of the Beholder and Pools of Radiance, so Baldur’s Gate was mind blowing when it came out. BG2 was even better!
I haven’t played a CRPG in a while. Never got into DoS series, etc. But there’s no way I was missing BG3 after the rave reviews it was getting, considering my history with the series.
Icewind Dale was awesome! I still have my copy stored somewhere in my basement lol.
“a perfect product”
I don’t think anyone at Larian thinks that they have created the perfect product. It’s pretty buggy still, and lacks depth in areas, but its intentions are pure and that buys a lot of credibility in and of itself.
