Uhh… today’s AAA studios have THOUSANDS of employees, hundreds of millions of dollars in budgets, and huge IPs on which to draw. Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Assassin’s Creed, Diablo, Warcraft, Mass Effect, Dragon Age… these studios have VASTLY larger resources than Larian. Like, an order of magnitude larger. This is gaslighting and whining. I’m not having it. Do better, AAA devs. Do a lot better.
The Divinity games are some of my favorites ever made. It makes me giddy that BG3 is doing so well to embarrass big companies 😂
This is partly why I ponied up full price.
I want more games from Larian.
I bought the game 4 times.
Twice for me, and a copy for 2 of my friends.
Pretty cool seeing one of them log a ton of hours in it after working. Like, I gave them that happiness :')
IMO the most important distinction is a game that puts play experience first vs profit.
Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Assassin’s Creed, Diablo, Warcraft, Mass Effect, Dragon Age… these studios have VASTLY larger resources than Larian.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the team that worked on Skyrim was significantly smaller than the Larian team that worked on BG3.
Selling a good product that people want is a hate crime against the tech industry
The most favorable reading I can give to the “don’t expect this to be the new standard” lines is that BG3 Is special. It is an exceptional piece of art within the genre, and it will be difficult or impossible for other studios to replicate its appeal. Like, you can say that readers really enjoy The Hobbit, or The Expanse, or A Visit from the Goon Squad, but you shouldn’t expect them to be the new standard. Few fantasy books since 1937 have been as good as The Hobbit, although a lot of them have imitated its characteristics.
Viewed that way, they’re absolutely right. We’re going to continue to get a bunch of buggy, derivative crap, and we’ll keep paying for it because…what else are you going to do? Play Skyrim for the 47th time? 23rd run through Elden Ring?
I have no problem if games reached this via a similar model that Larian used here (lots of experienced staff, pre-built systems, 6 years of development, 3 years of expertly done early-access with a highly engaged player base) but they’re not going to. They’re going to implement more crunch, more abuse, more destruction of the few people who want to work in games in order to get there. And that’s where I have the issue.
I want shorter games, with worse graphics, made by people who get paid more to do less. Because that’s what’s needed to make truly great games. People who are passionate, not burning themselves out just to barely make deadlines, make great games.
I don’t think demanding quality games is inherently at odds with wanting studios to not abuse their workers. What we really should support is broad labor protections and labor unions for developers. Because clearly the AAA studios don’t need the excuse of high demand for features from gamers in order to abuse their people since they have been doing that for years while churning out trash titles.
Completely agreed. The issue is that gamers™ aggressively advocate for better quality, and do not care about workplace abuse or worse products with more features. This creates the current feedback loop we have where games that are longer, have flashier features, and aren’t finished at launch.
Labor unions and protections would be excellent, but isn’t something that I, a non-game developer, can do much to advance, besides avocation.
and do not care about workplace abuse
I think the recent ActiBlizz situation proves that one incorrect.
Not saying that 100% of Gamers care, just saying it’s not 0% of Gamers who care.
I want shorter games, with worse graphics, made by people who get paid more to do less.
Honestly that’s an excellent summary.
Don’t get me wrong BG3 is probably one of the best games I’ve ever played and I eventually want BG4 or whatever expansion/spin-off/sequel they want to make. However I waited 23 years between BG2 and BG3, I don’t want to wait that long again, but I can wait.
But to your point I want good games. I don’t need 100+ hour adventures. In general I don’t want 100+ hour adventures. Those should be rare. I want games that I can finish (at a casual pace) in a weekend or two.
Portal 1? Braid? Both are short puzzle games that are absolutely fantastic.
Stanley Parable? Gone Home? Excellent story games. You can beat them in about as much time as it takes to watch a movie.
It’s disappointing that AAA studios don’t recognize this. I don’t want a bloated game that takes 300 hours to experience most of it. I don’t want a giant map. I want a good game. I want a small map filled with life, not a large one with soulless procedurally generated dungeons.
Would it be so bad if games didn’t have insane budgets? Most of my favorite games from the past decade are from small studios operating on pizza and hope.
Lower budgets would probably be better. High budgets mean high risk, developers and publishers try to minimize that risk and you get bland games that try to cater to too many tastes. Movies suffer from the same problem. They get budgets in the hundreds of millions and you wonder what they spent it all for.
High budgets are killing the film industry. In the case of gaming, it plays a factor, but greed is probably the main issue. Most big budget AAA games in the past made large amounts of money even if they didn’t have universal appeal. Because companies realised that they could make large amounts of money off loot boxes, microtransactions, cash shops and battle passes, they started trying to funnel players into games, mainly so that players would buy things. That’s one of the main reasons the AAA industry is getting worse: games need to appeal to as many as possible, while coming out as fast as possible, all so that players will buy the overpriced in-game items endlessly shoved in players’ faces.
I love me some good AAA games and want them to stick around. But I think it would be much better if they were a bit fewer and further between, and the big studios shift to more regular AA games, and give their devs chances to do some more oddball stuff with even lower budgets. More expiremntation and risky projects can only enrich the industry.
I can’t remember who it was. A famous actor, anyway. They were talking about what’s happened with movies. There’s nothing in the middle.
It’s either $100m+ or less than $3m. Either it gets a big producer and they pump so much money into it that it must be safe because it can’t lose money. Or is a small producer doing it for the love, but a small budget doesn’t go very far. The risky narratives done well would be funded somewhere between the two extremes but it’s just not how it’s done anymore.
In a strange way, to get more money in for the riskier productions, we need to get the money out of Hollywood. Can’t see it happening, myself.
You can’t? We just had a summer filled with high-budget flops, and now both the actors and the writers are on strike meaning that the studios won’t be able to recoup their losses any time soon. Add the reduced to non-existent theatre turnout in the first couple of years of the decade due to COVID and there’s been a hell of a lot of money “getting out of Hollywood.”
I disagree that a flop means lost revenue. This is an industry that’s so adept at hiding income to avoid paying taxes, actors, and every other studio worker that dodgy accounting is known as ‘Hollywood Accounting’. Maybe we’re talking about different things. When I say Hollywood, I mean the movie industry as a whole.
Hollywood has failed to capture some income streams. From theatres, for example, as you say. But there’s still too much money to be made (and too much propaganda potential) for enough big money to leave that the problems of monopoly finance capital go away.
from small studios operating on pizza and hope.
And that’s how it started.
You could give studios unlimited budgets and they’d still complain they don’t have enough time / money to get things right. The rhetoric is that “games are just so complex nowadays” and that justifies their 4/5/6 year development periods.
I’m not seeing the complexity that warrants that type of long development period. The visual fidelity on some games is impressive, but is it actually worth that 5 year dev time?
Yep. The final fantsay series was a bunch of lads in an attic. Now those lads are legends… with a fantasic legacy. Yet I’m still waiting for ES5 and GTA 6…
Remember fellow gamers, you hold the power of the purse, you get the final vote with your wallet.
If some studio head or developer manager tries to tell you that you have to accept micro transactions and such, just say no thank you, and move on.
There are plenty of other games from other good studios out there for you to give your hard-earned money to.
Yeah, don’t expect funding for AAA games!
Wait…
To the contrary, they had to pay to have the IP
How does it go?
I want smaller games, with lower quality graphics. Made by happier developers who are paid more to work less. And I’m not kidding!
AAA companies: Makes bad game and releases apology promising to make good games now
Also AAA companies: We are not capable of making good games, stop expecting to much.
New expectations? Lol. These were always the expectations!
That’s what I don’t get. These are expectations that I’ve had for years. The indie space has kinda proven that creativity will take a game a hell of a lot farther than cash ever will. With few exceptions I simply don’t buy AAA games anymore because honestly I just don’t expect the same level of effort will be put into making them.
I think that one (HUGE) part of BG3’s success is that it was in Early Access for, what, 2-3 years? During which it grew a dedicated modding scene, received a metric fuck-ton of feedback, and regularly dropped large content patches. This wasn’t an average dev cycle, and I think it shows. In some ways, the Dev. Feedback and interactivity reminded me a lot of the way Warframe does dev interactions.
It is exactly what I except going forward because, as that moron mentioned this is a fucking AAA game, not a Indy game.
AAA games developers absolutely have those resources and even more, so yes, they should have all of that.
Who the f is Shawn, wtf is evolve? Why is every shitty game dev crying that other people make good games, without shame? Oh that’s right, based on their releases, they have no shame.
He didn’t have anyone’s attention and he craves attention and now he has lots of attention, so I guess everything is coming up Milhouse as far as Shawn is concerned.
Hear that Gamefreak, owner of the highest-grossing media franchise of all times?
Those developers trying to shit on Larian need to cry and seethe more. Terribly incompetent people who can’t create good games themselves, why not trying taking notes instead?
Keep up the great work Larian.
The devs are mostly not the problem with the state of AAA games today, it’s the people telling them what to do in order to maximise profits.
Same as with most problems we face as a species, really.
Why are people pretending baulders gate is the only high selling game with no microtransactions as of late? Off the top of my head Elden Ring and Tears of the Kingdom both released in the last year or so, no microtransactions or dlc as of now.
