The only thing I could complain about is that I am still downloading. Due to the games size of over 100GB and no preload, the launch player numbers are very falsified think it will be much more. As I say I am still downloading.
Great to see baulders gate 3 doing well. A perfect storm of development conditions and we get rewarded at the end of it with a fantastic game. Hopefully heaps of extra extra content down the track to keep it going
Why do people say “perfect storm of conditions”?
Larian has worked hard to perfect their style of crpgs through the divinity series. They put an emphasis on good storytelling and listening to fan feedback. They do early access to perfect their systems. They hire writers, composers and developers based on merit. They care about what they are creating.
This is not a perfect storm but good management and development cycle. There is nothing random or lucky about it.
Of curse there is a lot of great Management and skill in Larian and they worked Hard to reach the Level of skill they have Shown of.
However there are also certain eternal Faktors. AFAIK there have been several Times in the past where the Studio have easily gone bankrupt were it Not for certain Events. Also they have reached a critical point of exposure where enough People know them. There are several Studios which Do great games but you have never Heard of them. As an example i think Unknown Wordls (Subnautica) are creating a great game with Moonbreaker but it seems to miss the critical mass and might die during development
Do people know this game was in early access for more than a year. They were fine-tuning and really paying attention.
A lot of factors lead to this reward. But Imo, it’s them building what could have been a 7/10 game (Divinity games), spending a lot of time polishing and then Publicly releasing a 10/10 game
i’m telling you, i hadn’t really been considering it all that seriously, but all this positivity absolutely makes me want to just go ahead and dive in with everyone… and reward the devs…
Baldur’s Gate 3 just hit half a million concurrent players, and is already on track to challenge mega-franchise Harry Potter’s Hogwarts Legacy for this year’s Steam sales crown.
While old-school tactics franchises like XCOM vanish from purview, series like Final Fantasy drop turn-based gameplay altogether chasing broader audiences, and classic names like Diablo go always-online rammed with in-app purchases — Larian said no.
It’s also a turn-based RPG that follows cRPG traditions carried forward by a shrinking number of studios who seem to have convinced themselves in various ways that players don’t want this kind of game.
Forget for a moment that the game is just insanely good, with great writing, endless Dungeons & Dragons-inspired depth, and quite polished, optimized PC performance.
As such, I’m similarly nervous for Dragon Age 4, which according to leaks, has dropped tactical play in favor of chasing more action-oriented combat, doubtless with trend-chasing in mind.
Larian’s respect for its audience, the relentless pursuit of quality over quarterly targets, and the rejection of trend-chasing in favor of elevating classic gameplay conventions are being rewarded by gamers in droves.
Dragon Age Inquisition was already a giant pile of shit, why would anyone expect anything else from a studio that hasn’t released a decent game in over a decade?
People are just tired of the anti-consumer bullshit and it shows. I’m glad Larian are thinking ahead instead of grabbing the cash now and running unlike most modern day triple A developers.
Really shows that they care for the games that they make and the audience they’ve amassed.
Hopefully this helps kill MTX, lootboxes and Battlepasses.
I haven’t played much, but I assume you don’t need to at all, considering how old those previous games are. It would be a big mistake considering the vast majority wouldn’t have played them.
As someone who has played BG1 and 2 and is now 21 hours in the game … so far there are no references. But the story, the worldbuilding and the characters are sooo gloriously brilliant
It’s very standalone. It’s based in the forgotten realms universe in terms of lore, so it has a ton of depth there. The actual story arc though seems totally unconnected to the previous ones at least ten hours or so in.
It seems completely separate, as it should be tbh. I am sure there will be sone references but this title has nothing to do with the narrative events of bg1 and 2. It is just the setting afaik.
Divinity OS2 had a dungeom master/builder and workshop support. Im assuming that will be expanded upon and put into BG3. I cant wait for peoples custom campaigns. The game is pure creative excellence and exactly what gamers have been wanting for a long time. A game you buy once.
The paradox of homogeneization… The more the industry trends towards chasing what’s considered to work and be safe, the more room it leaves for the truly bold like these guys to be successful by doing what’s considered to not work anymore.
Always beautiful to see.
It’s true. Kevin Feige (of the Marvel movies) once said something like, “People love chocolate ice cream, but if that’s all you offer them every day, they’ll start to hate it.” and for a time, it seemed like he and Disney / Marvel understood that, which lead to such a wide range of movie genres for the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the breakout successes… but now I feel like they’ve forgotten that, and now we get the formulaic “Marvel Movie” template shoveled out, and now they’re slowly starting to fail.
And for good reason. People need variety, and it’s because entertainment producers don’t understand this need that so many major studios are flailing. Hence the recent purge at Pixar for example, and why Ubisoft is struggling lately, etc. It’s not just game publishers that have this issue, it’s movies, tv, and comics too. Like the recent “Death” of Ms. Marvel which is eerily similar to all the extremely temporary crap that happened to Peter Parker’s Spiderman in the past, like the “death” of his aunt, or his “marriage” to Mary Jane.
Adding onto this, it also doesn’t help that executives go “hey, this movie/game/show has proven to work in the past and generated X amount of money, let’s do it again but slightly different,” which also contributes to everything feeling the same and formulaic due to corporate entities wanting their investment back on a “creative” entertainment product.
I really hope PS5 gives a demo of this. I wanna give it a try, but not sure how I’ll like the gameplay with turn based stuff, and not sure how much I’ll like the view. I’m not a fan of aerial views, but if I can zoom it in and out, like WoW, I might like it.
When you play with a controller, the UI is completely different. Menus are simpler; you control your character movement with the left stick, camera rotation and zoom (from third person, perspective and tactical view) with the right stick; you don’t have a hotbar with your skills, instead you access everything with the shoulder buttons that open a radial menu; you can use the dpad to change what your target is (enemies, items, world clutter).
In general, you can play the game without any problems with a controller.
Oh I would probably use a KBM if it’s available on PS5, but I like that camera control sounds similar to WoW.
Still hoping for a demo, so I can tell if I’ll like the turn based play. I’m really stingy when it comes to buying games, more so after the CP77 debacle. I know it’s not the Devs, but still, it’s left a bad taste in my mouth with how games are handled from the top.
I’m very happy to hear that make fantastic video games without any nonsense attached is still a business model that works today. Good to hear Larian and BG3 are doing great. Very well deserved.
Would you guys recommend this for a casual gamer I love playing Zelda but rarely progress the story because I just like exploring. I know they aren’t the same game but just giving an example of how I play games. Also, never played the other games before.
Definitely. I also don’t have much time to play but then you just take a slower pace. BG isn’t some competitive online game that forces you to commit unreasonable amounts of time to it if you want to enjoy it. Although you’ll be occupied for quite a while if you take it slow because the game is huge.
It’s one of the newest D&D like games out there, so UI wise it’s probably one of the best to start on. But there are other similar games (e.g. Pathfinder Kingmaker / Pathfinder Wrath of the righteous) that I’d start on first.
Both of those last two we’re a great overall introduction into what TRPGs can be like
By that do you mean it autosaves often and many autosaves, and you have to prepare to figure out the autosave you need? I’m not really sure the difference meant but that’s all I can think of compared to current games. Though if so I’d add, you get to pick how many autosaves it will do so you can increase / decrease as needed.
Also as someone who played 90s and previous older RPGs having multiple autosaves rocks, there weren’t always multiple autosaves so you tended to reload back to your manual save and try again from that point. Save scumming wasn’t considered a bad thing way back when, just how you’d figure out the hard stuff heh.
Quick save often lest you have to repeat ten minutes walking or the last couple of fights but do worse (or better damn you rng) than the first time. At least it’s just a quick F5 to save and not ‘find a place to rest to save’, plus the camp/fast travel system seems pretty forgiving to me so far. There is a limit to the number of quick saves you have, the older ones are dropped I haven’ paid attention to retention of non-quick saves, perhaps someone else could comment.
Meaning sometimes you realize you fucked up way back in the previous town or battle and have to go back and reload. Hence, you end up with like 10 saves at any given time.
I’m gonna be the guy that says no. It’s not an open world exploration game, it’s more of an exposition game. Playing in small bits is likely gonna leave you stuggling to remeber where the story left off and what you were trying to do. Maybe if you did chunks of the story at once but even short sessions for me turn into hours.
Just started playing myself, annoyed that I had to start over because people who join you in multiplayer PERMANENTLY JOIN THE PARTY! No way to dismiss them meaning you’re permanently locked out of Story Based Party Members…
Brilliant…
Whoever came up with that should be fired, out of a cannon and into the sun.
EXCEPT it uses a launcher, that’d be my only complaint. When I click ‘Play’, I want my game to launch, not take me to another screen where I have to click ‘Play’ yet again.
You can add --skip-launcher to the game launch options. I actually did it while debugging an issue getting the game to launch and have never even seen the launcher despite playing quite a few sessions!
It’d be nice not to have to tweak things like that but at least the option is there similar to Cyberpunk
In Linux it is pretty much mandatory, it asks for NVIDIA 536 drivers, max on linux is 535… skip the launcher, and suddenly my drivers are okay (and tbf, aside from my card not being extra good, and a couple texture bleed in portraits and some weird texture loading issues (like, some times faces look like they were hyper pimpled, for a lil while, then looks normal) it plays amazingly
An own launcher does not fit at all to what is reported about Larian. Steam has monopoly position and that will probably not change so quickly. Another launcher will only annoy the users. I personally avoid even games that need an extra launcher on steam like from Ubisoft or EA.
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The only thing I could complain about is that I am still downloading. Due to the games size of over 100GB and no preload, the launch player numbers are very falsified think it will be much more. As I say I am still downloading.
Great to see baulders gate 3 doing well. A perfect storm of development conditions and we get rewarded at the end of it with a fantastic game. Hopefully heaps of extra extra content down the track to keep it going
Why do people say “perfect storm of conditions”? Larian has worked hard to perfect their style of crpgs through the divinity series. They put an emphasis on good storytelling and listening to fan feedback. They do early access to perfect their systems. They hire writers, composers and developers based on merit. They care about what they are creating. This is not a perfect storm but good management and development cycle. There is nothing random or lucky about it.
Of curse there is a lot of great Management and skill in Larian and they worked Hard to reach the Level of skill they have Shown of. However there are also certain eternal Faktors. AFAIK there have been several Times in the past where the Studio have easily gone bankrupt were it Not for certain Events. Also they have reached a critical point of exposure where enough People know them. There are several Studios which Do great games but you have never Heard of them. As an example i think Unknown Wordls (Subnautica) are creating a great game with Moonbreaker but it seems to miss the critical mass and might die during development
Do people know this game was in early access for more than a year. They were fine-tuning and really paying attention.
A lot of factors lead to this reward. But Imo, it’s them building what could have been a 7/10 game (Divinity games), spending a lot of time polishing and then Publicly releasing a 10/10 game
Do you think that the divinity games were 7/10? I thought the first was fantastic.
That’s how you succeed, you make a great game, and be pro customer. Not complicated.
This is great news. Hopefully their success will inspire more studios to hold onto the genre.
i’m telling you, i hadn’t really been considering it all that seriously, but all this positivity absolutely makes me want to just go ahead and dive in with everyone… and reward the devs…
It’s an adventure
i feel it, man… i REALLY do… my game schedule is just completely dominated by a virtual farm at the moment lol… gotta get those beans in…
the age old problem: stay on the farm or go off on an adventure
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Baldur’s Gate 3 just hit half a million concurrent players, and is already on track to challenge mega-franchise Harry Potter’s Hogwarts Legacy for this year’s Steam sales crown.
While old-school tactics franchises like XCOM vanish from purview, series like Final Fantasy drop turn-based gameplay altogether chasing broader audiences, and classic names like Diablo go always-online rammed with in-app purchases — Larian said no.
It’s also a turn-based RPG that follows cRPG traditions carried forward by a shrinking number of studios who seem to have convinced themselves in various ways that players don’t want this kind of game.
Forget for a moment that the game is just insanely good, with great writing, endless Dungeons & Dragons-inspired depth, and quite polished, optimized PC performance.
As such, I’m similarly nervous for Dragon Age 4, which according to leaks, has dropped tactical play in favor of chasing more action-oriented combat, doubtless with trend-chasing in mind.
Larian’s respect for its audience, the relentless pursuit of quality over quarterly targets, and the rejection of trend-chasing in favor of elevating classic gameplay conventions are being rewarded by gamers in droves.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Dragon Age Inquisition was already a giant pile of shit, why would anyone expect anything else from a studio that hasn’t released a decent game in over a decade?
I actually loved Dragon Age Inquisition. Definitely more than Dragon Age 2 (though I liked all of them).
Good concise bot
People are just tired of the anti-consumer bullshit and it shows. I’m glad Larian are thinking ahead instead of grabbing the cash now and running unlike most modern day triple A developers.
Really shows that they care for the games that they make and the audience they’ve amassed.
Hopefully this helps kill MTX, lootboxes and Battlepasses.
I hate MTX, lootboxes, and battle passes, but I cannot imagine that they’ll go away unless it’s to replace them with something even worse.
deleted by creator
Oh wow I didn’t even know that was a thing. Yeah you’re right that does sound worse.
Evil is evil. Greater, lesser, middling. If I had to choose I’d rather not choose at all.
MTX is here to stay, the numbers speak for themselves. It’s unfortunate, but unless people stop buying them (they won’t) they aren’t going anywhere.
At least we still have developers willing to go against the norm.
Does anyone know if you had to have played the first two games to understand the story? Or is it standalone, or do they catch you up on lore?
I haven’t played much, but I assume you don’t need to at all, considering how old those previous games are. It would be a big mistake considering the vast majority wouldn’t have played them.
As someone who has played BG1 and 2 and is now 21 hours in the game … so far there are no references. But the story, the worldbuilding and the characters are sooo gloriously brilliant
So it’s kind of standalone then? I might just have to pick it up! It sounds really cool, only based on Lemmy comments I have read
It’s very standalone. It’s based in the forgotten realms universe in terms of lore, so it has a ton of depth there. The actual story arc though seems totally unconnected to the previous ones at least ten hours or so in.
It seems completely separate, as it should be tbh. I am sure there will be sone references but this title has nothing to do with the narrative events of bg1 and 2. It is just the setting afaik.
Divinity OS2 had a dungeom master/builder and workshop support. Im assuming that will be expanded upon and put into BG3. I cant wait for peoples custom campaigns. The game is pure creative excellence and exactly what gamers have been wanting for a long time. A game you buy once.
The paradox of homogeneization… The more the industry trends towards chasing what’s considered to work and be safe, the more room it leaves for the truly bold like these guys to be successful by doing what’s considered to not work anymore.
Always beautiful to see.
It’s true. Kevin Feige (of the Marvel movies) once said something like, “People love chocolate ice cream, but if that’s all you offer them every day, they’ll start to hate it.” and for a time, it seemed like he and Disney / Marvel understood that, which lead to such a wide range of movie genres for the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the breakout successes… but now I feel like they’ve forgotten that, and now we get the formulaic “Marvel Movie” template shoveled out, and now they’re slowly starting to fail.
And for good reason. People need variety, and it’s because entertainment producers don’t understand this need that so many major studios are flailing. Hence the recent purge at Pixar for example, and why Ubisoft is struggling lately, etc. It’s not just game publishers that have this issue, it’s movies, tv, and comics too. Like the recent “Death” of Ms. Marvel which is eerily similar to all the extremely temporary crap that happened to Peter Parker’s Spiderman in the past, like the “death” of his aunt, or his “marriage” to Mary Jane.
You seem like someone I could talk to at a party for hours
Adding onto this, it also doesn’t help that executives go “hey, this movie/game/show has proven to work in the past and generated X amount of money, let’s do it again but slightly different,” which also contributes to everything feeling the same and formulaic due to corporate entities wanting their investment back on a “creative” entertainment product.
I really hope PS5 gives a demo of this. I wanna give it a try, but not sure how I’ll like the gameplay with turn based stuff, and not sure how much I’ll like the view. I’m not a fan of aerial views, but if I can zoom it in and out, like WoW, I might like it.
You can zoom in and out as well as have a direct overhead view
When you play with a controller, the UI is completely different. Menus are simpler; you control your character movement with the left stick, camera rotation and zoom (from third person, perspective and tactical view) with the right stick; you don’t have a hotbar with your skills, instead you access everything with the shoulder buttons that open a radial menu; you can use the dpad to change what your target is (enemies, items, world clutter).
In general, you can play the game without any problems with a controller.
Oh I would probably use a KBM if it’s available on PS5, but I like that camera control sounds similar to WoW.
Still hoping for a demo, so I can tell if I’ll like the turn based play. I’m really stingy when it comes to buying games, more so after the CP77 debacle. I know it’s not the Devs, but still, it’s left a bad taste in my mouth with how games are handled from the top.
I’m very happy to hear that make fantastic video games without any nonsense attached is still a business model that works today. Good to hear Larian and BG3 are doing great. Very well deserved.
Do what people want and they buy your game?
Lets get those fucking MBAs out of the gaming industry.
Fuck you bobby kotik for creating this mess.
deleted by creator
It all started with the horse armor and we laughed
And then bought the fucking horse armor apparently.
Well think of the ROI for horse armor. One new model. How many sales do you need before you cover that cost?
Zero, because it was probably created by an unpaid intern.
Would you guys recommend this for a casual gamer I love playing Zelda but rarely progress the story because I just like exploring. I know they aren’t the same game but just giving an example of how I play games. Also, never played the other games before.
Definitely. I also don’t have much time to play but then you just take a slower pace. BG isn’t some competitive online game that forces you to commit unreasonable amounts of time to it if you want to enjoy it. Although you’ll be occupied for quite a while if you take it slow because the game is huge.
It’s one of the newest D&D like games out there, so UI wise it’s probably one of the best to start on. But there are other similar games (e.g. Pathfinder Kingmaker / Pathfinder Wrath of the righteous) that I’d start on first.
Both of those last two we’re a great overall introduction into what TRPGs can be like
No, probably not for casual. The D&D combat takes a good bit of time spent.
You have to go back to 15 years ago levels of auto save. It’s jarring at first but you get used to it.
By that do you mean it autosaves often and many autosaves, and you have to prepare to figure out the autosave you need? I’m not really sure the difference meant but that’s all I can think of compared to current games. Though if so I’d add, you get to pick how many autosaves it will do so you can increase / decrease as needed.
Also as someone who played 90s and previous older RPGs having multiple autosaves rocks, there weren’t always multiple autosaves so you tended to reload back to your manual save and try again from that point. Save scumming wasn’t considered a bad thing way back when, just how you’d figure out the hard stuff heh.
Quick save often lest you have to repeat ten minutes walking or the last couple of fights but do worse (or better damn you rng) than the first time. At least it’s just a quick F5 to save and not ‘find a place to rest to save’, plus the camp/fast travel system seems pretty forgiving to me so far. There is a limit to the number of quick saves you have, the older ones are dropped I haven’ paid attention to retention of non-quick saves, perhaps someone else could comment.
Meaning sometimes you realize you fucked up way back in the previous town or battle and have to go back and reload. Hence, you end up with like 10 saves at any given time.
I’m gonna be the guy that says no. It’s not an open world exploration game, it’s more of an exposition game. Playing in small bits is likely gonna leave you stuggling to remeber where the story left off and what you were trying to do. Maybe if you did chunks of the story at once but even short sessions for me turn into hours.
Just started playing myself, annoyed that I had to start over because people who join you in multiplayer PERMANENTLY JOIN THE PARTY! No way to dismiss them meaning you’re permanently locked out of Story Based Party Members…
Brilliant…
Whoever came up with that should be fired, out of a cannon and into the sun.
EXCEPT it uses a launcher, that’d be my only complaint. When I click ‘Play’, I want my game to launch, not take me to another screen where I have to click ‘Play’ yet again.
On one hand though, it at least offers something with the launcher: cross-saving. Not for everyone, but kinda neat if you also play in a console.
Paradox launchers allow you to manage your mod playsets, it’s pretty useful. That’s the only ones I know that have utility though.
You can add
--skip-launcherto the game launch options. I actually did it while debugging an issue getting the game to launch and have never even seen the launcher despite playing quite a few sessions!It’d be nice not to have to tweak things like that but at least the option is there similar to Cyberpunk
With DOS2 you can bypass the launcher (with a launch argument or by choosing another executable, I think).
Maybe this is possible for BG3, too?
add
--skip-launcherto the launch options“–skip-launcher” added to launch options in steam should skip straight to the game
In Linux it is pretty much mandatory, it asks for NVIDIA 536 drivers, max on linux is 535… skip the launcher, and suddenly my drivers are okay (and tbf, aside from my card not being extra good, and a couple texture bleed in portraits and some weird texture loading issues (like, some times faces look like they were hyper pimpled, for a lil while, then looks normal) it plays amazingly
There is an option in the launcher to disable the graphics driver version pop-up.
I literally read this while waiting for shaders to process on first run. Good timing and thanks!
An own launcher does not fit at all to what is reported about Larian. Steam has monopoly position and that will probably not change so quickly. Another launcher will only annoy the users. I personally avoid even games that need an extra launcher on steam like from Ubisoft or EA.
Any other reason to not like launchers other than 2 clicks? Just wondering…