Obsidian's Almost Baldur's Gate III

[villain of the story]

See the point about indie middleware at the end of this post.

I did see it, but I read it as a fancy blame word of the day. "Fucking middleware, man. It takes 3-4 mil to make a decent RPG but then you've gotta spend 20 mil for middleware, so that's why all RPGs cost 25+ mil."

1. Obsidian has an in-house game engine they developed to suit their needs.
2. They opted to use another, entirely new engine they were unfamiliar with.
3. They said the reason was the middleware licensing costs.

Facts speak for themselves.

The only fact here is that Obsidian has a high-end, console-friendly, eye-candy engine with a lot of expensive middleware packed in to attract publishers. It doesn't mean that that's the only way to go forward

Why do you keep stating the obvious is beyond me. Of course not and duh, they are using Unity now.

and any engine must have expensive middleware to win publishers' hearts.

This is a bizarre point. I don't remember middleware being a major selling point. Got anything to back this up?

Feargus' $25M figure has a context. He gives Mass Effect as a comparable example so you need to consider and judge his goals within that context. And within that context, $25M is about standard for a high profile AAA game. Under the right circumstances, you can make a game sell more if you throw money at it to reach those figures. Isn't that what Bioware and Bethesda has been doing?

I'm not saying that $25 mil is an unreasonable budget for a AAA game. I'm saying that $25 mil is a lot of money and perhaps Feargus would have gotten the contract had he asked for less. It's not like Atari doesn't greenlight smaller projects and never spends less than 25 mil on games.

Can't disagree with that. Well, at least it didn't lead to another poor :sob: developer story where the publisher demands a certain game made a certain way and fucks the developer in the ass.

Hundreds of indie games? A few dozen really fucking good? I must have missed something, do elaborate.

Question mark for both statements? New to the internets? You are a grown up boy, you shouldn't need somebody else holding your hand or giving you a quest compass to see that it is crawling with (mostly shit) indie games out there.

You are the one who's making a claim that there are a few dozens really fucking good indie games out there. Asking you to list some examples (preferably RPGs, as who cares about platformers or puzzle games) is hardly unreasonable and hardly calls for "google it".

Excluding crowdfunded games: Games of Wadjet Eye Games. Introversion games. Fray Knights*. NEO Scavenger*. Lone Survivor. Amnesia and Penumbra series. Hard Reset. The Void. Sanctum. Red Orchestra 1 & 2 (mods-turned-commercial-games). Legend of Grimrock. Frozen Synapse. Mark of The Ninja. Botanicula. I think all of that adds up to a little over two dozen. All of them I enjoyed more than any AAA crap (sans New Vegas) I have played in the last couple years. I actually remember at least another dozen but I can't recall their names atm and possibly more that I don't even remember right now.

And then there are the crowdfunded games. Chivalry, FTL, Conquistador. There are a few more I fail to recall but when compared in numbers, crowdfunded games fall behind significantly, if that means anything.

And about the hundreds of shit indie games? Steam and other major digital distribution platforms are crawling with them. Browse the <$10 categories. It's like a fucking deluge of toxic sewage set out to drown you.

*: RPGs. Check them out.

Are you saying it was impossible to do a decent engine without fancy middleware 5-10 years ago?

I am saying what I just said: that even in their Onyx engine built-up in-house to suit their needs, Obsidian was (ironically) using expensive middleware and that is the reason they dropped Onyx for PE. Therefore, your question is better addressed at Obsidian, which you might like to keep in mind for the next time you interview someone at Obsidian.

See above.

I don't care about the above. I stated a mere fact that. It will remain that way. No context can change it. While I don't trust Obsidian about financial management, I trust them to know what they are doing tech-wise and the associated decisions.

I also very much doubt that they would have buried expensive middleware deep within Onyx just to appease publishers to the point of dropping it completely for PE when Onyx was built up to be their life-line for future games. That is another thing you might like to keep in mind for the next time you interview Obsidian folks.

Or maybe they did just that deliberately to inflate their costs to get more money from publishers. They are, after all, using Onyx for South Park, which is another 2D game, though without the 3D hybrid approach as far as I know. Perhaps they thought that if they used Onyx for a project with a far smaller budget without the expensive middleware shit, their past and present business partners would catch onto it? Anyway, anything that can be said will be pure speculation.

And I just remembered Tim Cain saying in an interview that developing games were harder and took longer back in the day because they had to develop everything themselves since there weren't middleware solutions for everything you might need. I couldn't find the exact quote, though.

Harder and longer doesn't mean impossible. Didn't he do the Fallout engine in six months or so? Does anyone know how long it took him/Troika to do the Steam engine for Arcanum? Their PA tech demo looked pretty good too.

PA demo looked neither good or bad to me. A pretty environment with a guy walking and running around with real-time global dynamic lights in stitching framerate. Since we didn't see actual game systems in action, it was merely a renderer to any observer. And it was prettyish but if I were a clueless publisher as most publishers are, I would be worried about that shitty framerate.

 

[suejak]

Plus development costs have gone down due to explosion of indie middleware in the meantime. Conditions just aren't the same now. Also part of the reason we've been having an indie games explosion for the last couple of years. Where were all those indies back mid 2000s? Why this indie surge just now? You could just as well bitch about games in 80s about costing too much to develop and too expensive to buy when compared to today's similar indie games sold at around $5 a pop and often cost south of $10K to develop.

It was 5 years ago and the main reason we have the "indie surge" is kickstarter. Take that Madoc guy (Sui Generic), for example. Before KS, he would have had to work for years to turn it into a game or go to a publisher and probably be turned down. Now that people know they have a chance to raise tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, they have a reason to tinker with engines. Cause and effect.

Indie developers were always around, but until KS the easiest way to get a game out was to make a cool mod that was almost a stand-alone game and hope that it would catch the publisher's interest. Like Hammer & Sickle, for example, or DayZ.

You WERE talking about Indie games in general (DayZ), but if you now want Indie RPGs, I think they're mostly jRPG-likes of the wasn't-the-SNES-great mold. But the era of "making a mod and hoping someone notices" is an old one. That's like Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat-level old news. Indie games have been getting on Steam, GamersGate, GameStop, gog.com, etc, and making profits for years now with little to no publisher support.

Read up: http://milliondollars.blog.co.uk/2012/05/16/the-indie-game-boom-13688972/
This is a good overview.

Here's a cool indie games deal site that's been running hot for at least a year: http://www.indieroyale.com/blog

 

[Xavier0889]

Indie games have boomed because of digital distribution, not KickStarter. VD says some dumb shit.

We have come into a point which every game not sponsored by EA is indie.
We'll only have to wait to see how EA dies and nobody's able to cast Resurrection on them to witness the new video game crash. I'm looking forward to that, actually.

 

[tuluse]

villain of the story, Neo Scavanger is p cool. Just spend an hour and half with demo.

 

[Vault Dweller]

He said indie games though. And there has definitely been an indie game boom. RPGs? That's a little trickier, because RPGs are inherently of a much bigger scope. Not all genres follow the same logic.

Hence my point about KS being the driving force here.

As for genres, since we're discussing indie games in the content of RPG engines in a threat about Obsidian's RPG on an RPG subforum of an RPG-nut site, I naively assumed that we're talking about indie RPGs here.

Digital distribution is kind of necessary...

It is but it's been around for more than 10 years without triggering a surge [of indie RPGs]. Kickstarter did.

 

[villain of the story]

I would like to know where you are getting your numbers to base that opinion on.

 

[aris]

Joined: Apr 17, 2012

It's really hard to spot the edgy retarded newfag alt.

Always using the same join date non-argument, aren't you? And also, speaking about trying to be edgy:

So yet another shitty action game designed on consoles but named Baldur's Gate III?

I'll try to shed a tear but I really can't.

The single................ somewhat good thing is that Beamdog will make it more like Baldur's Gate (Isometric) and non shitty 3D OMG IMMERSION I CAN SEE FEAR IN THE ORKS EYE TECHNOLOGY™.

And then the gigantic BAD: Being made by Beamdog.

I didn't even have to dig, both of these posts are on the same page.

 

[Jaesun]

Oh noes!

 

[Azarkon]

The state of the gaming industry is to blame, not Feargus / Atari. Sure, publishers have a direct effect on things, but the market's fickle attachment to AAA action games and shooters, disdain for complex RPGs, and increasing movement towards console / mobile games make it commercially risky to invest in RPGs - including those with a franchise the size of BG's. Old school gamers aren't helping the process. We want indie - but we don't want indie. That is to say, we won't settle for amateur efforts and Android games - we want the grand scale and sweep of past classics, but have no one to turn to but Obsidian's Kickstarter projects because, at the end of the day, those isometric games weren't cheap when it came to the amount of employee hours needed to build them. No fancy 3D graphics and voice acting cuts down on the need to hire 3D artists, animators, and voice actors, but you're still talking about dozens of designers and programmers working for years. With present day salaries and overhead costs, that's an easy $10 million to break even.