What drove BG3's success, game mechanics or emotional engagement?

[PorkyThePaladin]

Where does this shit opinion that Larian is good at gameplay come from? Ok, I get it, they obviously focus on gameplay more than say on writing (Good God, I could shit out better stains onto paper than their writers' work), but just because you focus on something doesn't automatically mean you are good at it.

Let's break down RPG gameplay into its substituent elements and examine Larian:

- exploration - They have never been particularly good at this. Mostly because post-Divine Divinity, their worlds have been basically blobs, where you just go around on a fairly predictable path, and just complete shit in front of you. On top of which, there is almost never anything to find in Larian games (which kills the motivation for exploration): what are you going to find, another Diablo-style weapon you will be replacing soon, or some asshole yelling out Belgian jokes? And then the bazillion of fucking crates to rifle through for trash.
- puzzles - if Owlcat didn't exist, Larian would have the worst puzzles in RPGs. Pixel hunting for levers and similar trash.
- world interactivity - I don't know if people bring this up because in the beginning of D:OS you can put out a ship fire with a rain spell/scroll, but how often do their games actually have meaningful world interactivity outside of combat? You can probably count it on one hand. Unless you think moving barrels and crates all the time counts.
- combat - So overrated here. Combining fire with oil or water with electricity is only fun the first few times, after that it becomes a chore. And outside of that, Larian combat has some of the most boring and silly tactics/gameplay ever.

 

[luj1]

Cinematic cutscenes, voice acting, high production values, good graphics, sex. BG3 is a spiritual successor to DAO

I said the same, in 2020. Is this even controversial?

I see Infinitroon believes they succedeed due to mechanics. Bahahahahah

 

[Baron Tahn]

To be fair I do think reactivity of elements like electricity in puddles is a good idea for rpgs. Innovative and something approaching TT. But not when done like Larian does it where it became barrelmancy in DOS. BG3 did do a bit better from the little I have played. Otherwise agreed mostly with your rant Porky.

 

[luj1]

Where does this shit opinion that Larian is good at gameplay come from?

I mean Shillfinitroon literally made this topic to perpetuate such ideas. Are you blind?

 

[Late Bloomer]

The game was catered towards and marketed exclusively to homosexuals, zoophiliacs (furries), critical role fans, negroes, and danger hairs. The success of the game is because it had the graphics to visualize all the deviancy they marketed, combined with the degenerates fear of missing out. And did they market the hell out of their sexual fantasies. Watch any random stream of someone playing and they have no idea what they are doing. They just want to get to the camp scenes so they can dialogue with npc's and watch their sexual fantasies in cutscenes, made with a 100 million dollar budget.

 

[Ibn Sina]

I have never seen a game this marketable and I mean it. The entire format of the game lends itself very well to the short style vids and feed, on tiktok and youtube. With its freedom to approach situations with bizarre and funny solutions and life sim elements, it blow up on tiktok with such videos like throwing a cat at the goblin boss and other quirky stuff. Sven is a fucking marketing genius and an innovative bastard and puts all the other senile and impotant has-been developers like soywer, manlet howard, etc all to shame. and it shows.

 

[Tyranicon]

I just want to say that BG3 has the most utterly laughable, cringy sex scenes I've ever seen in any medium (including cave drawings), to the point where I said at one point that I don't think the animators know what sex is.

And this coming from a guy who makes pixel porn that someone compared unfavourably to Custer's Revenge.

If people are buying this for the sexy stuff, they're getting robbed blind.

Or maybe that's how zoomers have sex, I dunno.

 

[Artyoan]

I maintain that the appeal is primarily due to environmental interactions. Much like Elder Scrolls, much of the environment can be inspected, manipulated, broken, set on fire, picked up, possibly crafted with, used in combat, etc. Doesn't need to be practical or balanced. It is a sense of wonderment that anything could be there and any possibility could be an option. Much of it may be useless and that doesn't matter because the player doesn't know importance by default.

D:OS 1 showed the promise. D:OS2 blew up in popularity and didn't have that bioware style romance and heavy story focus. Just combine a heavily interactable environment and multiplayer. Solasta should go this route for their next game imo. Pretty much every crpg should.

The romance element is more popular than I'd like but I don't believe it is why BG3 was so big, nor do I think it is necessary to include in every crpg from now on. Same with full voice acting. Just get away from 'Press highlight key to see everything that matters' style of limited play.

 

[Bastardchops]

1. It's because it's a Baldur's Gate sequel.
2. It's because they made it turn based as DnD should be.
3. Also the youth are gay so that helped.

 

[Raghar]

Actually BG3 was massive failure.

 

[Baron Tahn]

Actually BG3 was massive failure.

Hows that? I mean I didnt like it but it still sold a lot of copies. Which equals a success to those that are going to make the next shit game just like it.

 

[Poseidon00]

I'm playing Temple of Elemental Evil and it shits all over BG3 and 5E...
A wonderfully tactical, isometric and prestigious cRPG fit only for gentlemen of class and distinction.

Yes, but... Hommlet.

It is manageable.
Just go to the Deklo Grove or do some World Map travelling to get some random encounters and grind some XP if Hommlet starts to bore you.
Then go to the Moathouse, that's when the game really starts to shine.
The Moathouse is one of the best designed starting dungeons in a video game.

I skip right over Hommlet and just do the combat quests, I get to level 2 fast enough that ignoring the NPC quests is barely noticable.

That being said, I loved the sleepy village of Hommlet the first couple times I went through. Yes, it's a boring and plain town, but many places are, in fact, just like that. It was a good way to get into the setting imo

 

[Harthwain]

1. It's because it's a Baldur's Gate sequel.

People like to bring this up, but I do wonder how much Baldur's Gate's brand really helped Baldur's Gate 3 in the practical sense. For example, Baldur's Gate reddit has ~99k people. Baldur's Gate 3 has 1.9m people. That puts Baldur's Gate pre Baldur's Gate 3 somewhere around 5%. Divinity: Original Sin reddit has 227k, meaning it is more than twice as big. So, yeah, I doubt the "it's a Baldur's Gate sequel and that's why it sold so well" argument being accurate.

2. It's because they made it turn based as DnD should be.

Wasn't the argument that turn-based is less attractive for mainstream? I thought that mainstream would hate a game where you have to read a lot (in the vein of Planescape: Torment), but Disco Elysium proved that such notions are wrong. I am sure the same can be said about "turn-based is more popular" or "real-time is more popular". In the end it comes down to game-to-game basis and how the game handles its gameplay.

Personally I think the biggest influencing factors were as follows:

1) Larian's fame following Divinity: Original Sin series (which probably had bigger draw than Baldur's Gate's name).

2) The amount of reactivity Larian tends to put into its games compared to other RPGs (being able to interrogate the dead via an item you find is a really big deal, for example).

3) The game is packed with stuff (in terms of scope) compared to other RPGs/developers, which made other developers cry. It's funny, because usually developers - particularly developers who are under corporate management - tend to offer less [content] for more [money]. Baldur's Gate 3 raises the bar here and shareholders don't like that (developers too, because it means more work for them and when making a video game is your job, not a passion project, then you don't want to work more than you have to).

 

[NecroLord]

I'm playing Temple of Elemental Evil and it shits all over BG3 and 5E...
A wonderfully tactical, isometric and prestigious cRPG fit only for gentlemen of class and distinction.

Yes, but... Hommlet.

It is manageable.
Just go to the Deklo Grove or do some World Map travelling to get some random encounters and grind some XP if Hommlet starts to bore you.
Then go to the Moathouse, that's when the game really starts to shine.
The Moathouse is one of the best designed starting dungeons in a video game.

I skip right over Hommlet and just do the combat quests, I get to level 2 fast enough that ignoring the NPC quests is barely noticable.

That being said, I loved the sleepy village of Hommlet the first couple times I went through. Yes, it's a boring and plain town, but many places are, in fact, just like that. It was a good way to get into the setting imo

Hommlet is nowhere near as bad as some like to think.
Yes, it is quite boring, but you just need some patience.
That's it.
Once you go to the Moathouse/Emridy Meadows, that's when the game starts to shine.

 

[Lemming42]

Wasn't the argument that turn-based is less attractive for mainstream? I thought that mainstream would hate a game where you have to read a lot (in the vein of Planescape: Torment), but Disco Elysium proved that such notions are wrong. I am sure the same can be said about "turn-based is more popular" or "real-time is more popular". In the end it comes down to game-to-game basis and how the game handles its gameplay.

It was definitely an outdated notion, probably going back to the late 90s. There was a thread here a while ago with an article where BioWare said they wanted to capitalise on Diablo and RTS games when making the original BG, and that the devs found the Gold Box games to be too confusing or tedious or whatever. So from a pure popularity perspective it made sense to try and merge the already-popular genres somewhat, since the leap from RTS games to BG1 is fairly small in many ways. But public interest in RTS games is somewhere around zero these days so it makes sense that a lot of new players not already familiar with the conventions of RTS games would find RTWP to be an insane clusterfuck (see: Pillars of Eternity).

I think technology has also helped, a lot of older turn-based games could feel a bit clunky and slow (the evergreen criticism of "I HAVE TO WATCH EACH UNIT TAKE THEIR TURN??? ;_;" that'll be familiar to anyone who's tried to introduce Fo3/NV fans to Fo1/2), and occasionally awkward or stilted camera controls, but now that we have full 3D environments you can whoosh around at top speed and everything runs smoothly, a lot of the perceived problems with turn-based are no more. If you compare the way BG3 plays with, say, Pool of Radiance or Dark Sun Shattered Lands, the overall experience in BG3 is obviously a lot smoother thanks to the technological changes in the last 30 years. In a lot of ways, turn-based is more accessible to new players now, since it's much easier to see the effects of invested skillpoints/chosen abilities in action, whereas a new player's experience of BG1/2 who isn't trying to micromanage everything is essentially that the party AI will just start doing random shit while they try to control their own character, and that half the time combat will end without them necessarily knowing how the fuck they won/lost.

Which is kind of funny - BioWare's aim with BG1 was to make the experience as widely-accessible and non-RPG-fan friendly as possible, and they succeeded enormously in the context of the time, but these days a lot of people seem to find BG1 offputting for the exact same reason that people once found it appealing.

 

[NecroLord]

BioWare's aim with BG1 was to make the experience as widely-accessible and non-RPG-fan friendly as possible, and they succeeded enormously in the context of the time,

I don't know about that.
The game could be quite hard, as low level D&D often is.
Lots of character deaths abound, even perma deaths - being gibbed, burnt to a crisp or frozen and then shattered.

 

[Lemming42]

Difficulty often doesn't seem to put even "casual" players off games - Dark Souls was a big breakthrough hit and pretty much sold itself as being hard. With BG1 the accessibility was more about the interface mimicking RTS games to make it feel comfortable to WarCraft/C&C fans, and the real-time system removing a lot of the party positioning and management aspects of the Gold Box games, as well as making it so that combat essentially moved much faster.

You can read about their intent here (though the article itself is annoyingly fawning): https://www.theringer.com/2018/12/21/18150363/baldurs-gate-bioware-1998-video-games

Earlier RPGs, including the Ultima games, had been difficult to control, making it complicated for players to select multiple members of their parties and tell them what to do. But Blizzard Entertainment had released Warcraft and Warcraft II in 1994 and 1995, respectively, and those two titles, along with Westwood Studios’ Command & Conquer series, headlined a mid-’90s RTS boom based on mouse-first management rather than keyboard commands. BioWare borrowed that mouse-aided design, transplanting a new interface into an old genre where it was sorely needed. “Basically, you swipe the interface from a real-time-strategy game and plug it into a role-playing game,” Greig says. “That solved the party mechanics.”

It didn’t address a second problem: Mixing real-time management of up to five party members with the complexity of the D&D rule set made the action chaotic. “It became pretty obvious pretty quick that there was no way you were gonna be able to play the depths of D&D in real time without ever pausing the game,” Oster says. “That’s when we came up with the ‘pause and play’ plan.” That addition enabled players to stop in the middle of the game, queue up commands to their party, and then restart the real-time action. Although Baldur’s Gate didn’t invent this “active pause” approach, it did help popularize it. “When you play Fallout to this day with the V.A.T.S. system for the slow-motion targeting, I think you can trace the origins of all that back to the ‘pause and play’ idea,” Greig says.

Not sure if it's mentioned in the article but I think the option of letting the party be AI controlled is another big thing that made it more accessible and appealing - instead of controlling each party member individually, you can reasonably focus on your player character and let your party do whatever. I don't think that's an inherently bad idea or anything, and it made a lot of sense at the time, but I also think that with TB games being smoother and quicker nowadays, it'll always be more engaging to just get the player to control everyone.

 

[Lhynn]

Its because its a good fucking rpg that delivers what rpgs have been promising for decades. Its the rpg closest to the tabletop experience in a time where dnd podcasts are a thing normies watch.

Yeah, marketing helped, but if you dont deliver you will get backlash, your reputation will sink, and your next release sales will suffer, weve seen that countless times before. As things are, next Larian release will be huge.

Watching the codex struggle with this game has been both hilarious and sad, because it shows you that a large majority of the site has been taken over by absolute shit tasters and bottom tier cretins.

You find them in poe 1 and 2 threads, you find them in AoD and CS threads, you find them everywhere, polluting the forums with their atrocious, baseless opinion they wont even bother to defend, theyll just rate your post and retreat.

 

[GloomFrost]

Its not....

 

[Lemming42]

delivers what rpgs have been promising for decades. Its the rpg closest to the tabletop experience

Yeah, this is pretty much it - the experience of playing BG3 was a constant stream of thinking "can I do [unorthodox idea]?" and the game answering "yes" pretty much every time.

The tradeoff is that it's a bit too easy overall since you can try pretty much any ridiculous scheme and it'll work - and there are some painfully obvious ones that literally always work in every situation, like barrelmancy - but that's the price of the mechanical freedom offered to the player. If they can find a way to keep the difficulty reasonably high without sacrificing that freedom in their next game, then they'll be winning big-time.

 

[Lhynn]

The tradeoff is that it's a bit too easy overall

To this I can only answer that you should really play the game in honor mode. Inevitably the game becomes a comedy of errors and near wipes, as you really dont realize just how challenging a game is until you are forced to tackle everything without a retry or twenty. You will really feel that d20.

 

[Harthwain]

Watching the codex struggle with this game has been both hilarious and sad, because it shows you that a large majority of the site has been taken over by absolute shit tasters and bottom tier cretins.

I get a similar impression, but it is less that Codex "has been taken over by absolute shit tasters and bottom tier cretins" and more that a lot of old active users are people for whom RPGs are essentially small-scale wargames/dungeon crawlers/murderhobo simulators. For these people any game that isn't combat heavy is going to be questionable, since combat is the key component of old school RPGs (and often pretty much the only thing you could do, in terms of interacting with the world).

 

[Daemongar]

I haven't played it but from the description and comments around here, it is successful because it's not complete shit, and that's what passes for good these days.

 

[luj1]

The game was catered towards and marketed exclusively to homosexuals, zoophiliacs (furries), critical role fans, negroes, and danger hairs. The success of the game is because it had the graphics to visualize all the deviancy they marketed, combined with the degenerates fear of missing out. And did they market the hell out of their sexual fantasies. Watch any random stream of someone playing and they have no idea what they are doing. They just want to get to the camp scenes so they can dialogue with npc's and watch their sexual fantasies in cutscenes, made with a 100 million dollar budget.

/thread

 

[luj1]

Its because its a good fucking rpg that delivers what rpgs have been promising for decades...

Sexual deviations? 184 hours of cutscenes?