•

Why did Baldur's Gate 3 blow up? Larian lead writer says it's thanks to "a big gamble" with CRPG standards

https://www.gamesradar.com/why-did-baldurs-gate-3-blow-up-larian-lead-writer-says-its-thanks-to-a-big-gamble-with-crpg-standards/

"We believe RPGs are big ... So we always believed the audience was there," says Adam Smith

102 comments

See all comments

seash

•

Maybe it’s just because I wasn’t following it super closely before release, but what promises did they even make that fell through? I only ask because I think there’s also a Reddit effect of people hyping themselves up about a game to the point where the final product can’t ever live up to expectations. This is a similar feeling I had to no man’s sky. How many of these promises were just things the community decided were in the game based on speculation from trailers and interview quotes?

This isn’t to say there weren’t problems. The game was obviously buggy and needed another year of development time to fix some issues (fortunately never experienced game breaking bugs like some did). There were perks that obviously weren’t working, and it simply never should have been attempted on old gen consoles. But overall I fell in love with that game I think because I went into it with zero expectations and now I’ve put like a thousand hours in since release.

JimmyMcGill

•

Plenty of promises weren’t kept up.

The marketing mentioned that your choice of background would basically mean an almost completely different experience. In the end you have 20mins of gameplay + some cutscenes and then all of it is mostly the same apart from some dialog options.

They hyped that the city would be vibrant and almost a sim in its own way. That you could just “live a normal life” go to the barber and interact with people. When I played most NPCs didn’t have any dialog, there was even like a brothel that you couldn’t visit. Honestly GTA San Andreas was miles ahead and it’s like a 20yo game at this point.

A lot of people like to reduce it to the bugs but BG3 is also very much a bit of a buggy mess and no one is complaining about that. The main issue is that we were sold an ocean and we realized that it has the depth of a puddle. And that you can’t fix with any amount of patches.