D&D General Baldur's Gate 3 will now be releasing August 3rd on PC and September 6th on PS5, increased level cap, race & class details and more

I wonder if BG3 could become the "Final Fantasy-Killer".
Kill the Final Fantasy series in general? No.

Kill Final Fantasy XVI specifically? Actually quite possible, considering the mixed reception that game has had. (Personally I enjoyed it well enough, certainly far more than I did XIII and XV, but it is held back by some significant flaws.) Also if BG3 ends up being a rousing success and outsells FFXVI, which is suddenly looking like a real possibility, it's going to put some real egg on Yoshi-P's face in light of his comments about how turn-based games do not sell as his justification for taking FFXVI in a fully action-based direction.
 
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Also if BG3 ends up being a rousing success and outsells FFXVI, which is suddenly looking like a real possibility, it's going to put some real egg on Yoshi-P's face in light of his comments about how turn-based games do not sell as his justification for taking FFXVI in a fully action-based direction.
Yoshi-P is intelligent and open-minded enough that he might even acknowledge that, but it won't change Square-Enix's course on this. They'll just come out with justifications like "different markets" and make the next FFXVI even more Devil May Care-like. That's just how Square-Enix are - completely unable to appreciate realities about the market. Yoshi-P is a bit better than that, but he's not really in-charge in-charge, y'know?

However successful BG3 is, I don't think there will be any immediate impact on videogame RPG design, at the design side.

I do think there may be a significant impact at the customer side, which is what Xalavier Nelson Jr was talking about re: audience expectations. His rather clumsily/overly hastily stated position is apparently that, if customers/audiences have their expectations raised by BG3, it's going to be very difficult for other companies to match those expectations, which may lead to other RPGs failing, sales-wise. The trouble is, that's just how the industry works, in literally all fields. Not just RPGs, but FPSes, third-person open-worlds, fighting games, platformers and so on. People's expectations get raised by a particularly good game, often on a kind of lower budget than some larger and more mediocre titles. To some extent it's intentional too - one of the reasons budgets inflate is that companies try to increase expectations to the point where lower-end products can't match them. This isn't always successful, but sometimes it is, especially if you're already the market leader.

And that customer-side impact will have longer-term impacts on RPG design. People will expect more, in not in terms of cinematics then at least in terms of writing and choices/approaches.

Starfield is also likely to have impact, and it's kind of odd it's not being talked about as much, in that it's likely to be so vast and full of pointless procedural content that it'll make it very hard to make a space RPG, because a horde of... gamers... will want those tons of pointless procedural content. Which isn't actually that easy to make - as Mass Effect Andromeda found out (which essentially was doing the same thing as No Man's Sky and Starfield). I presume TES6 will try to do the same thing to fantasy RPGs, i.e. to resurrect the Daggerfall approach to some extent, and to have a truly vast procedural land that no-one can match, as well as a more Skyrim-like central story and non-procedural locations. But that's probably a decade out so less relevant.
 






Yoshi-P is intelligent and open-minded enough that he might even acknowledge that, but it won't change Square-Enix's course on this. They'll just come out with justifications like "different markets" and make the next FFXVI even more Devil May Care-like. That's just how Square-Enix are - completely unable to appreciate realities about the market. Yoshi-P is a bit better than that, but he's not really in-charge in-charge, y'know?

However successful BG3 is, I don't think there will be any immediate impact on videogame RPG design, at the design side.

I do think there may be a significant impact at the customer side, which is what Xalavier Nelson Jr was talking about re: audience expectations. His rather clumsily/overly hastily stated position is apparently that, if customers/audiences have their expectations raised by BG3, it's going to be very difficult for other companies to match those expectations, which may lead to other RPGs failing, sales-wise. The trouble is, that's just how the industry works, in literally all fields. Not just RPGs, but FPSes, third-person open-worlds, fighting games, platformers and so on. People's expectations get raised by a particularly good game, often on a kind of lower budget than some larger and more mediocre titles. To some extent it's intentional too - one of the reasons budgets inflate is that companies try to increase expectations to the point where lower-end products can't match them. This isn't always successful, but sometimes it is, especially if you're already the market leader.

And that customer-side impact will have longer-term impacts on RPG design. People will expect more, in not in terms of cinematics then at least in terms of writing and choices/approaches.

Starfield is also likely to have impact, and it's kind of odd it's not being talked about as much, in that it's likely to be so vast and full of pointless procedural content that it'll make it very hard to make a space RPG, because a horde of... gamers... will want those tons of pointless procedural content. Which isn't actually that easy to make - as Mass Effect Andromeda found out (which essentially was doing the same thing as No Man's Sky and Starfield). I presume TES6 will try to do the same thing to fantasy RPGs, i.e. to resurrect the Daggerfall approach to some extent, and to have a truly vast procedural land that no-one can match, as well as a more Skyrim-like central story and non-procedural locations. But that's probably a decade out so less relevant.

I could it influencing other major European game companies like Paradox.
 

Comparing bg3 to final fantasy is like comparing red apples to green apples. They are both apples and you might like both ki da but they have distinct flavors.
 

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