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

[Zardnaar]

I think she's some kind of serious magical shapeshifter rather than merely a changeling, but I guess we shall see.

I don't think Paradox could afford to be influenced by it. They're struggling hard to get Bloodlines 2 out the door, and had a revenue of under $200m p/a in 2022 despite a large number of revenue streams. They also don't have a studio with experience making this kind of game on this kind of scale. The closest they have is Harebrained Schemes, who have made CRPGs and turn-based tactical games (and are indeed releasing The Lamplighter's League later this year), who are cool, but distinctly an AA studio, and would need to grow a lot to become an AAA studio.

Also the main lesson that I think only Larian even could have learned, because most American, British and even Japanese companies are too arrogant in this regard is: HIRE GOOD WRITERS. KEEP HIRING MORE.

Larian got repeatedly hit in the face with a lot of feedback that, despite making good games, they didn't have good writers. And rightly so. DOS1 is basically like a teenage boy with a poor sense of humour trying to emulate Pratchett, and writing in a foreign language before even more of the humour is lost in translation. DOS2 was like that boy a few years later, trying to emulate Joe Abercrombie or someone instead, but with essentially the same issues. But something very interesting happened after/during DOS2, which is that Larian actually took some of this criticism on board, rather than merely getting defensive about its precious writers (as again almost any American, British or Japanese studio would), and frantically started hiring the best English-language writers it could find, and setting up studios in English-language countries where they could work (principally Dublin in Ireland and Guildford in the UK).

I was very surprised by this, because I assumed Swen et al would react the same way as others to criticism of the writing, but they didn't. Instead they hired good people, and kept hiring them. And now we have a game which, at this point at least, looks to have peak-Bioware level companion and plot writing (and hopefully major NPC writing - the minor NPCs are not quite up to peak Bioware standards imho).

It also illustrate a fundamentally different mindset to most companies, where writers are seen as either:

A) Block of specific individuals who are "special" and only to be added to extremely grudgingly (this notably also tends to mean they are mostly white, male, and aging, which narrows the potential perspectives).

or

B) A bunch of disposable hacks, most of whom are to be fired as soon as the main writing on a game is done. This even can happen to pretty famous writers and then of course games often need later-on re-writes but they fired most/all of the writing team...

You could contrast Larian strongly with, for example, Bethesda, who have basically the same dire writing team for decades, showing no signs of improvement or positive change over that time - in fact on the contrary, lore, the one place where they were once very strong, seems to be weakening, with the only faint hope for Starfield being that Will Shen, who wrote the least-worst (but still pretty mid) content for Fallout 4 (Far Harbour) being the main quest guy. He's been at Bethesda since 2009, though, and has been involved in every badly-written game they've put out since. As have the others. Particularly worrying is that Emil Pagliarulo is game director, a man who has never been involved with anything that couldn't be summarized accurately as "hack", storyline-wise, despite decades in the industry and tons of credits. And that's by the very low standards of videogames.

(Anyone who disagrees that FO3 is badly written/plotted - and by extension FO4, which has essentially just a trope-ier, even more manipulative and lazier version of the same exact plot - should probably watch Hbomberguy's wonderful video on FO3 here, and the constrasting video on FO:NV here.)

Fallout 4 is decent until tge plot branches towards the end. Only 2 of the factions have decent plot lines(BoS, Institute).

I liked Far Harbor a lot.

 

[Zardnaar]

Some worries have started popping up in the Baldur's Gate 3 subreddit. Apparently the review codes for media outlets are going to come out tomorrow (when they were expected to arrive today), and it looks like the reviewers will have 4 days to look at the whole game before release. People are worrying this might be a sign that the game has considerable issues they don't want the reviewers to find out - especially if it gets coupled with a review NDA that lifts on release day.

I was confident they'd have less issues since they were able to put the release date one month earlier, but now it's starting to look like that was only to avoid competing with Starfield and not because the game was actually ready....

Might be unreal expectations. Some people have bought into the AAA+ claims because they have 400 odd employees for example.

A real AAA developer can have 7 studios.

I wouldn't worry to much until release I just never pre order now. Find out in a few days.

 

[CommodoreKong]

I thought it was always pretty obvious that Starfield was exactly why the release date was moved up.

I'm expecting it to be buggy but very playable and very good.

Oh yeah I'm sure Starfield was a huge reason for the release date change for the PC version.

Apparently reviewers are only getting review codes 4 days before launch so I'm expecting the game to come in hot with bugs and issues like so many other releases these past few years.

 

[humble minion]

I've played it via GEForce streaming and it runs really well even on a crappy laptop, if you'd rather not buy a whole new rig for it.

Alas, my internet connection is flaky 4g wifi, so streaming of any sort is questionable at best, and my alleged 'rig' is a refurbished Surface Pro 7 right now, so it'll probably remain out of my league for a while...

 

[MarkB]

I've played it via GEForce streaming and it runs really well even on a crappy laptop, if you'd rather not buy a whole new rig for it.

Does it keep your settings saved? I played the Early Access version on Stadia, and one frustration was that while it remembered my saves, it didn't keep my keybindings.

 

[Seramus]

Apparently reviewers are only getting review codes 4 days before launch

Most codes were sent out today. Mortismal got one, and he didn't think he would (he's a cool guy). A few went out after many EU reviewers had gone to sleep though.

 

[KEV777]

BG3 has innumerable cut scenes full of insufferable NPCs who ride the uncanny valley. I'm not sure I can put myself thought that. I'm sure the combat will be fun, but I honestly can't imagine enjoying this game with the scant selection of companions.

 

[Demetrios1453]

BG3 has innumerable cut scenes full of insufferable NPCs who ride the uncanny valley. I'm not sure I can put myself thought that. I'm sure the combat will be fun, but I honestly can't imagine enjoying this game with the scant selection of companions.

If you don't like or get tired of the origin characters, there will be 12 more generic characters (one from each class) that you can choose to join your party early in the game.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

If you don't like or get tired of the origin characters, there will be 12 more generic characters (one from each class) that you can choose to join your party early in the game.

But there is no escaping that it is a very talky adventure, with lots of opportunities to Starfleet your way out of combat encounters.

If someone just wants to kill monsters and steal their stuff they would be better playing Solasta, Diablo 4, or dusting off Icewind Dale.

This ties into all this "redefining CRPGs" nonsense. BG3 is great if you like that sort of thing, but not everyone does.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

But there is no escaping that it is a very talky adventure, with lots of opportunities to Starfleet your way out of combat encounters.

If someone just wants to kill monsters and steal their stuff they would be better playing Solasta, Diablo 4, or dusting off Icewind Dale.

This ties into all this "redefining CRPGs" nonsense. BG3 is great if you like that sort of thing, but not everyone does.

Yes it’s meant to be like the old games and have a good deal of story and exploration. It’s not Diablo.