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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9077208" data-attributes="member: 18">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.</blockquote>

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