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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9514172" data-attributes="member: 18">Oh, to be honest I forgot about the red flags! Sorry! I was just focused on Swen and Larian, not WotC.Red flag-wise, with WotC/Hasbro, there are a bunch:1) WotC has an outstandingly bad history of failures and low quality with software projects, whether they're licenced games, licenced software or internal projects.It's can think of any IP-owner-type company which has as poor/chequered a history here, and it's absolutely worst with D&D. At times it's almost looked like WotC was intentionally picking the worst possible people to partner with, and certainly some of the decisions that they've made have just been outstandingly and obviously bad. BG3 is the first even really okay D&D-based game since 2006's NWN2. A run of duds that long isn't bad luck, it's bad decision-making. Especially as WotC has been fully in charge of the licence again since like 2011.So that's a red flag right there - the fact that WotC are choosing to work with you! Because easily 90%+ of their decisions of this sort since like 2001 are terrible!2) WotC have a terrible reputation among game studios who have worked with them, as being both difficult to work with, and excessively greedy/grasping re: the percentages of revenue they want. These two factors together are the major reason Bioware's Dragon Age exists, for example, and also contributed to the decision to make an original SF IP with Mass Effect. We think of Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 and Icewind Dale and Planescape and so on as being successful, and as games, they were. But WotC ensured they were painful to make, and not as profitable as they should have been. When Bioware decided they wanted to make more fantasy RPGs in the mid-late '00s, they discussed working with WotC (who had by then recovered the BG and IWD licences, but not the main D&D licence - will discuss further down), and pretty quickly rejected the idea out of hand, because they had such bad experiences. Developing and marketing a new IP from scratch was expensive (surprisingly so, even) and risky, but still better than working with WotC!This is why Josh Sawyer would never work with WotC again, too - he's worked with them before - on IWD 1 (and expansion), IWD 2, and NWN 2 (and Mask of the Betrayer). But his experiences, plus how WotC continue to work with other people in the industry mean he absolutely wouldn't.So gigantic, glowing red flag there.3) WotC/Hasbro have proven to be both capricious and litigious with the D&D licence historically. Despite the successes of BG1 & 2, PST, and so on, when Hasbro decided not to continue to allow Interplay to use the D&D licence, but rather made it part of a package of digital licences together with Hasbro's not-very-profitable videogames division, Hasbro Interactive, and then sold this for an absolutely paltry sum to Atari. This was seemingly because Hasbro had decided videogames were a fad (in 2001...) and were never going to make any real money (again, in 2001, when videogames were skyrocketing in importance and profits in general), so these licences were worthless. Interplay retained the rights to make games called Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale, oddly (hence they made BG: Dark Alliance 2 in 2004). Atari didn't make much successful use of the D&D licence, but it did get a lot of mileage out of some other Hasbro licences and made $$$. Hasbro/WotC got pretty mad about its own stupidity and ended up suing Atari to try and get its licences back, and whilst I don't remember the specifics offhand, I do know Atari ended up getting paid quite a bit more for the licences than it had paid for them back in the day. And WotC have done a pretty terrible job with assigning those rights since they got them back, only seemingly getting lucky with the Beyond team being competent (honestly WotC ignored red flags there, they were rolling the dice!), and the sole solidly good decision WotC has made with the D&D licence was to let Larian use it. And then Hasbro/WotC utterly thoughtlessly, and mere months after BG3 had become a huge megahit, decided to fire literally everyone behind that decision/those negotiations, almost everyone who had worked with Larian (I think it is now literally everyone, with the more recent layoffs).So that level of capriciousness and litigiousness and thoughtlessness, and the fact that Hasbro pushes WotC around, and doesn't even think twice about doing it, is another big red flag.So yeah, really serious red flags were ignored by Larian.It's definitely not immaterial, and you haven't presented reasoning as to why it would be. Swen is not the most professional guy, but he knows how to be polite. Also, what is true and what is a lie? That's a serious question here, not just rhetoric!When Swen says "WotC aren't why we didn't do BG4", on one level, that's absolutely true - because the decision was a positive one to work on other games after he decided to go to the team and ask what they wanted to do, it wasn't to just give the finger to WotC.On the other hand, had Hasbro not decided to nuke all their major contacts with Larian from orbit, and to do so for a reason that Swen, particularly, individually, personally and openly despises - i.e. to up their share value temporarily, and without much regard to how important/useful/talented those people might be - would Swen have even gone to his team and said "Hey guys, do we really want to continue work on BG4?" (which we now know they were in fact working on, contrary to his earlier statements)? And would the team have been so keen to abandon BG4 had Hasbro not done that?Further on true vs lie, I think it's true to say "WotC weren't responsible" because Hasbro made the decision re: layoffs, not WotC. You might think that's a small distinction, but frankly it's exactly the kind of wordplay/precision Swen has repeatedly shown he's really into!Let's be clear on the timeline:August 2023 - Baldur's Gate 3 was released.December 2023 - Hasbro fired essentially everyone involved in working with Larian in and Swen commented on this.March 2024 - Larian announced they weren't making BG4 and gave Swen gave a powerful speech/rant about how "greed" was leading to "layoffs" which was very bad.We now know from Swen that BG4 had been in pre-production/early production since at least August 2023, and until March 2023. So for at least 7 months, BG4 was being worked on by Larian. There was seemingly no question about BG4 at Larian for at least some of that period. But in March Swen went to Larian's employees and asked if they wanted to keep working on BG4 (as we now know - at the time he seemingly implied they weren't working on anything in particular, but has since corrected that). I don't there's an reasonable interpretation that Hasbro's decision to layoff a ton of people wasn't involved in in Larian ditching a project they'd been working on for at least* 7 months. But there is the valid sematic argument that it was Hasbro who killed this, not WotC!* = I dunno how familiar people are with game production, but many/most studios start shifting the artists and writers and other creatives to primarily working on the next game before the "current" game even releases - sometimes years before! Swen has even talked about this before, and how important it is, because it's part of how you keep all your talent employed - concept artists and the like aren't useful when you're 75%+ of the way through a game, but they can start working very usefully on your next project. CDPR does this (aggressively so even - there are already people working on Cyberpunk 2077 2, and have been for quite a while). Bioware does this. And so on. Contractors/freelancers also factor in for some roles, but Larian are quite clear they prefer people to be permanently employed. Anyway, point is, Larian had probably been in light pre-production for BG4 for more like 1-2 years, and heavy pre-production for 7 months or more. So they were throwing away a lot of work to ditch BG4.</blockquote>

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