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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9750579" data-attributes="member: 18">That is the issue.You're seemingly assuming because of the name that this would be, like the other BG games, an exceptional game.Unless you believe in like, fate/destiny and that the BG name is especially blessed, there's no reason to think a WotC-produced BG game would be even good at this point. Now, that's not "forever". Maybe WotC's upcoming games will be excellent? It could happen. But WotC are not reliable here, and the major concern is that they appear to want to do this in-house, when they have zero experience with CRPGs and no sign that that is going to change, and don't have any team obviously well-suited to this particular kind of challenge, which is a pretty major challenge, given how insanely good BG3 was.It's not random. It's not Russian Roulette. It's just that WotC are very, very bad (historically and seemingly still, given the Sigil mess) at anything to do with digital, including selecting people to make D&D games. You can look at the studio making a game and have a pretty good idea if the game is going to be at least "okay", and if it has the potential to be amazing. Or at the very least say "We have no idea". But WotC haven't even suggested a studio yet, and they don't own any with any real experience/skills here (the closest being Archetype, but I suspect if Exodus is a hit, they'll want a sequel, and if it's a dud, well, that'll be the end of Archetype - there does exist a middle path where it reviews decently and sells okay but not crazy numbers and maybe that's when we might see them attempt a BG4 via Archetype).I think the worst case is a little worse than that, because it's likely to take well over $100m to develop it - and if it takes five years (so $20m+/per year), that's like, a significant proportion of WotC's revenue (not profit, revenue) every year. The worst case is probably game releases, is terrible, flops, causes WotC to take a big loss, Hasbro decides to fire the majority of people at WotC generally (not just this game studio) and probably several WotC game studios to try and get a share bump to make up for this loss.That's more consequential than "we ignore it".There are other pretty bad cases too.I don't agree actually, and I think I can support my opinion well.It's extremely rare for a studio who has a history of making "good" games to suddenly make a "bad" game. When it does happen, there's usually a clear and well-established reason why it does.Look at Bioware - despite being constantly pushed to ridiculous levels of crunch and insanely short dev times, they put out good game after good game. Even their worst games, were, in retrospect, pretty good (even brilliant in ways). This only changed when, due to a combination of insanity from Bioware leadership and greed from EA, they talked themselves into focusing resources on a GaaS looter-shooter, two things they'd never even attempted before. They've never recovered from that, or not yet but there was a clear cause to their downfall.Look at Owlcat. They've steadily got better. PF:KM was a bug-filled mess with an okay story and mostly-okay characters. PF:WotR was a much-less-buggy game with a really good story and some good characters. WH40K: Rogue Trader has an amazing story, really good characters and was only normally buggy for a CRPG. Likewise gameplay and UI have steadily improved game on game.Look at Larian. DOS1 was good. DOS2 was great. BG3 was astonishing. And it wasn't an accident. They refined how they worked, what they invested in, and how they operated after every game. They realized the limits of having a non-primary English-speaking team write dialogue which was then translated (often leading to some clunky wording or fall-flat jokes) and spent money and effortNeed I go on? I can. There are sometimes more complex situations, like Bethesda Game Studios - their problem isn't simply that they got left behind because their leadership aren't up to scratch. Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim were all pretty amazing because they were actually going ahead of the curve. But they failed to keep up with the team size they needed, and they let mediocre writing stay in place (even when Skyrim came out, people discussed how the writing was nowhere near as good as contemporaries), and stuck with an engine that people will defend to death, but clearly has some issues. So Fallout 4 was only good/decent, and Starfield took 7 years only to be a pretty massive letdown, and we're still multiple years out from Elder Scrolls 6.It does happen, but it's very rare in the AAA sphere, which is what we're discussing. It's maybe more common in the indie sphere.Basically you seem to be treating this as 50/50, i.e. 50/50 a new game from an established, successful studio working in that genre is bad. 50/50 a new game from developers no-one has heard of is good.But those aren't the odds. It's more like 90/10 or 80/20 that an established studio makes a good-to-amazing game, and more like 10/90 that brand new AAA studio makes a good game.</blockquote>

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