While Baldur’s Gate 3 is being widely celebrated by fans and developers alike, some are panicking that this could set new expectations from fans. Good.

  • I think by “some developers”, they’re referring more toward the AAA studios who have spent the last couple decades baking MTX into every nook and cranny they can find in their games, and not indie devs.

      • Honestly, nowadays it feels more like an indie studio is more of an indicator of quality than AAA. Most of the games I buy and enjoy are indie/small studios.

        Larian is about as indie/small as Bethesda was when Skyrim released.

      • AAA games are very rarely as innovative as indie games, it’s all just the same rehashed stuff I feel like. Just whatever is “safe”.

        So, I very much agree, the typical AAA stuff from studios like EA, Ubisoft, etc. Don’t interest me.

        Although maybe Starfield will be interesting, we’ll see. I didn’t really like Fallout 4 though, I wished the RPGs were a bit more like the more old school ones lol.

        • I’m willing to be surprised by it, but I’m not optimistic for Starfield. What I’ve seen of it so far looks mainly like they grafted chunks of No Man’s Sky onto a Bethesda Fallout game and are trying hard to pitch it as The Next Big Thing. Frankly, I’d much rather have the next mainline Elder Scrolls game instead, but at this rate I’m going to be 40 before I get to play a sequel to a game that came out in my 20s.

                • About $500 of the ~$600 million they’ve raised is mine, dating from the original crowdfunding campaigns and the first year or two of development. I still check in every year or two to see if they’re any closer to having a complete game, and every time I do, I come away with the sense that they’ve put vastly more effort into developing and selling spaceship JPEGs than they have into making the game those spaceships are supposed to be used in.

          • I saw a tier list meme that some teenager made on Discord of every game they’d ever played. You know what didn’t appear once on the list? Not a single Grand Theft Auto game nor a single Elder Scrolls game. I asked them why and they said because GTA5 and Skyrim are “old”

            They’re taking so long between releases now that they missed an entire generation of gamers

    • Even so they won’t be panicking. They can just pull a trusty piece of IP out and slap some microtransactions on it and the core target group will be all over it.