Baldur’s Gate 3 Is EXACTLY What AAA Cannot Be

welcome back to the show everybody today is an exciting day because Baldur's Gate 3 is out this is absolutely a generational game it is the culmination of a interesting and fairly a typical set of circumstances that has led to a company being able to absolutely punch above their weight and deploy a tremendous amount of resources to a single title so Paul is gate three if you're not aware it's a crpg in the more traditional sense it's a sequel of course to the Baldur's Gate games from BioWare back in the old days set in D D's forgotten realm setting terms of gameplay it is the kind of RPG though I think people have been hoping for for years and that it is extremely reactive to your choices it is very systems driven and utterly focused on character-led action I mean even think about like the camera work that you're seeing and even the trailers the previews it's an utterly shocking amount of production for a game of this format it crazy now this is all working in a modified DND 5th edition rule set that of course is built from the ground up for this game and in terms of length and stuff we're looking at a 75 to 100 hour game length with 17 000 permutations of ending and 170 hours of alternative cutscenes of course that's 17 000 permutations as you know if you have lots of different variables it can be different you're then to work out the total number of different variations you're multiplying those together so your endings do you know your quantity vendings technically speaking does get rather silly as you keep on multiplying those also a pretty shocking feature this is a game that you can play entirely and co-op with three friends including two-player split screen on one console or PC which is cracked now the thing is this is coming from larion larion have been making games in the Ed the Divinity setting now those the one that I remember the most was a Divinity Dragon Commander but from Dragon commander of course they moved on just a year later to Original Sin it then got its enhanced Edition then there was original sin they are really damn good RPGs and the overall point here is that I mean with divinity they were working at that setting for a long ass time with original sin and original sin too they've been working in a similar format of game to Baldur's Gate 3 meaning that versus almost any other Studio you are looking at so much finely honed and like finally acquired Talent over many years just laser targeted to make a game like this now this is PC August 3rd PS5 September 6th no Xbox yet and the team have actually said why it's because they cannot get Split Screen Co-op working acceptably in the series s and because that's the case they can't publish on either Xbox you are allowed to have some different features between the two of them like obviously Ray tracing but if it's a back in the back of the box gameplay feature there needs to be parody between between s and X currently they don't feel their s version is up to Snuff so the whole thing does have to be delayed ultimately though that they're going to do that delay in order to deliver a you know quality product that meets their standards that is absolutely what you want to hear and if you want some dates there pers fan their CEO he said in June that it might actually not launch this year so probably some sort of engineering hurdle to overcome now of course the thing is this is a game that came out into Early Access and uh yes people have been playing the game since October of 2020. this makes me think of Dave the diver funnily enough that's a game that had a year of Early Access finally honed itself and because of that had an absolutely explosive launch here we are seeing that on the largest of scales so you take a look at the Early Access release the the red bar is decently sized the blue bar for positive reviews is far larger though what this means is that fans feel a strong sense of ownership over you know over the game um to all my Early Access homies it's been real it's actually helped the game build a community so that whatever launch day happens there's a dedicated Community there right there's you know that backing of elite troops that makes the whole Army feel uh rallied or whatever I don't know that was a weird analogy but yes Early Access has been a massive Boon for this game and they confirmed that two and a half million copies of the game had been shifted before launch now this is a bit where it comes to disclosure time I purchased this game with my own money yesterday and haven't played any Early Access that said a mutual friend of much of our team ended up I think it was last year perhaps getting a job at larion so I believe yes the writer and editor of this video they both uh Colin Connor they both do have a copy of the game um that was provided to them for free um not in an official sense um but I think in the way that like employees just get a few codes that they're able to hand out to like friends and family and that only happened a few days ago though so it's not like um you know they've been playing a free copy of the game for years but you should know that because that is indeed what happened one thing that propelled this was the bear people generally liked uh Baldur's Gate three people really like the television show The Bear but this is not about that because this is about shagging a bear shagging a bear is one of the things that you can do because hey if you are dealing with Druids that can shape-shift I suppose why why be a coward just do that there you go yes you can shag the bear Druid and this is perhaps responsible for at least several of this next very impressive number because yeah the all-time player Peak is 471 000 basically 472 if we're rounding that is extremely impressive for what is mostly a single player game obviously I know co-ops there but it's not like this is about Royale that is an extremely impressive number I mean other games that come to mind are like Hogwarts legacies it was a bit higher than this I believe in the very low 500s suffice to say though this is a humongous number this is the sort that any AAA game would absolutely love now that said there was one thing that was not particularly ideal which is the review situation because um look every review is positive that's uh that's a good thing there are a range of bugs that I think with a game of this level of systemic involvement depth Fidelity yeah there's going to be bugs but what was a bit unfortunate though is the review build of the game was delayed for critics and streamers initially not until a week before launch but then it was actually delayed by another two days which meant that it happened 3.5 days before a launch so if you've wondered why the big Outlets that you maybe follow for reviews or some of the people you follow for reviews if you wonder why they didn't have like a full feature I finished the game it's because yeah the demo or the review build was only three and a half days before a launch which in terms of number of hours like even if you just played the game for three and a half hours straight or days straight and did not sleep that would not be enough time to finish the game so obviously for a finished review that's impossible yeah um it's not a small game and if you want the reasons for this it's pretty simple usually it is last minute bugs that would absolutely Scupper reviews there are other times though where a developer or publisher is trying to hide problems in the game by making sure that reviews can't go out except in a rush to meet embargo and that will end up playing to their favor we all know what it's like whenever a game has issues and maybe the review embargo has also launch day and there's also been a very small review period that kind of thing can just kind of suck except though we should probably think about Starfield because that had an impact in this game right so Baldur's Gate 3 was supposed to launch September 6th Starfield took that date right and of course because at Starfield the preceding weeks of you know reviewer were work on marketing that all would have been going into star field because as big as Baldur's Gate is it's not Starfield of course if you move it forward by a few weeks then you get armored Core six right um it can't go further into that storm of like Autumn early winter games so they actually moved things forward right they moved their launch forward it's probably ended up being good enough for players evidently though for the review build it did cause them some issues but even with those unfortunate things like assuming you can tolerate D mechanics it does seem that this is pretty much exactly the best that you could hope for this is pretty sweet and speaking of good things I should say our game the palebjond was featured in a daily deal by Valve a few days ago and that means that currently it's 25 off it's 25 off until the 6th of August so if you want to pick up our uh narrative survival role-playing game inspired by the heroic age of Antarctic expedition you can do that on Steam the link will be down below as well as a link to store.bellular.games which includes the new collector's edition goodies like this art book that our team put together so store.valuator.games steam link down below and with that said let's talk about how things have actually been going so people are assuming that larion will eventually be working toward a definitive edition of this game that is something that they've done for both of their Divinity games and that likely means a whole big swath of new classes races quest lines and more stuff um probably being built out over time to fill in gaps in the DND Source books right which is pretty cool I mean you you launch your your base game and then you just get to your Definitive Edition Victory lap just this time round they got to have a very successful Early Access to make the actual game that came out extremely successful the idea that we could then have a definitive edition of that is kind of insane and certainly given that this uh success in terms of sales I think they'll be able to afford it and while this is one single humongous project there are interesting things to say about about Larry in general right because they've learned a lot from Baldur's Gate 3 per perhaps they will be applying things to Divinity which is their own fantasy setting and this is what the CEO Sven said to Bloomberg he doesn't know yet what Larry will do next however he hinted he hopes to work in multiple games and has expressed the desire to make something smaller next time he certainly doesn't want to spend another six years developing single game he said which I think is fair and it does highlight that Baldur's Gate 3 is something that absolutely is very special you very rarely see a game like this and there are good reasons why now this did lead to an interesting discussion that absolutely exploded online and tonally I think it was a bit strange I feel like some of it was a little bit reactionary and it was kind of lumping things in with that thing where a few Horizon devs made an absolute tit out of themselves by uh you know just basically talking smack about um about Elden ring led to some very funny names of like this is what altered ring would look like if the Horizon developers made its UI and all these big cluttered masses are you know Ubisoft [ __ ] but in this case from my read of it it was a lot of AAA devs just being like yeah you know don't expect this as your average sort of AAA game because this is the result of a interesting set of circumstances because often the games we get are the result of their production realities because it's the production that makes the game and that's why there are things to go to sort of go into here so an indie game developer as aloe ver nettleson was prompted by some of the reaction that he was seeing um to this game right that um may be said to him that some people were unaware of some of the development specifics of this game people kind of saying that you know this is the new standard for all RPGs you know from Starfield to Sea of stars everything it has to you know it has to meet up with this kind of incredible Mega game and uh what he basically was doing was pulling the curtain back a bit to talk about how Baldur's Gate 3 is the perfect storm of conditions to allow for something like this to exist as um as he said as the at the end and it's unfortunate the thread went uh viral in the way that it did um in an era of Mega games Baldur's Gate 3 is one of the largest attempted built by a specialized group of people using mature technology specifically built to make this specific game reinforced by invaluable Mass player feedback and Market validation ahead of its launch this is not the new Baseline for RPGs this is an anomaly trying to do the same thing in the same way especially without the same advantages could kill an entire group of Studios that is absolutely true because the point is they made Divinity they made Divinity too they did the of course the definitive editions of those games they were able to get this into Early Access then spend three years so can other Studios do this sort of thing yes they absolutely can however rather than just saying hebrewistically we're going to make a game like Baldur's Gate 3 here is 100 million dollars oh way you go or 200 million dollars can't do it like that because money doesn't make the game money pays for the team and the team makes the game and if you're allocating all that money to a team who's not set up to make this kind of game in this type of time frame you're not going to make this game successfully and As He suggests yeah this that could kill the studio and of course that is exactly the sort of AAA hubris that we see all the time where they're like oh that format of game cool we want one here's a bunch of money do it and then Anthem happens and we all think what hang on did you just try to because if you look at Anthem Anthem is almost like the anti this and of course I think it's a fun thing to bring up because anthem of course is a BioWare game Baldur's Gate one and two are BioWare games now anthem was the team experience of making that kind of game no did the team have core technologies that were uh you know like tailor-made to make that type of game no those things led to Anthem probably taking as long if not longer than Baldur's Gate 3 to make and being Anthem because it turns out money and team size is important but technology experience those things are what actually makes the game you need the money to pay for that but if you don't have that you won't make the game so that was basically the core thing that uh kicked this off now did every uh game developer who then reacted to that like reacts perfectly uh you know no I think in many cases it's people just being kind of worried that like hey I'm working at uh you know insert company here it's going to be a shame if we're held to this uh standard because this is the sort of game that like this is probably the only group of people in the world who could make this with that time and budget because it is a once in a sort of generation game and that's one of the challenging uh things I suppose I mean even you know developers at obsidian uh kind of you know made some comments there and it's like God damn obsidian like if anyone they'd be a bit closer to being able to make games like this given you know pillars fraternity and everything um but I think a lot of the drama that follow this is really ignoring the point of the original thread so it's really not about whether developers are worried that Baldur's Gate 3 is better than their games it's more that they're worried that if they make lesser games that are still great that will be called out for that and this is the challenging thing where we say yeah well it's a it's the free market and the free market has created these people call larian and they've just beaten you up and taking your lunch yeah true they have but also it's a little bit like um oh what's he called Max oh I've forgotten his name the chess boy very good chess boy oh my God I can't believe I've forgotten his name but the whole thing is like he's just a complete anomaly right in his ability to play chess or like you know like a Michael Phelps where it's like yeah you're the structure of your body is weird and different and that helps you become an excellent swimmer it's like you know larion is so fine-tuned to make this type of game that to expect another Studio to successfully make this type of game is perhaps not you know not a wise thing but of course larion they can make this game make it so good and charge what they're able to charge here because the game is so good that it will attract a humongous audience and a lot of Revenue as we can quite evidently see it is so basically Baldur's Gate 3 is you know it's a million things going right when every single party involved is at the best they can possibly be and to actually go through some of these factors larion is an independent company that means they don't have to deal with Publisher demands other than Wizards of the Coast licensing requirements Dungeons and Dragons as an IP is at the Apex of its mainstream popularity of course also coming off the back of a movie that people were actually quite surprised you know at its quality or at least how much fun it was to watch and also there are no Force requirements to rush a release or to change features again take a look at another BioWare game Mass Effect 3 EA basically said oh Mass Effect 2 good right you've got 18 months to make the next one good luck and in a world where we talk about Jedi Survivor being you know a rapid development cycle at three and a half to four years you look at what they accomplished for Mass Effect 3 and it is genuinely insane that Mass Effect 3 is as good as it is given how EA seemingly did most of the things they could do to make it a bad game by ruining the conditions of its development the other point here is that bar a few educational titles Larry and have only made crpgs they've made crpgs for 20 years their senior staff you know the people that they have who hire the people that make this game have been making crpgs for years and years and years and years right and they've also hired out people to of course supplement those existing staff there's no dilution of Staff time or resources there's nobody splitting time between say this and building a first person shooter which happens at some other Studios so this is six years of development that is actually built upon six uh sorry upon um what like years of our decades like well two decades perhaps of of work on tools on engine on systems right and again it's not just like the material benefits there it is the internal knowledge of how to make this sort of a game again there's times I talk about game field you know the way you see somebody who's really good at playing quake and they just know whenever to pre-fire a rocket uh you know around the corner and they'll just blind kill somebody because they know how all the movements are because not because they could sit down and write them all out on a piece of paper but because they have game sense and they can feel it well there is a thing that's like a game developer sense you know so like as an example pale Beyond we made this now we're making another game I'll talk about that in the future point though is our team's game sense has increased massively and now we're finding like oh my God it took us a month to answer these questions before now we're answering them instantly because we have more game sense and we're you know still making a form of role-playing game right so it's just one of those things it's one of those intangibles it's why whenever we see high levels of employee attrition at Big AAA Studios we start to get worried if you want to know why big trip AAA Studios seemingly have all the money in the resources but don't end up finding the fun it's things like this right so larion is running at a you know almost like anti-aa in terms of a lot of the inherent downsides of those teams unfortunately are saddled with but with the resources undoubtedly of a AAA team that's what leads to a very special game this has been in development since 2017 they had three successful years of Early Access constant feedback constant bug testing and also constant funding as well so they are launching in an absurd position of strength right and while this is not something that other Studios will be easily able to do there are lessons to be learned from this so while I think that holding other games to the standard of Baldur's Gate 3 is not I mean we can talk about whether it's good or bad wise or not we could just go to the more objective thing which I would say is it's not a realistic thing to judge them by but what we can do is hope the development teams learn from Baldur's Gate 3 that they see all of the things that went right that led to this game being as good as it is and that they work that into how they plan and build games because that will mean that they're actually getting the True Value out of the staff that they've hired instead of misusing and wasting those staff I don't know why but let's just take a minute to laugh at skull and bones and now that we've done that let's get back to the news so one group who would kind of know a lot about this is Obsidian obsidian of course you might know them from Fallout New Vegas but they've been making crpgs for ages and they were damn good at making crpgs pillars of Eternity stands out as a genre classic then pillars of fraternity 2 was a publicly acknowledged failure that did not sell as much as the original because the kickstarter provided fans of that game with the game and there just wasn't enough to maintain momentum post launch as for a multitude of reasons it just didn't sell and release despite it having a very you know positive reception as positive as the first one so it's one of those things sometimes audiences can be fickle supporting you right up until they don't that can then end up tanking the company and uh of course you know obviously what to obsidian end up doing they end up being slurped up by Phil Spencer and they're a Microsoft Studio now that being said they still do get to have benefits of having done pillars of Eternity and its sequel because a vowed is in fact set in the pillars of Eternity settings so there's absolutely a lot of stuff that will possibly apply uh to about and now of course obsidian we're lucky they have an amazing history they have amazing you know recognition they were able to get some other publisher funding on the outer worlds but the thing is for a smaller team even a double A or AAA like that can lead to death and hundreds of layoffs and let me tell you um I can't exactly say who um but you know there's a few people I I talk to and it's like oh [ __ ] you're you're like real why are you talking to me I'm just some [ __ ] of Northern Ireland you're you're like you know in a video games place and you're numbers have more zeros than I numbers wow um but you know sometimes I hear from those guys um and uh you know one of the things that you kind of begin to understand a lot of these like newer big like you know Venture Capital backed games like for the companies it is do or die right absolutely do or die if the game it doesn't hit whatever dead no way you'll afford that run rate no way at all I remember one time somebody um I I know is in the games industry in California said um and I was for a senior position um it was animation and it was 300 000 a year that was the salary that's crazy and this is perhaps where I could talk a little bit about Larry and themselves so they actually have six locations and uh one of the reasons of course that um plenty of us in in my team like we have a maid who's in larion is because they did open up in Dublin so locationally right they've got a Barcelona Dublin Gantt Guildford uh Kuala Lumpur and uh Quebec right uh notably like some of those places are expensive they ain't California expensive and that probably means that their dollars go a little bit further I mean it's a chunky team 450 people and I think for all of the AAA bashing which hey you guys know I have a lot of criticisms of AAA um it's worth noting what the CEO of larion himself actually said about this whole thing that went on though about the discourse he said that audiences and critics shouldn't be claiming that this sets a new standard for everything games like ours are very specific it's what we wanted to make and it's what we specialize in so it's logical we have a certain pedigree in creating it because we've been building these games for 20 years already I don't think there's such a thing as a game that says oh this is the standard and everyone has to hold themselves to it because tomorrow someone else will come up with something new and cool standards change so rapidly that there are no standards so definitely a relatively safe answer um of course one of those things you can just be like I mean yeah of course our games [ __ ] getting sick we've been making these for 20 years don't call us the standard because you know implicitly we all know um yeah I just think it's an interesting uh topic what I am very for though is like a lot of these just companies being able to you know punch a little bit harder recently I've been playing a game called Ramadan 2 we called it out in our June games Roundup video where Eminem 2 is fantastic you know and it's completely built off the strengths of Remnant one and it's just one of those things like oh yeah you you guys are like you're doing a thing you're doing a sequel to the thing that makes a lot of sense it's really fun you've clearly like learned from thing one to thing two uh you know this is what allows Studios to get stronger and stronger and stronger I think the problem is whenever some of these aaa's get you know gobbled up by one of the big big you know Publishers like your your Ubisoft your Electronic Arts is your Activision blizzards and then they are just all put on to you know make make this game you didn't come up with it we bought you so you can make more Call of Duty that's like Toys for Bob are they really going to be specialized that making Call of Duty probably not bit weird right so that's kind of the situation what should we learn from this number one this is a game that I think is worth checking out number two we should think about how we build our teams and we should think about like what kind of inherent skill sets we want on our teams and we should probably think about how we can Compound on prior successes instead of just randomly flipping between different sorts of projects uh you know at the whims of some publisher that owns us right I think it's one of those things whenever the big suit people get to uh I mean even take a take Arcane got a bunch of people make immersive Sims you try to get them to make a multi-player looty shoot thing why did you do that that was silly so in a way I would say actually um if you want the this is not to hold games to the standard Baldur's Gate 3 but if you want the anti-bolders gate 3 as in if this is the perfect use of a team let's talk about the perfect misuse of a team that's got to be radfall because that's not a team experience of making that kind of game why did you get them to do that so the games industry gives us lots of lessons about what we should or should not do and indeed there are lessons that I think we can take out of this context and apply to our own lives so thinking about this makes us all the wiser if you would like to support my team then you can pick up the pale Beyond which is 25 off until August 6th thanks for the feature valve and and Gabe all very cool and if you want to buy some of our collector's edition goodies you can do that at store.balular.games alright have a brilliant day and uh yeah I suppose go play Boulders gate three I mean you best get started now it's bloody long all right see you next time

Channel: Bellular News

Views: 378,804

Keywords: baldurs gate 3, larian, larian games, baldurs gate 3 gameplay, baldurs gate 3 impressions, anthem, bioware, baldurs gate, review, impressions, game industry, steam games, valve games, bellular, bellulargaming, bellular news

Id: JlvHt6Rq8vQ

Length: 26min 43sec (1603 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 04 2023