Baldur's Gate 3 Will (And Should) Win Game of the Year

2023 has been a very good year for video games it's had many well-known highly anticipated titles releasing in a relatively narrow time frame early in the year we got the Legend of Zelda tears the kingdom and soon after we got release after release Pikmin 4 the Resident Evil 4 remake Final Fantasy 16 armored Core 6 Baldur's Gate Diablo 4 Starfield these are large games with large audiences that had big expectations before release and there were also many smaller games that nevertheless had impressive quality so it goes without saying that the game awards specifically the game of the year award would have stiff competition in fact there'll be competition into what just gets into the nominees there are usually six nominees and which six deserve to compete for the award is going to be a topic for lively discussion I'm sure now my favorite game this year is armored Core 6 fires of Rubicon it had amazing gameplay and a very rich story a story that really spoke to me and I thought just got better when it was expanded on in the new game and New Game Plus armored Core was a fantastic game and it definitely met the standard quality that from software fans have come to expect from that company but armored Core 6 is not going to win game of the year it is my favorite game this year and I really hope it gets nominated for Game of the Year and I hope that it wins an award in a different category maybe best action or action adventure but it's not going to win game of the year that honor is going to a game that I like a lot less but that deserves it more and that game is Baldur's Gate 3. [Music] now this is not a review for Baldur's Gate 3. the game came out to near Universal praise and I don't think I can add anything worthwhile to that conversation so it's not a review I just want to point out why I think it's going to win game of the year and that's because it's a turn-based crpg and that is not a popular genre nobody plays those that is a specific genre for a niche audience turn-based crpgs don't sell 10 million units they don't generate long-lasting media buzz on this scale and they generally don't attract casual players they don't have mainstream appeal and in case you think I'm exaggerating let me just show you something for context the director of publishing at larian Studios made a tweet and in the Tweet he said that effectively 13 million people owned a crpg on Steam and that's nothing that's nothing Baldur's Gate by itself will sell more than 13 million copies on Steam I think it's at 10 million right now The Legend of Zelda tears the kingdom which came out earlier this year sold about 18.5 million copies in under two months more people bought tears of the Kingdom than own a crpg on Steam and forget crpgs even turn-based games which are probably more popular than crpgs in general even they are viewed as unpopular or not mainstream and this is explicitly the reason why Final Fantasy 16 wasn't turn based in several interviews the producer Yoshi P expressed a belief that the action genre would generate for Final Fantasy 16 more sales and appeal to a younger demographic my point is that turn-based crpgs are at a massive disadvantage even larion cites the genre as one of the reasons that the game was underestimated turn-based crpgs are very Niche genre which makes Baldur's Gate 3's incredible breakout success and mainstream popularity so impressive like you have to understand how narrow the palette of a normal gamer can be I have a friend who's a stereotypical mainstream kind of guy he would never touch a video game that's turn-paste he thinks they're archaic he thinks that it's just something that people used to do with because of the limitations of Technology he thinks the only reason people play those games is that they're nostalgic for their childhood or their youth and that as soon as those old people die off developers will stop making turn-based games to appeal to them and the whole genre will be relegated to the Dustbin of History this is a man who doesn't care about stories he skips cutscenes and he only plays video games for the gameplay he's never heard the term crpg and I don't think he has the intelligence or the temperament to sit down and enjoy a game with any level of difficulty or strategy involved but Baldur's Gate 3 was so popular it was so in the news it was so universally praised that it caught his attention and he bought it and the next time I check up on him to see how he's doing in Baldur's Gate 3 assuming he would have put it down once it realized it was a crpg I found that he hadn't put it down in fact this game caused him to have a kind of Spiritual Awakening I've never seen before not only does he play he plays on tactician he listens to the cutscenes he's invested in the story he's mortified over making difficult decisions every time he encounters a new enemy he examines them and reads their descriptions and what they're weak to and what effects they have my point is this crpgs are still not mainstream but Baldur's Gate is Baldur's Gate has a mainstream appeal that the rest of the genre doesn't it's luring in people like my friend and its presentation gives them the toolkit to enjoy this kind of game a kind of game they otherwise would never be able to enjoy it's going to win game of the year because it deserves to win game of the year its success is evidence of its quality because it achieved that success despite being the kind of game that a year ago my friend would scoff at and that's a much bigger achievement than anything the other large games this year managed to do and that's the end of this video as always thank you very much for watching

Channel: Ratatoskr

Views: 44,948

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Id: H7RElay1PZE

Length: 6min 9sec (369 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 25 2023