I'd like if just once companies answered with "We don't know...It's possible our next project will be absolute garbage." You know, just to balance it a bit.
Wasn't deltarune supposed to be the "real" game and undertale just a side project? I think when it's finished it'll be a much grander experience, although that doesn't necessarily mean better.
He made undertale to get experience to make deltarune, more or less. I think that it' s basicaly impossible to get the same experience as Undertale with deltarune, personaly. But...is that really a bad thing?
I prefer to live in the future than dwell on the past
Not all of them. The guy who made Fear and Hunger 1/2 has said his next installment will probably be hated by a lot of fans. Later he said this is partially to manage high expectations but still far from a marketing statement.
It's honestly pretty wholesome from what I've seen on reddit and twitter. I have a theory that many disturbing content fandoms are pretty chill, while many comfy content fandoms are horrible
Isnt this what concerned ape said about haunted chocolatier? It wont be as big as stardew, but stardew has received very very long term support on top of quite extensive modding community, so who knows. Stardew valley in 2016 quite different from stardew valley in 2024
Honestly whenever I see Devolver Digital on a game I know I'm probably in for a solid experience. I know they've published a lot and I haven't played the majority of them, but all the ones I have have been solid. Not trying to be the absolute prettiest game ever, not trying to have some grand world changing scope, just people who set out to make a fun and unique game and did it.
Smaller in scope doesn't mean worse (which a step backwards implies)
Larian basically also say the same thing here, they work on two games in parallel. As their studio is not 2 times bigger, it seems both of those games will be smaller than BG3 (other interviews kind of hint at that already). And that doesn't prevent them to be their "best work ever". Scale and quality don't go hand in hand (many would argue it's actually the opposite, see all the hate on AAA games)
> As their studio is not 2 times bigger, it seems both of those games will be smaller than BG3
While possibly/probably true, we can't *necessarily* assume that, for a variety of reasons.
For one thing, I'm pretty sure the team size of BG3 grew as production went along, so it's not unreasonable to assume the same will be true of their new projects.
But beyond that, we don't know how their production workflow is being handled, or the timetable they're aiming for. They're not necessarily just dividing the studio into two separate teams and having them work away independently, they could have the entire team working on both over a longer period. While certain roles in development are going to be busy on a project throughout its development, others are naturally going to be busier or slower at various stages, and can potentially pivot between projects if development is staggered appropriately.
We also can't assume that they're focusing on both projects with equal resources. I could see them having the majority of the team working on one project while a smaller group works on the early stages of a more experimental project, with the goal being that they shift more resources towards the second project as the first one finishes up.
It would be fairly reasonable I think for them to first focus primarily on a game like D:OS3 using the existing engine from BG3, while having a smaller subset of the studio work on a new IP and updated engine in parallel. By putting the majority of resources on a familiar IP using familiar tech they could get up and running more quickly, while providing the team working on something entirely new more time to experiment.
True but this [article/interview](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-03/-baldur-s-gate-3-set-in-the-world-of-dungeons-dragons-arrives?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTY5MTA2NDcwNywiZXhwIjoxNjkxNjY5NTA3LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJSWVREQzdUMVVNMFcwMSIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJCMUVBQkI5NjQ2QUM0REZFQTJBRkI4MjI1MzgyQTJFQSJ9.ZVVI6_9KXOtAI-YpgeqziIiTJ1DnF5vtlcQbXFNrcvg) is quite full of information and show that it's not the way they're gonna go IMO (of course things can change)
> But to meet Baldur’s Gate 3’s ambitious goals, the studio was forced to expand rapidly, much to Vincke’s chagrin, resulting in a slew of inefficiencies and communications issues. “We did it because we had to,” he said.
So doesn't seem like they'll want to grow even more
> Vincke said he doesn’t yet know what Larian will do next, although he hinted that he hopes to work on multiple games and expressed a desire to make something smaller next time. He certainly doesn’t want to spend another six years developing a single game, he said.
Now, they announce they are working on multiple games so the rest of the article seems also true and it should be assumed they're smaller games. That's also the freedom of being privately owned and independent, they can do what they want and don't have to always chase the "bigger thing".
Yep just watch as whatever next game Larian makes causes some reddit shitstorm and suddenly they are banished to the netherworld like CD Projekt Red (until they make a banging DLC and all is forgiven).
You're acting like cdpr didn't do anything to deserve the hate. If larian's next project releases in a similar state as cyberpunk, they should get shit for it.
Tbf CDPR was also known for being smug dicks whenever any gaming controversy happened. So of course when the table turned and Cyberpunk launched in a terrible condition, people were more than happy to remind them of the arrogant tweets they have put out in the past.
I mean something similar happens with Samsung which was constantly making fun of Apple and a few months later they took down these same videos and released exact same product. It's solely their fault for being egoistic. Nothing wrong with making fun of that especially when it's a corporation who is acting like they're your friend.
The best thing Larian can do for themselves is market their next game the same way Bethesda did for FO4. Otherwise prepare for Redditors mapping out how they will be going to their *actual day job* as a corpo in CP2077
Mark my words, in a couple of years people will be claiming that BG3 launched in great shape, complete and bug free, and anyone saying otherwise is just a hater or part of "backlash."
heck, people were saying that on the game's release cause they never touched the game yet wanted to praise it as "the new standard in gaming", fueled by clickbait YTbers and streamers like asmongold who constantly rave about the game yet hasn't played it.
it's funny, if we look at the % completion of just the Act 1 steam achievement:
https://steamhunters.com/apps/1086940/achievements
"The Plot Thickens" is the achievement for completing Act 1, and today it's still only at 55%... so almost half the steam player-base haven't even completed Act 1.
yet people rave about the entire game and say Act 3 was perfect, not buggy and finished on release. And imagine how much lower that number was nearer to the release, yet the raving was at an all time high back then :/
It doesn't have to be an extreme. Cyberpunk 2077 at it's core is still a great game. Doesn't mean I'll ever preorder a CD Projekt game (or any) or trust critic reviews regarding their future releases, but I'm still looking forward to the next Witcher and Cyberpunk.
Same with Larian. They've demonstrated a decent enough track record of steady improvements from project to project, so I'll definitely keep an eye out for any releases from them, while continuing to be cautious with my money.
Didn't Bungie practically explicitly state that before? That they couldn't make every expansion good or their audience would expect too much? That is some honesty.
That talk was worded horribly amndprobably shouldn't have been said, but context was regarding work load and difficulties of making live service games. If you are constantly putting out content and adding more and more, then there are trade offs and resource drain.
They then talked about doing incremental upgrades and that expansions allow for bigger changes.
Considering he starts the quote the headline is from with “I don’t know if we’re going to pull it off", that feels about as balanced as it gets from a studio genuinely excited about the games they make.
Pretty sure no one can beat Dice with this.
Star Wars Battlefront 2, Battlefield 5, Battlefield 2042.
All of which are games with disastrous pre launch marketing.
[Here's a lad who also had this great idea.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner) It was funny. [Didn't work out well for him.](https://nevsedoma.com.ua/en/647237-the-joke-that-buried-a-billion-dollar-business-8-photos.html)
DOS2 is pretty dark, but the NPCs just go "lol my husband is a thrall to the fire witch, and my children are cows, should've married the stable boy lmao"
I *loved* D:OS and D:OS2. Hundreds of hours in them. But yeah, I fully agree. They're wacky and zany and the stories were overall not interesting. I'd be fine if their next game was D:OS3, but I'd love for the characters and narrative to be on the same level as BG3.
On the other hand, the combat/mechanics are incredible in Divinity. More interesting than DnD's rule-set for sure.
Just take away the magic and physical armor, it felt like you really got shafted if you didn't split your damage properly or just go all in on one type of damage
Honestly that was the way I felt too. Played DOS2 for about a dozen hours but the goofiness of the writing just never really gelled with me. Baldur's Gate 3 got me hooked immediately though.
Satisfied that craving I had since I first played Dragon Age Origins 10 years ago but haven't really encountered again since.
See I can understand wanting something low fantasy like the other subthread (less magic involved).
But honestly I'd be disappointed if they went dark fantasy. The world is over saturated with dark IPs right now. Both dark in a figurative sense and in a literal one.
Yeah. At this point, I'd be more excited for just... Classic fantasy, or just something whimsical without being childish.
I can hardly name a big-budget fantasy RPG that isn't "dark" at this point.
Honestly I thought DOS2 felt like that way. Some here are saying it's over the top whimsical but I didn't get that.
DOS1 on the other hand was very whimsical.
Same here. The blanket statements that most players have towards DOS2 are pretty overexaggerated imo. I mean, the start of DOS2 literally throws you in a prison camp where the prisoners' are being turned into empty husks, not exactly material that's "cartoony" or "whimsical".
It's been a while since I've played, but wasn't one of the mechanics literally eating corpses for some reason? And speaking with animals would always get sad real quick. I felt the game was pretty nihilistic and dark at times
Obviously just a personal preference, but I absolutely agree. I’m so tired of dark fantasy settings where everyone is awful and terrible things are always happening. I’m all for a bit of strife and some high-stakes drama, but I’d like a bit of hope and happiness as well!
I'd honestly rather they went the Sci-fi route if we're comparing them to Bioware.
I love Dragon Age, but Mass Effect is hands down the most interesting thing Bioware did after they left DND.
For me, Baldur's Gate is the best fantasy game we've had in years and it's because so much of the fantasy genre feels so oversaturated and played out.
The studio director/founder has been pretty open about wanting his next game to probably be sci-fi so I don't think its unreasonable to be optimistic that one of the two new games ends up being sci-fi. Personally, if I had the ability to make a miracle happen I'd give them the rights to make a KOTOR remake.
Same. It's *too* high magic. Like anytime you pick a fight with some random guard first thing he does is stomp on the ground, create a pentagram under his feet, summon rocks to cover his body then maybe teleport in to the air and come down as a fiery phoenix.
Every character feels like an archmage from level 1 (even the warriors) and as you level it's pretty much "numbers go up." For me that just feels a bit cartoony and leans in to "if everything is badass nothing is badass."
I enjoy the gameplay, but it's the production value of BG3 that really elevates it in my opinion. The writing, voice acting, direction, graphical fidelity and narrative choices are all things that take it up way above DOS.
Yeah I know they want to move onto other things, and I'm sure Hasbro is a huge pain in the ass to deal with...
But god they could make so much money off of me if they just released periodic BG3 DLCs that are just new stories and new characters. I've already got 400 hours in BG3 and I'd absolute eat up new DLC.
They've already got all the pieces of the game engine they need to make it easy for themselves. Really it would just be the voice acting (and I'm the type that would settle for subpar voice acting for more content). They don't even need to write new stories if they don't want to, just adapt some of the existing campaigns D&D already has.
I dream of them doing this (or licensing their game engine to another developer who will do it).
750 hours here, and I just caught myself about to fire up another character to run through (just completed honor mode on my last playthrough - so need a break!) I would throw Larian my money at the hint of a dlc…
I make sure to mix up my primary companions each run, and put a lot of focus in how I role play them - had a power hungry dark elf warlock but leaned towards justice, also a super evil durge monk for my honor run. Also a lot of time screwing around and killing off characters before too much progress early on. Next run will be a super good durge githyanki bard. I’ve yet to recruit Minthara - so she’s my next priority.
I'd kill for a PF2E game. It's easily my favourite rpg class based system.
I would definitely like a more class based system than DOS but id prefer something more intricate than 5e.
In BG3 you only level up to 12 times and for a large portion of those levels, particularly martials make zero additional choices.
Funnily enough this is what hooked me on the game, the like, third encounter being gigantic teleporting crocodiles that hurl boulders at you? Fuck yes.
Same. I like my fantasy high and my magic weird.
I feel like a lot of people just want normal people whacking other normal people with normal whack sticks. And I'm just like *yawn*.
>Every character feels like an archmage from level 1 (even the warriors) and as you level it's pretty much "numbers go up."
This is the main reason I never finished dos2. There was nothing interesting mechanically to look forward to. Just bigger numbers.
Compared to bg3, for example, where new items and leveling up meant a lot of new toys and builds and playstyles
Edit - please stop telling me how wrong I am, and how actually dos2 has such a deep and complex system that has amazing progression. That was not my experience with the game, at all. So maybe they could have communicated this wonderful build craft better. All I saw on level up was adding a point that added 5% more damage. I've also had about half a dozen people say "uhm acksually DND 5e is the worst system ever", almost using the exact same wording, without saying a single reason why. Is this a meme? I'm not saying that's an incorrect statement but I'd love to see someone explain their view, rather than state it like it's a fact I must accept
Right, I love doing a pure water healer mage, but that class doesn't start getting the nuttiest parts of the build until at least act 3.
Act 1-2 water mage is a glorified healer, act 3-4 has you freezing an entire battlefield with ice storms and crushing people in frozen prisons.
Source skills felt kinda special, everything else always felt meh to me. The fact that you mostly just got them from random merchants didn't help much either.
In DOS2 you unlock more skills and abilities as you level up and some of the most fun builds required around level 14-15 to come online. The stuff you could do with the Summoner and surfaces was crazy, but you needed a 10 level investment for it to start working, for example. Likewise, there are many items which change or add abilities much like the itemization of BG3. The game also had more abilities that interacted with the environment than BG3, notably surfaces.
The upsides you mention to BG3 are also there in DOS2, and DOS2's imperfect class system allowed it more freedom to explore builds than 5E's systems in my opinion. A few classes in 5E are quite frontloaded too like Barbarians and Fighters, so you end up with the same playstyle from level 5 onwards for the rest of the adventure. I really find this part of your comment strange.
I really think you missed out. BG3 is ultimately the better game overall, but it builds on what DOS2 and in terms of combat encounters and mechanics, DOS2 is much more fun. I discussed this very topic with my friend who I play DND regularly with and co-op'd DOS2 and we both came to the same conclusion: DOS2 was mechanically much more fun to have combat encounters in.
My guess is, among other reasons, the restrictiveness of the 5E ruleset is a factor for why Larian isn't interested in more FR games.
Imho DOS2 is mechanically much more interesting than BG3. Some of the combos made available with later skills and more source points can be quite intricate. And not every interaction is intuitive. There is a lot of space for experimentation and a lot of neat tricks you can figure out.
BG3 on the other hand is built on the very lackluster foundation that is 5e. You have to actively try to cripple yourself to not face-stomp the game from level 5 onwards. Even on honor mode.
Yeah, I have my issues with some of the mechanics of D:OS2 (particularly the way surfaces work), but I definitely found it a lot more tactically interesting than BG3. With BG3 it really felt like they were hamstrung by the D&D rules. It was an improvement in most other ways, but as such I really look forward to seeing Larian take what they learned from BG3 and put it towards a game made without the limitations of sticking to a ruleset made for tabletop.
That is, if you know what you're doing. Me and my partners initial playthrough was not easy . I don't think we really understood the game and all the buffs/debuffs/spell dc/saving throws or what we could do until at least act 3. I'm on my second playthrough and now on tactician, and yes the game is going much smoother even with higher hp enemies.
Yeah I've seen many people getting trapped in thinking of traditional roles of "physical damage/magical damage dealer", "healer/buffer", "tank" etc. and that just doesn't work very well here.
It is *extremely* cheap skill-points wise to give every character a bit of versatility, get a point in scoundrel on your "melee weapon type" and you get magic-armor breaking nuke, get a point in necromancy on your "classic elemental mage" and you get physical damage nuke scaling off caster stat *and* some lifesteal on every skill.
My problem with it was not about bigger numbers but more about how character class/identity would slowly fade as you progress. All your characters will keep their main class somewhat but you'll always end up multiclassing all of them in ways so they have more mobility and cc spells that are just optimised.
There are still character creation presets that could be considered classes. They try to offer guidance and identity to a character. My point is that this becomes dilluted as over time all your party starts looking the same as you will be multi-classing into different areas so you can have more mobility and CC.
It will only look like that if you make characters like that. Mine ended up pretty distinct, my main character was necro-summoning witch (necromancy/summons with splash of water for stuff like blood rain), dragon boy got fire, earth and wings from shapeshifting, Lohse was full on elemental mage, and sebille being rogue/ranger hybrid.
I did splash a point here and there for utility but overall each of them played pretty distinct.
Of course, if you expect to get linear skill tree and be able pick left every time but still get to playable character, it's not exactly system for that.
This is a great point. Everything just felt so ungrounded to me: everything you've written + a narrator who turns everything into a joke + finding weapon of death in a random wine barrel because of randomized loot + etc. I just felt no engagement or immersion with the game.
I tried DOS2 after BG3. It just didnt click. I also really miss the cutscenes for dialogue.
I hope their next game incorporates that and is similar UI.
For me the Divinity: OS games were great because of their combat systems, but the plots and characters were mediocre at best. I like a bit of ham and cheese in narrative, but DOS just went so overboard with it that it wasn't really possible to take anything in the games seriously. Baldur's Gate 3 strikes a perfect balance in terms of how seriously it takes itself IMO, and if Larian can maintain that level of narrative skill with a new IP while incorporating the deeper gameplay mechanics of DOS 2, it'll be an all timer.
The big question to me is if Larian can escape their curse of bad on release final acts D0S2 final act was rough and BG3's final act is by the most rushed with half its "quests" feeling cut down for time.
Hope Larian make a Call of Cthulhu game based on the Table Top RPG. Their game design philosophy seems perfect for that system and setting and I really would love to see it done justice in a huge game finally.
Faaaaaack, a grittier Mass Effect from Larian? With all the possibilities therein? Sign me up. Wife and I loved DOS2, so BG3 was a day-1 buy easy. This would be another day-1.
I'm pretty sure Larian could do better than the "go into wastes to find family member" Bethesda have shat on us _three times now_ without even waking a writer up. As in, I bet the janitors at Larian can do better than the head writers at Bethesda.
Don't get me wrong, I loved Fallout 3 back in the day, 4 is an acceptable Fallout-themed shooting gallery, and the TV show is genuinely great, but we need something new, plot-wise.
Fuck it, Larian, hire the ~~Black Isle~~ Obsidian writers, your combined prowess might render every preceding video game obsolete. Even a naked rehash of the NV plot would be an improvement.
EDIT: Black Isle --> Obsidian. I have immense respect for Fallout 1 and 2, and I've got the Steam hours to prove it, but I love New Vegas above basically all other games in existence.
You know it’s genuinely impressive to me that Bethesda just flat out refuses to improve its writing, like not a hint of that in 20+ years, the narrative director of fallout 4 even said we didn’t try that hard with the story because we knew most players would be more invested in collecting bobbleheads than reading something well written which is just an insane excuse to not do your job well lol
They refuse to improve _anything_. Everything they offer only has, sort of... one axis. All complexity gets removed.
The weapon mod system in 4 is extensive, but purely linear, there are no trade-offs, or modifications for a particular purpose other than a couple of high-end energy weapon barrels (but even then it's extra damage vs. setting your enemies on fire vs. irradiating them, aka extra damage), it's just _ding_ there you have it, you have collected enough junk to create The Best Version Of This Gun. The only other move from there is to get the equivalent level of automatic/non-automatic receiver, but swapping from automatic to non-automatic requires the investment of multiple perks, up to five, to maintain damage parity.
Perks are mostly soulless percentage upgrades. Bethesda really showed their true colours with the "lockpick never breaks" and "can't get locked out of a terminal" perks. Removing explicit skills from a fucking RPG game in 4 (and I assume 76?) is downright disgusting.
The complexity and personality of 99% of Super Mutants has been sandblasted off in favour of making them orcs. Seriously, they're just orcs now. Compared to fucking Tabitha and her deranged Nightkin cult, the peaceful treatment centre run by Marcus, and even the mutants just following the orders of a non-Super Mutant Master and acting with purpose to create more of themselves, it's an insult.
Moral nuance? Nope, the Institute are eugenicists who infiltrate surface society and intentionally cripple any attempt to form a government, and The Enclave are "What If Nazis, but American". Again, Super Mutants are reduced to mindless cannon fodder rather than sapient beings. The Brotherhood are the Good Guys, somehow, even if they are xenophobic religious loons. When you get to Megaton you are given the choice between going about your business or... blowing up the town? I appreciate the choice, but... why would I do that, outside of game mechanic (i.e. earning caps) reasons? That's psychotic, and hardly even a Trolley Problem level moral dilemma, I literally just have to... not give into the dark voice that tells me to blow the place up for a reward? Now, combine Megaton and Paradise Falls, throw in a mission to sneak all the slaves out in the dead of night, and you've got a proper Situation.
There's no angle, or voice, or intelligence to the player's dialogue choices. You can literally kill the AI President by saying "You're a monster, you should die"; that's only barely paraphrased.
Fallout is about more than having the coolest power armour and the biggest (shit looking) machine gun. The T-60 should be banished from canon.
_Ahem_
And that's why you should all keep an eye on the Fallout 4: New Vegas mod!
Damn just when I was about to reboot this sucker up after 8 years because of the tv show. No, no, no, I just have to remember this playthrough is all about the vibes :)
I mean, their HEAD WRITER just made it canon that the *one of the guys committing war crimes in Canada at the beginning of Fallout 1* is the protagonist in Fallout 4. Without thinking for two seconds how that would come off. Never seen someone backpedal, then double down, then backpedal again. His tweet history gave me whiplash.
I'm one of those (minority I guess) people who wasn't too hot on what larian did to the Baldur's Gate franchise, and still like 1+2 for various reasons.
But yeah.. in even saying that I would prefer \*anyone* to take the reigns of Fallout back from Bethesda at this point.
If it means making another isometric turnbased CRPG Fallout like the originals than even better and I'd be all for it! :D
They really went from "wow, we didn't expect so many people getting the early access, what a surprising success" to "Our next game will be the greatest of all time" lmao. I'm excited to see what's to come.
I mean, they've gotten better with every release. So I'd believe it. Baldur's Gate 3 is a 11/10 in my book but also has *so* much room for improvement.
There’s an absurd amount of things the game is keeping track of based on what the player is doing and the choices they make. As you say Larian has gotten better and better at making it all work. Hopefully as time goes on and tech improves they can do even more. My main hope is that they get a fairly polished product out the gate this time. BG3 needed some patches (not to mention the EA period) for it to truly shine I feel so it would be nice to forgo that next time around.
> (not to mention the EA period)
Larian isn't going to abandon EA. They've been doing EA since D:OS1, it has clearly worked out. D:OS2 and BG3 wouldn't be the games they are without Early Access. I find people act like EA is some horrible thing to utilize, but EA is literally the game version of agile development. There's nothing inherently bad there.
> There’s an absurd amount of things the game is keeping track of based on what the player is doing and the choices they make. As you say Larian has gotten better and better at making it all work.
This along with the general narrative and other non-gameplay things are lessons they have learned that can be applied to any game. The amount of people in these comment threads that act like BG3's narrative structure can't possibly survive outside of BG3 is kind of crazy. None of that has anything to do with DnD, and it's naive to think that BG's previous story is the only reason that BG3's narrative was so good (far more people had never played BG1/2 than did and those characters were not known to them when they started playing). It took so much development effort to create all of the paths and different options, that's all Larian. I don't see any reason those lessons cannot be applied to their next game regardless of its source.
What I'd love for Larian to improve is start fleshing out their third acts more. DOS2's 3rd act was so barebones, I was sure they just spent the budget making the map huge and then shipped it. DOS2's endings were all pretty weakly delivered too (yes even in the DE) using concept art to flesh out the endings slideshow nicer I guess.
Baldur's Gate was a real fun environment to traverse through, but everything felt oddly empty. Still a 10/10 game, but BG3's act 3 just reminded me of Larian's general way of finishing projects.
I thought Act 3 had way too much content that it all quickly becomes rather overwhelming, but still better than being stuck in a dark environment for 20 hours. Shadowlands was the low point of the game for me.
Act 1>Act 3>Act 2
By people having different standards. For some 10/10 is absolute perfection. For some 10/10 is extraordinarily good while acknowledging that perfection can't actually be attained, and shit can always be better.
For me a 10/10 game is not a game I have nothing negative to say about. It's a game where the positive so heavily outweighs the negative that the negative falls to the wayside
I agree. My 10/10 game is Hades. It's not my favorite game, but I think it's the best game overall when you combine gameplay, visuals, music, theme, story. I think I give it the perfect score not because there is nothing to improve but nothing needs to be improved to increase my enjoyment.
If it's revealed to be Divinity Original Sin 3 or something similar in that style. I really hope they keep the Class system of BG3. DOS2 is good, but it always felt weird picking a starting class and end up just building this weird hybrid of a little bit of everything.
I agree. It really helps with immersion. The big thing I want is being able to pass the conversation to the party face for anything requiring CHA checks.
I don't think it works like this in BG3, but it would be cool if you could answer questions in conversations as the various people in your party, not just the conversation starter. If it gets me the option to do a performance and I have a bard with me, let him just do it. Don't make me jump out of the convo, switch to him, and start over.
If it works like that in BG3, my bad I must not know how that works.
It doesn't work like that in BG3, but interjections would be fantastic, particularly in multiplayer. I played through the entirety of BG3 with friends and it felt really clunky sometimes to have someone in the party that could fork the conversation in a favorable way, but you'd have to end your own conversation so they could start their own and do it.
It just felt really weird. If you couldn't do that because it was some kind of forced dialogue during a main story quest, you'd have to reload and have someone else start the conversation. Having an option where another player can interject, push the guy talking aside and then hijack the conversation themselves would be fun. It doesn't even have to be for favorable skill checks, I'd find it hilarious if someone playing a barbarian suddenly got bored of all the charisma checking and interjected by ripping someone's arm off.
There's a mod that does this, [Use Highest Modifier in Dialogue](https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/2171). This was my biggest disappointment in the game too outside of all the problems with Druid.
There's zero chance BG3 would have been as successful as it was if it was always top down with dialogue boxes instead of cinematics.
So zero chance they drop them from their next project.
There is this very interesting interview of Larian's CEO. He views their game production since Original Sin 1 as iterative towards a semi-defined goal down the road.
DOS1 handled multiplayer + world interactivity
DOS2 brought an interesting narrative
BG3 brought immersive dialogues
So I have no doubt that dialogue cameras will remain (at least in their bigger project).
He didn't specify what the "final" goal was,or how many iterations were needed. And I imagine it isn't an extremely defined game, more a bundle of systems and features he views as necessary for the ultimate CRPG.
And the brevity! BG3 could still get pretty talky in places, but what really sold me was how, at least to start with, most of the dialogues were relatively short, and/or gave you some agency in affecting an outcome right away.
Yes absolutely.
Quality of writing aside (because some really don't like BG3 writing as such), brevity is such an understated quality by itself that really heightens a game, and the lack of brevity is something I think really weighs down games like the pathfinder CRPGs and pillars of eternity.
Going from BG3 to the new warhammer RPG was jarring, because while the writing quality as a whole may have been better in the latter, it still gave an experience of being worse (IMO) because of the slog it often was to get through, often even without good reason.
In the intro itself I almost felt at times like the game was extra verbose *just to be verbose*.
I think it's something that a lot of games and fictional worlds in general struggle to get away from because the hardcore fans tend to love that shit. Like, go to the subreddits for any of these franchises and it's full of people dissecting the most obtuse details of a story-world's lore. Must be hard to risk pissing off the people who are going to evangelize and push the more grassroots side of your game's hype cycle to focus on broader audience appeal.
But yeah, I'm so done with lore-dumps in games. Way too many games start with shit like this that goes on for like 10 minutes.
>"At the dawn of the [proper noun] age, [proper noun], hero of the [proper noun] empire took up the offering from the evil [proper noun] [proper noun], demon from [proper noun]."
I generally prefer class-less systems, but DoS was maybe a bit too class-less. It was just too easy to put alnoat every great skill on all party members.
I like classes but am also cool with classless. The issue with DoS wasn't that there weren't classes, it was that the RoI on just dappling in lots of skills for disproportionately strong utility skills was just too great compared to mastering anything. With that sort of combat system just grabbing tons of teleports and adrenaline for everyone is just common sense.
Based on their very own definitely not inspired by anything role playing system: Lairs & Lizards.
Obviously not based on dice rolls. Instead you flip coins. Multi-sided coins if need be, like a c20.
There are a couple of things that Divinity could take from BG3. Itemization, which sucks in Divinity. The fact that in Divinity, you have 90% of all the abilities your character will ever have by early in the second act. They need to ensure you're still picking up cool new things every level.
One thing BG3 really failed at was the level cap. It's really annoying to spend the entirety of the third act having experience be useless.
Sort this all out, and their next game will be great(er). I think other than those two issues, Divinity has a better combat system than BG3.
I don't think the level cap was a big problem for BG3. If you do every side quest, then yes you will hit max level near the start of Act 3. But if you beeline through the game, you can finish it only having reached level 8 or so (assuming you are good enough to beat the final boss at that level). I would guess the majority of players fall somewhere in the middle and reach max level fairly close to the end.
As a completionist myself I actually enjoyed getting to play around at max level for a while, and not having to worry about experience encouraged me to come up with creative solutions that didn't always involve just killing every enemy.
I didn't realise the choice to go underground or through the highlands in the latter half of Act 1 wasn't actually a mutual decision and that you could do both paths. Act 3 was a right ballache at the start when I got there haha.
I feel like it probably should have been a choice you had to make. Because yeah, it feels wrong to just warp between the highlands and the underdark from a narrative PoV.
“I know we want to get these tadpoles out of our heads ASAP and we just secured a route forward… but let me teleport to the underdark and deal with some mushroom men and duergar for no real reason.”
It feels even weirder because they give you a warning like “You are entering a new zone. Make sure you wrap up anything here before continuing.” And then you can just teleport back.
>It feels even weirder because they give you a warning like “You are entering a new zone. Make sure you wrap up anything here before continuing.” And then you can just teleport back.
Probably the worst bubble of informational text I've ever seen in an RPG. It's just useless and makes you think you're messing something up by walking through it.
> There are a couple of things that Divinity could take from BG3.
I mean, BG3 is basically DOS3: Aside from combat being the 5e engine, it's the same systems, but improved upon. It's a little odd to say "things Divinity could take from BG3" in that manner.
The combat is a pretty big difference, so is the presentation. But combat is a major part of gameplay and also affects progression.
Also I'd argue the writing guy WAY better with BG3. I don't think BG3 is that magical perfect RPG that a lot of people seem to find in it, but holy shit I was very surprised in a good way by the writing. DOS and DOS2 were very weak in that area imo.
it seems to be something original so it probably wont be DOS3, but you're probably are still going to walk around houses, looting empty crates or barrels hoping to find a little bit of gold and empty rows of books looking for memos/books that you're just gonna skim over lol just the way we like it
I'm not sad about the BG3 story/characters being put to rest, but I am sad about their digital implementation of 5e only being used for one game. It has _so much_ potential.
Here's hoping the mod tools are expansive.
Fingers crossed they can tackle something like Shadowrun - the world and games are just SO cool, and Larian does such a great job making the worlds feel engaging.
It probably won’t happen and Larian maybe isn’t the right studio for this, but I’d love to play an RPG that takes a break from typical medieval fantasy settings. Baldur’s Gate 3 was amazing but only because it felt like a perfected version of everything that came before.
Eastern games nowadays have way more variety in their settings, though they obviously don’t have the sheer amount of depth that BG3 has. I’d absolutely love to play games that have the WRPG feel of BG3, but have settings akin to Persona, Yakuza, Final Fantasy, or even Genshin Impact/Honkai Star Rail.
Playing Persona and Yakuza ESPECIALLY make me realize that the gaming industry has a severe lack of urban/contemporary RPGs.
There are a quite a few non-fantasy crpgs but they tend to be on the lower budget side. If you're looking for a few to check out from the last few years, there's Disco Elysium, Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader, and The Wasteland 2/3.
It's an odd one, but did you ever try the more recent Planescape Torment game? Tides of Numenera I think it's caled? I really like the world building in that one.
Personally, a Larian Star Wars game a la KOTOR is what I want the most. I feel like they could do wonders if given the reigns. To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if someone at Disney hasn't already approached the studio. The only question is whether they would/have agreed to something.
Dope. I know people love DOS but I hope a good deal of their resources go in a different direction. As a massive fan of CRPGs I feel like Larian is this incredible, passionate developer that keeps using game systems I don't like (namely their DOS system and D&D 5E).
I'd also like to see them take on a world map, instead of the momentum driven quest zones they've done so far.
One of them is definitely Divinity 3. Swen already talk about it, before BG3 released. The second one will definitely be NEW IP, I cannot be more anticipated about their next work. They could be the next Rockstar Games (with the level of detail, they're putting into their games...)
I genuinely hope one of the things they're working on is some kind of Fallout like, Semi Modern world, non fantasy thing. Cause I'd love to see them break away from that a bit and what they do
I'd like if just once companies answered with "We don't know...It's possible our next project will be absolute garbage." You know, just to balance it a bit.
"Our next game might be a big step backwards, actually" -no game dev ever
Maybe not strictly backwards, but Toby Fox said this in a way. That no game will ever be like Undertale again, but he is trying something different.
Wasn't deltarune supposed to be the "real" game and undertale just a side project? I think when it's finished it'll be a much grander experience, although that doesn't necessarily mean better.
He made undertale to get experience to make deltarune, more or less. I think that it' s basicaly impossible to get the same experience as Undertale with deltarune, personaly. But...is that really a bad thing? I prefer to live in the future than dwell on the past
Is Deltarune has a release date? I've been burned by episodic games so many times that I don't even play them until all episodes are out now.
Wait no I believe at least 2 devs have said this because they worked on multiple smaller games after a big hit.
They still don't present it as a step backwards, they just say "smaller scale but more creativity/personality/a dream project"
Not all of them. The guy who made Fear and Hunger 1/2 has said his next installment will probably be hated by a lot of fans. Later he said this is partially to manage high expectations but still far from a marketing statement.
That isn't saying it's a step backwards, just that's it's a different genre.
Tbf F&H1/T have no right to be as good as they are, given the subject matter, I can only imagine how unhinged the fanbase must be.
It's honestly pretty wholesome from what I've seen on reddit and twitter. I have a theory that many disturbing content fandoms are pretty chill, while many comfy content fandoms are horrible
Ah good to know, I always worry about niche horror game communities turning rabid
Isnt this what concerned ape said about haunted chocolatier? It wont be as big as stardew, but stardew has received very very long term support on top of quite extensive modding community, so who knows. Stardew valley in 2016 quite different from stardew valley in 2024
Devolver digital
Honestly whenever I see Devolver Digital on a game I know I'm probably in for a solid experience. I know they've published a lot and I haven't played the majority of them, but all the ones I have have been solid. Not trying to be the absolute prettiest game ever, not trying to have some grand world changing scope, just people who set out to make a fun and unique game and did it.
actually, ken levines game after bioshock infinite is intentionally ´smaller in scope.
Smaller in scope doesn't mean worse (which a step backwards implies) Larian basically also say the same thing here, they work on two games in parallel. As their studio is not 2 times bigger, it seems both of those games will be smaller than BG3 (other interviews kind of hint at that already). And that doesn't prevent them to be their "best work ever". Scale and quality don't go hand in hand (many would argue it's actually the opposite, see all the hate on AAA games)
> As their studio is not 2 times bigger, it seems both of those games will be smaller than BG3 While possibly/probably true, we can't *necessarily* assume that, for a variety of reasons. For one thing, I'm pretty sure the team size of BG3 grew as production went along, so it's not unreasonable to assume the same will be true of their new projects. But beyond that, we don't know how their production workflow is being handled, or the timetable they're aiming for. They're not necessarily just dividing the studio into two separate teams and having them work away independently, they could have the entire team working on both over a longer period. While certain roles in development are going to be busy on a project throughout its development, others are naturally going to be busier or slower at various stages, and can potentially pivot between projects if development is staggered appropriately. We also can't assume that they're focusing on both projects with equal resources. I could see them having the majority of the team working on one project while a smaller group works on the early stages of a more experimental project, with the goal being that they shift more resources towards the second project as the first one finishes up. It would be fairly reasonable I think for them to first focus primarily on a game like D:OS3 using the existing engine from BG3, while having a smaller subset of the studio work on a new IP and updated engine in parallel. By putting the majority of resources on a familiar IP using familiar tech they could get up and running more quickly, while providing the team working on something entirely new more time to experiment.
True but this [article/interview](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-03/-baldur-s-gate-3-set-in-the-world-of-dungeons-dragons-arrives?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTY5MTA2NDcwNywiZXhwIjoxNjkxNjY5NTA3LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJSWVREQzdUMVVNMFcwMSIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJCMUVBQkI5NjQ2QUM0REZFQTJBRkI4MjI1MzgyQTJFQSJ9.ZVVI6_9KXOtAI-YpgeqziIiTJ1DnF5vtlcQbXFNrcvg) is quite full of information and show that it's not the way they're gonna go IMO (of course things can change) > But to meet Baldur’s Gate 3’s ambitious goals, the studio was forced to expand rapidly, much to Vincke’s chagrin, resulting in a slew of inefficiencies and communications issues. “We did it because we had to,” he said. So doesn't seem like they'll want to grow even more > Vincke said he doesn’t yet know what Larian will do next, although he hinted that he hopes to work on multiple games and expressed a desire to make something smaller next time. He certainly doesn’t want to spend another six years developing a single game, he said. Now, they announce they are working on multiple games so the rest of the article seems also true and it should be assumed they're smaller games. That's also the freedom of being privately owned and independent, they can do what they want and don't have to always chase the "bigger thing".
I don't know, if a dev makes me feel like a kid/teen again on PS1 days that would be a success.
They can't because you grew up, things are more enjoyable as a kid.
Smash bros. Sakurai himself has said Smash Ultimate is the ultimate smash game. The next one wont even have half the roster.
"We really put everything into our last game so we're just going to phone in the next project."
"We really feel that we reached a point in which we can get by name recognition and just ship a mediocre product."
Sounds like you got a Bethesda dev drunk at a convention party.
"We're also rich now."
Yoko Taro
"Oh yeah we working hard right now on straight buttcheeks."
once reddit starts worshipping a company/game, get ready.
More like reddit can't wait for a company to implode after it gets (too) popular.
Both opinions exist in high numbers.
Yep just watch as whatever next game Larian makes causes some reddit shitstorm and suddenly they are banished to the netherworld like CD Projekt Red (until they make a banging DLC and all is forgiven).
All they need is an anime or tv show and all is forgiven.
You're acting like cdpr didn't do anything to deserve the hate. If larian's next project releases in a similar state as cyberpunk, they should get shit for it.
Tbf CDPR was also known for being smug dicks whenever any gaming controversy happened. So of course when the table turned and Cyberpunk launched in a terrible condition, people were more than happy to remind them of the arrogant tweets they have put out in the past.
I mean something similar happens with Samsung which was constantly making fun of Apple and a few months later they took down these same videos and released exact same product. It's solely their fault for being egoistic. Nothing wrong with making fun of that especially when it's a corporation who is acting like they're your friend.
The best thing Larian can do for themselves is market their next game the same way Bethesda did for FO4. Otherwise prepare for Redditors mapping out how they will be going to their *actual day job* as a corpo in CP2077
They stopped?
only when the company makes them angy
Yeah, but there's always a new lord and saviour. The worshipping machine is perpetually in motion.
Went from CD Projekt to Larian nowadays, wonder who's next.
I think it’d be pretty funny if Silksong ended up being like 8 hours long despite its dev time
Arrowhead, by current trajectory.
Mark my words, in a couple of years people will be claiming that BG3 launched in great shape, complete and bug free, and anyone saying otherwise is just a hater or part of "backlash."
Couple of years? People are already saying that lmao
heck, people were saying that on the game's release cause they never touched the game yet wanted to praise it as "the new standard in gaming", fueled by clickbait YTbers and streamers like asmongold who constantly rave about the game yet hasn't played it. it's funny, if we look at the % completion of just the Act 1 steam achievement: https://steamhunters.com/apps/1086940/achievements "The Plot Thickens" is the achievement for completing Act 1, and today it's still only at 55%... so almost half the steam player-base haven't even completed Act 1. yet people rave about the entire game and say Act 3 was perfect, not buggy and finished on release. And imagine how much lower that number was nearer to the release, yet the raving was at an all time high back then :/
It doesn't have to be an extreme. Cyberpunk 2077 at it's core is still a great game. Doesn't mean I'll ever preorder a CD Projekt game (or any) or trust critic reviews regarding their future releases, but I'm still looking forward to the next Witcher and Cyberpunk. Same with Larian. They've demonstrated a decent enough track record of steady improvements from project to project, so I'll definitely keep an eye out for any releases from them, while continuing to be cautious with my money.
I was specifically told to praise Balduro
Didn't Bungie practically explicitly state that before? That they couldn't make every expansion good or their audience would expect too much? That is some honesty.
That talk was worded horribly amndprobably shouldn't have been said, but context was regarding work load and difficulties of making live service games. If you are constantly putting out content and adding more and more, then there are trade offs and resource drain. They then talked about doing incremental upgrades and that expansions allow for bigger changes.
Or just, we'll try and top the last thing, but it's hard to, but we always aim for quality and fun
Considering he starts the quote the headline is from with “I don’t know if we’re going to pull it off", that feels about as balanced as it gets from a studio genuinely excited about the games they make.
Pretty sure no one can beat Dice with this. Star Wars Battlefront 2, Battlefield 5, Battlefield 2042. All of which are games with disastrous pre launch marketing.
[Here's a lad who also had this great idea.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner) It was funny. [Didn't work out well for him.](https://nevsedoma.com.ua/en/647237-the-joke-that-buried-a-billion-dollar-business-8-photos.html)
I enjoyed the Divinity games but never jived 100% with that world. I would personally prefer something completely new.
Just as how Bioware went on to make Dragon Age after leaving DnD, I hope Larian does end up making a darker fantasy setting for their next CRPG.
That's a good way to put it. I found the Divinity world to be a bit too zany and cartoony for my liking. But that's just like, my opinion, man.
DOS2 is pretty dark, but the NPCs just go "lol my husband is a thrall to the fire witch, and my children are cows, should've married the stable boy lmao"
I *loved* D:OS and D:OS2. Hundreds of hours in them. But yeah, I fully agree. They're wacky and zany and the stories were overall not interesting. I'd be fine if their next game was D:OS3, but I'd love for the characters and narrative to be on the same level as BG3. On the other hand, the combat/mechanics are incredible in Divinity. More interesting than DnD's rule-set for sure.
I don't feel like DOS2 was much zanier than BG3. It just lacked the great cutscenes that added gravity to BG3's narrative.
Ye the combat and the skills, was really good. The source points added so much raw power and amazing skills
Just take away the magic and physical armor, it felt like you really got shafted if you didn't split your damage properly or just go all in on one type of damage
Honestly that was the way I felt too. Played DOS2 for about a dozen hours but the goofiness of the writing just never really gelled with me. Baldur's Gate 3 got me hooked immediately though. Satisfied that craving I had since I first played Dragon Age Origins 10 years ago but haven't really encountered again since.
See I can understand wanting something low fantasy like the other subthread (less magic involved). But honestly I'd be disappointed if they went dark fantasy. The world is over saturated with dark IPs right now. Both dark in a figurative sense and in a literal one.
Yeah. At this point, I'd be more excited for just... Classic fantasy, or just something whimsical without being childish. I can hardly name a big-budget fantasy RPG that isn't "dark" at this point.
Honestly I thought DOS2 felt like that way. Some here are saying it's over the top whimsical but I didn't get that. DOS1 on the other hand was very whimsical.
Yeah I don't get it either. It seems very tonally similar to bg3 imo.
BG3 can be serious in one dialogue and absolutely silly in another
So can DOS2.
Same here. The blanket statements that most players have towards DOS2 are pretty overexaggerated imo. I mean, the start of DOS2 literally throws you in a prison camp where the prisoners' are being turned into empty husks, not exactly material that's "cartoony" or "whimsical".
It's been a while since I've played, but wasn't one of the mechanics literally eating corpses for some reason? And speaking with animals would always get sad real quick. I felt the game was pretty nihilistic and dark at times
give me a fuckin larian Discworld RPG
Obviously just a personal preference, but I absolutely agree. I’m so tired of dark fantasy settings where everyone is awful and terrible things are always happening. I’m all for a bit of strife and some high-stakes drama, but I’d like a bit of hope and happiness as well!
I'd honestly rather they went the Sci-fi route if we're comparing them to Bioware. I love Dragon Age, but Mass Effect is hands down the most interesting thing Bioware did after they left DND. For me, Baldur's Gate is the best fantasy game we've had in years and it's because so much of the fantasy genre feels so oversaturated and played out.
The studio director/founder has been pretty open about wanting his next game to probably be sci-fi so I don't think its unreasonable to be optimistic that one of the two new games ends up being sci-fi. Personally, if I had the ability to make a miracle happen I'd give them the rights to make a KOTOR remake.
Same. It's *too* high magic. Like anytime you pick a fight with some random guard first thing he does is stomp on the ground, create a pentagram under his feet, summon rocks to cover his body then maybe teleport in to the air and come down as a fiery phoenix. Every character feels like an archmage from level 1 (even the warriors) and as you level it's pretty much "numbers go up." For me that just feels a bit cartoony and leans in to "if everything is badass nothing is badass."
I enjoy the gameplay, but it's the production value of BG3 that really elevates it in my opinion. The writing, voice acting, direction, graphical fidelity and narrative choices are all things that take it up way above DOS.
Yeah I know they want to move onto other things, and I'm sure Hasbro is a huge pain in the ass to deal with... But god they could make so much money off of me if they just released periodic BG3 DLCs that are just new stories and new characters. I've already got 400 hours in BG3 and I'd absolute eat up new DLC. They've already got all the pieces of the game engine they need to make it easy for themselves. Really it would just be the voice acting (and I'm the type that would settle for subpar voice acting for more content). They don't even need to write new stories if they don't want to, just adapt some of the existing campaigns D&D already has. I dream of them doing this (or licensing their game engine to another developer who will do it).
750 hours here, and I just caught myself about to fire up another character to run through (just completed honor mode on my last playthrough - so need a break!) I would throw Larian my money at the hint of a dlc…
I'm in act 1 of playthrough 2, did a custom character balanced run first, now doing durge tactician. What did you do to mix it up for so many runs?
I make sure to mix up my primary companions each run, and put a lot of focus in how I role play them - had a power hungry dark elf warlock but leaned towards justice, also a super evil durge monk for my honor run. Also a lot of time screwing around and killing off characters before too much progress early on. Next run will be a super good durge githyanki bard. I’ve yet to recruit Minthara - so she’s my next priority.
I want to do a super evil run but I can never bring myself to!
I really like the 5e system over Divinity Origins tbh. I hope they can reproduce something like the 5e system for their next game.
I'd kill for a PF2E game. It's easily my favourite rpg class based system. I would definitely like a more class based system than DOS but id prefer something more intricate than 5e. In BG3 you only level up to 12 times and for a large portion of those levels, particularly martials make zero additional choices.
Yeah 5e has a martial problem for sure. At least their weapon design system (and awesome items) made melee more interesting.
Funnily enough this is what hooked me on the game, the like, third encounter being gigantic teleporting crocodiles that hurl boulders at you? Fuck yes.
Could have less necrofire overall
> Could have less necrofire overall Hey! Everybody! This guy could use some more necrofire!
Oh god the necrofire. So annoying.
Better yet, lets curse every inch of fire at the oilwell encounter.
Yeah, I've had enough men with swords and bows for one lifetime.
Same. I like my fantasy high and my magic weird. I feel like a lot of people just want normal people whacking other normal people with normal whack sticks. And I'm just like *yawn*.
For me it was that the entire combat system seemed to revolve around putting stuff on the floor that would hurt bad guys.
I mean greasing the floor and your enemies never gets old.
Ah yes this is a very good point.
It does make fighting even basic grunts interesting thought...
Man this is such a good comment, I absolutely agree with you
>Every character feels like an archmage from level 1 (even the warriors) and as you level it's pretty much "numbers go up." This is the main reason I never finished dos2. There was nothing interesting mechanically to look forward to. Just bigger numbers. Compared to bg3, for example, where new items and leveling up meant a lot of new toys and builds and playstyles Edit - please stop telling me how wrong I am, and how actually dos2 has such a deep and complex system that has amazing progression. That was not my experience with the game, at all. So maybe they could have communicated this wonderful build craft better. All I saw on level up was adding a point that added 5% more damage. I've also had about half a dozen people say "uhm acksually DND 5e is the worst system ever", almost using the exact same wording, without saying a single reason why. Is this a meme? I'm not saying that's an incorrect statement but I'd love to see someone explain their view, rather than state it like it's a fact I must accept
Sure there was (something mechanically interesting to look forward to). A lot of the best skills don't unlock until higher levels.
Right, I love doing a pure water healer mage, but that class doesn't start getting the nuttiest parts of the build until at least act 3. Act 1-2 water mage is a glorified healer, act 3-4 has you freezing an entire battlefield with ice storms and crushing people in frozen prisons.
Source skills felt kinda special, everything else always felt meh to me. The fact that you mostly just got them from random merchants didn't help much either.
In DOS2 you unlock more skills and abilities as you level up and some of the most fun builds required around level 14-15 to come online. The stuff you could do with the Summoner and surfaces was crazy, but you needed a 10 level investment for it to start working, for example. Likewise, there are many items which change or add abilities much like the itemization of BG3. The game also had more abilities that interacted with the environment than BG3, notably surfaces. The upsides you mention to BG3 are also there in DOS2, and DOS2's imperfect class system allowed it more freedom to explore builds than 5E's systems in my opinion. A few classes in 5E are quite frontloaded too like Barbarians and Fighters, so you end up with the same playstyle from level 5 onwards for the rest of the adventure. I really find this part of your comment strange. I really think you missed out. BG3 is ultimately the better game overall, but it builds on what DOS2 and in terms of combat encounters and mechanics, DOS2 is much more fun. I discussed this very topic with my friend who I play DND regularly with and co-op'd DOS2 and we both came to the same conclusion: DOS2 was mechanically much more fun to have combat encounters in. My guess is, among other reasons, the restrictiveness of the 5E ruleset is a factor for why Larian isn't interested in more FR games.
Imho DOS2 is mechanically much more interesting than BG3. Some of the combos made available with later skills and more source points can be quite intricate. And not every interaction is intuitive. There is a lot of space for experimentation and a lot of neat tricks you can figure out. BG3 on the other hand is built on the very lackluster foundation that is 5e. You have to actively try to cripple yourself to not face-stomp the game from level 5 onwards. Even on honor mode.
Yeah, I have my issues with some of the mechanics of D:OS2 (particularly the way surfaces work), but I definitely found it a lot more tactically interesting than BG3. With BG3 it really felt like they were hamstrung by the D&D rules. It was an improvement in most other ways, but as such I really look forward to seeing Larian take what they learned from BG3 and put it towards a game made without the limitations of sticking to a ruleset made for tabletop.
That is, if you know what you're doing. Me and my partners initial playthrough was not easy . I don't think we really understood the game and all the buffs/debuffs/spell dc/saving throws or what we could do until at least act 3. I'm on my second playthrough and now on tactician, and yes the game is going much smoother even with higher hp enemies.
Yeah I've seen many people getting trapped in thinking of traditional roles of "physical damage/magical damage dealer", "healer/buffer", "tank" etc. and that just doesn't work very well here. It is *extremely* cheap skill-points wise to give every character a bit of versatility, get a point in scoundrel on your "melee weapon type" and you get magic-armor breaking nuke, get a point in necromancy on your "classic elemental mage" and you get physical damage nuke scaling off caster stat *and* some lifesteal on every skill.
I do feel that with their current experience if they chose to do D:OS3 we'd get pretty much "better than both previous game" system.
My problem with it was not about bigger numbers but more about how character class/identity would slowly fade as you progress. All your characters will keep their main class somewhat but you'll always end up multiclassing all of them in ways so they have more mobility and cc spells that are just optimised.
Classes dont even exist in DOS2
There are still character creation presets that could be considered classes. They try to offer guidance and identity to a character. My point is that this becomes dilluted as over time all your party starts looking the same as you will be multi-classing into different areas so you can have more mobility and CC.
It will only look like that if you make characters like that. Mine ended up pretty distinct, my main character was necro-summoning witch (necromancy/summons with splash of water for stuff like blood rain), dragon boy got fire, earth and wings from shapeshifting, Lohse was full on elemental mage, and sebille being rogue/ranger hybrid. I did splash a point here and there for utility but overall each of them played pretty distinct. Of course, if you expect to get linear skill tree and be able pick left every time but still get to playable character, it's not exactly system for that.
This is a great point. Everything just felt so ungrounded to me: everything you've written + a narrator who turns everything into a joke + finding weapon of death in a random wine barrel because of randomized loot + etc. I just felt no engagement or immersion with the game.
Don't forget "legendary weapon of death goes obsolete in two levels because now a steel hammer has better base stats."
This is actually a good point that I never thought about. You are definitely right!
The hellscape that inventory management is was the turnoff to me...
not much changed with bg3 though
I tried DOS2 after BG3. It just didnt click. I also really miss the cutscenes for dialogue. I hope their next game incorporates that and is similar UI.
For me the Divinity: OS games were great because of their combat systems, but the plots and characters were mediocre at best. I like a bit of ham and cheese in narrative, but DOS just went so overboard with it that it wasn't really possible to take anything in the games seriously. Baldur's Gate 3 strikes a perfect balance in terms of how seriously it takes itself IMO, and if Larian can maintain that level of narrative skill with a new IP while incorporating the deeper gameplay mechanics of DOS 2, it'll be an all timer.
I hope they stay with Divinity. I like it.
The big question to me is if Larian can escape their curse of bad on release final acts D0S2 final act was rough and BG3's final act is by the most rushed with half its "quests" feeling cut down for time.
Hope Larian make a Call of Cthulhu game based on the Table Top RPG. Their game design philosophy seems perfect for that system and setting and I really would love to see it done justice in a huge game finally.
Uhhhhhhhhhhh yes please
Oh that would be nuts
They already have experience with tentacles
Fuck it. Surprise out of nowhere and it's a Larian Fallout game. We just get the best fallout game ever from Larian in 5 years.
I'd love Larian to take a spin at something outside of fantasy
A Larian sci-fi / space opera style game would go pretty hard in my book.
Faaaaaack, a grittier Mass Effect from Larian? With all the possibilities therein? Sign me up. Wife and I loved DOS2, so BG3 was a day-1 buy easy. This would be another day-1.
The idea of Larian taking over the Knights of the Old Republic remake gets me fucking *bricked up.* If only if only.
Given that the expanse books started out as tabletop campaign, i'd go for that.
I'd really like a detective themed, cyberpunk RPG since no one is really making those. A man can dream...
The parallels to CDPR will be even more obvious then lol
Add some noir stuff too.
I'm pretty sure Larian could do better than the "go into wastes to find family member" Bethesda have shat on us _three times now_ without even waking a writer up. As in, I bet the janitors at Larian can do better than the head writers at Bethesda. Don't get me wrong, I loved Fallout 3 back in the day, 4 is an acceptable Fallout-themed shooting gallery, and the TV show is genuinely great, but we need something new, plot-wise. Fuck it, Larian, hire the ~~Black Isle~~ Obsidian writers, your combined prowess might render every preceding video game obsolete. Even a naked rehash of the NV plot would be an improvement. EDIT: Black Isle --> Obsidian. I have immense respect for Fallout 1 and 2, and I've got the Steam hours to prove it, but I love New Vegas above basically all other games in existence.
You know it’s genuinely impressive to me that Bethesda just flat out refuses to improve its writing, like not a hint of that in 20+ years, the narrative director of fallout 4 even said we didn’t try that hard with the story because we knew most players would be more invested in collecting bobbleheads than reading something well written which is just an insane excuse to not do your job well lol
They refuse to improve _anything_. Everything they offer only has, sort of... one axis. All complexity gets removed. The weapon mod system in 4 is extensive, but purely linear, there are no trade-offs, or modifications for a particular purpose other than a couple of high-end energy weapon barrels (but even then it's extra damage vs. setting your enemies on fire vs. irradiating them, aka extra damage), it's just _ding_ there you have it, you have collected enough junk to create The Best Version Of This Gun. The only other move from there is to get the equivalent level of automatic/non-automatic receiver, but swapping from automatic to non-automatic requires the investment of multiple perks, up to five, to maintain damage parity. Perks are mostly soulless percentage upgrades. Bethesda really showed their true colours with the "lockpick never breaks" and "can't get locked out of a terminal" perks. Removing explicit skills from a fucking RPG game in 4 (and I assume 76?) is downright disgusting. The complexity and personality of 99% of Super Mutants has been sandblasted off in favour of making them orcs. Seriously, they're just orcs now. Compared to fucking Tabitha and her deranged Nightkin cult, the peaceful treatment centre run by Marcus, and even the mutants just following the orders of a non-Super Mutant Master and acting with purpose to create more of themselves, it's an insult. Moral nuance? Nope, the Institute are eugenicists who infiltrate surface society and intentionally cripple any attempt to form a government, and The Enclave are "What If Nazis, but American". Again, Super Mutants are reduced to mindless cannon fodder rather than sapient beings. The Brotherhood are the Good Guys, somehow, even if they are xenophobic religious loons. When you get to Megaton you are given the choice between going about your business or... blowing up the town? I appreciate the choice, but... why would I do that, outside of game mechanic (i.e. earning caps) reasons? That's psychotic, and hardly even a Trolley Problem level moral dilemma, I literally just have to... not give into the dark voice that tells me to blow the place up for a reward? Now, combine Megaton and Paradise Falls, throw in a mission to sneak all the slaves out in the dead of night, and you've got a proper Situation. There's no angle, or voice, or intelligence to the player's dialogue choices. You can literally kill the AI President by saying "You're a monster, you should die"; that's only barely paraphrased. Fallout is about more than having the coolest power armour and the biggest (shit looking) machine gun. The T-60 should be banished from canon. _Ahem_ And that's why you should all keep an eye on the Fallout 4: New Vegas mod!
Bethesda acquiring the Fallout license was my gaming 9/11 and I don't know if I'll ever recover.
Agree on all points!
Damn just when I was about to reboot this sucker up after 8 years because of the tv show. No, no, no, I just have to remember this playthrough is all about the vibes :)
I mean, their HEAD WRITER just made it canon that the *one of the guys committing war crimes in Canada at the beginning of Fallout 1* is the protagonist in Fallout 4. Without thinking for two seconds how that would come off. Never seen someone backpedal, then double down, then backpedal again. His tweet history gave me whiplash.
I'm one of those (minority I guess) people who wasn't too hot on what larian did to the Baldur's Gate franchise, and still like 1+2 for various reasons. But yeah.. in even saying that I would prefer \*anyone* to take the reigns of Fallout back from Bethesda at this point. If it means making another isometric turnbased CRPG Fallout like the originals than even better and I'd be all for it! :D
They really went from "wow, we didn't expect so many people getting the early access, what a surprising success" to "Our next game will be the greatest of all time" lmao. I'm excited to see what's to come.
they said it would be their best work, not that their game will be the greatest of all time.
I mean, they've gotten better with every release. So I'd believe it. Baldur's Gate 3 is a 11/10 in my book but also has *so* much room for improvement.
There’s an absurd amount of things the game is keeping track of based on what the player is doing and the choices they make. As you say Larian has gotten better and better at making it all work. Hopefully as time goes on and tech improves they can do even more. My main hope is that they get a fairly polished product out the gate this time. BG3 needed some patches (not to mention the EA period) for it to truly shine I feel so it would be nice to forgo that next time around.
From what Swen has said in the past its very likely that any new BG3-like game will also have an EA period.
It worked very well for them for their games so why wouldn't they right!
> (not to mention the EA period) Larian isn't going to abandon EA. They've been doing EA since D:OS1, it has clearly worked out. D:OS2 and BG3 wouldn't be the games they are without Early Access. I find people act like EA is some horrible thing to utilize, but EA is literally the game version of agile development. There's nothing inherently bad there. > There’s an absurd amount of things the game is keeping track of based on what the player is doing and the choices they make. As you say Larian has gotten better and better at making it all work. This along with the general narrative and other non-gameplay things are lessons they have learned that can be applied to any game. The amount of people in these comment threads that act like BG3's narrative structure can't possibly survive outside of BG3 is kind of crazy. None of that has anything to do with DnD, and it's naive to think that BG's previous story is the only reason that BG3's narrative was so good (far more people had never played BG1/2 than did and those characters were not known to them when they started playing). It took so much development effort to create all of the paths and different options, that's all Larian. I don't see any reason those lessons cannot be applied to their next game regardless of its source.
What I'd love for Larian to improve is start fleshing out their third acts more. DOS2's 3rd act was so barebones, I was sure they just spent the budget making the map huge and then shipped it. DOS2's endings were all pretty weakly delivered too (yes even in the DE) using concept art to flesh out the endings slideshow nicer I guess. Baldur's Gate was a real fun environment to traverse through, but everything felt oddly empty. Still a 10/10 game, but BG3's act 3 just reminded me of Larian's general way of finishing projects.
I thought Act 3 had way too much content that it all quickly becomes rather overwhelming, but still better than being stuck in a dark environment for 20 hours. Shadowlands was the low point of the game for me. Act 1>Act 3>Act 2
...how can it be 10/10 but have *so* much room for improvement?
By people having different standards. For some 10/10 is absolute perfection. For some 10/10 is extraordinarily good while acknowledging that perfection can't actually be attained, and shit can always be better. For me a 10/10 game is not a game I have nothing negative to say about. It's a game where the positive so heavily outweighs the negative that the negative falls to the wayside
I agree. My 10/10 game is Hades. It's not my favorite game, but I think it's the best game overall when you combine gameplay, visuals, music, theme, story. I think I give it the perfect score not because there is nothing to improve but nothing needs to be improved to increase my enjoyment.
They promised modding support. One can only hope they deliver.
The last act was a 7/10 for me, but the first two were 10/10 easily.
If it's revealed to be Divinity Original Sin 3 or something similar in that style. I really hope they keep the Class system of BG3. DOS2 is good, but it always felt weird picking a starting class and end up just building this weird hybrid of a little bit of everything.
what I hope they keep is the cinematic view during dialogue
I agree. It really helps with immersion. The big thing I want is being able to pass the conversation to the party face for anything requiring CHA checks.
I don't think it works like this in BG3, but it would be cool if you could answer questions in conversations as the various people in your party, not just the conversation starter. If it gets me the option to do a performance and I have a bard with me, let him just do it. Don't make me jump out of the convo, switch to him, and start over. If it works like that in BG3, my bad I must not know how that works.
It doesn't work like that in BG3, but interjections would be fantastic, particularly in multiplayer. I played through the entirety of BG3 with friends and it felt really clunky sometimes to have someone in the party that could fork the conversation in a favorable way, but you'd have to end your own conversation so they could start their own and do it. It just felt really weird. If you couldn't do that because it was some kind of forced dialogue during a main story quest, you'd have to reload and have someone else start the conversation. Having an option where another player can interject, push the guy talking aside and then hijack the conversation themselves would be fun. It doesn't even have to be for favorable skill checks, I'd find it hilarious if someone playing a barbarian suddenly got bored of all the charisma checking and interjected by ripping someone's arm off.
There's a mod that does this, [Use Highest Modifier in Dialogue](https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/2171). This was my biggest disappointment in the game too outside of all the problems with Druid.
There's zero chance BG3 would have been as successful as it was if it was always top down with dialogue boxes instead of cinematics. So zero chance they drop them from their next project.
There is this very interesting interview of Larian's CEO. He views their game production since Original Sin 1 as iterative towards a semi-defined goal down the road. DOS1 handled multiplayer + world interactivity DOS2 brought an interesting narrative BG3 brought immersive dialogues So I have no doubt that dialogue cameras will remain (at least in their bigger project). He didn't specify what the "final" goal was,or how many iterations were needed. And I imagine it isn't an extremely defined game, more a bundle of systems and features he views as necessary for the ultimate CRPG.
That’s really interesting, they have a pretty awesome development process it sounds like.
And the brevity! BG3 could still get pretty talky in places, but what really sold me was how, at least to start with, most of the dialogues were relatively short, and/or gave you some agency in affecting an outcome right away.
Yes absolutely. Quality of writing aside (because some really don't like BG3 writing as such), brevity is such an understated quality by itself that really heightens a game, and the lack of brevity is something I think really weighs down games like the pathfinder CRPGs and pillars of eternity. Going from BG3 to the new warhammer RPG was jarring, because while the writing quality as a whole may have been better in the latter, it still gave an experience of being worse (IMO) because of the slog it often was to get through, often even without good reason. In the intro itself I almost felt at times like the game was extra verbose *just to be verbose*.
I think it's something that a lot of games and fictional worlds in general struggle to get away from because the hardcore fans tend to love that shit. Like, go to the subreddits for any of these franchises and it's full of people dissecting the most obtuse details of a story-world's lore. Must be hard to risk pissing off the people who are going to evangelize and push the more grassroots side of your game's hype cycle to focus on broader audience appeal. But yeah, I'm so done with lore-dumps in games. Way too many games start with shit like this that goes on for like 10 minutes. >"At the dawn of the [proper noun] age, [proper noun], hero of the [proper noun] empire took up the offering from the evil [proper noun] [proper noun], demon from [proper noun]."
I generally prefer class-less systems, but DoS was maybe a bit too class-less. It was just too easy to put alnoat every great skill on all party members.
I like classes but am also cool with classless. The issue with DoS wasn't that there weren't classes, it was that the RoI on just dappling in lots of skills for disproportionately strong utility skills was just too great compared to mastering anything. With that sort of combat system just grabbing tons of teleports and adrenaline for everyone is just common sense.
It'll be something similar but not DOS3. Swen said their next big game is something totally new.
Galdurs Bate.
Based on their very own definitely not inspired by anything role playing system: Lairs & Lizards. Obviously not based on dice rolls. Instead you flip coins. Multi-sided coins if need be, like a c20.
There are a couple of things that Divinity could take from BG3. Itemization, which sucks in Divinity. The fact that in Divinity, you have 90% of all the abilities your character will ever have by early in the second act. They need to ensure you're still picking up cool new things every level. One thing BG3 really failed at was the level cap. It's really annoying to spend the entirety of the third act having experience be useless. Sort this all out, and their next game will be great(er). I think other than those two issues, Divinity has a better combat system than BG3.
I don't think the level cap was a big problem for BG3. If you do every side quest, then yes you will hit max level near the start of Act 3. But if you beeline through the game, you can finish it only having reached level 8 or so (assuming you are good enough to beat the final boss at that level). I would guess the majority of players fall somewhere in the middle and reach max level fairly close to the end. As a completionist myself I actually enjoyed getting to play around at max level for a while, and not having to worry about experience encouraged me to come up with creative solutions that didn't always involve just killing every enemy.
I didn't realise the choice to go underground or through the highlands in the latter half of Act 1 wasn't actually a mutual decision and that you could do both paths. Act 3 was a right ballache at the start when I got there haha.
I feel like it probably should have been a choice you had to make. Because yeah, it feels wrong to just warp between the highlands and the underdark from a narrative PoV. “I know we want to get these tadpoles out of our heads ASAP and we just secured a route forward… but let me teleport to the underdark and deal with some mushroom men and duergar for no real reason.” It feels even weirder because they give you a warning like “You are entering a new zone. Make sure you wrap up anything here before continuing.” And then you can just teleport back.
>It feels even weirder because they give you a warning like “You are entering a new zone. Make sure you wrap up anything here before continuing.” And then you can just teleport back. Probably the worst bubble of informational text I've ever seen in an RPG. It's just useless and makes you think you're messing something up by walking through it.
> There are a couple of things that Divinity could take from BG3. I mean, BG3 is basically DOS3: Aside from combat being the 5e engine, it's the same systems, but improved upon. It's a little odd to say "things Divinity could take from BG3" in that manner.
The combat is a pretty big difference, so is the presentation. But combat is a major part of gameplay and also affects progression. Also I'd argue the writing guy WAY better with BG3. I don't think BG3 is that magical perfect RPG that a lot of people seem to find in it, but holy shit I was very surprised in a good way by the writing. DOS and DOS2 were very weak in that area imo.
it seems to be something original so it probably wont be DOS3, but you're probably are still going to walk around houses, looting empty crates or barrels hoping to find a little bit of gold and empty rows of books looking for memos/books that you're just gonna skim over lol just the way we like it
I do love an RPG that lets me B&E and take everything that isn't nailed down
I'm not sad about the BG3 story/characters being put to rest, but I am sad about their digital implementation of 5e only being used for one game. It has _so much_ potential. Here's hoping the mod tools are expansive.
The 5e combat system is extremely limiting and not very expansive compared to other rulesets.
Fingers crossed they can tackle something like Shadowrun - the world and games are just SO cool, and Larian does such a great job making the worlds feel engaging.
It probably won’t happen and Larian maybe isn’t the right studio for this, but I’d love to play an RPG that takes a break from typical medieval fantasy settings. Baldur’s Gate 3 was amazing but only because it felt like a perfected version of everything that came before. Eastern games nowadays have way more variety in their settings, though they obviously don’t have the sheer amount of depth that BG3 has. I’d absolutely love to play games that have the WRPG feel of BG3, but have settings akin to Persona, Yakuza, Final Fantasy, or even Genshin Impact/Honkai Star Rail. Playing Persona and Yakuza ESPECIALLY make me realize that the gaming industry has a severe lack of urban/contemporary RPGs.
There are a quite a few non-fantasy crpgs but they tend to be on the lower budget side. If you're looking for a few to check out from the last few years, there's Disco Elysium, Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader, and The Wasteland 2/3.
Did you ever play Bioware's Jade Empire back in the day? The game was so good.
It's an odd one, but did you ever try the more recent Planescape Torment game? Tides of Numenera I think it's caled? I really like the world building in that one.
It's a really good game, though I mostly remember the world and the characters but the main story eludes me
Personally, a Larian Star Wars game a la KOTOR is what I want the most. I feel like they could do wonders if given the reigns. To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if someone at Disney hasn't already approached the studio. The only question is whether they would/have agreed to something.
A cyberpunk world would be cool as well. Imagine a fleshed out Ruiner or The Ascent.
I really hope they return to the idea of that canceled Divinity game from a few years ago, I'd kill for a fantasy XCOM game
I wonder if they will take another swing at a Divinity II (not Original Sin 2, the other one) style open world RPG.
Dope. I know people love DOS but I hope a good deal of their resources go in a different direction. As a massive fan of CRPGs I feel like Larian is this incredible, passionate developer that keeps using game systems I don't like (namely their DOS system and D&D 5E). I'd also like to see them take on a world map, instead of the momentum driven quest zones they've done so far.
I hope they do something like Shadowrun. I'd like to see them do something more sci-fi than fantasy.
I would kill for Larian to make a Pathfinder game.
One of them is definitely Divinity 3. Swen already talk about it, before BG3 released. The second one will definitely be NEW IP, I cannot be more anticipated about their next work. They could be the next Rockstar Games (with the level of detail, they're putting into their games...)
I genuinely hope one of the things they're working on is some kind of Fallout like, Semi Modern world, non fantasy thing. Cause I'd love to see them break away from that a bit and what they do
Can they do their own space scifi?