Comments by "Crazy Eyes" (@CrizzyEyes) on "Why Baldur's Gate 3 is NOT an "Unrealistic Standard"" video.

The fact that they had to pay WotC actually speaks to how insanely fucking stupid WotC has become since 5e released. It's as if they looked at all the stuff that worked to make D&D a household name over 40 years and decided it was all stinky doo doo. Licensed CRPGs? Lame, who wants to play those? I literally would not have known D&D existed if it wasn't for Neverwinter Nights. I guess I should count myself lucky that someone at Larian cared enough to pay WotC for the privilege of making a blockbuster game for them just so I could take a nostalgia trip back through the Forgotten Realms.
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Nintendo are one of the few companies to break the mold on this. The other studios you listed, listen to what investors want them to make for sustainable revenue. Nintendo, for better or worse, believes that they know better because they are the game design professionals. Basically they say "shut up and sit down, we'll show you how to make money in this industry." The only exception is Pokemon which is caught up in a triple-joint ownership fiasco. Nintendo will nickel and dime you, but not through DLC content addons or MTX; they do it through dumb shit like Amiibo or "limited run" game releases like the SM64 bundle that run on FOMO/collector's value. The problem boils down to the fact that investors don't care that games are good, they want returns on their investment. Investment strategy dictates the best way to do that is consistent streams of revenue, which has never really been compatible with a good game development cycle. No one is going to wait 5 years and hope you produce a masterpiece; that's just idiotic investing. As obnoxious as Nintendo is sometimes, I wish more people would adopt their mindset and confidence.
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@ILoveGrilledCheese They do utilize predatory practices, just not the same kind that most Western studios (or even many Japanese ones) use. Making you rebuy all your retro games with every new console, even though all Nintendo does is port over their in-house emulator, is extremely predatory. So is charging exorbitant amounts for peripherals and locking QoL game features behind plastic figurines that will be discontinued.
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@EasyBakinX OK, what if Diablo 4 and BG3 were made by the same studio? Would it be fair for me to compare how the lead game designer or executives managed Diablo 4 versus how they managed BG3? Or is that also invalid in your mind? Just so you know you're basically alone on this opinion. No one else I've discussed this topic with has made claims to the effect of "you can't compare how two different games are managed or budgeted."
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@Oliver_the_place It is a bigger deal than you think it is because monetization is virtually never something that adds on to a game that was going to be good anyway. It is something that infects the design philosophy of a game as it is being conceptualized and produced. In BG3's case, typical monetization strategy could have locked Warlock and Bard away as DLC classes which would be released 6-9 months later. Act 3 might not have even been shipped with the game at launch. Entire areas of the Underdark which are not crucial to the story (like the Adamantine Forge) could have been removed and sold as DLC. The Dark Urge origin character/companion could have been DLC as well.
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@HGritzan That's a very dumb analogy. You could buy a whole lot of MTX in the game of your choice if you didn't spend the money on a gaming PC, or any other console for that matter. Nintendo's hardware peripherals are very overpriced, but they intentionally try keep the console itself affordable to lower the barrier of entry.
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@HGritzan I mean yeah, region locking is one of the shittiest things that they do, but I'm confused as to why you'd rag on their console price when they're known for having some of the cheapest options around. It's part of their whole business strategy.
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@EasyBakinX "I have 600hrs into diablo 4 and only money I spent was on the game itself. I don’t buy anything from the shop. There’s not a person twisting your arm to buy anything!" Not relevant. The discussion was about how game studios spend their production budget and why Diablo 4's budget was bigger than BG3's, but not spent wisely. Your or my own willingness to fall into the MTX traps has nothing to do with this. I was also explaining why a game can both be better and produced more cheaply, and thus, BG3's standard of quality is not unrealistic. "Comparing the 2 titles is like comparing a tomato to a pomegranate. Both fruits with entirely different tastes." Again, you fail to grasp the purpose of this discussion. This is about budgeting and management. It has almost nothing to do with the content of the games themselves.
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@kerianhalcyon2769 Oh I completely agree. I enjoy FR for the campiness and attachment to it from my youth, not because it is a serious and thought-provoking fantasy setting. Dark Sun or even Planescape are far superior D&D settings for that. And yes, I was never able to stomach Salvatore's books even as a teenager. To me, FR is the iconic schlock fantasy setting. The only one where I can find kinky Drow dommy mommies and melodramatic Christians (Ilmater) in the same place. FR is the inoffensive "whatever you want it to be" setting and it's why WotC returned to promoting it.
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I'm a developer but not a pro game dev, although I have made and worked on games. I still have the perspective of an outsider looking in, but my personal theory is one of two things: 1. The devs from these studios feel genuine frustration from being caught in a catch-22 scenario. They are stuck in a bureaucratic organization and management is basically closed off to them. This is their way of expressing it without losing their jobs. If they want to make good games, they have to climb the ladder to management to have enough influence to do so. All managers have to make sure revenue is sustainable for investors, which makes making the games bad or at least mediocre. Meaning, managers can never order the production of good games. Therefore, it's a catch-22 where no one can ever make good games at these studios. 2. The devs are not genuinely frustrated at being unable to make the game they want to make that they believe will be good, but are instead knowingly acting as mouthpieces for executives and meat shields to try and absorb the brunt of the community criticism and shape the narrative. Either way, it is a contradictory logical flow where the end result is always "bad game gets made because we think it's good for investors." The only way to break the cycle is to get rid of management wholesale.
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The standards thing is such a paper-thin bullshit discussion. Nobody said "this shouldn't be held as a standard" when actually exceptional games (in terms of funding and resources) came out, like Red Dead Redemption 2. Rockstar developed a whole new animation engine for their games that nobody else has access to -- granted, it was done before RDR2 entered development, but still. That same standard of production quality went all the way back to GTA4/RDR1 when the engine was developed. Holding any game company to Rockstar's standard of production would frankly be completely absurd. They broke many records with RDR2. If holding any game up as a standard would hurt the industry, it would be a game like RDR2. But not a peep came out about it. Only when Larian released their game, which was supposed to be for a niche audience, did this suddenly become relevant. Instead the fact that horse balls shrink in cold weather was celebrated. What they're really trying to say and don't want to admit is that they don't have either the creative freedom or talent to make a game like BG3. Or both. Based on everything I've played and seen, BG3 is a well-produced game but the idea that its budget reached anywhere near that of the typical AAA game seems totally ridiculous to me. It has no armies of investors ready to shovel money at their studio. It also has relatively small world maps that are content-dense. This is an older style of sandbox design that started with games like Gothic way back in 2000 because the tech was not there for larger worlds. So instead of complaining about it, designers adapted and I still believe Gothic is a very good game (although the combat did not age as well, the world is very well designed). It's a pretty cheap way to make an RPG; less map means less time and money spent on assets. But this type of intelligent design requires talent and passion and breathing room afforded by management. None of these things are in good supply in the typical AAA studio. Not because the devs are inherently worse, but because the studios are simply not ran that way. Their data has told them it's not cost efficient to make "truly" good games and it makes them angry when they're proven wrong. And like the data nerds they are, they cry "statistical outlier" and pretend it never happened.
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@xxm.6980 The difference is that when a game like Diablo 4 is being developed, entire teams of people are coming up with strategies to make monetized content and make sure people buy it. They spend millions of dollars on hiring people that do nothing but sit there and shit out gear skins for people to buy, and go to brainstorming meetings to come up with battle pass progressions. None of that shit exists in BG3, so Larian never had to spend money on it. Making a big budget MTX game is a huge gamble that only the wealthiest AAA studios can afford. I would be surprised if BG3's budget even broke $100 million and I would expect half of the budget to be purely marketing. For reference, Battlefield 4 cost $100 million to produce (not market) which makes sense -- think about all the highly detailed maps, textures, buildings etc. that are in that game and all the high fidelity sound effects that were recorded by professionals that rented the actual military hardware. BG3 has a lot of time and care put into it, but very few of the hallmarks of a huge budget high production value game.
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@johnlinks Being real for a moment, I've never played a CRPG that didn't have a game-breaking/exploitable build or bugs. It kinda comes with the genre territory and is, in fact, a big reason many people play CRPGs. They feel rewarded for being ingenious enough to come up with these builds or strategies. It only makes matters worse when the RPG is an adaptation of an existing rules system like D&D 5e, known for its exploitable builds.
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@Oliver_the_place Well, I tried to explain it to you, but you are already convinced that I am malicious (since you said I was being disingenuous) so I'm not sure if any further discussion will matter. In fact, I don't even know why you replied to me if you are convinced I am being dishonest. Let me try to explain it another way. Imagine 2 games are being developed, A and B. The same developers make both games and let's assume they are in the same state of mind for both games. Except, in game B, there is a management initiative for monetization to satisfy investors. Game B will necessarily be worse than game A for the reasons stated in both my and your own posts ("predatory monetization = bad game"). But, to the observer, they will appear to have been developed by completely different groups of people due to how drastically monetization design patterns will change game B. In a similar way to how Diablo 2 and its remake are completely different to Diablo 4. You are suggesting that Larian devs are talented and that is why their game is successful. I am suggesting that Diablo 4 devs could be talented and we would never know.
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