Is Baldur’s Gate 3 the New Standard?
Contributed by DJMMT
Unless you’re living under a rock, you are probably aware that Baldur’s Gate 3 was released on August 3rd, 2023. Oh excuse me, that’s actually a wildly inaccurate claim. While the official launch version of Baldur’s Gate 3 was released on August 3rd of this year, the game was actually made available to purchase and play to the public on October 6th, 2020. For those bad at math, this game has been available to the public for testing and feedback for THREE STRAIGHT YEARS. Before we go any further, I want to clarify something.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a great game. Not only from a critical standpoint, as it’s currently the highest rated PC game on Metacritic with a 97/100, and it has set records for most concurrent players on Steam since the official launch. But also from my own personal standpoint. I had zero interest in the game before the official launch. I had seen the trailers. I remember the releases of Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2, and I had absolutely no interest in playing this game. I’m not a Dungeons & Dragons guy, I don’t usually like CRPGs, and I hated the only other game from Larian Studios I’ve ever played, Divinity: Original Sin II. Yet after playing Baldur’s Gate 3 for just 45 minutes, I was sold. The purpose of this post is not to in any way to disparage Baldur’s Gate 3’s quality as a game. Additionally, I don’t currently own Baldur’s Gate 3. I was given the opportunity to demo it for 45 minutes. I will probably end up buying the PS5 version at some point, but I currently do not own the game and have played it for less than an hour.
I actually don’t want to talk about Baldur’s Gate 3 (BG3) as a game in this post. I want to talk about it, and its development, as a product. Since the game’s “release” I’ve been seeing tons of debate about the quality of BG3 and how other developers need to do better. The argument is that BG3 has set a new standard in game development that all other studios should consider the new normal. Now, while I like the sentiment of this argument, it’s laughably misleading and unrealistic. Once again, gamers have put me in the terrible position of having to defend, at least in part, corporations. Why is this community always filled to the brim with misinformed, garbage takes?
First, let’s talk about the IP problem. BG3 is not only the latest installment in a successful games franchise, you know since it’s the third installment, but it’s also an officially licensed and funded Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) project. Wizards of the Coast, the company that owns D&D, financed this game. That’s not a comment on resources to produce the game by the way. I’m not talking about the budget they had for development. I’m talking about the foundation of both users and expectations that BG3 carries with it. This game was never not going to sell unless it was total shit. There are simply too many fans of the Baldur’s Gate franchise and too many fans of D&D for this game not to be financially successful. Add to that an official endorsement from Wizards of the Coast and you have guaranteed financial success. Meaning that Larian Studios was given the time, resources, and ability to take risks that other developers often don’t have. It’s not fair to compare BG3 to a new IP. Only other highly established and successful franchises/adaptations should even be in the same conversation as BG3. The Witcher, which I’d argue set the standard that BG3 is now living up to, is a fair franchise to compare it to. Something long established with a dedicated fanbase like God of War or Assassin’s Creed is a fair franchise to compare it to. Upcoming games from studios you’ve never even seen before like say Black Myth: Wukong from Game Science is not a fair project for comparison. To be clear, I expect Black Myth: Wukong to be great, and I hope it is. I’m just saying that holding that game and studio to the same standard as BG3 and Larian Studios is objectively unfair.
Second, let’s talk about studio size. It has been reported countless times at this point that Larian Studios, at the time of BG3’s “launch” had 400+ employees. If we assume that at least 90% of them were/are working on BG3, that’s a huge development team. It’s not the largest of all time. But it is quite a lot. More than most games get. Again, a franchise like Assassin’s Creed can match those numbers. I’ve seen it reported that just under 1,000 developers worked on Assassin’s Creed: Origins. Whereas God of War Ragnarök apparently had just about 400. So again, if we’re talking about massively successful franchises that have been running for more than a decade by large publishers with barrels of money, then by all means consider BG3 a new standard for AAA RPG titles. But to say that it should set a new standard for all games is flagrantly unrealistic, and frankly it’s unfair.
Third, and in my opinion most important, let’s talk about the intentions of the core gameplay experience. BG3 is a story focused RPG that has dynamic plots and several playable characters (race + class + origin). What this means is that the game is built to be played multiple times. Like D&D, it never gets old, just different. You can play several campaigns and never experience the same exact outcomes twice. But that’s not a nod to BG3. That’s a core component of the genre. You cannot make a CRPG with a single character, a linear storyline with no choices, and a single outcome. That, by definition, is not a CRPG. Meaning that if you want to tap into the CRPG market, you have to make a game that allows for and encourages multiple playthroughs. And there are tons of games like that going back decades. My favorite CRPG, if you count it, is Dragon Age: Origins (2009). To be clear, I know some people probably don’t count that title. But even it allows for several playable characters (race + class + origin), has dynamic storytelling based on your decisions, and multiple outcomes/endings. That’s the genre. These games are not built to be one offs. Meaning that we shouldn’t commend games in this genre for being games in this genre. That’s just the bare minimum of the genre. The problem with comparing games in general is that not all games are in the same genre, and thus can’t fairly be held to the exact same standards.
I love Ratchet & Clank. I’ve been playing that franchise since the original game on PS2 back in 2002. It’s one of the few franchises that I can say has only gotten better over time and I have never grown tired of. I attribute the fact that I never get bored with these games to the fact that the games don’t come out that often and I never play any single installment more than twice. Preferably, I’d play them once, but I always get the platinum trophy in R&C games, and usually that requires a second playthrough. I can live with that without getting irritated with any of the games. But I usually don’t spend more than maybe 30 – 40 hours on any one installment. And I’m fine with that. I don’t want to play R&C for hundreds of hours. In fact, I’d probably go insane if I did. So the question is how would one apply the BG3 development model to a game like Ratchet & Clank?
Again, BG3 was in early access for three years. It did not launch perfect. It beta tested, while making a profit, for three years, and then after getting the game to a point where it felt as near perfect as it needed to be to do well with reviewers, it finally “launched.” While I personally don’t buy early access games, I don’t have a problem with developers using this method to create and release their projects. It does seem odd to do it with a AAA title, but that’s only because we’re not used to it. Ubisoft has a program built to accomplish the same thing. I know, because I’m a member of it. And as such I’ve played Skull & Bones for more than 100 hours at this point. I can’t talk about the game, since I’m under NDA. But the idea of developers letting actual gamers play their games and using that feedback to improve them for literally years is nothing new. The difference is that Larian Studios was charging people to help improve their game. Is that model something that a majority of gamers would want to see applied to all AAA titles? How would it even work with a shorter game like R&C?
Imagine if you were given the ability to buy an early access version of a 20-hour AAA game. And by early access I mean three or more years out from full release. You’d be done with the game before it ever got close to launch. Assuming it’s released to early access in a state where you can actually reach the end of the campaign, which is usually the case for early access titles with an actual ending, you’d finish the game years before launch. Even if you played it multiple times, it would still be done and dusted for you long before reaching a launch state. It took me 200 hours to get 100% completion in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. Are you going to play through the next R&C game 10x? And even if you did, is that going to take you three years? Because let’s be clear, it took at least three years for Insomniac Games to make the latest installment of the franchise, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. But that doesn’t mean people would enjoy playing it for that long.
The reality is that BG3 is an iceberg development story. People are seeing the tip, believing it’s the full iceberg, and then trying to apply that tip to other games. Meanwhile, they’re ignoring the entire iceberg below the surface that explains how BG3 was able to “launch” in such a complete state. And even then, the game still has bugs. It’s not a mess like the average Bethesda title is at launch, but they’ve already released multiple patches since launch. And that’s OK. What’s not OK is pretending that gamers would be happy with the AAA industry applying the model used to develop and release BG3 to all other types of games. There are certainly some games where this would work fine. Multiplayer focused games, such as COD, assuming they didn’t do an annual release model, would be able to hold an active audience that was willing to purchase the game unfinished and participate in the testing. Really long open world games that are going to have a ton of content, pre and post launch, like the current style of Assassin’s Creed titles would work. Sports games, again assuming the removal of an annual release schedule, would probably work. But the average linear story game would suffer under this model. Especially if the story isn’t Final Fantasy levels of length. And no, I do not want to see every game try to be as long as a JRPG. Too many games overstay their welcome already.
Therein lies the dishonesty of this argument. People want the outcomes of BG3, but they would absolutely not tolerate the steps to get there in a majority of cases falling outside the CRPG genre. Would it work for a FromSoftware soulslike? Absolutely. Would it work for Starfield? Almost certainly. Would it work for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2? Probably not. Certainly not if the game wasn’t being propped up by the power of the Spider-Man IP. I don’t even think it would work for a 3D Mario game. Nintendo would never do such a thing anyway, but that’s beside the point. The point is that the model is not actually universally executable. And again, this is while ignoring the budget requirements to do BG3.
What we can talk about are the things that games in general can and should start doing in response to BG3. All games should be released without the expectation of selling DLC down the road. Completed games at launch, as far as content is concerned, should go back to being the norm. No microtransactions in story driven games should go back to being the norm. You should get everything the game has to offer for your $70 purchase. These are things we should demand from developers. But that also assumes we’re talking about PVE, story focused games. It’s an entirely different business model than competitive multiplayer focused titles, which I don’t really play much to begin with. But even I can see that it’s entirely disingenuous to compare BG3 to Overwatch 2. If you want my honest opinion on Overwatch 2 and games like it, I don’t understand why people keep buying those trash games. But they do, so I’m not going to demand that studios stop making them. But that doesn’t mean we should compare steak to McDonald’s hamburgers and call it a fair comparison.
I do hope that the industry takes some important notes from BG3. But I don’t expect nor want BG3’s development model to become the expected standard in the industry. Because ultimately that will lead to the death of far more games than it will make better. Not to mention that it will make it even less likely for publishers to take a risk at building new IPs. Really, the standard should be something more practical like Ghost of Tsushima. But that’s a post for another time.
