“I can’t stress enough how often I’d hear a retail rep declare a genre/style/look was dead with zero supporting data.”
I mean… yeah, retailer gut checks were a major driver for the industry for ages. The entire myth of the videogame crash in the early eighties, blown out of proportion as it is, comes down to retailers having a bad feeling about gaming after Atari. I’m big on preservation and physical media, but don’t downplay the schadenfreude caused by the absolutely toxic videogame retail industry entirely collapsing after digital distribution became a thing. I’ll buy direct to consumer from boutique retailers all day before I go back to buckets of games stolen from little kids and retailers keeping shelf space hostage based on how some rep’s E3’s afterparties went.
That said, those guys really did flood the market with cookie cutter games in a very short time there for a while. There were a LOT of these.
Weirdly, Neverwinter Nights must have done extremely well for how much credit Bioware gives it for redefining the genre, but at the time I remember being frustrated by it. It looked worse than the 2D stuff, the user generated content stuff was fun to mess with it didn’t create the huge endless content mill you’d expect from something like that today.
I should go look up if there’s any data about how commercially successful it really was somewhere. Any pointers?
Agreed about Neverwinter Nights, BG2 was (and remains) one of my favourite games and I remember being super hyped for NWN. Being an earlyish transition to 3D really did hurt it visually, much the same as how Final Fantasy VI has aged much better than VII graphically.
The big letdown for me though was the cut down party size. BG2 was defined by the companions and party banter and I recall NWN feeling extremely lacking in comparison.
The post BG2 hype combined with the move to 3D and the very heavily advertised campaign builder probably built very intense hype though, so it wouldn’t surprise me at all if NWN sold extremely well despite not having as lasting of a legacy as BG2 for example.
Wikipedia?
I’m no fan of sports games. I dont play sports games. Also the kind of people I hang with also dislike sports games. And the last sport games I read about, a decade ago, had horrible reviews and awful graphics. So therefor I declare the Sports game genre for dead! /s
The /s is not needed. I was quite impressed to hear that EA Sports is one of the main money makers of EA despite having each new game as a buggier version of a previous one, only with an updated roster. I had no idea they were so popular and the last FIFA I played properly was in 2003.
So we are out there and we do think like that.Did you know that EA lost the FIFA license? FIFA decided that they wanted the whole cake so they’ve taken to developing the future FIFA games themselves.
EA is obviously continuing to develop their golden cow, now called EA Sports FC.
No, I didn’t. Huh. Still, golden cow is right. Because what it produces is still a pile of manure.
Considering the way they responded to ESPN football back when I was younger, I cheer on every time I hear bad things about EA Sports.
For those too young or who don’t recall… ESPN (or I should say, a company who licensed ESPN) came out with a budget football game 2000ish. They charged $20 for it, and it blew that year’s Madden game out of the water in terms of quality and reviews. It was situated to force the industry to pivot from AAA to lovingly-crafted AA titles by teams that clearly cared about the product being fun.
So EA gave the NFL a metric fuckton of money for exclusivity to murder the competition.
The end.
Huh. I was wondering about the name change when I bought FC 24 for my nephew this xmas. He made it very clear that they had changed names so that I didnt buy the wrong one, but he didnt say why it had changed. 🤯
Yep, that’s why! I’m guessing he was clear because he wanted the newest version of the same game. No idea if the official game is any good or not. Could be it’s a complete disaster.
madden should be dead but the people who buy it are literally like heroin addicts
all year they swear they wont buy it, its going to garbage like the last game, and then it comes out and they spend thousands on it. rinse repeat. i wish somebody else could use the nfl liscence just so EA or the other devs have to actually try making a good game
Last fifa I played didn’t even have number in it. It was called Fifa Soccer, I believe from '93? Good times back then…
For me, the problem is “isometric”. There have been very few games like that I’ve finished compared to others. It feels artificially constrained, especially in a 3D environment, when visibility is limited to like <10 meters away from your character. It’s worse if the camera rotates because then I find it quite hard to make a mental map.
I don’t have this issue with a top-down perspective generally. Maybe those tend to be more 2D (even if rendered they can’t really include environmental verticality) so it’s easier to navigate.
Dragon Age: Origins had the perfect camera that let you look around like an action game and then switch to the tactical camera. It’s astounding that modern rpgs cannot match how good the camera was in a game from 2009.
I adore BG3. But fighting the camera is harder than fighting the mobs.
Although it did get easier when I started using a controller to get around and a mouse to fight.
IMO there’s very few instances where an isometric camera makes sense these days unless you’re explicitly trying to capture the nostalgia of old isometric games.
I do find it’s a barrier for some fairly modern games I want to play like Divinity Original Sin 1+2 and Disco Elysium. I wish that wasn’t the case…
I’m not sure I’d call D:OS isometric, definitely birds eye view camera. I believe there are mods for divinity as well as BG3 that allow more dynamic cameras. I have one for bg3 and it’s definitely a different experience but if that’s one you’re after, you should try it out.
Cool I’ll take a look at mods, good suggestion. Yeah I’d like to be able to get more of an over-shoulder view sometimes during combat or exploration. Or at least lower to the ground.
That’s definitely possible! Nexus mods has several camera mods
Fair enough on Divinity: Original Sin, but it won’t really be a factor in Disco Elysium due to how it plays (or reads, rather). If you’re interested in DE just give it a shot and treat it as an interactive novel (which is what it is, really). The camera won’t be a factor in that game, trust me.
Ok, thanks. I’ve played maybe an hour of DE so far and maybe it was the controls moreso than the perspective that felt awkward. I might just need to tinker or get acclimated. Since it’s all story I want to play it on my TV or Steam Deck, so gamepad input rather than M+KB.
That’s fair, yeah. I played it with M+KB but have heard many others complain about awkward controls on a gamepad, and can imagine it isn’t ideal.
I always assumed it was the rise of consoles that was to blame, as CRPGs are a bit more cumbersome to control on those platforms. BG3 proved it’s possible, but it’s certainly not the platform it was built to be played on.
Casual players, shorter sessions, rise of first\third person action games like TES\DA targeting the same crowd, acting and dubbing characters to the same standard BG3 just did. Classic CRPGs like NWN do seem risky and expensive.
It’s amazing how much dubs can help hold a player’s attention. My mate loves 40k way more than DND 5E but he can’t play Rogue Trader with me for hours on end because it was strategically dubbed while BG3 was comprehensively dubbed.
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But BG3 isn’t isometric?
Ah, my mistake. I thought it meant ‘top-down’ perspective.
And they are probably correct.
If this game wasn’t called bg 3 it wouldn’t be selling like it it.
Rouge trader hit #2 for a day or two and went away. It’ll be a mid success and make some money from the 40k name. But other crogs just don’t sell as much and are risky.
Rouge trader hit #2 for a day or two and went away
Probably because there’s only so much makeup you can sell before the novelty wears off.
Poor business choice, you’ll always be in the red
Counter: If they’d called in Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition The Videogame it would have sold just as well.
I don’t know, I think the BG branding on top of it did help with the hype because of BG2’s reputation and existing fanbase. The D&D aspect is definitely a bigger deal though.
Ultimately I think it sold well because it’s a really good game that was easy to turn into fun memes and clips. Plus early access meant there were a ton of people who already played it which helped the hype even more.
I don’t agree. Plenty of DND forgotten realms games failed after bg2.
Long time between BG2’s release and the phenomenon that is Fifth Edition DnD.
The popularity and widespread appeal of dungeons and dragons in recent years can’t be overstated
It would probably only have sold as much as D:OS 3. Which wouldn’t have been a bad sale either, just not as much as BG3.
Agreed, but Bg was FAR more complex and involved. The high quality acting is expensive as fuck which makes it a higher risk.
I think you are overestimating the brand recognition of a game series from the 2000s.
Can we please Not act like the name alone is making this game such a succes
No. It’s a good game that’s 100% helped along because of the name.
Essentially they admit to having no self confidence and believe what any Gamestop rep tells them, then?
It was basically impossible to self-publish before Steam became massively popular. You needed a publisher to make the physical games and get them into brick and mortar stores. If the publishers all decided something, you didn’t have a choice but to listen.
I have to assume the blame of losing confidence would have lied more on the publishers stopping funding, not on Sawyer and co.
Larian has had several massively successful Kickstarter campaigns and releases in the genre, proving those concerns wrong again and again. If a developer really wanted to make a great CRPG in all those years, nothing was stopping them. Clearly they weren’t interested enough in it. Of course many of them will now jump on the huge hype train of BG3 and claim they‘ve always been oh so faithful.
That is not to say Publishers aren‘t also to blame of course. It‘s a bit tragic that BG3 was only even possible to become such an elaborate project with a huge investment from Tencent. And I can‘t speak for Larian of course but I don‘t think that was their first choice going by how secretive they‘ve been about Tencent‘s involvement.
But yeah if any dev from Bioware or Obsidian now claims they considered to make a massively huge CRPG like BG3 or anything comparable. As in actually bringing it up during a meeting with execs only to be shut down. I‘d have to call them big fat liars.
“massively successful” in the context of Larian’s entries in the Divinity series or even Pillars of Eternity, which moved almost three quarters of a million units in its first year on sale, don’t count as successes in the eyes of AAA publishers like EA or Ubisoft. Dragon Age: Inquisition moved more than a million copies in its first week on sale, was Bioware’s biggest launch (probably ever, given the current state of the studio), and still barely made an impression in EA’s bottom line. In the same year FIFA 12 sold 3 million copies in its first week, and with its Ultimate Team gacha system represented a much longer stream of ongoing revenue than anything a self-contained single player RPG could provide.
Not to mention, deep single-player RPGs are massive undertakings, that appeal to a somewhat fickle playerbase. EA and Activision have demonstrated with FIFA, Madden, and CoD that they can cheaply reskin the same game over and over on an annual basis and move multiple millions of copies each time, without making an effort. Why take a risk on a relatively niche genre where your game could flop because of an off story beat or wonky mechanic, when you can just stick your last megahit in the photocopier and have it poop out another nine-figure megahit?
BG3 is of course a massive success and should be celebrated, but big publishers want to maximize their return on investment, and right now that means wedging live service offerings, loot box mechanics, and micro transactions into whatever genre maintains the most engagement over time. Right now that means multiplayer shooters and sports games.
but big publishers want to maximize their return on investment, and right now that means wedging live service offerings, loot box mechanics, and micro transactions into whatever genre maintains the most engagement over time.
Oh look, there’s Suicide Squad over there. I wonder how it’s doing…
But Obsidian launched a campaign for Pillars of Eternity on Kickstarter a mere 3 years after the creation of the platform. As soon as they could, they did.
There is a ~6 year gulf between the point that Sawyer mentions and the creation of Kickstarter during which that option was simply not available.
Larian has had several massively successful Kickstarter
Well that’s the thing though, right, the genre actually literally had a major revival when Kickstarter became a thing. Before Kickstarter existed no one really understood the power of crowdsourcing.
… How do you use kickstarter before kickstarter exists, tho
