Baldurs Gate 3 & Game Dev recently

Off-topic
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And this is how gaming started. It’s a shame what it’s come to. Gamers used to make games they loved. And I think that ended with World of Warcraft, tbh.

Now, developers make games for companies that will make money. Unless, as you say, it’s the true independent shop.

I don’t think it’s solvable at all, at least not on a large scale. Sure you might get a game changed, here or there, but not the entire industry. It’s just like politics – you either have to have a full-scale rebellion against the powers-that-be, or nothing will change. Why? Because there’s always enough supporters of the status quo (for whatever reasons), that there’s no urgency to change it. What caused Blizzard to completely overhaul D3? A handful of rational voices on their message boards, or a full-scale rebellion, by the gaming community, against their business practices and the shittiness of the game itself? Do you really think we’ll see that level of (coordinated) outrage, at the entire gaming industry? Doubtful, sadly…

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Yeah. I personally believe there is an inverse effect to money/uniqueness when it comes to art. The more money thrown at something the lower the uniqueness threshold because you have to cater to the simplest form to attract the most people. I think the ‘holy grail’ of any art (gaming, film, music, whatever) are those lightning in a bottle moments where something that really does have depth hits a lot of people. But those are so much an exception that, while it’s okay to hold this as a goal, to be surprised when someone doesn’t reach it is a little disingenuous because the basic odds of human nature or so overwhelmingly stacked against it.

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I agree with you, but a retort that’s often levied against what you’re saying is that if you have the most money or the best platform, you’ll naturally attract the best artists and create the best art. Supposedly this has to be true because it sells the best, which is not a good measure of the quality of art. That’s a much longer conversation. Suffice it to say, the Mona Lisa doesn’t outsell Campbell’s Soup but that doesn’t mean the label artwork on their cans is a masterpiece with deep significance about the human condition or anything.

But another thing people who claim this don’t seem to understand is that the monetization of art is temporary. In other words, you can only sell your greatest idea once. And in all likelihood, you won’t exactly be set for life at that point if you do. For this reason, people who create art don’t necessarily do great art primarily for short-term gain. Artists, genuinely creative people, aren’t only motivated by money or social status. Very often they’re creative because they’re trying to find a role, or a game to play in society if you will, other than money and social status. Rather than adopting everybody else’s ideas about beauty and happiness, they’re trying to discover their own insights about those things. And a huge fraction of those people, especially the bordering-on-an-illness-brilliant ones, are higher in negative emotion or introversion to the point that they don’t work well with others. They’re going to be the ones that start those indie game companies or freelance because they’re unfit for corporate life temperamentally.

And even if they were, a lot of them find the idea of giving up their best ideas to those types of companies disgusting. A lot of their identity and self-satisfaction is tied up in their art. They will monetize it, but not if it means losing ownership of it completely and forever. Only a handful of creative people are willing to do that, which is why the talent pool for the entertainment industry becomes more and more limited the more oppressive and eternal that IP law gets and the fewer and fewer unique ideas are left to try in a field or genre. This whole issue is made worse by the fact that a unique idea is way more valuable than it was 50 or 100 years ago, because there’s so few of them left. Especially good ones.

I mean, this feeds into a longer discussion about ideas, but cut that short, we generally accept at this point that there are a limited number of kinds of stories or ways of doing things that are interesting to humans, and even fewer than that make sense as narratives. That being the case, most “new” ideas or stories are just reconfigurations of tropes or archetypes that already exist. “Superhero” is one of those. Sure, you have unlimited names and maybe character designs, but try to think of a super-ability that nobody has ever done before. Then, convince yourself that it’s not extremely similar to any of the existing ones while also being more interesting than most of them. If you can do that, (not saying it’s impossible, just saying it’s not easy to do,) then you’re a creative person and you probably should do something with that ability. A lot of people can’t or don’t like to think the way that you do. And if you can’t, well there you go. It’s not as easy as it seems. Lots of people try and fail to do this every day because the financial and social incentives are considerable. Consider also that “superhero” or “superhuman” themselves aren’t even that unique of concepts: That general idea goes all the way back to some of the oldest if not the oldest mythology. They are just mild modern twists on concepts we already had.

Some bonus advice for major companies: If you want to inspire a particularly brilliant creative person to do a big budget game, make it all about them or an IP that they already own; that way, they will be completely devoted to it as their own brand. You will get to use all their ideas and they will get to keep the satisfaction of the thing they made not being dead to them forever. Just be sure to put it in the contract that you get to keep your right to make and sell that thing going forward, so there can’t be any take-backsies on the thing you made, and you’re set. That would be the honest and artist-friendly way of doing things, in my opinion. We haven’t seen it enough, if ever.

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My point is that games arent as limited as films. Films with poor art and no music are near impossible to get off the ground.

However if we are talking about limited successes that get things off the table, games like slice and dice, vampire survivors, backpack hero, etc.

Those are often made by literally 1 or 2 people on a shoestring budget, and they earned enough for them to retire and/or fund a bigger company.

Not saying there arent some similarities between them, however i think the environment is different enough that comparisons to the film industy fall flat on most subjects.

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Very often who’s doing those are the people who are temperamentally unable to tolerate big offices and corporate time management. That’s a talent pool that those bigger companies and agencies have a hard time getting access to.

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They say this about why you should use the union (SAG-AFTRA) when doing indie films as well. And yes, those things tend to be ‘competent’ gate keepers, but not to talent. I have worked with very low talented SAG actors and very disgustingly talented non-SAG actors. What it DOES tend to gate keep is work ethic. Because it costs money to be in the union, you generally get someone who is at least attempting to put their money where their mouth is when they say they want to be a working artist.

But, the flip side to having access to that talent/workpool as a big money company also comes with a seedy underside that not a lot of people recognize. I am a HUGE advocate that adversity breeds innovation and inspiration. When you have ‘all the moneys’ you can simply throw that at your problem and ‘works itself out.’ This is why we have the conveyor belt superhero movies now. They’re all fun, sure. But like take out food. 3 hours later your realize your still hungry. (Again, I’ve got nothing against fun movies and they CLEARLY have the formula down to a science.) I still hold that this is why really breakthrows and genius in any art starts way lower down the money tower. What is problematic is nowdays the moment this happens they drop a bazillion dollars in those artist laps and most of them have no clue what to do with it. Look at Josh Trask. Look at Phillip Lord and Christopher Miller. Chloe Zhao. Their uniqueness as indie artists was squashed when they had to produce big bucks.

And of course, you are totally correct that there are two sides to all of this. There are successes. It’s a cutthroat business. (artists so often forget that part of it.) I find myself more and more everyday watching stuff made before the engine and computer graphics subsumed everything because the slickness and polished look that every main stream film has to have now looks utterly soulless to my eyes. It’s all so manufactured. (Totally personal though so I’m trying not to be too erudite about it.)

I like LE for all it’s rough edges. I do think that LE has some rough edges that most definitely should be fixed/adjusted/changed/improved. And I’m currently enjoying the Balder’s Gate run through I decided to jump back into after this thread popped up. I haven’t finished the first act yet (i think I’m close) but it’s a great game. I will say, the ‘romance’ subplots though seem reallllllllllllllyyyyyyyyyyyy in your face? LOLFOF

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Yeah those same wigs with all the money in the universe are afraid to take any risks. There’s a far greater risk of a movie being a flop than there is a chance of it being a home run, so they will go with the tried and true formula for whatever they’re making and focus group all of the joy and creativity out of it before the end. The more corporate something is, the more it will try to avoid failure rather than genuinely reach for greatness. That was something I mentioned earlier in this thread. It’s had a negative influence on our ideas as a culture, just because these are the same people in nonfiction trying to filter all the information that makes it to us, in addition to being the ones that create all of our (formerly) aspirational fiction.

You’re right though. I think most artists don’t understand the cutthroat-ness of business. Many or most of us have probably been trying to avoid it most of our lives. New ideas sound crazy sometimes, and once in awhile you get labelled the sucker when you show a naive willingness to try new things. The creative tendency tracks directly with openness to experiences. Smack dab in the middle of the most cynical part of the world isn’t the best place for a creative person to be. In fact, a lot of their work ethics aren’t great because they’d rather be out there somewhere else doing something more interesting. Nobody likes dealing with that psychology in a high stress environment with tons of deadlines hanging over them. I admire the creative people who can actually do that, because I can’t. I have to keep my creativity and my work life separate, and heavily reward myself for tolerating work. Luckily what I do now is much less routine and mundane than it used to be, but even now I find myself dissociating during meetings, wishing I was doing literally anything else, haha.

As long as LE allows me to be creative with my character, that’s all I really care about as well. That’s why I’m worried seasons and ladder will eventually ruin that for me. But oh well, such is my life, I suppose. Not the worst problem I could have.

Also I agree about the ‘romance’ side of BG3. That’s one of the big reasons I’m not very interested in it. I’m almost always more curious about and into a good story than a fun game, except in rare instances where I miraculously find both in one package. (This is especially the case in role playing games, where the point is to tag along with a band of adventurers.) And I’m sure there’s a lot of missteps in the narrative that would only serve to annoy me and ruin my day. I spend enough time yelling at the shows I watch; I don’t also need to yell at the games I play. I wouldn’t have anywhere to retreat to, haha.

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But the big budget things sell, not because of graphics, or soundtrack but because of ADVERTISING and NAME RECOGNITION

The reason nobody plays chronicron or slormancer is because nobody has heard of them. Meanwhile a game with shittier graphics can sell like crazy(vampire survivers) because some vtubers decided to try it. And many AAA games end up selling poorly because of lack of advertising or because of advertising that is openly hostile to the fans.

Even Treasure planet, which was made with a bunch of money ended up failing due to lack of advertising and bad scheduling. And that film was not only made by disney but is considered a classic.

TL;DR graphics does not sell games, marketing does

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I mean it’s some A, some B. Technically graphics are marketing. Just depends on if they market them or not. Almost none of the value of a game’s actual game play content comes from the graphics, unless and until we’re talking about things like having enough pixels on the screen to render what you actually need for the game to be the game. But you could put every game on lowest settings and it still be the same game, so the higher settings are just fluff to impress the audience or create atmosphere. I’m not opposed to those things as being part of the experience, but you can’t say that they’re the game play content, strictly speaking.

In either case, I agree with you though about the marketing. Brand recognition and marketing are why a lot of smaller studios have a hard time competing in this environment. But those are almost purely money-based issues also, so it’s the same difference. If you don’t have equal to your game’s budget in marketing dollars, it’s kind of hard to make it take off, regardless of how you go about it.

But it’s equally worth considering that things like poor game launches and lack of content do cause social media backlash and bad reviews, so games of a certain type or of a large enough scope to need money can fail when they would have otherwise succeeded due to a lack of development and infrastructure investment. In other words, making a good game isn’t nothing when it comes to success in the marketplace.

That’s not to say that the most successful games always have both; especially not these days. However, I think Baldur’s Gate 3 is an example of a game that does. They had a big marketing push and they made a game that people happened to want to play. That’s a pretty good strategy overall.

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So you just skipped right over that part where I said that I actually know people who won’t play the game, because of the graphics? Or was it not said clearly enough?

Until Steam, and the whole search for games functionality, I might agree with you about advertising and marketing. But that’s kind of out the window when someone can just be like “I want to play an XYZ type of game ”, and find an entire list of them. Now days, you can search the internet for “top XYZ games”, search Steam, view them on Twitch or Youtube, etc.

You’ll also find that NAME RECOGNITION can also hurt a game, simply because of “Blizzard fucking sucks, and I will never play another one of their games!” attitudes.

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It probably can be argued that having “good graphics” is a shortcut to success these days because they’re a shortcut to getting the general public to pay attention to them. Maybe for a particular type of game, there’s a minimum amount of graphics people accept. But there are counterexamples to this: The main one that comes to mind is Undertale. That game is very low-tech and it was still able to break through to success by the sheer amount of hype and word of mouth it received, as well as the goodwill that its creator had built up over the years making fan games.

I think it’s hard to say for sure that nobody plays certain games because their graphics aren’t good enough, but it is safe to say that a game’s reach is limited by its visuals if it doesn’t have a niche or a path to success other than appealing to the “this is the coolest looking game available” demographic. Graphics definitely matter to a lot of people.

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It might just be like packaging, since it’s usually the first thing people see about a game (other than maybe a cutscene or 2). Look how much money goes into packaging of products at the grocery, to get one’s attention…mainly kids’ foods. The same could be argued for graphics of a game, if it’s blocky, and looks like it was ported straight out of 1986, then I’m betting many people will just pass it by. But if the main character looks like Sean Bean, then I’m betting more people will stop and at least give it a thorough look.

Since we just addressed marketing and advertising, with the drying up of the physical-media market, cutscenes and gameplay samples are all people have to go by these days. Money no longer has to be spent on fancy box art to sell the game at Gamestop, instead that needs to go into the graphical dept in order to lure people to give it a try.

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I felt this way about John Carter. Great movie. Horribly, HORRIBLY marketed. I mean when it first started hitting the trailer circuit it at least still had “of Mars” attached to it. Also by Disney.

Yet things like friggin Avatar (which are only good because of the Cameron’s geek-on for technology) is one of the two highest grossing films of all time. :face_vomiting:

Case in point. Avatar.

Can anyone tell how much I can’t stand that movie? :rofl:

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At least it had better writing than D3.

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My 3 year old son made up a story about his poop this morning. That was better writing than D3, or the majority of WoW, post-WotLK.

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At the same time, there’s a lot of people like me who remember retro games and buy them because they look like retro games. You can find any number of pixel games on Steam right now that are super successful. So it really depends on a number of things. How stream-able a game is probably has a huge influence on how popular and successful it is these days as well.

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Oh, for sure. There are quite a few people who like that nostalgia feel. But, I have never heard of anyone say “there’s no way I’m playing that game, the graphics are too nice”. I never said it was impossible for a small budget game to be successful.

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I actually specifically don’t play big budget triple A games because they hurt my eyes. There’s too much garbage on the screen that they think makes the games look nice, when in reality it makes them look like a mess and causes them to run poorly. There was a time when people were allowed to complain about things like optimization, color palette, bloom effects, the neon colors that get overused in certain games, etc. In the decade or two before 2020, this was the case. And yes, there are still people who are critical of the visual design in triple A games; it’s just harder to hear from them these days than it used to be. A lot of that kind of criticism has been watered down or drowned out by social media goodwill campaigns and platform censorship.

If you’re asking me, I think most games that come out these days that people think look good mostly actually look bad. The most recent example is Diablo 4. I think it straight up looks worse than Diablo 3. There’s an unnerving lack of creativity and drabness to the models, effects and environments that makes me notice the influencers they paid off can’t possibly like it as much as they claim to. And I’ve felt this way about pretty much all the shooters and battle royale games that have come out over the last 4 or 5 years. I don’t think people can detect quality the way they used to, to think all these games look good visually. Maybe the only one that actually does is Apex Legends, but it’s so bland and unimaginative compared to Titanfall that I can’t bring myself to care about it.

I’m not entirely sure why so much creativity has been lost so quickly, but I suspect it has to do with the Gen X and Boomer generations aging out of the industry. There’s a generational gap between people who value beauty and people who don’t. That’s what seems to be going on to me, anyway.

But yeah, not everybody likes how these games look. I think a lot of the current audience is young and just can’t tell because they haven’t experienced earlier works to compare them to.

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This is definitely going to be an opinion thing. :smiley: I actually really like the look of d4 (although I don’t play it, because it won’t run on my computer.) I also turn down the saturation by about 33% in LE. Ever since Warhammer aesthetics + Japanese anime color schemes (the massive oversized power armor and giganto weapons and BIGGER!!!) started infiltrating everything from WoW to D3 to Lost Ark) I almost always use my graphics card software to lower saturation and slightly tweak contrast. I’m the guy in Grim Dawn who transmogs all his armor and stuff to the essentially gear that’s in the first tab of the skins. I can’t wait for LE to implement transmogs so can grit up my characters. :rofl: :joy:

EDIT: I should note I LOVE the warhammer lore I’m just not crazy about the visual aesthetic. Probably why I’m more inclined to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay than 40k. Even then I have to tone it down.

And to keep it a bit on topic, I wish I could do more transmoging in Balder’s Gate because some of that stuff is just…Nope. I’d almost rather run around in the camp clothes. :smiley:

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As an artist I find it offensive. Even the UI is awful looking. It looks like D3 but beat with an ugly stick. It has a strong mobile game feel to the color palette and UI designs that looks flat and cheaply accomplished. On top of that, the ambient effects, lighting, skins, shadows, etc. are all inferior to the previous title. There’s no life or depth to what you’re looking at. Every area is one-note and grey-on-grey, brown-on-brown, etc. I respect that other people have other opinions, but I don’t think if you did a visual breakdown of both games side-by-side that D4 would look like much more than an uninspired post-2020 art graduate’s hip reductive interpretation of a Diablo game.

I’d do a video comparing everything in both games but I’m over-employed and I don’t have the time. That and, that would require me to spend time playing Diablo 4 to get footage, which I really don’t want to do. I probably should, but against the tide of the “everything is awesome” social media campaign that has been undertaken for D4, it feels like it wouldn’t be heard anyway. The demographics that have already bought the hype and are dead-set on loving that game no matter what wouldn’t be swayed by my arguments, because they don’t possess the experience or skepticism necessary to assess them in the first place. It’s a catch 22: How do you do games criticism when the younger and probably larger part of the audience playing these games can’t think critically?

As far as gritty visual effects, that also can be taken too far. I feel like Grim Dawn was trying to cover up the fact that they couldn’t do their visual effects as nice at-launch as what people were previously used to in TQ. (Not that the game looks bad; I think it looks fine.) Baldur’s Gate 3 does look a little sleek, but I really have no complaints with it. Admittedly I haven’t seen as much of it, but I don’t think 3D objects that look polished necessarily look bad. That’s never been how I’ve felt. It’s more about whether or they look goofy or plastic-y, and if they’re achieving a convincing appeal if not directly to my suspension of disbelief, then at least to some kind of consistency with the world they’re appearing in.

I mentioned this before, but a lot of the earlier concept art for D3 was really interesting. I do think it’s unfortunate that the early part of the game didn’t express as much of the grungy gothic look and feel of that concept art before the appearance of a lot of the equipment defaulted to the shiny metallic glitz that WoW is known for. Would’ve been really cool to see more of the game look and feel like that.

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