this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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I had a hard time making it through this video. This guy's shtick is grating. At 1.5x speed, there's still tons of pregnant pauses for where he thinks I should be laughing, I guess. However, this is a point I agree with:
Baldur's Gate 3 would be just as fulfilling of an RPG at half the length. I'm in Act 3, about 70 hours in, and I skipped a lot of stuff along the way knowing how much game I had ahead of me. Further still, there's a lot of stuff I didn't do along that same way because my character build didn't open those avenues or because I just didn't know it was there. It's a very dense and deep game, and that's what's important to me rather than the length. It's important to me that they continue to do what they've done well in Divinity: Original Sin with all of those tiny interactibles and the way all of the systems work together to allow you to come up with your own solutions. The raised standard, to me, is that they managed to iterate on that with Mass Effect level production value in the conversation system where you don't just get a story that's written well or voiced well but also performed well. On top of that, the game brings back old standards that this industry mostly forgot in that it has LAN and direct IP connections as well as being available DRM-free so that the game or its multiplayer features don't have an expiration date attached to them. I didn't necessarily need this game to be 100 hours long in order to get the enjoyment I'm getting out of it.
And the thing that the author of this video seemed to miss is that several of the quote reply tweets to that thread were from AAA developers, which is where the IGN video came from (which wasn't even the first video to bring this up). The same thing happened when AAA devs behind the likes of Assassin's Creed were publicly criticizing aspects of Elden Ring as though people weren't fed up with the kind of experience that Assassin's Creed provides, and it led to that famous UI barf mock-up of Elden Ring. Elden Ring, like Baldur's Gate 3, only happened because its team iterated on something smaller, and it too avoids lousy monetization schemes.
Completely disagree.
Noodle is hilarious and his pregnant pauses are top-tier.
This video was specifically defending the indie dev, Nelson, that made the post that kicked this stuff off. Sure, other AAA devs responded to him, but it was Nelson that got most of the negative attention and death threats, even though his opinions were VERY measured and reasonable. It was also a criticism of the IGN guy that directed everyone's attention and pitchforks towards Nelson by cherry-picking his statements and taking them out of context.
The specifics of the length/scope of the game are honestly less important, IMO. The video is just a level-headed look at why this excellent game is so excellent, and why it's unrealistic to expect every game from now on to be like this. That, and he's trying to get gamers to chill the fuck out and stop with the death threats.
Obviously I wouldn't support death threats, but moving on...
Which the author didn't acknowledge or seem to understand why the IGN video was calling out AAA devs.
It's realistic to expect the likes of Bethesda and BioWare to meet a lot of expectations from Baldur's Gate 3. Or rather, it's fair to hold those games to certain standards that Baldur's Gate 3 manages, but none of us should expect those studios to meet those standards, because they haven't shown they're interested in meeting those standards. BioWare made Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 and Neverwinter Nights, D&D games with cooperative multiplayer, like Baldur's Gate 3, with no reliance on the publisher's server to play. When multiplayer shows up in Mass Effect though, it's some microtransaction-fueled horde mode instead of just replicating a tabletop RPG and letting your buddies play the other members in your squad on missions; Fallout 76 was Bethesda's idea of multiplayer Fallout, which is far worse. You can make decisions in games from those studios, but their character sheets have been sanded down, as have skill checks, and outside of putting a bucket on someone's head in Bethesda games, you often can't use the systems to get creative like you can in Baldur's Gate 3 or a tabletop RPG. It's fair to hold these games to those standards. Given the success of games like Disco Elysium and Kickstarter games like Torment: Tides of Numenera, I don't think anyone's really expecting scope and scale like BG3 from indie efforts, but those games do let you feel like you can play them your own way in a way that AAA's most expensive efforts often don't. That's what this argument always felt like to me from the perspective of the IGN video which, once again, was not the progenitor of the argument, even if it had the most eyes.