Online games news Tedious Retro Gamer, 12-08-2023
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If you are one of the hundreds of thousands of people who played the recently published Baldur’s Gate 3, you might have missed that you are actually playing a really bad game. Well, not actually bad game, it’s more like "a game bad for the industry". Yup, it’s Elden Ring all over again.
Just hours after the premiere of Baldur’s Gate 3 the AAA game designers (to be precise: some AAA game designers) went bananas on social media. Their consensus? "It looks like Baldur’s Gate 3 is a great game, but you should not expect other games to be as good as this one". Yeah, let’s take a moment for this sentence to sink in. Someone made a good game, but this could kill the gaming industry because now people will have unrealistic expectations for other AAA games. Yup, someone, presumable a grown up, actually put that on his social media profile.
On surface, it sounds like a complete nonsense, but if you think about it... it really is a complete nonsense. In a year, in which some of the biggest premieres turned out to be wall-to-wall crapfests (like Redfall, Forspoken, Lord of the Rings Gollum) some AAA designer (not for long, hopefully) has the balls to fight the real enemy - expectations of his clients. They came up with different excuses, like Larian Studios (developer of Baldur’s Gate 3) is a big studio, it took about 7 years to finish the project, so why should you expect other big studios to put the same effort into their products? It’s completely unrealistic, right?
Let’s compare this to the f.e. car industry - just because Ferrari is making great cars, you should not expect other car manufacturers to build the same quality cars, right? Yes, it is logical, but there is one small difference - Ferrari costs perhaps 10 times the money you paid for your own car, while Baldur’s Gate 3 (even though the price could be seen as steep) is in the same price range as their competitors or in some cases it is even cheaper (f.e. it is cheaper than Forspoken and Redfall).
So, dear AAA developers, perhaps it would be best if you leave the communication with the public to people within your companies, who know what they are doing, and you just stick to what you are good at, which is making the games. Although, looking at Baldur’s Gate 3, let’s say stick to what you are reasonably good at. What I’m trying to say is the same old rule: better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.
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