This is a hilarious controversy to me because it is so obviously a labor dispute but nobody is covering it that way.
If you work as a creative and your product doesn’t sell because you were forced to cut corners by your boss you should be mad at your boss not your audience.
This is a complex issue that most people who haven’t followed AA and AAA RPG development for the past 20 years or so won’t fully understand. For an entire period between the late 90s all the way to the early 2010s, RPG developers were taken over by large publishers, like Electronic Arts, and the operating ethos was that RPGs had to diversify their audience away from their core fans. The fallacy all along was a false dichotomy between two caricatures. The RPG fan who likes reading 17 novels of text in each questline and who is ok with number crunching, and a caricature of the console purchasing Call of Duty / FIFA player. Developers like Bioware followed that ideology to a t, shifting genres with each new release. They did expand their market, but only slightly nowhere near the level they expected. They arguably cannibalized their own audience while failing to make inroads elsewhere because the studio’s identity was dilluted over time. Meanwhile, developers like Bethesda also believed in the prevailing ideology, but they only went so far. They didn’t make RPGs in the style of the late 90s, but they didn’t diversify from their formulas either. While Bethesda streamlined their games, they didn’t change genre with every release. Hell, Bethesda didn’t even change engines.
The real lesson of Skyrim’s release in 2011 is that developers need to build up their audiences and their teams. They need to hone their pipelines, groom and attract talent, and become known for their niches. Most people on Steam don’t even play much of the games they buy. They purchase games nonetheless, because they wish to be part of the wider culture of videogames. This ultimate lesson is what’s behind successes like Rockstar’s, FromSoftware’s, and most recently Larian’s. However, studio heads tend to see things in terms of market appeal. So everyone had to make a Soulslike game. Everyone had to make an open world Skyrim successor. What’s particularly impressive about Larian is that they stuck to their guns, and those weren’t guns anyone was ready to bet on. Elder Scrolls at least is built on a foundation of something that seems mainstream-able. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a turn based RPG using a full implementation of the D&D rules and with rolls on screen for dialogue options. Ask anybody on the scene 10 years ago that this sort of thing would reach 700k-1million concurrent players on Steam and they’d laugh you out of the room. D:OS 1 and 2 were already bigger succcesses than we would have expected when they came out.
The developers who say that Larian’s success is lightning on a bottle are right. Though it’s more akin to a strongly built foundation, where bricks were layered over a long time with a lot of patience. Nobody woke up one day and decided to give some guy hundreds of millions of dollars to make the RPG with the most reactivity in the world. What you had instead was Sven Vicke and his little studio doing decades of mercenary work and what games they could afford to, so that they could pay the bills, surviving and creating a pipeline that all lead to this. The developers are right that BG3 isn’t the new standard. It’s exceptional. And now people online who remain frustrated with publisher and marketing led development are harping on those people’s words, as though clueless devs don’t want to give people what they want. The clueless people are on top, not on twitter.
Well said! I was thinking the same things but could not express it properly
The thing is that people’s feelings when they see those statements are valid, they just don’t know how to deal with them you know. When they say ‘I bought BG3 because its a cool project that deserves support’, they are right. There’s a lot of pointless money being thrown around in AA and AAA development. There’s a lot of frustration. And since I’ve been around the place for so many years, I just overthink this stuff through.
I think one able comparison is with Owlcat Studios, the crazy russians who came out of nowhere and started selling millions of copies with their Pathfinder adaptations. When they first announced their Kingmaker development, most people on the scene felt that it would play second fiddle to Obsidian’s Pillars of Eternity. But nobody expected either game to do as well as Kingmaker ultimately did. Fast forward a few years and Owlcat came out with Wrath of the Righteous, which was just a refinement from Kingmaker. Only much more massive a project. The game wasn’t even playable for a year after release but it was still enough of a success that the studio could afford to relocate to Cyprus and soldier on with the development of a Warhammer 40k game. Nobody would claim that Owlcat’s games are less valuable now that Baldur’s Gate 3 came out. Both Owlcat’s and Larian’s games are valuable because they have an identity and a niche, and aren’t afraid to be insanely ambitious to get where they want.
The second important comparison is with BioWare. Baldur’s Gate 3 feels like the game that BioWare should have made after Dragon Age: Origins. Even if BioWare didn’t want to make a full turn based D&D adaptation, not only did BioWare’s brand begin with Baldur’s Gate, but in many ways Baldur’s Gate 3 feels like a Dragon Age made with Original Sin technology. The camera work, the character driven storytelling, the RPG mechanics. BioWare could have evolved in that direction. But telemetrics and market demographics never told them it was an option. If I was in charge of the Xbox division the one thing I wouldn’t have done is what happened to BioWare. The studio was acquired and retooled - almost by osmosis really - to follow their parent company’s ethos. They went from making niche RPGs to believing that the only way they could afford to tell their character driven cinematic games was to become more like a mainstream action blockbuster release. Baldur’s Gate 3 disproves all of that.
If there is at least one game I’m extremely nostalgic about is Neverwinter 1, NWN was the game in the early 2000s arguably probably more popular than BG imo.
I wonder what’s your take on the NWN 1-2 transition from Bioware to Obsidian. I don’t entirely understand what went on there, I looked at the wiki before and it was something about licensing so reading your comment I’m not even sure where exactly the decision was made to just give up on those DnD games if that was even a thing.
It’s simple really. BioWare was hard at work on Mass Effect at the time and wanted to create more original IPs overall. From what I remember, they were the ones who recommended Obsidian to Atari. What’s interesting to me is how NwN2 ended up shaping not only Obsidian, but our general perception of the studio.
First, NwN2 came out during that dark age I mentioned, close to the height of the computer RPG dryspell of the 2000s. Standards were low, not only in terms of overall creativity but also on the technical side. Games like Bloodlines, Arcanum, and so on would all become cult classics even though some were brokenly unplayable or outright unfinished. Even so NwN2’s development was a disaster. The first lead did a terrible job, and it was Josh Sawyer who got the game out of the door. It was in a barely shippable state and it showed. Taking NwN1 with all the strengths and limitations it had, and turning it into a party based RPG was not a good idea.
That said, the lead writer (George Ziets) and the lead designer (Josh Sawyer), as well as the studio as a whole, were all young enough that they were willing to try something new with the expansions. Mask of the Betrayer kinda redeemed the NwN2 release. Whereas before people would say ‘at least the NwN2 Original Campaign’s trial scene was cool’ (good lord), now they could say that MotB was worth a playthrough all of it’s own (and it was). The spirit meter and the plot combined to tell a very compelling story. MotB, together with Avellone’s writing in Kotor created the image of Obsidian Entertainment as the bottomfeeder studio willing to do mercenary work for BioWare and Bethesda, but capable of adding compelling twists and turns of their own. Obsidian had become synonymous with subversion in the minds of many. Sawyer grew in confidence within the studio, and Avellone’s fame outgrew retroactively from his stint in Planescape Torment. However it was an illusion, and it did not describe the team as a whole.
If BioWare’s pitfall was believing they had to diversify from ‘rpg nerds’ towards ‘fratbros who buy Xboxes’ (both caricatures), there was perhaps no studio head who believed that false dichotomy more than Feargus Urquhart, the Obsidian head. The man always dreamt of making a Skyrim killer. Obsidian was lead for that end. When they made Pillars of Eternity, Obsidian created a beautiful, competently played game that nonetheless played it extremely safe. It tried to be a little bit of BG1, a little bit of Icewind Dale, a little bit of BG2 and it overall lacked in spice with it’s delivery. When Obsidian made Tyranny, they had a real gem in their hands, but (allegedly) diverted funds from it towards the making of Pillars 2. When they made Pillars 2 they overcorrected from the subdued nature of Pillars 1’s story, and failed to market the game properly, underestimating the effect that Pillars 1 had on their fanbase, as well as believing that Critical Role alone would sell millions of copies. None of it mattered though, because Feargus still got to sell his studio to Microsoft, which then greenlit funds to make his open world game. Except he never built a team towards that end. Obsidian had made New Vegas using Bethesda’s tech and assets. Then they made The Outer Worlds, which was a commercial success, but quite underwhelming overall. Now they are making Avowed, which seems to have been scaled back hard towards something on the scale of Outer Worlds rather than Skyrim.
‘Wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle’, people will say of Elder Scrolls and Bethesda games in general. Turns out digging an ocean wide puddle is still a ton of work. It requires a team, it requires patience, and eyes on the ball. Obsidian ended up no different from BioWare, chasing trends and imagined audiences rather than focusing on their core strengths. Ultimately story leads ended up quitting the studio, and those who didn’t, like Sawyer, ended up exhausted and risk averse. This means the new blood would join a studio with a fame for cool stories and subversions of mainline settings, only to end up directionless and working for Urquhart’s cashout boutique.