Not really surprising that german state media would fall in line when it comes to China reporting. The chinese have a history of playing ball with pretty much anyone from Israel to the EU and beyond. If there’s even any basis to the article’s thesis, it is the rabidly pro-US faction that rules Germany today which is making the main choice in this matter.
you, the outdated xixth century marxist: the capitalist class is anti abortion to maintain the reserve army of labor
me, the ascended breadtube theorist: the capitalist class made it illegal to get an abortion unless its a workplace injury to discipline the reserve army of labor
even basic healing spells reset your gastrointestinal systems so nobody needs to poop if they don’t wanna
^actual, possible kirkbride fan canon
this is from a blogpost of sven’s 10 years ago
One of my best friends told me that I really should update my blog. I explained to him that I’m literally working from six in the morning until midnight trying to get Dragon Commander out of the door and that the last thing I want to do in my current schedule is spend what little free or sleeping time I have left writing about work. He shrugged, repeated three times that I should update my blog, and then proceeded on another topic.
Net result: I’m updating my blog. He can be convincing.
So, we’re in crunch. Not because we’re in panic mode or because a publisher is threatening us with whatever legal nonsense, but because we still have a ton of small things we want to finish before the game goes live *and * because we selected a release date we swore we wouldn’t miss (August 6th 2013 for those interested)
The current situation is that there’s still some stuff on our task list and there’s a whole bunch of stuff on our bug/suggested features list, but most of it still all feels possible.
To put that last statement in perspective – of course, the lists are getting longer now that we launched the beta, and of course, we find ourselves forced to be selective, and of course we’d prefer to put everything in that still makes sense, and of course realization is dawning that we won’t manage to do it all. Still, morale remains high, because we think that what’ll be in will be sufficient to please a significiant large enough part of our audience and I hope wholeheartedly that that indeed becomes the case.
meanwhile, the complaints I (remember seeing) in linkedin reviews are along the lines of ‘larian magic entails reiterating ad nauseaum which can be very frustrating’ and ‘what really matters is convincing sven a feature is important, and the leads often brag of their ability to do so’.
without talking to a larian employee in private i kinda assume the crunch situation at larian is a) not good, but also b) possibly not the worst amongst game developers since this industry is somehow worse than holywood’s treatment of 3d artists.
so do qanon people wonder why dianne feinstein was cut off from the adrenochrome supply or what
same question but for joe
somehow conservatives managed to fool the world into thinking they don’t want to control every facet of people’s lives and ron does not stand for dishonesty
he’s the only principled candidate
her video about string theory is her best, it’s extremely good and it is relatable as well
thats the thing. they were always chasing trends, some entirely fallacious. they added horses because skyrim had horses. they created open maps because skyrim was open world. they made dragon age 2’s combat faster because they thought da:o’s had no mass appeal. at the end of the day all growth in bioware was because games as a whole grew over time, they definitely underperformed with all the trend chasing they did.
I don’t really agree with that. For starters, BG3 is no different from Dark Alliance and other games set in the city. It’s a sequel, in the ‘kind of’ sense. Then there’s how the idea that Dragon Age was the spiritual successor of the BG trilogy was a marketing gimmick. BioWare wanted to coach their new fantasy IP in something old and celebrated, even as they tried to diversify away from the design elements of their past. Dragon Age: Origins differed from Baldur’s Gate in game design and tone. Drastically too. It’s real focus was in the idea of Choice and Consequence, which wasn’t a legacy of Baldur’s Gate, rather one of Fallout’s.
In truth the reason why Baldur’s Gate 3 relates to Dragon Age is 90% because the late 90s/early 00s RPGs were just that influential and shaped the industry for years to come. The last 10% are things like the campsite aesthetics and rhythm, which are borrowed straight from Dragon Age. Baldur’s Gate 3 is it’s own beast, one that Larian and other RPG developers have been chasing for many years, and it actually doesn’t care to be much of a sequel to Dragon Age’s spiritual predecessor. It’s not even in the same subgenre.
TL;DR BG3 is more of a refinement of Dragon Age than a sequel to Dragon Age’s predecessor.
tbh its not a controversial thing to say. BG3 is what dragon age should have evolved into but bioware’s focus was elsewhere.
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.
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.
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.
yeah their comedy isn’t funny anymore i can’t believe they would sellout and just report on the news