Owlcat Games knows not to expect Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader to be as successful as Baldur’s Gate 3
No, almost no developer is independent and not beholden to some profit monger. Larian could do that because they didn’t have shareholders breathing down their neck telling them to ship the game now.
That’s an excellent and salient point.
It also cuts to the very core of my deep frustration around finance types more or less calling the shots entirely throughout the entirety of my career as a software engineer. The choice is very, very often between building good, reliable, well-thought-out systems that are genuinely helpful and barely scraping by (or in some cases, not) financially… or creating crappy, slapped-together, ad-riddled, society-destroying bullshit while taking a paycheck that’s decent enough to support your family.
When people talk about wage slavery, this is exactly what they mean.
Edit: revised awful wording
Is Larian considered a massive studio? On Wikipedia is says Larian is 450 people and on LinkedIn it says Owlcat is 201. I assume that Larian didn’t have everyone working on BG3 given their other efforts, so isn’t the total headcount not that far apart?
It’s just another round of excuses for the lackluster state of modern RPGs, and I don’t even think BG3 is that good, it’s just that the bar is so fucking low that something decent like BG3 gets touted as the best RPG in years, because in truth it sadly is.
To call it “decent” is so disrespectful to the complexity of BG3. Hardly anything else even comes close to the scale of BG3, let alone any game fully voiced, in terms of decisions, outcomes, dialogs, and campaign paths of BG3. I’m 70 hours into my first playthrough and still likely have another 10-20 hours left of act 3. And all of those hours have felt impactful and engaging; none of that filler garbage you see in other games this size like AC or starfield.
Eh.
Nowhere near as good as the old Bioware and Black Isle CRPGs, and if it’s going to call itself Baldur’s Gate then I’m going to hold it to those standards like it or not. It’s a fine game, but it’s ridiculously and disproportionately overrated by both the media and players alike, especially when it looks, plays and feels nothing like the original games that it claims to be a sequel to.
There’s almost no way you have played BG3 or you’re just being contrarian. I love the old bioware and black isle and crpgs, BG3 absolutely stacks up to 1/2.
