I was googling for TGDMB discussion of Baldur's Gate to post about Larian's trailer for Baldur's Gate 3, and ouch!DSMatticus wrote:Honestly, the current state of the CRPG industry is a pretty great mirror of the current state of the TTRPG industry. Instead of "hey, what do people want? We should do that," it's "hey, what were people doing before most of our players were even born? We should do that."
Divinity Original Sin basically came out of nowhere from an almost bankrupt nobody studio with a record of hastily released, buggy trash, didn't particularly innovate within the medium at all except by adding solid co-op functionality, and made so much goddamn money it ought to have defined the genre for the foreseeable future. Then they did it again a few years down the road. There is no reason for anyone taking a crack at a CRPG to not look at Divinity Original Sin and say "how do I do that?" instead of "how do I shovel out a neo-Infinity Engine game?" Exactly one of the neo-Infinity Engine games has come anywhere near Divinity Original Sin and that's PoE1, maybe.
I think the secret is that Larian Studios is Belgian, and as such they have no connections to the Silicon Valley CRPG/TTRPG clique, so there's no one around to give them the "common sense advice" that they need to publish Baldur's Gate clones or else they'll wind up the next Troika. Corporate incest basically means the west can't make a good turn-based CRPG because a bunch of vets are lurking at the metaphorical water coolers deflecting responsibility for absurdly sloppy product deliveries twenty years ago by blaming market trends. I mean, I love ToEE, but to call that game flawed is somewhere between "understatement" and "undeserved praise." It's buggy, it's unpolished, the pacing is shit, and the story is a question mark. It was never going to be anything but a cult classic - strictly for people who were willing to hold their nose and soldier past all the shit. And that's basically all of Troika's games in a nutshell. But the lesson the industry learned when Troika collapsed was "don't be different, ever, just keep publishing Baldur's Gate." And because the industry in question is a couple dudes and their gaming buddies (okay, that's a touch of hyperbole, but it's certainly fucking small) both on the TTRPG and CRPG side, that lesson will stick forever, wrong or right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcP0WdH7rTs
I'm not sure what exactly to expect from this BG3. I guess I'm cautiously optimistic?