this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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It's in the top ten most played games on Steam and had sold at least 5 million; even that number is two months old and doesn't include PlayStation. If I were to wager a guess, which you can often extrapolate from the number of reviews on Steam, it's much closer to 10 million, which is how many copies a typical Assassin's Creed or FIFA game will sell. Baldur's Gate 3 is mainstream.
Agreed. It is though an example of a game breaking out into the mainstream from a normally more niche genre (this particular type of dense, top-down, turn-based RPG). I'm curious to see if its subgenre will grow more popular in its wake, too, and by how much.
I find it particularly interesting that it became such a hit because its systems can be rather overwhelming for people who aren't already familiar with 5e/tabletop rules. The sheer amount of rules to learn, the volume of specific items and text bubbles to read, the fact that some aspects of the interface aren't really tutorialized well, etc.
I had no understanding of 5e, and there were a couple of things I didn't understand, but so much of that game, especially at the beginning, is choosing an option with a high chance of success and shoving or throwing things that most games wouldn't let you shove or throw. The way the game lets you verb any feasible noun, coupled with higher production value, is probably why this one hit. It's going to continue to make other RPGs with even higher budgets stand out as dinosaurs; not just Starfield but especially BioWare's next couple of efforts, given their Baldur's Gate lineage.
It's because people aren't idiots like developers have thought for years. People don't mind a game where you need to read and learn as long as there is a payoff for reading and learning. We have been paying the price for devs thinking everyone is braindead for over a decade now as more and more mechanics and features are removed to please people who were never going to give the genre a chance anyway. By way of example, Dragon Age II didn't get the Call of Duty audience to play Dragon Age, it just convinced most who liked Dragon Age that EA only accidentally published one of the best RPGs of its decade.