this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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Let's not pretend that Baldur's Gate 3 wasn't one of the highest priced Early Access titles on Steam for mostly all of its development. Usually Early Access games start at $20, get bumped up to $30 half way through and have a release price of around $40. Baldur's Gate 3 ~~came out swinging with $40 on day one, and now, on "release"~~, sits at a hefty $60. While reviews on Steam remained "Very Positive" through it's development, most positive reviews read like: "This is going to be good when it's done" and "This is an improvement on older BG titles", while the negative ones read like: "The game is riddled with bugs and missing content.". Those are pretty much telltale signs of a little bit to overambitious Early Access game. My opinion back then was, paying a $40 price tag to essentialy be a playtester is to much. But still I kept an eye out for progress.
What genuenly kept saving their face, was them being always prettier then the competition and having a very strong intro section to their game. The visuals were clearly the focus in early development, as well as the character design. The characters (male and female) looked so good, they could have been straight out of a porn mod for skyrim. And those sharp looking characters were highly represented on the Steam storepage. The intro was a proven "shit's going down, we gotta her out of here" trope, that many games use to through the player into epic action early in the game. You reel the player I with fancy looks, and keep them by throwing them into fun.
Would they have slipped into "Mixed" or "Mostly Negative" reviews, nobody would've been willing to excuse the $40 price. They would either bleed funds or have to adjust the price down to $30 or$ 20, both of which would affect further progress.
Baldur's Gate 3 is an anomaly in a sense off a gamble playing out in their favor. They asked to much and hoped nobody with lose their patience and reviewbomb them. They relied on their community and got lucky again of having basically zero competition to tear away their player base. If say Dragon Age: Inquisition would have taken the pedestal instead of just being mediocre, BG3 would have had a hard time taking back their playerbase in time when income is most important. But in the end it worked out because the devs delivered an actually functioning and excellent game.
I would not like to see the gaming market if every Early Access game asking for $40 on the promise of "Thrust us, it's going to be good, ...maybe." would become the new standard.
Uh....BG3 was always $60. I bought it Oct 6th 2020.
I checked SteamDB, and you are right. I must be missremembering. But that just makes it worse.
Way to out yourself like that. You just don't preorder games. Especially in this day and age.
Larian has an exceptional track record on early access.
Doesn't matter if there's few or a bunch of nice apples in the basket. Few bad ones will spoil everything. Nothing will change in the industry if we don't shame people for preordering. There is nothing to gain from preordering in the age of digital distribution. There's just artificial incentives they use to fool us.
They have a good record and I had the money at the time to purchase it that I wasn't guaranteed to have when it came out. I've already got like 40 hours into the game and it's not even fully released. I think I've already got my money's worth and I'm certain to put in many more hours.
Why the aggression? Think before you type, please.
Every Larian game so far was exactly like this, they always did early access for cheaper then went full price when it came out of early access.
BG3 was full price from the start, probably because of the money they had to pay WotC for licensing
Larian made one of the best RPGs ever with D:OS2 - that's really what allowed them to take that gamble.
That might be very true, but ironicaly it had the complete opposite effect on me. When I was looking into buying BG3, the slight hint of negative reviews kept be from spending money on an possibly incomplete game. But Dvivinty: Original Sin 2 was basically the full package and on sale for just a fraction of the price. The reviews praised the game as being the staple of turn-based RPGs, so I bought that instead. I've played the intro and a little bit further and never touched that game again. It just didn't click with me, no harm no foul. But I thought "if that's the communities highest praised game, then Baldurs Gate is going to be a Big Oof™". But I was an idiot - when I finally tried BG3 it was so much better than Divinity in nearly every aspect. I got hooked immediately, partial due to the better more refined DnD type combat system, but most importantly, because the NPCs weren't absolute assholes from the first second you talk to them. So the combat was fine, the characters were fine, the music and graphics were more than fine - in conclusion, this is 'bout to be a good game.
You should try D:OS2 again. The first act is a little hard to get through, and I stopped their my first time playing as well. But after I tried again (this time in co op with a friend) and got to act 2 I really started loving the game.
It's easier to lick my own elbow that to talk one of my friends to play a narrative driven, turn based, multi chapter RPG.
But I could give it another go solo.
And it would be a real shame if something bad were to happen to that arrogant reptile looking wannabe prince dude on an unspecified beach... ~a~ ~real~ ~tragedy~.
Or that skeleton looking Mofo that thinks he's better than everybody because technicaly, he can't die ~yeah,~ ~we'll~ ~see~ ~about~ ~that~.
The most irritating thing is probably the narration. You have a visual medium of a video game and the only major rule of "Show, don't tell." is being broken in the first line of dialog. The moment were you talk to the sailor on the ship and the narrator does the "squeal", I thought "Oof, this is going to be a douzy". Like really, you couldn't have somebody jump on a wooden pallet to record a sound effect?
Yeah, BG3 has a much more interesting story it seems. Whereas D:OS2 was better for multiplayer and the GM mode really.
I'd recommend watching some videos on the BG3 backstory, particularly the Descent Into Avernus story and the Gith vs. the mindflayers.
I'll keep that in mind, thanks.
Larian stated at the beginning that they deliberately set the early access at full price to try and discourage too many people from buying it. They wanted to try and keep the early access relatively small, and they wanted the people who did buy the early access to be the more passionate fans who would be more likely to provide feedback. That plan backfired because a shitload of people still bought it at full price anyway, but apparently that was their original intention.