Baldur’s Gate 3 recently released to roaring success and critical acclaim, yet there seems to be a massive amount of controversy behind this game – why is that? Let’s find out.
Let’s begin with what Baldur’s Gate 3 even is: it’s a role-playing game set in the Dungeons & Dragons universe, developed by Larian Studios. The game had been in the works for over 6 years and was a massive undertaking for the developer team, boasting hundreds and thousands of lines of dialogue and hours of gameplay. Everyone seems to love the game, critics and fans alike, so why are all the developers up throwing hands about this game? The answer is most likely greed.
BG3 is an unbelievable achievement in the likes of Breath of The Wild and Elden Ring that should raise the bar for what can be done in videogames, yet a lot of Western developers argue the exact opposite – that BG3 is a one-off thing and should not be replicated. BG3 does something that many studios are afraid of doing nowadays: over-delivering. Nowadays, game studios want to charge you as much as possible for the least amount of content; studios like Ubisoft are the biggest arbiters of this, releasing the same games every year with re-used assets, rehashed designs and minimal innovation. The idea of not “over-delivering” is that if you exceed the standard and make an actual good product, that is what will be expected from you going forward. Instead of actually doing that, many major dev studios choose the easy route of creating extremely similar products banking on nostalgia and false promises.
There is an argument to be made that games like BG3 should not be expected from indie studios, (as Larian are indie themselves) but as a result of this many AAA developers have tried to pin themselves onto this narrative as well. These AAA studios have far bigger staff numbers, budgets and man hours yet they still attempt to use excuses as to why they can’t do the same things Larian Studios are pulling off. The media industry as a whole is becoming stagnant and it’s getting more and more embarrassing reading tweets from major companies and studios explaining why they can longer put out consumer friendly products.
The disparity between what the gamers want and what the developers want has never been more apparent, seeing every developer voicing their concerns being absolutely flamed by everyone on X (formerly known as Twitter). BG3 is the pinnacle of RPG games and should be celebrated, instead it’s being painted as an anomaly.
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