I think it was mainly AAA devs panicking thinking that people will expect them to put out games as huge as Baldur's Gate 3 combined with high-end AAA graphics. Baldur's Gate 3 is a massive game in terms of the scale of what they designed, 2 million word script (which is more than the entire Harry Potter series, Chronicles of Narnia series, and LOTR+The Hobbit all combined) which was translated into I believe 12 languages for subtitle purposes, 174 hours of cinematics (of which you will only see like 20 hours on a single 70-100 hour playthrough due to the branching storyline and large number of dialogue options). It's just a huge game.
Your typical AAA is already struggling to break even, they already raised prices to $70 and still many must rely on microtransactions to turn a profit due to the fact that they just don't sell enough copies; it's hard to make a profit on 4 or 5m sales, less than half of which were full priced $70 sales. These developers were panicking thinking that Baldur's Gate 3 would make gamers expect a similar level of scale from their AAA games moving forwards. That is why one of the first developers to panic post about BG3 noted that only the most popular AAA devs like Rockstar and Bethesda sell enough copies to be able to afford to make a AAA game with a similar level of scale to BG3, the rest of them just couldn't do it. Larian used a few cost cutting measures to be able to manage that high level of scale on Baldur's Gate 3, it doesn't have top-of-the-line AAA graphics for starters, character models are pretty good but the environment graphics are a bit outdated, but more importantly, the 2 million word fully voiced script was only recorded in a single language, English, whereas many AAA's have voice acting in multiple languages, each language you voice a large script game in is going to add a pretty significant chunk of money to the budget. That developer was likely right that only the AAA devs who have proven capable of selling a large number of copies in the past would be able to pull off BG3's scale and complexity in a AAA game.
Aside from the sheer scale, it doesn't seem to me like Baldur's Gate 3 does anything too groundbreaking. It seems to be an excellent game, but I'm not sure that it is suddenly going to set a trend of other RPG devs trying to make a game with a similarly large scale and branching storylines, most of them just couldn't afford to do that.
Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 19 August 2023
