What BG3 does is threefold: 1) it's a game that's feature complete and polished at launch, 2) it's a big game that managed to avoid being a typical cookie-cutter open world filled with a tedious checklist of repetitive objectives, and 3) it doesn't try to relentlessly nickel-and-dime its players through microtransactions, battle passes, etc. Such a game is a rarity in the modern AAA space. The only other AAA third-party game released this generation that manages that combination of scale, quality, and completeness is arguably Elden Ring.

BG3 is incredibly ambitious, and no developer should feel like its necessary to do something of BG3's scale and complexity, but I do hope the reaction to it at least signals to the industry that it's time for a change. Hopefully it encourages them to stop rushing buggy, incomplete games out the door and treating their customers as glorified beta testers, to ease off of the aggressive monetization schemes and "live service" bullshit, and to put more thought into their game worlds instead of their constant parade of 20 square-mile, 60-hour-long adventures packed to the brim with filler that doesn't do anything to actually justify a game of that size.

I haven't played BG3 yet, but it reminds me of 90's PC gaming based on what I know from it.  In fact, it's making me consider buying a new PC just for gaming.  I can't remember the last time I did that.  Maybe it was the 90's?

Yeah, it does remind of a 90s Pc gaming - ambitious game, that is trying to do some things a bit different with some of its design goals. Unfortunately, like a lot of 90s PC games that were like that, it has, IMO, its fair share of gameplay issues - which is quite odd, given that some recent-ish lower budget games in that (quite established) genre don't suffer from the same problems.

Hehe, all three points were "standard" in the 90s, hence my take.

And yes, not every game needs to be as the best in it's field. But that was always so, with Skyrim, Zelda, Final Fantasy. All these games blew gamers away, but other games still released.

And yeah, instead of asking gamers to "not raise standards" the industry might be well off to cut back on the monetization bullshit and I am sure they will win back some customer goodwill.

It's honestly kind of amusing seeing some AAA devs "panic" about the achievement that is Baldur's Gate 3, when you simultaneously have a team that's easily quadruple the size of Larian that released a game just 2 months ago with a substantially larger budget, also took 6 years to develop, and still managed to mess everything up because of intentional design choices. A little title called Diablo IV and the developer is Blizzard Entertainment.

The big lesson I hope AAA devs learn off the unprecedented success of BG3 is to just achieve the level of quality with their games. If you focus on making a quality game rather than designing the game from the ground up to sell mtx and the like from the start of development, magic can happen.

Yeah, I wished the discussion about BG3 was: "What could we all learn from Larian.", instead we got: "Please don't expect us to measure up to BG3."

It's almost as if the AAA landscape is just so used to making games with mtx, battle passes, etc. and building a game around those systems that they've grown unaccustomed to just making a good game. Especially with how long these practices have been going on now and a whole new generation of developers having entered the industry since these practices began.

Once the profits started coming in, complacency takes hold.

I mean, multiple executives at Take-Two are going to have ABSURD bonuses that are exclusively tied to how many mtx are sold.....what a coincidence they're going to be partying it up when GTA VI launches, and not just because it's a major release.

There certainly are more developers and publishers releasing full games than before, hell even EA is unexpectedly taking these strides. So hopefully Larian really makes a lasting impression on the industry that we're hoping for!

How much of the game have you experienced?

All this reminds me of Reggie's "if it's not fun, why bother?" phrase, because it really does make a lot of sense. We've got a plethora of games in the past 5-10 years that have been designed from the ground up to just make money, and a good chunk of those are either dead, disliked, less talked about, or somehow struck it lucky enough to get other devs to emulate that cash flow.

Over the years I've seen indie devs adopting the "it has to be fun" mentality, whilst AAA seem to be still trend chasing, while also employing the "make it look as shiny as possible" mantra, and using online data harvesting to boast about how many players killed X of Y enemy type (which is just useless and doesn't sound fun to mention, seeing as how that data isn't a core part of the game, it's how you play it that should count, not a percentile number). 

It is kinda funny seeing some of those AAA devs ragging "don't expect this level of quality from us", while at the same time lowering their own standards, yet getting irked by someone in the saame field as them earning more rep and sucess, simply for just doing what was once the norm.