That‘s nice but I‘ll wait until reviews flock in to confirm this. There is a point when a studio is too big to pre-order. I‘ve seen this pattern before and know better than to ride the hype wave from one super success all the way to the next „more ambitious than ever“ title.
‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Maker Promises ‘Divinity’ Will Be ‘Next Level’
Submitted 1 day ago by ampersandrew@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
Comments
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 1 day ago
ripcord@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
Preordering in general is nuts.
groet@feddit.org 3 hours ago
For smaller (indie) studios it can make sense. If the game costs more money to developed than the developer has, preordering is indistinguishable from crowdsourcing like kickstarter. It removes the need for the developer to take a loan and investors, possibly giving up creative freedom.
Anything backed by a (big-ish) publisher should never be preordered!
myfunnyaccountname@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
You know. I have never once heard a single company admit that they are just gonna release some mediocre pos product. They all say the next thing will be the best thing since sliced bread. Not saying I doubt them. But a company will never be like “we gonna phone it in and release an at best 36% complete product.”
SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
It’s like Apple every year who proudly boasts on stage that they just made the best iPhone ever. Yeah no shit, that’s what they are supposed to do each year.
tomkatt@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Larian is very ambitious in their aims. Divinity: OS, DOS2, and Baldur’s Gate 3 were all huge games with incredible interactions and stories.
I don’t always like everything they do (in fact, I kinda hate BG3), but I respect their efforts. They don’t half-ass anything.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
They do say it sometimes, like Microsoft admitting defeat on this year’s Call of Duty. It’s not, “We’re going to release a mediocre product,” but when they say, “We hear you, and we’re making changes” or “we’ve made the difficult decision to…” or “we’re trying to stay agile”, that’s usually what it means. Beyond just hyping up their next product, there’s substantive information in here, like engine upgrades, expansion of the studio, reduction in production timelines, the damn genre of the video game (because that wasn’t a foregone conclusion given this series), etc.
sturmblast@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
Yeah, marketing
Zephorah@discuss.online 1 day ago
I believe them. Larian has done well.
Phegan@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Larian is the only studio where I believe the hype.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 day ago
At first, Larian had planned to continue working with Hasbro’s Wizards of the Coast division on Dungeons & Dragons, but Vincke said he and his team spent a few months working on a new project before realizing they weren’t feeling the excitement they once did. “Conceptually, all of the ingredients for a really cool game were there except the hearts of the developers,” he said. They abandoned that game last year and pivoted to Divinity, a franchise that Larian also happens to own.
It’s crazy they have the finances to be working on a D&D franchise game and decide “…Nah. Let’s do something else.”
They recently switched to a new engine…
Uh oh.
I know folks like to hate on Unity, and Borderlands 3. Rightfully so. But let me list out some “in house engine” releases:
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Cyberpunk 2077, which Nvidia backing
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Mass Effect Andromeda, after previously being Unreal
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Starfield
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Paradox Grand Strategy, like Stellaris
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A “smaller studio” example, Distant Worlds 2
All these drug their developers through hell, and we’re still technical messes at release.
Now let’s look at some others:
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KCD2: CryEngine
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Expedition 33: Unreal
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Black Myth Wukong: Unreal
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Stray: Unreal
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As a “smaller studio” example, Satisfactory: Unreal
…I’m just saying. Making a modern engine from scratch is hard. There are a lot of things to worry about. And the record of “RPG studios rolling a new in house engine” is not great.
MimicJar@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Re D&D,
It’s because Hasbro gutted the D&D division and burned their goodwill with Larian. pcgamer.com/theres-almost-nobody-left-ceo-of-bald…
Hasbro could have done nothing and made a bunch of money, but they chose temporary short term gains. Baldur’s Gate 4 will arrive far sooner than you think, and it will be terrible.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 day ago
WTF. That’s awful, and also totally baffling. “This single game is responsible for a huge chunk of revenue and introducting countless people to D&D; let’s lay off its staff and leadership.”
Baldur’s Gate 4 will arrive far sooner than you think, and it will be terrible.
What do you mean by this? An outsourced spinoff is already in the works?
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
They said very little about what that new engine entails, but much like Starfield, I suspect it’s largely reusing their old engine and only remaking select parts of it. Larian is doing something in the RPG space that, to me, makes nearly all of their competitors feel outdated, and it makes sense to me to make their own engine to do that as efficiently as possible. To make one of their games in an off the shelf engine like Unreal, with all of the bespoke physics objects and the ways every entity interacts with spells, elements, and other effects, could easily result in huge performance costs above and beyond what we saw in Act 3 of BG3.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Depends how much they “redo”.
I’m utterly terrified of them pulling an Andromeda/2077 and getting stuck in dev hell trying to debug the new engine bits instead of actually building the game. This is the advantage of prebuilt engines: someone else has already one all the low level legwork for you.
I’m less afraid of them pulling a Starfield, I suppose. The “divinity engine” in BG3 already runs okay. It’s not sleek like KCD2, but it doesn’t feel janky or dated either, and even the mildest refresh over BG3 would be fine.
tomkatt@lemmy.world 1 day ago
…I’m just saying. Making a modern engine from scratch is hard. There are just too many things to worry about. And the record of “RPG studios rolling a new in house engine” is not great.
Larian’s track record is good. They used an in-house engine for Divinity: Original Sin, Divinity: Original Sin 2, and Baldur’s Gate 3. And Vincke attributes at least part of their success to using in-house tools instead of “off the shelf” engines.
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nostrauxendar@lemmy.world 1 day ago
LarAIn
Alaknar@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
Oh, stop with this nonsense.
They are employing almost 30 concept artists, their art style is extremely unique. Just look at the Elves in DOS2.
They use the tools available to them. If quick iteration of the “foundations” of ideas is improved by the use of GenAI, why not use it? It’s already integrated into the products they’re paying for (like Photoshop).
It’s like saying “they shouldn’t be using Google Images or artbooks when developing concept art”, it’s just silly.
nostrauxendar@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The concepting stage is a really crucial and foundational stage in terms of design, but it can also influence writing, gameplay, etc. as an artist explores the thing they’re concepting.
I don’t like genAI, and think that using it at such an important stage will invariably mean it ends up influencing the game. I want to play games or experience media made with intention by people, not bland products shat out by a chatbot.
newthrowaway20@lemmy.world 1 day ago
So is this a whole new divinity or a remake of the first divinity?
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The first Divinity was called Divine Divinity, and it was closer to Diablo than Baldur’s Gate. As per this interview, this game is going to be the same style as BG3 and the Original Sin games.
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Ngl that is a stupid ass name lol
GunValkyrie@lemmy.world 1 day ago
So is this a whole new divinity or is this a remake of divine divinity?
VitoRobles@lemmy.today 1 day ago
All these promises can quickly spiral into the No Man Sky/Cyberpunk issue where on release, it’s a shell of what peoples expectations were.
You might say, “Well they fixed it.” But only after running their staff ragged to meet broken promises.
TheRealKuni@piefed.social 1 day ago
I can understand this hesitation, but I don’t expect that from Larian, they’ve delivered in the past and I suspect they’ll deliver again.
(So had CD Projekt Red of course, but Cyberpunk’s launch issues were largely stability/performance related, IIRC. Whereas Hello Games over-promised and under-delivered core features on No Man’s Sky.)
TrousersMcPants@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I think with CDPR people had conveniently forgotten how much of a broken, buggy mess Witcher 3 was at release tbh. It wasn’t as broken as Cyberpunk but I think that it was also easily forgotten because people weren’t remotely as hyped for the game when it came out. CDPR actually has always had a track record of putting out really buggy games that get patched into great ones later.
Glide@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Let’s be straight: as amazing as Baldur’s Gate 3 is today, Act 3 launched half baked and half broken. My first playthrough experience was horrible, largely thanks to broken flags and missing content from the Upper City, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have comparable experiences with early versions of Original Sin 2. Hell, they rewrote basically the entire final act of that game with the definitive edition, and I’m under the impression Original Sin 1 had a similiar situation, though I didn’t play it enough between the original and the definitive edition to experience it.
Now, part of all this is because Larian opts to make decisions to cut content and reduce scope rather than abuse their staff or delay a project. In Baldur’s Gate specificslly, I won’t say I am perfectly happy with the outcome, but they are a good studio that practices reasonable employee ethics, and ultimately puts in the work to get there with the product as well. I’d have no issue buying Divinity day one or even pre-ordering, but I do not expect a perfectly complete and polished experience on release.
lichtmetzger@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
Cyberpunk’s launch issues were largely stability/performance related
I played the first release when it came out. There were a LOT of mission-breaking bugs, missing content, much less customization options, entirely missing features, a really messy perk system etc. It feels like a very different game now, since they patched in more content that was initially missing.
Someone did a writeup of all the patches here.
They should’ve pushed back the game at least for another year. 1.05 mostly focused on the cutscenes and Jonny Silverhand/Keanu Reeves since that’s what sold the game initially and left a lot to be desired in other areas.
iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Too bad they are leaning into AI.
TrousersMcPants@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I really wouldn’t call it leaning into AI, they are using it for doing basic boring work and the CEO has even said he’s not even sure it actually helps that much with productivity. It’s really weird seeing the actual statements from Swen Vincke and then comparing it to articles saying he’s “heavily pushing AI” into employees, that just isn’t what’s happening.
I dislike AI as much as the next guy, but when even Clair Obscur launches with a few AI generated textures we have to just admit that AI is going to be used to some degree in a larger studio. So long as it doesn’t end up in the final product I don’t really care that much, it’s just kind of annoying.
Noja@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
Among the devs responding is a former Larian staffer, environment artist Selena Tobin. “consider my feedback: i loved working at @larianstudios.com until AI,” Tobin writes. “reconsider and change your direction, like, yesterday. show your employees some respect. they are world-class & do not need AI assistance to come up with amazing ideas.”
rockpapershotgun.com/larian-boss-responds-to-crit…
Honestly I’m prepared for LLM style sloppy writing. You don’t generate “placeholder concept art”. You just replaced a concept artists job and put the first ingredient for an AI slop game in your pipeline.
iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
we have to just admit that AI is going to be used to some degree in a larger studio.
“we” don’t have to admit anything.
Ryanmiller70@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
This is some Tim Sweeny “AI will be in everything” type BS
Damarus@feddit.org 1 day ago
Stirring hype has failed too many times. I’m sure they have big plans for the game and it’s going to be very good. However, promising so much so early just screams incoming drama to me.
Yamanashi@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
New engine!?!? Like an upgrade to the divinity engine or a completely different engine?
Cruxifux@feddit.nl 1 day ago
If divinity is as good as the last two I’ll be happy and they’ve given me no reason to believe it won’t be.
bhamlin@lemmy.world 1 day ago
And now, thanks to bg3, they have fuck you money. This next game is going to be insane.
Cruxifux@feddit.nl 1 day ago
Wooo! I’m very excited.
gustofwind@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I’m probably the only person who thought baldurs gate 3 was a boring slog
Please bring back divinity
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 1 day ago
I don’t think it was a slog, but I do find DND 5e an unsatisfying system. You spend a long time waiting to get to the cool parts of your character, and unlimited resting breaks dnd’s already dubious balance.
MDCCCLV@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
It’s available heavily modded if you want a more challenging experience.
And009@lemmynsfw.com 1 day ago
Well you’ve got an upvote so… There are some crazy ones out there for sure
lichtmetzger@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
The story was excellent, the combat was a slog. Still finished it and ultimately enjoyed it, but it felt like they were being limited by the DnD system a lot, ultimately worsening the experience.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 day ago
TommySoda@lemmy.world 1 day ago
With the money they made from BG3 they have the means to make Divinity the best it can possibly be and I couldn’t be happier for them. The first two Divinity games were great, don’t get me wrong, but they were basically low budget when compared to the money they got from Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast to make BG3. I imagine they basically have “fuck you” money now and can do whatever they want. I can’t wait.
TechLich@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Their concept artists are allowed to use some generative AI tools to explore ideas and speed up their workflow. They’re currently hiring a bunch more concept artists (both juniors and a senior character artist) so if you’re trying to get a job: https://larian.com/careers/4fd694b3-ece7-4307-9949-15cac512a815
Great place to go if you’re looking for a concept artist job.
Alaknar@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
It’s misinformation. They have almost 30 concept artists employed. They use GenAI for quick ideation, not for concept art.
Nalivai@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Also, corpos are alllowed and in some cases are required to lie, even the “good ones” like Larian. And now, when they have more money then ever, they become less trustworthy than ever. This slope is very slippery. Nothing stops them from overextending their ideas, and when a lot of money involved, I can forsee “well, we need to finish quickly, and we’re already use llm anyway, let it help with the script, and since it’s already in the script no reason not to let it generate some art, and well, since it’s already everywhere, why don’t we generate the code with it”
Ugurcan@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yeah, Divine Divinity and Beyond Divinity were awesome!
jupiter_jazz@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
x.com/LarAtLarian/status/2001011042642505833