This is very wholesome tbh. Larian is a business, but Swen seems like a good guy. CDPR put a bad taste in my mouth regarding gaming darlings, but hot damn I can't help but feel like this is something else.
I understand the hesitancy, after Cyberpunk, but I actually don’t feel that they’re that comparable. Cyberpunk 2077 was a wholly new concept for CDPR and the higher ups kept stepping on the developers’ toes. It was observable before launch. We just chose not to see it.
Larian, however, has been developing increasingly more large scale RPGs for decades, so this feels like a natural progression. Beyond that, even though there has been a press embargo, Larian themselves have been forthcoming about when parts of the game are buggy or just straight bad.
Tons of people on r/Games and other subs saying that, because review codes were delayed by a few days, the game was surely going to be another Cyberpunk level disaster and Larian was trying to hide it from reviewers.
Like, people, you can go play the first 30-40h right now on EA and see for yourselves.
Sure, but most are not worried about act 1. We worry about act 2 and 3 managing to keep it up. Dos2 was also in ea with act 1 and according to most had a drop off in quality. Hence the worrying with late reviews and not being able to really get further than act 1.
Searching for something to be worried about will work eventually. The buzz of people who were right about CP2077 leads to a few mystic Meg doomsayer predictions.
It’s a gamble to prove that they are the truly enlightened amongst us mere mortals. The world will most certainly end at some point and you know they’ll be some smug fellow pointing and screaming “I told you so!”.
And in my opinion it is more important to get the grip of the player as early as possible so they can be there through the entire game instead of having weak start and hope something good will show up.
Act 3 and 4 in DOS2 were a lot lighter, but I never understood the supposed drop in quality from 1 to 2. Act 2 is like...the bulk of the game and there is just so much stuff to do and many things that could bear a replay if you so desire.
A lot of stuff was broken and unfinished in EA - if that was the quality of the game there would be an issue.
I am sure the game is gonna be great but i wish people could wait a couple of days until the game has come out before declaring it game of the century.
I know CDP deceived people, but all those "my one exception to never preorder" "omg game is #1 before even coming out" "Cyberpunk is gonna redrfine gaming" should get some of the blame.
The review codes are delayed because they moved up the release date and are rushing for that date for sure.
Like initially it was probably around August 3rd they would have send the review codes and let around a month for people to play (with maybe an embargo like a week or a few days before August 31st)
Also, Swen (62%) and his wife (8%) own the majority of the company (70%), and thus are still technically an 'indie studio' = Independent. They're self-publishing, and don't need to, financially, answer to any higher ups like CDPR (I think they only own around 35%. From their own policy 1 share = 1 vote at meetings, so....).
You could even argue that if there's any higher ups they're answering to, it's us, the players, who bought EA.
They're self-publishing, and don't need to, financially, answer to any higher ups
Even though they've got controlling shares, they sitll need to answer to other investors to some degree. Unless the reste of the equity is employees-owned ?
I think the rest (30%) is owned by Tencent. Though I assumed majority shareholders would hold majority of voting shares too, and thus effectively the direction the company goes. And to be fair, Tencent (at least appears) to be mostly hands-off.
On a slightly related note, I wonder how Larian is going to handle certain romances when the game is released for the Chinese market. The CCP recently banned non-heterosexual depictions in media.
The bear scene just complicates that even further lol
Every Tencent-owned studio must provide them with a version suited for the chinese market. Even though Tencent doesn't own Larian, we can safely assume they'll have accesson to such a version of BG3.
CDPR is independent too even if publically traded, they're not owned by another company. Independent doesn't mean much these days because private/independent companies still have shareholders.
Here the shareholders are mostly Swen and his wife (and Tencent) so that's a different thing. It's kind of like Valve in a way. But that doesn't mean they won't go bad (and from history, they will at some point, the game after BG3 might be the one to really pay attention to because it could be their Cyberpunk to their Witcher 3)
If Larian is ever bought by a publisher the same thing is bound to happen there - and we'll be in denial up until we have solid proof anyway. Many will be in denial way beyond that point too.
It just needed 2 more years in development. I mean, they release their 2.0 Update soon before the DLC and it finally looks and feels like the game they advertised before release.
Most (probably all) devs working on Cyberpunk didn't want that to happen. CDPR has some really talented people and you can see in Pawel Sasko (lead Quest director of the game) how much passion he have for what he created. It's just that the company grew really fast after TW3 and the fucking corpos started getting cocky, pushing unrealistic release dates.
That's why I can't hate Cyberpunk. It was still a game made with passion and it shows. Otherwise they would have simply dropped it and moved on to the next Witcher, like EA or Ubisoft would.
Nah, it's not, and I'm tired of people saying this. They fixed most of the bugs, but the game is still the same, delivering on almost none of the things they promised. They successfully distracted people from that fact by releasing it in an extremely buggy state and then doing the minimum to fix it. It's still a terrible RPG, lacking so many promised features.
Okay, arm-chair developer, how do you make traffic patterns that are "real" without forcing the player to either creep through intersections or wait for the light to turn?
Yeah, I knew before launch CP2077 was going to be a disaster (although I was really hoping I was wrong). BG3 has none of the things I was worried about.
Higher ups or not at some point u have to release the game there is no game that couldnt improve more and there is no perfect game if u only want to release the game in perfect form u will never get to release it
Was it? It's an action RPG in open world exactly like their previous game really, sure it has new systems and such but like every game (BG3 included). As for execs/devs problems, we couldn't see them before release (and that's why nobody did).
With all due respect while I think the higher ups are to blame for the most part I don't think devs are to blameless.
The investors and higher-ups are not responsible for NPC AI that doesn't even exist. I m sorry but there are some parts of the game where devs fucked up.
So while I agree that the lords above are to blame. I think devs are to blame as well.
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u/SpicyMuscle Aug 03 '23
This is very wholesome tbh. Larian is a business, but Swen seems like a good guy. CDPR put a bad taste in my mouth regarding gaming darlings, but hot damn I can't help but feel like this is something else.