Just posted my review with that as the headline.

The game is completely fine. I enjoy the game. I am hopefully about to finally finish the damn thing. However it is so simplified and so written for a casual audience that I just find myself constantly annoyed it's as successful as it is. I enjoy it but I would take something like Pathfinder: WotR over it without even thinking for a second. So I worry this game will forever change the genre in ways I don't like, as Oblivion did.

Obviously I'm old and mainstream stuff isn't made for me anymore, but that's the point. I liked CRPGs not being mainstream for that reason.

Oh well.

Never played Pathfinder: WotR and I couldn't get into Pathfinder: Kingmaker, which seemed greatly inferior to Pillars of Eternity. Granted, I might like it more if I gave it another chance - IIRC, I quit soon after acquiring the kingdom and I never got to be comfortable with the Pathfinder ruleset. I didn't much like the writing up to that point, either.

It may be the case the BG3 mechanics are simpler than Pathfinder but isn't that kind of a given due to DnD5e vs Pathfinder? I'd hardly call DnD5e casual, though. It's still more complicated than many games and so I'm glad BG3 has been much more popular than expected. Hopefully those new to this style like it enough to look at similar types of games in future.

For comparison's sake, how would you rate the mechanics of WotR vs PoE and Dragon Age: Origins? I wouldn't consider any of them mainstream but I wouldn't consider the latter two to be complicated, either. I'd consider DA:O to be significantly simpler than BG3, and PoE to be about on par, although BG3 is partly an immersive sim, which neither PoE or DA:O were, which makes the world seem much more alive.

As for story, I loved the themes, world building and story line in Pillars of Eternity, which was particularly impressive for an original IP but I don't consider BG3's writing to be inferior. I'm only part way through Act 3 but I find the story and dialogue to be well crafted and actually reminds me of a combination of Mass Effect/Dragon Age and the way The Witcher 2 had a lot of threads that came together and I find the reactivity to be mostly good. I think the only baggage BG3 carries vs PoE is the legacy of Faerun, which I don't find as appealing as Eora but it's totally, 100% subjective. The genre certainly has a lot to credit Faerun for, as long running as it has been.

Lastly, I don't worry about any game changing an entire genre for the bad. Whilst it may be a given company no longer makes the games I like anymore, like Bioware's demise and what Obsidian's doing with Avowed, historically it seems independent developers have a way of preserving the greats of the past, regardless.

Any time something becomes popular, there are some people who hate it because they viewed it as their special thing - they were part of some elite group that knew about X, and now everyone is doing X, and they're no longer special. There are also people who embrace the new community members, tolerate them getting in the way and slowing things down while they learn the new thing, and then benefit from the improvements to the activity that inevitably come as entrepreneurs try to cash in on the increased demand.

I've watched it happen with skateboarding, surfing, punk music (actually, multiple genres of music), pogs (a **very** niche thing that was popular for a few months in certain areas), vinyl recordings, cybersecurity, and now D&D.

If BG3 is a gateway that gets more people into D&D or CRPGs, you're going to have an influx of people who identify as RPG players buying video games, showing up at conventions, buying things at your local tabletop store... and with that increased demand will come increased innovation, and ultimately lead to better products.

Without that flood of demand, you get the same pocket of niche nerds doing the same thing over and over, which really limits the potential for innovation. They're also spending the same pool of money, and there really isn't enough demand to justify someone spending money to bring a new product to market.

I still grumble when there's 30 kids on razor scooters clogging up my local skate park, or when there the lineup at my previously locals-only surf break has a bunch of tourist kooks in it, but it's impossible to deny that moving to mainstream has been a net benefit to me.

If you're right, and BG3 is the gateway that brings more people into the roleplaying world, embrace it and look forward to more games and more innovation. BG3 may be too watered-down for you, but an influx in demand for CRPGs may be the thing that permits the next version of Pathfinder or Solasta, or even the videogame translation of some more obscure ruleset that otherwise wouldn't have had the funding.

You get to choose which person you want to be - the stodgy old timer who wants to keep this as their special thing, or the seasoned veteran who embraces change and sees increased popularity as a good thing. It won't change what happens (the popularity will come, or it won't), but it will change how you're affected by it.

Do with that what you will.

Baldur's Gate came out a quarter of a century ago. It's not really saying much to say Baldur's Gate III has more content. Most modern RPGs have more content.

Pathfinder is great too. But BG3 builds a platform to actually 'role play' during the 'role playing game.' Pathfinder has us all fixated on character builds, rather than how to handle a plethora of meaningful choices. But maybe it's just my taste. I hope the future of CRPG's is built around role-playing elements, rather than character building, even though I do enjoy character building and complexity. I just don't want it to be the focal point of the game. BG3 is much better, in my opinion.

Wtf ?

The dev team of BG2 wasnt smaller than the one for BG3.

AND BG2 is 2D, i.e. content was much easier than 3D where you have to create all kinds of stuff. The background of BG2 was literally just paintings. Mostly, anyway. Name just one, because I'm drawing a blank.

NWN2 for example was way shorter than BG2.

'More' content is not an indicative of 'better quality'. We should have all learned that lesson by now.

More =/= better
Bigger =/= better
'Open world' =/= better

BG3 expertly places quality over quantity

Larian in general has become superfluous with quality-over-quantity. They have lifted the CRPG genre out of decades in stagnation, put the genre on their back, and carried it into the 21st century.

There have been more good RPGs in the last 15 years than you can shake a stick at. Disco Elysium, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, Dragon Age: Origins, Pillars of Eternity, etc.

All of those are good/great CRPGs. But none of which moved the genre significantly forward (more of the same)-- hence the stagnation. I enjoy playing those games, but Larian has moved the genre on an epic leap forward. Hopefully, this level of role-playing becomes the new standard and other games continue to build off it.

I don’t know the relative size of the BG BG2 dev teams to the BG3 dev team, but I would be surprised if the BG3 dev team was not larger. After all, BioWare were a small independent studio founded in 95, only 5 years old when they released BG2.
Anyway, you can’t compare content levels on the size of the relative teams, you would use the development cost. Even adjusted to todays values I bet BG2 dev costs are far less than BG3s. As BG2 took just less than 2 years to develop and the expansion ‘Throne of Bhaal’ another nine months. About the same amount of time BG3 was in early availability.

Comparing the ease of coding 2D 25 years ago against coding 3D today is comparing Apples to Oranges. BG2 would be written in C and maybe some C++ , BG3 seems to be C# going by the Mono DLLs. As a programmer I can tell you it’s a lot easier and quicker for me to produce content with today’s languages and development tools than it was using C and C++ in the 90s.

I think BG3 is a fantastic game (500+ hours it must be) and certainly has more content than any RPGs I have played. But you can’t compare it to BG and BG2 produced 25 years ago without either being influenced by todays standard or nostalgia.

Err, I'm a system programmer myself. Primarily C/C++/C#.

And that makes little if any sense.

Programmers make a small part of a development team of games.

The vast majority of people working on a game are artists of various kinds that work with the engine to produce content, not actually programming the engine.

And 2D content IS much easier and faster to produce than 3D, obviously.

Geromino has a point... BG2 didn't have actors doing mocap, full cinema, voice acting, etc. Even other modern game devs have kinda grumbled a bit at it because it raises the bar quite a bit in terms of level of detail, and sets new levels of expectations for video games.

That said, There's a difference between content and complexity. The level of detail in the game mechanics in BG3 is *EXTREMELY* high... well beyond most CRPGs I've played (though I tend to prefer older titles, so that's not saying much). Larian clearly spent a lot of time playtesting, and doing so adversarially, to find those odd edge cases where someone wants to do something no reasonable person would do.

Unfortunately, despite all this, BG3 still feels smaller than a game like BG1, D:OS 1 or 2, or even something like DA:O. There aren't a lot of different areas (the areas in BG3 are **MUCH** bigger, but it still doesn't feel like I'm seeing as much as I saw in other games), there's not a lot of wholly independent side quests that have no long-term bearing on the game... like some town with a farmer who's pissed that some random beasts are eating his crops. Each act has more or less 1 major quest hub, and although the decision tree is SUPER flexible and the potential endings vary wildly, the overall world still feels fairly small. Incredibly detailed, but not terribly big.

I honestly wish they'd taken some of the resources they used to mocap and voice act all the random, completely irrelevant NPCs and instead spent it on making some of them more relevant... more small side quests, new zones to explore, more varied encounters... essentially more of a world to explore, rather than only being able to explore the areas directly related to the Absolute/Tadpole plot.

Still, it took them for freaking ever to get this out of EA, and I'm sure they had plans to do many of those things that were cut because people (myself included) were getting pretty impatient. I guess you can't have it all.

BG's Infinity Engine was developed from scratch simultaneously with the game development. For BG2 the Infinity Engine was modified when developing BG2. Also programming made up a lot more of game development then then it does today. BG was quite cutting edge for dos games as the backgrounds were not tiles that had to be loaded each was rendered.

Of course 2D development was easier and faster than 3D 25 years ago, the same is still true today. But the technology and dev tools of today are significantly more powerful than those of 25 years ago, to produce BG/BG2 today would be a lot easier and faster. You really can't compare against BG/BG2 produced in the 90s and say they are 2D so it was easier 2D was not as easy as it is today.

I was working as a programmer in 95 and the the application I was working on for 3 years would be a lot easier and faster to produce today as well as being more powerful and having more functionality. You can't compare the amount of content of games from the late 90s with one today.

BG/B2 maybe 2D but the technology they were using is 25 years old and they were both developed in a shorter time than BG3.