this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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I had a hard time making it through this video. This guy's shtick is grating. At 1.5x speed, there's still tons of pregnant pauses for where he thinks I should be laughing, I guess. However, this is a point I agree with:
Baldur's Gate 3 would be just as fulfilling of an RPG at half the length. I'm in Act 3, about 70 hours in, and I skipped a lot of stuff along the way knowing how much game I had ahead of me. Further still, there's a lot of stuff I didn't do along that same way because my character build didn't open those avenues or because I just didn't know it was there. It's a very dense and deep game, and that's what's important to me rather than the length. It's important to me that they continue to do what they've done well in Divinity: Original Sin with all of those tiny interactibles and the way all of the systems work together to allow you to come up with your own solutions. The raised standard, to me, is that they managed to iterate on that with Mass Effect level production value in the conversation system where you don't just get a story that's written well or voiced well but also performed well. On top of that, the game brings back old standards that this industry mostly forgot in that it has LAN and direct IP connections as well as being available DRM-free so that the game or its multiplayer features don't have an expiration date attached to them. I didn't necessarily need this game to be 100 hours long in order to get the enjoyment I'm getting out of it.
And the thing that the author of this video seemed to miss is that several of the quote reply tweets to that thread were from AAA developers, which is where the IGN video came from (which wasn't even the first video to bring this up). The same thing happened when AAA devs behind the likes of Assassin's Creed were publicly criticizing aspects of Elden Ring as though people weren't fed up with the kind of experience that Assassin's Creed provides, and it led to that famous UI barf mock-up of Elden Ring. Elden Ring, like Baldur's Gate 3, only happened because its team iterated on something smaller, and it too avoids lousy monetization schemes.
I could take courses on rhetoric for the rest of my life and still wouldn't be able to disagree more with that statement. If anything the game could need an act or two more.
Honestly, whenever I see someone complaining about a long game I wonder why they are in such a rush to finish it. What's the problem with a 500 hour game? Just take your time. No need to finish it whenever you're done with it, even if it's only years later. But I guess gamers today just need their next dopamine fix and can't be bothered anymore to invest some time into a game. After all the next overhyped game is just a week or so away and it absolutely needs to be played right at release! Best make every game like a 2 minute tiktok so gamers can consume at an even higher rate!
The problem with a 500 hour game is pacing, finding natural calls to action and conclusions to those story arcs. And the next game that comes out in a week offers a fulfilling experience in a different way, and it's nice to see a breadth of different great experiences rather than just one really long one. I say that as someone who's put 1500 hours into my favorite game. I'm not necessarily wishing for Baldur's Gate 3 to be shorter, only that Baldur's Gate 3's scope could have been scaled back without affecting how much I enjoy it or how much value I got out of it. I would really like to see a batch of D&D 5e games on this engine the way there was a batch of Infinity Engine games back in the late 90s and early 00s, and even those games were much shorter than BG3. In general, I'd say games over a certain budget threshold sacrifice a lot of enjoyment in order to make their games bigger and/or longer, and games like BG3 and Elden Ring are the exception, so in most cases, I'd rather big games like Halo Infinite or Assassin's Creed scale down to the smaller experiences they used to be.
Now you're talking about the quality of a game. That's a completely different discussion. I obviously take a good, short game over a long, bad game as well. But given that the quality is equal in all aspects, I would always take the longer game over the shorter one.
I don't think it is a completely different discussion. The length of the game affects length of development time, the available budget that they can spend on a game, etc. There are all sorts of effects on development, which circles back to me not feeling the new Halos or the new Assassin's Creeds are as good anymore. I hardly consider length of a game at all in how I feel about it or prefer it, as long as feels like it should be that long, which comes back to pacing again.
Completely disagree.
Noodle is hilarious and his pregnant pauses are top-tier.
This video was specifically defending the indie dev, Nelson, that made the post that kicked this stuff off. Sure, other AAA devs responded to him, but it was Nelson that got most of the negative attention and death threats, even though his opinions were VERY measured and reasonable. It was also a criticism of the IGN guy that directed everyone's attention and pitchforks towards Nelson by cherry-picking his statements and taking them out of context.
The specifics of the length/scope of the game are honestly less important, IMO. The video is just a level-headed look at why this excellent game is so excellent, and why it's unrealistic to expect every game from now on to be like this. That, and he's trying to get gamers to chill the fuck out and stop with the death threats.
Obviously I wouldn't support death threats, but moving on...
Which the author didn't acknowledge or seem to understand why the IGN video was calling out AAA devs.
It's realistic to expect the likes of Bethesda and BioWare to meet a lot of expectations from Baldur's Gate 3. Or rather, it's fair to hold those games to certain standards that Baldur's Gate 3 manages, but none of us should expect those studios to meet those standards, because they haven't shown they're interested in meeting those standards. BioWare made Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 and Neverwinter Nights, D&D games with cooperative multiplayer, like Baldur's Gate 3, with no reliance on the publisher's server to play. When multiplayer shows up in Mass Effect though, it's some microtransaction-fueled horde mode instead of just replicating a tabletop RPG and letting your buddies play the other members in your squad on missions; Fallout 76 was Bethesda's idea of multiplayer Fallout, which is far worse. You can make decisions in games from those studios, but their character sheets have been sanded down, as have skill checks, and outside of putting a bucket on someone's head in Bethesda games, you often can't use the systems to get creative like you can in Baldur's Gate 3 or a tabletop RPG. It's fair to hold these games to those standards. Given the success of games like Disco Elysium and Kickstarter games like Torment: Tides of Numenera, I don't think anyone's really expecting scope and scale like BG3 from indie efforts, but those games do let you feel like you can play them your own way in a way that AAA's most expensive efforts often don't. That's what this argument always felt like to me from the perspective of the IGN video which, once again, was not the progenitor of the argument, even if it had the most eyes.