In the last two weeks, a Baldur’s Gate 3 “controversy” was sparked by a July 8 Twitter thread written by the head of Strange Scaffold, Xalavier Nelson Jr.
In the thread, he expressed concern about players expecting Baldur’s Gate 3 to set a new standard for RPGs. The suggestion, somewhat clumsily stated, was that Larian started with several significant advantages that its rivals don’t have. Further, trying to build a competing game of the same scope and quality could easily kill another studio.
In the way that the year 2023 goes, the thread triggered a predictable firestorm. Everyone had an opinion (and those that didn’t quickly found one in pursuit of more clicks and views).
Baldur’s Gate 3 YouTubers and fans took immediate offense, pointing out – with justification – that Larian worked their asses off to get this opportunity and nearly went out of business before the moderate success of Divinity: Original Sin and its sequel.
Other YouTubers and game journalists hopped on the outrage bandwagon. Meanwhile, several prominent developers leaped to the original poster’s defense – both on the thread and in think pieces of their own. In subsequent days, Nelson Jr. clarified his thoughts in a series of videos, which helped quiet down the discussion.
In this tiny corner of the internet, I suppose I’m just adding to the noise by posting my thoughts. But as someone who’s been building games for a while – and is one of the biggest Baldur’s Gate franchise fans alive – I couldn’t leave the discussion alone.
Because if ever there was an argument where both sides have a valid point, it’s this one.
Vaulting Ambition, Which O’erleaps Itself
The graveyard of the game industry is chock-full of games that got too ambitious. The story of Daikatana (which coincidentally launched in 2000, the same year as Baldur’s Gate 2) is a classic example. With a veteran team behind its development, Ion Storm’s heavily-hyped shooter seemed like a sure bet but launched in a bug-ridden state to mostly negative reviews.
The crux of the argument for the developers jumping into the thread to defend the original poster is sound – fifty-person teams that attempt to compete directly with what Larian has accomplished are heading for disaster.
Does this mean that fifty-person developers can’t make great RPGs? No – in fact, even one-person development teams can make great RPGs – in at least one case, consistently doing so since 1994.
Shipping a successful game requires a team to do two fundamental things right. One part is flashy, the “cool game idea” part – what’s the core vision for the game you’re building, what will make it stand out in the market, and what will excite players? The other is the boring execution part – forging the original vision into something achievable with the team, budget, and time available.
When developers worry that they’ll have to compete with Baldur’s Gate 3 in the future, they’re not talking about competing with a unique vision. Larian’s not banking on that; instead, they’ve doubled down on excellence on the execution side.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is on track to be a deep and lengthy game with enormous amounts of reactive content, built by a studio that understands what the team can deliver and what the fans want – but it’s not especially innovative.
Which Grain Will Grow, and Which Will Not
There’s always a degree of luck in shipping successful games. Certainly, I’ve not had the best record of guessing the success of the games I’ve worked on. Even the best projections by the best marketing heads in the business can only do so much.
Josh Sawyer, who has a justifiably excellent industry reputation for his work on games like Icewind Dale and the Pillars of Eternity series, was one of the developers who spoke up in defense of the original thread’s point. Obsidian’s Pentiment, which Sawyer led last year, is a perfect example of how smaller teams should build games.
Pentiment is a great game. It’s a passion project with a unique art style and innovative storytelling. I’d rank it with Disco Elysium and Pathologic 2 among the titles I’ve played that had the most emotional impact.
Depending on how far you’re willing to stretch the definition, Pentiment is a role-playing game. At the same time, it’s a small game – mechanically simple, its gameplay is driven primarily through dialogue choices.
I view Pentiment as an enormous development success, regardless of how profitable it was in the end. Its small scope served as a great testbed for Obsidian’s ideas. When you play it, you feel the team experimenting with genuinely fresh narrative techniques. It’s an easy leap to see how its systems and ideas can be leveraged for larger, more ambitious role-playing games down the road.
Had the Pentiment team attempted a bigger title out of the gate, the cost would have made Microsoft executives blink and the game would have never gotten past greenlight. Instead, Pentiment’s clever design planted seeds in a fertile field and improved Obsidian’s already excellent track record.
More importantly, it exercised team muscles that will give them the power to make something even better down the road. In that sense, it’s comparable to the incremental leaps Larian made with Divinity: Original Sin and its sequel before making Baldur’s Gate 3.
Divinity: Original Sin was built on a playground of environmental mechanics in turn-based RPG combat, letting players be especially creative. Taking the best elements of the combat system and fusing it with similarly-flexible 5E Dungeons & Dragons combat choices in Baldur’s Gate 3 is a logical step forward for the Larian team.
As Larian’s defenders in this current controversy correctly suggest, the result isn’t simply a studio getting lucky. It’s a case where a studio continued to execute solidly and incrementally for a long time until getting an opportunity to build a much bigger game.
On the flip side, Pentiment’s financial results were modest. It’s critically acclaimed but it’s not a sales juggernaut. In interviews, Sawyer said that the game would not have happened without Game Pass and Obsidian’s status as a first-party Microsoft studio.
And this is where the original Twitter thread does have a point. For Baldur’s Gate 3 to achieve what I expect it will, many moving parts had to come together all at once. Larian was the right studio, at the right place, at the right time, with the right license. Some of this was under the studio’s control; some of it was not.
What’s Done Cannot Be Undone
A couple of pieces are missing from the discussion the Twitter thread sparked.
First, even in a world where Baldur’s Gate 3 raises the bar of player expectations, most games don’t need to compete at that level to be successful. There’s enough “pie to go around.” Not every ARPG needs Diablo 4’s audience to return its investment; similarly, Jeff Vogel makes enough selling small, retro RPGs to support himself and his family.
Second, the final verdict is still out on Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s had a great early access run, and its excellent marketing has resulted in a top spot on Steam.
But Cyberpunk 2077 and No Man’s Sky were also hotly anticipated until they launched in less-than-perfect states. (To their credit, the developers of both games redeemed the titles with strong post-launch support, but the reputations of the developers took a substantial hit.)
In the run-up to the Baldur’s Gate 3 release, last-minute choices are being made to optimize the launch – including moving the PC release earlier to August to avoid Starfield’s blast radius in early September. (A couple of Larian associate producers in charge of last-minute localization pick-ups are probably tearing their hair out right now.)
Despite the lengthy early access period for the game, the verdict is out on how smooth the launch will be. Complex, reactive RPGs are notorious for needing hefty post-ship patches.
As always, some of the “Best game ever! Game of the year for sure!” preview buzz is genuine, but some of it is hype. On August 3, we’ll see if the promises of the game will be kept.
Time and the Hour Runs Through the Roughest Day
Finally, this last thought:
Fans have fond memories of BioWare’s Baldur’s Gate 2 but not everyone knows the stories about the development process that created it. Though the game was built with established tech and used an existing engine, it wasn’t smooth sailing. The enormous amount of content resulted in a couple of years of heavy crunch for the team.
Crunch – brutal, lengthy, and often mandatory overtime – was a practice that was still very much “the way to make games” at many companies in the late nineties. The practice continues to this day at some studios, despite plenty of evidence that suggests how destructive and fundamentally ineffective it is.
Rockstar’s development of Red Dead Redemption 2 is a recent example. Yes, Red Dead 2 is great – but it’s great despite the crunch, not as a result of it. In my career, I crunched the longest and hardest on a mediocre and ultimately unsuccessful game. On the flip side, I put in hardly any overtime at all on a couple of genuinely excellent ones.
From an outsider’s perspective, Larian has a healthier studio culture than BioWare in 1999-2000. They’ve admitted in interviews to some overtime in the lead-up to launch; at the same time, they seem to be aware of the risks and dangers of crunch. Unlike Rockstar, Larian also acknowledges (publicly, at least) that crunch is not a good development practice.
So: for studios that are fortunate enough to have all the pieces in place – the resources, budget, and vision to build a game with the scope and massive project dependencies of Baldur’s Gate 3 – how do they do it sustainably, avoid burning out the great team they’ve assembled, and position themselves for a reasonable level of success on their next game?
Therein lies a better question than the ginned-up pseudo-controversy over an inartfully worded Twitter thread.
While you wait for Baldur’s Gate 3, there’s just enough time to play through Pentiment. You should do that! (It runs great on a Steam deck, and it’s also on Game Pass). See you next week.