ampersandrew

Camera movement and perspective can have a huge impact on selling the images as “real”. You can have a drone hover over a race car, and it will look fake, because your brain tells you it’s a video game; “Here’s to You” from the beginning of MGSV: Ground Zeroes still looks better than most cut-scenes because it emulates a person holding a camera.

I’d also like to see them expand on crafted items, improve the experience of playing with a bow and arrow, and maybe rethink a few other systems that an expansion could tackle.

That’s the best part. It doesn’t matter. (But the real answer is still like top 5 on Steam.)

Funny, but no, this is really on that pace, and unlike gestation, these kinds of things follow more traditional sales curves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games

This feels like the moment that people should be using to come to the conclusion that video game budgets and development timelines are unsustainable.

15M copies in a month puts it on pace to be one of the best-selling games ever made.

This interview does not refute the rumor that there’s a work stoppage on Bloodborne due to a contract dispute between them and Sony. Anything new about Bloodborne is dismissed as “unable to say more”, so it sounds like FromSoft is going to make Sony pay up if they want to do anything new with Bloodborne.

Because if you have to play on their servers, they have more opportunities to upsell you on microtransactions.

That’s insane.

What country do you live in, if you don’t mind me asking? One of those two consoles is just about ubiquitous among people who play video games in the US.

I thought the market was healing from live service, but it looks like we’ve still got a ways to go yet.

We’re already looking at an exclusivity window for Final Fantasy reduced to just a few months, so here’s hoping.

As I recall it, much more hype came from a squirrel witnessing sex with a bear.

I agree with you on the percentages, funny enough, and that’s why it doesn’t explain the game’s success to me. If D&D was responsible, there’d be far more people picking up the enhanced editions of the first two games, Neverwinter Nights, etc., and the MMO would be way more popular. If it was 5e, Solasta would have set the world on fire years earlier. I just don’t see it as the largest contributing factor when I’ve seen plenty of examples of people surprised to learn that the game is tied to Dungeons and Dragons after they’ve already started playing it.

D:OS2 sold several million copies btw. Maybe that doesn’t quite count as mainstream, but it was already a healthy increase from what the first game sold, so they were trending up already.

What percentage of BG3 players do you think are/were tabletop D&D players before they played it? Because I’m betting the percentage is very low.

An order of magnitude doesn’t mean anything when the market is much more than an order of magnitude larger.

It does, because who are you selling to if 90% of your audience never heard of the original thing?

If you don’t know for an absolute fact that the primary reason that BG3 pushed Larian past niche into a blockbuster success is the IP, you don’t know what you’re talking about.

You don’t see anything wrong with you asserting the opposite? It’s not even sort of ambiguous? Yes it is! lol. The only way to prove otherwise would be to time travel back to 2017 and revoke the IP from Larian. D:OS2 already sold significantly more than its predecessor, and word of mouth was almost surely going to make their next game sell more than that too, and it turns out things like performance capture help to really pull people into a story-driven game. Most people who picked this game up probably couldn’t even tell you that Baldur’s Gate was a city and only knew that it had two previous iterations because this one has the number 3 in the title.

An order of magnitude is an order of magnitude. It’s the same size no matter who portrays it. If you’re comparing sales, it’s always a huge difference. Doom, in the 90s, reached as many people as BG3 did today. That’s largely because of the shareware model at the time, but that’s how big BG3 is, and BG1 and 2 were nowhere near that. Speaking anecdotally, the thing that attracted me to BG3 had nothing to do with D&D and everything to do with the CRPG formula finally catching up to the production value of dialogue systems from games like Mass Effect, which are typically found coupled with a compromised RPG format, so being able to get both in one package has a lot of appeal.

Microsoft themselves couldn’t will that into existence with the Windows Store.

Baldur’s Gate 3 outsold its predecessors by an order of magnitude. I think you’re overestimating the cultural clout that a game from 23 years earlier carries. Games just didn’t reach anywhere near as many people back then.

I’d argue it had far more to do with it being another one of Larian’s RPGs with significantly more production value.