That IGN video

Tradeghouls 'n ghosts

I know none of this is the point of any of this, but apparently Baldur’s Gate 3 really chugs in the third act even on high end hardware. People with steam decks are saying it shouldn’t be steam deck verified because there it gets like 10-15 fps and crashes. Turns out the most polished bit of the game was the stuff available in Early Access. 🤔🤔🤔

Bbtomb Also it is so fucking funny to me that a mainline Baldur’s Gate is the game these clowns have decided to rally around.

This gets me too! I think a lot of the stuff that makes BG sound impressive to these people is stuff that’s standard practice for the genre. Having 100 hours of branching quests and lots of character customization options is a must for a CRPG for it to be a CRPG. If they gated weapons and armor behind loot boxes or whatever the guy is fantasizing that another company would do, it would kind of cease to be a CRPG. It would just immediately alienate the core audience.

I don’t think the average g*mer really has any awareness of genre games, because as yeso eloquently put, it’s nerd shit. Hades had an incredibly similar story where it was in early access for a long time, and was a great game from a great european independent studio that didn’t get a lot of coverage before its launch. But because roguelites are nerd shit, a lot of people were blown away by the replay-ability when that’s the literal basis of all roguelites. I think this is going to keep happening with genre games.

Anyway, they weren’t going to play these games anyway, they just want to feel like they are getting one over on the people who make whatever miserable slot machine they chose to get attached to.

Gaagaagiins

Tradeghouls 'n ghosts If they gated weapons and armor behind loot boxes or whatever

Wouldn’t have expected someone named “Trade Good” to be so against giving consumers choices!

captain

yeso which articulates literally nothing about the actual game

Are articles like this legally barred from communicating any human thought or emotion?

Video Game King

captain Are articles like this legally barred from communicating any human thought or emotion?

Fake humanity plays better for SEO than actual humanity. Display enthusiasm, not expertise; encourage consumption, not reflection.

captain

Video Game King Seems extremely difficult to write this many words about something without accidentally saying something specific about it. In this case it’s the editor of the magazine so I guess it’s a moot point but I wonder when freelancers are given an assignment like this does it come with the instructions “don’t say anything particular about the game, we have to edit that out. Vague praise only please. Write about how significant to gamers in general this is”

Jax

Ol’ Grandpa: Droning on about the war or whatever for the billionth time

Me:

We’re living through a seminal moment in the history of PC gaming

I knew it was going to change the history of games forever

Decades can pass without such an event happening, so to not only live through one but to recognise it for what it is, truly is something special

I think it’s worth taking a moment to step back, breathe, and take in just how special this event is. It may not happen again for a very, very long time.

xhekros

Jax Decades can pass without such an event happening, so to not only live through one but to recognise it for what it is, truly is something special

Oh, my fucking god.
Imagine saying this when I feel a lot of really cool improvements in videogames happen almost every year, if not each year xD

Also, I hate this hypermaximalism. I feel like observing the “New Marvel movie is the new Odyssey of our time and the best Marvel movie” again.

yeso

something similar although inverted happened with Cyberpunk 2077 which yes deserved criticism, but very little of it had to do with what’s actually in the game and what the experience of playing it was like (other than technical problems which to be fair were unusually severe for the last gen versions). It’s this need to find an angle among angles on something rather than actually speak to the thing itself

DaveedNoo

I observed this between friends in the wild:

A: Oh lame. No cross play multiplayer
Oh we’ll spend your money how you want
I would still buy BG3 to stick it to game publishers and developers

B: Why would developers be mad? It’s my understanding they like money

A: Cuz BG3 is setting “unrealistic” expectations for games
Cuz it works
Is popular and well like
Doesn’t have micro transactions
And they actually used early release to actually fix problems instead of taking money and running

Tradeghouls 'n ghosts

Gaagaagiins Baldur’s Gate is communist for not letting gamers vote with their wallets

yeso

I linked the Reverse Shot video game article in the movies thread, and one of the critics called video games a new art form, which in the grand scheme of things is of course correct but god damn is it depressing to compare the output of cinema from say starting with the Lumiere bros 1900 through 1950 with Pong in 1972-present. lmao that BG3 is some massive achievement come on

Video Game King

yeso My response to this would be to ask what exactly are the points of comparison. Because sure, blockbuster video games are made less as an artistic statement and more as an investment, but the same holds true for a lot of film history, very broadly speaking. I see a few reasons why the broader culture hasn’t quite internalized this. Nobody remembers the mass produced dreck from these eras (in large part because none of it has survived long enough for people to remember it); they remember the films that won Oscars, the films that later critics would hold up as representing the best of the medium. And even then, chances are most people don’t have the time to go out of their way to watch decades old films, engage with their place in film history, and maybe even push back against the implicit assumption that “influential” automatically equates with “good” (I’m looking at your centrist ass, Fritz Lang).

…Anyway, as far as video games are concerned, I would take this as a sign of both how heavily commercialism has utterly dominated the medium since its earliest moments and of the necessity to move away from said commercialism if we’re ever going to substantiate the medium’s artistic worth. Look toward games that aren’t remembered as best sellers: The Prisoner, Freedom: Rebels in the Darkness, Discipline: Teikoku no Tanjou, any number of games I could pull off Itch.io, etc.

yeso

Video Game King I think with video games it’s the scarcity of popular work that has something to it, like John Ford, Steven Spielberg, etc etc. There hasn’t been anything remotely close to that phenomenon in video games

I’m thinking the two mediums share some similarities in that they’re technical/industrial and at least for a matter of several decades were dominated by studios and publishers that had the resources to make and distribute a product. I’m not quite sure why both have diverged in terms of like basic quality to the degree they have. Maybe it was comparatively easier to train workers on the technical aspects of film production, while for a lot of the history of video games, you had a smaller, more heterogenous pool of computer nerds who’ve all never read a book without a dragon in it, and said nerds are both more niche in their tastes as creators and as consumers. Maybe because cinema’s antecedents were stage productions, which were directly related to literary writing that the source material was just better, more meaningful and ambitious stuff vs video games which has mainly been inspired by the nerd culture offshoots of film and tv.

Not really sure what the reason is, but I think it’s strange that at this point in time, anyone grown adult who writes about games for their career can possibly think Baldur’s Gate 3 is some important work. I mean, I know there are “critics” who make the case for marvel movies but that’s still not a POV that’s taken seriously (I hope)

Andy B

Sorry to dig this up but Kotaku just released a bizarre article basically forgiving bethesda for not making the greatest game of all time (Starfield). I don’t understand theses sort of responses but it feels like it’s been normalized.

“…Starfield feels the same way Fallout 4 did, which felt the same way Skyrim did, and that does not make it “one of the most important RPGs” ever made. It just makes it a good Bethesda game, a game made by a studio that Microsoft spent $7.5 billion to acquire. We’d do well to remember that, both as consumers and critics, going forward.”

Like…. what???? Why does this have to be said? I feel like I’m missing something or maybe I’m just entirely removed from the Zeitgeist.

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