After $90 million driven by Baldur's Gate 3, Hasbro says games will be "huge" for D&D and Larian's hit RPG is "just the first of several new video games" to come

stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to Games@sh.itjust.works – 154 points – After $90 million driven by Baldur's Gate 3, Hasbro says games will be "huge" for D&D and Larian's hit RPG is "just the first of several new video games" to come
gamesradar.com

Baldur's Gate 3 is a "mega hit" that Hasbro expects to pay dividends for years

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Read: We're just a clueless corporation but we intend to bleed this thing dry to pay for our yatchs.

Well hopefully it means more awesome Larian games though.

Divinity was amazing, literally downloading baldurs gate to play with the wife for valentines as we speak, so I love them.

But it probably won’t, it probably just means shitty magic crossovers and other horrible nonsense.

I doubt Larian will return to D&D for the next game.

Give them Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and the internet will go berserk

Can we give them Dragon Age, because BioWare doesn’t seem to know what it’s doing anymore.

At this point Bioware is just a skinsuit worn by EA. Once the skinsuit gets too stinky they will dispose of it and buy a new studio to make a fresh suit.

If someone makes a new kotor game but uses the same extremely janky DND 3.x rules I am going to search my house for the monkey's paw. That would make me so mad.

Wizards of the Coast owner Hasbro, which says Larian's "mega hit" RPG, having driven around $90 million in revenue in the last year, is a good sign for more video games to come from the D&D license.

I don't know them, but this seems like they have understood that D&D is beneficial to their purse.

Hasbro wants more games but that doesn't say Larian wants or has been contracted for more. It'd be dumb for Larian to at least not make an expansion. Though I do understand expanding the level cap is super difficult and a LOT of spells will need to be limited in scope.

Larian said they were releasing a complete game. I honestly hope they don't release an expansion. The ending was great, and I don't know where you go after. An expansion past the ending would almost cheapen the whole game for me. After a huge build up to the fight of the netherbrain. It wouldn't feel right to continue after that.

And only getting to 12th level felt fine. I don't think it needed to go higher. Mine abs my partner's characters were beasts even at level 12. So it doesn't feel like it's necessary.

Why is level cap hard to expand?

In short, at 7th to 9th level spells shit get stupid really fast.

In any case, the sweet spot of the 5th edition ruleset(which Larian vastly improved upon) is levels 5 to 10. Under that and you're too squishy, over that and you start getting into the plane shifting and just outright death spells.

God i hope Larian never touches dnd again, they can do way better.

Y'all ready for a decade of moderately to incredibly broken, brain dead, pushed out the door for a quick buck D&D games?

People seem to forget their gaming history. William SRD has an entire channel dedicated to incredibly broken, brain dead, pushed out the door for a quick buck D&D games.

I watch every episode of W.SRD, that's the only enjoyment I forsee for the future of Hasbro D&D video games

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

William SRD

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

The 90s are back, baby!

FUCK YEAH! START THE LAWNMOWER!!!

For the uninformed, start the lawnmower is a fist pump that mimics the action of pulling the starter cord on a lawn mower

It's going to be like that time that GTA3 was a huge success, and a million shitty and broken "open world" games came out (Excluding Simpsons Hit and Run that game was great)

Or when WOW was a huge success and we were buried with a million shitty and broken MMO WOW clones.

Tale as old as tiiimeee.

Lmao without Larian's dedication I doubt they're gonna get anywhere close to BG3 in the future

Loved BG3. but it was the hit it was because it was done by people who love the D&D world and didn't attempt to live up to any specific monetary goals, nor did it rush out to try and beat some arbitrary deadline. it was done in the old style of development, by a relatively small team over long periods of time to showcase their labour of love.

given the history of D&D the company itself and it's more recent copyright monetization and attacking the playerbase for profit, I cannot see them pumping out other games that are anywhere CLOSE to what Larian produced.

Wee're going to get a whole lot of bullshit shovelware trying to ride BG3's excellence.

this is why we can't have nice things :(

Yeah, the reason BG3 was so good was because unlike Hasbro and WoTC, they love the Forgotten Realms, and they love video games. If either weren't true, it would be an awful game.

Oh god, they're gonna Fox it up. Listen: dozens of cool shows came out circa 2000, did pretty darn well, and were thrown in the fucking garbage for not being The Simpsons. That show's firehose of money funded brilliant new productions - most of which were cancelled for not instantly creating an equal firehose of money.

This is how Firefly, Futurama, and Family Guy were shitcanned despite intense demand. But games don't get revivals or movies the same way. They can't be pulled back together with a writer and some key actors. Game franchises just die. Their original creators get scattered to the winds, and the rights get tangled up in a heartbeat, so anything with the same name is just an empty brand and inadvisable hope.

Baldur's Gate 3, in so many ways, was a miracle among miracles. And these geniuses are liable to expect that, every time, in ways that make life hell for any studio whose quality is merely exceptional.

Best we can hope for in game franchises are games that are made by the creators of X, but after Back 4 Blood I'm incredibly wary of anything like that

Wow, did Back 4 Blood have Left 4 Dead lineage? I assumed it was a straight ripoff.

Like 3 developers, and they based some of their advertising on "from the creators of Left 4 Dead" or some such phrasing. It is effectively a straight ripoff, but significantly worse

Futurama is currently in the middle of its 8th season.

Family Guy is in the middle of its 22nd season.

Firefly had a geek royalty showrunner who turned out to be a real creep.

Any other examples?

Both Futurama and Family Guy were cancelled early in their runs in 2002/2003 and only revived years later. Firefly was cancelled around the same time and just never revived.

Without Larian and without the writers of the core books yeah I'm sure it'll be great totally won't do a 4th edition again.

Didnt they say they were looking to sell D&D like last week?

Stock price manipulation.

That turned out to be incorrect. From what I remember:
It was one news outlet in China, unconfirmed by anyone else, and denied by all parties mentioned as involved. It could have been malicious, but it also could have been a misunderstanding / mistranslation.

Its on my list, and I've played Solasta (loved it, but they level higher than BG3 does).

However, I think Pathfinder games do better Legendary adventures. The characters attain godlike strength in the end whereas D&D 5ed is not very good at that so far in the Video game space.

What ever happened to games like NeverWinter Nights where you could literally do a raid on the hells themselves or Neverwinter Nights 2 where you can make an attack on the God of the Dead's Domain.

Developers complain about how hard it its to do spells and powers past a certain level and yet their predecessors still found a way to do it even if they had to make certain limitations on them.

Still, I am glad to see BG3 a thing even if the characters are weak compared to the original ones from BG2.

A game of the scale of BG3 in the PF2E ruleset would be so fucking amazing.

Couldn't make those campaigns in the 5e ruleset, not well at least. Pathfinder and even older editions of dnd are much better designed.

Wish I could get into this game, but I'm so done with turn based fighting. I can't take another game with that mechanic

Turns are optional, just hold shift+space to turn them off on pc.

That seems like it would make for chaotic fights. I’ll have to save and see what happens lol

That's very weird, but i do feel the same way about the 5e system. I can't finish bg3 despite seeing the quality of it due to the shitty base system. I'll never get why they did dnd. Larian could do so much better, they could have picked up any ip they wanted.

Oh I could like an action game set in the universe. Or a souls-like dnd game? I’d be down.

They tried an action game a couple years ago. It was aggressively mid... I hope they try a BG3 again and get a studio that's actually good at making games to make the game

I’m thinking something like Horizon Zero Dawn, just set in the Baldur’s Gate area.

I hope theres a new mtg game. They were all fun to me.

With MTG arena they don't really have incentive to make more games. Which is a shame because Duels of the Planeswalkers was fun

That was the shit. I worked so damn hard to beat that game and get the sick headgear for my Xbox avatar

it's a shame they removed planeswalkers from consoles, i enjoyed playing offline with a controller

Naw if they could make arena more playable to everyone i think they coukd have another winner on their plate

I would prefer to see something that uses the IP that isn't just a card game port. Something new. If MMOs weren't all (Except for destiny I guess) hamstring by their own 90's era hotbar mechanics, I'd think an MMO would be cool.

Didn't they just absolutely gut Larian staff?

Larian is independent. They're not owned by Hasbro. I think Hasbro has done some serious layoffs lately, but I haven't seen anything about layoffs at Larian.

Larian Studios, the developer of Baldur's Gate 3, has been "affected" by layoffs at Wizards of the Coast, the company that manages the Dungeons and Dragons brand. The CEO of Larian Studios, Swen Vincke, revealed that almost all the people who were in the original meeting when Baldur’s Gate 3 was approved are no longer working at Wizards of the Coast after the recent layoffs[1][4]. This includes several prominent names from the D&D team, such as Mike Mearls and Breeanna Heiss[1]. The layoffs at Wizards of the Coast were part of a larger trend in the gaming industry, with several other companies also having laid off employees in the same year[1][5]. The impact of these layoffs on the future of Baldur's Gate 3 and other projects is not yet clear.

Citations: [1] Baldur's Gate 3 Studio CEO Comments on Hasbro Layoffs https://gamerant.com/baldurs-gate-3-hasbro-layoffs-dungeons-and-dragons/ [2] CEO of Baldur's Gate 3 dev Swen Vincke says the D&D team ... - Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/18j5qjc/theres_almost_nobody_left_ceo_of_baldurs_gate_3/ [3] Baldur's Gate 3 dev speaks out on Hasbro's shocking DnD layoffs https://www.pcgamesn.com/baldurs-gate-3/layoffs-comment [4] Larian CEO acknowledges Wizards of the Coasts layoffs in belated The Game Awards speech https://www.eurogamer.net/larian-ceo-acknowledges-wizards-of-the-coasts-layoffs-in-belated-the-game-awards-speech [5] Baldur's Gate 3 Lead Says "There's Almost Nobody Left" On D&D Team From First Meetings https://www.thegamer.com/baldurs-gate-3-lead-dd-team-first-meetings-laid-off/

He literally meant they were fired from WOTC. He was talking about the team at WOTC they were working with; nobody at Larian was fired.

Read the articles and not just the headlines.

Read my post again. I didn't randomly quote and italics one word randomly for fun

We need more Eye of the Beholder and classic Bard's Tale and classic Wizardry, and less fucking Baldur's Goddamn JRPG Story-Heavy Bullshit Gate. Story-heavy shit has basically killed gaming. Go watch TV for your fucking story, kids, and leave games alone.

"Boo hoo games have changed it's all different now story is good blah blah". Bullshit. Do you want to play chess and every other move have to stop and be forced to watch a part of some fucking medieval war movie? No? THEN WHY DO YOU WANT THIS IN VIDEOGAMES?

i wonder why gamers are having a hard time beating the illiterate numbskull allegations 🤔

Story killed gaming? Nah... story-driven games are what took games out of the basement and into the mainstream. One can only make so many "I have a gun / sword and I kill the things" games before it gets repetitive.

Okay okay. So let me get this straight. Story bad. You realise story has been a centre point of gaming for a long long long time.

Second. As someone who has played games for 25+, there's plenty of games out there if you just want constant combat. Doom for example. Halo. Overwatch. Apex. Dark souls.
Even combat heavy games have stories though. Overwatch has background lore and in game story now.
Doom gotta save everyone from bad alien dudes.
Halo. Stop the covenant using the rings.
Dark souls... Well dark souls is so lore heavy it's hard to keep up with the story.

So if you don't like story in games. Well maybe stick to space invaders and leave the good games to people who actually appreciate good games.

You know the story isn't between moves in combat (with rare exceptions)?

A lot of video game writing is bad, but computers allow storytelling that isn't possible through other mediums. BG3 is choose your own adventure but actually good.

Also: read books for your stories. 😉👍

I grew up on SSI gold-box games, Eye of the Beholder, and other similar games. I think those games would have had many elements from BG3 were it technically possible, if a bit more wargamey in some respects.

I like both, personally