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Baldur’s Gate 3 is Metacritic’s highest-rated PC game ever, but devs are rejecting cheap comparisonsWhere’s that Calm Emotions spellslot
Where’s that Calm Emotions spellslot
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Larian Studios
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Larian Studios
Still, it’s all very apples-to-oranges, and developers are pushing back. They’ve been pushing back since well before launch, actually. A few weeks before release in July, Strange Scaffold founder (and gosh, former RPS contributor?!) Xalavier Nelson Jrthreadedabout players using their excitement for Baldur’s Gate 3 “to apply criticism or a ‘raised standard’ to RPGs going forward”. Rather than drawing hasty comparisons, he wrote, it’s important to consider Baldur’s Gate 3’s accomplishments with and against the specifics of its development and production circumstances. It represents the work of over 400 people around the globe, and builds on institutional knowledge amassed from the Divinity series, together with three, lucrative years in early access to harvest community feedback and squash bugs.
All of which reflects Nelson Jr’s own, broader desire for greater transparency and understanding between developers, press and players. As he said when I interviewed him a little while back forNME: “change the conditions in which you make a thing and you change the thing you make. That’s common sense for any other medium. But in games, I don’t see this truth acknowledged quite often.”
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Larian Studios
Night in the Woodsdeveloper Scott Benson wasmore whimsical in his assessment. “Just left the game dev coffee shop and we’re all really mad and upset and afraid because of Baldur’s Gate 3’s scope and quality,” he wrote on Sunday. “Everyone is threatened because someone finally made a giant very expensive well received rpg with voice acting. Now we all have to do that. Very upset”.
I’ll leave you with Alice’sBaldur’s Gate 3 review, plus somerift-mending thoughtsfrom Michael Gamble, project director at Bioware on the nextMass Effect. “Well, @baldursgate3 is everything I wanted it to be, and more. As a fan, it gets me excited. As a developer, it gets me excited. Even if you aren’t into DnD, you should give it a try.”
Disclosure: Former RPS deputy editor Adam Smith (RPS in peace) now works at Larian and is the lead writer for Baldur’s Gate 3. Former contributor Emily Gera also works on it.
