Baldur's Gate Larian is moving away from D&D, no BG3 DLC or BG4

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Sarcasm or for real? I always had the perception that Diablo II was wildly more successful compared to BGII due to far lower barrier to entry complexity-wise, very reliable multiplayer etc.

I'm talking about the first one. Diablo wasn't some niche title only known to RPG fans, it was huge. BG was also big. It turned Bioware from a fly-by-night studio into one with enough clout to move Neverwinter Nights from Interplay to Atari. They had so much clout that Obsidian was able to benefit from their success by getting royalties from KOTOR 2 and NWN 2 sales in their contracts (deals they never got again from future publishers).

Eventually. Those are lifetime sales numbers. It also feels like you’re missing some of your own post there.

It took Diablo 4 years to reach 2.5 million. BGs:

Worldwide, Baldur's Gate ultimately surpassed 2.2 million sales by early 2003

Baldur's Gate II alone reached almost 1.5 million sales by December 2002, and more than 2 million by November 2005

They're in the same bracket.

What point do you think that quote is making that you put there? Knights of the Old Republic came out in 2003. Making adjustments to how combat worked after an E3 2002 showing because people were seemingly having a hard time understanding what BioWare were trying to go for is not any indication that nobody liked the combat of Knights of the Old Republic on release, and that that’s something even BioWare knowns.

"What Went Wrong 1) Using a round-based system"

"The fundamental lesson learned, albeit in retrospect, is that the scale of player actions allowed by a combat system must match the scale of actions on which the system operates"

"In addition, we are actively applying the lessons on what worked well and what didn't work as well to the three new intellectual properties in development at BioWare, one of which, our recently announced Xbox-exclusive title Jade Empire, will be published by Microsoft."

https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/3...pg-codex-forum/?do=findComment&comment=541679

I've had groin pulls that were more fun than KotOR combats

With further hindsight (that postmortem is from 2003) it can safely be said it was a stupid move for them to move away from what they’d done in Knights of the Old Republic with Jade Empire and Mass Effect, both of which would end up preforming worse. Final Fantasy 12 makes it all the weirder too, because there’s a game that has combat much like KotOR, and it sold over 5 million in a year. BioWare must have been aware of FF12 too, I mean they take that game’s Gambit system for Origins.

Why are you acting as if kotor was significantly bigger than their other games?

Total sales of the game's Xbox and computer releases surpassed 2 million copies by February 2005 and 2.5 million by May and reached nearly 3 million by March 2006. As of 2007, Knights of the Old Republic had sold 3.2 million units.

In April 2011, it was reported that both Mass Effect and its sequel have combined sold more than seven million units worldwide

Jade Empire was a misstep, that's why it didn't get a sequel. Mass Effect got a trilogy.

Your Diablo point makes no sense since Diablo is not just the one Diablo game. Diablo as a series, by the early 2000s, was not in the same bracket as BioWare’s Baldur’s Gate series. Diablo 2 is a thing, it came out in the year 2000, it sold 2 million copies in one and a half months. In 2001 Diablo 2 sold half a million more than the combined total sales of both Baldur’s Gate games in 2001. Your point about the first Diablo game is completely nonsensical because there was a second, even bigger, Diablo game that came out a few years later. Even with the first Diablo game sales don’t tell the whole story, the game got a PSX release a year after the PC version, it was in rental places where many different sets of people could play the same one copy over and over again.

You are aware that the lesson he said they learn with the KotOR’s combat system is something they implemented before release. That the problem they picked up on was something they noticed at a E3 showing in 2002 a year before it came out in 2003, and the guy says in the quote you posted that they fixed the problem they saw people having with the game? When your original point is: Even BioWare knew the combat sucked. An anecdote about how they noticed something late in development at a trade show, and fixed it before release, doesn’t make your point. It also doesn’t exactly help if lessons learned for better combat resulted in Jade Empire combat.

Jade Empire didn’t get a sequel because the sequel team just played with their dicks for a few years trying to reinvent a wheel that was already rolling around at the time. I’m sure you read about the utterly stupid development cycle of the Jade Empire sequel that became Project Revolver a few years ago.

 

[mindx2]

So...what now for Larian? As was said, Bioware and Obsidian ditched what they were good at and started experimenting with dumb shit with results being what they are.

I feel like the safe guess is to just assume they'll make another game with gameplay similar to the two D:OS games and BG3, but with a smaller scope

Yet sven recently said their next game will dwarf BG3. From gamespot interview:
"Prior to development on Baldur's Gate 3, Larian CEO Swen Vincke was already planning out the company's future, and this included what he calls "the very big RPG that will dwarf them all."

When all this news broke of them walking away from BG Swen also stated their next game won't be the "Big RPG" he's talked about over the years.

 

[Shrimp]

So...what now for Larian? As was said, Bioware and Obsidian ditched what they were good at and started experimenting with dumb shit with results being what they are.

I feel like the safe guess is to just assume they'll make another game with gameplay similar to the two D:OS games and BG3, but with a smaller scope

Yet sven recently said their next game will dwarf BG3. From gamespot interview:
"Prior to development on Baldur's Gate 3, Larian CEO Swen Vincke was already planning out the company's future, and this included what he calls "the very big RPG that will dwarf them all."

When all this news broke of them walking away from BG Swen also stated their next game won't be the "Big RPG" he's talked about over the years.

Full quote:

Prior to development on Baldur's Gate 3, Larian CEO Swen Vincke was already planning out the company's future, and this included what he calls "the very big RPG that will dwarf them all."

Speaking to GameSpot at GDC, Vincke explained that Larian's next game also won't actually be the aforementioned "very big RPG," but will be another step toward realizing it.

"I think there is some tech that we don't have yet," Vincke said. "And I don't know what the specs are on the next gen [of gaming systems] yet, but I hope that it's going to bring us closer."

Granted that Larian undoubtedly ended up rolling in money from BG3 I still hope they dial down the scope and try to limit themselves. Even if it's what the modern market wants having janky MoCap cutscenes for whenever you talk with random NPCs must be an absolute black hole on the budget and development time.

 

[onemananadhisdroid]

I think the bigger risk for Larian's next game is a radical genre shift - ie, sci-fi instead of fantasy.

This is how videogame CEOs think nowadays, it is exactly why we have trash today. No one with balls.

Imagine moving from fantasy to sci-Fi being considered as "having (space?) balls".


Then again, RPGs are the forever playgrounds of dwarves and elves, of Pip-Boys and Cyberpunks. Basically, a genre of games where even announcing a zombie apocalypse or WW2 game would be seen as a radical move and as subverting all expectations.

 

[Sotomonte]

I liked KotoRs combat! But then I like RTwP just fine. I used to think it was cool pausing it when lightsabers were clashing. Needed some more animations but when u look at something like Baldurs Gate where everyone just swings, the dodging and blocking in KotOR was sweet!

It has nothing to do with BioWare, but... if we talk about one of the best combat animations, we have to mention the two Drakensang. You could see how they parried the blows with their weapons, blocked with their shields, feinted to avoid the thrusts, etc... great stuff

 

[scytheavatar]

https://www.ign.com/articles/baldur...-about-foregoing-dlc-aaa-development-and-more

You alluded to the fact [in your talk] that you've stayed in this set of systems for a while, how Baldur's Gate 3 was born out of Divinity: Original Sin 2. But you've also said in the past that you did eventually want to make Divinity: Original Sin 3. Is that what this is, or is it totally new?
Vincke: I can't tell you.
Fair enough. I had to ask.
Vincke: Yeah, I can't tell you. No, it will have its proper moment. Hopefully nobody's going to leak it for us, but it's different than what you think it is, but it is still familiar enough for you to recognize that it's something that we are making.

I interpret Swen's words as only possibly meaning two things: either they are doing a genre shift but familiar turn based gameplay, or they are doing the same fantasy and look but NOT turn based. Think chances of it being the latter is slim going by Larian's philosophy and how Swen usually thinks.

 

[Shrimp]

It's going to be Dragon Commander 2

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

The Wasteland 2 Kickstarter had 61,290 backers. It wouldn’t exactly be a bolded statement to say even post the Wasteland 2 Kickstarter that Wasteland as a brand was basically meaningless. Wasteland 2 didn’t even happen on the back of people wanting another Wasteland game, it happened in the hope that it’d be something more along the lines of classic pre Bethesda Fallout. Wasteland was essentially a trivia question. It was seemingly seen to have so little worth that EA let the trademark lapse, and then just let the series go to Brian Fargo after he picked up the Wasteland trademark name from Konami in like 2003 or something.

I also agree with this. How many Fallout/Fallout 2 previews and reviews even back in the late 1990s mention Wasteland somewhere in the background of the game? A good chunk of them. Same can be said for Fallout 3. Even a lot of the modern Fallout themed YouTube videos can't help but reference Interplay's Wasteland. The game didn't sell well, so people didn't support Wasteland 2 and Wasteland 3 based on actual playing the original.

 

[Roguey]

Your Diablo point makes no sense since Diablo is not just the one Diablo game.

Pretend it's the year 1998 or 1999. The top two crpgs in existence are Diablo and Baldur's Gate. Diablo is not significantly more successful than Baldur's Gate.

It's only true that BG2 hit the crpg ceiling while Diablo 2 raised it a bit.

You are aware that the lesson he said they learn with the KotOR’s combat system is something they implemented before release.

They couldn't completely fix it. "Using a round-based system" was considered a flaw in their post-mortem, kotor still uses rounds. JE, ME, and DA:O+ do not.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Your Diablo point makes no sense since Diablo is not just the one Diablo game.

Pretend it's the year 1998 or 1999. The top two crpgs in existence are Diablo and Baldur's Gate. Diablo is not significantly more successful than Baldur's Gate.

It's only true that BG2 hit the crpg ceiling while Diablo 2 raised it a bit.

You are aware that the lesson he said they learn with the KotOR’s combat system is something they implemented before release.

They couldn't completely fix it. "Using a round-based system" was considered a flaw in their post-mortem, kotor still uses rounds. JE, ME, and DA:O+ do not.

Diablo was also a console game, it was bought by movie rental places like Blockbuster and Hollywood Video in ‘98, and those copies that they bought were rented out to many other people for a few years. You can’t really make a direct comparison to the number of people that would’ve played them.

That said, your original point was that everyone knew Diablo, ergo, everyone knew the BioWare Baldur's Gate games as well. I wouldn’t say that back in ‘98 and ‘99 that Diablo was all that well known a game. Most PC games were fairly under the radar. Being the best selling CRPG doesn’t mean much when the numbers that come with being that are in the neighborhood of 2 million after being out for years.

 

[Roguey]

Diablo was also a console game, it was bought by movie rental places like Blockbuster and Hollywood Video in ‘98, and those copies that they bought were rented out to many other people for a few years. You can’t really make a direct comparison to the number of people that would’ve played them.

I don't know anyone who played Diablo on Playstation. Seems like the reviews for it were middling as well? https://www.ign.com/articles/1998/03/28/diablo

I wouldn’t say that back in ‘98 and ‘99 that Diablo was all that well known a game. Most PC games were fairly under the radar.

Who the hell cares about console gamers? The vast majority of console players were literally small children. The PC game core demographic was teenagers and adults and of course there weren't that many of them, it was a very nerdy and low status activity.

Meanwhile, Half-Life was the biggest FPS of 1998:

In the United Kingdom, it placed second in February—behind the debut of Baldur's Gate—and fifth in March. In April, it claimed #3 on Chart-Track's rankings and dropped to #16 on those of PC Data. On April 23, Sierra announced that global sales of Half-Life had reached almost 1 million copies.

After maintaining the 16th place for May in the US, Half-Life exited PC Data's monthly top 20 in June. Half-Life became the fifth-bestselling PC game of the first half of 1999 in the US. Its domestic sales during 1999 reached 290,000 copies by the end of September. During 1999, it was the fifth-best-selling PC game in the US, with sales of 445,123 copies. These sales brought in revenues of $16.6 million, the sixth-highest gross that year for a PC game in the US. The following year, it was the 16th-bestselling PC game in the US, selling another 286,593 copies and earning $8.98 million.

There you have it - Baldur's Gate was as comparably big as Half-Life. It even beat it in the UK charts for a time.

 

[Swen]

I wouldn't say it was Divinity that made them famous, rather the brand-power of D&D and BG. With this choice they're either going back to being respectable developers in their niche, i.e. nobodies that make Divinity Games, or they're going to have to come up with an entirely new IP that has to be a banger from go because people will inevitably compare it to their last game.

I think you underestimate how popular Larian and their games have became. Divinity: Original Sin 2 sold 7.5M (for comparison - Baldur's Gate 3 sold 10M). Not bad for "nobodies" without a widely known IP.

Correction; BG3 sold atleast 15 million.

It should probably be remembered that we don’t know how much Divinity Original Sin 2 sold. The 7.5 million figure isn’t an exact figure, it’s an estimate that comes from Swen Vincke saying:

“I want to say, but I'm not sure if it's true, that DOS2 sold three times DOS1. 'Many millions' is the real answer. Enough to sustain something like BG3 and allow us to develop it.”

There was an official sales number for DOS1, so someone took it and times it by three. The BG3 figure comes from something similar.

“It’s almost doubled Divinity: Original Sin 2 now, so it’s doing really well, as Divinity: Original Sin 2 was very successful. So it did beyond what we expected.”

The “almost” would imply less than 15 million. But DOS2 sales could’ve also been less than 7.5 million, it could’ve been 7 million or just about anything between those two numbers. If it was 7 million than the BG3 estimate could be a whole million off, and the “almost” would mean even more than that.

Swen: It's almost doubled DOS2 now, so it's doing really really well as DOS2 was very successful. So it did beyond what we expected.

For reference, the last time they gave us an update on DOS2's sales was back in 2019 when they said it sold three times that of DOS1, which put DOS2 at 7.5 million copies back then. So it seems like Baldur's Gate 3 is now have sold at least around 15 million copies.

Also note that BG3 consistently stays in the top 10 global sellers on Steam. It's probably between 15 and 20 million by now.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Diablo was also a console game, it was bought by movie rental places like Blockbuster and Hollywood Video in ‘98, and those copies that they bought were rented out to many other people for a few years. You can’t really make a direct comparison to the number of people that would’ve played them.

I don't know anyone who played Diablo on Playstation. Seems like the reviews for it were middling as well? https://www.ign.com/articles/1998/03/28/diablo

I wouldn’t say that back in ‘98 and ‘99 that Diablo was all that well known a game. Most PC games were fairly under the radar.

Who the hell cares about console gamers? The vast majority of console players were literally small children. The PC game core demographic was teenagers and adults and of course there weren't that many of them, it was a very nerdy and low status activity.

Meanwhile, Half-Life was the biggest FPS of 1998:

In the United Kingdom, it placed second in February—behind the debut of Baldur's Gate—and fifth in March. In April, it claimed #3 on Chart-Track's rankings and dropped to #16 on those of PC Data. On April 23, Sierra announced that global sales of Half-Life had reached almost 1 million copies.

After maintaining the 16th place for May in the US, Half-Life exited PC Data's monthly top 20 in June. Half-Life became the fifth-bestselling PC game of the first half of 1999 in the US. Its domestic sales during 1999 reached 290,000 copies by the end of September. During 1999, it was the fifth-best-selling PC game in the US, with sales of 445,123 copies. These sales brought in revenues of $16.6 million, the sixth-highest gross that year for a PC game in the US. The following year, it was the 16th-bestselling PC game in the US, selling another 286,593 copies and earning $8.98 million.

There you have it - Baldur's Gate was as comparably big as Half-Life. It even beat it in the UK charts for a time.

You don’t personally know anyone that played Diablo on PSX, or you’ve never heard of anyone playing it on the PSX? Because I’ve seen a few people on this forum say they played it on the PSX over the years. And how many people did you personally know back in the ‘90s that played Diablo and weren’t part of your friend group that introduced each other to the game?

Did you forget what we were even talking about? I said BioWare’s Baldur’s Gate wasn’t a well know brand. Which it wasn’t. You said it was, and have been trying to make the point it was. Look, if you want to make the point it was known within its little known niche market, you can do that. But it wasn’t a truly well known game like Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, Resident Evil 2, Street Fighter 2, Mortal Kombat, Myst, Virtua Fighter, The Sims, Final Fantasy 7, Age of Empires 2, and StarCraft.

And no, PC gaming’s core audience was not fucking adults in the mid to late ‘90s and 2000s. The PC gaming audiences was largely the same kids and teens playing console games at that exact same time. Maybe what you’re saying was true before the PC boom of the ‘90s, but by around 1996/1997 I don’t think any of my friends didn’t have a PC to play video games on...and maybe like only one of them had a parent that played video games on the thing. My guess would be that most American homes with kids (let’s say boys 8 and over) by like ‘97 also had a PC those kids could played video games on.

Half-Life was not the biggest FPS of 1998. 1997’s GoldenEye on the N64 was the biggest FPS of 1998. Half-Life was also outsold by Deer Hunter on the PC in 1998. Maybe this is something that dawned on you while looking at the Half-Life numbers, but Half-Life was not a huge game on release. It was a well regarded game on release, even before release, (it had a very nice demo) and you differently would hear a lot about it over the years because of its modding scene; but Half-Life came out at the end of ‘98, and it wasn’t big until maybe the end of 2001. Half-Life sold better in the three years after 2001 than it did before that.

 

[Rhobar121]

Does it matter if BG was popular when it came out? The brand was virtually dead for over 20 years.
Let's assume that the game sold even 4 million copies. What does this change?
By today's standards this is a small number. Half of these people probably don't play games anymore or are dead.
The average gamer may have heard about the game somewhere, but is unlikely to care about it in the same way that most older gamers cared about titles released in the 1980s.

 

[Aarwolf]

It matters that many normies were teenagers then, now they are 35-45, and they can afford the game, they can afford PC or console and they are nostalgic about games they played back then and things they were doing back then. That's why we have whole nostalgia driven business - remasters, remakes, resurgence of D&D, Lego and so on and so forth.
Clue is that many of us couldn't afford these things back then, but now we can - and it doesn't matter how many copies of Baldur's Gate was sold in 1999 and 2000, it matters how many of us wanted that game, played its pirated versions and now want to evoke that times again.

 

[KeAShizuku]

It matters that many normies were teenagers then, now they are 35-45, and they can afford the game, they can afford PC or console and they are nostalgic about games they played back then and things they were doing back then. That's why we have whole nostalgia driven business - remasters, remakes, resurgence of D&D, Lego and so on and so forth.
Clue is that many of us couldn't afford these things back then, but now we can - and it doesn't matter how many copies of Baldur's Gate was sold in 1999 and 2000, it matters how many of us wanted that game, played its pirated versions and now want to evoke that times again.

GOG was founded on that nostalgia.

 

[Roguey]

You don’t personally know anyone that played Diablo on PSX, or you’ve never heard of anyone playing it on the PSX?

Both.

Because I’ve seen a few people on this forum say they played it on the PSX over the years.

A few people on a forum, congrats.

Did you forget what we were even talking about? I said BioWare’s Baldur’s Gate wasn’t a well know brand. Which it wasn’t.

It was. Bioware promoted Dragon Age: Origins as the spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate. Obsidian also had a very successful Kickstarter regarding a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate (and all those other lesser known Infinity Engine games). Beamdog had a fair amount of success releasing those Enhanced Editions.

But it wasn’t a truly well known game like Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, Resident Evil 2, Street Fighter 2, Mortal Kombat, Myst, Virtua Fighter, The Sims, Final Fantasy 7, Age of Empires 2, and StarCraft.

Some of those games are a lot more well-known than others.

"by April 1998 Doom's shareware edition had yielded 1.36 million units sold"

"StarCraft's worldwide sales reached 4 million units by July 2001; South Korea accounted for 50% of these copies" (really propped up by the Koreans)

And no, PC gaming’s core audience was not fucking adults in the mid to late ‘90s and 2000s. The PC gaming audiences was largely the same kids and teens playing console games at that exact same time. Maybe what you’re saying was true before the PC boom of the ‘90s, but by around 1996/1997 I don’t think any of my friends didn’t have a PC to play video games on...and maybe like only one of them had a parent that played video games on the thing. My guess would be that most American homes with kids (let’s say boys 8 and over) by like ‘97 also had a PC those kids could played video games on.

You're European where PC gaming was bigger than consoles. When I was a teenager I only knew of one other person who also had a computer. Other kids only had consoles if they played games at all. Most kids did not play PC games except at school where it was the typical educational fare (Oregon Trail, Carmen Sandiego). Quake, Duke, Diablo, Fallout, Thief, Unreal, System Shock 2- these were all rated M, not for kids at all. Baldur's Gate was rated T for Teen but most teenagers certainly weren't into nerdy THAC0 D&D crap. The Baldur's Gate audience was adults and nerdy teens. Most American kids would find the rules incomprehensible. Not like Final Fantasy or other Squaresoft RPGs which didn't require any deep understanding of the rules.

 

[Baron Tahn]

Perspective is a funny thing and subjective. PC gaming or Nintendo was the only choice. It was Civ, Doom, Baldur's Gate, Darklands, Dungeon keeper...All PC.

Consoles -snes and megadrive- were for babies who wanted to play Mario and Zelda - (both of which I owned on my grey brick gameboy so not really judging babies here) - but if you wanted to play with the big boys it was games made for adults. Consoles trashed the entire industry and were obvious decline of the superior PC master race!

From my own pov of course.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

It was. Bioware promoted Dragon Age: Origins as the spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate. Obsidian also had a very successful Kickstarter regarding a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate (and all those other lesser known Infinity Engine games). Beamdog had a fair amount of success releasing those Enhanced Editions.

I remember posting the news back when this site first started, and trust me, Baldur's Gate came up a LOT in stuff with new games, previews, interviews, and so on. A game couldn't talk about a combat system without there being a reference to "real time with pause like Baldur's Gate". If it wasn't Baldur's Gate, it was Diablo. That's about the only thing publishers were interested in making in the early 2000s through mid2000s. Anyone who thinks Baldur's Gate was a virtual unknown during the 2000s has no idea what they're talking about.

 

[Zeriel]

Baldur's Gate 1 had very silly writing too, but there's just something that's incredibly off putting in BG3.

I think its because baldurs gate 1 was created by true D&D nerds that had a consistent tone, where baldurs gate 3 is all over the place. the writing feels way too contemporary. it doesnt help that every flaming fist I run into is some midget lady with modern danger hair

There's something to be said for old 2D graphics: They give you an idea of what's happening, but if you want to visualize it in your mind's eye, you have to employ certain powers of imagination. So BG1 Flaming Fist look like whatever you think they look like, within certain loose constraints. (e.g., male human, gray plate armor, quarterstaff.)

That's no longer the case since NWN.

Fast forward to today, and it's all zesty homosexuals and BIPOCs with blue hair, and there's no way to imagine anything different. You can mod the game to taste, but that would be racist.

I didn't think that BG1's writing was all that silly, by the way. It wasn't necessarily sillier than the adventure guides and other source material at the time.

People love to take one or two momentary jokes as the whole thing. It's bizarre. I feel like the people doing it really, really hate BG1 and want to use those moments to attack the whole thing. BG2 is a lot more of an obvious trend towards the route Bioware would take at the time, but even by the time of NWN it was still "normie-centric", the progressive mental illness train only really became noticeably bad in the early to mid 2010's. It all comes to a head around when Trump was elected in 2016; 2015 is the cut-off point. It's really remarkable how you can look at TV shows from 2015 and see sane writing, then everything after that point just goes off the rails. It's like seeing the precise moment the Roman Empire fell.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

You don’t personally know anyone that played Diablo on PSX, or you’ve never heard of anyone playing it on the PSX?

Both.

Because I’ve seen a few people on this forum say they played it on the PSX over the years.

A few people on a forum, congrats.

Did you forget what we were even talking about? I said BioWare’s Baldur’s Gate wasn’t a well know brand. Which it wasn’t.

It was. Bioware promoted Dragon Age: Origins as the spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate. Obsidian also had a very successful Kickstarter regarding a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate (and all those other lesser known Infinity Engine games). Beamdog had a fair amount of success releasing those Enhanced Editions.

But it wasn’t a truly well known game like Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, Resident Evil 2, Street Fighter 2, Mortal Kombat, Myst, Virtua Fighter, The Sims, Final Fantasy 7, Age of Empires 2, and StarCraft.

Some of those games are a lot more well-known than others.

"by April 1998 Doom's shareware edition had yielded 1.36 million units sold"

"StarCraft's worldwide sales reached 4 million units by July 2001; South Korea accounted for 50% of these copies" (really propped up by the Koreans)

And no, PC gaming’s core audience was not fucking adults in the mid to late ‘90s and 2000s. The PC gaming audiences was largely the same kids and teens playing console games at that exact same time. Maybe what you’re saying was true before the PC boom of the ‘90s, but by around 1996/1997 I don’t think any of my friends didn’t have a PC to play video games on...and maybe like only one of them had a parent that played video games on the thing. My guess would be that most American homes with kids (let’s say boys 8 and over) by like ‘97 also had a PC those kids could played video games on.

You're European where PC gaming was bigger than consoles. When I was a teenager I only knew of one other person who also had a computer. Other kids only had consoles if they played games at all. Most kids did not play PC games except at school where it was the typical educational fare (Oregon Trail, Carmen Sandiego). Quake, Duke, Diablo, Fallout, Thief, Unreal, System Shock 2- these were all rated M, not for kids at all. Baldur's Gate was rated T for Teen but most teenagers certainly weren't into nerdy THAC0 D&D crap. The Baldur's Gate audience was adults and nerdy teens. Most American kids would find the rules incomprehensible. Not like Final Fantasy or other Squaresoft RPGs which didn't require any deep understanding of the rules.

It’s hilarious that you think kids didn’t play M rated games. Doom, or at least some version of it, (probably Final Doom) used to be set up on computers at Walmart in those years they used to do that. I think that ended sometime in the early 2000s when PC sales started to decline, I do remember playing Sid Meier's SimGolf at Walmart, so they were still doing at the start of 2002. 2002 was probably the end of that.

Were you a teenage before 1996, or were you a teenage in the late 2000s when the PC boom had ended and that average person that would’ve been buying a nice PC before was maybe getting a laptop that wasn’t much good for playing video games...and then even later just getting a tablet. Maybe the Walmart stuff clued you into this, but I don’t live in Europe, and everyone I knew as a kid, before I was a teen, had a pretty nice PC they could play video games on by at least 1997. Everyone had at least one current console, and they had a PC. Before 1996 I think I only knew 4 people with a PC a home, one of which was a fairly well off person that had Sega Channel. But by ‘97 it seemed like everyone I went to school with (girl and guy) had a PC. PC games were also fairly cheap in comparison to console games, (even when console games got cheaper with the move to CDs) so it was a little easier to talk a parent into just randomly buying one from time to time.

Since you’re pulling quotes from Wikipedia I’m sure you also saw these:

“ By late 1995, Doom was estimated to be installed on more computers worldwide than Microsoft's new operating system, Windows 95.”

“ In addition to sales, an estimated six million people played the shareware version by 2002; other sources estimated in 2000 that 10–20 million people played Doom within 24 months of its launch.”

Let’s take a look at those KickStarter numbers for Obsidians’ spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate: Pillars of Eternity (Project Eternity) - 73,986 backers. Now, if a game was only ever bought by 75,000 people, would you be arguing that it was some well known successfully brand that guaranteed future sales in the millions for some sequel? By 2016 it’s sales were at 700,000. That is not a big game that everyone knows of. Those are not big numbers.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

It was. Bioware promoted Dragon Age: Origins as the spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate. Obsidian also had a very successful Kickstarter regarding a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate (and all those other lesser known Infinity Engine games). Beamdog had a fair amount of success releasing those Enhanced Editions.

I remember posting the news back when this site first started, and trust me, Baldur's Gate came up a LOT in stuff with new games, previews, interviews, and so on. A game couldn't talk about a combat system without there being a reference to "real time with pause like Baldur's Gate". If it wasn't Baldur's Gate, it was Diablo. That's about the only thing publishers were interested in making in the early 2000s through mid2000s. Anyone who thinks Baldur's Gate was a virtual unknown during the 2000s has no idea what they're talking about.

But this is a site specifically catering to CRPG fans, and even more specifically fans of CRPGs from that Interplay and Trokia era of CRPGs from the late ‘90s and early 2000s. Everyone here is gonna know what those BioWare Baldur's Gate games are, and I’d expect most people here have even played them. I don’t particularly like them, but I played them, and I’d see them, (as well as the Icewind Dale games, and the Fallout games) on the shelf in Walmart. I’d also expect someone working at the PC gaming side of some gaming site, especially in the 2000s, to have played one of the BioWare Baldur’s Gate games. But that doesn’t mean the general gaming audience gives a fuck about Baldur’s Gate as a brand, or really even knows much of anything about it beyond it being a thing a exist...if even that. I mean I’ve read interviews with Ken Levine for BioShock where the Freedom Force games come up, but I don’t take that to means Freedom Force is a well know game series. You’d also expect to see talk of Baldur’s Gate at the time your talking about, Baldur’s Gate 2 was still fairly new at the time this site started.

Like you can go to movie related sites and see that kind of thing with well regarded movies nobody watched too, but you wouldn’t turn around and use that to say the movie was actually way bigger than it actually was.

I’d say anyone who thinks Baldur's Gate wasn’t virtually unknown in the 2000s is in a very insular bubble. To me it’s crazy there are people in here that think there was some high level of brand awareness around BioWare’s Baldur’s Gate games when we can look at the numbers and see the sales of both their games. It’s crazy there’s people that think Baldur’s Gate 3 sold somewhere in the neighborhood of 14 or 15 million copies because of BioWare’s previous work, neither of which hit 3 million sales, and not because the previous game Larian Studios put out sold somewhere in the range of 7 million copies. There being so few people that even played the first two is probably why Larian didn’t have to do a real-time with pause combat system. I mean, who the fuck cares if you change it, almost nobody played the previous two, and Larian’s last game sold more than the combined total sales for the previous two games and their expansion packs.

 

[DeepOcean]

The way this reads, Ubisoft is going to be making Baldur's Gate 4.

I dunno what will cause more depression:
1 - BG 4 being a cross over of Forgotten Realms and Mario Rabbits for Nintendo Switch and Mobile...
2 - Larian announcing their next game is DoS 3.

 

[mediocrepoet]

The way this reads, Ubisoft is going to be making Baldur's Gate 4.

I dunno what will cause more depression:
1 - BG 4 being a cross over of Forgotten Realms and Mario Rabbits for Nintendo Switch and Mobile...

BG4 being a tactics game with Mario and the Rabbids would be awesome. Where's the depression coming from?

 

[Lyric Suite]

BTW, i said BG1 writing was silly but it's worth pointing out the main quest was actually very good. Saverok's realpolitiks machinations and how grounded his plan for domination actually was made for a wonderful experience. It balanced the silliness and jokes as there was something serious going on and was much better throughout than your usual video game story. There was a pontential for them to go really boring with Saverok's using some magical macguffins to treaten the world and all that boring shit but instead Bioware ended up being smarter than that. It's not the greatest story ever told in a video game but it really felt like it was written by people who actually must have read some real books in their time and draw some actual cues from them.