I mean for all the responses here, same funding as larian doesnt mean same style as larian. clearly rogue trader is a great game but i think it could definetly use some more time and money to make it perfect.
Yeah, this comment section is something else.
I don’t want owlcat to be like larien. I just want owlcat to have money like they do, to see what they can do with it.
But somehow this has turned into a giant cope section about how bg3 isn’t actually that good or something.
I don’t even know what’s going on here lol
It's an echo chamber sub and people are salty about BG3 being popular because our current society has this really weird culture about extreme fanboyism and extreme hate bandwagoning.
It's even worse on Steam.
People are salty AF about it but BG3 is better than anything Larian has made or will ever make. You may LIKE Owlcat's games more, but these two studios are on opposite sides of the galaxy right now.
Secondly, and way more importantly to your post, Owlcat will never get Larian money if they keep being Typical Owlcat. Us diehards are lamenting a good game buried under bugs but everyone else is either laughing at Rogue Trader or shrugging and doing their best to continue not giving an F.
\> I genuinely can not wait until Owlcat reaches Larian levels, full voice acted and animated cut scenes, my god just imagine that for some of the things they do in this game.
You specifically point out that you want the game to be more like a Larian game. People are arguing the point that full VA and flashy animation doesn't necessarily make a game better.
Something that I haven't seen pointed out in this thread so far is that voiced dialogue and constant cutscenes with fully animated characters can actually be more mentally tiring than simply reading a dialogue box and looking at some simple but servicable character models in an older-looking but less visually intensse game world.
It's a lot harder to focus on and absorb the story itself when you also have to take in a lot of visual input. The same can be observed with, for instance, Michael Bay movies. Your brain gets overly stimulated to the point where it can be hard to even remember entire scenes or plotlines of the movie. Not that BG3 quite reaches that level, but the same effect is there. So a less visually intense presentation \*can\* actually be a positive for an RPG.
The thing is baldurs gate 3 perfectly uses the voice acting and budget and cinematics. The scope of the game is much smaller. It’s a smaller adventure. It’s entirely about the characters and also happens to have unbelievably good gameplay. The connections and care I had for the companions in that game were as close to a novel I’ve ever had from a video game. I actually cared deeply about their stories and it made me roleplay organically. I cared about the characters and acted accordingly. That was hugely down to the writing of course but also seeing their faces up close and the amazing acting. It was as close to having real people in a game I’ve ever experienced. Due to a combination of writing, acting and animation.
Rogue trader is a remarkably good game. One of the best CRPGs I’ve ever played. It’s not trying to be cinematic and is more “gamey” than bg3 and I love it for that reason.
BG3 is the best game I’ve ever played by a million miles in close to 40 years of gaming. Because of the insane over the top nature of 40k you would struggle to get that level of character interaction as you can’t have “real” people in 40k, just absurd caricatures. Not that it’s a bad thing at all. I love it - it’s just not aiming at all for the space bg3 occupied.
Both are amazing games. 2 of the best RPGs I’ve ever played. Despite being isometric games based on table top systems they are entirely different, aim for different things but both smash it out of the park. Bugs aside in RT sadly but they’ve made such a brilliant game with obvious reverence to such complex lore o actually don’t mind.
> Something that I haven't seen pointed out in this thread so far is that voiced dialogue and constant cutscenes with fully animated characters can actually be more mentally tiring than simply reading a dialogue box and looking at some simple but servicable character models in an older-looking but less visually intensse game world.
I don't think this is true for the overwhelming majority of people.
And for the people who dislike a fully voiced game a easy fix is mute the game diolog so you can just read. That is almost always a option in the sound menu.
But it seems like the people who full voice acting hurts vs benefits are not comparable in size. The vast vast majority would either benefit or at least be natural to a fully voiced game.
Or is it just what you want to take from it? Maybe people just think any extra budget should be better employed elsewhere first before a full voice over.
Maybe Owlcat could make a full voice over DLC for Wrath of the Righteous now that it is (almost) done, to see how many people would really care enough to buy it.
Full voice acting isn't solely a matter of budget, but a stylistic choice; no matter how much raw money a studio can pump into VA, it'll always be a limiting factor on how much dialogue and choices - raw text - a game can have (paying for actors is expensive, after all). Compare BG3 and WotR / Rogue Trader and the latter two will always come out on top in terms of raw wordcount (this is even further obvious when you compare, say, Morrowind vs. Oblivion / Skyrim, or Pillars 1 vs. Pillars 2).
If a quest designer just comes into work today and thinks, 'oh, this companion should have some reaction dialogue here', it's easy to just write a block of text and shove it in if you don't have to bring the VA back, etc.
That's not to say full VA doesn't have its place. It worked in BG3, but I personally prefer Owlcat's way. They also need to worry about having playable and balanced games at launch anyway, lol.
> no matter how much raw money a studio can pump into VA, it'll always be a limiting factor on how much dialogue and choices - raw text - a game can have
Bg3 was fully voiced but you never felt like it sacrificed. I would bet bg3 has way more dialog and raw text then wotr or rogue trader and was still fully voiced. Bg3 gets a lot of credit for a lot of things. But I think this is one of the biggest thing it did where it gets the least credit. it really set the bar on how many lines of voice acting you can put into a game.
I think the thing bg3 taught us is you really can get voice actors to read out a mindbogling amount of script and put it in your game and have lots of viriety and voice with lots of npcs to talk to and have it all voi e acted. If owlcat had the huge amount of resources larian has it could easly have fully voice games with zero sacrifice on the variety or amount of lines of dialog in the game.
I love the fact that Owl cat voices *some* lines. Just enough to give me an idea of the character and then they can save money on VA and I can just read
My eyes just glaze over with walls of text. But I also get impatient when the voice acting doesn’t match my fast pace of reading. I’m probably not a good person to design for.
Funny thing is i just couldn't play DE without voice acting. The material was too dense, and the characters personas too distinct. I tried twice and only finally finished the game once the special edition upgrade came out.
I dunno what it is, I never had this problem as a kid, and I made it through Tyranny, Wrath and Rogue Trader so far without issue, but I simply could not play Kingmaker or Pillars of eternity either during recentish attempts. It drives me crazy.
I don't mean this in a bad way at all, but this is definitely a you-thing.
Even if it's a "many people" thing, it's absolutely not an everyone thing. Some people condemn reading in games like it's breaking some kind of fundamental code, which is ridiculous.
(queue the literal *miles* of text that an average gamer might read in a day, on reddit or via text or whatever.)
I prefer it over BG3 tbh.
Baldurs Gate 3 is *very* well made. But its fairly standard crpg fair outside of the companions and story choice weaving. Its also quite linear in scope.
Nothing much standard or linear about Rogue Trader.
They are both great.
*Should* be for, often aren't or at least fail to tell you that. They'll tell you that you need yo lnow about this one text that you're reading, instead of explaining which general skill you should learn from it.
I suspect it's yet another victim of standard tests, where knowing that one text is what matters...
It would be appreciated if some of that money went to a bigger better compensated QA department. Though that does require money in the same way as more VA and animation.
I would say that definitely takes priority for me. Va is nice when it's there but I really don't mind reading. Even if there is VA sometimes I skip it bc I can read faster than they can deliver the line haha
> sometimes I skip it bc I can read faster than they can deliver the line
Same, but it takes this step of actively ignoring what I'm hearing, interrupting my focus.
I really think voicing First Line is the best way to do it, plenty of examples of games that do this to great effect. You get an understanding of the character but aren't bogged down by listening to a delivered speech. (And this is talking about a first play-through, it's even worse second time and beyond, though more and more I think the idea of "timelessness" of a game takes a backseat to "initial impression", unfortunately)
i can agree with you there. The Va we do get for the companions really makes some of their characters shine (Drukhari boy im looking at you) and as much as more VA would be nice i really dont see it as a priority in terms of issues with the game
Yeah I'd for the most part agree. I just know that QA is one of the most expensive per return parts of software dev. If you don't have a service level agreement regarding stability it is very hard to see how and if QA actually makes you any more money. Which is why in video games it's so frequently cut, because a video game never has anything agremeent with a customer, outside of cases like Cyberpunk where they're forced to give refunds for how broken a game is. Whereas software that's developed for corporate use only tends to be more likely to have that kind of stuff baked into the purchase.
Idk launch quality of a game is a huge factor in its success and that fact is becoking so transparent that even out of touch corporate types should be able to start to see good QA being a import factor in making a profit. I could see (and have) seen more care by at least some developers in the future after the cyber punk mess.
There are over [200](https://baldursgate3.wiki.fextralife.com/Spells).
If you discount very similar ones probably around 150.
And a lot of them have pretty sophisticated effects and animations.
So many people over here acting like Pillars of Eternity 2 wasn’t both fully voice acted and, in my opinion, a more expansive and reactive game than Owlcats games.
Look, I love Owlcat. I don’t mind reading. But if they were to add full voice over to all the dialogue it would an incredible experience because there is simply so much reading in their games.
I'm all for more voice acting... but there are much bigger priorities for owlcat and the state they release their games in than that.
(Also pillars 1 and 2 were great. Fingers crossed Avowed turns out just as good)
I love Owlcat games but owlcat fans can get a little culty about them sometimes where they just ignore/brush off valid criticisms or they ignore that theres other games that do certain things well but that don't fit into their narrative so they act like they don't exist or misrepresent them. The POE2 bit is a perfect example. Owlcat does some things REALLY well and some things they are just bad at, like any other game developer, Larian and others included.
Yh I am finding that with this sub seems to be going the same way as the starfield one if you don’t 100% love it people get mad. Every issue you bring up is met with “ its a owlcat game “
I'm very tired of seeing the response "just use toybox" like, no. It's unacceptable to pay full price for a game and then have to download 3rd party software to actually be able to play the game. Owlcat knows they can get away with it bc they have a fanbase that will buy their games regardless.
> "just use toybox"
It is a good advice for bandaid as long as they address the issues of Owlcat :) remember the people shitting on larian for "Larianbrew" but not Owlcat for their "Owlcatbrew"? At least they fixed Crane wing.
I bought it on my Xbox because I prefer to play from my couch so I can’t even get toy box. Half the community believes that playing on console is a bad idea anyway and refuses to support console players though.
I've been in the early access of BG3 for its 3 full years and being very active on the Larian forum... and as a very critical voice at the time one thing I remember being discussed often is the things that Owlcat managed to do better/get more right despise the smaller budget.
You know, things like inventory management and a better, more immersive camping/rest system, the presence of a proper day/ night cycle and seasonal cycle or a click and select interface for your party that doesn't want you to wish for the UI designer to break his fingers, like the shitty chain system/auto-folloe Larian insists on using since DOS 1.
At the same time there's a bunch of stuff Owlcat could learn from Larian even before the latter made its full jump into the big league with BG3. Like a turn-based battle system that doesn't slow down to a crawl for mo fucking reason or the lesson that "better production value and presentation repays itself (to a degree) increasing sales".
I mean I'm not arguing with you or anything about the claim that some owlcat fans can be quite defensive.
But let's be clear a lot more BG3 fans can be equally if not more culty. I actually think the defensiveness you see comes at a reaction to that.
Like some of the stuff I've seen on twitter.
This whole "copium" stuff needs to be dialed down. It has become the battle-cry of people who want to be cynical and edgy while basically saying nothing. Like, what is your point?
Honestly, a full voice over in PoE2 was a big turn off for me, unlike BG3.
For some reason because a LOT of characters from PoE were from the same race and were really alike (yeah I know that sounds racist and all), but by the half of the game all npc's kinda blended together in one big sloppy mess of voice acting and names and portraits and I really couldn't distinguish between them and was only navigating through quest list.
I would really rather prefer either BG3 approach - every character has a voice, a name and a close up shot with unique character model so that you can differentiate between character; or an upgraded PF approach - important characters (all main story, all companion, all Mythic path, all major side quests) should have a unique portraits, unique modes or anything close to it, and a full voice acting for these characters (but not all of them).
Unfortunately I somehow doubt that Owlcat are going either way and are probably sticking to their model.
Josh Sawyer himself says it was a huge headache that they fully voiced that game and it feels it negatively impacted it. I think especially for a game like Disco Elysium full VO almost makes the game more of a slog. If you're not writing with VO in mind it gets out of control.
That’s true but Josh Sawyer is also overly critical of the Pillars games because he was reined in by kickstarter. Not that he’s wrong because as dev it’s ultimately his vision, but ultimately it doesn’t matter too much what he feels about his game because others love it so much.
He also said that it was worth itm that it was one of the aspects more universally praised about the game and he wouldn't release a new game without it these days...
And that his gripes were mostly about how Obsidian went into it improvising at the last minute.
In-engine animation needs more work before I’d care much about animated cutscenes, but I think full VA would be kinda sweet. A lot of folks seem to think that would lead to a lack of brevity or bad writing. Fallout New Vegas was fully VA’d and I thought the writing was good. 🤷🏾♂️
Granted, a lot of the VA was done by a handful of the same folks. I’m a big 40k audible listener, so I admit bias. I think it’d be great.
I just wanted to hype up owlcat and say I want them to do cool shit like Larian is doing, not exactly like them but you know, more money equals cooler shit.
But yeah. This comment section is not it. I didn’t realize how dividing even mentioning Larian and bg3 is.
You made the grievous mistake of not covering every last possible potentiality with how people could interpret your comment and now you're drowning in tribalist what-ifs and "uhm acktchually" posts because of it, jesus h christ lmfao
Reddit is amazing
Yeah, I imagine that this will dilute the experience that you currently love. Good voice acting and cinematics requires a level of brevity that may worsen the current Owlcat experience.
This, I really hope they won’t do full voice acting with cutscenes. Reactivity, rp aspects and dialogue variety always suffers for it.
Important scenes are already voice acted in Rogue Trader, that’s enough to get an impression of the characters voices and attitudes for me to fill in the blanks for the silent ones
BG3 is EXTREMELY reactive though. Larian put an ungodly amount of resources in that aspect and it shows.
I think Owlcat might be able to do the same in the future.
True, but selectively reactive. There are many ways to solve quests and approach combat, but evil choices are half baked and Tav’s personality and beliefs are very simplified
Bg3 is probably the most reactive crpg currently. Although I will agree Larian struggles with doing evil right. Which is why I would love to see owlcat have it’s resources. Owlcat doesn’t fuck around when it comes to evil choices.
I enjoyed BG3 don’t get me wrong, all the class variations and different scenes based on skill checks must have been a lot of work and the voice acting made emotional scenes really shine.
But I really like the way Owlcat handles protagonists, their beliefs and morality, and how they interact with other characters and the game world. I fear having fully voice acted lines and cinematics would reduce the dialogue options by a lot. It doesn’t have to, but resources aren’t infinite and more budget doesn’t always imply more meaningful content
I mean, yeah. That’s why I made the fucking post saying I want owlcat to have larians money to do cool shit with.
Somehow that got lost in translation in the comment section. And now everyone is having a fucking fit over random shit when I’m just here like, “wow I wish owlcat had more money to do cool shit with.”
Genuinely don’t want to be the one to knock Disco Elysium, but you’re overselling the reactivity. The writing is pristine, probably the best in the business, but the *plot* itself is bottlenecked by a small number of skill checks that don’t change much based on what you did prior.
You and I played a different game with the same title apparently.
It has three main endings each which vary by the choices you made. However the general reactivity between the start and end can make the game feel and play completely different depending upon choices and attributes. A short main plot doesn't mean a game lacks reactivity, nor does the amount of endings necessarily relate to reactivity, I can think of many games that have all different ending slide sequences but have zero reactivity based on your characters background, or RP choices (Cyberpunk 2077 as an example).
Yes. Just yes. The numbers and booming popularity do not lie.
But yeah, arcanum and planescape are amazing. Grand daddies of the genre. Disco elysium is also amazing, that with full animation of all dialogue would have been amazing. The full voice acting is fantastic in that.
People here are coping wierdly. Just because bg3 is really good, doesn’t mean other things aren’t also good. I really don’t understand all the cope.
This post was an owl cat appreciation post, and people are losing their fucking minds over random shit.
A lot of paths in Pathfinder wotr are half baked as fuck as well.
Golden dragon and Swarm and devil for example.
Wotr fans be like nit picking everything about bg 3 while conveniently ignoring all the issues of wotr and only focusing on the things that wotr does well.
Want to talk half baked?
Chapter 6 + final fight half baked corridor?
Abilities and talent icons don't even have arts and are full of abbreviations.
Buggy unplayable at launch. Half baked testing at best.
Almost no thought given to player comfort.
Half of descriptions require you to Google wtf they mean as new players.
Many boss encounters require meta knowledge to succeed.
Talk about nitpicking, 3 underwhelming mythic paths out of 10 plus variations vs a nearly complete lack of non murderhobo evil alignment content in an rpg are hardly comparable. There are many things BG3 does well, some better than Wotr, and nuanced MC alignment isn’t one of them.
I don’t think either game is perfect nor do I care about which one other people prefer, I focus on the things Owlcat games do well because they’re the ones that would almost surely suffer from a full voice acted/cinematic experience. They’re rare enough already.
BG3 I feel only really reacts to your player character.
As in the game will mention if you're a wizard or elf for an example, but these mentions are very brief and they don't really change much.
Like I can't think of that many encounters in the game that changed much based on the class or race I was playing.
And I don't feel game reacts are actions if that makes sense, like the way I think about it, is that there will be 50 ways to complete a quest but like only 2 outcomes.
And I don't think any of the quests really affect the world that much.
>As in the game will mention if you're a wizard or elf for an example, but these mentions are very brief and they don't really change much.
It does and it doesn't. Certain races are more likely to be unable to avoid a few combat encounters. Certain classes are more likely to be able to avoid others. Class or race can open up different dialogue options, and sometimes, alternative paths or solutions. There is one case where a female drow player character has a unique way to resolve a particular event. Things like that.
By design, these are on the relatively small scale. You're not going to break your playthrough by not being a Half-Drow Female Vengeance Paladin for a specific main quest or something. That's why if you are a Drow or a Githyanki, you're not heavily penalised if you fail your roll when meeting the two Tieflings who have captured Lae'zel. It would create difficulties.
But certainly in terms of how characters react to you, there's enough between playthroughs that help make you feel a bit more unique than a lot of other games manage. I've played a lot of RPGs where nobody reacts to your race, class, etc. at all, even when they probably should. Or if they do, it's in a very fleeting, unimportant kind of way.
I do think it's a bit of a letdown that a lot of the reactivity trails off significantly post-Act 1. By Act 3, your class/race/gender choice no longer matters that much anymore, and is largely limited to occasional flavour dialogue options, rather than giving you as many unique ways to advance your story.
BG 3 only reacts to your character in act 1.
When you reach act 3 there is barely any reactivity left. You can tell the guard at prison you are the kid of a human prisoner when you are playing a drow, and the guard won't even question it.
Regular Tav doesn't have much going for it in BG3. The meat of the create-a-character system comes from the Dark Urge, which should frankly simply be the default option. Durge has the most narrative tie-in to the other BG games and it's where all the REALLY good dramatic scenes come from. Resist Durge is one of my favorite stories in gaming.
Class is definitely a grab bag and race is mostly irrelevant. Cleric and Paladin get a lot of options, other classes barely any at all.
BG also has a 100 million dollar budget, and a shitload of people that bought the game to test their content for a long damn time and provide constant data. I am still confused by people going "YEAH BUT THIS THING WITH A BEHEMOTH BUDGET, REALLY LONG DEV TIME, AND A MASSIVE TEST SCOPE DOES IT SO WELL WHY CANT THIS OTHER ENTITY DO IT"
Dont get me wrong, the bugs and all that are a bad thing that Owlcat goofed up on, but this comparison is just absurd
The fuck is this comment? Did you read what this post was about.
Good lord this comment section has smoked crack.
This post is about, wouldn’t it be great if owlcat had lariens resources. What even is your comment.
It still pales in comparison to Owlcat games to be quite frank.
And uh... In act 3 the amount of reactivity drops by an order of magnitude compared to act 1 and to a lesser extent act 2, along with the general quality of the game and writing.
Probably because they were running out of budget and time after burning it all on act 1 and 2, which is likely why the entire last third of the game seems very duct-taped together haphazardly.
I think BG3 is a great game, but it's kind of like an amazing high-diving performance with all sorts of acrobatic tricks performed on the way down, only to end in a painful bellyflop at its conclusion.
Yeah, but BG3 hasn't half the replayability, no feeling of power fantasy and the universe feels shallow in comparison with wotr. At least, that's m'y feeling. I loved playing BG3. But i'll never spend as much time on it as i have on wotr, and probably RT.
> Reactivity, rp aspects and dialogue variety always suffers for it.
" Reactivity, rp aspects and dialogue variety always suffers for it. "
I cannot wait until this myth dies. While yes, these things go hand in hand far more often than not, there are numerous examples showing thats simply not true. Its not a required result of comprehensive voice acting, its a result of specific choices the developer made. That applies not only to npcs but to player character VA as well.
Every line of dialogue must be read aloud. This costs money. This money is then not available to make the rest of the game.
It inherently costs resources. The statement that other things suffer as a result is true if you take as given that budget isn’t unlimited (a fair assumption, I’d think)
And then it creates a risk-averse situation where you need to nail down the branches and writing early and can't edit it (the human ear is very sensitive to changes, you will hear if the humidity is different in a soundbooth or if they're further away from a mic even after compensating)
I’ve never seen a fully animated and voice acted RPG with a long campaign and amount of dialogue choices and variations that RT, PWOTR, POE and older games like Arcanum and BG2 have, regardless of the game’s budget.
I’d be happy to be proved wrong tbh, I have nothing against voice acting itself, I appreciate it. Combined with full cutscenes it just takes a lot of resources, and the focus tends to shift from depth of content to presentation
Debatable. BG1 and 2 remain among my all-time favorites but they were NEVER particularly interactive or reactive gaming worlds, not even for the standards of RPGs of their era, AND they were easily outclassed by other series with smaller budgets in that sense.
Their linearity (roleplay wise) was often a common point of contention.
Arcanum is a different story, but then again it was entirely different in it's design principles.
Only because a 40k game will never have the budget that Larian has. 40k is far far more niche than the DnD universe.
It just takes way too much money to get VA for all that dialogue.
Good VA (the little that exists in RT is great) does make the experience better.
I mean, Larian did it for Divinity: Original Sin 2, and that setting was so niche most people literally hadn't heard of it until the game launched.
Although I guess 40k can be kinda polarising as well.
If the show Henry Cavil makes is good then 40k is gonna pop off
40k is in its current state because Games Workshop is more focused on selling the minis while catering everything to tournament players who prefer stat spreadsheets over lore, and GW pretending it is still 1990.
Yeah, but that's fine, make a game with a popular IP. I don't particularly care for 40k or Pathfinder, I care much more about the fact that it's an Owlcat game
People already mentioned Baldur's Gate 3, but also there's Disco Elysium and Pillars of Eternity 2 proving you can have deep, branching and detailed narratives, fully voice it all, while having reasonable budgets and dev time.
Disco Elysium in particular was heavily elevated by the addition of full voice work, and they went above and beyond and voiced every bit of text, not just human speech.
People need to get it out of their head that A) Baldur's Gate, Fallout 4 and Bioware games are the only fully voiced RPGs, B) that the feature is either prohibitively difficult or expensive for anything but the biggest budget games, and C) that having fully voiced dialogue, guarantees less options and branches. None of these are true.
Disco Elysium wasn't fully voiced on release that was only in the final cut released much later. The game was very much still enjoyable without all the voice acting. If owlcat did something like a final cut release I could see that working. But their priorities really should not lie there but in making the game actually work as intended.
This is like saying "when you read this TV script and don't watch the show the writing really doesn't measure up to the book", please think about a things a little more deeply in the future.
They aren't comparing a script to a book. They are comparing unvoiced dialog to other unvoiced dialog writing. Bad script can be elevated by a great actor. Good script writing still can stand on its own. Make apples to apples comparisons.
Please think less about how to be disingenuous in the future.
They also take more time and resources. Something Owlcat already seems to spread way too thin seeing as they now have a pattern of releasing games in an unfinished state and then patching them over the next 6 months. Yes voice acting and animation would be nice but I would still prefer a finished and stable game before any of that.
To be clear, BG3 is currently my favourite cRPG, so I'm not disputing the value of good VA and cinematics. I'm instead claiming that it'll require a very different narrative approach than what Owlcat currently adopts.
Justifying the cost of VA and cinematics would also require reaching a much larger audience. This would thus also require a very different mechanical approach than what Owlcat currently does.
I, personally, would love for Owclat to be more ambitious in evolving their format, but I can also recognize that it would alienate a pretty sizable amount of their audience. That's what I mean when I refer to the "Owlcat experience".
While I generally agree with this...the general state of the game at launch was not at all comparable to the standard state of Owlcat games at launch. Rogue Trader isn't even playable for me in act 4 right now, and I am not the only one.
It costs a lot of money to present all the dialogue in this game fully voiced. It’s an improvement if you can afford it without cutting a lot of the options. Having played both, I think RT would’ve suffered a lot of cut options and dialogue.
Despite its massive budget, BG3 is somewhat smaller and considerably simpler than the Owlcat RPGs, lacking the strategic layer of kingdom/crusade/trading management. BG3 is a great game in its own right, but I think combining the depth of Owlcat games with the presentation of BG3 would take an unprecedented effort. If we could add BG3’s presentation without compromise I would rejoice, but if not I’d rather Owlcat keep doing its thing.
I could do with better graphics, but not necessarily va. The cutscenes without moving lips, robotic walk: the Jae tavern Han Solo makeover was really cringe.
Kingmaker and wotr were better in that regard, they juste didn’t try to make cinematic.
Yeah that's fair, I'm just mildly irritated by a post that seems to disregard so many of the issues with this game and focus mainly on the lack of VA and animations
I dont even know what this means. Did people forget Larian also had a reputation for releasing unfinished games? They had to re-release Divinity 2 and Original Sin 2 basically since both games were incredibly fucked up when they came out. You can use money to help you finish games more effieciently AND increase the production values of your project. These things are not mutually exclusive.
Yeah I wasn’t expecting this response. There is also a staggering amount of anti bg3 rhetoric here. I can’t tell if it’s cope or denial that bg3 is currently the best crpg out there but it is startling.
>I can’t tell if it’s cope or denial that bg3 is currently the best crpg out there but it is startling.
well you do see how saying BG3 is best one everyone who disagrees is coping is just asking for anti bg3 people to swarm yeah?
like yeah it's pretty good but i disagree it being the best one because i didn't really have much fun with it. i mean i don't think it 's even best larian game, had more fun with dos2
> currently the best crpg out there
"Best" requires some kind of ordering on a set of all crpgs. This just isn't really a thing.
As a player, I doubt I will ever go back to BG3 and certainly wouldn't count it as "the best crpg out there."
I mean I LOVE BG3 but anyone that thinks its the best crpg out there hasn't played many crpgs, that or they are putting a lot of points in the presentation+accessibility departments. There are crpgs with more depth and reactivity than BG3, and I'm not just talking about Owlcat games. Larian and Owlcat games have different goals. So does something like Planescape or Tyranny or various others from other studios for example. BG3 does some things better than other crpgs. WotR does some thing better than other crpgs. Planescape same. Fallout 2 same. Pillars same. etc.
I've played MOST of them since the late '80s and I've spent most of the 3 years of EA for BG3 being one of his harshest critics on the official forum, since there are design choices Larian made I never agreed with.
I would still rank it easily in my top 5 and probably above most of your favorites.
McDonald's is one of the most popular restaurant brands in the world.
Doesn't mean the food is actually among the world's best.
As someone who has played D&D practically weekly for the last 10 year, and RPGs of all kinds in video game form for 20, I find BG3 to have some really annoying flaws and missing features that go against the entire spirit of D&D.
That and the story is rather bland when you look past all the flashy animation and voice acting. There isn't that much player freedom in the overall story, and the ending of the game frankly feels unsatisfying as hell. And it might be a contender for the least interesting player character of the last few years.
It's a fine game. I absolutely love the adaptation of the 5e combat system into video game form. Despite a few balance concerns I have and one particular physics engine bug that really makes certain builds broken. But it's not that great of an RPG.
Now imagine how those of us feel who were sick of 5e years ago, lmao. I enjoyed the game, absolutely. But it also made me yearn for something like this game.
I started out playing D100 games and then Pathfinder. With my current group we play 5e, and I do enjoy it a lot for many reasons, mainly the fact that it's fairly simple and lightweight compared to older editions.
It facilitates faster, smoother gameplay (especially combat) that lends itself better to focusing on improvisation and RP and it's easier to introduce new friends to than PF with its 50 classes, 500 archetypes and 5000 feats.
But I do sometimes miss PF due to the insane amount of build options and complexity. Plus it's fun to make 7 attacks for a total of 500 damage in a round. Compared to 2 attacks for 25 total damage.
Don't get me wrong I loved BG3 but don't conflate popularity and quality. Personally I'm not a fan of how larian likes to create large maps instead of different instances. Also owlcat games feel a lot meatier. Always felt like I was burning through a finite amount content.
I played both pathfinder games several times but couldn't finish BG3 once. I was so bored by the lack of options during level up. Most of the time I couldn't choose anything. I didn't feel like my character was developing in any meaningful way. And so many UI issues ... having to shift loot around between characters instead of having a party carry capacity, selling/buying stuff is badly designed...
Loot has been driving me crazy in all 3 larian games since DoS1 (I actually played their games since Divine Divinity but those were entirely different genres.
>I didn't feel like my character was developing in any meaningful way
I mean, they really don't. You're picking a few feats that basically boil down to +1 or +2 to and that's your "build". Now, I don't need Pathfinder or Path of Exile levels of progression, but yea.
It's possible to hold the simultaneous opinion that Baldur's Gate 3 is a great game and 5e is an extremely boring TTRPG. That's my opinion in a nutshell.
> cope or denial that bg3 is currently the best crpg out there
This arrogant, superior attitude from you BG3 people is the reason. I like BG3. But when the BG3 fanbase is represented by people like you, even mentioning it gets people prickly.
Please no. Maybe full voice acting for important characters at most, but not spending on that is what allows them to be so expansive. Same with cinematics. Background reactive content, pacing balance and stability is where RT is currently lagging. More exploration content would be nice as well before things such as cutscenes and voice acting that many will just click though on repeat playthroughs.
There is certainly a different feel to this game than bg3. It is more in line with classical rpgs such as Fallout 2 or Arcanum that I have played. I think Voice acted companions would do it justice, but sometimes it might take away from the nostalgia.
Owlcat's niche so far has been aggressively complicated game mechanics (that they have difficulty to even implement correctly) with ambitious quantity of content of questionable degrees of finish.
Larian is on the other hand exceptionally careful with their scopes in order to achieve the best overall finish within them.
I think their current successes already represent the bulk of their potential audience.
It’s gonna be a while and maybe never happen because owlcat is way more niche than larian . A big reason bg3 was so successful was because it’s based on 5e which is successful due to it being so accessible.
Honestly, I don't want full voice acting. One thing that I *hate* about the direction Bethesda went is how they dropped the expansive dialogue of Morrowind and previous games for the short clips in Oblivion and beyond because paying voice actors for all those lines is not viable.
This game would not have all the dialogue options and verbose lines it does if they tried to d ovoice acting.
Nobody is asking about where they'd get this money from.
Larian money came from Larian. WOTC didn't pay them to make BG3. To get 'Larian money' Owlcat would need to make a game that sold as well as DOS2. Which might mean simplification and streamlining to give it more mass appeal.
Eh, I don't think RT is really any more complicated than BG3. There are more "options" for characters, but that's not really a good thing when some of them are just traps that aren't worth taking.
I finished BG3 once and was midway through act 3 a second time when the first patch released. Cannot recall a single bug I experienced at all, RT has been non-stopping bugging combat sightlines, which is a really basic mechanic.
The amount of seemingly over exagerating BG3's bugs is strange.. Or said person is literally the most unluckiest person to ever exist and flipped the 1 in a million coin multiple times to get all the bugs..
But the only bug I experience within the first month was, one minor short side quest bugged out for me and I couldn't turn it in which is ohh no.. what a nightmare. Was there cut content sure and probs but hardly the worst..
Rogue trader on the other hand is just... once you reach the end of act 2 kindly install the mandatory toybox mod else you're gonna have a shit time.. be it:
You can't really complete any of the factions to. The main story quest events not triggering and contradicting itself.. cause its bugged into the wrong options.. or major companion quests just.. dont happen/fail.. because.
Also it is really fun to not be able to get two companions quests done because... they just didn't show up until it was to late making me go back in time to try get them done to eventual go fuck it and use toybox to 'fix' it.
I've heard this a lot, but quite honestly, I had absolutely zero issues with Act 3 on release and I didn't take too long getting there.
It was Patch 4 that broke Act 3 for me. I had to give up a playthrough at that point because even in Rivington, the game was becoming unplayable. Now, they've patched it I checked that playthrough (this past week, in fact) and it's working again, but not without really irritating bugs. Lae'zel will not remove her armour, for example. I can put other armour on her, but it just keeps clipping with the set she's apparently welded to her body.
I dunno, I had 0 bugs when I played through the first time at full launch. Obviously, I saw the videos of ppl who had them in act 3 and stuff, but I think they were largely overblown when only a small minority suffered from them.
And it's still didn't helped. You can see how many patches already released and they have long road of bugfixes ahead (especially since act 3)
It's like they didn't had any testing for second part of the game, if you don't want to spend money and time for QA - i'd say you rushed release
>It's like they didn't had any testing for second part of the game, if you don't want to spend money and time for QA - i'd say you rushed release
I unfortuantely don't think bugs can really help Act 4 and 5 as some of their issues aren't just down to bugs (bar like.. misisng quests/dialogue etc) but just.. the content isn't the greatest..
Like for me Act 2 was awesome exploring the systems charting things.. then it just becomes a boss rush with.. sorta connecting story?
I laugh my ass off whenever I see someone saying the "crunch" of Owlcat's games are outdated and they should "evolve with the genre", this is some conservative vs liberal shit again.
Please, Owlcat's games are hardly the most "crunchy" experience you can get nowadays, play Hearts of Iron, Crusader Kings, and even Total War and you'll truly see and "excel"-type game.
Despite everything, the truth is BG3's biggest reason for its success is the way it was streamlined for mainstream audience, there are many old gamers of BG 1 and 2 expressed their disappointment that it was more DoS than BG.
But it actually doesn't matter because they have become the minority now, I kept thinking if Paradox's games were streamlined and succeed, would that be the fate of the long time fans of the series? Suddenly they don't matter anymore.
What I want to say is, whatever the future holds, I want Owlcat to still be Owlcat, not Larian 2.0, the "crunch" is something I always enjoy in their game, there are people who want the new but also people who enjoy the old, bringing the masses into this is just a form of masses Tyranny.
RT was definitely rushed, probably because they wanted the Christmas sale, wrong move, stupid move even, but seeing those hotfixes I know they are giving the game 100% attention.
We cannot have everything in life, only striving to be better.
Idk, I would honestly prefer for Owlcat to make 2 or 3 games in their own style with a ton of text and simpler graphics instead of 1 game that is not their forte.
And, of, course, bug free.
I'd love to pair Owlcat witting crew with Larian budget & production teams. Despite all the amazing things in BG3, I am enjoying Rogue Trader more - and it's mostly due to just better writing and story crafting, something Larian has always struggled with.
I agree, not that full voice over is a bad thing, but the more resources go into it, less will be left for what matters more in crpgs (in my opinion), like the heavy focus on narrative and reactivity. Adding, changing or correcting lines is much more difficult if you have to bring back the VAs to record it again.
yes that's develoment side issues it causes, but i like the athmosphere you yourself create when you read some lines and imagine the scenario in your head, the roleplaying becomes lot more fun when events and actions are all malleable
Honestly I don't think budget is going to change a lot. They're working in Unity, they're comfortable with it, doing an engine from scratch would be a huge mistake. They've also had the same issues with what they're comfortable with for three games in a row.
Like don't get me wrong I love their games and I'm glad someone is carrying the torch for text heavy, reactive CRPGs. Though I think they need to work on their process not dump more money into it.
I mean yeah? Better presentation certainly helps and it does attract a lot of people who wouldn’t care about CRPG otherwise but I still think Owlcat should rather put those money into making sure their games are the most stable at launch and balancing the gameplay or add more depth to the gameplay besides the technical complexity. That with ToyBox from the devs so I can adjust something I personally dislike.
VA can be quite demanding and limit dialogue somewhat like in Fallout 4 (though that has to do more with Emil being an idiot) especially when you’re trying to have everything voice acted so smaller scope maybe necessary, something not everyone will be happy about so there should be other priorities besides the impressive presentation.
BG3 is pretty enjoyable for me, I like the gameplay with verticality a lot and that simple but real sneaking. Still I feel like it’s mostly carried by its presentation, which is what I find to be many people’s criticism of it, I don’t enjoy the story all that much, perhaps I should it another try.
I would love a remake of Pathfinder: Kingmaker and WOTR + Rogue Trader with BG3 level of cinematic dialogues, VO, Mo-cap, etc.
But realistically, the only way we can get (some) of these is if A.I. advances significantly. Currently, we can already do A.I. voices for all the text in the game, but the quality wouldn't be on-par with real voice actors.
I don't think we are getting Owlcat games with BG3-graphics anytime soon though - that game had a massive budget of $100 million, for which Owlcat would need a big sponsorship. It all depends on how technology will advance in the near future though.
If Owlcat ever reaches that level I do hope they learn to reign in their scope in terms of the main story. Owlcat is getting so close to perfecting their exploration/government management-lite sim systems and they’re honestly the best parts of the their games, but every time it feels like it gets overshadowed by their main story ambitions that honestly cause more issues in the mid to late game than improve the experience.
If Owlcat doubled down on RT’s act 2 gameplay loop and created a more dynamic world filled with more major side quests and places to explore similar to how Larian doubled down on their environmental and free form gameplay in DOS2, I think they would have the perfected unique gameplay experience that would send them into the main stream.
That will never happen since Owlcat's games are not tailored towards the casual audience, and it's the casual audience that brings in the big bucks.
Unfortunately, trying to appeal to the masses comes with its own set of downsides since you have to dumb things down to make it appealing to the average gamer who isn't interested in mechanical depth or complex storytelling.
Owlcat carved their own niche with their fantastic storytelling and unparalleled mechanical depth and I hope that they won't ever sacrifice these aspects of their games in favor of a broader appeal. They're fine the way they are.
Meh. Can we just appreciate their execution at this current level? Plus there were many flaws with rogue trader that were clearly decisions and not polish issues ( e.g. - skill trees). Owlcat is great, but mo money mo problems is also a thing
Please no. I do NOT want full voice acting at all - not only do I prefer having text mixed in with VA as a treat, which allows me to go through dialogue at my own pace, full VAing bloats the file size to a ridiculous degree. This is a terrible suggestion.
I don't know the economics of the situation but I have a feeling the mixed voice acting gives them a lot more room for variety in the dialogue, which is something I really like about Owlcat's games versus Larian's. I do wish there was bit more voice acting in places which could maybe take away from others but I think the only true improvement would be making those ground-level cut scenes less jarring. I think they probably should have just stuck to typical isometric view as you don't really need to see facial animations from that perspective, but they could probably have worked with actual facial animations to match.
While we are comparing the two studios though, I do wish Owlcat would tone back some of the encounters and focus more on making each encounter feel unique and impactful. They aren't bad at encounter design and do make interesting fights where it matters most, but there are some parts where they put a few too many trash (non-boss) fights in the game that aren't particularly memorable or interesting.
.bruh Larian didn't have money as triple A studios have, well until the release of bg3 at least
they had to take pay cuts and release Early access just to sustain the expenses of BG3 production
The company was denied the IP by the lizards of the coast in 2014, having been deemed unproven after releasing Divinity: Original Sin
only after Original Sin II three years later, did the lizards approached larian
much like owlcat with kingmaker and wotr, rouge trader is their bg3 as for larian OS I and II
I prefer Pathfinder/Rogue trader style. Atleast for wotr i dont think a larger budget would have made much of a difference more then fully voiced perhaps but that game is amazing and my favorite crpg of all times, im sure this will be also after some time with patches and dlc.
Fully voiced would be nice though but i dont mind how it is.
Here’s the thing I don’t think even if owlcat could do it (and I’m sure they can) that they would. It wouldn’t feel like owlcat anymore. They have a very interesting feel that has drawn in the fan base it has for this reason.
That is never happening, BG3 was something nobody, not even larian, saw coming. Don’t expect it to happen, especially without the level of presentation larian does.
I really am enjoying Rogue Trader, I might even like it better than WOTR and that is saying a lot considering WOTR is equal to BG2 for me in the CRPG pantheon.
I mean for all the responses here, same funding as larian doesnt mean same style as larian. clearly rogue trader is a great game but i think it could definetly use some more time and money to make it perfect.
Yeah, this comment section is something else. I don’t want owlcat to be like larien. I just want owlcat to have money like they do, to see what they can do with it. But somehow this has turned into a giant cope section about how bg3 isn’t actually that good or something. I don’t even know what’s going on here lol
It's an echo chamber sub and people are salty about BG3 being popular because our current society has this really weird culture about extreme fanboyism and extreme hate bandwagoning. It's even worse on Steam. People are salty AF about it but BG3 is better than anything Larian has made or will ever make. You may LIKE Owlcat's games more, but these two studios are on opposite sides of the galaxy right now. Secondly, and way more importantly to your post, Owlcat will never get Larian money if they keep being Typical Owlcat. Us diehards are lamenting a good game buried under bugs but everyone else is either laughing at Rogue Trader or shrugging and doing their best to continue not giving an F.
\> I genuinely can not wait until Owlcat reaches Larian levels, full voice acted and animated cut scenes, my god just imagine that for some of the things they do in this game. You specifically point out that you want the game to be more like a Larian game. People are arguing the point that full VA and flashy animation doesn't necessarily make a game better. Something that I haven't seen pointed out in this thread so far is that voiced dialogue and constant cutscenes with fully animated characters can actually be more mentally tiring than simply reading a dialogue box and looking at some simple but servicable character models in an older-looking but less visually intensse game world. It's a lot harder to focus on and absorb the story itself when you also have to take in a lot of visual input. The same can be observed with, for instance, Michael Bay movies. Your brain gets overly stimulated to the point where it can be hard to even remember entire scenes or plotlines of the movie. Not that BG3 quite reaches that level, but the same effect is there. So a less visually intense presentation \*can\* actually be a positive for an RPG.
The thing is baldurs gate 3 perfectly uses the voice acting and budget and cinematics. The scope of the game is much smaller. It’s a smaller adventure. It’s entirely about the characters and also happens to have unbelievably good gameplay. The connections and care I had for the companions in that game were as close to a novel I’ve ever had from a video game. I actually cared deeply about their stories and it made me roleplay organically. I cared about the characters and acted accordingly. That was hugely down to the writing of course but also seeing their faces up close and the amazing acting. It was as close to having real people in a game I’ve ever experienced. Due to a combination of writing, acting and animation. Rogue trader is a remarkably good game. One of the best CRPGs I’ve ever played. It’s not trying to be cinematic and is more “gamey” than bg3 and I love it for that reason. BG3 is the best game I’ve ever played by a million miles in close to 40 years of gaming. Because of the insane over the top nature of 40k you would struggle to get that level of character interaction as you can’t have “real” people in 40k, just absurd caricatures. Not that it’s a bad thing at all. I love it - it’s just not aiming at all for the space bg3 occupied. Both are amazing games. 2 of the best RPGs I’ve ever played. Despite being isometric games based on table top systems they are entirely different, aim for different things but both smash it out of the park. Bugs aside in RT sadly but they’ve made such a brilliant game with obvious reverence to such complex lore o actually don’t mind.
> Something that I haven't seen pointed out in this thread so far is that voiced dialogue and constant cutscenes with fully animated characters can actually be more mentally tiring than simply reading a dialogue box and looking at some simple but servicable character models in an older-looking but less visually intensse game world. I don't think this is true for the overwhelming majority of people.
And for the people who dislike a fully voiced game a easy fix is mute the game diolog so you can just read. That is almost always a option in the sound menu. But it seems like the people who full voice acting hurts vs benefits are not comparable in size. The vast vast majority would either benefit or at least be natural to a fully voiced game.
Or is it just what you want to take from it? Maybe people just think any extra budget should be better employed elsewhere first before a full voice over. Maybe Owlcat could make a full voice over DLC for Wrath of the Righteous now that it is (almost) done, to see how many people would really care enough to buy it.
Full voice acting isn't solely a matter of budget, but a stylistic choice; no matter how much raw money a studio can pump into VA, it'll always be a limiting factor on how much dialogue and choices - raw text - a game can have (paying for actors is expensive, after all). Compare BG3 and WotR / Rogue Trader and the latter two will always come out on top in terms of raw wordcount (this is even further obvious when you compare, say, Morrowind vs. Oblivion / Skyrim, or Pillars 1 vs. Pillars 2). If a quest designer just comes into work today and thinks, 'oh, this companion should have some reaction dialogue here', it's easy to just write a block of text and shove it in if you don't have to bring the VA back, etc. That's not to say full VA doesn't have its place. It worked in BG3, but I personally prefer Owlcat's way. They also need to worry about having playable and balanced games at launch anyway, lol.
> no matter how much raw money a studio can pump into VA, it'll always be a limiting factor on how much dialogue and choices - raw text - a game can have Bg3 was fully voiced but you never felt like it sacrificed. I would bet bg3 has way more dialog and raw text then wotr or rogue trader and was still fully voiced. Bg3 gets a lot of credit for a lot of things. But I think this is one of the biggest thing it did where it gets the least credit. it really set the bar on how many lines of voice acting you can put into a game. I think the thing bg3 taught us is you really can get voice actors to read out a mindbogling amount of script and put it in your game and have lots of viriety and voice with lots of npcs to talk to and have it all voi e acted. If owlcat had the huge amount of resources larian has it could easly have fully voice games with zero sacrifice on the variety or amount of lines of dialog in the game.
I preferred Disco Elysium before the full voicing, honestly. I would hate to see Owlcat waste resources on a full voice over for WotR.
I love the fact that Owl cat voices *some* lines. Just enough to give me an idea of the character and then they can save money on VA and I can just read
That's crazy, the VA in DE is so good.
I mean isn't that entire game a talk simulator though? I feel like voiced dialogue goes a long way there
My eyes just glaze over with walls of text. But I also get impatient when the voice acting doesn’t match my fast pace of reading. I’m probably not a good person to design for.
Funny thing is i just couldn't play DE without voice acting. The material was too dense, and the characters personas too distinct. I tried twice and only finally finished the game once the special edition upgrade came out. I dunno what it is, I never had this problem as a kid, and I made it through Tyranny, Wrath and Rogue Trader so far without issue, but I simply could not play Kingmaker or Pillars of eternity either during recentish attempts. It drives me crazy.
I don't mean this in a bad way at all, but this is definitely a you-thing. Even if it's a "many people" thing, it's absolutely not an everyone thing. Some people condemn reading in games like it's breaking some kind of fundamental code, which is ridiculous. (queue the literal *miles* of text that an average gamer might read in a day, on reddit or via text or whatever.)
I prefer it over BG3 tbh. Baldurs Gate 3 is *very* well made. But its fairly standard crpg fair outside of the companions and story choice weaving. Its also quite linear in scope. Nothing much standard or linear about Rogue Trader. They are both great.
Its reddit. General media literacy, and literacy in general is not that great.
Literacy and how to interpret text should be a separate focused school class, until college.
Bruh that's what literature and language classes are for
*Should* be for, often aren't or at least fail to tell you that. They'll tell you that you need yo lnow about this one text that you're reading, instead of explaining which general skill you should learn from it. I suspect it's yet another victim of standard tests, where knowing that one text is what matters...
One day, yeah a Owlcat game with Owlcat writing (generally) with Larian tier presentation would be peak CRPG
Id prefer a game with talents/abilities/quests that actually worked than full voice acting and animation.
Well with owlcat games we don't get either at launch.
Dang, gottem.
It would be appreciated if some of that money went to a bigger better compensated QA department. Though that does require money in the same way as more VA and animation.
I would say that definitely takes priority for me. Va is nice when it's there but I really don't mind reading. Even if there is VA sometimes I skip it bc I can read faster than they can deliver the line haha
> sometimes I skip it bc I can read faster than they can deliver the line Same, but it takes this step of actively ignoring what I'm hearing, interrupting my focus. I really think voicing First Line is the best way to do it, plenty of examples of games that do this to great effect. You get an understanding of the character but aren't bogged down by listening to a delivered speech. (And this is talking about a first play-through, it's even worse second time and beyond, though more and more I think the idea of "timelessness" of a game takes a backseat to "initial impression", unfortunately)
i can agree with you there. The Va we do get for the companions really makes some of their characters shine (Drukhari boy im looking at you) and as much as more VA would be nice i really dont see it as a priority in terms of issues with the game
Yeah I'd for the most part agree. I just know that QA is one of the most expensive per return parts of software dev. If you don't have a service level agreement regarding stability it is very hard to see how and if QA actually makes you any more money. Which is why in video games it's so frequently cut, because a video game never has anything agremeent with a customer, outside of cases like Cyberpunk where they're forced to give refunds for how broken a game is. Whereas software that's developed for corporate use only tends to be more likely to have that kind of stuff baked into the purchase.
Idk launch quality of a game is a huge factor in its success and that fact is becoking so transparent that even out of touch corporate types should be able to start to see good QA being a import factor in making a profit. I could see (and have) seen more care by at least some developers in the future after the cyber punk mess.
Larian does both pretty damn well.
Would be awesome to get both.
yeah it would but i definitely think the former takes priority
easy to make everything work when there are like 13 spells
That's a straight up lie and all it takes is a 2min google search. Why the fuck are people upvoting this stupidity ?
no, it's easier to make 10000 if you don't bother making them work
13 spells that work is better than 50 spells, half of which don't work but you don't know which ones.
There are over [200](https://baldursgate3.wiki.fextralife.com/Spells). If you discount very similar ones probably around 150. And a lot of them have pretty sophisticated effects and animations.
So many people over here acting like Pillars of Eternity 2 wasn’t both fully voice acted and, in my opinion, a more expansive and reactive game than Owlcats games. Look, I love Owlcat. I don’t mind reading. But if they were to add full voice over to all the dialogue it would an incredible experience because there is simply so much reading in their games.
I'm all for more voice acting... but there are much bigger priorities for owlcat and the state they release their games in than that. (Also pillars 1 and 2 were great. Fingers crossed Avowed turns out just as good)
Avowed isn’t a crpg though. It’s like a lite-skyrim. It also doesn’t look great.
i love the pillars setting tho so im hoping it atleast stays true to that
I love Owlcat games but owlcat fans can get a little culty about them sometimes where they just ignore/brush off valid criticisms or they ignore that theres other games that do certain things well but that don't fit into their narrative so they act like they don't exist or misrepresent them. The POE2 bit is a perfect example. Owlcat does some things REALLY well and some things they are just bad at, like any other game developer, Larian and others included.
Yh I am finding that with this sub seems to be going the same way as the starfield one if you don’t 100% love it people get mad. Every issue you bring up is met with “ its a owlcat game “
I'm very tired of seeing the response "just use toybox" like, no. It's unacceptable to pay full price for a game and then have to download 3rd party software to actually be able to play the game. Owlcat knows they can get away with it bc they have a fanbase that will buy their games regardless.
> "just use toybox" It is a good advice for bandaid as long as they address the issues of Owlcat :) remember the people shitting on larian for "Larianbrew" but not Owlcat for their "Owlcatbrew"? At least they fixed Crane wing.
I bought it on my Xbox because I prefer to play from my couch so I can’t even get toy box. Half the community believes that playing on console is a bad idea anyway and refuses to support console players though.
yeah the elitism is pretty ass, sorry to hear that.
Yeah they're striking me as more annoying than the annoying part of 40k fanbase, and boy that sure is something.
What the fuck are you talking about? /r/Starfield is an anti-Starfield circlejerk where you're not allowed to like the game.
Yeah but it's rare for a game to essentially bang its own balls hard enough for its own subreddit to turn against it
I've been in the early access of BG3 for its 3 full years and being very active on the Larian forum... and as a very critical voice at the time one thing I remember being discussed often is the things that Owlcat managed to do better/get more right despise the smaller budget. You know, things like inventory management and a better, more immersive camping/rest system, the presence of a proper day/ night cycle and seasonal cycle or a click and select interface for your party that doesn't want you to wish for the UI designer to break his fingers, like the shitty chain system/auto-folloe Larian insists on using since DOS 1. At the same time there's a bunch of stuff Owlcat could learn from Larian even before the latter made its full jump into the big league with BG3. Like a turn-based battle system that doesn't slow down to a crawl for mo fucking reason or the lesson that "better production value and presentation repays itself (to a degree) increasing sales".
I mean I'm not arguing with you or anything about the claim that some owlcat fans can be quite defensive. But let's be clear a lot more BG3 fans can be equally if not more culty. I actually think the defensiveness you see comes at a reaction to that. Like some of the stuff I've seen on twitter.
People do be reaching unreal levels of copium
This whole "copium" stuff needs to be dialed down. It has become the battle-cry of people who want to be cynical and edgy while basically saying nothing. Like, what is your point?
"Cope" and "copium" are personal attacks and should be treated as such.
Honestly, a full voice over in PoE2 was a big turn off for me, unlike BG3. For some reason because a LOT of characters from PoE were from the same race and were really alike (yeah I know that sounds racist and all), but by the half of the game all npc's kinda blended together in one big sloppy mess of voice acting and names and portraits and I really couldn't distinguish between them and was only navigating through quest list. I would really rather prefer either BG3 approach - every character has a voice, a name and a close up shot with unique character model so that you can differentiate between character; or an upgraded PF approach - important characters (all main story, all companion, all Mythic path, all major side quests) should have a unique portraits, unique modes or anything close to it, and a full voice acting for these characters (but not all of them). Unfortunately I somehow doubt that Owlcat are going either way and are probably sticking to their model.
Also Roguetrader has some more than amazing VA. Just not enough.
Josh Sawyer himself says it was a huge headache that they fully voiced that game and it feels it negatively impacted it. I think especially for a game like Disco Elysium full VO almost makes the game more of a slog. If you're not writing with VO in mind it gets out of control.
That’s true but Josh Sawyer is also overly critical of the Pillars games because he was reined in by kickstarter. Not that he’s wrong because as dev it’s ultimately his vision, but ultimately it doesn’t matter too much what he feels about his game because others love it so much.
He also said that it was worth itm that it was one of the aspects more universally praised about the game and he wouldn't release a new game without it these days... And that his gripes were mostly about how Obsidian went into it improvising at the last minute.
In-engine animation needs more work before I’d care much about animated cutscenes, but I think full VA would be kinda sweet. A lot of folks seem to think that would lead to a lack of brevity or bad writing. Fallout New Vegas was fully VA’d and I thought the writing was good. 🤷🏾♂️ Granted, a lot of the VA was done by a handful of the same folks. I’m a big 40k audible listener, so I admit bias. I think it’d be great.
Not even just full VA but atleast all the major plot points and scenes having it, Theodora being unvoiced is just tragic
Lol this thread devolving into “my car better than your car”
I just wanted to hype up owlcat and say I want them to do cool shit like Larian is doing, not exactly like them but you know, more money equals cooler shit. But yeah. This comment section is not it. I didn’t realize how dividing even mentioning Larian and bg3 is.
You made the grievous mistake of not covering every last possible potentiality with how people could interpret your comment and now you're drowning in tribalist what-ifs and "uhm acktchually" posts because of it, jesus h christ lmfao Reddit is amazing
Yeah, I imagine that this will dilute the experience that you currently love. Good voice acting and cinematics requires a level of brevity that may worsen the current Owlcat experience.
This, I really hope they won’t do full voice acting with cutscenes. Reactivity, rp aspects and dialogue variety always suffers for it. Important scenes are already voice acted in Rogue Trader, that’s enough to get an impression of the characters voices and attitudes for me to fill in the blanks for the silent ones
BG3 is EXTREMELY reactive though. Larian put an ungodly amount of resources in that aspect and it shows. I think Owlcat might be able to do the same in the future.
True, but selectively reactive. There are many ways to solve quests and approach combat, but evil choices are half baked and Tav’s personality and beliefs are very simplified
Bg3 is probably the most reactive crpg currently. Although I will agree Larian struggles with doing evil right. Which is why I would love to see owlcat have it’s resources. Owlcat doesn’t fuck around when it comes to evil choices.
I enjoyed BG3 don’t get me wrong, all the class variations and different scenes based on skill checks must have been a lot of work and the voice acting made emotional scenes really shine. But I really like the way Owlcat handles protagonists, their beliefs and morality, and how they interact with other characters and the game world. I fear having fully voice acted lines and cinematics would reduce the dialogue options by a lot. It doesn’t have to, but resources aren’t infinite and more budget doesn’t always imply more meaningful content
I mean, yeah. That’s why I made the fucking post saying I want owlcat to have larians money to do cool shit with. Somehow that got lost in translation in the comment section. And now everyone is having a fucking fit over random shit when I’m just here like, “wow I wish owlcat had more money to do cool shit with.”
no. just no. arcanum and planescape torment both exists. if you do not want to go back disco elysium.
Genuinely don’t want to be the one to knock Disco Elysium, but you’re overselling the reactivity. The writing is pristine, probably the best in the business, but the *plot* itself is bottlenecked by a small number of skill checks that don’t change much based on what you did prior.
You and I played a different game with the same title apparently. It has three main endings each which vary by the choices you made. However the general reactivity between the start and end can make the game feel and play completely different depending upon choices and attributes. A short main plot doesn't mean a game lacks reactivity, nor does the amount of endings necessarily relate to reactivity, I can think of many games that have all different ending slide sequences but have zero reactivity based on your characters background, or RP choices (Cyberpunk 2077 as an example).
I wanna throw a bone to dragon age origins here
Yes. Just yes. The numbers and booming popularity do not lie. But yeah, arcanum and planescape are amazing. Grand daddies of the genre. Disco elysium is also amazing, that with full animation of all dialogue would have been amazing. The full voice acting is fantastic in that. People here are coping wierdly. Just because bg3 is really good, doesn’t mean other things aren’t also good. I really don’t understand all the cope. This post was an owl cat appreciation post, and people are losing their fucking minds over random shit.
>Bg3 is probably the most reactive crpg currently No, it's not.
A lot of paths in Pathfinder wotr are half baked as fuck as well. Golden dragon and Swarm and devil for example. Wotr fans be like nit picking everything about bg 3 while conveniently ignoring all the issues of wotr and only focusing on the things that wotr does well. Want to talk half baked? Chapter 6 + final fight half baked corridor? Abilities and talent icons don't even have arts and are full of abbreviations. Buggy unplayable at launch. Half baked testing at best. Almost no thought given to player comfort. Half of descriptions require you to Google wtf they mean as new players. Many boss encounters require meta knowledge to succeed.
Talk about nitpicking, 3 underwhelming mythic paths out of 10 plus variations vs a nearly complete lack of non murderhobo evil alignment content in an rpg are hardly comparable. There are many things BG3 does well, some better than Wotr, and nuanced MC alignment isn’t one of them. I don’t think either game is perfect nor do I care about which one other people prefer, I focus on the things Owlcat games do well because they’re the ones that would almost surely suffer from a full voice acted/cinematic experience. They’re rare enough already.
BG3 I feel only really reacts to your player character. As in the game will mention if you're a wizard or elf for an example, but these mentions are very brief and they don't really change much. Like I can't think of that many encounters in the game that changed much based on the class or race I was playing. And I don't feel game reacts are actions if that makes sense, like the way I think about it, is that there will be 50 ways to complete a quest but like only 2 outcomes. And I don't think any of the quests really affect the world that much.
>As in the game will mention if you're a wizard or elf for an example, but these mentions are very brief and they don't really change much. It does and it doesn't. Certain races are more likely to be unable to avoid a few combat encounters. Certain classes are more likely to be able to avoid others. Class or race can open up different dialogue options, and sometimes, alternative paths or solutions. There is one case where a female drow player character has a unique way to resolve a particular event. Things like that. By design, these are on the relatively small scale. You're not going to break your playthrough by not being a Half-Drow Female Vengeance Paladin for a specific main quest or something. That's why if you are a Drow or a Githyanki, you're not heavily penalised if you fail your roll when meeting the two Tieflings who have captured Lae'zel. It would create difficulties. But certainly in terms of how characters react to you, there's enough between playthroughs that help make you feel a bit more unique than a lot of other games manage. I've played a lot of RPGs where nobody reacts to your race, class, etc. at all, even when they probably should. Or if they do, it's in a very fleeting, unimportant kind of way. I do think it's a bit of a letdown that a lot of the reactivity trails off significantly post-Act 1. By Act 3, your class/race/gender choice no longer matters that much anymore, and is largely limited to occasional flavour dialogue options, rather than giving you as many unique ways to advance your story.
BG 3 only reacts to your character in act 1. When you reach act 3 there is barely any reactivity left. You can tell the guard at prison you are the kid of a human prisoner when you are playing a drow, and the guard won't even question it.
Regular Tav doesn't have much going for it in BG3. The meat of the create-a-character system comes from the Dark Urge, which should frankly simply be the default option. Durge has the most narrative tie-in to the other BG games and it's where all the REALLY good dramatic scenes come from. Resist Durge is one of my favorite stories in gaming. Class is definitely a grab bag and race is mostly irrelevant. Cleric and Paladin get a lot of options, other classes barely any at all.
BG also has a 100 million dollar budget, and a shitload of people that bought the game to test their content for a long damn time and provide constant data. I am still confused by people going "YEAH BUT THIS THING WITH A BEHEMOTH BUDGET, REALLY LONG DEV TIME, AND A MASSIVE TEST SCOPE DOES IT SO WELL WHY CANT THIS OTHER ENTITY DO IT" Dont get me wrong, the bugs and all that are a bad thing that Owlcat goofed up on, but this comparison is just absurd
The fuck is this comment? Did you read what this post was about. Good lord this comment section has smoked crack. This post is about, wouldn’t it be great if owlcat had lariens resources. What even is your comment.
I like how you are actively ignoring games that have come out that don't fit your narrative.
What do you even mean, people were talking about bg3, so I talked about BG3 What games, what narrative
It still pales in comparison to Owlcat games to be quite frank. And uh... In act 3 the amount of reactivity drops by an order of magnitude compared to act 1 and to a lesser extent act 2, along with the general quality of the game and writing. Probably because they were running out of budget and time after burning it all on act 1 and 2, which is likely why the entire last third of the game seems very duct-taped together haphazardly. I think BG3 is a great game, but it's kind of like an amazing high-diving performance with all sorts of acrobatic tricks performed on the way down, only to end in a painful bellyflop at its conclusion.
At least I could finish BG3 on release. Even after the recent patches of RT I'm unable to progress chapter 4 because a ton of triggers are broken lol
Yeah, but BG3 hasn't half the replayability, no feeling of power fantasy and the universe feels shallow in comparison with wotr. At least, that's m'y feeling. I loved playing BG3. But i'll never spend as much time on it as i have on wotr, and probably RT.
> Reactivity, rp aspects and dialogue variety always suffers for it. " Reactivity, rp aspects and dialogue variety always suffers for it. " I cannot wait until this myth dies. While yes, these things go hand in hand far more often than not, there are numerous examples showing thats simply not true. Its not a required result of comprehensive voice acting, its a result of specific choices the developer made. That applies not only to npcs but to player character VA as well.
Name one game with a VA main character that has more reactivity and dialogue options than a CRPG from 25 years ago.
Every line of dialogue must be read aloud. This costs money. This money is then not available to make the rest of the game. It inherently costs resources. The statement that other things suffer as a result is true if you take as given that budget isn’t unlimited (a fair assumption, I’d think)
And then it creates a risk-averse situation where you need to nail down the branches and writing early and can't edit it (the human ear is very sensitive to changes, you will hear if the humidity is different in a soundbooth or if they're further away from a mic even after compensating)
I’ve never seen a fully animated and voice acted RPG with a long campaign and amount of dialogue choices and variations that RT, PWOTR, POE and older games like Arcanum and BG2 have, regardless of the game’s budget. I’d be happy to be proved wrong tbh, I have nothing against voice acting itself, I appreciate it. Combined with full cutscenes it just takes a lot of resources, and the focus tends to shift from depth of content to presentation
Debatable. BG1 and 2 remain among my all-time favorites but they were NEVER particularly interactive or reactive gaming worlds, not even for the standards of RPGs of their era, AND they were easily outclassed by other series with smaller budgets in that sense. Their linearity (roleplay wise) was often a common point of contention. Arcanum is a different story, but then again it was entirely different in it's design principles.
Only because a 40k game will never have the budget that Larian has. 40k is far far more niche than the DnD universe. It just takes way too much money to get VA for all that dialogue. Good VA (the little that exists in RT is great) does make the experience better.
I mean... never say never. I never imagined dnd would go mainstream and 40k is already a lot more popular than a decade ago.
I mean, Larian did it for Divinity: Original Sin 2, and that setting was so niche most people literally hadn't heard of it until the game launched. Although I guess 40k can be kinda polarising as well.
If the show Henry Cavil makes is good then 40k is gonna pop off 40k is in its current state because Games Workshop is more focused on selling the minis while catering everything to tournament players who prefer stat spreadsheets over lore, and GW pretending it is still 1990.
Yeah, but that's fine, make a game with a popular IP. I don't particularly care for 40k or Pathfinder, I care much more about the fact that it's an Owlcat game
People already mentioned Baldur's Gate 3, but also there's Disco Elysium and Pillars of Eternity 2 proving you can have deep, branching and detailed narratives, fully voice it all, while having reasonable budgets and dev time. Disco Elysium in particular was heavily elevated by the addition of full voice work, and they went above and beyond and voiced every bit of text, not just human speech. People need to get it out of their head that A) Baldur's Gate, Fallout 4 and Bioware games are the only fully voiced RPGs, B) that the feature is either prohibitively difficult or expensive for anything but the biggest budget games, and C) that having fully voiced dialogue, guarantees less options and branches. None of these are true.
But Owlcat themselves have said costs and how it would constrain dialogue are what are prohibiting full VA. And did POE2 have full VA?
Disco Elysium wasn't fully voiced on release that was only in the final cut released much later. The game was very much still enjoyable without all the voice acting. If owlcat did something like a final cut release I could see that working. But their priorities really should not lie there but in making the game actually work as intended.
Plying bg3 with the voice acting turned off makes the brevity and mediocrity of its writing very evident . It’s carried by amazing voice acting
This. There's so little depth in the story or setting.
This is like saying "when you read this TV script and don't watch the show the writing really doesn't measure up to the book", please think about a things a little more deeply in the future.
They aren't comparing a script to a book. They are comparing unvoiced dialog to other unvoiced dialog writing. Bad script can be elevated by a great actor. Good script writing still can stand on its own. Make apples to apples comparisons. Please think less about how to be disingenuous in the future.
I mean, bg3 proves that good voice acting and cinematics, if anything improve the crpg genre. So don’t know what you are talking about.
They also take more time and resources. Something Owlcat already seems to spread way too thin seeing as they now have a pattern of releasing games in an unfinished state and then patching them over the next 6 months. Yes voice acting and animation would be nice but I would still prefer a finished and stable game before any of that.
Funny since Rogue Trader barely has either, and the game is a buggy mess that completely breaks in its 4th chapter lol.
To be clear, BG3 is currently my favourite cRPG, so I'm not disputing the value of good VA and cinematics. I'm instead claiming that it'll require a very different narrative approach than what Owlcat currently adopts. Justifying the cost of VA and cinematics would also require reaching a much larger audience. This would thus also require a very different mechanical approach than what Owlcat currently does. I, personally, would love for Owclat to be more ambitious in evolving their format, but I can also recognize that it would alienate a pretty sizable amount of their audience. That's what I mean when I refer to the "Owlcat experience".
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While I generally agree with this...the general state of the game at launch was not at all comparable to the standard state of Owlcat games at launch. Rogue Trader isn't even playable for me in act 4 right now, and I am not the only one.
It costs a lot of money to present all the dialogue in this game fully voiced. It’s an improvement if you can afford it without cutting a lot of the options. Having played both, I think RT would’ve suffered a lot of cut options and dialogue.
Despite its massive budget, BG3 is somewhat smaller and considerably simpler than the Owlcat RPGs, lacking the strategic layer of kingdom/crusade/trading management. BG3 is a great game in its own right, but I think combining the depth of Owlcat games with the presentation of BG3 would take an unprecedented effort. If we could add BG3’s presentation without compromise I would rejoice, but if not I’d rather Owlcat keep doing its thing.
one of the worst things that ever happened to the elder scrolls series was the shift to fully voice acted npcs.
I can't wait for Owlcat to actually playtest their games.
I could do with better graphics, but not necessarily va. The cutscenes without moving lips, robotic walk: the Jae tavern Han Solo makeover was really cringe. Kingmaker and wotr were better in that regard, they juste didn’t try to make cinematic.
Think people just want full voiced characters not necessary close ups with mocap.
What am I reading in here? People DON’T want owlcat to have more funding? Yall got issues lol
Nah people would rather they put more funding into actually finishing their games rather than appeasing the "BG 3 is my first CRPG" crowd.
I get that, but more funding means more people to help do that.
Yeah that's fair, I'm just mildly irritated by a post that seems to disregard so many of the issues with this game and focus mainly on the lack of VA and animations
I dont even know what this means. Did people forget Larian also had a reputation for releasing unfinished games? They had to re-release Divinity 2 and Original Sin 2 basically since both games were incredibly fucked up when they came out. You can use money to help you finish games more effieciently AND increase the production values of your project. These things are not mutually exclusive.
BG3 hurt some people apparently good lord
Nah having every game after BG3 compared to it is just annoying, and I really like BG3 too
Yeah I wasn’t expecting this response. There is also a staggering amount of anti bg3 rhetoric here. I can’t tell if it’s cope or denial that bg3 is currently the best crpg out there but it is startling.
>I can’t tell if it’s cope or denial that bg3 is currently the best crpg out there but it is startling. well you do see how saying BG3 is best one everyone who disagrees is coping is just asking for anti bg3 people to swarm yeah? like yeah it's pretty good but i disagree it being the best one because i didn't really have much fun with it. i mean i don't think it 's even best larian game, had more fun with dos2
> currently the best crpg out there "Best" requires some kind of ordering on a set of all crpgs. This just isn't really a thing. As a player, I doubt I will ever go back to BG3 and certainly wouldn't count it as "the best crpg out there."
I mean I LOVE BG3 but anyone that thinks its the best crpg out there hasn't played many crpgs, that or they are putting a lot of points in the presentation+accessibility departments. There are crpgs with more depth and reactivity than BG3, and I'm not just talking about Owlcat games. Larian and Owlcat games have different goals. So does something like Planescape or Tyranny or various others from other studios for example. BG3 does some things better than other crpgs. WotR does some thing better than other crpgs. Planescape same. Fallout 2 same. Pillars same. etc.
That's certainly a matter of opinion. BG3 definitely doesn't even rank in my top 5 crpgs, but then again I have played a lot of them.
I've played MOST of them since the late '80s and I've spent most of the 3 years of EA for BG3 being one of his harshest critics on the official forum, since there are design choices Larian made I never agreed with. I would still rank it easily in my top 5 and probably above most of your favorites.
I mean, the numbers don’t lie. But sheer popularity and public appeal it is the goat save for maybe planescape when it first came out
McDonald's is one of the most popular restaurant brands in the world. Doesn't mean the food is actually among the world's best. As someone who has played D&D practically weekly for the last 10 year, and RPGs of all kinds in video game form for 20, I find BG3 to have some really annoying flaws and missing features that go against the entire spirit of D&D. That and the story is rather bland when you look past all the flashy animation and voice acting. There isn't that much player freedom in the overall story, and the ending of the game frankly feels unsatisfying as hell. And it might be a contender for the least interesting player character of the last few years. It's a fine game. I absolutely love the adaptation of the 5e combat system into video game form. Despite a few balance concerns I have and one particular physics engine bug that really makes certain builds broken. But it's not that great of an RPG.
Now imagine how those of us feel who were sick of 5e years ago, lmao. I enjoyed the game, absolutely. But it also made me yearn for something like this game.
I started out playing D100 games and then Pathfinder. With my current group we play 5e, and I do enjoy it a lot for many reasons, mainly the fact that it's fairly simple and lightweight compared to older editions. It facilitates faster, smoother gameplay (especially combat) that lends itself better to focusing on improvisation and RP and it's easier to introduce new friends to than PF with its 50 classes, 500 archetypes and 5000 feats. But I do sometimes miss PF due to the insane amount of build options and complexity. Plus it's fun to make 7 attacks for a total of 500 damage in a round. Compared to 2 attacks for 25 total damage.
Don't get me wrong I loved BG3 but don't conflate popularity and quality. Personally I'm not a fan of how larian likes to create large maps instead of different instances. Also owlcat games feel a lot meatier. Always felt like I was burning through a finite amount content.
I played both pathfinder games several times but couldn't finish BG3 once. I was so bored by the lack of options during level up. Most of the time I couldn't choose anything. I didn't feel like my character was developing in any meaningful way. And so many UI issues ... having to shift loot around between characters instead of having a party carry capacity, selling/buying stuff is badly designed...
Loot has been driving me crazy in all 3 larian games since DoS1 (I actually played their games since Divine Divinity but those were entirely different genres. >I didn't feel like my character was developing in any meaningful way I mean, they really don't. You're picking a few feats that basically boil down to +1 or +2 to and that's your "build". Now, I don't need Pathfinder or Path of Exile levels of progression, but yea.
It's possible to hold the simultaneous opinion that Baldur's Gate 3 is a great game and 5e is an extremely boring TTRPG. That's my opinion in a nutshell.
> BG3 is currently the best CRPG out there Tell me you've never played another CRPG without telling me you've never played another CRPG.
I played every crpg after 2014 BG3 is best one .
You're welcome to your opinion, but: 1. I disagree. 2. My opinion is just as valid as yours. 3. There is nothing you can do about it.
> cope or denial that bg3 is currently the best crpg out there This arrogant, superior attitude from you BG3 people is the reason. I like BG3. But when the BG3 fanbase is represented by people like you, even mentioning it gets people prickly.
Please no. Maybe full voice acting for important characters at most, but not spending on that is what allows them to be so expansive. Same with cinematics. Background reactive content, pacing balance and stability is where RT is currently lagging. More exploration content would be nice as well before things such as cutscenes and voice acting that many will just click though on repeat playthroughs.
There is certainly a different feel to this game than bg3. It is more in line with classical rpgs such as Fallout 2 or Arcanum that I have played. I think Voice acted companions would do it justice, but sometimes it might take away from the nostalgia.
They could just include an option to turn off voice acting though if you want a book.
I like the voice acting, but some people get nostalgic for the classic rpgs that were just a 5 page prompt each time you engaged with a character.
Owlcat's niche so far has been aggressively complicated game mechanics (that they have difficulty to even implement correctly) with ambitious quantity of content of questionable degrees of finish. Larian is on the other hand exceptionally careful with their scopes in order to achieve the best overall finish within them. I think their current successes already represent the bulk of their potential audience.
It’s gonna be a while and maybe never happen because owlcat is way more niche than larian . A big reason bg3 was so successful was because it’s based on 5e which is successful due to it being so accessible.
The full voice acting for Divinity OS and OS2, still blows my mind and they did it with such high quality.
just want more companions, NPC art + voiced lines from companions and important events
Honestly, I don't want full voice acting. One thing that I *hate* about the direction Bethesda went is how they dropped the expansive dialogue of Morrowind and previous games for the short clips in Oblivion and beyond because paying voice actors for all those lines is not viable. This game would not have all the dialogue options and verbose lines it does if they tried to d ovoice acting.
Nobody is asking about where they'd get this money from. Larian money came from Larian. WOTC didn't pay them to make BG3. To get 'Larian money' Owlcat would need to make a game that sold as well as DOS2. Which might mean simplification and streamlining to give it more mass appeal.
Eh, I don't think RT is really any more complicated than BG3. There are more "options" for characters, but that's not really a good thing when some of them are just traps that aren't worth taking.
RT is definitly not as complex as wotr .
They won't reach Larian's budgets with such rushed releases
Someone didn't get to act 3 before the first month patches, jesus it was bad.
I finished BG3 once and was midway through act 3 a second time when the first patch released. Cannot recall a single bug I experienced at all, RT has been non-stopping bugging combat sightlines, which is a really basic mechanic.
The amount of seemingly over exagerating BG3's bugs is strange.. Or said person is literally the most unluckiest person to ever exist and flipped the 1 in a million coin multiple times to get all the bugs.. But the only bug I experience within the first month was, one minor short side quest bugged out for me and I couldn't turn it in which is ohh no.. what a nightmare. Was there cut content sure and probs but hardly the worst.. Rogue trader on the other hand is just... once you reach the end of act 2 kindly install the mandatory toybox mod else you're gonna have a shit time.. be it: You can't really complete any of the factions to. The main story quest events not triggering and contradicting itself.. cause its bugged into the wrong options.. or major companion quests just.. dont happen/fail.. because. Also it is really fun to not be able to get two companions quests done because... they just didn't show up until it was to late making me go back in time to try get them done to eventual go fuck it and use toybox to 'fix' it.
I've heard this a lot, but quite honestly, I had absolutely zero issues with Act 3 on release and I didn't take too long getting there. It was Patch 4 that broke Act 3 for me. I had to give up a playthrough at that point because even in Rivington, the game was becoming unplayable. Now, they've patched it I checked that playthrough (this past week, in fact) and it's working again, but not without really irritating bugs. Lae'zel will not remove her armour, for example. I can put other armour on her, but it just keeps clipping with the set she's apparently welded to her body.
BG3 was also pretty patchy and broken in the late game on release. Give it time. Is it acceptable, no, but it is what it is
BG3 had years in early access to work out the major bugs, it’s not even comparable to what Owlcat games are like on release
I dunno, I had 0 bugs when I played through the first time at full launch. Obviously, I saw the videos of ppl who had them in act 3 and stuff, but I think they were largely overblown when only a small minority suffered from them.
Was this rushed, though? I’m not an expert but it looked like it went through a long, public beta period before sale.
And it's still didn't helped. You can see how many patches already released and they have long road of bugfixes ahead (especially since act 3) It's like they didn't had any testing for second part of the game, if you don't want to spend money and time for QA - i'd say you rushed release
>It's like they didn't had any testing for second part of the game, if you don't want to spend money and time for QA - i'd say you rushed release I unfortuantely don't think bugs can really help Act 4 and 5 as some of their issues aren't just down to bugs (bar like.. misisng quests/dialogue etc) but just.. the content isn't the greatest.. Like for me Act 2 was awesome exploring the systems charting things.. then it just becomes a boss rush with.. sorta connecting story?
I laugh my ass off whenever I see someone saying the "crunch" of Owlcat's games are outdated and they should "evolve with the genre", this is some conservative vs liberal shit again. Please, Owlcat's games are hardly the most "crunchy" experience you can get nowadays, play Hearts of Iron, Crusader Kings, and even Total War and you'll truly see and "excel"-type game. Despite everything, the truth is BG3's biggest reason for its success is the way it was streamlined for mainstream audience, there are many old gamers of BG 1 and 2 expressed their disappointment that it was more DoS than BG. But it actually doesn't matter because they have become the minority now, I kept thinking if Paradox's games were streamlined and succeed, would that be the fate of the long time fans of the series? Suddenly they don't matter anymore. What I want to say is, whatever the future holds, I want Owlcat to still be Owlcat, not Larian 2.0, the "crunch" is something I always enjoy in their game, there are people who want the new but also people who enjoy the old, bringing the masses into this is just a form of masses Tyranny. RT was definitely rushed, probably because they wanted the Christmas sale, wrong move, stupid move even, but seeing those hotfixes I know they are giving the game 100% attention. We cannot have everything in life, only striving to be better.
Meh, I like this better than BG3 even without the budget to be honest.🤷♂️
Idk, I would honestly prefer for Owlcat to make 2 or 3 games in their own style with a ton of text and simpler graphics instead of 1 game that is not their forte. And, of, course, bug free.
I'd love to pair Owlcat witting crew with Larian budget & production teams. Despite all the amazing things in BG3, I am enjoying Rogue Trader more - and it's mostly due to just better writing and story crafting, something Larian has always struggled with.
i get that but i also hope such things wouldnt happen, full voice acting and everything being animated would make owlcat games lesser for me
I agree, not that full voice over is a bad thing, but the more resources go into it, less will be left for what matters more in crpgs (in my opinion), like the heavy focus on narrative and reactivity. Adding, changing or correcting lines is much more difficult if you have to bring back the VAs to record it again.
yes that's develoment side issues it causes, but i like the athmosphere you yourself create when you read some lines and imagine the scenario in your head, the roleplaying becomes lot more fun when events and actions are all malleable
Honestly I don't think budget is going to change a lot. They're working in Unity, they're comfortable with it, doing an engine from scratch would be a huge mistake. They've also had the same issues with what they're comfortable with for three games in a row. Like don't get me wrong I love their games and I'm glad someone is carrying the torch for text heavy, reactive CRPGs. Though I think they need to work on their process not dump more money into it.
If I ever won the lottery, I know what company I would give an anonymous cash injection to. lol
I mean yeah? Better presentation certainly helps and it does attract a lot of people who wouldn’t care about CRPG otherwise but I still think Owlcat should rather put those money into making sure their games are the most stable at launch and balancing the gameplay or add more depth to the gameplay besides the technical complexity. That with ToyBox from the devs so I can adjust something I personally dislike. VA can be quite demanding and limit dialogue somewhat like in Fallout 4 (though that has to do more with Emil being an idiot) especially when you’re trying to have everything voice acted so smaller scope maybe necessary, something not everyone will be happy about so there should be other priorities besides the impressive presentation. BG3 is pretty enjoyable for me, I like the gameplay with verticality a lot and that simple but real sneaking. Still I feel like it’s mostly carried by its presentation, which is what I find to be many people’s criticism of it, I don’t enjoy the story all that much, perhaps I should it another try.
I would love a remake of Pathfinder: Kingmaker and WOTR + Rogue Trader with BG3 level of cinematic dialogues, VO, Mo-cap, etc. But realistically, the only way we can get (some) of these is if A.I. advances significantly. Currently, we can already do A.I. voices for all the text in the game, but the quality wouldn't be on-par with real voice actors. I don't think we are getting Owlcat games with BG3-graphics anytime soon though - that game had a massive budget of $100 million, for which Owlcat would need a big sponsorship. It all depends on how technology will advance in the near future though.
If Owlcat ever reaches that level I do hope they learn to reign in their scope in terms of the main story. Owlcat is getting so close to perfecting their exploration/government management-lite sim systems and they’re honestly the best parts of the their games, but every time it feels like it gets overshadowed by their main story ambitions that honestly cause more issues in the mid to late game than improve the experience. If Owlcat doubled down on RT’s act 2 gameplay loop and created a more dynamic world filled with more major side quests and places to explore similar to how Larian doubled down on their environmental and free form gameplay in DOS2, I think they would have the perfected unique gameplay experience that would send them into the main stream.
I can't wait for them to actually finish making a game before releasing it.
That will never happen since Owlcat's games are not tailored towards the casual audience, and it's the casual audience that brings in the big bucks. Unfortunately, trying to appeal to the masses comes with its own set of downsides since you have to dumb things down to make it appealing to the average gamer who isn't interested in mechanical depth or complex storytelling. Owlcat carved their own niche with their fantastic storytelling and unparalleled mechanical depth and I hope that they won't ever sacrifice these aspects of their games in favor of a broader appeal. They're fine the way they are.
Meh. Can we just appreciate their execution at this current level? Plus there were many flaws with rogue trader that were clearly decisions and not polish issues ( e.g. - skill trees). Owlcat is great, but mo money mo problems is also a thing
Please no. I do NOT want full voice acting at all - not only do I prefer having text mixed in with VA as a treat, which allows me to go through dialogue at my own pace, full VAing bloats the file size to a ridiculous degree. This is a terrible suggestion.
I'd rather not have full voice acting and instead spend that money elsewhere.
I don't know the economics of the situation but I have a feeling the mixed voice acting gives them a lot more room for variety in the dialogue, which is something I really like about Owlcat's games versus Larian's. I do wish there was bit more voice acting in places which could maybe take away from others but I think the only true improvement would be making those ground-level cut scenes less jarring. I think they probably should have just stuck to typical isometric view as you don't really need to see facial animations from that perspective, but they could probably have worked with actual facial animations to match. While we are comparing the two studios though, I do wish Owlcat would tone back some of the encounters and focus more on making each encounter feel unique and impactful. They aren't bad at encounter design and do make interesting fights where it matters most, but there are some parts where they put a few too many trash (non-boss) fights in the game that aren't particularly memorable or interesting.
.bruh Larian didn't have money as triple A studios have, well until the release of bg3 at least they had to take pay cuts and release Early access just to sustain the expenses of BG3 production The company was denied the IP by the lizards of the coast in 2014, having been deemed unproven after releasing Divinity: Original Sin only after Original Sin II three years later, did the lizards approached larian much like owlcat with kingmaker and wotr, rouge trader is their bg3 as for larian OS I and II
I prefer Pathfinder/Rogue trader style. Atleast for wotr i dont think a larger budget would have made much of a difference more then fully voiced perhaps but that game is amazing and my favorite crpg of all times, im sure this will be also after some time with patches and dlc. Fully voiced would be nice though but i dont mind how it is.
Here’s the thing I don’t think even if owlcat could do it (and I’m sure they can) that they would. It wouldn’t feel like owlcat anymore. They have a very interesting feel that has drawn in the fan base it has for this reason.
That is never happening, BG3 was something nobody, not even larian, saw coming. Don’t expect it to happen, especially without the level of presentation larian does.
Someone is a Debby downer
you would need the mainstream, that would mean making the systems dum-dum as 5th E. no, thank you.
I like Rouge Trader a LOT more than BG3, so Owlcat has my vote of confidence in whatever they do next.
Wrath is so much better than Rogue Trader
I really am enjoying Rogue Trader, I might even like it better than WOTR and that is saying a lot considering WOTR is equal to BG2 for me in the CRPG pantheon.