Video Game Standards Die Every Day: Baldur's Gate 3 Head on Recent Debate
"There's so much free space to explore, still, in the creative tree."
While Baldur's Gate 3 is enjoying its title of the best PC game according to players, let's come back to the hot debate about standards raised just before the game was released.
If you missed it, Xalavier Nelson Jr., Studio Head of Strange Scaffold, started a thread on Twitter, asking players to not "apply criticism or a "raised standard" to RPGs" based on Baldur's Gate 3.
"In an era of megagames, Baldur's Gate 3 is one of the largest attempted, built by a specialized group of people using mature tech specially built to make this specific game, reinforced by invaluable mass player feedback AND market validation ahead of its launch.
This is not a new baseline for RPGs – this is an anomaly."
Developers from popular studios, like Obsidian, Insomniac Games, Epic Games, and Blizzard supported the message. Players were divided, some agreeing and some questioning if such big studios were afraid of competition.
Nelson later clarified his stance, saying he meant that money and time poured into a game don't guarantee its success.
Now, we've finally found out what Larian Studios' founder Swen Vincke thinks about this statement. Talking to PC Gamer, he commented that while there are certain circumstances behind Baldur's Gate 3's creation – "obviously, yeah, if you're a 50 man studio or 10 man studio, you shouldn't try to make a game like BG3" – these "standards" are fleeting.
"The problem I have is with the use of the word 'standards,'" he said. "This is videogames, standards just die every day. Things get reinvented. New things appear all the time. When I was starting out in the industry, Assassin's Creed set the new standard. It was over—nobody could make games like Assassin's Creed, there was too much budget behind it, that was going to be the future, everybody had to consolidate, blah blah blah. That didn't materialize. In videogames there's so much free space to explore, still, in the creative tree."
Just as some pointed out in the comments under the original tweet, he found it "strange" that developers from big studios would be worried about boundary-pushing, especially considering the new creative possibilities offered by modern technology. Vincke also said that you don't need a massive game like Baldur's Gate 3 to change the genre.
"Disco Elysium changed standards on the fly with a small team, right?" he said. "That's a completely different standard now. There are so many games that change standards, to the point that there's no standards, was my thing. But I think you should always strive to evolve, especially in this medium which is different than other media in the sense that technological evolution has always been a big part of it. There's always been innovation, but at the same time, it doesn't require massive technological evolution to do something crazy, and cool, and different than what anybody else has done before."
All in all, Larian made a good game, with 800,000 players playing it at the same time at launch and I'm sure left a lasting impression not only on players but developers, too. Will they try to replicate what Larian did? Possibly. Will they have it in the back of their minds? Certainly.
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