How did Baldur's Gate 3 become so successful?

It's a great game. People played it and let other people know it is indeed a great game. Nothing else more to it tbh.
 
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Because the game is truly phenominal, and don't let any contrarion try to tell you otherwise. The amount of freedom you have in the game, and in all the ways the game accounts for that freedom and plays scenarios out differently, is truly insane. It was also unique in that until BG3 released, CRPGs and most truly in depth RPGs in general were low budget niche titles. BG3 was the first AAA level full blown CRPG we've seen in a very long time.

I think also the characters of the game did serious heavy lifting as well. The main plot of BG3 is fine and not anything truly noteworth, but the characters and all their stories is what really elevated the story. People really connected with Shadowheart, Astarion, Karlach, etc.
 
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Lol to anyone saying that it was "marketing / "bear scene":

Baldurs Gate is basically CRPG royalty, (anyone that lived through that era knows how big Baldurs Gate 2 was for the PC gaming ecosystem. It's basically the PC gaming Crono Trigger 1-2 / Super Mario 2-3 moment with a Diablo 3 / StarCraft 2 level of hype.)

By the undeniably the best current WRPG/CRPG developer,

Using a still massively popular license, (which IMHO is one of the Achilles heel of the game, it's combat system. But we're taking about sales success here)

Massively successful early access, (2.5 mi only on early access so the reviewers already know what to expect+ the word of mouth)

Insane production value for the genre, (they changed even the voice actors career with that...)

"Perfect" execution, which lead to GOTY level scores,

Lariant after launch support, (huge things were add after launch, mod support, one of those great pro consumer moments in gaming)

The meme scenes + gen Z viral scene was merely an after thought in all of that.
 
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I don't know why i didn't buy this game yet, i loved BG1 and BG2 back when i played them. Even NwN. This one for some reason (i suspect is because i've seen so much around the dialogues with animation, i prefer just text) i just don't have the impulse to buy it.
 
Not really. it was a different type of perversion than what anime Japanese games offer.

Implying there is a tsunami of CRPG fans and that the success of BG3 was in line with other good CRPGs.

It wasn't, it was vastly more successful than any other ones and I am saying this is why.

If you don't agree fine but just stop replying to my posts.

Ricky Gervais Lol GIF


Keep digging, holy shit
 
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The game launched in EA to nearly 74k CCU. Then over the next couple years it maintained a few thousand CCU up to June 2023. Then in July 2023 it jumped by nearly 30k CCU after the bear fucking scene was shown and went viral. Turned out to be a fantastic game and word of mouth spread like wildfire. Game launched in August 2023 and hit it's peak CCU.
 
read the approximately 2358923502935820 articles that PC Gamer wrote about it.
Bear fucking? There are literally porn games where you play as a dragon and have explicit sex with both women and men and i haven't seen those take off. Yet you say a single joke scene in a 200 hour game that isn't even explicit is what caused this game to sell 20 million?

Heck, it was even a shapeshifter, just a 3 in the barbot scale

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  • Top-tier presentation
  • Excellent characters overall (even if they're a little too horned up)
  • Accessible gameplay - much less fatiguing/analysis paralysis than AP-based systems like DoS2
  • Compelling story & writing

A huge part of the overall success was attracting a very significant female audience, largely through the reasons above.
 
I don't know about the quality of the game, haven't played it.

But even if it were a masterpiece, the success is still surprising to me. CRPG, turn based, a lot of reading, D&D rules, dice rolls... It's not a game I'd expect the mainstream to play or even pay attention to.
It has tremendous production values for a CRPG. It's fully voiced for its myriads of choices. Graphics are good (for cRPG). It has a metric ton of content.

And then it's an amazing game with great story, great characters and huge amount of choice for each situation.

Plus it has super reactive combat that can involve the environment and spells that can result in crazy situations.

And all of the above can show great on YouTube.

Like some else above mentioned, you literally had other devs going "You can't expect us to produce BG3 quality game".
 
Have been thinking of jumping into this or Claire Obscur. I enjoyed Persona 4-5, Octopath Traveller, Xenoblade 2, Mother 3, Diablo III-IV, back in the day also Fallout 3 and Mass Effect 1-3, but have spent recent years with Elden Ring and other From stuff. My main concern with Baldur's Gate 3 whether it has a slow beginning with lots of systems learning and reading screens of text.
Wait, you played P4-5 and you think BG3 is the one with the slow start…. 😂

If you got through those, you have nothing to fear from BG3. It kind of starts with a bang.
 
The game is outrageously good, and playing through co-op with a friend was one of the best modern gaming experiences I've had.

I didn't buy into the pre-release hype. I had almost no interest in it. It wasn't until I started to hear directly from my friends (who know I don't like RPGs) that I would like it did I give it a try.

Man I'm glad I did. That game is just outstanding.
 
What exactly sets it apart from other contemporaneous RPGs?
That for once

for fucking ONCE

somebody remembered that actual RPGs are based on DnD, where all your choices would alter the campaign a bit or a lot.

And Larian did just that in a sea of fake RPGs with 90% unchangable stories.
 
Perfect storm of:
-Larian's pedigree, apparent genuine passion, and status as unbeholden to rotten publishers
-a respected license
-virality (be honest: bear romance got tons of eyes on this that otherwise wouldn't have)
-great characters/writing/choice/production value/polish
-word-of-mouth
-FOMO
-lack of microtransactions
-quick bug fixes

Everything about BG3's success was well-deserved. One of the GOATs.
 
High budget for a CRPG with lots of choices but I personally thought the game looks bad as none of the characters looks that appealing to me and not into the enemies and setting too. And this is coming from someone that usually likes the sword and sorcery type of movies from the 80s and games from the 2000s like the Elder Scroll games and Warcraft/WoW games.
 
I played through it twice and loved it, but the "bear sex marketing" that people talked about definitely made me hesitant to play it. It turns out it's only specific circumstances with a character that I didn't even use, so it didn't affect my game.

Everybody talking about it and insisting that you MUST play it was annoying as well; I hate the whole "FOMO" thing people do with new games. The same thing happened to me with Rick and Morty. The fanbase was too annoying "Pickle Rick! Szechuan Sauce!" So, I never even watched the show until season 6 was out, and it turns out I actually like it a lot.

Anyway, I played it like a year and half later, and I thought it was great. I think what people are saying about the freedom to play the way YOU want to play is a huge part of why it was so good. Too many games force the developer's "vision" on you. That's why I'm not a huge fan of cinematic type games in general.
 
Great game with lots of story and gameplay choices. DND 5E is popular even in tabletop form. It has good looking companions with great voice acting.
 
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Not really. it was a different type of perversion than what anime Japanese games offer.

Implying there is a tsunami of CRPG fans and that the success of BG3 was in line with other good CRPGs.

It wasn't, it was vastly more successful than any other ones and I am saying this is why.

If you don't agree fine but just stop replying to my posts.
Tsunami of CRPG fans? So that is a yes, then? Because CRPGs are extremely popular. The game had almost 80k players in early access day one, in which the game was pretty barebones. Dragon Age: Inquisition, a game that pales in comparison to BG3, sold 12 million. Divinity Original Sin 2, Larians previous game, sold 7.5 million, and that had way less hype and build up to it. Not to mention, the very name of Baldurs Gate had quite a bit of CRPG weight behind it. D&D at this time period was/is having a bit of a Renaissance due to online DM sessions like Critical Role.

The bear drama helped give some additional press, but the game was already widely marketed and heavily featured by basically every single gaming outlet and YouTube channel out there.
 
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It's a pretty good "AAA" game from a company that isn't completely shit (yet?) and it has plenty of content for coomers.
 
Good game get many player

Bad game do not

I simplified the phrasing for some of the retards in this thread

And this is coming from someone who does not even like the game/genre. Open mindedness can be so liberating. 🥰
 
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i think that the odds of good games getting noticed increase proportionally to the amount of mediocrity present. &, this gen? there's been a lot of mediocrity...
 
Simple answer: it's a quality desert out there. People actually don't want these endless low-effort multiplayer slop games. It's just what we're being given.

BG3 sold by simple virtue of being a complete-package AAA RPG experience (that didn't suck, unlike Failguard). At the time, there literally was nothing else like it.

It's the same reason why people hoovered up copies of Elden Ring. What else ya gonna play?
 
As if PC Gamer is anything to go by 😂 nobody reads that shit bruv

The only few recent times that I've seen PC Gamer shitpieces making the rounds, it's simply having a stupid Twitter Bait headline for easy clicks (which unfortunately works, but I'm still going to give any outlet shit for doing it).

So Idon't see PC Gamer as anything better than Diet Kotaku. Hopefully, they go out the same way.
 
1) Strong word of mouth from the Early Access period, which indicated there was a lot of potential in the actual game. Some of those people also trusted Larian because of their previous RPG works.

2) Current popularity of D&D as well as good memories regarding the previous Baldur's Gate entries. They had been very successful and so reviving the series would appeal to a lot of folks.

3) Excellent marketing! Crazy things could be possible and the bear was only one example. Not an infinite amount of choices, mind you, but there's a bunch of ways of approaching many situations (mainly in Act 1, but also later on).

4) Solid writing and characterization (by and large), which in turn also provided a lot of opportunities for romance and investment. That's a selling point and not a small one, if you can pull it off properly.
 
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perverts and weirdoes latched onto it



90% of it wa the meme. Or more accurately the resulting backlash to the meme that gave the game free publicity.

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To elaborate: it's hilarious that the game's stans don't even want to consider that maybe, just maybe, that one thing (and all its ramifications and variations in the game) could have been, for once, exactly what the "modern audience" was looking for and would actually buy a game for, instead of hyping it and ultimately not buy it. Admitting it would require thinking that you've played a good game and have to share its enjoyment with an audience that you'd want to stay as far away as possible from the games that you like.
 
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To elaborate: it's hilarious that the game's stans don't even want to consider that maybe, just maybe, that one thing (and all its ramifications and variations in the game) could have been, for once, exactly what the "modern audience" was looking for and would actually buy a game for, instead of hyping it and ultimately not buy it. Admitting it would require thinking that you've played a good game and have to share its enjoyment with an audience that you'd want to stay as far away as possible from the games that you like.
There is this weird tendency on NeoGAF and other sites that are similar ideologically for them to declare a game they like "not actually woke" despite all evidence to the contrary instead of just saying they liked a woke game.

Y'all like the same game a bunch of degenerate perverts liked. It's not that big of a deal.
 
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Dev team prioritised game's quality and amount of content before anything else, even antifeminist and antiwokeist like myself can apreciate and admit BG3 is very good game, ofc if some1 doesnt like the genre he wont play it but otherwise u will, hell i will too once i somewhat can handle my backlog( wont be anytime soon, rip xD ).
I'm not really into crpgs but I did play all the way through bg3 and enjoyed it a lot. It's just got amazing roleplay potential and quality.
 
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