Ten years of fine products no one asked, once pouted the bear known to the world.
The first two games of Baldur's Gate are like hard-to-reach peaks in CRPG games. Its grand adventure is different for every player, with so many memorable characters and storylines to immerse themselves in.
Baldur's Gate 2 came out 20 years ago, but since then, players have not only been looking forward to the release of the third installment, but also hoping that it will recreate the long-lost RPG era. Now, Wizards has licensed the version to Larian, allowing this IP to continue. Judging from the results, Baldur's Gate 3 Steam platform sold 5.2 million copies, living up to expectations.
According to SteamDB data, the highest number of simultaneous online users in Baldur's Gate 3 exceeded 870,000, eight times the team's expectations, making it the second highest number of new Steam online games this year, the first being the record of 879,000 online set by Hogwarts Relics in the first half of the year. At the same time, there is only a gap of 60,000 or 70,000 from the old man ring.
At present, the score of "Baldur's Gate 3" tends to stabilize, and it has won the first place in the PC game ranking of the M station, which is the same as the "Disco Elysium" score. Interestingly, four of the top 10 on this list are CRPG games. (The latest shows that the rating dropped to 96, but it's still the highest-rated game since 2010.) ）
CRPG ushered in the Renaissance
In recent years, CRPG has received a mediocre response among mainstream players, and its works have often been just acclaimed.
Although such games have a high standard of gameplay mechanics, visual quality, and narrative structure, they have always struggled to attract more players due to their lengthy gameplay, high degree of freedom in the open world, and tests of players' patience and thinking.
Only a few loyal players who miss classic CRPGs and enjoy world exploration and text reading will find fun in these titles as always.
And the emergence of Baldur's Gate 3 may change this situation. Some time ago, there was a hot question, will Baldur's Gate 3 raise the standard of RPG games, so that other manufacturers have followed suit but cannot surpass it?
Baldur's Gate 3 caused panic among some developers
Swen Vincke, the founder of Larian, responded positively to the debate: "Standards are dying every day, new things are emerging all the time, and in the field of video games, the creative tree still has a lot of room to explore."
That said, Baldur's Gate 3 promises to redefine contemporary RPGs, but other games are also changing the bar:
A large number of existential theories and political ideas in "Disco Elysium" are extremely profound; "Requiem in an Exotic Land" involves the obscure philosophy of life and death, feeling the bombardment of various overhead ideologies; Obsidian's work is imbued with its unique and mysterious vintage atmosphere. In terms of mesh narrative and multiple endings, "Tyrant" is undoubtedly a big benchmark; The powerful Build system of the Trailblazer series is staggering; The advent of Divinity: Original Sin 2 has given CRPG a leap in freedom and interactivity.
The bamboo insect representing communism
So stick to your own characteristics, you don't have to rely on the gourd to draw the scoop, and the same is true of "Baldur's Gate 3". It continues and draws on the strengths and strengths of Divinity: Original Sin 2, a game that allows players to do basically anything the system can accommodate. For example, the classic combo of greasy + fireball, the artificial "highland advantage" of one person talking to one stealing, stacking boxes.
Players can use a bottle of stealth potion and then sneak to steal enemy weapons to balance strength; You can also talk directly to the leader, use the ability of "little tadpole" to force the other party to obey, and even let the enemy eat excrement, kill himself, and so on.
It can also be "done" in the areas that cannot be done: human and beast, Lgbtq+, spirit suckers, vampires... Larien's art was ahead of its time.
Many players who came to the "love system" of the game also had to marvel at its untablorable gameplay mechanism and networked plot narrative structure. According to Chrystal Ding, one of the main screenwriters of "Baldur's Gate 3", "Baldur's Gate 3" has a total of 17,000 similar endings, which is quite the beauty of "The Garden with Bifurcated Paths".
The fly in the ointment is that although the current official version of the content can easily exceed 100 hours, you can still feel that there are many things that have not been realized.
It is not possible to use "talking to the dead" for all corpses
After all, DND's worldview is simply too large – Baldur's Gate is just one of the major cities in the Forgotten Realm. In the game, Larian only did the content of the lower town, and did not even present the full body of the lower town, which is far less than half of the entire area of Baldur's Gate. Larian also limited the player's level to level 12, and some of the high-ring spells that broke through imagination did not appear.
In addition to the basic consistency of the world view, Baldur's Gate 3 has a major change in game mode compared to the previous game.
Bio Ware's Baldur's Gate, developed in collaboration with Kuroshima Studios, introduced real-time combat for the first time based on the CRPG. This is undoubtedly one of the features of the Baldur's Gate series.
Now, Larian has put his proud turn-based system into Baldur's Gate 3, restoring the way DND should be. After all, several real-time games that Larian has made for more than a decade have been tepid, and the team has been disbanded several times. And the success of the turn-based gameplay of "Divine Realm: Original Sin" has made the team better.
It can be said that Larian's system began to take shape from "Divine Realm: Original Sin", to "Divine Realm: Original Sin 2" gradually matured, and finally "Baldur's Gate 3" became the masterpiece.
Of course, Larian's turn-based system is not static, and a turn in Baldur's Gate 3 is determined by actions, bonus moves, and movement values. And all actions in "Divine Realm: Original Sin 2" are determined by action points.
DND's faction system (the Faction Nine-Square) was abandoned in Baldur's Gate 3, and Larian doesn't seem to want the old system to limit players' moral choices. In the first chapter of Woodland, the Tiflin child with a thief fetish faces punishment, and the player can choose to stand by and let him die, showing his neutrality, or of course he can choose to stop it. Players can also choose evil thoughts at the beginning of the game, and they can sword when they see people, and Larry said that more than ninety percent of NPCs can be killed.
Another thing that has to be mentioned is Laryan's performance in dealing with the core mechanism of DND. Most of the past DND adaptations chose to omit the process of rolling the dice and present the results directly, trying to create an immersive gaming experience.
But Larian has no such concerns, and Baldur's Gate 3 presents the dice mechanic as an important special effect for players, which not only makes it easier for novice players to understand the rules of the game, but also shows the unique charm of DND's "randomness". At least let the player know that they have missed because the judgment has not been passed and bad luck, rather than the game deliberately making things difficult.
So this "Baldur's Gate 3", is he "right"?
The Baldur Gate series was licensed early on by Interplay, and BioWare was developed in partnership with Black Island Studios. Later, Interplay's series of tumultuous operations successfully sent him away, and the copyright was also withdrawn by Wizards. The old student soft is unconscious, and the current raw soft took out the "Mass Effect Andromeda" and "Anthem" continuous thunderstorm, counting on the transfer of "Dragon Age 4" with one hand.
Baldur's Gate 3 was originally to be developed by Black Island Studios. It is based on the third edition of the DND rules and will feature completely new chapters that are completely different from the past Balzi stories. But this orthodox sequel was eventually canceled, leaving only a few concept art from the legend.
Today, Baldur's Gate 3 brings unprecedented popularity to DND and CRPG. It attracts many players who do not have a CRPG foundation or do not understand the rules of DND. While players are curing "electronic impotence", some fans of the previous game have made other sounds - no such smell.
Because Larian has his own control over the style of play, and the difference between the release of the old and new games of "Baldur's Gate" is more than 20 years, there is a large age gap during the period. Some old players think that new players will only focus on Larian's "avant-garde art" and stay on the surface of the game. New players believe that this group of people worships the old classics as "the Bible" and puts on the hat of "old age" for them.
They will argue over the name of the game, the dice, the turn-based, the rules of the game, and even the degree of commercialization.
Pointing out the shortcomings of Baldur's Gate 3 will also be deleted.
In the eyes of old players, the orthodoxy or "faith" in their minds is soft. It is the Black Island studio that brought such palace-level works as "Baldur's Gate", "Fallout", "Requiem in Exotic Land" and "Icewind Valley". When Nai crossed the border, the Black Island was long gone. This regret is like hearing that the production team of "Disco Elysium" has been disbanded.
On the other hand, CRPG has hardly had many major titles in recent years, and now the Baldur's Gate series can be regarded as a lifetime. Whether it is most of the old fans, or the main creators of many Western manufacturers, they are looking forward to this day.
In addition to Raw Soft and Interplay, Black Island's Baldur Gate connects many Western manufacturers. At the time of the sale, Obsidian, CD Project, and B Company all sent congratulatory messages.
"We feel like something is eating away at our consciousness... Happy Release Day! Celebrate this amazing journey. ”
Take Company B as an example, Company B once won the famous radiation IP, and Dragon Play Studio (later renamed Black Island Studio) is the founder of this game IP. Not to mention Obsidian, its predecessor was Black Island Studios.
In addition, CD Project represented Baldur's Gate early on, localizing and publishing the game. Larian was founded two years before Baldur's Gate was officially released, and his early work, The Divine Realm, was heavily influenced by the semi-instant format of Baldur's Gate.
epilogue
Larian took over the copyright and achieved today's results, and it has to be said that "Baldur's Gate 3" is Larian's first triple-A game in the true sense, and it can also be said that it is a key battle for whether they can go down in history.
For Wizards, another aspect of Baldur's Gate 3 is to further promote the rules of the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons and attract more audiences to the pit. Just like when it was Neverwinter OL, it was 4E, so it was ADND when it was 4E, and when it was "Baldur's Gate", it was ADND, so when using ADND, when looking for someone to make a game in version 5E, it will no longer do ADND. Dungeons & Dragons: Rogue Honor, released in April, is also based on the 5th edition rules.