Most people who bought BG3 were niggercattle who's idea of a good RPG are action-adventure games with barebones RPG mechanics (regardless of if they're good games), doubt they ever heard of Baldur's Gate before so expect a fuck ton of copies because it has the name Larian in it.
Probably an extremely rare case but I have seen at one person who didn't realize the 3 in the game was because it's the third game, wasn't a shitpost iirc, they were just dim.
Fucking hell, get off your high horse. You're not reading Spinoza's Ethica or any actual classics. You're reading fantasy novels from the 50s. Your elitism has the same standing as some blue-haired freak praising Harry Potter. They are good books, but holding them up as some near-religious artefact is ridiculous.
Read a different fucking book. I'd even accept C.S. Lewis at this point. He's trad and right too, you'll like him.
Divinity OS2 wasn't as mainstream so it might as well not exist for most gamers. Real RPGs are still very niche for the most part, Baldur's Gate 3 broke the mold and so this is the game everybody will remember them for. I foresee people thinking this IS Baldur's Gate 4 due to their ignorance and complaining it isn't just that.
Exactly.
Both Divinity Original Sin games were a commercial success, and a contributing factor for why they were chosen to make Baldur Gate 3.
Many games have the DnD license, but are absolute stinkers, so I would argue that WotC needed Larian more, then the other way around.
In the end, this game was so successful because of several reasons, none of them being brand recognition.
This is about everything we see within a minute before they're all karmically wiped out. This is a hedonistic cult celebration that has been so engendered into wherever this is, that it's become normal enough to bring kids to – *cough* pride parades *cough*
Alternatively this is a completely normal and acceptable occurrence but they burnt the wrong sacrifice which is the sole reason everyone died at the end. There's another possibility why it's become normal in the context of the setting.
In the Divinity setting (at least from playing original sin 1 & 2) the 7 gods stole divine power from under their boss' nose, fucked him and everyone else off to a void (kind've a purgatory) and created morals in their own individual images because living things generate the power they feast on (Source). They weren't great morally but their biggest opponents (their old manager + the secret 8th guy they kind've fucked over but he's the devil so who cares) were also the biggest threat to mortals, so working with them was kind of necessary – not that many even knew what their true nature was in the first place. At the end of the 2nd game these 7 Gods are killed and their former boss (who has been continuously invading from purgatory from the very start) can potentially be locked away forever if you pick the game's most selfless ending - give up your source.
Not gonna lie, you saw a hell of a lot deeper into this trailer than I did. I saw a weird interspecies orgy, a toddler watching a man burn to death, and gratuitous misery on par with a Tarantino flick. I appreciate the recontextualization--not enough to endure it again and confirm for myself--but now at least I can appreciate why some people were disturbed by the trailer but enthusiastic for the game. If you're right, there's at least a hint of the story awaiting in here, rather like BG3's ceremorphosis trailer. Yeah, I know, apparently the game is really different in tone from the trailers (wouldn't know, bought it on word of mouth only) but the ceremorphosis sequence is at least contextualized even if you're ignorant of DnD/Baldur's Gate: soldier/city watch guy staggering around poisoned/drunk/sick/something in an intersection deserted of everything but his fallen squad. Then the body horror starts, but there are discretion shots from some of the worst of it and then finally he's a mind flayer and he rises into the sky and there's more mind flayers flying over the city now.
As to the 'canon' ending of DOS2, if the wiki is to be believed, yes, Lucian the not-so-Divine-anymore and the Godwoken all sacrificed all their Source to re-seal the barrier between worlds so that the God-King and his bugs are stuck in the Void. The immortal ticks that were the gods are all dead now. (And in a certain light, the 'final solution' to the Voidwoken problem being the elimination of a powerful and problematic minority is just deliciously ironic from a European dev studio.)
Still have negative interest in this game, but again, thank you for explaining what you saw in the trailer. I missed it.
if the people complaining about BG3 and a lack of real RPGs in this thread haven't played Age of Decadence and Colony Ship, you are also niggercattle and part of the problem. Go buy and play them, whether they put up more revenue will determine if they can keep making the modern grognard RPGs everyone claims to want.
Colony Ship is a turn-based, party-based role-playing game set aboard a generation ship launched to Proxima Centauri. The game features a detailed skill-based character system, multiple ways to handle quests, choices & consequences, and branching dialogue trees.
if the people complaining about BG3 and a lack of real RPGs in this thread haven't played Age of Decadence and Colony Ship, you are also niggercattle and part of the problem. Go buy and play them, whether they put up more revenue will determine if they can keep making the modern grognard RPGs everyone claims to want.
Colony Ship is a turn-based, party-based role-playing game set aboard a generation ship launched to Proxima Centauri. The game features a detailed skill-based character system, multiple ways to handle quests, choices & consequences, and branching dialogue trees.
There were rumours during development that Lars (the head of Larian) had a massive shit fit with WoTC because they were pushing for dlc and mtx, and trying to force them to keep the series going by ending the game on a cliff hanger.
Lars told them to fuck off, apparently, and wrapped the game up quick time to not work with WoTC again.
There's every chance some of the less desirable bits in the game Larian were against but went along with it to get along.
Anyone who has worked a project with a customer who constantly creeps the original agreement, knows how much of a pain in the arse they can be.
Lol all I said was there was a reason classics are praised years later while modern media is largely forgotten right after consumption even when they're legendarily awful. Comparing some creature sperging about HP (especially considering the people who would have blue hair would bash HP because "muh terf") to something like-using your example-C.S. Lewis is an awful example and reaching.
Like how some people react when people even mildly criticize certain media made recently? Like how you're acting now in-fact over people not mindless readying themselves to consoom this game? Again all I said was there's a reason why classics hold up for potentially centuries while modern media dies the month it's born at best. I also used LotR as an example of a single classic and you still seem to fixate on that and think I'm using that as the end-all-be-all of classic literature, you also seem to fixate on literature when I clearly extended the term to all media.
...I'm repeating the words "classic" and "literature" often I notice.
And then if I were to praise C.S. Lewis you'd have this same meltdown over how I'm holding his work as near-religious artefact. Also funny you mention C.S. Lewis when you were getting pissy over me not using an even older example of classics. And yet you also are upset about people using a 70 year old book and that we should pick a new one?
So again, you're upset about me not using a much older classic while also being upset that people are using Tolkien's work (C.S. Lewis and Tolkien were great friends and I'm sure they'd be spinning in their grave over this conversation) as an example.
I've seen your posts before so I'm not sure why I bother with a frothing fool like yourself who will probably love the faggotry that's definitely going to be in this game but here I am. Going back to the game, you folks can enjoy your future release that will no doubt be plagued with terrible story writing, character, probably shitting on the existing world building from the previous games, among the many other issues this game will have and I will make fun of for (and you) because pattern recognition has apparently been bred out of us within a generation or two.
I'll pirate this game when it releases out of early access, assuming I'm alive by then, and when some autistic legends from RPGHQ mods the faggotry out the game if the gameplay is actually worth playing-oh shit speaking of which Realm Restored 3.0 is out.
To be fair it's a possible I'm committing a "death of the author" i.e. seeing someone that wasn't intended by the creator. However the basic gist of of what we see from the action on screen is: People cheering a burning man whilst doing disgusting shit -> the man being burned explodes open with an evil-looking vortex -> they all die, amalgamated into a scary statue. This factors into my read of it. Events in a story shouldn't happen in isolation to the world around them. If the man explodes due to something unrelating to what's going on around him, then it renders what's happening as pointless gratuity. A basic rule with writing stories is things should happen in reaction to other things. The "->" used above to denote "therefore", not "and then" or "then suddenly" – the hedonism had to serve some sort of purpose to justify the subsequent event, otherwise it'd just be a series of non-sequiturs.
It might be naïve of me, but creators tend not to create their work with the most intentionally vile messages/themes unless they state outright outside the work or ham fist the message within the work itself. Sometimes they can fuck up the delivery to the point of the work itself not translating their intent whatsoever (Robocop was meant to be be critical of American law enforcement lmao) but typically things are very straightforward. If that trailer was meant to convey everything in it positively and we were meant to feel sympathy for those that had died, then they botched it.
There's been a trend over the past decade or so of works eliminating the need for audiences to think about what they're watching/reading/hearing because they're often told what to think in lieu of thinking for themselves.
The creator of the work might do this themselves, or the characters within said work will do it. Nothing is allowed to be left unsaid and decided by the audience. The "good" character will state outright the intent/moral/theme, the villains will have paper thin motivations to embed the idea that what they want and represent is bad, and the audience has no room to interpret their own message because they're not allowed to - fans of the work will enforce it.
Why this has happened has numerous answers, with multiple answers being simultaneously correct. One such answer is that the creator is so afraid of their work being appropriated by people they don't like, or they get prideful over people looking at the work in a "wrong" way**, so they'll pre-empt individual interpretation within the work itself or share the intent prior to its release. The Barbie movie is an example, where the actions demonstrated on screen initially invite alternate interpretation but then get smothered by the movie itself.
For context (so you don't have to suffer through it):
The "message" of the film is hit over the audience's head here because Ken and the Kens have taken over Barbieworld and enforced "patriarchy", which involves all the men being cooperative and friendly with each other, emphasising masculinity, and the women being in a uniform and now secondary role to the Kens as their accessories - an arrangement they're all all happy and content with until they're told it's wrong by the creator's mouthpiece because it's oppressive (an interpretation you'd only see if you subscribed to Critical Feminist Theory.
This compulsion to tell the audience exactly what they should be feeling/thinking is typically because a lot modern messaging sees a disconnect between the actions on screen and the creator's intent. Anything you've heard regarding the right-wing's lack of "media literacy" are typically examples. The Boys, for instance, has the villain Homelander kill a man for throwing a can of soda at his son.
The accompanying music, cheer of the "MAGA-coded" crowd, excess gore*, and ominous zoom on the son's face is hammering home that this is meant to be bad. But it requires ignoring what we just saw in favour of a different interpretation. We're not supposed to see a man defending his son, we're supposed to see an innocent and brave protestor receiving an unjust overreaction to "peaceful" disagreement (why it should matter whether or not they won't feel it should factor into why attacking someone is justifiable is one of those moral qualms you're better not thinking about because of what it says of the person who supports it).
The worsening quality of that show, and stories in general, is down to creators doing as much as they possibly can to remove any "wrong" or combative interpretation of scenes and/or characters***.
Since this is an established pattern, audiences both supportive and critical now dismiss what they see, or worse, think nothing of it, because they're likely to be told what to think in the work itself or outside of it by the creator. And the trend for the past decade or so, even on movies that pre-date the phenomena - such as The Matrix series - is that we can't trust the most overt interpretation, or even the very scenes as they play out in real time, because we're not supposed to trust our own senses, apparently.
This has had the consequence of creating a (justifiably) paranoid – and exhausting – relationship between media and its consumer, where we're now forced to consider the intent of every choice to determine whether or not we can even trust what we're seeing on screen or not, and whether a design choice was made in earnest****, to push a certain message, or to spite certain people the creator dislikes - and still, whether the spite and message is out of principle or the belief it'll help get eyes on screens. This has left the modern consumer two options when it comes to modern entertainment:
(1) Switch your brain off and consoom.
(2) Switch your brain off and don't consoom.
Modern media/art/entertainment have justified if not encouraged both. This paranoia has only worsened in recent times, with the likes of KCD2 and the aforementioned Barbie movie both hiding contentious inclusions and political elements because it shows that the creator was aware of the split reception such elements would invite but simultaneously felt so strongly about including these elements in their "art" that they had to be included, even if they serve no real purpose in the narrative.
A pattern doesn't make something certain to happen, the odd exception can occur here and there. It's fine to err on the side of caution though.
Personally I always try to hope for the best, but I'll hold back on expecting the worst until I'm made aware or see for myself something that'd otherwise dash my hopes.
*Gore and other gross excesses don't just act as a way of showing off tech or titillating the consumer, they may also emphasise a feeling or emotion you would already feel from such imagery anyway. You can write it off as the creator putting their perversions on screen or celebrating it (which I can't dismiss outright) but I think it's also a symptom of the dumbing down of stories. It isn't enough we see a couple entwine and fall into bed, we now have to see the actual act of sex taking place - all to convey they're attracted/in love with each other. It's not enough to see a man's head explode, we need to see it in as much detail as we can - just to convey that they are dead now, and it's horrible/good. Because stuff like this has been used so liberally, the actual idea of using it for anything more complex is the equivalent to lost technology. Hot Fuzz (good movie) reserves the bloody, gory deaths for the murder victims to contrast with the village, the outward personalities of the murderers, and to make the insistence they're all just "accidents" come across as extra farcical.
Whilst I don't think the trailer is exactly A+, a way of interpreting the simple intent of the imagery is at the very least meant to demonstrate why/how they all died - their sins were too great for any one man to bear, and they exploded out of the man and right back at the people. The idea of transferring your sins to a sacrifice isn't unique, some Jews do it.
**The "movie game" genre i.e. The Last of Us, God of War PS4/PS5, etcetera and video game stories being created with "deep" stories is often believed to be the result of shame or embarrassment. They couldn't make it as a movie or tv creator and feel like they're "settling" for vidya instead. This "feeling" isn't unique to gaming. There's often a nested inadequacy people who belong to one art form might feel compared to another.
Author -> may feel their work is "visually" inadequate (leads to "purple prose")
Movie maker -> may feel that their work is "narratively" inadequate (leads to "telling" not "showing")
Game developers and graphic novelists/comic book writers -> may feel their work is tonally and professionally inadequate (leads to works like "Crossed" by Garth Ennis and the phenomena of "movie games" such as The Last of Us 2 which try hard to assert themselves as being "mature".)
***There's certainly older examples, but the character of Rorschach from Watchmen was meant to be a criticism of objectivist morality who dies as a consequence of being set in his ways and Dr. Manhattan is meant to be the more pitiable character for having to kill his friend and then exile himself from humanity. Moore intended them both to be morally grey, but Rorschach's "grey" actions include executing a child rapist/murderer with a hatchet, leaving a prostitute to get abused by her pimp (or customer), and possibly being a bit racist - which kind of pale in comparison to allowing hundreds of millions to die. This resulted in an ending that is a clear cut example of right and wrong i.e. the very thing Moore wanted to avoid. The characters were interpreted as "hero" and "selfish arrogant asshole" respectively, where the only character who doubts himself in the end of the graphic novel is Ozymandias (in the movie he was more resolute) and Nite Owl & Silk Spectre aren't in the wrong for their inaction. Moore considers sacrifices pointless if they serve no purpose, but I won't go as far as to say that he intended for the audience to regard Rorschach as a retard for how and why he died.
****Casting is a big one. Lauding X-person being in a role because of Y-attribute has lead to a lot of this. Recent example: a tv show based on Amadeus Mozart has a half-Japanese man (who looks visibly East Asian, not someone who passes for white like Keanu Reeves) in the role of Amadeus. As far as I know there's been no lauding of this man's ethnicity being in the role but because casting historical characters as black or Indian has been lauded as "courageous", there has been too frequent a pattern of such casting being decided for political reasons or spite (Netflix's Cleopatra) as opposed to an earnest belief in the actor's capability to ignore history in favour of performance. The show might be good, the performance might be great, but there's no hope for its quality or incentive to watch given the pattern already intertwined with such casting. Similarly, gratuitous or contentious imagery in recent times has intended to evoke the opposite of revulsion and dislike. Such imagery when it was intended to evoke disgust was typically associated with shit, low-quality entertainment by critics of the past but now critics it. In both cases, critics were wrong, critical of The Thing but revering The Boys. What this example says is whilst it can point to something being shit, it doesn't necessarily have to be the case.
if the people complaining about BG3 and a lack of real RPGs in this thread haven't played Age of Decadence and Colony Ship, you are also niggercattle and part of the problem. Go buy and play them, whether they put up more revenue will determine if they can keep making the modern grognard RPGs everyone claims to want.
Colony Ship is a turn-based, party-based role-playing game set aboard a generation ship launched to Proxima Centauri. The game features a detailed skill-based character system, multiple ways to handle quests, choices & consequences, and branching dialogue trees.
I've got that installed (Colony Ship RPG). I just have to start the damn thing.
I enjoyed Age of Decadence well enough. I also liked Owlcat's stuff for the most part.
There were rumours during development that Lars (the head of Larian) had a massive shit fit with WoTC because they were pushing for dlc and mtx, and trying to force them to keep the series going by ending the game on a cliff hanger.
I heard it was because WoTC basically did the typical corporate thing of firing the experienced talent in favour of filling the position with cheaper hires to reduce on overheads. The people Larian worked with from WoTC were all fired after BG3 left early access. The CEO of Larian effectively saw several acquaintances all get fired and he was supposed to feel nothing from it and just work with the replacements with the exact same cohesion. It was probably a whole bunch of reasons though so there's a grab bag of reasons to choose from.
To be fair, the classics that are remembered are typically fantastic for some reason or another and have simply risen to the top of the rest. Pick a famous work, find out the year of release, then look up what else came out during that year. You'll typically see the same mountain of schlock/mediocre/shit content that you're familiar with today.
Terminator 2 came out in 1991, alongside such classics like, The Guyver, The Linguini Incident, and Jungle Fever.
If books are your thing, how about the all-time classic: Alice in Wonderland? 1865 saw great literary works come out such as, The New Epicurean and Can You Forgive Her?
And just looking at the steam front page more or less gets across this point but with games too.
We're not really exceptional when it comes to producing shit. It's always existed and in great quantity, we're just fortunate enough that it's sieved out for the most part if it came out prior to 2010 or the 2000s.
I was in a similar boat. It feels like pointed outrage marketing, the sleazy sex and gore felt like it was pretty cynically crafted in order to get people kvetching. Personally, if all I am going to get is a CGI trailer I would at least like to see something a little closer to the actual content of the game.
Nobody actually wants to play these types of RPGs, they want to watch a YouTuber play through them for them and then they can talk about it as if having played it.
I can believe this. It would have been pretty easy to sell all of the shit they added via updates, subclasses, etc; for 10$ a pop on a digital store somewhere.
That's the kinda shit that would also hurt Larian's reputation, so I can dee why they would drop Wizards like a hot rock. I think the company was consistently shooting itself in the foot around this time, with the OpenGL stuff and shit like it.
That image can't be 27 years old, can it? Thought it was made within the last...eh, 5-10 years? It's certainly still going to be accurate unless we all become a single thought hivemind (rather than multiple).
You're right, 2000 was 47 years ago. Do you feel old yet? It's a joke. I don't even remember when the image first popped up, but it should be around '13-'15
As to the 'canon' ending of DOS2, if the wiki is to be believed, yes, Lucian the not-so-Divine-anymore and the Godwoken all sacrificed all their Source to re-seal the barrier between worlds so that the God-King and his bugs are stuck in the Void. The immortal ticks that were the gods are all dead now. (And in a certain light, the 'final solution' to the Voidwoken problem being the elimination of a powerful and problematic minority is just deliciously ironic from a European dev studio.)
I get this is the best ending and all that, but it really irks me Lucian set up all that evil as fuck shit that you witness, and had his hands tied to all of it, and just walks away to be King-God again (as we know he does because there are games set after), there were niggas feeding people alive to Dogs under his command, they did some really fucking nasty shit, and I'm all for the "get rid of Source" plan, but after, all the people involved need to be clubbed to death.
I had a lot of fun with Divinity OS 1, 2 and BG3, and I'm looking forward for this one. But I'd be lying if I said this trailer didn't make me cringe with all the edgelord degenerate gay shit.
That really is the bigger issue than anything. Got to wonder if this will also be released in early access like Baldur's Gate 3, there is just something so depressing about an RPG being released incomplete. You should be able to play it from start to finish on day one, not wait months for the half-assed, incomplete finale to be patched in.
I hate this too. But one of the reasons game prices have gone down since the 90s as everything else has become 2-5x more expensive is that people aren't spending the same resources on QA as they used to. If you wanted to hire QA ppl and playtesters to replace the feedback Larian got from early access, it would take 6-18 months of dev time and millions of dollars.
Why not just ignore the game until it hits a playable state? I only buy Owlcat games when they're finished. There are so many games out there waiting an extra 3-4 years after what owlcat deems "released" to play it doesn't seem so bad.
Hedonism for the sake of hedonism sounds about right for modern Larian, while we won't know until it's out I highly doubt it's for much else than shock value and "horny." Fingers crossed I guess.
The Starship Troopers movie adaptation also comes to mind. But those are just two of a slew of media that accidentally glorifies and "makes cool" what it's tries to criticize.
There's been a trend over the past decade or so of works eliminating the need for audiences to think about what they're watching/reading/hearing because they're often told what to think in lieu of thinking for themselves.
Less a trend and more so "as long as there existed a system where someone is above you in some way" as this type of "think what we think" has existed for far longer than the past decade. The fact that it has shows how much people really don't actually want to think for themselves and it's far easier to be told what to think. You're absolutely correct.
This has had the consequence of creating a (justifiably) paranoid – and exhausting – relationship between media and its consumer, where we're now forced to consider the intent of every choice to determine whether or not we can even trust what we're seeing on screen or not, and whether a design choice was made in earnest
This wouldn't even be that exhausting if we actually had to consider every choice, but usually it's pretty obvious. The exhausting part is more of a fatigue of shitty, in-your-face, think what we want to think (which goes back into your point on removing the audiences need to think. There's no higher thought process for some of these scenes, to use the example of The Boys you used, the writers (what I hear every time I think of them, thanks Bunjee) are constantly trying to hammer their beliefs into you. "Homelander bad, Homelander fans are Trump supporters, you should hate all of them."
Now extend that to a headache inducing amount of media and now it's less paranoia and exhaustion from "can we trust our eyes" and "what did the author truly mean" and more "I wish I didn't have any" and "how can anyone think the author means anything else" respectively.
I heard it was because WoTC basically did the typical corporate thing of firing the experienced talent in favour of filling the position with cheaper hires to reduce on overheads. The people Larian worked with from WoTC were all fired after BG3 left early access. The CEO of Larian effectively saw several acquaintances all get fired and he was supposed to feel nothing from it and just work with the replacements with the exact same cohesion.
See now that's interesting. Much as I find it hilarious that he would chimp out over people picking HWITE PEEPAL more than any other race or color, this seems more realistic.
We're not really exceptional when it comes to producing shit. It's always existed and in great quantity, we're just fortunate enough that it's sieved out for the most part if it came out prior to 2010 or the 2000s.
Pick a famous work, find out the year of release, then look up what else came out during that year. You'll typically see the same mountain of schlock/mediocre/shit content that you're familiar with today.
Absolutely, there has been dogshit throughout the centuries, but I'm mostly comparing the greatest works of our past and how they stand up where as modern works are universally forgotten much quicker. Then again you also have to factor in how generations worked and how classics tend to be made when very few other things like it existed, if at all. But so far most modern anything I've witnessed tend to just produce cancer fanbases, cancer trends, and inspire more cancerous works to exist.
I found myself more interested in shit works from the past than shit works of today too, but that's just my perspective. Also notice how interesting this discussion is when some faggot isn't flinging shit because they're pissy someone thinks differently. Cheers.
Holy shit are we really going to start talking on politics before even seeing anything relating to gameplay? It's not even a cut and dry thing since the peasants being degenerate get punished horrifically rather than showing it as some tragedy. At most you can say it is disgusting for no real reason.
Degenerate orgies next to at least one child while they burn someone alive, also next to at least one child, is reason enough.
Truthfully, I'd had been more ok with it just been peasants giving an innocent old man the Nick Cage experience as it would establish that these people are rightfully awful. But with the idea of this old man seemingly being a vessel of evil and that being the reason they burn him, it puts these people in a good light. It shouldn't.
Two things, the first being "do you have pattern recognition?" The second being "have you seen anything else relating to Divinity 3 we can talk about?"
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