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Comment on Xbox Games Showcase Deep Dive | Avowed

ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

If I was Microsoft and I saw Baldur’s Gate 3 pop off, and I owned Obsidian and Pillars of Eternity, I would leverage the work they’re doing with Avowed to prop up Pillars of Eternity III as “our Baldur’s Gate 3”. In a worst case, I’d imagine Obsidian would continue to intelligently manage their development resources to work more efficiently and release games more regularly than basically any other developer their size.

Then again, if I was Microsoft, I wouldn’t shutter the studio that just made a game of the year contender, so who knows?

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Zehzin@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I don’t know if a higher up will see the numbers on PoE 2 and decide they should invest like 20 times the game’s budget to match BG3 on a sequel. Specially a Microsoft higher up.

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- ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  You think Pillars of Eternity II was only made for $5M? I’d be shocked. But still, assets made for Avowed could be ported right over to a theoretical PoE3, and that saves time and money. Here’s hoping. I’ll bet it happens, even if it isn’t the BG3 competitor version.
  
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  - Zehzin@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Wasn’t the budget 4 million?
    
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    ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Could be. If so, they did fantastic work for only $4.4M. The entire console business is in the process of being turned on its head, so nothing is predictable anymore, but if the world still worked now the way it did a few years ago, you’d eat the cost of making a must-play game knowing that you weren’t going to make your money back just to get eyes on your brand and console. Two years ago, Microsoft might have agreed. Now it’s anyone’s guess.
    
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NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
The problem is that basically EVERYONE has an overwatch game this year. We had, what, three different Overwatches during the Keighleys proper? Fucking Valve have a god damned Overwatch game.

And… Overwatch 2 failed horribly. So did the Gundam Overwatch.

A proper CRPG will take years. Baldurs Gate 3 largely benefited from early access but MS can’t rely on that with how much of a cluster everything has been. Unless POE3 is “as good as Baldurs Gate” in early access? it is a “failure”. So there isn’t going to be a “hey, let’s see if this is still cool in four years” project.

My hope is that POE getting that patch a few days ago is a good sign. But my money is on Avowed underperforming (because, like Outer Worlds, “Waa, it isn’t Skyrim!!!”) and Obsidian becoming a support studio for Bethesda.

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- ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Pillars 2 was already fully voiced, give or take some narration. And I’ll never forgive reviewers for dinging Outer Worlds for its scope. That’s not a bug; it’s a feature.
  
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  - NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    It still significantly increases development costs over the CRPGs of olde. Especially because BG3 felt like the first game that had:
    
    GOOD voice acting
    
    Significant “choice” and branching narratives
    
    Plenty of content that players will “never” see.
    
    Whereas POE2 and similar games very much felt like we were “losing out” a bit to support the VO. Because… we were. We have known that ever since Bioware started doing it.
    
    And yeah. Outer Worlds was basically the same scale as Fallout 3. But people want a giant empty open world. Never managed to finish it (the two times I played I lost interest around the time I got to the capital-ish planet) but had a great time.
    
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    ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    
    Whereas POE2 and similar games very much felt like we were “losing out” a bit to support the VO. Because… we were.
    
    It’s funny, because I thought POE2 proved quite handily that we very much were not losing out. Yeah, it raises the cost, but we’ve had a decade now of CRPGs bucking the trends of the AAA RPGs that motivated them, most of them fully voiced at this point if they didn’t launch that way. POE2 launched fully voiced, and it’s still one of the best of those.
    
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