it's ben

every roguelike is a rogue clone actually, that's why they're called roguelikes

This has been said to death but there's this real uncanny valley situation in games where it feels like the only "comfortable" budget niches are "indie game that intentionally does not look expensive" and "no-shit for-real game that looks expensive". Every time something manages to create a mid-budget niche, the next game is pressured to kick it up because of something else that comes along with a little more polish, and the arms race towards "oops we just made a AAA game" begins anew.

This is real good Iro.

as much as i think baldur’s gate 3 is at this point probably throwing its hat in the ring for most overrated game of all time, i do find it to be a big step up over the divinity original sin games. i think a large part of that is that the forgotten realms, warts and all (and i think the realms are at least 50% warts), is miles better than larian’s divinity setting (all warts, all the time). and that 5e rules made for a much more engaging game than what larian cooked up for divinity (which says more about the quality of larian’s homebrew systems than the suitability of 5e as a basis for a video game).

whilst the larian house style isn’t my favourite, i am always interested in what they’re doing as a studio. ‘divinity original sin 3’ is a really deflating idea. i’m not sure my interest in checking out every crpg that comes out could survive another brush with that setting.

the studio i feel bad for are owlcat, who presumably will do another pathfinder rpg at some point. i cannot imagine what it would be like to develop a tabletop adaptation crpg with about a 10th of bg3’s budget and resources in a post bg3 world.

The constant chase for the perfection of a formula that works to make games (or any creative work) marketable at the expense of creativity and new, interesting ideas will never not be something I bemoan. But again, as you say, I can't blame people for trying to make something that'll sell. Food has to get on the table somehow, after all. Still, I understand the frustration.

Please allow me to politely give my opinion on this. I enjoy D&D (especially the Forgotten Realms setting) a lot. I like the turn-based tactical combat of 5e (despite all its pitfalls and issues). I played through BG1/2 in college and greatly enjoyed them.

For me, the big appeal of BG3 wasn't the graphics or the voice acting or anything like that. It's that we haven't have a D&D game that plays like D&D since 2009(NWN2: Mysteries of Westgate). And even then, it is the first time since like the Gold Box era when we have turn-based tactical combat. Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and Neverwinter Nights all featured that weird real-time-but-you-can-pause combat. BG3 fulfilled my desires of a game that played like 5e D&D without having to compromise or have weird caveats.

My big hope is that WOTC and whoever they contract out to finally gets it through their fucking skull that D&D players want to play D&D (tactical combat with a cool story). And that what we DON'T want is all the nonsense that came out between 2009 and 2023. We had roughly a decade and a half where D&D games were ports of older games, idle clickers, p2w MMOs, board game ports, cash-grab mobile games, or whatever on earth Dark Alliance was trying to be.

I just want to play turn-based D&D combat man.

(I have recently started playing Kingmaker and the ability to toggle between real-time and turn-based combat makes me very happy. I wish I had known about this game sooner.)