We just want good complete micro transactionless games
Edit: that are also well optimized
No we don’t. BG3 is great for a lot of reasons, but nowhere on the list is “it uses the rules of D&D”. D&D is a terrible game system. Make a game like BG3 that isn’t… that.
Fuck these people, they did every single thing wrong with their product and the only people who do good things with it are independent content creators. Critical role made D&D the thing to play in the internet age and Larian made a great game with it. Meanwhile D&D under Hasbro has done…what? Fucking nothing is what. They give you shitty books with 95% fluff you don’t need and/or makes no sense, but it has a new subclass for each class in it. Are the classes good? No! No they are not. But while you buy those books anyway please take a look at our 100$ deck of cards that we pretend is gonna make you able to create great adventures on the fly. Nevermind that the whole mechanic of it could fit into a few pages of text as die roll tables.
They can’t even publish all the 50 year anniversary D&D books in their 50th anniversary! They also said those books are a combined 1000 pages as if it’s a value add or impressive, when the current 3 books also have that combined page count. They basically want you to re-buy your books for 50 bonus pages and the only value add you get will be some fucking focus-tested subclasses. Will they be good? WHO CARES! Even if they are good, the classes will get put on the internet within a day and you don’t need the rest of the books at all!
Don’t buy any D&D products. Don’t give money to these people. Let their company die.
Also, play better games. Fabula Ultima, Lancer, Sentinel Comics TTRPG, there are innumerable games that do any genre you could ever want better then D&D does fantasy.
play better games
I’d heavily recommend people who want to play DnD but better and without Hasbro look at Pathfinder 2e.
Fixes all the major issues with DnD (boring combat where melee gets glued to each other due to attacks of opportunity, no variety in actions outside of magic, broken balance, mandatory healer, etc)
It’s also being produced by the only unionized TTRPG company.
There used to be a whole Pathfinder instance. No idea if it still exists.
That simply isn’t true, I think. A game based on Pathfinder made by Larian would most certainly do better than anything they could pump out based on D’n’D without Larian. It’s Larian and Baldur’s Gate specifically who got more recognition, not D’n’D as whole.
Anyone who played Larian’s previous titles can tell you the only thing DnD brought to the table was a popular IP.
5e combat is better than their garbage elemental system from Divinity. Stopped playing that shit after the tenth flight with necrofire covering the entire battlefield.
that is an extremely debatable, incredibly hot take. i wasn’t a fan of cloud and surface spam but lets not pretend that 5e’s combat is universally loved, either. larian made it work pretty well by sanding off some edges here and there but it’s, at best, a sidegrade.
And it was used to great effect. There’s a ton of good stuff in the D&D mythos that can be made into other solid games.
Hasbro will fuck it up, I agree, but the potential is undoubtedly there.
Yeah I agree. They deserve a lot of credit for elevating D&D rather than relying on it to elevate the game. The result is grater than the sum of its parts; both D&D and Larian reached a wider audience through the collaboration.
…did they think people wanted bad d&d games? Of course people want great games of their favorite hobby, what does this even mean
Lmao I honestly so hard at this, but honestly they were probably thinking “what’s the lowest fucking bar we have here?” And instead this success told them that a little more investment might actually have better returns
If I read between the lines I hear " We are going to try to milk this new cash cow"
I thought it was like: we found out it can be profitable to take the time to make a high quality product. At least when Larian is doing it.
Considering there were rumored to be several games in the pipeline that all got scrapped at the beginning of last year, I think you’re right. Dark Alliance didn’t do great so I’m sure the execs freaked out.
Hopefully you’re right about the message they received.
I am shocked to hear that an unfinished game didn’t do great
What are you talking about? Dungeons and Dragons: Dark Alliance was a whole ass game. It got kind of shitty reviews (currently sitting at 50% on Steam, 4/10 on IGN, 53% on metacritic). Published June 21, 2021.
Releasing a game with obvious bugs is releasing an unfinished game in my books
I read it this way as well. Even if I didn’t trust Larian as a company (I do), it’s pretty clear that taking the time to make a high quality product worked out really well for them.
I really hope you’re right
Also be fine if Larian just goes with Pathfinder or their own IP next time. Hasbro can fuck right off.
Agreed, I hope they will make Divinity: Original Sin 3 next!
Nothing this good can be replicated. People would be better off if they kept their (coughCDProjektRedcough) expectations low after a smash hit that fans love.
The witcher games preceding Witcher 3 did very well, and TBH Cyberpunk turned out pretty ok as well. So I’m not sure your example really fits. For its own part, Larian was picked to make this game because the Divinity games are so popular and successful.
But I’ll agree that it’s really unlikely to do this more than once on purpose, but clearly it can be done by competent studios.
the faulty console launch aside, cp77 came as a really good game, one of the best story and characters I’ve seen in a while
I really disliked it for many reasons even though I had no bugs but can’t pretend it wasn’t ambitious, Guys did jump over their head with it and tried to do something entirely new for them. And they had a hard crunch to complete it. Can’t hate the product, these devs, but honestly fuck their management.
I liked the story, I think Jonny was integrated fantastically, and the mechanics were decent
My only complaint is there wasn’t enough. Not enough cyberware, not enough branches in the story, not enough ways to feel the power growth as your character levels and gets better gear
All in all, I don’t get the hate. It was a good game. With more time to flesh it out it could’ve been an instant classic, the bones are all there… I’ve got the dlc sitting in my library for when I’m ready to devote the time to dig into it
the dlc is really good, albeit short, it feels really long
all the characters are well written and it’s hard to straight up hate/like them, the gray area is real
also, theres 4 more ending added if I’m not mistaken, give It a shot
Hasbro? The ones who sent gones to someone’s house and fuck them up because they accidentally got a pre release version of magic the gathering? Yeah they probably will fuck it up.
They sent the god damn Pinkertons
The overtly evil FBI wannabes that are in the the Red Dead games
Not goons, Pinkertons, like Wild west union busting Pinkertons.
Continuing to be amazed that the Pinkertons both still exist and are still up to their old tricks. Nothing is ever learned.
Yeah them, thanks forgot there actual names.
because they accidentally got a pre release version of magic the gathering?
It was a streamer that got the pre-release boxes early by mistake, and live-streamed opening them to drive traffic to his channel. Most cards aren’t revealed ahead of time so these leaks let potential pre-buyers see what was in the set and decide if they wanted it.
What he did was stupid, but he did nothing wrong, and nothing especially harmful.
Calling the Pinkertons on him was obscene on principle, but it was especially egregious when the damage was so minimal. They hurt themselves more with that stunt than the leaks hurt them.
Don’t just say “goons,” say Pinkertons. Actual literal union organizer murdering Pinkertons. Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast sicced those Pinkertons on a children’s card game reviewer for the crime of telling people about something they received in the mail.
In other news, 5e.tools is a great resource containing all official 5e content, in a convenient easily navigable website. Personally I prefer the mobile interface, but the desktop is great too.
There’s also a Pathfinder 2 version for those inclined.
The fantastic thing about Pathfinder is that all the rules are released to the public, so things like this are completely legal, and thus we get a lot more of them than D&D gets. We’ve got Pathbuilder for creating character sheets, as well as the Pathbuilder encounter builder for GMs (as well as numerous other character and encounter builders—I just like these because they integrate with each other), Archives of Nethys for a very user-friendly rules reference, and on and on and on.
In D&D you have to rely on expensive tools with special deals with WotC (by the gods I hate Beyond and their double-dipping “pay a fixed price for content and a subscription for app features” business model—though the creators behind Beyond have gone ahead and done the same thing for Pathfinder with Nexus, if you happen to like their UX) or ones willing to basically pirate content and hope that WotC’s lawyers can’t get it taken down, like 5e.tools.
5e.tools is a hydra. You’re free to download the entire thing and host it yourself. If Wazi decides to take it down, a dozen more will take its place
Too bad they fired all of the liaisons on the Hasbro side. Oopsie
I hope laurin switches to Pazio material or some other lore source tbh. I mean they (hazboro) fired all of they’re working partners from their side and are clearly bad fucking stewards of the IP.
The people demand a Dark Sun expansion 😡
I wouldn’t mind some Spelljammer also.
Give us all the weird settings!
Eberron too please!
And Hollow World!
A lot of people are focusing on the D&D part but honestly what the people really want is for any and all studios to take the time they need so they can release non-buggy, higher quality games.
