They had massive success with Divinity, the ground work already laid out. They bought rights to a big IP, kept to their Divinity formula and actually spent on marketing. Plus it happened to come at the right time when people needed the RPG itch scratched.
D&D is also as big as its ever been, especially with a latent audience of viewers who maybe don’t play very often, and at a time when there aren’t enough DMs for everyone who wants to play to find a table. Plus, Baldur’s Gate is prime 30-year-nostalgia-cycle bait for millennial+ PC gamers.
There’s pretty big overlap between the kind of people who play PC games or even a lot of console games and who may be interested in this other genre of games, and especially the biggest name in that genre. It didn’t translate to the general public, though.
It’s also a great primer for the game itself. It introduces Faerun and (most) of the races while being a fun story in its own right. Although I have played Baldur’s Gate 2 and Neverwinter Nights back in the day I (re)watched the movie before starting BG3 and it was a nice apéritif to the main course.
Indeed, DnD has been catching my interest but have never known any players, and jumping in the DM role is daunting.
BG3 lets me play something very close to DnD without any hassle.
Yeah, the only gambles they actually made with this game were changing the camera to be complete shit and making the game harder to run smoothly than their previous games. The only way this game was ever going to do poorly was if they completely shit the bed and released it in an unplayable state.
Camera was still complete shit in DOS2, they must not play their own game, because how they think that it’s acceptable is beyond me. Thank fuck for modders though, their camera mods make the games so so so much more enjoyable (even if the camera still has the larian jank attached).
They should just give people free cam, let me look around wherever I want and stop taking control of it to try and focus on actions, I am constantly wrestling with the camera for no reason. Bizarre they kept it like this.
They had massive success with Divinity, the ground work already laid out. They bought rights to a big IP, kept to their Divinity formula and actually spent on marketing. Plus it happened to come at the right time when people needed the RPG itch scratched.
D&D is also as big as its ever been, especially with a latent audience of viewers who maybe don’t play very often, and at a time when there aren’t enough DMs for everyone who wants to play to find a table. Plus, Baldur’s Gate is prime 30-year-nostalgia-cycle bait for millennial+ PC gamers.
And the recent D&D movie was basically free advertising for Larian.
Less of it than Hasbro anticipated, though.
There’s pretty big overlap between the kind of people who play PC games or even a lot of console games and who may be interested in this other genre of games, and especially the biggest name in that genre. It didn’t translate to the general public, though.
It’s also a great primer for the game itself. It introduces Faerun and (most) of the races while being a fun story in its own right. Although I have played Baldur’s Gate 2 and Neverwinter Nights back in the day I (re)watched the movie before starting BG3 and it was a nice apéritif to the main course.
Indeed, DnD has been catching my interest but have never known any players, and jumping in the DM role is daunting. BG3 lets me play something very close to DnD without any hassle.
Exactly this
Been wanting to play dnd but i only know one person who dms
Exactly, it’s no surprise it’s blown up really. Doesn’t take a team of analysts to figure it out.
Yeah, the only gambles they actually made with this game were changing the camera to be complete shit and making the game harder to run smoothly than their previous games. The only way this game was ever going to do poorly was if they completely shit the bed and released it in an unplayable state.
Camera was still complete shit in DOS2, they must not play their own game, because how they think that it’s acceptable is beyond me. Thank fuck for modders though, their camera mods make the games so so so much more enjoyable (even if the camera still has the larian jank attached).
They should just give people free cam, let me look around wherever I want and stop taking control of it to try and focus on actions, I am constantly wrestling with the camera for no reason. Bizarre they kept it like this.
I don’t remember the camera in Divinity being this bad, but it’s been a few years since I played it, so I could definitely be wrong.