this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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Developers were right to be in fear of Baldur's Gate 3 resetting expectations. This isn't close to all of the reason for this backlash, but for me it's a notable part.
Here we all have for contrast suddenly an expansive, complete, player-respecting game that isn't trying to squeeze money out of you at every turn... it reminds me of old PC games, before the enshittification of the industry began, before the corporate rot set in. When I bought my copy of Heroes of Might and Magic 3, it was complete. It was expansive. It was before micro-transactions were really a thing, so it was a finished product. BG3 makes me think of those games, but with modern technology. My gaze shifts back to the allegedly "modern" games we have now, to Overwatch 2, and it just feels cheap and disgusting. A minimum-viable pile of gameified gambling covered in greasy MBA penny-pincher fingerprints, shrouded by half-truths from marketers trying to puff it up to look like a complete experience. It is still possible to deliver the better experience. It's clearly just a matter of "want".
I feel like I've just come from a family-owned restaurant on the beach in Cabo and came back home to a McDonald's in a roadside casino, and I've just realized how genuinely shitty it all is.
I think I would actually rather just go outside or start a new hobby than touch "games" like this ever again.
You are in a similar position (it sounds like) to where I was a short time ago.I was so fed up with the state of things on the computer/console/handheld front that I just kind of did not want to play anything anymore. Two things, and adjusting my expectations, really helped:
Game Pass - I’ve had it forever, but now it is more important, since I’m not buying new games as much anymore. It’s a small monthly fee, and I can frequently be surprised by the quality of some smaller indie games.
RetroAchievements - This is my current “thing”, and hopefully it will be for a long time to come. You use an emulator that has support for RetroAchievements (the biggest one being RetroArch) and the correct ROM file, and you can earn achievements in thousands of old games, from the earliest days of mass-market computing and consoles (magnavox, intellivision, apple ii, fairchild, amstrad cpc, etc.), through all 8 and 16 bit consoles, and up to Ps1/2/PSP/N64/3DO/Dreamcast, with Gamecube, Vita, or PS3 likely to be the next “big” console release (probably Gamecube). Revisit your favorites from years past and play them in new ways to get all of the achievements, or try out games you never had (or systems you never had) for the first time. Biggest criticism is that they have a tendency of being “too hard”, but you can either just pick games that don’t have ridiculously hard achievements, or just not go for 100%.
I will absolutely be buying Baldur’s Gate 3 as well.